“The capitol building, you mean?” Anais prompted.
Barnett waved his hand. “Capitol, estate, personal palace. President, ruler, puppet. My head on a pike: We’ll see it happen at some point when they get over the walls. I just would rather have some more fun while there’s still some life in me yet without some goddamned Accordance soldier screwing me over early. Struthiforms can’t tell the difference between a child and a fully grown human because the walking drumsticks lay eggs and leave them, so they don’t even understand what a child is. See, that’s the problem with aliens on the ground. They’re alien. Which I keep saying. But who the fuck listens to me? I’m just the acting president.”
Anais glanced at me. “He can’t be in the publicity program. There have to be consequences for what he did.”
“Let the CPF give him a chance to prove himself. He stood between a soldier in full armor and a kid. Do your president a solid: Send him to the Hamptons instead of . . . what you’re planning.”
I looked at them both, but they avoided my eyes.
Anais finally sighed. “Okay, Mr. President. The Hamptons it is.”
5
The hopper rattled and shook as it flew us over the American East Coast. I sat on a plain bench with Anais on one side of me, and on the other side an unshaven, older Colonial Protection Forces soldier who looked supremely bored.
I twisted my wrists. The zip ties cut into my skin, but neither of them had cared about my complaints. Right now, I was still technically a prisoner. A recruit who’d gotten in the way of the Accordance military doing their job.
The soldier propped up two prosthetic legs against the bench on the other side, leaned back with crossed arms, and closed his eyes.
“Anais, what about my parents?” I asked.
“What about them?”
“Are they going to be executed, now that everything is changing? What’s going to happen?” I was scared that a split-second decision was going to ruin it all. All the sacrifices I’d made. “Anais, please help. If everything I’ve done is for nothing—”
“Help? Help?” Anais groaned. “I’ve done nothing but help you and you’ve blown it. Who helped coach you to sell your story better? Who shepherded you kids around the world? Who ran into the fucking fire to drag your ass out to safety? I did. I did that. Now you’re whining about more help. You know what you haven’t done? Have you thanked me? Once? Have you ever thought about the fact that all of this isn’t just about you?”
I pulled back from his anger. “It’s your job,” I protested.
“My job is to take willing recruits and parade them around the world for PR purposes. If I really gave a shit about nothing but my job, I’d only take recruits from families that worked closely with the Accordance. I wouldn’t have helped you save your parents’ lives by letting you into the program. To be honest, I may not be making that mistake again.”
I resisted Anais’s words. I couldn’t find it in my heart to give him credit for doing the good thing. It was the minimum.
And yet. He was right. He could make things simpler. And he hadn’t. And that said . . . something.
“As for your parents,” Anais said, “I don’t see the point in sending a recruit to training knowing his parents are about to die. That shit isn’t going to make a good soldier. No, the deal stands. The deal stands because you were on live TV, standing in front of a child. You risked your life to protect, and we’re spinning that. You’re about to get the promotion that you’ve been begging for, because you want to protect more than just a child in a riot.”
“A promotion?” I was zip-tied and locked to a bench in an Accordance vehicle. There were no portholes, just turbulence and whining motors. I didn’t feel like I was getting a promotion.
“Promotion to combat. Real action.”
The old soldier on my other side spoke up. “Congratulations, boot. You’re about to become cannon fodder. You could have spent your whole enlistment being an actor in uniform. Simple exercises, safe on Earth. Now, no more TV appearances. No champagne with politicians. No handshakes. No jogging along nice boulevards with security.”
Anais smiled sadly. “He’s right.”
The hopper pitched up and shook, the engines whined as we suddenly dumped velocity. The CPF soldier staggered up and slid the side door open with a grunt.
“Your home for the next couple days,” he shouted back over the wind.
We glided through the air over the Hamptons. Obstacles littered the beach. The remains of bombed-out mansions used for target practice slumped over into sandy grasses. Bunkers pocked the landscape like inside-out barnacles, hoppers lined up on landing pads around them. Barracks clustered around bulldozed pits, and I saw several squads of humans running in formation.
The hopper slid over it all and dropped the last hundred feet down to the beach, kicking up a maelstrom of sand and water.
Anais cut the zip ties loose and pointed at the door. “If you make it back, look me up,” he said, not unkindly. “I’ll buy you your first drink.”
The soldier grabbed my collar. “Welcome to the first day of the rest of your war,” he shouted into my ear.
Then he threw me out of the hopper and into the storm.
+ + +
I choked and tried to cover my face as wet sand blasted my exposed skin. The hopper eased back into the sky, and the flurry stilled. I wiped caked sand away from my face and stood up.
Four other hoppers slapped down onto the beach. Three or four recruits tumbled out the doors of each hopper, landing awkwardly in the sand and staggering in the blast of air as the vehicles rose back into the sky.
We milled around, pulling closer together as we watched the insectile aircraft skim out over the ocean, then bank south together in formation.
“Anyone know where we’re supposed to go next?” a girl nervously asked. She hugged herself, and her wide-eyed fear created a sort of boundary around her. Everyone stepped back, as if worried they might catch it.
We glanced up at the sound of a loud buzz. A carapoid, wings fully extended, finished a ten-foot jump over our heads and landed in the sand near the water.
We all gaped. No one had ever seen one of the beetle-like aliens in armor. It looked like a mobile tank with scuttling feet as it moved toward us, holding a raised baton in one of its knobby hands.
It jammed the stick into a puddle of salt water. The stick sizzled and spat, and the puddle of water exploded from the jolt cast by the mother of all cattle prods.
We all reflexively jumped back. “Jesus,” someone muttered.
“Is that our drill instructor?”
“What are any of you good for?” the carapoid asked in a hiss augmented by the heavy segments of gray armor molded to its mandibles. They creaked as it moved. “Do you have any survival instincts? Or will you be the first to die when it gets really ugly? Do you have any talents to offer me? Because right now you all seem bewildered and scared, and that’s not what I need. But maybe I have trouble interpreting your ugly alien faces and you’re all ready to go. Either way, you are here so that we learn where best you might serve.”
The carapoid moved over the sand, thudding its way around the group, eyeing us through compound eyes protected by scarred blast-proof goggles backlit with heads-up display information.
It tapped the prod against the armored carapace. Tick, tick, tick.
None of us said anything.
“The Accordance sacrifices much to keep an umbrella over your heads, and you’re all cowering on this beach like hatchlings on a mother’s stomach,” the carapoid said. “So let’s shake you loose and see whether you can scuttle on your own, yes?”
We all looked at each other.
Tick. Tick. Tick. “See that pier out there? I’m going to start walking toward it after you. Anyone I catch up with, I’m going to tap to encourage them. Ready? Go.”
He screamed and leapt into motion, staggering away from the carapoid drill instructor. I needed no similar convincing. I ran.
I’d been on a hunger strike the last week. This week I’d been drinking punch and flying around the world to parade myself as a new recruit. I was jet-lagged and bewildered. Out of breath.
Smaller, faster recruits than me ran past as I struggled to keep to the middle of the pack, highly aware that just a few people struggled on behind me in the wet sand.
Zap! I glanced behind to see the girl with wide eyes eat sand as the carapoid got within reach and tapped her.
She lay facedown on the beach, quivering, as several of the other girls gave her and the drill instructor a wide berth to pelt for the pier. They passed me by; I’d slowed down as I’d looked behind.
I snapped my attention forward and ran like hell, passing a purple-haired girl wearing a leather jacket and jeans. She glanced over at me, and her eyes glinted silver in the sunlight. A couple years older than me, than most of the recruits, she looked pissed, not scared like the rest of us.
We all made it to the piers. I grabbed one of the weathered pylons and panted, holding myself up.
“This won’t do,” the alien drill instructor said as it trundled up to the heaving, exhausted mess of us scattered around the pylons. It moved around on its many legs to face back down the beach, then turned back to us. “Again!”
It squeezed the prod. Sparks ran threateningly up and down it.
The group took off. But the girl with the silver eyes walked up to the carapoid. “This is stupid,” she said calmly.
I stayed to watch, still catching my breath, ready to run like hell.
“What?”
“You’ve figured out who can run faster,” she said. “But what the fuck does that have to do with who can fight the best? Unless you’re planning on putting us into battles where we run away from the enemy a lot.”
The carapoid rubbed its forehands together, making a cricket-like chirp. “Now, there’s some spit,” it said. “Well done. You’re right. This exercise tells us nothing about you other than who can run the fastest, and that’s not all we’re looking for. There will be more tests, don’t you worry about that. But what it also tells us is—”
It slammed her on the chest with the prod. She fell back against the pylon behind her, but surprisingly kept standing. From her jacket rose a wisp of smoke, and she quickly shucked it off and let it drop to the sand by her feet.
“It also tells us who follows orders! Now follow my damn orders and run!”
We both took off down the beach.
6
A boy with thick shoulders stood on a chair in the center of the mess hall. His skin dripped salt water from his grays, and he’d shaved his head down to the scalp to reveal a custom CPF Earth-and-triangle tattoo on the back of his neck.
For the whole day we’d been run back and forth down the beach. Until recruits dropped to the sand and wouldn’t move. Until we coughed, our lungs burned, and our muscles gave out.
Human medics checked over recruits with burn marks on their skin as we milled about and eyed the kitchen’s empty counters. The food that had been left out had been snapped up by the runners who got to the mess hall first.
Runners like the kid with the South African accent standing on the chair.
“Today, you learned something about yourselves,” he shouted at us. “About the warriors you really are. Or aren’t. Over the next few days, we will find out who the true fighters are, and who will be our support staff mopping the barracks while we fight to protect Earth!”
“Sounds like a lot of bullshit,” I muttered.
Someone next to me snorted. I hadn’t realized I’d said that out loud. I was more tired than I realized. She nodded though. “His name’s Ken Awojobi. He was on my transport in. His family is in deep with the Accordance. He’s on the officer track, and he knows it. Been training and studying for this his whole life. A chance to serve, gain rank, then come out high for something in Accordance civil service. Maybe run a partition, or something nice like that.”
I wasn’t too tired to smile and hold a hand out. “I’m Devlin,” I said.
“Cee Cee.” Cee Cee was a head shorter than me. She’d pulled her blond hair back in a tight ponytail. The corners of her eyes fluoresced with processor ink tattoos. Extra augmentation.
“What is he doing?” I asked out loud.
Ken had pulled out a pair of clippers. “You, grab him.”
A nearby recruit squirmed and kicked at the two lean recruits pinning him down. Ken grabbed his head and the clippers bit down.
“This is crazy,” I said, looking around for the drill instructor.
“It’s all a test,” Cee Cee said. “Look.” I followed her eyes to the upper corners of the room.
“What?”
“Cameras. I can sense their link-ups.” She tapped the nano-ink beside her eyes. “They’re watching us. All the time. We’re being studied. Smile.”
“Just keep moving and keep people between us and the idiot with the clippers,” I muttered, and tried to put a hand on her lower back. A bit of showmanship that I couldn’t help.
But my plan didn’t work. Ken spotted the movement. He swaggered over and flipped the clippers on and off. “Worried about losing a little hair? Think it’ll mess with your good looks?” He glanced at Cee Cee and smiled.
“Look,” I said. “They have official barbers; if we’re going to get shaved down, they’ll do it.” Ken didn’t need to parade around as if he were in charge. Although, from what Cee Cee said, he probably would end up being in charge anyway.
“Oh, but this is tradition,” Ken said.
“I don’t care,” I said. Why was I bristling so much? “It’s not your place.”
Ken’s eyes flashed. “Not my place?”
“Look—” As I said that, Ken grabbed my head with one hand. “Hey!”
“I know who you are, asshole,” he hissed. I jerked back from him, the clippers snarling and catching my neck. Hair fell down between us as I twisted away. Two of Ken’s “assistants” grabbed my arms. I tried to yank free, but they were strong, their fingers bruising me as they shoved me down onto a table. “Seen you on TV. Seen your parents. You’re traitors, anti-Accordance. So you might fool some people, by pretending to join. But anyone who looks closely can see you don’t give a shit about all this. You’re half-assing it.”
Metal ran up my scalp and more hair flurried around me and landed on the table shoved against my face.
“Fuck you.” I squirmed and tried to kick backward. I got a knee, and a curse.
“There’s some real, actual fight in him,” Ken announced to the room. “He’s not as much of a pacifist coward as his parents after all.” He dug an elbow into the back of my neck and I gasped. The clippers nicked my left ear, and I felt a little trickle of blood run down the lobe.
Ken shoved himself away from me, and I jumped up, my face hot with humiliation. Fists balled, I growled, but he just laughed and stepped away as his newfound groupies made a wall in front of him and shook their heads.
Five recruits now surrounded him like bodyguards.
Six on one. Two of them older, large biceps under their gray T-shirts.
I was going to get my ass handed to me. And Ken knew it. He smiled, daring me to try. Everyone else had seen the logic of not trying it.
Fast. I’d have to get past them and focus on getting just one punch in. One punch to show the room that Ken wasn’t invincible. To make a point.
To prove that I wasn’t a coward to everyone watching.
“Lights out in two minutes!” a human drill instructor shouted
from across the room. “Anyone not in an assigned bunk will spend the night on the beach with me. Your names are on your bunks. Go!”
The larger threat scattered us.
I jogged through the hallway, looking for the bunks, exhausted, hungry, still tense with anger. I stopped when I saw a water fountain.
“We don’t have time for that,” someone passing me hissed.
I kept drinking water. Until I felt like something in my stomach was going to burst. Part of me was trying to fill that hole the hunger had excavated in me. But I also had another trick up my sleeve.
The end of the corridor opened up into an almost warehouse-sized room. Hundreds of bunk beds in rows in the open area. To the back, bathrooms and showers.
I jumped into my lower bunk. Looked around. “Hey, upstairs,” I asked the bunk above me. “Is it all boys in one row and girls in the next?”
“As far as I can see,” the voice replied tiredly.
“Huh.”
“I wouldn’t get out of the bed at night, though.” The bed shifted, and a brown face peered over at me. Curved gang sigils marked the massive forearm dangling over the side.
“Why not?”
“Force fields. I got here a day early. Our overlords aren’t interested in anyone here getting into trouble at night. We might as well be in a jail cell come lights-out.”
And just as he said it, the lights cut out.
There was some muttering chatter between the rows—invitations—and then a sound like a bug getting zapped in one of those bug lights. Someone screamed and swore.
“See?” Upstairs laughed.
“Shit. When do they turn back off ?”
“Hoping to make friends with someone you met?”
“No, I drank a lot of water. I’m going to have to pee,” I told him. “I wanted to wake up early, but now I’m wondering how I take a piss in the middle of the night.”
My bunkmate’s face came back over the edge. “Up early,” he said thoughtfully. “That’s smart. What’s your name again? I saw it when I got to the bunk, but forgot.”
The Darkside War Page 4