The Darkside War (5 page)

Rakwon and Cee Cee picked me up to brush the sand off. I didn't want to meet Cee Cee's eyes. I felt half as tall as I was. But she joined Rakwon and me at breakfast again.

“It is what it is,” Rakwon said philosophically, watching me glower. “Ken's officer bound. He's not worth the trouble.”

“He's an asshole,” I said. He was a collaborator.

But then, everyone here was a collaborator. Me too. I couldn't use that word out loud.

“He's excited to be here and he's well trained,” Cee Cee said. “He's a good soldier. We're all ready to kick ass, right, recruit?”

I looked around. All of us in our grays. Training. Run­ning. At Accordance's beck and call. I couldn't tell if Cee Cee was being sardonic or genuinely drinking it all in.

I kept my head down and mouth shut. I just needed to be adequate. So that my parents could live. So that I could survive this.

Just live through it, I told myself. Stay human.

+  +  +  +

On the fourth day, the mix of alien and human instructors started picking us off for interviews in small offices. I sat in front of a human instructor, a middle-aged man with graying hair and weary lines around his eyes. Behind him, a struthi­form instructor rustled feathers and glanced at a screen in his feathered, clawlike hands.

“We've been watching you,” the human instructor said. “You're avoiding trouble. Following orders. Getting up early for breakfast: Nice trick with the water fountain. So, now it's time to think about how best you can be of use to the Colonial Protection Forces. How do you envision your future service?”

“I was thinking cook,” I told them both. “Peeling potatoes. Making stews. I could be a great sous-chef for the CPF, I think.”

“Cook?” the alien asked.

“I've also heard some armies have bands, right? I used to play flute. . . .” I had the most earnest voice, and kept my face straight. But what else was I going to do? Ask them for the most dangerous position?

I just wanted to show up and do what I'd promised: no more, no less.

The human instructor cut me off. “You're not going to be in a band.”

“There's a book in the indigenous literature section of the common library on this base,” the struthiform said, craning its neck forward to regard me. “
Catch-22.
The concept behind the title is that you'd have to be crazy to ask for missions and sane if you didn't, but if you were sane you had to fight in the human war. But if you fought, that meant you were crazy, and shouldn't. And if you didn't want to fight, that meant you were sane and had to. See?”

I didn't. I hadn't read it, either. Most human classics had been not banned but “de-emphasized” in schools. There were older, superior Arvani sagas. And shows.

“You done having fun?” the human instructor asked. “Because here's the thing, recruit, it's all going to shit out there. And we're going to need all the bodies we can get.”

He waved a hand. The desk between us filled with an orbital image of a world. Greenish clouds and unfamiliar, patchy continents.

“This is happening. Tens of light-years away. But as far as the Accordance is concerned, it's right next door and getting closer every day.” The daylight faded; the planet spun into night.

Clusters of circular city lights in the planet's dark flickered. Then died. A cluster here, then another there. When the planet spun back into daylight, pillars of smoke streamed up to join the clouds.

The instructor swiped the image away. Flicked through videos of cities, unnaturally high Accordance spires and more black, treelike skyscrapers slumping over to the ground as their legs splintered and gave out. Bodies flicked by. Struthiforms, carapoids, a long-legged furry thing with surprisingly humanlike eyes. The corpses lay still.

“We just lost an entire planet,” the instructor said. Something large descended. Eldritch, asymmetrical, a city-sized jellyfish dropping out from the skies. Translucent, and yet it sucked all the light away as it moved.

“Conglomerate host-ship. Atmospheric entry class,” the struthiform said coldly.

“Those black, flea-like things coating it, they're living ablative shields. They stick themselves onto the host-ship and use their backs to protect it as it enters the atmosphere. Once it's down, they detach and forage for food.”

“Forage?” Millions of crispy shells fell clear of the shivering host-ship. Most broke as they struck the ground. The survivors, steaming hot, ripped into the corpses on the ground.

“The Accordance traced the home world of those creatures,” the struthiform said. “They used to be a space-faring civilization. Intelligent. Now they're living heat shields. And that's it. Their monuments dust, their cities lost. Covered in a living shell of Conglomerate computational slurry that's slowly eating its way down into the core of their world. They reshape whole systems to their needs, and entire species to their whims. They love finding new biomes, like Earth's. They'll sample our DNA, investigate, catalog, and then reshape us into whatever they have a need for. They already tried this with the Pcholem once. That's why we need fighters, Devlin. Because we're losing worlds to them. We need more fighters.”

The human instructor jumped back in. “Your test scores from the past few days are back. We think you're well suited for one particular arm of the Colonial Protection Forces.”

I was still thinking about living ships discarding their heat shields to gobble alien corpses. “What do you think I'm so good at?”

“We're creating an all-human fighting force. Human officers. Human fighters. We need to build human expertise up, and stop depending on Accordance-led human squads so that we can grow the CPF's native strength. You're going to join the first all-human light enhanced infantry regiment.”

Light enhanced infantry. Just enough powered armor that a human could keep up with enhanced infantry in the Accordance military. Just enough power that we would be put in the middle of alien-versus-alien action.

These two instructors sounded excited. As if I should be proud of the chance. I bet they sounded like this even when they were handing someone a toilet scrubber and explaining that the recruit's new mission would be to scrub toilets onboard an Accordance space station.

“There's a new training center on the dark side of the moon: Icarus. Named after the crater that surrounds the whole area it sits in,” the human instructor said. “Congratulations, you ship out for Icarus tonight.”

7

“Listen up!” drill instructors both alien and human shouted at us as we crowded together down on the cold morning beach. “You will bring nothing with you. You will leave all personal objects behind on this beach before getting inside transport craft.”

Hoppers flew in over the Long Island Sound. They kicked up saltwater spray as they overflew the beach, and then dropped down to pick up recruits at the front of the line.

“Devlin!”

Rakwon and Cee Cee broke out of line, like many of us milling around the back, to say good-bye. It had been only a few days, and yet it felt like a graduation of some kind as we quickly hugged each other. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“Peacekeeper forces,” Rakwon said. “Manhattan. If I keep in line, in a few years I could get a promotion.”

“Peacekeeper? They gave me a whole big story about being desperate for soldiers in the CPF.”

Rakwon shrugged. “They were talking about the ‘repacification' process. We've been out of the news loop here all week. I think there are more riots or something. Well, at least I'll get to see my family on weekends. I can take a message to your family for you, if you want.”

“No.” They didn't want to hear from me. “What about you, Cee Cee?”

“Recruits: in line!” an instructor shouted.

“Orbital counterforces. Drones and links,” Cee Cee shouted as she ran back to her place. “I might even get to fly a Stingray . . . if they pass the human pilots emergency authorization act.”

“Good luck,” Rakwon said as he ambled quickly away.

“No!” an all-too-familiar voice screamed from behind us all. We turned to see Ken dragged out through the doors and thrown into the sand. He staggered to his feet, lurching back toward the struthiform instructors that had thrown him out. His voice broke with emotion as he screamed, “You can't do this. This isn't how it's supposed to be! I'm from a Landed Family! I was born, and trained, to be an officer. Do you even know how much was invested in me?”

The nearest struthiform slapped him with the back of a feathery hand. Ken fell awkwardly into the sand. “Get in line,” the alien snapped.

Ken crawled on his hands and knees, nose dripping blood down onto the sand. In just a single morning he'd fallen a long way from being the strutting leader of his instant crew. He crawled into line behind me, and someone helped him to his feet.

He looked at me with bruised eyes and a swelling lip. “You too?” he asked numbly.

“Light infantry,” I confirmed, not quite sure whether I should enjoy his humiliation or hate the aliens that had backhanded him so casually. “I'm going to Icarus.”

I wanted to ask if he was okay. But he very obviously wasn't. It was a stupid thing to want to ask. I didn't bother.

Ken swallowed. “You know what happens to human infantry.”

“What?”

“We die.”

+  +  +  +

The hoppers landed us at the flowerlike structures of the new Lakita Singh Air and Space Port. Instructors pushed and herded us into a launch terminal, then yelled at us some more.

“This is your buddy,” a human instructor said. He shoved a nervous recruit at me. “Put your hand on your buddy's shoulder. Hold tight. Now, you are responsible for your buddy. Anything happens to your buddy, it'll happen to you. When I ask you where your buddy is, you won't tell me, because you'll be holding your buddy's shoulder and it'll be so obvious where he is, you won't have to say anything. Got it?”

I nodded.

The instructor shook his head, like my father when trying to teach me some complex piece of math that I just couldn't quite get the first time around. “You don't nod. You answer with a ‘yes' and an ‘instructor' in there, son. The Hamptons may be run by aliens that don't allow us to use ‘sir,' but we can work around that. You're still CPF. And it'll be all-human CPF for you lot. So my rules apply. Let's try that again: got it?”

“Yes . . . instructor!” I fumbled. His eyes narrowed, then he nodded and moved on to the next recruit.

“What's your name?” my shoulder buddy asked. We were standing awkwardly facing each other, an arm each on a shoulder, like at a dance.

“Devlin. You?”

“Keiko.”

We'd been lined up against the walls of the terminal. This was a wing for launches headed for orbit, not flights around the world. Since the occupation, the Accordance had dis­mantled most of the smaller airline hubs in favor of incredibly high-speed rail. But international flights and flights to space were still served.

LSP had once been something else, before the aliens had deemed it unusable and demolished it. Another set of letters. “At least,” my father had told me, “they kept a human name on the port.”

Most of the humans in the port flaunted expensive suits and waited in glassed-off areas with subdued lighting. They sat on lounge chairs where attendants came by to take their orders. We watched them eat, laugh, and sashay around.

Someone pushed a pink dog in a stroller back and forth across the waiting area, cooing at it, feeding it tiny snacks.

The hushed, quiet space behind that glass could have been mine. I could have been mixing with those upper-class civilians, enjoying finger food and traveling the world. If I hadn't thrown away my usefulness as a propaganda tool.

Now . . . I rubbed my short hair.

What was taking so long? We'd been just sitting here for twenty minutes, hands on shoulders, bored.

“Look at that,” Keiko said with wonder in his voice. “I saw her get hauled off for beating a kid up. You saw that, right?”

I leaned far forward. At the very end of the line the girl with silver eyes and still-purple hair sat on the ground as two human instructors conferred over her.

“
Smell
that,” I said, my attention drifting across the hall as my stomach growled.

For those in a hurry, a Brooklyn brownstone had been pulled apart, brick by brick, and painstakingly reassembled in the terminal. And on the steps, in front of it, an “authentic” food cart sold hot dogs and cheeseburgers.

“Did you get a chance to eat before getting shoved out to the beach?” Keiko asked.

“No,” I said. “Look, we're about to be shot off to who the hell knows where. We've been drinking balls of juice in round slime containers. Because it's optimal and easy to feed us that way. This might be our last chance to eat something real for a long, long time.”

“We have to stay put,” Keiko said. “They'll kill us. . . .”

I looked down the line. The instructors were still focused on paperwork and the purple-haired girl. “Last chance,” I hissed. “Even if I get in trouble: It'll be all on me. I promise, it'll be worth it.”

Recruits on either side had been listening in. “Just grab my shoulder when he goes,” someone suggested.

“How you gonna pay?” someone else asked.

I glanced back down the line. The instructors had their backs to me. I let go of Keiko.

“Shit, man, don't do this,” he whined.

I lit out away from the group, quickly, just to get distance. Then I walked casually over. “Hey,” I called out.

The older lady at the cart looked startled. Her blue eyes darted back and forth. “I can't help you run, son,” she hissed. “It's humans-only in this terminal anyway, you can't go anywhere without passing a checkpoint.”

“No,” I spread my hands. “This is our last chance to get any real food. Before . . .”

She let out a deep breath.

“Look, my father's name is Thomas Hart. I don't have any way to pay on me, they took everything away, but if you contact him, he'll . . .”

“What do you want?” she asked quickly. She just wanted to get rid of me, I realized.

“Anything I can carry,” I said quickly. She slid me a box of doughnuts and five hot dogs on a cardboard tray. I eased back across into the line.

“Holy shit, holy shit,” Keiko hissed as I slid back into line. “Holy shit.”

“Come on. Pass these along. Hurry up! Drop the box on the floor when we're done, put a doughnut in your pocket, a hot dog in the other.” I stuffed my hot dog into my mouth.

Oh man. Never had street food tasted . . . So. Fucking. Good.

“Move on up!” the instructors shouted, turning around, their paperwork done. Actually, no, I realized: A struthiform instructor had arrived. The human instructors had been waiting for the real leadership to show up.

The doughnut scraped sugar on the outside of my pocket, but I wiped it off best I could.

“Let's go! Keep it moving! Get aboard the jumpship.” I chewed my hot dog surreptitiously as I passed the instructors waving us through down to our new transport.

The wedge-shaped jumpship's blistered and pockmarked skin, which I'd glimpsed near the docking tube, meant it had seen quite a few reentries. There were no portholes, no screens. Just ribbed metal hull and foam seats for us. Two carapoid pilots sat behind a bulkhead and door, however. They shut it as we entered.

“Buckle in. You should know how to use a buckle. So get it done already! You, sit. Sit there. With your buddy.”

Minutes later the ship rose through the air. I could feel engine pods under our feet, and then even heavier Accordance engines kicking on behind us. This was no hopper. The engines behind us growled with energy and shoved us back into our seats. Manhattan's Accordance-spired skyline fell away as we tilted toward the clouds and flew up.

With alacrity. The pressure of acceleration continued to press on my chest. Whenever I thought the squeezing had to stop, it continued to press harder.

Until, with a gasp, it went away.

Weightlessness. A big smile grew on my face, despite myself. There were no portholes, but I knew we were in orbit. I knew that from here, if I could see anything, I'd be looking down at the continents and the curve of the Earth.

“What
the fuck
is this?” an instructor asked, unbuckling herself to rise up into the air to grab at something.

It was a doughnut, trailing sugar glaze in the air.

“What is unauthorized food doing on
my
transport?” the instructor shouted. Her ponytailed hair bobbed behind her as she looked around. “Who did this?”

She only got a series of blank looks from my row.

Another instructor bounced up into the air. “Don't anyone unbuckle. We're going to search you. . . .”

Ken raised a hand. “Instructor: I know!”

“Rat motherfucker,” I hissed. I barely had time to say even that. One very angry instructor's face was right up in mine as she positioned herself in the air next to me.

Then the other.

The yelling began, and behind them, Ken held up a doughnut of his own and took a bite with a big smile.

It looked like his natural state of asshole had come back online.