The Darkside War (6 page)

8

Everyone poured excitedly out of the docking tube into Tran­quility City. “Hey. Gravity,” someone said.

“I can't bounce around like those old astronaut videos. What gives?”

“Antigravity in the floors,” Ken announced. “When my family visited Tranquility, they told us humans aren't allowed dense attractor technology.”

“Antigravity,” someone chimed in.

“Dense. Attractor. Technology,” Ken repeated.

That was why the one human space station struggling in orbit still had people floating around in it. And our transport, a cheap craft used to move recruits around, had none either.

But somewhere underfoot, Accordance engineers had laid down a grid of material that pulled us all down toward it. Immensely expensive, and done just so that they could be comfortable here on the moon.

The cargo bay's vaulted ceilings stretched far overhead, like a giant's ribcage. Robotic forklifts with long, articulated, spiderlike arms scurried around the football-sized open floor, pulling square containers off five-story racks that they sometimes had to climb up to reach.

“I saw a whole program about the people they flew to the moon to do the construction,” Keiko said. This part of the city had been dug out by humans helping run alien-built mining machines. The end of the cargo bay was a massive airlock designed for giants, with train tracks running through it into the bay.

“Okay recruits, keep walking!”

We trooped out of the busy cargo bay in obedient lines and snaked our way into Tranquility City's subways and tunnels. Then up a series of escalators, everyone still making sure to keep a hand on the shoulder of the recruit in front of them.

The familiar architecture of Accordance spires appeared when we broke street level.

“Fuck me,” Keiko said. “We're on the surface of the moon.”

“Keep moving!” the instructors shouted as we stumbled, looking around.

“Nothing like on a screen,” I said, awed and also stumbling after the recruit in front of me.

Translucent material capped the streets between buildings, letting us look up into the black sky. Bright light dripped from luminescent globes and strips, filling shadows and crevices with a soft green light to augment the natural sunlight. Gray hills circled around the city where the streets ended, plunging back underground.

“I thought I'd see stars,” someone said.

“Too much light. Washes it out. Just like at a stadium.”

“It's Earth,” Keiko whispered as we turned the gentle curve of an Accordance skyscraper's base.

It hung in the sky, blue and small. Everyone stopped as they looked up. The entire line bunched into a crowd. I craned my neck, ignoring the busy street.

“What's that?” someone else asked. A comet-like silver shape high overhead occluded the Earth briefly, casting us in a flitting shadow before moving on.

“A Pcholem ship,” someone said. “They came in those ships.”

“That
is
a Pcholem. Not a ship. Pcholem.”

“What?”

“Move!” a struthiform instructor hissed, coming up alongside us. “Move now.”

Carapoids moved around us on the street, and more struthi­forms bobbed past to avoid us. The streets ran thick with aliens going about their business. Several water-filled glass bubbles with Arvani inside trundled past.

“It's just us,” Keiko said. “We're the only humans out here.”

Most humans on the moon worked for the Helium-3 mines, or on Accordance construction.

We kept moving, still looking up for a last glimpse of home, until we passed under another large airlock at the city's edges. Humans glanced at us from several small eateries that lined the edge of the oval common area.

No shiny, green-tinged metal cleaning robots in here. Trash and dirt littered the crosswalks and graffiti filled the walls.

Welcome to the human section.

“I gotta go,” Keiko whispered.

“What?”

“Bathroom. We're in a human zone, right? I gotta go.”

“The instructors are out for my blood already, now we're going to get noticed again?”

“That's not fair,” Keiko said. “As your buddy, I'm going to catch all that shit too. So the least you can do is help me take a dump.”

I groaned as Keiko raised a hand and waved.

“What is it?” the nearest instructor asked, her ponytail whipping around.

“I need to use a bathroom, instructor.”

“Buddy up. The nearest one is right across the museum. You have ten minutes. If you're not aboard . . .” She let the missing words hang in the air.

I wondered what they did to recruits absent without leave here on the moon. The Accordance owned it outright, now. It didn't belong to humans anymore, even though they could see Tranquility City's lights from Earth.

Humans hadn't been using the planets and their moons, the Accordance had noted. It was better they be developed by a civilization actually able to do so. It would happen anyway. That was the stick. The carrot was the offer to keep autonomy by signing off.

On Earth, humans still demanded the right to run them­selves directly despite occupation, and would cause trouble to keep that. Here? The Accordance could do anything they wanted.

Be careful up here, I thought. Make it out the other side.

“Where's the museum, instructor?” Keiko asked.

She pointed between the restaurants across from us. Hand on shoulder, Keiko and I crossed the hundred yards of common area.

The Apollo Cultural Heritage Preservation Site. The pictures I'd seen had never shown it surrounded by a pair of restaurants filled with tired-looking lunar miners in overalls.

On the other side of the translucent doors I saw a familiar boxy shape.

Keiko made a strangled sound. “Bathrooms, here we go.” Right outside the museum, between the nearest restaurant and the museum.

“I'm going to let go of your shoulder now,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever.” He scurried inside, and I heard a stall bang shut.

And just on the other side of the wall from where he squatted, something that took humanity decades to create gathered dust in an exhibit. The pinnacle of achievement in outer space. The farthest a human had ever gone from our world. The Apollo Lunar Module descent stage.

The Accordance had crossed stars. We had made it to the moon.

Keiko clamped his hand on my shoulder and I yelped. “You look deep in thought,” he said.

“Yeah, well.”

We crossed back. “What were you thinking so hard on? How much we're going to kick ass at training camp?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but the response never came. A wave of hot energy smacked into the back of my head with a roar. The explosion came a split second later. Or, at least, my awareness of it did.

Things spun around me until my head smacked into the steel-and-concrete ground.

Everything faded. I lay still, blinking and looking at the world askew.

The roar hadn't stopped. It kept thundering on. A wind rushed past me up toward the ceiling. I wiped blood on my sleeves and twisted around. “Keiko?” I croaked.

People ran past us, trying to get through the ten-foot-thick doors that trundled toward each other to seal off the human section. They dodged chunks of metal and dirty moon concrete and just barely slid through.

A flurry of sharp dust whipped around, stinging my throat as I tried to pull in a deep breath.

“Recruits: on board, now!” an instructor shouted. “In, in, in!”

“Keiko!” I staggered back in the direction I'd been tossed from and away from the airlock where the instructor stood. “Keiko.”

“Recruit!”

I glanced back. No gray shapes stood in line anymore. They'd all boarded. Gotten safely inside the craft that would take us to our training camp. If I ran there, I might make it in. They would have to shut the door soon, to stop losing air.

Because that was what the wind was: air getting sucked out of the cracked top of the human section. It had been half-buried under one of the hills surrounding Tranquility City, where all the rock and dirt came from.

Keiko lay next to a chunk of roof, a pool of blood slowly spreading around him. I scrabbled over. A supporting beam the size of a car had pinned his leg, bent it, and trapped him in place.

I saw white bone when I looked underneath. And more blood. It kept pulsing out the ruined mangle of flesh.

He stirred slightly, a moan of pain, but his glassy eyes looked through me as I grabbed his bloody hand and squeezed it. “Hold on!” I shouted. “Just hold on.”

I panted and blinked, dizzy and coughing in the dust still whipping around me. How could I stop the bleeding? We didn't have belts, and there was so much damn blood.

And I could barely focus. Or breathe.

Hands behind me pushed a mask against my face. “Take a deep breath.”

“Okay. . . .” I turned. Silvered eyes, purple hair. Behind a similar emergency rebreathing mask.

“What's your name?” she asked.

“Devlin,” I murmured. Then stronger as oxygen cleared my head. “Devlin!”

“I'm Amira.” She kicked off one of her boots and unlaced it. “Give him air too. You take a couple of pulls, give it to him for a couple.”

“Right.” My senses rushed back as my brain got moving again. Three deep breaths, then I got the mask on Keiko. “Do you know what to do?”

“I'm reading instructions right now,” she said, voice muffled behind the rebreather.

The eyes. The nano-ink tattoos. Like Cee Cee, she could ride invisible bandwidth. A hacker. Full of bioware and other computing and neural hardware. She'd be pulling up entries on how to stop bleeding and following the instructions. I took two pulls on the rebreather, then set it back on Keiko's face. I couldn't tell if he was breathing; there was no fog on the glass visor.

“Hands up!” came an order shouted so loud my ears buzzed. Struthiforms in thick, full-black armor and helmets ran at us. “Hands up, don't move.”

Amira was trying to get the shoelace around Keiko's thigh and cinch it. Blood soaked the lace, and her fingers dripped red. I moved in front of her and Keiko, my bloody hands in the air. “We're CPF recruits!” I shouted into the thin air. “We need medical attention for—”

The head struthiform in the wedge formation struck me with a wing hand. I crumpled to the ground, dizzied by the hit. It held my face down in Keiko's muddied blood as another Accordance soldier zip-tied my hands.

“If you continue to struggle, you will be shot.”

“I don't understand,” I gasped, the dizziness creeping back over me. “We're CPF. Why are you doing this?”

Amira looked over, her face also shoved into the ground. “It was a bomb. A human bomb. All humans in Tranquility are getting arrested.”

9

Amira wriggled her shoulders, stretched, and then pulled free of the zip tie. She rubbed her wrists and put the tie on the table between us.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Isn't your dad Thomas Hart?”

“Yeah.”

“And he didn't teach you to cross your wrists and flex before getting zip-tied? Or how to break them off ?”

“We never fought the arrests,” I told her. The struthiforms that interrogated me in a separate room had retied my hands in front of me. I held them toward her now. “Can you help?”

“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.”