The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  “A raptor jumped us on the way out.” Ken rubbed his forehead. “It killed five of us before we put it down.”

  He wasn’t bragging. Not trying to score points. He looked shaken mentioning the deaths.

  “How many are near the door?” I asked.

  “Outside of me and Boris, five others.”

  So just nine of us in the room. “Have you seen anyone else?”

  “Just screams and bodies,” Ken rasped. “Efua, you said you saw something?”

  One of the other survivors had moved closer in the dark and spoke up. “We did see a cloud of crickets drag Commander Zeus off,” she said. “We don’t know what happened, though. Normally they don’t take you alive . . . they just start firing first.”

  Commander Zeus must have had some value to them alive, I thought to myself. Unlike the recruits.

  “I’d thought, once we had guns we could get armor and then fight back,” Ken said softly. “But after that raptor . . . I realized we aren’t ready for this. We barely started training. They’re seasoned killers. After that encounter, I just wanted to get suited up and find a place to hole up. Fight only if cornered.”

  I nodded. “Amira and I were going to armor up, then go hide in the mines. See if we could get somewhere safe from there, or find out what’s going on. Is it just here? Or is everything under attack?”

  Ken looked up. “Like Earth?”

  “The Conglomerate is here, and they usually come for whole systems,” Amira said.

  “Fucking hell,” Boris said. “The mines aren’t a bad idea.”

  “Can you really reach out from there to find out what’s happening?” Ken asked.

  “If anyone can, it’s Amira. Anyone have a better idea to stay alive?”

  Ken took a deep breath, then shook his head. He looked at Boris, who also shook his head.

  Amira held up a hand. “Crickets,” she said. “They’re going door-to-door.”

  I turned to Ken. “Give Amira and me the MP9s you and Boris have, you all get into armor, and we’ll hold them off.”

  Ken hesitated for a second, then handed me his submachine gun. He handed me an extra magazine. “Shoot sparingly, not a lot of magazines left. And we lost most of the other weapons in the fight. We just have some handguns passed around now.”

  Amira pointed at a rack of suits. “Ken, Boris, those suits are all the same arm. We’re going to need to stay on the same network that they can’t hack so we can chat. Everyone else, just make sure you’re all in the same arm.”

  I stomped my way forward toward the doors and checked the MP9. “Is this the safety?”

  Amira leaned forward and flicked up the switch I’d indicated. “Firing mode. Keep it off full automatic for now. Save ammo. The safety is in the trigger on this one. Just keep squeezing.”

  “Right.” I didn’t ask how she knew all this, but raised the gun and flipped my helmet up as the sound of skittering outside got louder.

  20

  The doors jerked up, a slight gap of light appearing before they seized. Amira had her eyes closed, concentrating as she fought to keep the doors from opening. Electrical smoke from burning motors in the doors wafted around us.

  A pair of sticklike pincers reached under the door, trying to pull it up.

  I stomped them, snapping the limbs clean off.

  It was like kicking a beehive. Suddenly the entire gap filled with metal lobster-sized bodies thrashing to get through the gap and into the room.

  “They know we’re here,” Amira grunted.

  I aimed the machine gun low and fired along the floor. Pieces of cricket flew off and clattered to the floor with each shot.

  “Save the ammo for something bigger!” Ken shouted from the back of the room.

  I kept stomping. The door lurched farther open. I grabbed a cricket out of the air with my right hand and slapped it into a wall. It burst into parts and rained to the floor. One of the legs twitched and tried to jam a knifelike tip down into my ankle. I leapt back away and shot it.

  Crickets zoomed around the room, bursting past us, seeking to stab anything they could. But everyone had armored up.

  Cricket bodies were slammed against walls, pulverized under boots, or just thrown aside as we spilled out into the corridor. “Amira?” I shouted.

  “This way.”

  We retreated from the swarm of metal insects falling over themselves to get at us. I followed Amira, crushing crickets underfoot. How far away was the breach that would get us outside onto the lunar surface? Because then we could really open up and run.

  “Stop!” Amira shouted. “Raptors. Backup is coming.”

  “How many?” Ken asked.

  “Four.”

  No way could we face four raptors.

  “Back the way we came,” Ken said.

  “But . . . ,” someone objected.

  “He’s right!” I shouted. “Come on.”

  We charged into the boiling mess of crickets, flailing and destroying as many as we could as we ran on. We skidded to a halt at another junction. Amira raised a hand.

  More crickets scuttled toward us, some of them bouncing off the walls with eagerness. Why were we stopped?

  Then I felt it: a thud in the floor under my boots.

  “Troll?” I asked.

  Amira turned toward me. Through the helmet I could see her face had gone pale. She nodded.

  “Raptors to the back, troll ahead,” I said out loud.

  “I told you we should have gotten those fucking explosives,” Boris said. “Take them with us.”

  I leaned against the wall, feeling each vibration of the troll approaching us. “We can’t get to the breach,” Amira said. “We’re going to have to see if we can outrun them on the training grounds, it’s the only direction left.”

  “That’s something.” I started backing down that corridor.

  “It’s just buying time,” she said.

  “You told me time gives us options.” I was thinking.

  “Troll or raptor, not much of an option.”

  “No, but we have something they’re not expecting,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You. The facility is still powering up the variable gravity. Can you access it?”

  “I think so,” Amira said. “You want me to use the field against them?”

  “Captain Calamari did it against us. Should be just as annoying, don’t you think?”

  Amira started to jog faster. “Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know how long it will take, though. Ken, take this MP9.”

  “We’re going deeper into the base,” I called out. “Cover Amira as best you can, give her space. If you want to get out of here alive, you’ll make sure nothing touches her.”

  + + +

  We burst out of the bay leading onto the center grounds and scattered without thinking. We’d been doing drills on the training field enough that it was instinct.

  Only this time it wasn’t a fellow squad coming at us, but real Conglomerate enemies.

  “Keep moving,” I said. “We have to buy Amira time.”

  “This better work,” Ken grumbled.

  Crickets tumbled out after us, some of them unfolding translucent wings and taking to the air. Then came the loping raptors.

  I circled around the rim of a crater to get something between us as long lances of focused energy stabbed at us from the raptor’s rifles, exploding dirt whenever they hit the ground.

  Gunfire answered them. Ken perched on the lip of a boulder, sniping at them. He’d pulled the gun’s shoulder stock out and unfolded the forward grip for better aim. The aliens scattered as well, hunting for cover as more accurate fire struck them.

  The cap over the grounds had been punctured and melted, so there was no atmosphere. But Amira stood behind us and raised her gauntleted h
ands. “I’m into the training system’s weather control. I think this will only hit them,” she muttered to us. “But just in case, hunker down.”

  Fist-sized hail flung itself out of the sky on the other half of the course. Crickets circling overhead fell, wings suddenly punctured. The raptors huddled, distracted by the pelting chaos.

  Without eyes in the sky, with the raptors knocked back, we took the chance to rearrange ourselves, finding the best spots on the course. Spots well-known to us.

  One of the raptors broke cover and jumped into the air, looking for us. Amira waved a hand and the raptor twisted. It came right back down to the ground, faster than it had anticipated. It struggled to get to its feet, fighting the suddenly heavy gravity.

  Ken fired three quick bursts at it. It reeled back and fell over a ledge, then slid down into the middle of a crater.

  “One less raptor to worry about,” he said.

  But none of us were paying attention. We were all looking at the rocky creature stooping out from under the bay door and stepping into our arena.

  The troll seemed to keep unfolding, getting taller and taller. It took slow, deliberate steps forward.

  “I’ve got gravity cranked all the way up,” Amira said. “Overrides and all.”

  “Can you imagine the world that thing came from?” Ken whispered, somewhat awed.

  I didn’t want to.

  “Anyone see something behind the troll?” Amira asked. “There’s something there, right?” Her voice sounded strained. She staggered and fell back. I moved closer to her, leaving cover.

  “Amira, what’s wrong?” I moved around to look into her visor. She glanced over at me, and I saw blood run down her upper lip. Like it had when the electromagnetic pulse fried the computer chips and her unhardened nano-ink. “Shit. Amira!”

  “Look at the troll!” she snapped. “Do you see something near it? I can feel it, all over the network. It’s attacking me.”

  I looked again. Yes, something: a blur moving alongside the legs.

  “Yeah. I thought something was in my eye, or on the helmet,” Boris said.

  “Ghost,” Amira said softly. “It’s a ghost.” Almost too soft to hear.

  “Fuck,” I said. That’s all we needed, the alien that caused all the other aliens to go berserker.

  Amira’s voice firmed up. “I think I can still work around it. It’s everywhere, but I can . . . here we go, get ready to run.”

  Yellow mists rose from the ground. They swirled around the troll and the raptors and rose quickly. Other gases mixed in, and the entire dome thickened with them.

  “Smoke screen. And they’re slowed down. Now we run,” Amira said.

  Ken and Boris hung back to cover us as we bounced to the other side. A big leap with our assisted legs got us onto the scaffolding twenty feet over the grounds. Some awkward climbing and we broke out of the facility.

  Another great leap for us, and we were on the lunar surface, bounding for safety in the shadows of the jagged hills and craters around the base.

  “Faster!” I shouted at everyone. Over by the Arvani quarters the Conglomerate starship was pulling up its tendrils with surprising swiftness for something its size. Whatever it was.

  It began to drift our way.

  “I think it’s coming for us,” I said, just before thick beams of energy lit up the lunar night like searching spotlights, dancing around the battered gray rocks we were trying to hide behind.

  21

  The barrage melted lunar regolith and threw boulders into the air as rock exploded. Stabbing energy blasts dazzled my eyes as I scrambled for cover.

  “They’re climbing higher for an angle on us,” Ken shouted after a few minutes of chaos and hell.

  Someone started whimpering on the arm’s channel. I sympa­thized as I huddled down into the shadows of a niche in a crater. “Stay still,” Amira said. “The suits have adaptive camo. They have countermeasures built in for Conglomerate sensors. Heat, UV, color, EM. Just don’t move, and the suit has the capacity to hide us. Move and it can’t keep up.”

  I was already gray as the rock around me.

  “Everyone should call in,” Amira continued in a calming voice. “Who made it out? We didn’t have time for names back inside. Who’s in our arm?”

  “Boris, me, you, and Efua are one arm,” Ken said. “The other four are another arm.”

  If we used the common channel, the Conglomerate would use the radio chatter to find us. The quantum entanglement only worked for intra-arm communication.

  “Which one of us is closest to someone in the other arm?” Amira asked. “Are they moving around?”

  “I am,” said a voice that wasn’t Boris’s recognizable accent, Amira, or Ken’s deep voice. She recognized the need to identify herself. “Efua here. I’m ten feet away from someone in the other arm. I don’t know the person’s name, but whoever it is saw us all stop moving and hide, and is copying us.”

  Good. I hadn’t even thought about comm issues. If we’d been supported by properly trained octaves we’d know how to pass communications through from arm to arm, as well as ways to pass information up to leaders.

  But we had no idea what we were doing. Amira was our most competent technologist, and she’d been hit by the electro­magnetic pulse.

  “Efua, can you safely get to this person and touch their armor?” Amira asked. “That’ll set up a direct comm link, and you don’t have to do anything. The suit should figure it out for you.”

  “I think so.” Efua was silent for a long moment. “I’m going over.”

  We waited for her to do that. I winced as more energy struck the dirt nearby. But it was random fire.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked after a few minutes. I hadn’t been paying attention as we’d run for it. I’d dived into a crater a couple hundred feet away from the base. Ken was close to the bottom of the same crater, behind a boulder that had rolled down the slope. I didn’t know where anyone else was.

  “A little farther ahead on the other side of the ridge,” Amira said. “I saw Devlin dive in. I risked the fire to get more distance.”

  “I’m right next to Devlin,” Ken said flatly.

  “Um . . .” Boris cleared his throat. “I’m near the rover bay, hiding behind one of the transport shuttles.”

  “You doubled back to the base and moved around to the bay?” Ken asked, beating me by a split second.

  “Well,” Boris said, “flying out with a shuttle when they’re distracted might be easier than trying to leg it out, yeah? Also, I thought there might be some useful bits lying around.”

  “And?”

  “I found a welding torch,” Boris said. There was a faint hint of satisfaction in his voice. “It’s supposedly strong enough to go through walls. I think it might go through raptor armor.”

  “Anything else useful?” Ken asked.

  “Explosives,” Boris added.

  “Where’d you find those?”

  “Locked away somewhere I had to use the torch to get at,” Boris said.

  “You could have blown yourself up,” Ken snapped.

  Boris made a noncommittal sound.

  “We’re all in danger,” Amira said. “It’s as good an idea as any. He may yet be the one that makes it out now that the damn ship is trying to melt us into the surface.”

  Efua interrupted us. “Okay, I have contact with the other arm. Is there anything you would like me to say to them for you?”

  “Stay put,” Ken said. “Tell them about the camouflage, okay?”

  “Okay. I am telling them.”

  The light show stopped. The ground stopped shaking underneath us.

  “What’s happening now?” I asked.

  “Want to take a look over the edge?” Ken asked. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. But someone was going to have
to.

  “Give me a second,” I told him.

  “Wait . . .”

  I did it slowly, trying to give the suit time to adjust to the change. Hopefully anyone looking at this tiny little space at the crater’s lip would see nothing but gray.

  “Devlin, what are you doing?”

  I tensed, waiting for a bolt of energy to smack into my helmet and take the top of my head clean off. Nothing happened. I kept moving until I finally peered over the edge of the crater.

  I stared at the lumpy, bell-shaped head of a troll standing tall farther down the slope of the crater. “Oh shit.”

  It leapt into the air, passing over me and sailing into the center of the crater.

  Ken rolled away from the boulder and started firing at it. The gun silently puffed smoke in the vacuum out of the barrel, and bullets chipped away at the troll’s bulky ankles.

  “Ken! Run!” Amira bounced onto the tip of the crater. She must have leapt as hard as the suit possibly could, maybe even killing overrides for safety, to make it back from the ridge in a single bound like that.

  The large rock she’d been carrying continued on as she smacked into the ground. It struck the troll right in the temple, and the alien swung to look at her.

  Ken leapt out of the crater. So did I. But Ken shot at the troll again, clipping it in the head, getting its attention back on us and away from Amira.

  “Those bullets aren’t doing shit!” I yelled. “They’re good for crickets, that’s it. We’re just pissing it off.”

  “I know.” Ken popped up like a tick, bouncing from boulder to boulder, zigzagging and staying well away from the troll. “Efua, get your arm to the mining facility while we have the troll’s attention!”

  The troll stopped trying to catch him and pulled out a large weapon strapped to its back. More cannon than gun. Well, more sawed-off cannon than cannon, really. It was squat and oddly bulky. In fact, it was wider than it was long. A weapon that was almost all mouth.

  “Cover!” I yelled. The cannon glowed white and blue, then spat a long line of darkness. Light bent and wobbled around it. The boulder Ken hid behind was plucked right off the ground.