The Darkside War (7 page)

10

The commander's tentacles filled most of the free space in the tiny craft that dropped out of the lunar night, leaving Amira and me to push ourselves as far up against the back bench as we could.

Through the large porthole on my side I watched as we arced high over the cratered mountains in the dark, whipping a mile overhead a desolate landscape punctuated by the occasional grid and piping of lunar mining facilities.

There were so many craters. The Earth-facing side of the moon had been smoother with its seas and plains. The dark side looked as if it had been in a long, losing war: billions of years of constant artillery bombardment, ravaged by the vengeance of outer space's constant barrage of rocks from beyond Earth's orbit.

All around me, as far as I could see right now, was the Icarus crater. It was almost sixty miles wide, and we'd been flying over it for the last couple minutes.

“Big railgun,” Amira said. I looked out her porthole. A mile-long bridge-like structure ran along the surface. It held a long pipe in its struts rather than a road, though. “A mining facility. They're taking the processed ore chunks and just shooting them in capsules to wherever in orbit they need to go for Accordance projects.”

As we watched, lights danced up and down the trusses and a capsule slightly bigger than the craft we sat in hurtled toward the horizon and rose up into orbit.

A minute or two later, another one followed it.

“Your new home.” Commander Zeus tapped an armored tip against the curved screen in front of him.

The lights of the Icarus training facility lit up the horizon, then almost blinded me as we crested a hill. The craft shuddered as the commander fired engines to slow our forward motion to a near stop, leaving us hanging just over the complex.

Below us an entire crater had been capped with a clear dome, then filled with ponds, brush, bridges, obstacle courses, and other objects I couldn't identify.

Four petal-shaped complexes spread out around the capped dome, making it look like a giant clover from above. More half-buried cylinders popped up inside nearby craters.

“The dome allows for a variety of conditions,” Commander Zeus explained. “We can heat it, chill it, raise the pressure, lower it. Blow wind. Flood it. Put in any number of atmospheres from a variety of planets. We can create storms, hail, winter, summer. We can change the gravity itself via dense attractor base plates buried under the ground. Your living quarters are off to the sides, your commanders live in the quarters one crater over. Be proud: We invested a lot in this for just humans.”

We gently struck a landing pad on top of one of the petals. It pulled us inside, the roof closing overhead after it.

The pad came to a shuddering halt near a row of rovers, their massive balloon-like wheels almost touching each other.

“You're just in time,” the commander said. “While you've spent a day sitting around doing nothing, your teammates have had a meal, learned where their rooms are, and are getting ready for their first round of Escape the School.”

“Escape the School?” Amira asked.

“I'm told it's a rough translation of a concept we Arvani use in our training. I want to see you all in action.”

+  +  +  +

Recruits strung out in a circle in the natural amphitheater to the back of the capped lunar dome.

We slipped in at the back of the line, taking our place. Most of the recruits were in their late teens, like me. Quite a few in their twenties, though. “War's a young man's game,” my father had often said. “One where older statesmen send the patriotic young to settle their elders' disagreements with their blood.”

I looked around. Lots of thickly muscled arms and strong backs. I felt like the runt in the back. Whatever came next, I guessed I'd have to depend on quick feet and quick thinking.

Commander Zeus descended on a cabled platform from the top of the dome.

He threw a black ball out with one of his tentacles into the muddy grass in front of the recruits. “The moment your fingerprints touch the ball,” he shouted, “it registers that you have possession. It also lights up so you can't hide with it.”

We all regarded the ball.

“The aim of this test is to show me who can hold on to the ball the longest.”

Someone raised a hand. “What happens to those who hold it the shortest? Or who don't get it at all?”

“Your orders,” Zeus said, “are to hold on to it the longest.”

Amira stood behind me, her arms folded. “You remember the beach on the Hamptons?” I asked her. “We need to get our hands on that thing. Together.”

“One against everyone is going to be hell,” she agreed. “A bunch of us against everyone else is going to be more survivable.”

“Right. Let's find anyone we know.”

We started walking around, looking for recruits we recognized from the trip to Tranquility City.

The platform began to rise back up into the air on its cables, lifting Zeus into a catwalk gallery under the dome.

“One last change in the current,” the alien commander shouted. “I will be venting the dome's atmosphere until you pass out to see how you function.”

I thought about the choking moon dust lacerating my throat as I struggled to breathe back in Tranquility City.

“Hey, it's Doughnuts,” a voice called out. Amira pulled a familiar-looking dark-haired recruit along.

“Nico's in,” she said.

“What are the rules?” a recruit down the line shouted up at the retreating platform. It was Ken, I realized. “What are we allowed to do?”

There was no reply.

Amira yanked more people over to me. Our hasty team grabbed shoulders in a huddle. I counted ten of us, mostly all recognizable from the ride to the moon. “Here's the idea,” I said. “If any of us can grab it, the rest of us huddle around and protect them. We rotate in, get some holding time, until we've all got hands on it. Then we let it go. Yell ‘ball' and we'll surround you. Each of us gets five seconds.”

“You sure this will work?” the recruit who'd nicknamed me Doughnuts asked.

“No,” I said. “We'll get the shit kicked out of us trying to do it. But you think it'll go any better with us trying it alone?”

A horn blared, an unmistakable start signal.

A scrum instantly developed over the ball. Individuals scrapping around the mud to try to hold on. Legs churned, bodies writhed.

One of the recruits staggered out of the mass of bodies, swore, then threw herself back in with a vicious elbow to someone's neck.

“My finger's broken! Help!” A scraggly boy crawled out and held up a hand. Bone stuck out of the side of his finger and blood ran down his wrist.

But no help came down from the gantry. Or from anywhere else.

Ken approached us, a surprisingly humble nervousness obvious in his body language. “Create a wedge,” he said. “I think that'll get us in there.”

“There is no ‘
us,
' ” I snarled at him, remembering his elbow digging into the back of my neck as he shaved my head, embarrassing me in front of Cee Cee.

He raised his hands, conciliatory. “Look, I'm sorry about the doughnuts.”

“Fuck off,” I said, and turned my back. I took several deep breaths, watching the dozens of recruits in front of us fighting like a cluster of weasels over the ball. I glanced back and saw Ken walking away, looking for someone else to join forces with.

“We need all the help we can get,” Amira muttered to me.

“Fuck him. We don't need
his
help.”

“He was right about wedging in,” Amira said.

I grunted. “I guess.”

“When do we try for it?” the guy who'd called me Dough­nuts asked.

I looked over at Amira's silver eyes. “Our instructors are venting air. When do we start getting dizzy?”

The right corner of her mouth pulled back, a half smile as she figured out what I was thinking. The first time I'd seen that. “Five minutes. More or less.”

“I want to eat dinner first tonight, if they're pulling that stunt from the Hamptons again,” I said. “So we're just going to stand here and take long, deep breaths. Keep yourself oxygen­ated. We're going to form up in a triangle, and keep our arms locked together. Biggest up at the spear tip, right? If that scrum moves at all, we slowly track it. Amira, can you keep time for us?”

“Nice thinking, Doughnuts.”

“It's Devlin,” I said. “You are?”

“Grayson.”

We linked arms and formed up, like protestors facing an advancing line of enforcers. The hard part would be waiting and holding as Amira ticked off a minute, and then another. I kept up a running patter of positive support, keeping the small squad upbeat about our plan.

“Three minutes,” she reported. The scrum broke apart. A recruit with a ripped uniform punched someone in the face and tore free. Blood streamed down his face as he held the ball to his barrel-like chest, cradled in thick, muscular arms. The ball lit up like a small sun as he placed his fingers against it. We all blinked and shielded our eyes.

“Let's get him,” Grayson said. We all surged forward a bit.

“Walk!” I shouted. “Walk. Stay together.”

A cloud of recruits surged after the recruit with the ball. They ran across the mud toward an obstacle course away from the open clearing we'd assembled in.

Some of the runners looked woozy, but determined.

“Two minutes,” Amira called out.

“Breathe deep, walk easy,” I said as we shuffled after the prize.

The recruit finally succumbed to the crowds chasing him and went down. The scrum reassembled, occasional figures wrapping themselves around the ball in a fetal position as they got the shit kicked out of them and the ball pried out of their hands.

“One minute.”

Screams of injured recruits echoed off the dome and bounced back down at us. I glanced up at the catwalk. Zeus stood on his platform, surveying the chaos but not putting a stop to it.

“It's sleepy time,” Amira said.

“Go!” I shouted.

Our wedge struck the scrum hard, scattering bodies and trampling people caught by surprise. We were fresh, not dizzy, and organized.

“Get the ball but don't unlink your arms!” Amira shouted.

“Count to five, then pass it along.” I hoped that whoever had snagged it wouldn't hog it, or I'd be screwed.

The center of our huddle lit up, dazzling my eyes as one of the recruits managed to get on his knees to retrieve the ball. Behind me, a knee struck my kidney hard enough that I sagged in place as I gasped.

I hung limp, tears running down my cheeks. Amira yanked me back onto my feet.

“Pass.”

The ball was passed to the right as we huddled and weathered a storm of scratches, punches, and attempts to pierce our human wall.

But the air loss was having an affect. The punches were weaker. The roars of rage choked. We were on our knees, arms still linked, heads together, struggling to keep strong.

When Amira awkwardly passed me the ball I hugged it to my stomach. At the count of four, the Klaxon sounded. We all flopped onto our backs and gasped fresh air as it streamed back into the dome in a rush of wind.

Commander Zeus descended from the sky on the platform, picked around the passed-out humans—sidestepping moaning recruits being tended to by struthiform medics—and ignored the still-standing survivors who eyed him warily.

“I seem to have been stuck with a mass of miserably performing apes!” the Arvani commander shouted. “And while I find you all about as appealing as barnacle growth, I have my duty. So we have a lot of work to do.”

I didn't like the sound of that.

Zeus paused in front of me. “You: You performed tolerably. You will pick seven to create your arm.”

“My what?”

“Your arm,” Zeus repeated. “A collection of fighters. Eight fighters to an arm. You will be their octave.”

“Sounds like we're going to be a group of fighting flutists,” Amira muttered behind me.

Zeus raised the voice coming from the armor. “Eventually there will be twenty-five arms here on the base. You will learn to lead your arm, and the arms will also learn to fight together and against each other. It is a privilege to be an octave. Grasp it tightly. Hurry to pick your team, or the other octaves will have their choices.”

“Amira,” I called out.

Zeus moved across the mud. “You: You are an octave.”

I didn't pay attention to who the other octaves were. “Grayson.” He could keep calling me Doughnuts if he wanted, but he'd held the line.

“Worst game of playground dodgeball ever,” he muttered, but came to stand next to me.

I started grabbing recruits, some from our group, others that I'd noticed who'd somehow grabbed time on the ball during the exercise.

Amira tapped me on the shoulder as our team formed. “You have a fan,” she said.

Ken stood near a climbing wall, his arm in an inflatable cast and a purple welt over his right eye. He glowered at us, then pointed a finger at a tall recruit. She jogged over to join his team.

Ken pointed at me and flipped me off.

“Family privilege,” I grunted. “Welcome to Earth under the occupation. Apparently he gets to be an octave whether he's skilled or not.”

Amira raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that?” she asked.

I was.

“Hurry up and pick your team, know-it-all,” she murmured. “Pay attention, there are some people you don't want Ken to snag from under you.”

11

I had yet to see my bunk, but I guess it didn't matter. I didn't come to Icarus with any belongings. I didn't have anything to put down anywhere.

Zeus clanked his way around the warehouse we'd been ushered to in one of the living quarters off the crater dome, deep in one of the cloverleaf-like areas, eyeing the various arms assembled before him.

“Now that the arms are picked and the octaves are in command, you will suit up in armor,” Zeus announced.

My arm shifted, its members slightly excited by the announcement.

I had picked Grayson Stockton, from Leeds, who played rugby before getting recruited out of a tenement in occupied London. He'd literally held me up while we fought for the ball. Another member of the first team, Casimir Sharpe, I'd spotted moving quickly through the mess before he joined us. I wanted that speed on my side.

Amira had pointed out a Viking shield-maiden of a figure towering over half the group near the back. “You'll want Amabel there for muscle,” she said. “The other octaves aren't taking her seriously.”

“Yeah.” If Amira wanted her, she was with us.

Roger Li, another member of our initial huddle, agreed to come with us. Haselda Madsen was another Amira suggestion. “I sat next to her on the way to Tranquility. She's smart.”

“Smart is good,” I said.

“She's also spent time in Brazil and Chile. With Roger's Mandarin, you have two of the most common CPF first languages outside of English. The Accordance is pulling a lot of different people together, and that means we have a variety of languages being used. A lot of them know English as a second language, but we can't count on it. There'll be a lot of Chinese-, Indian-, and Spanish-speaking recruits.”

Zeus raised an armor-plated tentacle. “Your armor,” he announced.

Struthiform officers pushed racks of black armor into the room, the suits swaying on their hooks. Each suit split open, looking like mandibles of black, chitinous insects ready to swallow us.

We stared. The sleek plating and mechanized joints meant this was Accordance military-grade issue. Designed for humans, but illegal on Earth. Even human enforcers didn't get to step into this stuff.

“Check out the patches on the shoulder,” Amira said. “At least that's human designed.”

A stylized Earthrise had been etched into each shoulder patch. The pockmarked moon in the foreground, Earth rising behind it.

“What are you gawping at?” Zeus shouted. “Get suited up!”

“How?” I asked, tentatively approaching the cracked-open suits.

“Some on-our-feet learning,” Amira said.

“Oh, come on.” Amabel laughed. “I've seen struthiforms do this on-base outside Charleston when I was four. We'd sneak up to the edge of the base and watch them train.” She strode over, spun around, and put out her arms. Then backed into a hanging suit.

The cuffs snapped to her wrists, legs snapped forward, and the chest closed in. The whole suit gripped her and sealed shut with a hiss, seams disappearing. It readjusted, shaping itself with minor tweaks until it conformed to her size and shape.

She winced. “Okay, that hurts a little.”

“What hurts?” Casimir asked, a little nervously.

Amabel raised her legs, rocking back and forth on the hook. “Come find out,” she challenged.

I walked forward. The suit was alien. Inside I could see the lay of the cut-open human shape it manifested, but that was the only recognizable human element of the suit. The interior of the suit glowed with spiky filaments of some kind of bioluminescent mold.

I turned around and backed in.

When my arms touched the gauntlets, they startled me by grabbing my wrists. The rest of the suit snapped shut around me, just like Amabel's had.

Sections readjusted shape, memory metal shifting and pulling in tight to become a heavy second skin. Something pricked my skin, then shoved its way into my lower back. The burning sensation spread up my spine.

I gasped. “That's invasive.”

Around me the rest of the arm backed into their suits until we all dangled from hooks.

Zeus moved to the front of the mess. “This is a fusion of inferior human technology and the superior workmanship of the Cal Riata.”

“The what?” someone closer to the front asked.

“Arvani that left the depths for the shallows,” Zeus told us. “We colonized the lakes and tidal pools of the Arv. We did that by building machines to let us explore land. We are still the leaders of Arvani invention and study. You should consider yourselves honored that I'm stuck here in your backwater.”

“He sound a little bitter about being here to you?” Amira asked.

“Hard to tell, the voice is synthesized; but I think you're right,” Amabel said.

“This armor,” Zeus shouted, drowning out the snapping sound of the suits closing up, “is powered by the same engines as a hopper, just smaller. It can do more than just increase your strength five times over: It features adaptive real-time camouflage, and it can recycle the internal air for a few days as well as liquids for up to a week.”

“Ewww.” Grayson made a face.

“Your communications have quantum entanglement for security on each arm's own channel, entangled again for a connection back to Command. There are also public radio frequencies for inter-arm—”

A loud crash interrupted Zeus. Someone had leapt off his hook and buried himself in the ceiling. The soft material rained to the floor, and the recruit had obviously not died as he kicked and wiggled around, stuck in the gooey ceiling. Obviously the room was designed with a safety feature.

Zeus didn't look up, just waited a second and then continued. “First, you need to visualize your helmet. This finishes the suit-up process now that there is a neural link with your spinal cord.”

I closed my eyes and thought about a helmet. The rim snicked and then something thunked into place. The air around my head filled with the sound of my breathing. I opened my eyes to see the helmet had shot out of the collar and surrounded my head.

“And now I'll release the suits from their racks,” Zeus said, his voice filling my helmet. “Move slowly, and cautiously. Do not damage my ceiling any further.”

The hook yanked free, and I stumbled forward. Each step jerked oddly, but as I took each one, something about the suit seemed to stop resisting and then overreacting to me. It began to move with me. Anticipate my movements.

By my tenth step, I felt one with the suit and no longer like an awkward toddler staggering forward.

“Hey, this is Amira.” Amira's voice startled me by filling the helmet as well. “I know you're all new to this, but just think about where you want to talk to. Think ‘Command' and you'll be sending to Zeus. Probably not a good idea unless you have to. Think of your team, or arm I mean, and you'll be on the channel.”

Then right over, Zeus came in. “Now it's time to get used to your suits.”

A few groans popped out on the public channel from other arms.

Zeus scuttled out of the room and we followed. Down halls, and then out into the domed crater we'd struggled through earlier.

There were no days on the moon, I realized. Zeus would decide when we slept, when we were tired, what we would do.

When was the last time I'd slept? Had it been a couple days? I'd been moving from event to event and wanted to rub my eyes, but the helmet was in the way.

I thought about visualizing it opening. And right as I did so, a whirlwind almost knocked me over.

“Amira here. They dumped the air,” Amira reported on the arm's channel. “Everyone helmeted? Call it in.”

“I'm here.”

Amira sounded annoyed. “Who the fuck is ‘I'? I don't know your voice yet. Use your name.”

“Sorry. Casimir here.”

“Amabel.”

“Roger.”

“Katrin.”

“Grayson.”

“Devlin,” I said.

“Haselda . . . shit,” she grunted. “Just landed on my face. I'm here.”

I looked around and saw a figure standing up from a divot in the dirt.

“Welcome back to the training area,” Zeus said. “We have prepared an obstacle course for you. First arm to the other side gets dinner. The losing arms get to run back to this side and go hungry. Go!”

“What is their obsession with starving us?” Amira grumbled.

“Let's go,” I grunted. “Let's just get this done.”

We loped forward along the dirt trail leading to the other side. The first obstacle: a tall stone wall with barbed wire at the top.

“And up we go.” Amira leapt nearly fifteen feet into the air, skimmed the barbed wire, and disappeared over the other side. “Careful, water pit on the other side,” she reported.

I leapt. I didn't quite coordinate my jump, so I didn't reach the top. I struck the wall, stone broke and crumbled, and I flipped forward, landing in the pit of water upside down and flailing.

A suit landed nearby in an explosion of water, and the helmeted head turned down to face me. Ken's voice came through on the public channel. “I
thought
that was you, Devlin. Graceful.”

I struggled to stand, and Ken shoved past me, checking me easily with a shoulder. I toppled back into the water. “Damn it.”

Ken leapt out, streaming water behind him. He hit the ground and flexed his knees, then jumped like a cricket to a spot another twenty feet away.

“Come on, Amira,” I called out.

“Let it go,” she said. “Haselda's having trouble getting over the wall.”

“Casimir, help Haselda,” I ordered. “Everyone else, keep up with me.” Why was Amira arguing with me over the arm's channel? I was the octave. I was the leader.

I ran after Ken through more pits of mud and water, and then crawled quickly under crisscrossed lasers that sizzled against the suit.

The ghostly word
OVERHEAT
flashed in the lower right corner of my helmet's screen, some kind of heads-up display popping into my field of vision, but it faded as I crawled away.

I battled through a hell of competing wind and firestorms that buffeted me. Staggered through what looked like a pool of acid, took a running leap, and jumped out over a chasm.

I didn't realize how deep it was until the midpoint of my leap when I looked down, and
8
00
FEET
appeared along with a range finder on the heads-up display.

“Shit.” I wouldn't have jumped if I'd realized the fall could kill me.

I'd assumed the training grounds were a safe place. But they weren't. Maybe that acid would have eaten through my suit if I'd taken too long.

No one was playing games here. The Accordance wanted to train us to fight an enemy they feared. They weren't holding back.

Zeus hadn't cared about Keiko. He didn't care about me. We were aliens to the Arvani. Aliens they needed to train to fight.

Disposable.

I slowed down. Took the obstacles more seriously.

Survive, I thought as I ran toward the wide maw leading out of the crater training grounds. I wanted to survive this.

The remnants of other arms straggled in. My vague fantasy of grabbing Ken in full armor and knocking him down had faded. I was just glad Amira and I had struggled across into the tunnel in one piece.

Zeus thudded across the metal floor. “Where is the rest of your arm?”

“Behind us,” I said.

“Unacceptable. Where is Haselda? Have you looked into your arm's welfare? Have you kept it together and used it effectively?”

I looked down at the ground. “No.”

“Useless ape,” Zeus hissed in my helmet. “You are an octave. Act like it. Everyone, strip out of your armor, that's enough for one day. Hart, you'll be outside running laps without the suit.”

I started to work on cracking out of my suit as the rest of my arm caught up. Again, visualizing the action sent the command through whatever had slipped itself into my spine and did the trick. The chest cracked open. Haselda limped in, held up by Casimir.

The large doors leading out to the crater rolled shut. More helmets snapped open and slid down into the suit collars. “Are you okay?” I stopped focusing on trying to get out of my suit and walked over. It resealed itself up the middle of my chest.

Blood ran down Haselda's lips from her nose. She walked past me, looking weary.

“Casimir?”

“She hit the wall headfirst after the first stumble,” he said. “And then you left us behind. Nice work, man.”

“You know what,” I said, temper flaring. “I didn't ask to be an octave. I didn't even fucking ask to be sent here to the moon.”

“Let's just get out of the power armor and take our medicine,” Casimir said tiredly.

Amira moved in closer, her voice tight. She'd shucked her armor already. The neural interface was easy for her. “They're depending on you, Devlin. And we're going to have a lot of time stuck together.”

“Hey!” Ken had his helmet flipped down and walked toward me. “You know what you are? You're a disgrace. You're a coward. You don't deserve the honor of being an octave, because you don't even want it.”

It stung because it came too close to the truth, which I knew deep down, but on the surface I exploded. “Hey, asshole. Who ran from Tranquility when the bomb went off ? You did. You left Keiko to die.”

That hit home. Ken came at me swinging. I put up a gauntleted hand to block his punch, and then smacked into him just as hard.

“Guys!” Amira shouted.

We grappled and swung around. Then separated. “Asshole,” I muttered. “You've been at this since the Hamptons. You need to back the fuck off.”

“Go back home, traitor.”

“Stop it!” Amira snapped, sounding utterly exasperated. She stepped between us, and I pushed her aside to get at Ken. My forearm struck her with a loud crunch, and both Ken and I froze.