The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  Zeus paused in front of me. “You: You performed tolerably. You will pick seven to create your arm.”

  “My what?”

  “Your arm,” Zeus repeated. “A collection of fighters. Eight fighters to an arm. You will be their octave.”

  “Sounds like we’re going to be a group of fighting flutists,” Amira muttered behind me.

  Zeus raised the voice coming from the armor. “Eventually there will be twenty-five arms here on the base. You will learn to lead your arm, and the arms will also learn to fight together and against each other. It is a privilege to be an octave. Grasp it tightly. Hurry to pick your team, or the other octaves will have their choices.”

  “Amira,” I called out.

  Zeus moved across the mud. “You: You are an octave.”

  I didn’t pay attention to who the other octaves were. “Grayson.” He could keep calling me Doughnuts if he wanted, but he’d held the line.

  “Worst game of playground dodgeball ever,” he muttered, but came to stand next to me.

  I started grabbing recruits, some from our group, others that I’d noticed who’d somehow grabbed time on the ball during the exercise.

  Amira tapped me on the shoulder as our team formed. “You have a fan,” she said.

  Ken stood near a climbing wall, his arm in an inflatable cast and a purple welt over his right eye. He glowered at us, then pointed a finger at a tall recruit. She jogged over to join his team.

  Ken pointed at me and flipped me off.

  “Family privilege,” I grunted. “Welcome to Earth under the occupation. Apparently he gets to be an octave whether he’s skilled or not.”

  Amira raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that?” she asked.

  I was.

  “Hurry up and pick your team, know-it-all,” she murmured. “Pay attention, there are some people you don’t want Ken to snag from under you.”

  11

  I had yet to see my bunk, but I guess it didn’t matter. I didn’t come to Icarus with any belongings. I didn’t have anything to put down anywhere.

  Zeus clanked his way around the warehouse we’d been ushered to in one of the living quarters off the crater dome, deep in one of the cloverleaf-like areas, eyeing the various arms assembled before him.

  “Now that the arms are picked and the octaves are in command, you will suit up in armor,” Zeus announced.

  My arm shifted, its members slightly excited by the announcement.

  I had picked Grayson Stockton, from Leeds, who played rugby before getting recruited out of a tenement in occupied London. He’d literally held me up while we fought for the ball. Another member of the first team, Casimir Sharpe, I’d spotted moving quickly through the mess before he joined us. I wanted that speed on my side.

  Amira had pointed out a Viking shield-maiden of a figure towering over half the group near the back. “You’ll want Amabel there for muscle,” she said. “The other octaves aren’t taking her seriously.”

  “Yeah.” If Amira wanted her, she was with us.

  Roger Li, another member of our initial huddle, agreed to come with us. Haselda Madsen was another Amira suggestion. “I sat next to her on the way to Tranquility. She’s smart.”

  “Smart is good,” I said.

  “She’s also spent time in Brazil and Chile. With Roger’s Mandarin, you have two of the most common CPF first languages outside of English. The Accordance is pulling a lot of different people together, and that means we have a variety of languages being used. A lot of them know English as a second language, but we can’t count on it. There’ll be a lot of Chinese-, Indian-, and Spanish-speaking recruits.”

  Zeus raised an armor-plated tentacle. “Your armor,” he announced.

  Struthiform officers pushed racks of black armor into the room, the suits swaying on their hooks. Each suit split open, looking like mandibles of black, chitinous insects ready to swallow us.

  We stared. The sleek plating and mechanized joints meant this was Accordance military-grade issue. Designed for humans, but illegal on Earth. Even human enforcers didn’t get to step into this stuff.

  “Check out the patches on the shoulder,” Amira said. “At least that’s human designed.”

  A stylized Earthrise had been etched into each shoulder patch. The pockmarked moon in the foreground, Earth rising behind it.

  “What are you gawping at?” Zeus shouted. “Get suited up!”

  “How?” I asked, tentatively approaching the cracked-open suits.

  “Some on-our-feet learning,” Amira said.

  “Oh, come on.” Amabel laughed. “I’ve seen struthiforms do this on-base outside Charleston when I was four. We’d sneak up to the edge of the base and watch them train.” She strode over, spun around, and put out her arms. Then backed into a hanging suit.

  The cuffs snapped to her wrists, legs snapped forward, and the chest closed in. The whole suit gripped her and sealed shut with a hiss, seams disappearing. It readjusted, shaping itself with minor tweaks until it conformed to her size and shape.

  She winced. “Okay, that hurts a little.”

  “What hurts?” Casimir asked, a little nervously.

  Amabel raised her legs, rocking back and forth on the hook. “Come find out,” she challenged.

  I walked forward. The suit was alien. Inside I could see the lay of the cut-open human shape it manifested, but that was the only recognizable human element of the suit. The interior of the suit glowed with spiky filaments of some kind of bioluminescent mold.

  I turned around and backed in.

  When my arms touched the gauntlets, they startled me by grabbing my wrists. The rest of the suit snapped shut around me, just like Amabel’s had.

  Sections readjusted shape, memory metal shifting and pulling in tight to become a heavy second skin. Something pricked my skin, then shoved its way into my lower back. The burning sensation spread up my spine.

  I gasped. “That’s invasive.”

  Around me the rest of the arm backed into their suits until we all dangled from hooks.

  Zeus moved to the front of the mess. “This is a fusion of inferior human technology and the superior workmanship of the Cal Riata.”

  “The what?” someone closer to the front asked.

  “Arvani that left the depths for the shallows,” Zeus told us. “We colonized the lakes and tidal pools of the Arv. We did that by building machines to let us explore land. We are still the leaders of Arvani invention and study. You should consider yourselves honored that I’m stuck here in your backwater.”

  “He sound a little bitter about being here to you?” Amira asked.

  “Hard to tell, the voice is synthesized; but I think you’re right,” Amabel said.

  “This armor,” Zeus shouted, drowning out the snapping sound of the suits closing up, “is powered by the same engines as a hopper, just smaller. It can do more than just increase your strength five times over: It features adaptive real-time camouflage, and it can recycle the internal air for a few days as well as liquids for up to a week.”

  “Ewww.” Grayson made a face.

  “Your communications have quantum entanglement for security on each arm’s own channel, entangled again for a connection back to Command. There are also public radio frequencies for inter-arm—”

  A loud crash interrupted Zeus. Someone had leapt off his hook and buried himself in the ceiling. The soft material rained to the floor, and the recruit had obviously not died as he kicked and wiggled around, stuck in the gooey ceiling. Obviously the room was designed with a safety feature.

  Zeus didn’t look up, just waited a second and then continued. “First, you need to visualize your helmet. This finishes the suit-up process now that there is a neural link with your spinal cord.”

  I closed my eyes and thought ab
out a helmet. The rim snicked and then something thunked into place. The air around my head filled with the sound of my breathing. I opened my eyes to see the helmet had shot out of the collar and surrounded my head.

  “And now I’ll release the suits from their racks,” Zeus said, his voice filling my helmet. “Move slowly, and cautiously. Do not damage my ceiling any further.”

  The hook yanked free, and I stumbled forward. Each step jerked oddly, but as I took each one, something about the suit seemed to stop resisting and then overreacting to me. It began to move with me. Anticipate my movements.

  By my tenth step, I felt one with the suit and no longer like an awkward toddler staggering forward.

  “Hey, this is Amira.” Amira’s voice startled me by filling the helmet as well. “I know you’re all new to this, but just think about where you want to talk to. Think ‘Command’ and you’ll be sending to Zeus. Probably not a good idea unless you have to. Think of your team, or arm I mean, and you’ll be on the channel.”

  Then right over, Zeus came in. “Now it’s time to get used to your suits.”

  A few groans popped out on the public channel from other arms.

  Zeus scuttled out of the room and we followed. Down halls, and then out into the domed crater we’d struggled through earlier.

  There were no days on the moon, I realized. Zeus would decide when we slept, when we were tired, what we would do.

  When was the last time I’d slept? Had it been a couple days? I’d been moving from event to event and wanted to rub my eyes, but the helmet was in the way.

  I thought about visualizing it opening. And right as I did so, a whirlwind almost knocked me over.

  “Amira here. They dumped the air,” Amira reported on the arm’s channel. “Everyone helmeted? Call it in.”

  “I’m here.”

  Amira sounded annoyed. “Who the fuck is ‘I’? I don’t know your voice yet. Use your name.”

  “Sorry. Casimir here.”

  “Amabel.”

  “Roger.”

  “Katrin.”

  “Grayson.”

  “Devlin,” I said.

  “Haselda . . . shit,” she grunted. “Just landed on my face. I’m here.”

  I looked around and saw a figure standing up from a divot in the dirt.

  “Welcome back to the training area,” Zeus said. “We have prepared an obstacle course for you. First arm to the other side gets dinner. The losing arms get to run back to this side and go hungry. Go!”

  “What is their obsession with starving us?” Amira grumbled.

  “Let’s go,” I grunted. “Let’s just get this done.”

  We loped forward along the dirt trail leading to the other side. The first obstacle: a tall stone wall with barbed wire at the top.

  “And up we go.” Amira leapt nearly fifteen feet into the air, skimmed the barbed wire, and disappeared over the other side. “Careful, water pit on the other side,” she reported.

  I leapt. I didn’t quite coordinate my jump, so I didn’t reach the top. I struck the wall, stone broke and crumbled, and I flipped forward, landing in the pit of water upside down and flailing.

  A suit landed nearby in an explosion of water, and the helmeted head turned down to face me. Ken’s voice came through on the public channel. “I thought that was you, Devlin. Graceful.”

  I struggled to stand, and Ken shoved past me, checking me easily with a shoulder. I toppled back into the water. “Damn it.”

  Ken leapt out, streaming water behind him. He hit the ground and flexed his knees, then jumped like a cricket to a spot another twenty feet away.

  “Come on, Amira,” I called out.

  “Let it go,” she said. “Haselda’s having trouble getting over the wall.”

  “Casimir, help Haselda,” I ordered. “Everyone else, keep up with me.” Why was Amira arguing with me over the arm’s channel? I was the octave. I was the leader.

  I ran after Ken through more pits of mud and water, and then crawled quickly under crisscrossed lasers that sizzled against the suit.

  The ghostly word OVERHEAT flashed in the lower right corner of my helmet’s screen, some kind of heads-up display popping into my field of vision, but it faded as I crawled away.

  I battled through a hell of competing wind and firestorms that buffeted me. Staggered through what looked like a pool of acid, took a running leap, and jumped out over a chasm.

  I didn’t realize how deep it was until the midpoint of my leap when I looked down, and 800 FEET appeared along with a range finder on the heads-up display.

  “Shit.” I wouldn’t have jumped if I’d realized the fall could kill me.

  I’d assumed the training grounds were a safe place. But they weren’t. Maybe that acid would have eaten through my suit if I’d taken too long.

  No one was playing games here. The Accordance wanted to train us to fight an enemy they feared. They weren’t holding back.

  Zeus hadn’t cared about Keiko. He didn’t care about me. We were aliens to the Arvani. Aliens they needed to train to fight.

  Disposable.

  I slowed down. Took the obstacles more seriously.

  Survive, I thought as I ran toward the wide maw leading out of the crater training grounds. I wanted to survive this.

  The remnants of other arms straggled in. My vague fantasy of grabbing Ken in full armor and knocking him down had faded. I was just glad Amira and I had struggled across into the tunnel in one piece.

  Zeus thudded across the metal floor. “Where is the rest of your arm?”

  “Behind us,” I said.

  “Unacceptable. Where is Haselda? Have you looked into your arm’s welfare? Have you kept it together and used it effectively?”

  I looked down at the ground. “No.”

  “Useless ape,” Zeus hissed in my helmet. “You are an octave. Act like it. Everyone, strip out of your armor, that’s enough for one day. Hart, you’ll be outside running laps without the suit.”

  I started to work on cracking out of my suit as the rest of my arm caught up. Again, visualizing the action sent the command through whatever had slipped itself into my spine and did the trick. The chest cracked open. Haselda limped in, held up by Casimir.

  The large doors leading out to the crater rolled shut. More helmets snapped open and slid down into the suit collars. “Are you okay?” I stopped focusing on trying to get out of my suit and walked over. It resealed itself up the middle of my chest.

  Blood ran down Haselda’s lips from her nose. She walked past me, looking weary.

  “Casimir?”

  “She hit the wall headfirst after the first stumble,” he said. “And then you left us behind. Nice work, man.”

  “You know what,” I said, temper flaring. “I didn’t ask to be an octave. I didn’t even fucking ask to be sent here to the moon.”

  “Let’s just get out of the power armor and take our medicine,” Casimir said tiredly.

  Amira moved in closer, her voice tight. She’d shucked her armor already. The neural interface was easy for her. “They’re depending on you, Devlin. And we’re going to have a lot of time stuck together.”

  “Hey!” Ken had his helmet flipped down and walked toward me. “You know what you are? You’re a disgrace. You’re a coward. You don’t deserve the honor of being an octave, because you don’t even want it.”

  It stung because it came too close to the truth, which I knew deep down, but on the surface I exploded. “Hey, asshole. Who ran from Tranquility when the bomb went off ? You did. You left Keiko to die.”

  That hit home. Ken came at me swinging. I put up a gauntleted hand to block his punch, and then smacked into him just as hard.

  “Guys!” Amira shouted.

  We grappled and swung around. Then separated. “Asshole,” I muttered. “You’ve been at this s
ince the Hamptons. You need to back the fuck off.”

  “Go back home, traitor.”

  “Stop it!” Amira snapped, sounding utterly exasperated. She stepped between us, and I pushed her aside to get at Ken. My forearm struck her with a loud crunch, and both Ken and I froze.

  Amira didn’t make a sound; she looked annoyed as she collapsed. Then she grabbed her stomach. Her eyes rolled back into her head.

  “Amira, oh shit.” I dropped to my knees. I was in power armor. Five times as strong. She’d stepped out of hers. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It was an accident.”

  “Step aside.” A struthiform shoved past me. Another whipped in next to Amira. Medics.

  “Is she okay?”

  “Shut up,” Zeus said. One of his mechanized tentacles grabbed the back of my armor and yanked me off my feet into the air.

  Amira was rolled onto a stretcher, and the struthiforms picked her up and left the room. I struggled to get down and follow her, but Zeus held me up. “Careless,” he said. “Useless. You’re done. You are no longer octave. Get out of your armor, go outside. Start running. I’ll come get you when you’re done.”

  12

  No one met my eyes as I walked down the rows of tables with my tray of Accordance human-optimized food. The gray goop and energy spheres wiggled with each step, and the square protein bars slid around the nonstick surface.

  I tried to sit with my arm, but Casimir shook his head as I moved to swing my leg over the bench.

  “Oh, come on,” I snapped. I’d been isolated from everyone for an entire day; wasn’t that punishment enough? “You’d all be licking Ken’s boots right now if it weren’t for me.”

  “Maybe,” Casimir said. “But Amira wouldn’t be laid out with crushed ribs, internal bleeding, and maybe worse.”

  “They said she was going to be okay,” I said firmly. Accordance medical technology was near magical. Every­thing was okay.

  Or, at least, I kept telling myself that.