The Darkside War (9 page)

It felt like we were playing on a distant, dreamy stage.

Amira sat at our arm's table. “You guys got your asses handed to you,” she said with a half smile.

“Yeah,” Casimir grumbled.

“Looks like you could use my help. So I'm back.”

Our arm had its full strength back—Amira was okay to train.

The only good thing to happen so far today.

I leaned on the edge of the table, and no one said anything. I kept quiet, and listened to Amira and Casimir break down what had gone wrong.

“You should have kept your head down,” Amira said coldly. “That's when it spotted you.”

I smiled to myself, kept my face blank, and just nodded. She was talking to me again. That was a step in the right direction.

13

Three days. More drills. More drivers taking over suits and creating chaos within perfectly executed plans. Casimir stopped yelling at me after he ended up shooting us in the back when one landed on him.

A quiet peace developed between my arm and me. I kept my mouth shut, and they let me slowly ease my way back in.

We began to improve. Not as fast as the Arvani instructors wanted, though. Zeus and his two fellow instructors would stomp around the crater's obstacles in their armor to yell at any number of recruits. But by now we knew to sweep the air, the ground, and our perimeter. We could leapfrog our way forward and attack another arm.

Not bad, I thought.

“When do you think they'll give us the real weapons?” Haselda asked at one point. “Instead of the toys.”

“We'll be playing laser tag until we stop getting our suits taken over by the mechanical training drivers,” Amira said. “Right now toys are all we're ready for.”

On the fourth day, all the arms gathered in front of Zeus.

“Four to eight arms,” he declared, “make a fist.” He pointed at us. “You on the left will be Red Fist. On the right, Yellow Fist.”

We stood in the heart of the Yellow Fist.

We broke apart quickly, shepherded to either side of the crater on a run led by struthiform instructors.

“Your job is to take, and hold, the structure in the center of the training grounds.” A ragged set of pylons and concrete had extruded itself from the ground. It looked somewhat like an ancient Greek ruin, but with alien curves and script on the broken columns.

“Who's in charge of the team?” someone asked over the general frequency.

“Fist,” someone corrected.

“Whatever. Who's in charge?”

“Commander Zeus didn't say.”

“We have four octaves; one of us will need to figure it out,” Casimir's voice broke in. “Everyone else: Shut up.”

There was a pause. Then, “I'm good with Casimir.”

“Cas for me.”

“The other fist is moving.”

“Let's go!” Casimir ordered.

We bounded across the training ground, around caustic pits and mud-filled trenches, making the run back toward the center. It was exhilarating, until a bank of mist began to bubble out of the ground.

We slowed, suddenly unable to see more than a few feet in front of us. The edges of pylons loomed out of the murk at us. An acrid taste, like tear gas, briefly slipped through my suit's air before it switched over to internal recycling of air.

The common channel filled with a few coughs.

“I'm down!” someone cried out.

“Who said that?” Casimir asked, frustration in his voice.

And then the common channel erupted in chaos. Within minutes, Red Fist had taken a chunk out of us as we tried to organize.

Recruits lay scattered in unmoving suits, swearing and apologizing.

Instead of trying to hold the structure, Red Fist had run right through it to come out on our side and cut us in half.

“Now all we have to do is hunt you down and pick you off,” said Ken over the common channel, glee in his voice. “Or do you want to just surrender now, Casimir, so we can all head in for lunch early?”

Commander Zeus interrupted, “There's no early lunch; you fight until I call an end to it.”

“Casimir,” I said on our arm's channel, working very hard to visualize sending the message correctly and not accidentally broadcasting to everyone. “If it's Ken, let me go out there and run around, create some chaos.”

“That's a waste,” Casimir replied.

“No. Ken hates me. He won't be paying attention if I'm running around shouting at him. Seriously, toss me out there, then counterattack.”

Casimir was quiet for a while. I had almost never interrupted his plans, until now. Finally, grudgingly, he said, “Okay.”

I leapt out from cover. I was good at sprinting, and the current gravity setting in the crater was comfortable. I ran and shouted on the common channel, “Ken: I'm coming for you!”

Flashes lit up the air around me: people shooting at me. But I ducked and weaved all over the debris at the center like an insane rabbit while shouting obscenities at Ken, wherever he was. Through rubble, underneath, around. I even managed to wing a few people with shots of my own, though after I got too turned around, I stopped shooting to avoid friendly fire.

Ken took the brunt of my shouting without saying a word, while I suggested what horrible things he did to squid-like aliens in return for their blessings.

I kept it up for a good five minutes until a suit struck me from the side and knocked the air clean out of me.

Ken's angry face stared at me, visor to visor. “You call me a tentacle licker one more time . . . ,” he growled.

I did worse.

He punched my helmet with armored hands, while I laughed and lay in place. As long as he was focused on me . . .

The glass in my visor cracked slightly. “Hey,” I said.

A spiderweb of cracks spread out with the next punch, and gas seeped in. I coughed. “Hey, you're breaking my helmet.” I tried to struggle free, but Ken had me pinned, and another member of his fist had my legs.

He punched again, and now the acrid, yellow gas shoved its fingers in and filled my helmet. My eyes teared up, forcing me to close them. I gagged on the foul-tasting air.

“I can't breathe,” I yelled. “Get the fuck off me. Get off.”

Ken didn't say anything, kept punching, and glass shards hit my face as the visor completely broke. My nose ran, my throat screamed, I tried to hold my breath.

The next punch, I realized, would be to my face. With nothing to protect it, Ken might yet kill me. I rolled slightly over, jamming my face into mud and gas, and Ken continued hitting me, forcing my face down into it.

“That's enough,” Zeus said over the common channel. “Red Fist has it.”

+  +  +  +

By lunchtime the next day I had blown the last of the mud out of my nose, but still had the aftereffects of inhaling the gas. I'd spent the night in one of the medical pods, the cold biometallic arms wrapped around my chest as it monitored my lungs for any lasting damage.

Amira joined me to watch the twinkle of the mass driver's launches.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Not looking forward to running; still hurts a little to breathe. But they say I'm ready.” I slurped one of the energy spheres. I was getting better at doing it without making a mess of myself. “I'm glad that half-cyborg struthiform wasn't on duty. Did you talk to him?”

“A cheerful one. He refused to tell me his name. It was his ‘gift' to me.”

“I think I'd be in even more of a foul mood if he'd talked to me while I was laid up there overnight,” I said.

Amira laughed. I wasn't sure if the warmth spreading through me came from the drink, or because Amira put a hand on my shoulder. “We didn't win, but that was a smart move,” she said.

She let go.

This was a possible reopening of our friendship. I felt relieved, like that simple touch had filled a massive emptiness.

“We keep getting matched up against Ken,” Amira said. “You notice that?”

“They're pushing us.”

“Zeus is. I had some time laid up in the medic bay to poke around. This isn't standard. Arms should be chosen by randomization for one-on-ones. Zeus keeps overriding. He's having fun with you two.”

“Well, it's easy with Ken, isn't it? Just toss him into the situ­ation—”

Amira interrupted. “Get real. You've been just as eager to needle him. What you did yesterday was tactically sound. But don't act like everyone didn't hear everything over the common channel.”

I pulled back away from her. “Oh, you're taking
his
side here?”

“Damn it, Devlin, there are no
sides
here,” she snapped at me. “There are only humans, who are not part of the Accordance. Who don't get to vote in Accordance affairs, or rise to be in charge. We are a client species. We are their cannon fodder. Ken knows it. You should know it. Spending all your energy worrying about him means you aren't paying attention to the real thorn in your side. So get your head out of your ass.”

My ass? I opened my mouth to say something nasty back, and then closed it. Maybe I was tired from whatever they'd injected me with last night. Or maybe having my visor broken and staring a gauntleted punch in the eye changed something. But I bit my lip for once.

“At the very least,” Amira said, “not being at each other's throats for the rest of training will make things calmer, yeah? And then he's out of your life, most likely.”

Do the time. Get back.

I wasn't going to get back to Earth and my family if Ken punched my face inside out with power armor during a moment where Zeus couldn't stop him.

And besides, I didn't want to endanger Amira's goodwill. So I sighed and got up. “Okay.”

I walked past the tables and across the mess hall. People glanced up, then realized my target. Conversation died down, more heads turned.

“Hey . . . ,” I said, as earnestly as I could imagine. “Ken.”

He turned around. His expression changed, lips tightening, a controlled anger settling into his jaw. “Come to personally surrender before the next exercise?” he asked. “Get it all over with?”

“No.” I thought about sitting next to him, but then thought better of it when I saw that the rest of his arm looked just as hostile. “I wanted to come and . . .” I realized how this looked. I looked weak. Fumbling over my words. Trying to apologize. Trying to patch things up. As everyone stared.

“Beg me to leave you alone?” Ken asked. “Put your hands together and get on your knees, ask pretty please?”

People laughed. I flushed. “You know what, I tried. Fuck you.”

I'd tossed a match. I knew it. Ken knew it. He shot up.

“Look, let me take that back,” I started to say, trying to fix the crumbling bridge. But Ken shoved me in the chest. I wobbled back on my feet, arms flailing. More laughter.

If I'd ever had any social capital in this room, it was all gone. “Stop pushing me,” I hissed. “I'm trying to talk.” I should have done this somewhere else, somewhere less public. Small gestures, leading up to a peace. Instead of this grand gesture.

“No one here cares what you have to say,” Ken said, and stepped forward to push me again. “Go away.”

I stopped his shove, blocking the movement and grabbing his hand.

He looked at me, then stepped right in. With a sudden ferocity, we'd locked. Grappling, we swung around twice, and then Ken threw me. I hit the table, smashing globs of food and bouncing off.

I launched myself forward and got one good hit. Right in the chin. Ken staggered back, and then we both exploded into an uncoordinated mess of punches and kicks, what little training we'd had forgotten as we tried to draw blood. Or at least a concussion.

An armored tentacle wrapped itself around my waist and picked me right off the ground, yanking me away from Ken.

Ken likewise hung two feet over the ground, his legs kicking wildly.

“You useless fucking apes,” Zeus said. “You know, on our world Cal Riata like me used to find something shiny. Then we'd dangle it just out of the water by a riverbank until an ape like you would come down to the edge. Then we'd drag you under, drown you, and eat you. I can see the appeal.”

I gasped, my waist squeezed so tight I could barely suck in half a breath.

“Let's fight,” Zeus said enthusiastically. “This is what you do, right? Constantly war with each other? Squabble for the slightest reasons? It's in your nature. Between the fighting and your sexing each other every spare minute you have, it's a wonder any time is left over for training. So let's see it out.”

Our nature? I coughed.

Zeus marched us out into the crater, through the rumbling bay doors, curious recruits following along to see what would happen.

But at a careful distance.

Zeus dropped us on a beam of metal above a frigid pool of water and shoved a stick in each of our hands. “There.” He sounded satisfied, or maybe I imagined it. “Now you fight.”

He left us shivering on either side of the beam and retreated to watch.

Was this standard? Was it a part of training to set two recruits to fight each other?

Ken moved across the beam toward me.

I kept the sticks in each hand down. “I'm not going to do this; this is crazy.”

“Crazy because you know you're about to get your ass kicked.”

I moved forward slowly. “This is what Zeus wants. A show.”

Ken hit me in the stomach with one of the sticks. I doubled over, but didn't hit back. He frowned, and paused, watching me, waiting for a return strike.

“Hit him!” Zeus shouted, the voice echoing throughout the entire training ground.

Ken glanced over, struggling between wanting to obey the command and having to hit someone not fighting back.

“I'm done,” I said. “I don't want to cause any trouble. I just want to focus on getting through this as best I can.”

“Shut up!” Zeus ordered. “Listen up, apes, there's no talking on the beam. There's only battle.”

Ken gave a halfhearted jab in my direction to see what would happen. I ignored it.

“I'm going to make whoever falls off that beam run around this entire forsaken moon,” Zeus said. “With no food. Until you drop and beg for the chance to get back up here again.”

Ken swallowed.

“Hit him!” Zeus repeated. “Or I'll extend the punishment to your entire arm as well.”

Ken looked at me. “Fight.”

“No.” I shook my head.

“Asshole,” Ken hissed, frustrated, and followed that up with a fast strike to my head.

I wasn't going to perform for the alien. I let the hit knock me off the beam. All the heat fled my body as I struck the water.