The Darkside War (17 page)

29

The trolls continued their honor guard position all the way back to the ruins of the base. We stopped under the trailing arms of the jellylike Conglomerate starship. Two raptors ran out of a nearby airlock, danced around the trolls, and tried to grab me. The ghost responded, invisible limbs shoving one of them rudely back.

“You stopped moving,” Amira said. “Are you okay?”

“There are two raptors here.” They aimed their energy rifles at me. “They seem to be arguing with the ghost.”

“About what?”

“I don't know. I don't speak invisible alien,” I snapped. “But I think maybe they want me dead.”

A massive hand swung from the sky and slapped a raptor. It flew across the dirt and bounced several times, and the second troll stepped forward and crouched aggressively in front of the other raptor.

It slung its rifle and stepped back.

The other raptor stood up and visibly shook itself, then slunk off.

“I've been working hard on updating some heads-up display software to patch in and show you something,” Amira said. “You're going to need it. You're in the strike zone and you have five minutes before the barrage starts.”

“I'm not getting away,” I said. I'd been fighting the ghost all the way here. In addition to broken wrists, I now had contu­sions all over my body. A slight concussion from rattling my head around left me slightly out of it. The ghost was stronger and faster.

My visor flickered and rebooted. The information about my suit and charge levels faded. It came back on, and the lunar surface around me changed. It was overlit by large pools of red light.

“Red is impact, timers are above them. The arcs are the trajectories.”

A four-minute timer hung above the red bull's-eye I stood in. I looked above me. Three minutes until the Conglomerate ship got hit. Lines of silvery thread led away from the center of the impact pools off into the dark sky.

Nine different silver lines led to the alien ship. Another ghostly one appeared as I watched. Each came in from a different angle or vector.

“Now, for getting you away from the ghost, I need you to hug it and get the charge port in your heels firmly against its surface. I'm going to discharge your power into it, and when I do that, it will temporarily overwhelm it. Or startle it. I hope. It's the best I can do.”

She sounded so apologetic, I felt duty-bound to respond with energy. But I was tired, and hurting, even despite the painkillers I'd had the suit pump into me. “Thank you, Amira.” I looked up. Two minutes.

“If that happens, you run. Stay out of the red zones. Debris is still an issue. You'll have to work hard, the suit will be mostly dead or dying after the discharge of energy.”

“Okay.”

One of the long tentacles unfurled itself from the starship and reached down for the ground. I watched it descend all the way down to meet us. The flat tip hit the ground in front us, kicking up lunar dust. I gently shifted my feet down, angling them to touch the ghost's invisible surface.

“Tell me when you're ready,” Amira said.

Sixty seconds.

The ghost and trolls waited for the dust to settle, then stepped forward onto the flat tip of the tentacle. I pressed my boots firmly against the ghost.

Forty seconds.

The tentacle contracted, transparent musculature showing veins the size of bridge cables pumping fluid underneath its skin, and we slowly rose.

I watched the lunar surface drop away.

Thirty seconds.

“Now,” I told Amira.

My boots exploded with arcs of electricity. The ghost danced and writhed in pure blue light, and its viselike grip on me broke.

I shoved off and out from the platform tip of the tentacle and into free fall, streaming electricity as I fell.

When I hit the ground on my back I lay there, the air knocked out of my chest, gasping.

Fifteen seconds. “Did it work?” Amira asked.

“Yes,” I hissed. One of the trolls let go of the tentacle and stepped out over the side to fall down after me. I got up. The armor wasn't too heavy, but there was no assistance. It was just me and my own muscle.

The troll struck the ground in front of me.

I turned and ran back the other way in a halfhearted loping bounce. I just needed to get out from under the ship, even if it meant heading farther into the strike zones. The pool I stood in had a countdown of a minute.

Seven seconds. A troll leapt over me and landed in front of me. We faced off.

Five.

It stopped looking at me and glanced up.

Three, two.

One. Something flashed along the silver line so quickly I barely saw it and struck the side of the Conglomerate ship. The entire jellylike structure shivered as the capsule ripped out the other side. Debris hung in the air over us, yanked out of the ship's insides. “It's a hit!” I shouted, and regretted it. Pain spiked through my ribs from the effort.

A figure leapt out away from the tentacle. It was no longer invisible; I could see limbs. Two legs, two arms, a head. The flat gray armor looked mundane now.

The second impact and third hit the Conglomerate ship. It began to move, wobbling and struggling to get away.

“Devlin, run!”

I turned and bounced away, looking at the red pools. Twenty seconds. I veered in a circle, leading the troll around and into it. The now visible ghost followed. I'd burned out its camouflage and gotten away, but it was mobile again. And coming for me. Shit.

Ten.

Amira shouted excitedly. “Kinetic energy is an
angry
bitch!”

The ship was no longer directly overhead and debris was hitting the ground everywhere, pieces of the ship falling away. A whole tentacle detached and draped itself over the base.

Crickets boiled out from the ship and the base, leaping and running for safety.

“Devlin, Ken? Are you okay?”

I doubled back, away from the next target. The troll followed. I stopped at the edge, turned back to it, and raised my hands. The ghost stepped forward, out from under the troll's legs.

The lunar surface exploded as the impact I was waiting for happened. I flew through the air, cartwheeling hard enough to black out, then jar back to life as I struck the surface. I bounced several times.

There was no troll anymore, just a black stain where it had stood. Impacts were hitting constantly, the ground shaking every few seconds as payloads Amira had sent up in various orbits were all now converging to hit at almost the same time, even though they'd been launched at different intervals.

The ghost had been flung with me. It lay still, arms and legs spread at unnatural angles. I crawled over, glancing around at the impact points on Amira's heads-up display to see if it was safe as I worked my way toward safety. Sixty seconds before this area would get hit by another of Amira's capsules.

I looked at the ghost as I passed by, and froze.

His face was covered in blood.

But it was a he.

It was a person.

There was a dead
human being
in Conglomerate armor lying on the ground. The ghost was human.

Was this a trick? What did it mean? Had Conglomerate forces been to Earth? When? Or was it some kind of parallel evolution?

Or was this Conglomerate species molded to look human so it could invade or rule Earth?

I didn't know. I grabbed the body and pulled it along with me, grateful for the lower gravity.

Thirty seconds.

I stumbled and fell as I ran out of the area as best I could and—

Wham!

—another impact threw me clear as I clutched the ghost's body. Rocks and dirt rattled against my armor.

I scrabbled along farther, getting clear of the impact zones. I was on my ass, pulling the ghost after me. I watched the Conglomerate ship fall slowly into the base, vomiting gas and fire as it burned and I scooted slowly away.

My heads-up display flickered and died.

No air scrubbing now. I would just breathe the air left inside until I passed out. I wasn't sure how long that would be, but I was sure it wasn't long enough for me to make it back to the launcher.

I sat on top of the ghost, hoping it was truly dead, and watched the destruction unfold in front of me.

30

“Are you okay?” Ken had to push his helmet's visor against mine for sound to travel between us. A quick and crude way for us to communicate. Sound waves hitting his visor, then mine, then passing back to me. He sounded distant and tinny. “Devlin, say something.”

I coughed.

“Amira, he's okay. He has some air still.”

But not for much longer, I thought.

“Hold on, Amira gave me an air canister when she sent me to look for you,” Ken said. He left and walked around to my side. A loud hiss startled me, and then my head cleared. Fresh air. My apathy at seeing Ken, at still being alive, was swept away.

But with that came the awareness of all the pain I was in. And I couldn't request a new round of painkillers.

Ken came back around and touched helmets again. “I think we can make it to the launcher now. Who is that with you? Is he alive?”

“It's the ghost,” I said. “Help me pick it up. My wrists are broken.”

“But . . .” Ken pulled away to look closer. He turned back to me, talking, but I couldn't hear him without our helmets touching.

He grabbed my helmet and bumped his visor into mine again. “It's a person.”

“I know.” I pulled away and tried to reach for the ghost on my elbows and knees. Ken shook his head and picked it up. He slung it over his shoulder and leapt ahead of me.

Of course, his armor was still functional. I struggled to my feet, hard to do without using my hands, and bounded after him as best I could on complaining muscles.

We made better time to the launcher than we had when hiding from the Conglomeration, even though I was slowing Ken down. Nothing swarmed us as we bounced over craters and scrambled up the hills.

Amira waited by the slopes of the launcher's crater. She leapt into our midst and tapped me, then pointed up.

Silver Accordance ships, lean and festooned with shards and spikes that indicated heavy energy weaponry descended from overhead.

The cavalry, it seemed, had arrived.

Armored struthiforms jumped out of opening bay doors and down to the ground. They swarmed over us, knocking us down to the dirt and trussing us with electrified cables that snapped and spat as they touched our armor.

I screamed as my wrists were wrenched tight.

They didn't know what was going on, I told myself. All they know is that the base is destroyed.

The cables were hooked to something that reeled us right up off the ground into the nearest hovering ship. Within seconds we were surrounded by more aggressive struthiforms, who stripped our armor off.

“Get away from the armor,” they shouted.

“We are the good guys,” Ken protested, and got struck in the face. He fell down, bleeding.

Amira twitched, but I shook my head. “Don't. Don't do anything. Just stay still.”

“Be quiet!”

“If I get put in a cell after saving
all your asses
I'm going to be really fucking pissed off,” Amira shouted.

One of the struthiforms raised an energy rifle, and Amira turned and glared.

It suddenly had second thoughts. “Sit,” it ordered us. “All three. Sit and do not move.”

We sat on the floor, surrounded by our guards. “Are you okay, Ken?” Amira asked. Ken grunted and kept holding his nose. His leg had started to bleed onto the floor.

I watched two struthiforms drag the ghost away.

“Up now,” a struthiform ordered, prodding us with an armored foot.

“We need medical attention,” I said.

“You will get it at your destination. There are no medical facilities for your kind aboard.” It shoved us forward again. “Move now.”

We were hustled down a ramp and into a jumpship with five struthiform guards and a carapoid pilot.

“They're bringing someone else aboard,” Ken said, trying to stand up.

“One of the others survived?” A bit of hope lit up in me as I looked for a familiar face under the lump of gray being rushed in by two struthiforms.

And then I recognized the tattered, alien form, even despite the tubes and cocoons of alien medical technology wrapped around its core.

“It's Shriek,” I said. And even though the face was alien, burned and jagged, I was glad to see it.

One of the other struthiforms turned to regard me. “You know this one?”

“A medic,” I told it.

“We found the medic inside a stove surrounded by bottles of pure oxygen,” the struthiform soldier said, and flared its feathers out. “So far, the medic refuses to speak to us.”

I snorted.

“Nice to see
he
has medical attention,” Ken muttered.

“He's Accordance,” Amira whispered. “We're just human.”

Minutes later we zipped out of the warship and curved over the remains of the base. I winced as I moved to better see out of the porthole. “Look out your windows,” I said. “We did that. We survived the Conglomeration. Whatever happens next, whatever the Accordance does to us, remember this.”

Shriek stirred on the stretcher and craned to look at us. “You didn't just survive,” the strange alien said. “You destroyed them. You protected your home world. Though, I'm going to be curious what the Pcholem think about all this.”

The pieces of the Conglomerate ship were spread out across the fields of lunar dirt around Icarus base. Some of them still glowed red.

31

“Do you remember me?” Vincent Anais asked.

Earth's strong pull weighed on me as I sat, handcuffed to a table in a large room near the very top of an Accordance administrative building. Through the floor-to-ceiling oval window, I could look down at Manhattan's silver skyscrapers spread out around the central cluster of Accordance structures.

“I do,” I said solemnly. “Where's my drink?”

Anais rubbed puffy eyes. “I would laugh, but I was woken up and dragged out of bed. Then I was told we were all under attack, and that it might only be a matter of weeks before Earth would be overrun. I'm tired, recruit. And everything has changed.”

“Twelve hours ago I was on the moon,” I told him. “They put us on an Arvani-only ship. It was called a Manta. I think I saw one on a show once. They mainly go planet to planet, right? The way the other passengers acted, you'd think we had cooties, but armed Arvani officers shut them up. And I have yet to see a doctor.” I raised my cuffed hands, trying to ignore the pain that came in waves.

Anais winced. “I'm sorry. It'll be soon.”

“This isn't how you treat us. Not after what we
did
.”

“What you did is up for interpretation.” Anais looked away as he said that. His heart wasn't in it.

“Bullshit. You should be able to pull info out of the wreckage. The black boxes in our armor. The launcher. We told our stories on the way here, with weapons aimed at us.”

“All the evidence will be carefully examined. Now, Mister Hart, moving on, where is Amira Singh?”

“I'm sorry, did you misplace her?” I stared right at Anais.

He sighed. “She seems to have, uh, escaped.”

“Goodness gracious,” I said. “In a secure facility like this she's gone missing? I don't know where she is, but seeing that Ken's still holding emergency medical sealant foam on his wound and my broken wrists are shackled to a table, I can't imagine why she'd turn down your hospitality.”

“Has she said anything about her intentions as far as revealing sensitive military information found while at the Icarus base?”

I leaned in. “We caught a
ghost
. That's what this is about. You don't want her revealing what it is.”

Anais bit his lip. “Devlin, let's be open here. Don't think you're the first to find out what the ghosts are. The Arvani administrators were all just given updates thirty minutes ago. In those files: updated information about ghosts. Information they didn't know about until now. They are . . . upset that this has been held from them. But Arvani top command has been dealing with this for a lot longer than you can imagine.”

“And they're terrified that Amira will release this into the wild.”

Anais nodded. “Things have gotten tense here since you left. Something like this would be explosive. Do you understand?”

Always trying to manipulate us, I thought. Even now, with the threat of invasion imminent. “I don't know where Amira is,” I said. “But the last thing she told me was that, with the Conglomeration about to attack, she wasn't going to spend her last days in an Accordance cell; she was going to go enjoy them. I think the secret is safe with her.”

Good luck,
I'd told her when we'd gotten off the Arvani ship.
Don't let them drag you down,
she'd said, and squeezed my forearm.

“And what about you?” Anais asked. “Is the secret safe with you?”

Ken, I realized, they already considered loyal. But I was the other wild card. “It all depends on what's happening next,” I said.

Anais waved his hand over the table. The white color faded. I looked at a cloud of rubble and rock, so far on the edge of the solar system that the sun was just a tiny pinprick. A suggestion of light, another star.

In the cold dark, shadows moved. Shapes with purpose.

The perspective whirled back. It was a feed from a fast-­moving Accordance drone ghosting past the edge of a massive fleet of organic, irregular shapes. Some of them similar to the one in pieces near Icarus base.

“The Conglomerate forces are massing in the outer Oort cloud, on the far edges of your solar system and past our defenses. You repelled their beachhead, so they are planning a siege now. Accordance ships can't get in or out. They are trapped here with us. They need more recruits. Because the fight is coming to us.”

A blast of energy wrenched through the dark and vaporized the drone. The image faded, leaving just the white table.

“The Arvani will move your family out of the political camp they are currently in and to home custody in upstate New York,” the Arvani on the left said. An Arvani tank had crept into the room silently while I was watching the video. I tried not to jump back slightly, thinking of Commander Zeus's slashing, armored tentacles. “If you agree to our condi­tions.”

“I can't go home?” I asked.

“You are needed now more than you were before,” said Anais. “Let us promote you to the youngest lieutenant, at twenty, in the CPF.”

“I thought I was an octave,” I said. “Aren't native ranks not allowed?”

Anais smiled. “We're getting concessions. A fully human officer corps. The chance to use native rank insignia across the force; we're configuring this all on the fly, but taking full advantage of Arvani fear. Let us train you more. Deploy you. Help the CPF fight the Conglomeration. Because they are coming for Earth, Devlin. They're coming for us.”

“Get the cuffs off me, and get me a goddamned doctor,” I told Anais.

+  +  +  +

I walked down toward the old financial district, enjoying the freedom to choose any direction, any path I wanted. I had no particular aim in mind, I just wanted to feel the sun on my skin, the breeze on my face. I wanted a hot dog with mustard, or a gyro, or a gelato, just something that wasn't optimally designed to fuel my metabolism.

The city was different now. Smaller, maybe. I'd had a change in perspective. The streets looked grubbier. Earth First tags spray painted on brick corners warned me that walking here in my grays might not be too smart.

There'd been bombings. The repacification hadn't worked. Human ingenuity prevailed as minds bent themselves to making life miserable for collaborators, civil servants, aliens. New York looked like a city under occupation: human enforcers in yellow riot gear in clusters everywhere, looking determined and tired. Armored struthiforms rumbling by on personnel carriers. Broken windows, destroyed buildings. The pockmarks of bullets on facades.

Concentration camps in New Jersey and Long Island. Livestreamed executions. Bombings. The occupation's iron grip was slipping, because the Accordance was pulling its forces into orbit to ready itself for the oncoming invasion.

And who knew how many Conglomerate double agents were already here?

Rumors said the Darkside base attack had opened negotiations between Earth First and the Colonial Administration for a cease-fire. Earth First was trying to decide which enemy to fear more: the one that occupied our world and its moon, or the one that might breed us into hungry heat shields.

I stopped walking around aimlessly and headed toward my appointment at the Empire State Building.

The whole side of the ancient structure had been repainted in Colonial Protection Forces gray with white swirls. And to my surprise, recruits in civilian clothes stood in a line waiting to get into the lobby. A line that wrapped around the block. Once processed, they'd be housed here before going to the Hamptons for selection.

People pointed at me as I walked by. The Accordance had used my image already this morning, broadcasting the story of our fight. Ken and I had become symbols of resistance. They'd left Amira out, as they didn't know what she was going to do next.

Even I wasn't sure I wanted that profile.

But I could use it.

As I stood in front of an auditorium full of wide-eyed recruits, I smiled. If we could fight and survive the Conglomeration, the threat that made Arvani shit their tanks, then we'd be a dangerous force.

The graffiti-spreading Earth First activists outside could cause trouble. But these recruits in front of me? They could turn on the Accordance and gain Earth its independence.

In time.

If we survived.

If I could help build them into the weapons we all needed to be.

I cleared my throat, and heard the sound amplified to three hundred pairs of intent eyes.

“Listen closely,” I shouted. “There are many aliens out there. They come in all shapes and sizes. But if you want to survive your first encounter with the enemy, there are five aliens that you will need to spot on sight. Pay attention to me now, and you might live.”