by Karen Bao
A few meters ahead, Yinha raises her fist, attempting to rally the Dovetailers. She has switched her Pygmette to its indoor combat settings; it’s shed its outer shell, and its wings have folded in. “Hold the ranks. Shields up! Advance!”
Get up, Phaet. This is what you’re here for. Shield in one hand, knife in the other, I lunge from my hiding place as the loyalist troops surge forward. Now that they’ve broken cover, their numerical advantage hits us full force. They have enough troops on the floor to crush any hope of breaking through, and several more units perch atop spaceships, firing down from above.
“Sage! Help!” the young soldier screams. A Militia soldier’s gloved hand wrenches his head back, and the soldier’s laser finds its way into his chest.
Before I can think, my half-meter knife buries itself in his attacker’s shoulder. The female loyalist soldier sways, then collapses, taking the boy soldier down with her. She’ll wake up screaming in pain, but at least she’ll wake. No one can say the same for the boy. I’ve seen enough laser deaths to know that my companion is gone.
Muting my headset, I empty my lungs in a cry of despair.
Nash doesn’t miss it. She drops down from above me, draping a strong arm around my shoulders to pull me to safety and then to embrace me.
“Phaet, you were there for him. You tried, you really did.” Her dark, familiar eyes ground me in the moment, make me notice the things that are constant, not changing.
“I was supposed to protect him,” I whisper. I should be protecting all of them. But it’s getting harder.
Our already-small attacking force dwindles. Unless we can show ourselves to the Singularity’s residents, and they give us the support we’ve hoped for, we won’t survive—let alone take the base.
More Dovetailers follow Nash and me into the open hangar. As she falls back to let me lead, a cone of them gathers behind me, pushing me deeper into the melee. Featureless enemy helmets are all I can see; the blankness makes it easier to fight them. When I think of them as human, I make mistakes.
My knife sneaks between plates of armor, sinks into flesh and blood, injures many but kills none. Before every battle, I remind myself that I’ve murdered one person—an unknown Lunar recruit who died on Saint Oda’s shores—and that one is too many. I swore not to increase that number, but as the weeks drag on, it’s getting harder and harder to keep that promise.
I survey the scene. A few loyalist troops have fallen back; the ones that haven’t push on despite nonlethal but surely excruciating gashes and projectile wounds. They’re good fighters—better than ours. Only experienced soldiers can fight through those injuries.
Grateful for the visor over my face, I let panic arrange my features into a desperate grimace. My knife bites into a forearm and a shoulder muscle, knocks a laser blaster out of an enemy’s hand.
“Oi, Dove Girl, give me a hand here!” Alex’s voice sounds from inside my helmet. I see him three Destroyers ahead, perched atop the ship’s left wing and facing down a squat enemy soldier. “This pest could use a nap, don’t you think?”
With my left hand, I get out my tranquilizing gun and send a dart, known as a “Downer,” into the soldier’s kneecap. He lunges at Alex but stumbles as his leg goes numb. Alex side-kicks him into the fuselage; soon he’s slumped against it like a drunkard, unconscious.
“Brilliant.” Alex pushes the soldier through the hatch on top of the ship. “I’m using his fingerprint to fire this baby up . . . We’ll fly into the hallways soon.”
True to his word, Alex makes the Destroyer heave backward. He slides out through the repair door on the ship belly’s left side and rolls when he lands. Each second stretches out, long and suspenseful, as the ship picks up speed. The wheels begin to whistle—and then the forked tail tears into the hangar doors.
Crrrunch! The doors buckle, and the troops nearest them push the totaled Destroyer away to reveal a circular hole about two meters in diameter.
“Out! Into Defense!” Yinha barks, satisfaction lacing her sharp words.
Some of us on foot, some in converted Pygmettes, we burst through the jagged hole in the hangar doors and run straight into the Defense Department’s hallways—and another conglomeration of Militia troops. Our steps are accompanied by the flat, female voice of a computer: “Attack on base. Terminate all experiments and proceed to the nearest rendezvous point immediately. Attack on base. Terminate . . .”
“Get Phaet into the hallways!” Yinha hollers over the noise. “And make sure everyone recognizes her!”
Since the fighting in Defense is at such close range, the loyalists don’t dare create a laser-storm. Dovetailers shove their way through the dilapidated military stronghold. The place is a low-ceilinged warren of hallways with historical firearms on display as if in a museum.
Finally, we make it into the Singularity’s interior, which is dark like a planetarium. The first department on our right is Astrophysics, the front door a glowing blue hemisphere with a panel that slides back to allow entry. It’s a model of a giant star, millions of times as massive as our sun. White eddies swirl across its surface: storms that could engulf a nearby planet.
Alex sprints ahead, enters something into a keypad next to the star-door, and pounds on it for good measure. Seconds later, it opens, and two women in their late twenties gesture for us to hurry into the dimly lit, low-ceilinged entryway, taking shelter from the battle. Inside, they flash us the Dovetail sign with their hands: thumbs interlaced, fingers spread wide like wings. They have similar inquisitive eyes and short bobbed haircuts, but one has electrically pale features while the other is tan-skinned and black-haired.
The Singularity’s crawling with Dovetail allies, Alex told us during the briefing. Some of my coworkers can’t wait a second longer for freedom.
When Alex bends down to crush the pale woman in a hug, I realize she’s sitting in a metal battery-powered hoverchair with landing cushions that float several centimeters above the ground. The metal of the chair probably interacts with the base’s grav-magnets, which repel the water in our bodies and create the illusion of greater gravity. In this woman’s case, it allows her to hover. Her right hand rests on a joystick attached to the armrest.
The tan woman leans forward and whispers something in Alex’s ear.
“Friends,” Alex calls to us, “meet some more friends. This is Rose Mu”—he points to the pale woman—“and Mitchell Mu”—the tan one. “They were Astrophysics’ cybersecurity team until about a minute ago. I wouldn’t have survived a week here without them.”
Rose glides alongside me, smiling and squinting slightly. She looks familiar; I suspect I’ve seen her in old news broadcasts. Her eyes, a misty blue gray, are fringed by lashes like frost, and they make the back of my neck prickle. One front tooth looks recently chipped, something that the Singularity’s Medical Department should’ve fixed as soon as it happened. They probably haven’t because the Committee reduced supply shipments after small incidents—a secret meeting here, an assault on a lone Militia soldier there—began to crop up.
“Phaet?” Rose touches my forearm, fingers light like moths. “The living legend.”
“Stuff it, Rose,” Alex says. Turning to me, he mutters, “She cracked Battery Bay’s top classified network at fourteen.”
My jaw falls open, and I stare, dumbfounded. That’s why I recognize her. She must’ve won some Committee award, and I watched the televised ceremony. That makes Rose one of the genius hackers we were hoping to find here.
Rose disregards Alex’s comments and my astonished face. She gestures toward her sister. “Mitchell probably wants to say hello too, but she’s shyer than I am. Also more focused, and less fun—”
“Come on, Rose,” calls Mitchell, jogging next to Alex. “Let’s fight now and make friends later.”
She sounds . . . tired. Weak and hungry. Both women do, in spite of their excitement. Their fade
d lavender robes hang loosely on their frames. Taking a peek through the translucent door, I see that the other Singularity residents look similar, and know that this place doesn’t have enough food for itself, let alone for Dovetail. My heart sinks.
“Down this hallway,” Alex calls. “Let’s capture some Committee cronies!”
Rose floats nearer to Mitchell and Alex, who are gathered around a wide air vent in the floor. Yinha and I stand guard as the three of them pry up the grate—Rose grabs an edge with her left hand and pulls her hoverchair’s joystick back with the right. One by one, Alex, Mitchell, and Rose disappear inside. They’ll begin tracking down the Singularity’s leadership, which our reports indicate has hidden in one of the interconnected scientific departments.
The rest of us exit Astrophysics the way we came and move farther into the base’s claustrophobic interior. Since the radio telescope built atop the colony imposes spatial limitations, Base VI lacks IV’s wide corridors and expansive domes. The comparatively tiny Atrium is a cylindrical room a hundred meters in diameter and five meters high. Along the perimeter, different scientific departments’ sliding doors open into labs and boardrooms. As a whole, the structure resembles a small-scale panopticon.
I run in the front line. The transparent alumina helmet some Materials engineers designed for me means the Singularity’s residents can instantly identify me. Their eyes, and then their fingers, point at my hair, which is more than half silver now. The fading color doesn’t concern me, though Dovetailers have said they’re worried that I’m in poor health. It makes me look as weary as I feel.
The transparent helmet was the brainchild of Sol Eta, Mom’s former colleague in Journalism and Dovetail’s public relations coordinator. “Instant recognition!” she said. “Seeing the Girl Sage’s hair will galvanize everyone around you.”
The Singularity’s civilians react as we hoped. “The Girl Sage is here!” they shout. “Dovetail’s come for us!”
But the patrolling Beetles punish them for it. A Sergeant several meters in front of me smacks an awestruck teenage girl across the face with an Electrostun gun. Blood dribbles from her left nostril. “Quit that talk and get back,” the Sergeant barks. “They’re terrorists.”
A nearby boy—probably the girl’s friend—tries to pull the much bigger Sergeant away from her. The Sergeant zaps him with his Electrostun, turning back to his black-suited Militia troops before the boy’s head hits the floor. The girl screams; the Sergeant ignores her too. “Get Theta first,” he tells his unit.
But the crowd rushes in, enraged by the loyalists’ assault on their own. Civilians wrench Lazies from soldiers’ hands, drive fists into chest armor, shout for bystanders to join in. Our allies look almost comical next to our enemies—exhausted, undernourished, pathetic—but sheer numbers turn the battle in our favor. Although their reckless fervor endears them to me, it makes the scene painful to watch.
The soldiers that evade assault are firing violet lasers my way. But I’m prepared. When I squeeze my left hand into a fist with my fingers around my thumb, microscopic mirrors swing out of my suit’s gray fabric. Although my skin heats up, the clothing reflects the brunt of the laser blasts back at my attackers.
This uniform is the most valuable thing I own—and my first real engineering project. Three months ago, a Committee attack sent a Dovetail satellite crashing down near the Free Radical, shattering its ultra-thin, reflective solar sail. I spent long nights in an engineering lab, breaking the fragments into even smaller pieces and attaching them to my Dovetail uniform. An engineer helped me perfect the mirrors’ flipping mechanism, and my brother wrote code so I could control my suit with hand motions.
Cygnus. I must return to him, to my sister, and not empty-handed.
The lasers reflected by my suit either strike or blind my opponents, forming a pocket of open space around me. I take advantage of the visibility to fire a Downer into a loyalist’s thigh. As he collapses, knocked out by the tranquilizer, I wrench the ballistic shield from his hands. Hunkering down behind it, my back protected by my troops, I set my gun in long-range mode and pick off enemy soldiers, targeting the ones with civilians in chokeholds or handcuffs. My heart beats steadily, and I’m grateful for every pulse. How could I live without this suit? It works so effectively that Asterion Epsilon, the newly elected leader of Dovetail’s territory, wants a suit made for every member in active service—eventually. The cost in time and materials will be enormous.
Is my life worth more than other soldiers’? I don’t like to think so, but the proof is right here. The loyalists’ violet lasers gather most thickly around me.
Protected by a ring of Dovetail soldiers, I run to the Atrium’s center, where a stark black sculpture about three meters high rises from the floor. It roughly represents a black hole, a real “singularity” in space-time. Two rings of white metal intersect, one oriented vertically and one horizontally, with nothing but darkness in the center. I grab one of the rings, using momentum to swing myself back and forth until I’m up and standing on top of it.
The situation looks promising. Dovetail troops have surrounded pockets of struggling civilians, protecting them from loyalist Militia. We’ve taken the hallway’s center and pushed the enemy back against the walls.
Okay, I think. Time to talk. Deep breaths. Shoulders down. Look at their hairlines so that you seem to be making eye contact.
“Militia of the Singularity,” I call. My high-pitched, timid voice echoes through the cramped space. The Dovetailers here have hooked up my headset to the speaker system, and it makes me sound more authoritative than I feel. “You’re outnumbered. Your leaders have left you for dead. Disarm now, or Dovetail will turn your own weapons against you.”
The few Beetles left standing respond by training their Lazies on me; their violet laser fire glances harmlessly off my suit. They look at one another, befuddled and scared, and check their belts for other weapons that might work.
“Base VI is ready to join IV as a free city.” I’ve practiced this speech dozens of times, but my tongue still threatens to trip over every word. “You are the Moon’s best Physicists, Mathematicians, Software Engineers, and more. Dovetail welcomes you with open arms. You . . . you’ve chafed against the Committee’s restrictions on your intellectual freedom for long enough—assigning you experiments, censoring your publications, disrupting your children’s education with Militia training.”
I see nods, the sparks of repressed anger in their eyes. It gives me hope—and the courage to keep speaking.
“So I beg you: take action against the Committee. Help us capture Hopper Gamma and bring her to justice.” According to hearsay, the woman who replaced the Singularity’s deceased, feral-eyed dictator Wolf Omega as representative is tamer—and smarter—than her predecessor. “Help us send the last of the loyalists fleeing to Base I. Are you with us?”
A meek chorus of affirmation, punctuated with a few strong yells. I’ve reached the script’s end, but the situation calls for improvisation. “You can say what you mean now—you don’t have to be afraid.” I suck air into my lungs and put wind behind my words. “Are you with us?”
This time, their shouts are so powerful that they resonate in my bones. As I dismount from the black hole statue, the Singularity’s population begins striking the last Militia stragglers with fists, feet, knees, and elbows. Just as we hoped, the base’s meticulous order has disintegrated, leaving the place not only messy but vulnerable. Dovetail will have to restore it, on our terms—or the base might not last another day.
ACROSS THE ATRIUM, THE THREE-METER-HIGH doors to the Nuclear Physics Department blow off their frame. Sizzling and shining, the metal blocks send a throng of civilians and several Dovetail fighters stumbling backward.
After that, dead silence.
When the curtains of smoke lift, they reveal five Dovetail members and Mitchell and Rose clustered around where the department entrance
used to be. Dovetailers from the Free Radical restrain prisoners in magnetic handcuffs; half of them have already given up struggling. In front, Alex holds the chain around a short, elderly woman’s wrists with his left hand. His right wields a Lazy, the tip jammed against the captive’s forehead.
Hopper Gamma, the interim Base VI representative. Her face, with its button nose and weak jaw, is youthful, not what I’d expected of Wolf Omega’s replacement. But I’m careful not to underestimate her. Because she headed InfoTech for decades in Base I, the Moon’s capital, Hopper’s mind is a labyrinth of secrets. Those child-like eyes are piercing and clear.
“Great place to hide, Nuclear, with all those giant magnets and lasers sitting around.” Alex sounds bored, but there’s an electric current running beneath his words, an intensity that I almost never hear from him. The old woman in his grip whimpers. He sneers. “Don’t worry; we won’t kill you. Dovetail’s after the puppeteers, not the poor minions tied to the strings.”
Sol Eta asked me to deliver the final victory speech, but Alex begged me to let him do it. I surrendered the duty without hesitation. My mind is still whirling from my words earlier. Phaet Theta didn’t know how to shout. But this person I’ve become? She has no choice but to propel her voice into every crevice in people’s minds.
Now Alex hands Hopper off to two Dovetail fighters. “Load her up—we’ll take her home as a souvenir.”
The soldiers grasp our prisoner’s elbows and sweep her off to the side.
“I rotted on this base for more’n three years with the lot of you,” Alex says. “Worked as a data monkey till my eyes bled. These two”—he points at Mitchell and Rose—“made it bearable by hating it too. Cobalt in the next solar system over? Committee wants it for weapons, not pretty blue face paint, as some of us may have hoped.” Grim chuckles from the crowd; Rose laughs a bit too loudly, and Mitchell shushes her. “The Dovetail life’s better. Take it, or we will take you out.”