Dove Alight

by Karen Bao

  “If we partition the Moon into two states, they will obliterate each other,” Andromeda says. “A satellite flyby bombing, poison masquerading as a gas leak . . . Without air to breathe outside, none of us can run from danger. This Moon holds no room for compromise.”

  A risky statement, but a true one.

  “May we have a moment?” Nebulus says, gesturing to his colleagues.

  Yinha nods and places both hands on her hips, centimeters away from her firearms. The Committee members huddle together in a tiny cluster, whispering, and their smallness startles me.

  After they break apart, Hydrus speaks. “Dovetail, we are at an impasse. The entire Moon, or nothing, for both sides. But . . . how shall we choose the winner? Tic-tac-toe?”

  On the big screen behind us, it’s the Dovetail leaders’ turn to cluster together, whispering. The Committee and their Militia’s impatience hangs like a cloud of toxic gas over Base I.

  To buy Dovetail time, I step up to the microphone.

  “It’s not up to you—the people at the top—to decide how the rest of us should live, and who we should live under. It never was. That’s something you don’t understand. The Lunar people tried to tell you so many times, first with protests, then with their votes, and now with fire: here, humankind is not free. And we won’t rest until that changes.”

  “We didn’t ask for a history lesson, little Sage,” says Nebulus. “We asked to hear your side’s demands.”

  “Here they are,” I say. “My brother’s mind, my sister’s innocence, and my mother’s life. I demand you—I beg you—to return everything you’ve ever stolen from any base citizen, living or dead.

  “But these are things that you—even you, the Standing Committee of the Lunar Bases—could never do, even when you were at the peak of your power. Dovetail knows better than to ask those things of you. In comparison, our demand is child’s play: let go.”

  I imagine the faces of everyone who can no longer speak to the Committee: Belinda, Mom, Murray, the thirty thousand dead on the Singularity—and of the people who still can. I imagine their spirits bolstering mine. My voice rings out louder, clearer, brighter, now that it’s not entirely my own. “Let go of your dream to rule every place humankind has ever settled. Let go of your resentment of the people that have tried to stop you.”

  I sweep my hand across the room, gesturing at the massive, motley audience, at the rolling text on the newsreel: BASE III CITIZENS PUT OUT FIRES, CELEBRATE MILITIA’S SURRENDER.

  “Let go . . . of us.”

  THOUSANDS SHOUT THEIR SUPPORT, GUSTS of sound sweeping across the base: the sound of victory, so close that I could spread my arms and ride the resonant waves of it into the air.

  But the cheers quiet at the sound of muffled thumps. Hydrus is clapping into the microphone. Slow, plodding claps—one, two, three.

  “A moving speech, little Sage. You have learned much. You would have made a fine politician. A fine Committee member.”

  Would have?

  “But you will never take our place. Not you, nor anyone in Dovetail. If we cannot govern the bases, as is our right . . .” Cassini trails off. A smile twists his mouth, even as horror twists my insides. “Then nobody will.”

  He turns to the promenade’s far end, where huge panels on the ceiling are sliding apart to reveal cavernous storage chambers underneath.

  “Release the drones.”

  * * *

  çA low buzz sounds from the Main Lane’s terminus, near Base I’s Recreation Department. At first, I’m relieved. Since the Committee has nothing to lose, I was almost expecting them to blow up a window or bomb the base.

  But no, they didn’t. And whatever their plan, it is probably much worse.

  A copper cloud creeps down from the ceiling, surrounding the Batterer troops, Pacifians, Militia, and Base I residents, whose screams of agony fill our ears. Even from afar, I know that these are not Bai Rho’s creations. The Committee’s turned Dovetail’s own inventions against us, performing a last feat of scientific brilliance, as if proving that their superior minds can never lose to ours. They’ve warped the biodefense drones into something else, something as wicked as they are—but what?

  Panicking soldiers and civilians alike flee into Culinary, InfoTech, and various scientific departments, packing the areas past capacity and then shutting the doors in an attempt to keep the drones out. People come rushing onto our stage beneath the Pillars of Liberty, their bodies’ collective motion threatening to sweep us away.

  Not everyone escapes. Watching on the Main Lane’s big screens, which show security pod footage, I see half the drones fall like dark dust, their machinery jamming up in midair. So the Committee’s made something imperfect. They rushed the engineering process and created a faulty product.

  Finally.

  It’s almost satisfying to see them fall this far.

  But the other half of the drones are still buoyant—and they’re swarming around people, stinging them. The victims stop breathing and moving of their own free will; arms and legs rattle as if they’re being electrocuted. Their skin flushes poppy red dotted with spots of cornflower blue. Their bodies wilt. Finally, they collapse. I shudder, knowing without being told that the drones are injecting abrin into their bloodstreams.

  Boom. An explosion rocks the tiles beneath my feet, shaking me out of my numb horror. To my left, the cockpit of a Dovetail Destroyer has been flattened. Two soldiers within are dead. Hydrus runs toward it, another grenade raised in his hand, and the rest of the Committee follows. They scramble inside, shutting the hatch, speed into Governance, and swerve to the right. A panel of wall slides up to reveal a hidden passageway, and they jet through.

  I fight down a burst of fury at the fact that they’re escaping. There are more important things to do than chase them down—they’ve already lost, even if they live. And we won’t even do that, not if we don’t figure out how to escape these “drones.”

  We: my friends, and our thousands of allies and enemies, Earthbound and Lunar alike. We will all meet our end here.

  Alarms blare, accompanied by an automated voice: “Air filters jammed. Evacuate base immediately.”

  Fuse. If the drones, faulty as they are, penetrated the air filters, that means they can slip through the tightest seams imaginable. Nowhere on base is safe.

  “Hurry! Get everyone into a ship, a rover, anything!” Yinha’s screaming into our headsets. “I need all capable drivers and pilots to ferry people to the Dugout—bring all available craft to make pickup!”

  Jang and his two bodyguards have disappeared. Yinha and her Pygmette are nowhere in sight. She must have sped off to aid her troops, who are massed closer to the drone cloud at the other end of the hallway. How long will it take the copper death to reach us? Two minutes? One?

  I grab Alex and Wes by the forearms and run toward a wall so that we don’t get trampled. As we barge through a tight ring of Pacifian foot soldiers—our new allies—I lose my grip on Alex. His long arms and legs tangle in the crowd.

  “Keep going!” he cries as the riptide of fleeing civilians carries him away. “Stay together, you hear?”

  But when Wes and I are almost at the wall, he, too, slips out of my grip. I hear him give a shout of alarm—and pain. The crowd has parted around him. He holds his right calf, blood running through his fingers; there’s also a deep gash on the outside of his left thigh. A muscular arm in a gray Pacifian uniform is tight around his neck.

  “You two escaped me. Twice.” Lazarus corners me against the wall, holding Wes’s neck in one arm and a dagger in his other hand. “And so the Committee reduced me to a mere foot soldier.” He sounds like a child mourning about never being good enough for his parents. In fact, he has always been that child. “Without their support, I am utterly and intolerably alone.”

  Indeed, Lazarus has no troops to help him. His demotion must explain why
we didn’t see him on our way to the Committee’s hideout. No wonder I thought something was missing.

  “But I did not fail to kill you,” he says. “You failed to die. Even now, you are here, judging me, pitying me, puffed up with the notion that you are better than I. I cannot . . . I cannot endure it.”

  I swipe, parry, stab, all the while taking stock of the situation around us. Hordes of people scurry about like termites outside their nest—uselessly, without a real sense of direction. With the metro tunnel to the Dugout buried under rubble, we must escape this death trap via spaceship. People fight for room in the vehicles available, packing Lunar, Batterer, and Pacifian craft past capacity.

  Lazarus uses his height against me, sending blows downward until he backs me into a Pillar of Liberty. “I will not leave the nanodrones to finish you.”

  I try to kick Lazarus’s legs, but he swings Wes around, using him as a human shield. In one swift move, his dagger blade slips between the plates in the armor over Wes’s belly, and I see Wes’s eyes roll back in his head.

  The scream comes from my mouth. I funnel idea after idea through my mind, trying to think in spite of the pain.

  “Up,” Wes chokes out. “Look up.”

  A ship is whining above our heads, and my head whips around to look at it.

  Yinha’s open-top Pygmette screeches to a halt; she fires two Lazy blasts at Lazarus. He bends like a reed to dodge them. Wes uses the distraction to twist out of his grip. Clutching his midsection, he stumbles toward me with halting steps. Every movement leaves slicks of blood on the floor. I rush forward, and he falls hard into my arms.

  Shaking his head, Lazarus gives Yinha a threatening smile. “This does not become you, Yinha. I once considered you a league apart from these scum. We could have done well together.”

  In a rush of memory, I recall his fruitless advances toward Yinha last year. He wanted to use her to gain Dovetail’s trust, just as he tried to use me . . . or was he just craving human contact?

  “You never had a chance.” Yinha’s finger spasms on the trigger, but she doesn’t fire.

  Lazarus chuckles. “No matter. You aren’t woman enough to appreciate me. And not man enough to kill me with that silly laser gun.”

  Yinha glares at him but doesn’t fire. “I’m still human. That’s more than you can say.”

  She can’t pull the trigger. She can’t end him for good, and it makes me irrationally angry. Is her humanity worth our lives?

  “As I foresaw,” Lazarus’s hand drifts to his belt. “You miserable creature.”

  He throws a grenade upward, but before it hits Yinha’s ship, she dives, knocking Lazarus to the floor. They grapple over her weapon; I watch, too afraid to shoot lest I hit Yinha.

  Above us, the Pygmette explodes in a dense cloud of fire and smoke and flying carbon fiber. Supporting Wes, I stumble away, looking over my shoulders at the falling debris. Yinha grabs a piece of hull and slams it into Lazarus’s face, knocking him out.

  She doesn’t need to burn him with a laser now. In a few minutes, the drones will take care of him.

  “Go, Stripes!” Yinha yells, not bothering to dust herself off before running back into the fray. “Get out of here!”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m clearing my troops out. Get Wes to a hangar. Any hangar, you hear?”

  And without a backward glance, she’s gone. It’s time to think hard and move quickly—Wes and I are on our own now.

  I CAN’T GET HIM OUT THROUGH DEFENSE—it’s on the other end of the base, near the nanodrone cloud. People are heading toward the collapsed metro tunnel’s entrance and boarding ships bound for the surface, but the crowd is forming a bottleneck. Blood loss will kill Wes before we get close.

  The other option is to find a ship and bust through the nearest large window, but it’s a fool’s hope, as ships are in short supply. What about the Committee’s emergency hangar? I know they have one; they must keep spare craft in there.

  I turn us in the Governance Department’s general direction. As we struggle forward, Wes heroically supports some of his weight on his injured leg. Wincing, he presses down on his abdominal wound to staunch the flow of blood, but it’s useless compared to a real bandage. Faster! I imagine Yinha screaming, as if this were a training drill. How could she have left us?

  I half carry, half drag Wes up the stairs outside Governance, and he makes it harder by trying and failing to support his own weight. I try not to glance back at the approaching copper haze, but it’s impossible. Now that I’m higher up, I see that the nanodrones have passed the three-quarters mark of the Main Lane. The cloud has thinned because of malfunctioning drones falling down, but there are still enough to kill anyone in its path.

  I face forward again and try to accelerate, lunging with every step. But the screams behind me are advancing, burrowing into my skull like diamond-tipped drills. I look over my shoulder and see the whirring drones descending upon hundreds of helpless humans. They’re too small to make out from this distance, but as I watch in horror, men, women, and children start to bat their arms frantically. Their faces turn red, then purple, then blue . . .

  I freeze, numbed all over again by what I’m seeing. Drone attack seems like the worst way to die: suffocation and seizures, the utter shutdown of your body’s cellular machinery, all while watching those around you suffer the same.

  Emotions clash within me, too many to process at once. I only manage to discern pity for Bai because he made the drones, and fury at the Committee for twisting them.

  “Bai was right,” Wes murmurs, “to be so worried.”

  “Just when I thought they couldn’t do anything sicker,” I say.

  Then his eyes cross for a moment, and renewed urgency shoots through me. I drag Wes through the Governance lobby doors, shoving past the crowd. Some people run about, unsure where to go next; others have stopped, hands on knees, to catch their breath. The drones will arrive soon, and we all know it. I have to keep moving.

  “Phaet!” A voice sounds in my headset, accompanied by the sound of shooting. On a list of the people who could administer a shot of relief to me, hers would be one of the last names.

  “Callisto?”

  “Book it to the Committee’s emergency hangar, under Governance. Mom gave me an old fingerprint mold of Hydrus’s, and I used it to get in. I’ve got a Destroyer revved up and ready to go.”

  Can I trust her? Despite my doubts, I turn into a side hallway, moving in the hangar’s direction.

  “Dove Girl,” Alex says in my ear. “I’m in the ship with her, hovering outside the airlock.”

  “Militia Pigs out here pestering us, so you have to run,” Callisto says. “If we enter the base, they’ll fly into the airlock, wreck the thing, and create a vacuum.”

  “It isn’t far,” Alex says. “Cut through the Sanitation lane on the right of the lobby, follow it down till you reach the hangar.”

  Someone has left a manhole open for us; Alex must have passed this way a short time ago. Wes and I crowd into a cylindrical elevator and drop down into the filthy tunnel. After the doors open, I heave us forward, every squelching step a struggle.

  “Callisto,” I pant. “Why?”

  Callisto sighs. “I owe you one. Remember, the day this all . . . this started?” That means the day your mom died. “When I went mental because I found out Mom was in Dovetail? Kappa could’ve shot me in the Sanitation lane. You, too. But neither of you did. It’s more than a favor. It’s my life for yours.”

  That incident mattered to her this whole time? Why didn’t she show her appreciation instead of antagonizing us, to the point where I wondered whether our mercy was justified?

  But now I know we made the right decision. Now that Callisto’s returning the favor, all of us might still have a future.

  Horrible screams break out in the hallway above us. The drones hav
e breached Governance.

  Wes swears violently; his face is so pale it almost blends into the white floor.

  I readjust his arm around my shoulders and move forward.

  “Okay, Pig G78’s attacking the enemy from behind,” Callisto reports. “We’re pulling into the airlock. You won’t have to meet us in space.”

  Nanodrones buzz behind Wes and me, ever closer. I’d hoped that the Sanitation lanes would protect us from their reach, but the bugs have infiltrated the tunnel through the tiny gaps between the elevator and the shaft. Despite the needles in my lungs, I push myself to run harder. Move it, or there’ll be stingers in your skin.

  Wes’s arm chafes against my shoulders—I don’t mind his strong grip, since it tells me that his body is still functioning—but his legs dangle on either side of me, slowing me down.

  The buzzing gets louder, until the air around us seems to oscillate with the beating of drone wings. Wes’s grip weakens.

  “Hang on!” I tell him.

  We take another elevator up into the Committee’s blaringly bright hangar. It’s much smaller than Defense’s, but all too huge right now. Wes slumps in my arms. I’m supporting almost all his weight now.

  “I can . . . walk . . .” he mumbles into my shoulder, pushing his feet against the ground as if to demonstrate that it’s true.

  When we’re halfway across, I hear the faintest buzzing—but it’s not just from behind us anymore.

  “Step on the gas, Dove Girl, they’re attacking from above!” Alex shouts in my ear.

  As if invading through the ventilation tunnel weren’t enough, the drones are streaming into the hangar through slats in the ceiling. I keep running, blind to the violet lasers that streak at us from behind. Mid-step, my left calf is set on fire. Shrieking, I tumble to the ground. Wes rolls off my back.

  I didn’t flip the mirrors on my suit.