The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  Also, after staring at it for a moment, I picked up Boris’s cutting torch. Amira paused in front of a shelf, then pulled out what looked like an RPG launcher. But the tube was solid, and ribbed with high-density battery packs and high-energy cabling that crawled in and out of hundreds of ports, giving it a surprisingly cobbled-together look.

  I glanced at the labeling on the shelf she’d taken it off. EPC-I was all it said.

  Efua broke the silence as we slowly crawled out over the lunar surface for the ridge that would cover us: the far rim of the Icarus crater. “We’re pinned down,” she informed us, her voice somewhat flat and calm. “There is a raptor outside, and crickets inside. We’re trying to use as little ammunition as we can, but eventually . . . the raptor will come for us.”

  “We’re coming,” I said solemnly. “But it’s going to take a while to get past the ridge.” We were moving from shadow to shadow again, easing our way over the pockmarked surface out of the line of sight of the Conglomerate ship.

  “And how long do you think ‘a while’ might be?” Efua asked.

  “It took five hours to cross last time,” Amira said. “Plus time to get from the ridge to the mines.”

  “Five hours,” Efua repeated. “Okay. Okay, six hours. We will see you then.”

  She didn’t sound sure of that. She was talking herself into it.

  “The ghost isn’t dead,” Amira whispered. “It’s still on the Accordance networks, trying to find me. I have to stay locked down.”

  “It could be a different ghost,” Ken said, speaking for the first time in over an hour.

  “It could be,” Amira agreed. She didn’t sound sure.

  “Trolls,” I said from my spot in the dark. The giant creatures had come around the side of the base, roving back and forth in a crude search pattern.

  + + +

  “They’re going to slaughter everyone in Tranquility,” Ken said, two hours later. We crouched in separate craters, waiting for the trolls to turn their backs so we could move. “And then they’ll come for Earth.”

  “I know.” I was in the clear. I scrabbled over broken rock to leap out from the shadows in the dark. I landed on the tip of a boulder, then swung behind it just before a troll turned and looked my way.

  No dust, I pleaded. It had been a long, risky move.

  “It didn’t see you,” Amira said.

  I let out a breath.

  “Clear to spot for me,” she said a moment later.

  I peeked around the boulder and got eyes on both massive aliens.

  “What are we going to do?” Ken asked.

  “Stay alive,” I said. “Try to get word out. Try to walk out from under this jamming and get Amira to send a message. And you’re good, Amira. Go.”

  I saw Amira kangaroo out from boulder to boulder in almost a straight line. The impacts looked brutal, but it kept her from arcing up high over the surface.

  Smart. I’d have to try that.

  “It’s going to take too long to walk out from under this,” Ken said. “They will move away and attack Tranquility before we have a chance to get within range of something that can hear our suits. We need to take direct action.”

  “You’re welcome to pop up and wave at the trolls anytime you want,” I told him. “I don’t want to be toe-paste.”

  “There is more than just surviving,” Ken snapped. “The stakes are much higher.”

  “Stay alive first,” Amira cautioned. “The longer we do, the more options we can scare up.”

  “I just . . . ,” Ken started.

  “I know,” Amira said. “Save that. Just hold on to it for later.”

  I leaned back against the boulder and looked up over the ridge that we’d been slowly, too slowly, moving closer to.

  Something twinkled up into the dark sky between a notch in the rock, then disappeared, blocked from my sight as it was flung into orbit.

  “Efua, Devlin here,” I said. “Is the mass driver still launching payloads?”

  “Devlin, I hear you, just one moment.” Efua grunted. The sound of something like a slap came through, and tortured metal. Efua panted. “Yes. It just launched. I think the Conglomeration is leaving it alone, so that no one from Tranquility realizes anything is wrong over here.”

  No gunshots. Her team had to be attacking crickets by their armored hands to save ammunition.

  Dangerous. But they were trapped and running low.

  Buying time, I thought. All we were doing was buying time. And the end was the same no matter what. We were not going to live through this. Even if we got word out, or hid and survived, eventually our air would run out.

  We needed to go about this in a different direction. We needed to stop running and start thinking.

  I looked back up at the notch where the twinkle of the launch came through.

  “I think Ken’s right,” I said, before I’d even realized it.

  “Shit. You too?” Amira sighed. “What are you thinking now? We storm the base?”

  “No. We’re fucked,” I told her. “We’re outnumbered. We’d get cut down the moment we popped our heads up. But maybe we can still hurt them. Hurt them enough to get a signal out. When Zeus flew us in, he said the mass driver could change where it delivered packages.”

  “It’s giant artillery,” Amira said. “Right in front of us. You’re right. But there is a raptor and a shitload of crickets crawling around.”

  “I didn’t say it would be easy. Or guaranteed. But can you access the systems?”

  “That’s not the biggest problem,” Amira said.

  What had I missed? “What’s the problem?”

  “The moment I get into the Accordance systems on that thing, the ghost will know. It’s sniffing everything around here. I see why the Accordance uses entangled quantum systems for our team comms, and tries to use regular frequencies as little as possible. Trolls aren’t looking, you’re a go.”

  “Moving.” I took a deep breath and shot across the surface and up the ridge. I smacked into rocks, some of them tumbling down the base-facing side. “Shit.”

  On the other side I rabbited again.

  “They’re focused elsewhere, still good. Still good. Ken: Go!”

  I found a bolt-hole on the other side of the slope and watched the horizon.

  “Can you trick it?” I asked.

  “Go,” Ken said.

  Amira responded with a grunt. She was moving now. I looked left just in time to see her somersault over the ridge and arc slowly down into the crater. She hit in a plume of dust.

  “Get clear of that,” Ken said.

  She hopped from rock to rock, away from dirt, trying to avoid leaving tracks from the large divot she’d made. “What do you mean, ‘trick it’?”

  “They’re going to know we’re attacking and retaking the mass driver and the mines supplying it,” I said. “So they’re not going to be that surprised if you show up on the network. I don’t know a ton about systems and networks, but can you trick them into thinking you’re trying to break out a signal?”

  Amira bounced around some more, then came to a stop. “Maybe,” she said thoughtfully.

  “As long as they don’t realize we’re fucking with the mass driver,” I said. “We hit their ship, the jamming goes down, we warn everyone.”

  “And then all hell breaks loose.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And a lot of lives might be saved.”

  “We are clear,” Ken said, arcing overhead in a long jump away from the rim. “They are circling back the other way. And I think Devlin has the plan.”

  “My last one wasn’t so hot,” I said.

  Ken hit dirt. “I want to see that seething mass of Conglo­merate shit fall out of the sky and burn. I can’t think of any other way to make that happen, and it’s a better plan than any I’ve come up wi
th. Amira, are you willing?”

  “You can’t do this without me,” she said.

  “It matters how we choose to die,” Ken said.

  “Don’t lecture me about how to die, Ken. I’ve seen people throw themselves at a cause and bleed out in the street. I’ve held arms while basement surgeons try to save a fighter for a cause. When the moment comes, all you have is pain and fear. No one’s marching off into it full of fervor and excitement. They beg for their mothers. They beg for relief.”

  “They scream,” Ken agreed softly. “Then they choke, because the air is sucked out of the building. You try to give them air, but some of them wave you away. And then their heads pop, hit by concentrated energy. Hundreds of them. No fervor, Amira. Just survival.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot you were in there when it happened.”

  “And so was Boris,” Ken said. “I want to give them back a taste of what they did. Will you help?”

  “Well, we’re going to head over there to help Efua out anyway,” Amira said. “We might as well try this.”

  “Good.” I stood up and loped along behind them. “Efua, we’re coming!”

  “I heard your plan,” she said. “But you need to hurry.”

  We picked up the pace as best we could.

  26

  Crickets swarmed around the pilings, a mechanized cloud of snapping pincers and needle-sharp maws. The launcher itself dwarfed us all. It sat inside a low-lying crater, the breech down at the center and the tip propped up by the ridge a mile away. Accordance engineers had then covered the entire crater in superstructural, organic latticework that created a perfect bowl for the barrel to rest in.

  The mile-long barrel could be moved, just as Zeus had said. The lattice below it had gears and pistons the size of buildings under the pilings. A typical Accordance structure: fragile ­looking, giant, and carved quickly out of a landscape.

  “Where are the tunnels to the mines?” Ken asked. “Efua? Can you tell us?”

  “She’s been quiet for the last forty minutes,” Amira said.

  “Efua!” Ken repeated.

  “She’ll answer us if she can,” I said.

  “Let’s try the base of the launcher,” Amira said. “There’s probably another way in. They’d want to be able to drive things in, but we’ll have to walk all the way around the rim of the crater to find it. They have to have something near all that equipment that needs maintaining, though.”

  “Also, that’s where the crickets are swarming from,” I agreed. The moving cloud hadn’t spotted us peeking down from the ridge at them yet. A small part of me suggested that it would be a good idea to turn and run before they did, that I could still live through this by running.

  But where?

  “We have to be quick; they could just cluster and overwhelm us.” Amira sounded annoyed by the idea, like it was a tactic beneath her.

  “Keep them away from your helmet,” Ken said. “Don’t waste too much of your ammunition. And watch for the raptor. I haven’t spotted it yet, have any of you?”

  A child-sized cricket scuttled up from under the latticework and leapt into the air. Amira fired once with a handgun, hitting it in the center and scattering pieces, which rained slowly down around us.

  The boiling mass at the center of the crater stopped swirling around the mass driver’s infrastructure and swirled in our direction.

  “Let’s go!” I shouted, leaping over the ridge and onto the lattice toward the swarm. “Amira, keep behind us.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” she snapped, angry. I looked up as she leapt over me toward the oncoming rush.

  “You’re the only one that can program the damn thing!” I shouted.

  “Then keep up.” Amira jumped again, high and visible to the cricket swarm. They adjusted en masse, shifting to anticipate where she would land.

  “Amira!”

  At the apex of her jump she swapped from handgun to the EPC-1 device with all the energy blisters she’d slung on her back. And didn’t fire.

  It had been a ridiculously tall jump, with not much forward progress. Crickets boiled underneath her, climbing over each other’s metallic jointed bodies with artificial eagerness to look upward at her. Jaws snapped, legs readied to stab at her.

  Ken changed course, headed toward the growing mountain of crickets. “Get back,” Amira snapped as she plummeted down at them.

  She triggered the device she held casually at her hip. The energy blisters glowed, the cabling lit up, sparked, and a ring of energy spat from the tip. Everything in my suit dimmed slightly at the same time, and my movements stuttered.

  Crickets of various sizes and shapes fizzled and spat, then fell still. Amira plunged into their bodies and slid down a hill of twitching legs. “They’re not the only ones who can use electromagnetic pulses,” she said triumphantly. “Electronic Pulse Cannon, model 1, for the win. Come on!”

  We changed course, zigging and zagging our way down the slope so that crickets could gather and clump for Amira. After two more bursts, and two more piles of twitching crickets, we hit the base.

  “So many,” I muttered.

  “At least we haven’t encountered any drivers,” Amira said. Just the test ones in training could scatter us.

  “Don’t jinx us like that.” I didn’t even want to think of the things jamming their tails into my spine to take me over.

  “There’s an airlock, and a ramp,” Ken said, veering off.

  “Right behind you,” Amira said.

  I came up behind them, making sure something didn’t get us while we entered. Amira hopped around, looking for manual overrides.

  Three cat-sized crickets, one of them dragging broken legs behind it, leapt over the ramp’s edge at us. I shot them down with a few silent, quick bursts of my MP9, then crushed the remains with my heel.

  “Okay,” Amira said. “We’re in.”

  We piled into the airlock and Amira shut it behind us. Moments later things clattered against it, trying to break through and get to us.

  We stood in the space between the two doors for a moment, catching our breath.

  Then Amira grabbed a lever and pumped it several times to charge the inner door. “You ready for this?” she asked.

  I raised my MP9. “Yes.”

  I was lying. Anything on the other side knew something was about to come through.

  Ken stepped up next to me. “Ready,” he said.

  Amira pushed the lever back into the wall and the door clunked, then jerked open. A white-hot bolt of lightning blew my vision out as it snapped through the open space and hit Ken. He opened fire even as he flew back, knocked into the outer door.

  I stepped forward, firing wildly. Amira’s weapon fired, my steps stuttered, and fuzzy static filled my ears. “Got the energy rifle,” she said.

  The snap of electricity stopped, my helmet visor faded, and my sight returned just in time for me to see a raptor in midleap, tossing its now-ruined weapon to the side.

  “Raptor!” Ken shouted, a moment too late.

  “Oh—” It struck me, knocking me right back into the airlock. “Shit!”

  The thwack of bullets filled the airlock: Amira, on the raptor’s back, firing point-blank at its long neck with her handgun. It let go of me and slammed up against the airlock, trying to shake her loose.

  Ken staggered to his feet as I fumbled with the welder. I’d seen Boris use it, but it was an alien tool designed for alien hands. For several agonizing seconds, I couldn’t figure out how to turn it on as we struggled in the airlock.

  Then it lit up, the points converging on the pure point of light, and I swung it up into the tangle of Amira, Ken, and the raptor. I aimed for its chest, but Ken, wrestling with one of its hands, swept past me. The welder cut through his calf and he screamed.

  “Shit.” I apologized as I slammed
the torch into the raptor’s chest, not willing to risk also hitting Amira, who struggled on its shoulders, if I aimed for the neck.

  Molten armor splashed back against me and covered my shielded wrists. I shoved forward, and the raptor staggered back. “Get away,” I warned Amira as I leaned in, feeling the welder bite through armor, then pop through.

  Amira rolled away, and I pinned the alien to the wall and buried the weapon deeper with another shove. It stopped trying to claw at me. It slumped forward, pinned as the welder passed through the back of its armor and melted into the wall.

  “I think you got it,” Amira said. “You can turn it off.”

  I pulled my thumb off the button and the sizzling faded. I let go, leaving both the alien and the welder hanging from the wall, and turned around. “Ken!”

  He stood on one leg, with an arm over Amira’s shoulder. “I’m okay,” he said, through audibly gritted teeth. I could see sweat dripping from his face through his helmet.

  “Shit, man, I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “You killed it.” He grimaced. “That is what matters. And the cut is not so bad. The suit is giving me painkillers and packing the wound with sealant. I can compensate. You can let me go. We must get control of the mass driver.”

  He pulled away from Amira and wobbled on his own.

  “I just need somewhere to patch in locally,” Amira said. She sounded tired. They were all running on fumes. Maybe even making mistakes at this point. Small ones, but how straight could you think when you hadn’t slept since the attack?

  But we couldn’t slow anything down now.

  “There will be more crickets in here,” Ken said. “Go with Amira so she can focus on the things she needs to do. I’ll search for Efua and the others.”

  “Be careful.” I wanted to grab his forearm, but he nodded and limped down the corridor. I turned and grabbed the welder with both hands and yanked it. The raptor toppled to the floor.

  “This way,” Amira said, stepping over it.

  “How do you know?”