by Karen Bao
But it’s real, and all the numbness in the world won’t erase it.
Base VI is gone forever.
* * *
“What we have witnessed was a crime not only against innocent Lunar civilians, but against all of humanity.” Prime Minister Sear’s voice cuts through the empty air. The broadcast screens show him leaning on a podium, muscles coiled in anger as if he’s ready to spring. This time, I listen to every word.
The Batterers filling the streets and watching on their roll-out screens mostly look terrified, though a few are full of grief, and still others are furious. Parents grasp children’s hands; couples turn to each other for comfort. I witnessed a similar scene right after the Free Radical wrenched itself from Committee rule and prepared to fight. Change the Batterers’ clothes, wipe off their face paint, and they’d look almost Lunar.
“We must join the fight against injustice, millions of miles above our heads,” says Prime Minister Sear. He’s leapt on our tragedy, using it to advance his longtime political agenda. His single-mindedness doesn’t anger me. I’ve learned to expect such things from people with power, whether they’re Lunar or Earthbound.
“We cannot stand by while their sham government commits mass murder! If the Committee eradicates Dovetail, we will be their next target. We cannot wait until that day to fight back!”
Applause, whistles, and flag-waving from the growing crowd. Sear has turned his people’s fear into indignation and determination; impressed, I make a mental note for the next time I give a speech.
News stations all over Battery Bay begin to broadcast interviews with Parliament members. As I walk, I watch people’s roll-out screens over their shoulders.
“Representative, what do you make of the Lunar Standing Committee’s threat?” asks a reporter.
“They want to deter us from allying with Operation Dovetail,” replies his interviewee, a young, expertly groomed Parliament member. “Battery Bay does not cower before threats!”
Another screen, another journalist: “Representative Harrington, yesterday you denigrated the Lunar people, calling them degenerate. Have you changed your position on the Dovetail insurgency?”
The stringy-haired bigot who tore apart the alliance proposal looks shaken. “Whatever a people’s moral deficiencies, they do not deserve to be killed by their governments.”
He talks robotically, as if hating every word that passes between his teeth. Though he doesn’t want to help Dovetail, he’d be a fool to speak out against public opinion.
Pushing through the crowd behind Andromeda, I hear segments of more news reports: “The Standing Committee constitutes an Earth-wide threat and must be deposed.” “If the Committee defeats the rebels, they’ll destroy us next. We must fight them.” “My constituents are afraid for their lives, and we must take down the cause of their fear—the Lunar government.”
It took an entire base’s murder to bring these people to our side. But it’s worked. Maybe the Committee didn’t think we’d react to their atrocities by uniting instead of disintegrating.
“Come this way.” Andromeda motions for Yinha and me to follow her. “The Batterers are reaching consensus in our favor. We need to figure out our next move.”
We hustle down a side street until the wide rectangular “park” comes into view. It no longer deserves that name. Black water sits in depressions dug out by Pacifian bombs; the great lawns look parched, pockmarked. Trees have been ripped out of the ground or torn limb from limb; leaves blown away, branches singed black. Even the squirrels and pigeons must have perished in the attacks.
The three of us stare at the devastation for a long moment before venturing into the burial grounds.
“WE NEED YOU BACK. ALL OF YOU.” Asterion’s distressed voice plays from the Sanctuarists’ makeshift computer. We’re in a sheltered cave near the park’s center. It was spared much of the destruction that wrecked the surrounding area.
In the background of the audio clip, there’s the hum of spaceship engines and the tremolo of conversation. Asterion sent the message at 03:48 Lunar time: several hours ago. We’d have used Dovetail’s communication mechanism to intercept it—HeRPs with signal connections to the Free Radical—but Alex insisted that the Sanctuarists’ smaller, more convoluted network was safer from Lunar or Pacifian spies.
It’s dark here. The chilly air smells like rotting leaves and damp fur; dirty water fills small pockets in the bumpy granite of the cave floor. The blue light from the screen, which runs off the power of an emergency generator, casts a sickly hue on the skin of everyone assembled—me, Yinha, Andromeda, Alex, Wes, and Wesley Sr.
We sit in a semicircle, facing the monitor on the wall. Wes’s knee touches mine, and I hope the contact comforts him as it does me. You’re with me now, it seems to say. Each instant we’re alive, the universe is granting us one more second together. Then, impossibly, another and another. Given recent events, I’m grateful for every one.
“I wish I had a better way to deliver both the terrible news,” Asterion says, “and the good news too.”
On Wes’s other side, his father sits, body angled protectively toward his son. His back is hunched in a C-curve. One hand shields his forehead and eyes from view. The grief in his posture—and the love—sends shivers up my spine. This man sent his fifteen-year-old son to the Moon, sent me on a suicide mission after I proved to be Lunar. But he looks incapable of hurting anyone now. His oldest child’s death seems to have snapped something inside him.
“The Singularity. It’s . . .” Asterion takes a deep breath before confirming our worst fears. “It’s . . . gone. Bombed out. Small thermonuclear warhead with twelve kilotons of explosive force, but it was enough to exterminate the settlement. Committee pulled the bomb from lunar orbit, sent it crashing down. Evacuation from the base was futile. Over thirty thousand dead.”
All those lights snuffed out, in one instant. My mind struggles to wrap around the number, but it unravels each time I try.
Alex is shivering, mumbling to himself. “Leavitt— Lovelace—” Some of the thirty thousand dead, the ones he cared for most. I think of Mitchell, Rose’s black-haired sister, who remained on the Singularity after the invasion, of her sharp eyes sparking with unanswered questions. Incinerated. How has Rose reacted to the news?
Wesley Sr. tugs on his sleeve. “Be still, agent.”
Alex shakes his head, refusing to look up. I look at Wes to see how he’s taking Asterion’s revelations. His face is blank, as if the words haven’t yet entered his ears.
“We should’ve left more important loyalist prisoners there as a deterrent . . .” Yinha muses.
Andromeda shushes her. “It wouldn’t have done any good.”
I wonder if she’s right.
Asterion begins talking again, his voice more businesslike this time.
“Here’s the real reason we need you. Dovetail had no choice but to attack Base II ahead of schedule.” He tells us that loyalists were preparing to storm Base I’s underground neighbor, Base II, known colloquially as the Dugout, to root out Dovetailers. So we beat them to it.
Andromeda tenses up, but the weariness on her face remains.
“The invasion succeeded,” Asterion announces. “As of 02:12 today, the Dugout is Dovetail territory.”
I blink dumbly at the cavern wall. After such a tragedy, the enormity of Dovetail’s success feels like a lie. An illusion someone could wipe away at any moment.
“The cost to Dovetail was minimal,” Asterion’s recorded voice says. He describes cutting power from the Dugout, causing chaos and letting Dovetail invade with minimal damage. Most of Dovetail’s troops and influential people like my siblings have been moved to the Dugout, as have our prisoners Jupiter Alpha and Skat Yotta, to deter nuclear attack.
We exhale in relief—and wonder.
Bit by bit, I let myself believe that it’s true. Dovetail proved
itself stronger and smarter than anyone could have foreseen. The Dugout is ours.
My family’s there now. Has Cygnus adjusted to his new surroundings? Is Anka still able to take care of him?
She’s strong. I know she can.
“Now for the less thrilling news,” Asterion says. “The loyalists attacked a fleet of our ships flying from home”—Base IV—“to the Dugout, and we lost food as well as personnel. A shipment of Bai’s drone prototypes was also destroyed, so the new territory is biologically vulnerable.”
But we’ll be back to help soon enough. The Dovetail envoy will soon fly to the Moon, passing through contested airspace and a belt of nuclear weapons.
“With thousands of loyalist troops returning from Earth,” Asterion says, “I need your help to lead our forces, Yinha. Andromeda, we need you—you and your practical advice, even if it’s the last thing I want to hear sometimes.” This elicits a sad chuckle from Andromeda. “And Girl Sage, we need you to put the light back in Dovetail’s eyes. Come home. And bring as many Batterers as you can—”
“Sir, we’ve finished the weapons inventory.” A young woman’s voice interrupts. She sounds far away.
“Coming,” Asterion calls. Turning back to the recording microphone, he says, “I have to go. Reply as soon as it’s safe.”
A click, and he’s gone.
Taking the Dugout was no small victory for Dovetail. Losing all of the Singularity was no small loss for humankind. I want to celebrate and mourn, to give both events the weight they deserve, but all the people who’d do either with me are otherwise occupied. Andromeda has taken up the microphone to record a reply. Leaning over her shoulder, Yinha occasionally interjects with comments. Alex ignores their feverish whispers, instead watching Wes plead with his father.
“Please,” Wes says, “I have to go back up there.”
He’s coming with us. A burst of happiness makes me feel weightless, but only for a moment. I want Wes to stay with me, but I can imagine how painful it’ll be for him to leave his grieving family. And how dangerous our journey into the sky will be.
Wesley Sr. presses his thin lips together. “No. You will not leave this city. It would crush your mother—”
“Come off it, Senior,” Alex says.
“You will stay on Earth as well, Huxley,” Wesley Sr. says. “There’s enough work for you here on Battery Bay.”
“We’ve helped set off a civil war up there,” Alex says. One that killed his friends. For both boys, the Lunar conflict is personal.
“He’s right,” Wes says to his father. “The Lunar war exists in part because of our actions. Didn’t you teach us to finish what we started?”
“I . . . After Marina . . .” Wesley Sr.’s chest deflates. It makes him look terribly small, especially because we’re all sitting on the ground. “It can’t happen to you, son.”
Wes stares at his hands. He’s toying with his shoelaces, winding and unwinding them around his wrist. “If I’d gone back earlier and thrown the Committee out, maybe she’d still be here.” His father remains silent. “When I go to the Moon this time, I won’t be alone. I’ve got Alex . . . and Phaet.” His knee nudges mine. “This time, I’ll save Saint Oda for good, just like you and Mother always wanted.”
“We don’t expect you to be a hero or a savior—not anymore,” Wesley Sr. says. “We just want you to live. That’s what she and I have decided.”
Wes looks into his father’s face—not as an underling or a child, but as an equal. “It’s time for me to make that decision on my own. Even if it’s one of my last.”
Wesley Sr. stares at his son, blinking in surprise. Then he puts an arm around Wes and thumps him on the shoulder. When Wes returns the one-sided embrace, his father crushes him in both arms.
“I’ve never been prouder of you, my boy.” Wesley Sr.’s face is buried in his son’s shoulder, but I can still hear his voice cracking with emotion. “Or more afraid to lose you.”
“UP YOU GO, MISS.”
As the Batterer officer boosts me into the Champion’s cramped cabin, I take a last look at Wes, who’s boarding an identical vessel off to my right. It takes everything in me not to scream his name. You’ll see him again on the Moon, I tell myself. The Batterers will have to guard his life until then.
To prepare for liftoff, our clumsy Earthbound spaceship is oriented vertically, its tail pointed at the ground, instead of horizontally like a Lunar craft’s. The Champion is a meter longer than a standard Destroyer but twice as heavy; with squarish stabilizers, it’s shaped more like a chubby manatee than a shark.
Yinha’s already inside. She cranes her head back to look at me, her lip curled up as if she’s smelled something awful. Perhaps it’s the old cotton cloth covering the seats, or the oxidized iron on the dashboard.
In a few minutes, we’ll be en route to the Dugout, where everyone important to me and the rebellion is stationed. I wish we could pilot our own Destroyer there, but the Batterers deemed it too dangerous: Committee ships would target a Dovetail vessel first, and this time we lack decoy Destroyers to throw them off. So Yinha and I are aboard the Champion. Andromeda is in another ship, and Wes and Alex are in yet another. The Batterers spread us throughout their fleet so that enemies will have trouble capturing—or killing—all five of us at once.
As the ship fires up, preparing to launch, metal rattles all around me. Yinha grips my arm, squeezing her eyes shut as we lift off. The vehicle trails smoke and roars like a typhoon—as other ships join us in the air, the din escalates, and my head begins to pound. The two pilots and four other crewmembers gesture at each other. Their mouths move, but I can’t hear a word.
Crack. Pain pulsates through my skull; the ship’s sudden movement has smashed my head into the metal wall. When I open my eyes, black spots block out the center of my vision.
“What’s going on?” Yinha shouts at the pilots. “Hey, Batterers, you just dodge something?”
My vision clears; I look through the windshield and see missiles about half a meter long streaking toward us.
“We’ve reached the belt of weaponized base satellites,” a Batterer pilot calls. “And someone’s activated the tactical nukes.”
The Batterer fleet disperses. Yinha’s fingers tighten around my arm; neither of us has ever sat in a ship under attack and been unable to pilot it to safety. We’ve both studied the bases’ miniature nuclear weapons and were prepared for the Committee to use them, but we’re stuck now, depending on the less-knowledgeable Batterers to get us through this barrage alive.
Embedded in satellites, the warheads can be fired at spaceborne objects with great accuracy. They have slightly more than a critical mass of uranium-235 under enormous pressure, resulting in a few dozen tons of explosive force each. That’s more than enough to vaporize a ship.
“Disassemble hull’s outer layer!” calls the lead pilot.
A crewmember jams his finger on a red button. The Champion’s covering peels away like an onion skin. Metal pieces shoot outward, knocking three missiles out of the way. They silently explode into shiny arrowheads as we roar past, our hull one layer thinner.
Behind us, another Batterer ship isn’t so lucky. A missile collides with its left wing. The uranium atom fragments react with the oxygen in the cabin, and the explosion sprays blinding orange flames into space.
Horrific thoughts crowd my mind: Andromeda could’ve been on that ship, or Alex and Wes. Would the universe dare to take Wes away from me only two days after our reunion? Yes, it would. I’ve never believed it’s a fair place.
I can’t control what happens to Wes’s ship. But I must ensure this one makes it to the Moon. Sucking in a deep breath, I reassess the situation: the Batterer pilots are trying to shoot down the satellites. But the spherical spacecraft rotate too rapidly, spinning away on their orbital paths. Every shot misses.
“Forget the satellites!” I beg t
he crew. “Fly us close to Bases I and II. The Committee won’t risk hitting their own stronghold.”
They listen. Pressure builds in the engine; the spaceship jets northward, our pilots aiming us at the lunar North Pole. Within seconds, other Batterer ships overtake us so that we’re no longer a single target.
By the time Bases I and II come into view, we’re racing through a clear black sky, empty of missiles. The pilots let off exhaust from the front of the craft to slow us down.
To the north, a sprawling complex of semi-polyhedral buildings—Base I—hugs the Peary Crater’s rugged rim. Known as the peaks of eternal light, the mountains behind Base I are almost always in the sun’s spotlight. Only the most thorough lunar eclipses can cloak them in shadow. In contrast, the deepest, coldest craterlets south of the base house ancient black water ice that’s only illuminated by passing satellites.
“The Dugout’s the bump over there!” Yinha calls. “We’re almost on top of it.”
Peering out the window, the small lumps in the regolith look like badly buried treasure. The Dugout, built a decade after Base I, was constructed a dozen kilometers south of its predecessor as an emergency hideout. Due to its underground location, its residents can’t enjoy views of mountains or even the black basalt “sea,” Mare Frigoris, that spreads southward from the base in all its pockmarked glory. But many Dugout residents sampled Base I’s grandeur, if only for a few hours at a time, before Dovetail took over. An underground passageway hollowed out millions of years ago by volcanic activity connects the two settlements, and the Committee’s architects turned it into a metro tunnel. Dugout residents commute to Base I every day to cook, clean, and serve the highest echelons of Lunar society—or should I say “commuted”? Now that Dovetail’s occupied the Dugout, the tunnel must be out of service.
Without more interference from the loyalists, the Batterer fleet circles closer to the newest chunk of Dovetail territory. Although the Committee’s not attacking us anymore, uneasiness lingers in my gut. I know them. They’re watching our every move.