The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  “I will. But when they are about to come back, you need to put them back on, got it?”

  “Definitely. I’ll keep them loose around my wrists.”

  She pushed a fingernail in and somehow released the catch. The tie opened up, and I massaged my hands. “Thank you. Thank you for coming over.”

  “You looked ready to pass out,” she said. “The rebreather masks were in a locker near the transport’s airlock. Didn’t feel right watching you die.”

  I looked down at the brown flakes on my fingers, and on hers. “Did you get the shoelace tied before they pulled us away?”

  Amira waited a beat. “No.”

  “He wasn’t breathing.” I refused to look up at her. I kept my head down.

  “I know.”

  I took a deep breath. “I didn’t go to any regular schools much, we moved too often. I’ve been in the middle of protests, riots, arrests. I’ve seen people shot, but carried away by ambulances quickly. I’ve never seen that much blood before. It’s like something from San Francisco.”

  “Or earlier,” Amira said, somewhat nonchalantly. “Before your dad. When the fighting was violent. The paramedics couldn’t get in during Pacification.”

  “You’re not that much older than me,” I said. “You were, what, eight or nine years old then?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I imagined a young Amira watching a running gun battle in the middle of a burned-out New Jersey. “And now you’re fighting for the Accordance?”

  Amira’s jaw clenched. “Your parents are still alive and resisting. Lucky you. Mine were executed on a street corner. I survived because if you needed a pass, a way into limited movement areas, then you had to talk to little Amira Singh. For a payment I’d help hack and forge anything. My parents had wanted me to help the cause. The whole family invested in the cost of me taking online classes and apprenticing to older hackers, but all those investors had hungry children who needed me as a meal ticket after their parents were shot. Lucky for them I learn fast. Lucky for them I had the education. Unlucky for them, now, that I’ve been dragged off and they have no one.”

  She waved her fingers over her eyes and at the silvered swirls on her arms and neck. “Accordance isn’t supposed to sell this on Earth, but there are always black markets where less-than-scrupulous aliens can make money selling us what we can’t make ourselves. I can tap into Accordance virtual networks and augmented reality feeds. We’ll never be full citi­zens, but I can at least taste a little of their world. When they caught up to me they gave me a choice: a lifetime sentence, or the CPF. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Fuck ‘sorry.’ Everyone’s sorry the Accordance invaded our world. I’m sorry half my neighborhood fought back. Sorry I detected enforcers coming and hid myself, but couldn’t warn the rest of my family. We’re sorry that kid died in front of us. I’ll bet you’re sorry you betrayed your parents to serve in the CPF.”

  She leaned forward and pulled her zip tie closed with her teeth as I stared at her.

  “Someone’s coming?” I asked, doing the same.

  “Under emergency session, acting president Barnett just forced microchip legislation through,” Amira said, letting go of the tie. “Everyone is now going to be sorry that Tranquility was bombed by radicals, because if they want to travel, they’ll now need to be tagged like the little pets we are. Everyone’s fucking sorry, Devlin. It’s the state of the universe these days. But at least you tried to help someone next to you, and that’s more than we often get.”

  The door slid open. An Arvani commander in full matte-­black battle gear scuttled through the door. Its eight mechanized tentacles tapped the ground as it approached us.

  No water in a tank, like civilian Arvani. This armor form-­fitted the alien. Pistons and plates hugged the octopus-like form, sliding and shifting with it as it walked toward us.

  Shimmering glass covered the large, unblinking eyes. “Call me Commander Zeus. The sound is close to what I like to think my name begins with, and I hear the name holds import, so I will have it. I’m your new instructor. Of all the indignities piled on me of late, my latest is that all the human instructors at the Icarus camp have been dismissed and your training turned over to me. I had to come pick you apes up myself.

  “If I could, I’d leave you here to rot. But that would be more paperwork than just hauling myself down here to drag you out of this room. Let’s move.”

  Commander Zeus turned around.

  “No,” I said, refusing to get up.

  The commander pivoted back, a scary rapid uncoiling movement that happened in the blink of an eye, and regarded me. “No?”

  “Tell me what happened to Keiko.”

  The Arvani didn’t move for a second. “Dead.”

  I’d expected that. I didn’t expect it to suck the air out of me even though I’d prepared for it.

  “We need to do something,” I said. I wasn’t sure what. Some kind of ceremony. Something.

  Zeus knocked the chair out from under me. I hit the ground with a groan, and the commander squatted over me. “One dead recruit is a tiny speck of shit in a whirlpool,” the alien said. “There will be more before your time is over. This is the perspective you should curl your limbs around.”

  “We still have to respect our fallen,” I said. “It’s what we do.”

  “The fallen do not care,” Commander Zeus said. “And I do not care ‘what you do.’ But I will tell you what I will do. If you do not follow me out of this room, there will be consequences for your dereliction. I’m sure you can imagine them. I do not care what you choose. My duty to protocol here has been made.”

  Zeus turned around.

  Amira grabbed my arm and helped me up.

  “Remember Keiko in your own way,” she said. “Let it go for now. Don’t put you or your family on the list.”

  “I had to—”

  “I know. But you just pissed off Captain Calamari there. The creature that’ll be running our whole world for the next few weeks.”

  “Commander Calamari,” I corrected her.

  “No.” Amira squinted. “I think it’s Captain Calamari for me.”

  10

  The commander’s tentacles filled most of the free space in the tiny craft that dropped out of the lunar night, leaving Amira and me to push ourselves as far up against the back bench as we could.

  Through the large porthole on my side I watched as we arced high over the cratered mountains in the dark, whipping a mile overhead a desolate landscape punctuated by the occasional grid and piping of lunar mining facilities.

  There were so many craters. The Earth-facing side of the moon had been smoother with its seas and plains. The dark side looked as if it had been in a long, losing war: billions of years of constant artillery bombardment, ravaged by the vengeance of outer space’s constant barrage of rocks from beyond Earth’s orbit.

  All around me, as far as I could see right now, was the Icarus crater. It was almost sixty miles wide, and we’d been flying over it for the last couple minutes.

  “Big railgun,” Amira said. I looked out her porthole. A mile-long bridge-like structure ran along the surface. It held a long pipe in its struts rather than a road, though. “A mining facility. They’re taking the processed ore chunks and just shooting them in capsules to wherever in orbit they need to go for Accordance projects.”

  As we watched, lights danced up and down the trusses and a capsule slightly bigger than the craft we sat in hurtled toward the horizon and rose up into orbit.

  A minute or two later, another one followed it.

  “Your new home.” Commander Zeus tapped an armored tip against the curved screen in front of him.

  The lights of the Icarus training facility lit up the horizon, then almost blinded me as we crested a hill. The craft shuddered as the commande
r fired engines to slow our forward motion to a near stop, leaving us hanging just over the complex.

  Below us an entire crater had been capped with a clear dome, then filled with ponds, brush, bridges, obstacle courses, and other objects I couldn’t identify.

  Four petal-shaped complexes spread out around the capped dome, making it look like a giant clover from above. More half-buried cylinders popped up inside nearby craters.

  “The dome allows for a variety of conditions,” Commander Zeus explained. “We can heat it, chill it, raise the pressure, lower it. Blow wind. Flood it. Put in any number of atmospheres from a variety of planets. We can create storms, hail, winter, summer. We can change the gravity itself via dense attractor base plates buried under the ground. Your living quarters are off to the sides, your commanders live in the quarters one crater over. Be proud: We invested a lot in this for just humans.”

  We gently struck a landing pad on top of one of the petals. It pulled us inside, the roof closing overhead after it.

  The pad came to a shuddering halt near a row of rovers, their massive balloon-like wheels almost touching each other.

  “You’re just in time,” the commander said. “While you’ve spent a day sitting around doing nothing, your teammates have had a meal, learned where their rooms are, and are getting ready for their first round of Escape the School.”

  “Escape the School?” Amira asked.

  “I’m told it’s a rough translation of a concept we Arvani use in our training. I want to see you all in action.”

  + + +

  Recruits strung out in a circle in the natural amphitheater to the back of the capped lunar dome.

  We slipped in at the back of the line, taking our place. Most of the recruits were in their late teens, like me. Quite a few in their twenties, though. “War’s a young man’s game,” my father had often said. “One where older statesmen send the patriotic young to settle their elders’ disagreements with their blood.”

  I looked around. Lots of thickly muscled arms and strong backs. I felt like the runt in the back. Whatever came next, I guessed I’d have to depend on quick feet and quick thinking.

  Commander Zeus descended on a cabled platform from the top of the dome.

  He threw a black ball out with one of his tentacles into the muddy grass in front of the recruits. “The moment your fingerprints touch the ball,” he shouted, “it registers that you have possession. It also lights up so you can’t hide with it.”

  We all regarded the ball.

  “The aim of this test is to show me who can hold on to the ball the longest.”

  Someone raised a hand. “What happens to those who hold it the shortest? Or who don’t get it at all?”

  “Your orders,” Zeus said, “are to hold on to it the longest.”

  Amira stood behind me, her arms folded. “You remember the beach on the Hamptons?” I asked her. “We need to get our hands on that thing. Together.”

  “One against everyone is going to be hell,” she agreed. “A bunch of us against everyone else is going to be more survivable.”

  “Right. Let’s find anyone we know.”

  We started walking around, looking for recruits we recognized from the trip to Tranquility City.

  The platform began to rise back up into the air on its cables, lifting Zeus into a catwalk gallery under the dome.

  “One last change in the current,” the alien commander shouted. “I will be venting the dome’s atmosphere until you pass out to see how you function.”

  I thought about the choking moon dust lacerating my throat as I struggled to breathe back in Tranquility City.

  “Hey, it’s Doughnuts,” a voice called out. Amira pulled a familiar-looking dark-haired recruit along.

  “Nico’s in,” she said.

  “What are the rules?” a recruit down the line shouted up at the retreating platform. It was Ken, I realized. “What are we allowed to do?”

  There was no reply.

  Amira yanked more people over to me. Our hasty team grabbed shoulders in a huddle. I counted ten of us, mostly all recognizable from the ride to the moon. “Here’s the idea,” I said. “If any of us can grab it, the rest of us huddle around and protect them. We rotate in, get some holding time, until we’ve all got hands on it. Then we let it go. Yell ‘ball’ and we’ll surround you. Each of us gets five seconds.”

  “You sure this will work?” the recruit who’d nicknamed me Doughnuts asked.

  “No,” I said. “We’ll get the shit kicked out of us trying to do it. But you think it’ll go any better with us trying it alone?”

  A horn blared, an unmistakable start signal.

  A scrum instantly developed over the ball. Individuals scrapping around the mud to try to hold on. Legs churned, bodies writhed.

  One of the recruits staggered out of the mass of bodies, swore, then threw herself back in with a vicious elbow to someone’s neck.

  “My finger’s broken! Help!” A scraggly boy crawled out and held up a hand. Bone stuck out of the side of his finger and blood ran down his wrist.

  But no help came down from the gantry. Or from anywhere else.

  Ken approached us, a surprisingly humble nervousness obvious in his body language. “Create a wedge,” he said. “I think that’ll get us in there.”

  “There is no ‘us,’ ” I snarled at him, remembering his elbow digging into the back of my neck as he shaved my head, embarrassing me in front of Cee Cee.

  He raised his hands, conciliatory. “Look, I’m sorry about the doughnuts.”

  “Fuck off,” I said, and turned my back. I took several deep breaths, watching the dozens of recruits in front of us fighting like a cluster of weasels over the ball. I glanced back and saw Ken walking away, looking for someone else to join forces with.

  “We need all the help we can get,” Amira muttered to me.

  “Fuck him. We don’t need his help.”

  “He was right about wedging in,” Amira said.

  I grunted. “I guess.”

  “When do we try for it?” the guy who’d called me Dough­nuts asked.

  I looked over at Amira’s silver eyes. “Our instructors are venting air. When do we start getting dizzy?”

  The right corner of her mouth pulled back, a half smile as she figured out what I was thinking. The first time I’d seen that. “Five minutes. More or less.”

  “I want to eat dinner first tonight, if they’re pulling that stunt from the Hamptons again,” I said. “So we’re just going to stand here and take long, deep breaths. Keep yourself oxygen­ated. We’re going to form up in a triangle, and keep our arms locked together. Biggest up at the spear tip, right? If that scrum moves at all, we slowly track it. Amira, can you keep time for us?”

  “Nice thinking, Doughnuts.”

  “It’s Devlin,” I said. “You are?”

  “Grayson.”

  We linked arms and formed up, like protestors facing an advancing line of enforcers. The hard part would be waiting and holding as Amira ticked off a minute, and then another. I kept up a running patter of positive support, keeping the small squad upbeat about our plan.

  “Three minutes,” she reported. The scrum broke apart. A recruit with a ripped uniform punched someone in the face and tore free. Blood streamed down his face as he held the ball to his barrel-like chest, cradled in thick, muscular arms. The ball lit up like a small sun as he placed his fingers against it. We all blinked and shielded our eyes.

  “Let’s get him,” Grayson said. We all surged forward a bit.

  “Walk!” I shouted. “Walk. Stay together.”

  A cloud of recruits surged after the recruit with the ball. They ran across the mud toward an obstacle course away from the open clearing we’d assembled in.

  Some of the runners looked woozy, but determined.

  “Tw
o minutes,” Amira called out.

  “Breathe deep, walk easy,” I said as we shuffled after the prize.

  The recruit finally succumbed to the crowds chasing him and went down. The scrum reassembled, occasional figures wrapping themselves around the ball in a fetal position as they got the shit kicked out of them and the ball pried out of their hands.

  “One minute.”

  Screams of injured recruits echoed off the dome and bounced back down at us. I glanced up at the catwalk. Zeus stood on his platform, surveying the chaos but not putting a stop to it.

  “It’s sleepy time,” Amira said.

  “Go!” I shouted.

  Our wedge struck the scrum hard, scattering bodies and trampling people caught by surprise. We were fresh, not dizzy, and organized.

  “Get the ball but don’t unlink your arms!” Amira shouted.

  “Count to five, then pass it along.” I hoped that whoever had snagged it wouldn’t hog it, or I’d be screwed.

  The center of our huddle lit up, dazzling my eyes as one of the recruits managed to get on his knees to retrieve the ball. Behind me, a knee struck my kidney hard enough that I sagged in place as I gasped.

  I hung limp, tears running down my cheeks. Amira yanked me back onto my feet.

  “Pass.”

  The ball was passed to the right as we huddled and weathered a storm of scratches, punches, and attempts to pierce our human wall.

  But the air loss was having an affect. The punches were weaker. The roars of rage choked. We were on our knees, arms still linked, heads together, struggling to keep strong.

  When Amira awkwardly passed me the ball I hugged it to my stomach. At the count of four, the Klaxon sounded. We all flopped onto our backs and gasped fresh air as it streamed back into the dome in a rush of wind.

  Commander Zeus descended from the sky on the platform, picked around the passed-out humans—sidestepping moaning recruits being tended to by struthiform medics—and ignored the still-standing survivors who eyed him warily.

  “I seem to have been stuck with a mass of miserably performing apes!” the Arvani commander shouted. “And while I find you all about as appealing as barnacle growth, I have my duty. So we have a lot of work to do.”