Authors: Zachary Brown
16
I sat in a small bubble of my own angry silence. My wrists were starting to go numb, and even though Amira had taught me how to get out of them, while electrocuted and lying on the ground, I hadn't been able to move a single muscle.
My fingers hurt at this point. But I wasn't going to ask her for anything. And I particularly wasn't going to beg for my restraints to be loosened because I was uncomfortable.
The gray landscape, most of it shadowy in the dark because we'd killed the lights again, ghosted by the cab windows.
It felt like it was taking longer to get back. I leaned my head against the chair and closed my eyes, drifting off to the thump of the soft tires against lunar dirt.
“What was that?” Amira asked aloud, startling me out of my stupor.
“What?” Damn it. I spoke before remembering I was giving her the angry silent treatment.
She was looking through the upper cab windows. Up at the dark and stars. “Something . . . just grazed the sensors. Like an absenceâ”
Amira jerked back in her seat, her whole body taut with pain. At the same moment, the rover's interior lights flickered, then shut down. It coasted along on momentum, bouncing over a hole, and came to a stop. Amira grabbed her head and moaned.
“Amira?”
The sounds of fans circulating air faded away. An eerie quiet fell inside the rover.
“Amira?” I was a little freaked out. “Amira, what's wrong?”
We were busted. Fuck. We'd been caught, the rover disabled, and soon Zeus would come striding toward us. I was going to be deep in the shit any second now, and she was going to . . .
Blood streamed from Amira's nose. She rocked back and forth, mewling.
“Amira, are you okay?”
She pulled her hands away and looked at me. I gasped. Blood trickled out of the corners of her eyes, like red tears. “It hurts,” she hissed.
“Can you see?”
Amira took a deep breath and wiped her bloody cheeks off with the backs of her wrists. “Yeah. Yeah, I can see. I lost some function, but I can see.”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Some kind of electromagnetic pulse. Anything nonÂhardened burned out. Some of my ink's military-grade; it's still running. Civilian stuff's mostly shot to shit.”
I briefly imagined nano-ink sizzling all throughout her body, wrapped around nerve endings and skin as it bubbled and sparked. I shuddered and twisted my aching hands.
Amira saw the movement. She leaned halfheartedly forward and pulled a knife out of a hip pocket. After cutting me loose, she sort of hung there, holding the other seat and closing her eyes for a moment. “The air isn't being recycled,” she said in a shaky voice. “It'll be okay for a while, but we need to check the suits. We'll use the rover's air until it's stale, and while I see if we can get a signal out, then switch to the suits.”
I looked over her shoulder. “I don't think that's our biggest problem.” This wasn't something Zeus was doing to us, I realized. Not punishment for stealing the rover. Not anything.
She turned. The lip of the crater above us glowed red, reflecting flashes of fiery heat. The horizon lit up, like lightning flickering away in a distant storm.
Then more red flashes danced out in the open, the hellish glow increasing. Balls of fire, dissipating quickly as the air vomited up into the sky, rising into the black night of the lunar dark before fading away.
“That's a lot of air lost to burn that long and high in the open vacuum,” I said softly.
“It could be an industrial accident.” Amira staggered to her feet. “The mass driver isn't too far away from the base.”
“With an electromagnetic pulse? You
said
you sensed something in the sky.”
She grabbed my shoulder and limped back toward the suits. “I
thought
I did. It could be anything.”
“And the only way to know is to climb up and take a peek. How far away were we? Do you remember?”
Amira opened the locker and touched the nearest suit's collar. Lines throughout the suit glowed briefly yellow. “The suits are hardened, ready for a variety of outside jobs.” She breathed with relief, resting her head against the locker's edge.
“There might be painkillers in the first aid kit,” I said.
“No.” Amira straightened with effort. “Might need it for later. Save it for when we know what's happening.”
We pulled the shapeless suits on. Amira pointed out the controls on the left forearm's inner surface. Tap to make the materials tighten and shape to my body. Not too different from the backup manual controls for our fighting armor, really. But this one didn't slither into my back and link up to my thoughts.
“Don't use the common channel or speak while we're out there,” Amira warned, before I tapped to make the helmet slide up out of the fabric and lock into place.
I nodded.
We bounded our way across the dust and up the side of the crater. The last hundred feet were steep: a rock climb, though falling would likely not be as dangerous as back on Earth. It was hard to figure out what a dangerous height would be, but we flirted with it.
I mostly worried about missing a handhold in the dark, and we weren't using any lights, even though the suits had built-in spotlights for just this sort of situation.
Huffing, I finally pulled myself up to the rim of ragged rock and looked out over the shadows and dirt between us and the conflagration.
The training base burned. The cap over the entire crater drooped, melting over what structure remained. Blackened spars jutted out in irregular directions.
Something moved above it. A charred, translucent jellyfish. It was massive. Almost as big as the base itself. We watched as bioluminescent light filled its interior, then traveled down through the long tentacles reaching the ground.
The behemoth's surface boiled with movement; not a single space remained still. Tiny sticklike insects fell away like dandruff, a cloud of brown that swooped around and clustered tighter as it dove into the ruins of the base.
I jumped as a hand grabbed my shoulder. “Hey,” Amira said. “I'm patching a direct line via physical contact so we can talk.”
“Those are crickets,” I said. “Easily a hundred of them. This is a Conglomerate attack.”
“Raptors are on the ground,” she said, and pointed.
She was right. A dozen of them loped over boulders, clad in armor, kicking up dirt as they ran toward the base from where they'd been lowered by a tentacle away from the structures.
“Oh shit.” Two rocky humanoid figures walked out from the interior of the Conglomerate ship. They leapt off from the edge of the gelatinous-looking rim, falling slowly at first, then speeding up. They struck the surface, throwing dirt up all around them and leaving small craters from the impact.
“Trolls.” Amira's voice quavered, just as mine had.
The two creatures towered over the raptors at their feet as they stood and thudded their way toward the base.
17
More explosions ripped the base as we watched in horror. People we knew were trapped inside. People we knew were dying in there.
“They're switching to heavy jamming,” Amira said. “Anticipating that there'd be a lot of hardened equipment around. I can't get the suit's comm systems to make contact with anything.”
“So we have no idea if this is happening anywhere else? The moon, Earth, they could all be under attack and we have no idea?”
“We're in the dark,” Amira said. And her hand squeezed my shoulder.
“Fuck.”
“This isn't a large force, but I don't know what that means. It could mean they're just being detached to mop us up and all the action is elsewhere. Or it could be a sneak attack. And since we're on the other side of the moon, we can't even just wait to see if we spot any explosions on Earth to figure it out.”
“We could run until we get out of jamming range,” I said.
“And who knows how far that is? We have twenty-four hours of capacity in the suits. We probably blew out most of our air leaving the rover; it didn't have a proper airlock.”
Another silent fireball rose above the base as something detonated inside. I flinched. Twenty-four hours of life left. My vision narrowed. What did that even mean?
The suit felt suddenly claustrophobic, my breathing loud and accusatory. Every breath, more air lost. Another lungful closer to a gasping death. “We're fucked,” I said.
“We will be,” Amira said. “We have twenty-four hours to think of something. To find air. Survive. The longer we keep going, the more options appear.”
I looked out over the base, my heart pounding. This couldn't be happening. “For what? To die a few days later? To walk out across the moon and see Earth burning like Shriek said it would? I don't think I want to see that.”
The image of an Earthrise came to me, but instead of a rich blue sphere I imagined the Earth burning as it appeared over the lifeless gray lunar surface.
“I'm going to choose life,” Amira said. It sounded like her jaw was clenched. Fury filled my helmet as she continued. “Even if it's not for very long. I've fought too goddamned hard for every little scrap I've gotten. I'm not stopping now. I think we might be able to walk to the mines. I'm not sure if we can make it, but I'm betting there are supplies there, for the humans who service the automated launcher.”
It was hard to hold two theories in my head at the same time, and try to figure out how to proceed while consulting both possibilities. One: The Earth and the rest of the moon were under attack. In that case, we were just buying time.
But if it wasn't widespread . . .
“Surely you can't attack an entire world without the Accordance noticing
something,
” I said. Two: only the moon was under attack.
“I was thinking that,” Amira said. “Seems unlikely, doesn't it?”
“We need our armor,” I said. “The rebreathers will give us enough time to walk out from under the jamming. Or at the least, get us to the mines for sure. How far away are they? Fifteen miles?” It had been hard to tell flying over. But I could see the launches from the base, so the launcher couldn't be too far away.
“Maybe.”
“People can walk twenty or thirty miles a day, I think. But there are a lot of craters in the way to scramble through and around. I don't want to end up passing out a few hundred feet away from the entrance of a mine and dying there.”
“Our armor is in the middle of a damn firefight,” Amira said, pointing at the base.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It doesn't look like they're taking prisoners from here. I'm not seeing anyone shooting back.”
“We don't know what's going on, but we know the crickets are mostly patrolling, so it's a dozen raptors . . . ”
“And two trolls.”
“And two trolls.” I nodded.
“They'll rip us apart if they see us,” Amira said.
“Not if we can get to the armor first.” I turned around and looked at her faint face behind the helmet glass. “I'll go while you wait, if you want.”
“No. I think you're right. I can't tell for sure if we'd make the mines. It's a coin flip. But there's one thing still in our way.” She pointed at the Conglomerate ship. “It'll see us. Any of those weapons it used on the base will make charcoal out of us.”
Even as she said that, the organic structure wobbled. It glided out over the base and over toward the Arvani quarters.
“Now we have to run for the base,” I said. “It's on the other side.”
“Fuck,” Amira swore. “Fuck. I know. You're right. I don't like it. Fuck.”
I hid my relief. I knew I needed her abilities. Whatever was hopefully left of them. “Then let's do this,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.
In the old history books my father had kept, I'd read with disbelief the stories of men in battle during a great world war. Huddling in trenches, they'd be ordered with a whistle to rush over the lip into horrible machine-gun fire and die in horrific numbers.
At the time I couldn't ever imagine anyone being able to move their muscles to stand up from safety and walk toward their own execution.
Yet here I was, moving down the outer slope of a crater toward the open plain between the base and us.
We used boulders and smaller craters for cover as best we could. But it was awkward to scrabble around in the lower gravity of the moon. We'd been mostly training in the artificial higher gravity of the base. It was hard to crawl on your elbows when a single shove could pop you back up to standing.
My helmet was filled with sweat by the time we scraped our way closer, waiting for the large Conglomerate jellyfish of a starship to rise up over the ruined top of the base.
But it was still busy on the other side.
Amira pointed at a large, still-glowing hole in the side of the base. I touched her shoulder. “Can you access anything?”
“Yes. Some of the cameras are able to talk to me, but I'm low bandwidth. Mainly motion-sensing information, simple stuff.”
“So is there anything moving on the other side of that hole?”
“Not unless it's waiting to jump us.”
“Ah, shit.”
“Better than standing out in the open,” Amira said.
We didn't come this far to turn back. We bounced through the breach under the mess hall. I glanced up at the broken windows and saw a body slumped over. No head, just a bloody stump. Frozen blood made a long, ruddy icicle down the side of the black wall above us.
Gravity yanked at us as we stepped into the base. The plates below us were still working.
We skulked carefully around the corridors in silence, discovering more bodies. I didn't want to recognize the faces, and I was starting to understand Shriek's refusal to learn names as twinges of recognition lanced me.
Most of the faces I saw were gnarled into silent screams, struggles to breathe air that never came. Surprise. Fear. Unseeing eyes looking through me.
Long hair in a ponytail behind an emergency rebreather. For a second I wondered if she was passed out and lying down. Until I saw the horrible burn marks.
Some of the recruits had gotten to emergency gear, but then been shot by the Conglomeration.
Amira grabbed my forearm and turned me around. The doors leading out to the corridor had been ripped off. Plates bulged where they'd been forced aside.
“A troll came through here,” she said.
The silver walls were covered in splotches of blood where bodies had been smashed against them and mauled.