The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  “Devlin,” I said.

  “Rakwon.” Rakwon extended his hand over the edge of the bed. I shook it. It was a big, strong hand. I felt like a child.

  “You play sports?” I asked.

  “No. Everyone asks. We run big in my family. I guess it’s because my mother’s Samoan. Dad’s from Queens. My brother played rugby, but quit after he lost a tooth.” He laughed. “If you don’t piss the bed tonight, wake me up with you. The fields turn off right before breakfast. Getting there first while everyone is getting their bearings is a good idea.”

  Another loud zap, this time swearing in a decidedly female timbre.

  “The fields are up across beds as well. So it’s only bunkmates that can move around. Get some sleep, don’t pee yourself. Wake me up when you get up.”

  + + +

  We converged on breakfast like a barbarian horde, up before the force fields around our bunks dropped out, waiting for the telltale shimmer in the air to fade away.

  The line cooks ladled porridge-like goop into divots in our trays. At the end of the counters were squares of what looked like unwrapped energy bars near large baskets of fist-sized gray blobs.

  “What is this shit?” I asked.

  Rakwon pointed with a spoon at the goop. “Slurry. Made in Accordance vats and perfectly balanced with all the nutrients a human digestive system needs. You can live off it forever.”

  “And this?” I shoved the gray blob. It wobbled.

  “Energy drink, kinda. Sharpens focus. And hydrates. You can eat the film that holds it together.” Rakwon bit into his blob and slurped hard to get the liquid out before it dribbled out from the collapsing spheroid. Then, like slurping spaghetti, he sucked the remains in and chewed them.

  “It looks like snot.”

  Rakwon grinned. “Keep the energy bar in your pocket for later,” he said, sliding his square into a pocket of his grays. I did the same.

  The slurry tasted vaguely like oatmeal . . . if I used my imagination. I spilled most of the lightly coconut-flavored orb juice down my chin. And I didn’t care. We’d got in first, got our table, and had food.

  “Holy shit,” Cee Cee said. I looked up, mouth full of food, to see the girl with silver eyes and purple ponytail pass us by.

  “She tried to stand down the instructor on the beach,” I said.

  “Those eyes.” Cee Cee shook her head. “They would’ve had to tattoo in the nano-ink with a gun right to the open eyeball.”

  Rakwon stopped eating and put down his plastic fork. I swallowed; my appetite fled as I thought about a needle striking an eyeball.

  “No sedation.” Cee Cee winced.

  The girl wore her grays now. No street gear. No piercings. But she’d somehow not had her hair shaved down. The purple stood out as she walked between the tables. I noticed processor tats ran down her biceps and forearms in galaxy-like swirls and swoops.

  “Hey, hey you!” a smiling boy shouted. “Where you from?”

  She stopped. He stood in her way. They were face-to-face, food tray to food tray. “Bronx,” she said.

  “Nah, I mean, where are you from from?”

  “Castle Hill,” she said, looking quite unimpressed.

  The boy shook his head. “No, no. Like, where are your parents from?”

  “Wisconsin and Jersey,” she said.

  “No, no, you know what I mean.”

  The girl could have blended into a crowd in some South Asian country. She shoved her interrogator and walked around him with a “Get out of my way.” Rakwon laughed. “Bronx,” he said.

  “Better question is, what’s her name,” Cee Cee murmured. “She’s a walking supercomputer with attitude.”

  The boy didn’t get out of her way, though. He moved back to stand in front of her. “You ain’t too polite; I’m just asking you a question,” he insisted.

  She shoved him again with the flat of her hand. He dropped his tray and pushed her right back. Hard enough she flew back and sprawled hard on the ground.

  Everyone froze.

  Except for the purple-haired girl. She grabbed a nearby chair and kicked a leg out from it. The metal screws broke right off with the impact.

  Then she hit him across the side of the face, using the chair leg like a bat.

  He dropped to the ground. She kicked him in the ribs twice, then once in the face. She tossed the leg aside and stepped back, hands in the air, as two human drill instructors ran across the room at them. “He needs help,” she called out to them. “He fell into that chair really hard.”

  They tackled her and dragged her away.

  “Washed out in one day,” someone said in an awed voice.

  There was only cold satisfaction on her face, though. Like she was done playing a silly game she hadn’t wanted in on to begin with.

  “Glad I didn’t say good morning to that one,” Rakwon muttered.

  “She seemed cute and cuddly to me,” I said, still staring at the door she’d been dragged out through.

  “A real teddy bear,” Cee Cee said. “I’m sure you wouldn’t mind trying to put an arm around her at night.”

  “I have a feeling it’d be like hugging a porcupine,” Rakwon said.

  “Move out!” a carapoid drill instructor shouted from the doors. “Move out!”

  + + +

  The drill instructor the previous day hadn’t lied. We weren’t just running up and down the beach. Now we were tested in other areas. In a room with screens mounted on clear plastic stands, I stared at a holographic display of random parts floating in the air.

  “This is a puzzle,” said the carapoid alien instructor. “You will now solve it. Attention will be paid to how fast you solve it.”

  Simple enough, I thought, looking at the pieces.

  Then I noticed the instructor tugging out a fire hose from a box in the wall.

  Wait a second. . . .

  “Waterproof screens,” Rakwon moaned.

  I didn’t even have time to swear. A powerful jet of frigid water knocked me back from my console. The carapoid instructor gleefully swept the stream of pounding water across the room. By the time I’d put the three-dimensional puzzle together, my fingers shook so hard I could barely manipulate the images.

  To warm us all up, they ran us up and down the beach.

  Last ones in didn’t get dinner. So I went hungry again.

  By lights-out I didn’t have the energy to talk to Rakwon. But I did stop to drink enough water to get up early again.

  Day three we built a tower out of large logs, and defended it against other teams on the beach. Ken led a team. He buried my face in the sand, choking me. “You’re too slow to eat dinner. Chew on sand, coward,” he hissed.

  Maybe the girl with the purple hair had the right idea. I was going to have to kneecap Ken and get dragged away to a prison to get away from all this.

  Rakwon and Cee Cee picked me up to brush the sand off. I didn’t want to meet Cee Cee’s eyes. I felt half as tall as I was. But she joined Rakwon and me at breakfast again.

  “It is what it is,” Rakwon said philosophically, watching me glower. “Ken’s officer bound. He’s not worth the trouble.”

  “He’s an asshole,” I said. He was a collaborator.

  But then, everyone here was a collaborator. Me too. I couldn’t use that word out loud.

  “He’s excited to be here and he’s well trained,” Cee Cee said. “He’s a good soldier. We’re all ready to kick ass, right, recruit?”

  I looked around. All of us in our grays. Training. Run­ning. At Accordance’s beck and call. I couldn’t tell if Cee Cee was being sardonic or genuinely drinking it all in.

  I kept my head down and mouth shut. I just needed to be adequate. So that my parents could live. So that I could survive this.

  Just live through it, I told myself. Stay h
uman.

  + + +

  On the fourth day, the mix of alien and human instructors started picking us off for interviews in small offices. I sat in front of a human instructor, a middle-aged man with graying hair and weary lines around his eyes. Behind him, a struthi­form instructor rustled feathers and glanced at a screen in his feathered, clawlike hands.

  “We’ve been watching you,” the human instructor said. “You’re avoiding trouble. Following orders. Getting up early for breakfast: Nice trick with the water fountain. So, now it’s time to think about how best you can be of use to the Colonial Protection Forces. How do you envision your future service?”

  “I was thinking cook,” I told them both. “Peeling potatoes. Making stews. I could be a great sous-chef for the CPF, I think.”

  “Cook?” the alien asked.

  “I’ve also heard some armies have bands, right? I used to play flute. . . .” I had the most earnest voice, and kept my face straight. But what else was I going to do? Ask them for the most dangerous position?

  I just wanted to show up and do what I’d promised: no more, no less.

  The human instructor cut me off. “You’re not going to be in a band.”

  “There’s a book in the indigenous literature section of the common library on this base,” the struthiform said, craning its neck forward to regard me. “Catch-22. The concept behind the title is that you’d have to be crazy to ask for missions and sane if you didn’t, but if you were sane you had to fight in the human war. But if you fought, that meant you were crazy, and shouldn’t. And if you didn’t want to fight, that meant you were sane and had to. See?”

  I didn’t. I hadn’t read it, either. Most human classics had been not banned but “de-emphasized” in schools. There were older, superior Arvani sagas. And shows.

  “You done having fun?” the human instructor asked. “Because here’s the thing, recruit, it’s all going to shit out there. And we’re going to need all the bodies we can get.”

  He waved a hand. The desk between us filled with an orbital image of a world. Greenish clouds and unfamiliar, patchy continents.

  “This is happening. Tens of light-years away. But as far as the Accordance is concerned, it’s right next door and getting closer every day.” The daylight faded; the planet spun into night.

  Clusters of circular city lights in the planet’s dark flickered. Then died. A cluster here, then another there. When the planet spun back into daylight, pillars of smoke streamed up to join the clouds.

  The instructor swiped the image away. Flicked through videos of cities, unnaturally high Accordance spires and more black, treelike skyscrapers slumping over to the ground as their legs splintered and gave out. Bodies flicked by. Struthiforms, carapoids, a long-legged furry thing with surprisingly humanlike eyes. The corpses lay still.

  “We just lost an entire planet,” the instructor said. Something large descended. Eldritch, asymmetrical, a city-sized jellyfish dropping out from the skies. Translucent, and yet it sucked all the light away as it moved.

  “Conglomerate host-ship. Atmospheric entry class,” the struthiform said coldly.

  “Those black, flea-like things coating it, they’re living ablative shields. They stick themselves onto the host-ship and use their backs to protect it as it enters the atmosphere. Once it’s down, they detach and forage for food.”

  “Forage?” Millions of crispy shells fell clear of the shivering host-ship. Most broke as they struck the ground. The survivors, steaming hot, ripped into the corpses on the ground.

  “The Accordance traced the home world of those creatures,” the struthiform said. “They used to be a space-faring civilization. Intelligent. Now they’re living heat shields. And that’s it. Their monuments dust, their cities lost. Covered in a living shell of Conglomerate computational slurry that’s slowly eating its way down into the core of their world. They reshape whole systems to their needs, and entire species to their whims. They love finding new biomes, like Earth’s. They’ll sample our DNA, investigate, catalog, and then reshape us into whatever they have a need for. They already tried this with the Pcholem once. That’s why we need fighters, Devlin. Because we’re losing worlds to them. We need more fighters.”

  The human instructor jumped back in. “Your test scores from the past few days are back. We think you’re well suited for one particular arm of the Colonial Protection Forces.”

  I was still thinking about living ships discarding their heat shields to gobble alien corpses. “What do you think I’m so good at?”

  “We’re creating an all-human fighting force. Human officers. Human fighters. We need to build human expertise up, and stop depending on Accordance-led human squads so that we can grow the CPF’s native strength. You’re going to join the first all-human light enhanced infantry regiment.”

  Light enhanced infantry. Just enough powered armor that a human could keep up with enhanced infantry in the Accordance military. Just enough power that we would be put in the middle of alien-versus-alien action.

  These two instructors sounded excited. As if I should be proud of the chance. I bet they sounded like this even when they were handing someone a toilet scrubber and explaining that the recruit’s new mission would be to scrub toilets onboard an Accordance space station.

  “There’s a new training center on the dark side of the moon: Icarus. Named after the crater that surrounds the whole area it sits in,” the human instructor said. “Congratulations, you ship out for Icarus tonight.”

  7

  “Listen up!” drill instructors both alien and human shouted at us as we crowded together down on the cold morning beach. “You will bring nothing with you. You will leave all personal objects behind on this beach before getting inside transport craft.”

  Hoppers flew in over the Long Island Sound. They kicked up saltwater spray as they overflew the beach, and then dropped down to pick up recruits at the front of the line.

  “Devlin!”

  Rakwon and Cee Cee broke out of line, like many of us milling around the back, to say good-bye. It had been only a few days, and yet it felt like a graduation of some kind as we quickly hugged each other. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Peacekeeper forces,” Rakwon said. “Manhattan. If I keep in line, in a few years I could get a promotion.”

  “Peacekeeper? They gave me a whole big story about being desperate for soldiers in the CPF.”

  Rakwon shrugged. “They were talking about the ‘repacification’ process. We’ve been out of the news loop here all week. I think there are more riots or something. Well, at least I’ll get to see my family on weekends. I can take a message to your family for you, if you want.”

  “No.” They didn’t want to hear from me. “What about you, Cee Cee?”

  “Recruits: in line!” an instructor shouted.

  “Orbital counterforces. Drones and links,” Cee Cee shouted as she ran back to her place. “I might even get to fly a Stingray . . . if they pass the human pilots emergency authorization act.”

  “Good luck,” Rakwon said as he ambled quickly away.

  “No!” an all-too-familiar voice screamed from behind us all. We turned to see Ken dragged out through the doors and thrown into the sand. He staggered to his feet, lurching back toward the struthiform instructors that had thrown him out. His voice broke with emotion as he screamed, “You can’t do this. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be! I’m from a Landed Family! I was born, and trained, to be an officer. Do you even know how much was invested in me?”

  The nearest struthiform slapped him with the back of a feathery hand. Ken fell awkwardly into the sand. “Get in line,” the alien snapped.

  Ken crawled on his hands and knees, nose dripping blood down onto the sand. In just a single morning he’d fallen a long way from being the strutting leader of his instant crew. He crawled into line behind me, and someone helped him
to his feet.

  He looked at me with bruised eyes and a swelling lip. “You too?” he asked numbly.

  “Light infantry,” I confirmed, not quite sure whether I should enjoy his humiliation or hate the aliens that had backhanded him so casually. “I’m going to Icarus.”

  I wanted to ask if he was okay. But he very obviously wasn’t. It was a stupid thing to want to ask. I didn’t bother.

  Ken swallowed. “You know what happens to human infantry.”

  “What?”

  “We die.”

  + + +

  The hoppers landed us at the flowerlike structures of the new Lakita Singh Air and Space Port. Instructors pushed and herded us into a launch terminal, then yelled at us some more.

  “This is your buddy,” a human instructor said. He shoved a nervous recruit at me. “Put your hand on your buddy’s shoulder. Hold tight. Now, you are responsible for your buddy. Anything happens to your buddy, it’ll happen to you. When I ask you where your buddy is, you won’t tell me, because you’ll be holding your buddy’s shoulder and it’ll be so obvious where he is, you won’t have to say anything. Got it?”

  I nodded.

  The instructor shook his head, like my father when trying to teach me some complex piece of math that I just couldn’t quite get the first time around. “You don’t nod. You answer with a ‘yes’ and an ‘instructor’ in there, son. The Hamptons may be run by aliens that don’t allow us to use ‘sir,’ but we can work around that. You’re still CPF. And it’ll be all-human CPF for you lot. So my rules apply. Let’s try that again: got it?”

  “Yes . . . instructor!” I fumbled. His eyes narrowed, then he nodded and moved on to the next recruit.

  “What’s your name?” my shoulder buddy asked. We were standing awkwardly facing each other, an arm each on a shoulder, like at a dance.

  “Devlin. You?”

  “Keiko.”

  We’d been lined up against the walls of the terminal. This was a wing for launches headed for orbit, not flights around the world. Since the occupation, the Accordance had dis­mantled most of the smaller airline hubs in favor of incredibly high-speed rail. But international flights and flights to space were still served.