The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  Haselda sighed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. . . .”

  Roger Li shook his head. “You need me to translate?” he asked sharply. “No one is happy with you here.”

  “This is high school shit,” I snapped. “I made a mistake. I admit it. I fucked up, big. But I’m still part of this arm. I can sit at this table.” In fact, I’d pulled this whole group together.

  But that didn’t mean jack, apparently. Grayson stood up and loomed over me. “Look: We’ll train with you, yeah? You’re part of this arm. But at this table, right now? You’re not fucking welcome.”

  I picked up my tray with its wiggling, alien food, and moved on through the chatter of the mess hall. Faces I vaguely recognized glanced at me, then went back to conversing and eating.

  The mess hall was on the rounded edge of the leaflike barrack building radiating out from its hub, the crater. A set of floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the pitted and pocked lunar dark side. I sat by myself and gazed over the barren gray hills in the distance.

  Something twinkled and flew out over the craters and hills, rising as it shot away over the lumpy horizon. A minute later, another twinkling sparkle flung itself out into the darkness. The mass driver over the hill was patiently slinging its pellets of raw material out into orbit, regular as a metronome.

  As those pellets circled out from the dark side of the moon, they’d probably come out of the moon’s shadow and into the light, and see Earth.

  It had been only a couple days since I’d last seen it from Tranquility City, but for some reason time had stretched and everything that had happened there felt like it happened both an hour ago, and forever ago. Every time I thought about seeing Earth over the lunar hills, I felt the punch of an explosion, the rush of air leaving my lungs. Blood on my hands.

  Shivering, I poked at an energy sphere until it broke apart and spilled liquid all over the tray.

  + + +

  A simple schedule started to form for us. The last two days we’d been run across the crater, herded, drilled, and yelled at by struthiforms, carapoids, and Arvani instructors in the morning. Or, at least, the first four hours that the lighting throughout the base was on.

  In the “afternoon” we had an hour to eat and rest. Most snarfed their food, like I had, so they could use the time for themselves. After I tossed my tray, I straggled behind a small clump of recruits walking back to their bunks.

  “Too fucking exhausted,” a familiar American voice muttered in front of me: Amabel Lee, who sounded faintly like the acting president but without the creepy factor. “I’m just going to lie down on top of my blanket and die for a half hour. Wake me up?”

  “I could wake you up,” Casimir said with a tired sort of leering in his voice.

  “Don’t do that,” Amabel said. “I’m too tired to tell if you’re joking, flirting, or being creepy.”

  “My bad,” Casimir said.

  In the corner near a supply closet, two couples leaned against a crook in the wall and made out haphazardly. Casimir snapped a towel at them. “Asshole,” the girl muttered.

  We might be exhausted, on the dark side of the moon, monitored by aliens, but that wasn’t going to stop human nature in any way, judging by the sounds late at night.

  Casimir and Amabel walked into our bunk room. Our whole arm slept here, and there were eight rooms for the eight arms of this wing, housing all sixty-four recruits. After our class proved its worth, we’d been told, more humans would be pulled into the elite Darkside training program, and all four wings would be filled with recruits.

  I looked in the room. The bunk near the door would have been mine, as octave. Instead, Casimir flopped onto it and noticed me.

  I nodded neutrally and kept walking past the door. I hadn’t planned on lying in uncomfortable silence there, which was all I’d gotten the past two days whenever I was in the room.

  The sickbay for this wing was right off the great doors leading into the training crater. The struthiform medics had turned me away each time I’d tried to visit, but this time they let me through.

  “I’m here to see Amira Singh,” I told the struthiform medic in an alcove by the door.

  It looked up from manipulating three-dimensional images of some pink-and-purple alien anatomy. The large ostrichlike face had been reshaped in some horrific accident and then fixed. Parts of its face were artificial, and matte-black patches of machinery pocked the face where fine down should have been. Scars ran up and down the slender neck. “I don’t know what an ‘amirasing’ is,” it said.

  The struthiform stood up, the thick left leg hissing at it did so. Synthetic. And the winglike hands, also heavily scarred, had some digits ending in prostheses. I took a step back.

  “Amira. One of the recruits. That’s her name.”

  It cocked its head, the scraggly feathers above the hard shell of its nose wafting about. The limpid eyes blinked. “I don’t know your names.”

  “Well . . . why not?” I found myself asking, while also mentally slapping myself. Even by alien standards, this one seemed a little off.

  “Names don’t really matter, now. We are all just feed for the machine.” It pointed claws at my chest. “I will fix you, I will tend to you. But I will not learn who you are, because I never wish to have known you. It will only be another emptiness pulled from me if I did that. I will reward you by not burdening you with my own method of self-identification. It is a gift. Say, ‘thank you, medic.’ ”

  “Thank you, medic,” I stammered. “I guess I hadn’t realized you all had names.”

  “Why, have you never asked one of us?”

  “Usually you have your boots on the back of our necks.”

  The struthiform raised its wings. Shit. I was in trouble. But after a second of it tapping the floor, it lowered them. “Well said. They are so enthusiastic about doing Arvani bidding, aren’t they?” It stomped the floor again. “We are scared. Every one of us you meet, that is the last of the clutch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Wing hands drooped and feathers ruffled. The struthiform sat back down at its station. “Arvani said I would soar the dark skies to protect my clutch. But instead I burned. But in this war, there is nowhere to go back to. Instead, they have pieced me back together and I’m alive once more. And before I burned, I saw my world fall to the Conglomeration. Without the brood nests and mothers, the Thunder Cliffs, the great Joins, there are no more clutches. Arvani tell us we will retake the home world. But, with each battle, it is farther and farther away, and more of us die. Do you think I will see the end of my species, human, or will I die before that happens?”

  I stared at him. “I don’t . . .”

  “The one you seek is in the first room, a member of your arm. I would not go see her, though. There will be greater things to worry about soon, I imagine, and you must save your strength.”

  “I’d still like to go see her, though,” I said.

  “Then go.” It waved a wing hand.

  I hurried before it could change its mind and walked quickly past shimmering energy curtains and spiderlike machines that hung from cables in the ceiling. Surgical robots that could, in seconds, pull you apart, fix you, reassemble you. Emergency medical pods lay in half-repose, shells open and ready to hug a body, whether carapoid, struthiform, human, or Arvani.

  I stopped at the first door and glanced in. Amira lay back, ensconced in a medical pod. Tubes led out from it to plug into the wall.

  She was sitting up and talking to Katrin, who loomed over her while Haselda sat on the edge of the pod nodding along. Amira’s face looked puffy, and her right arm was purple with bruises. I winced.

  Everyone stopped talking when Amira noticed me at the door. Haselda and Katrin looked at me, then back at Amira, looking for a cue.

  Amira raised her right hand, and then made a dismissive wave. The door slid shut in
front of me.

  Message received.

  + + +

  “Heads down!” Casimir shouted as we huddled behind a pile of debris late the next morning. Now our octave, he radiated frustration. We’d been tasked with claiming a muddy pit up the hill that was currently occupied by Ken’s arm.

  It wasn’t going well.

  We didn’t have real weapons yet. We just had training handguns and rifles.

  “We have a full inventory of native-made weaponry,” Zeus told us when they’d handed out the training weapons with human handgrips. They looked . . . close to what we expected a weapon to look like, but as if someone had melted them and stretched them. Accordance loved their smooth-flowing organic shapes. “We have native handguns, machine guns, submachine guns, and shotguns. But they all, primitively, use bullets. And we can’t train with bullets, can we? Instead, you’ll be using human-grip light trainers. One handgun model, one basic rifle with a variety of simulated fire rates. Even though these emulate Accordance weapons, you will be assigned native weaponry for battle. Accordance weapons are for Accordance fighters.”

  Our training weapons spit out a blue laser light with roughly the same power as a toy pointer you might use to drive a cat crazy.

  But sensors all over our suits would shut down the power armor and freeze any part of the suit that got hit. Which was why Katrin was pulling herself up toward us without the use of her legs.

  “Grayson, we need to flank them,” Casimir said to us. A heavy wind kicked up, scouring us with debris and knocking some of us over.

  “Someone needs to help Katrin in,” I said.

  “They’re trying to lure us out,” Casimir said. “Ken’s arm chose to shoot her in the legs to draw us out.”

  I knew it was just a training mission, but seeing her slowly pulling herself toward us didn’t feel right.

  Something zinged overhead. I caught a glimpse of scaly, waving legs and a spiny pink tail.

  “What was that?” Haselda asked.

  Even though I’d only seen it out of the corner of my eye, I knew what it was. We’d had the lessons drilled into us so many times, I’d felt a chill down my back. “Driver,” I said. “It was a driver.”

  “It can’t be real,” Haselda said.

  “No more real than our pistols,” Casimir said. “But . . .”

  A driver bounded out of the slurry of wind and dirt, smacking into Katrin. “Shit,” she grunted. “It’s taking over my suit.”

  Despite myself, I relaxed. Katrin was alive and talking. This might feel real, but she was going to be . . . crap, she was on her feet and bearing down on us.

  “Shoot her!” Casimir shouted, as if over the wind, despite the fact that we were all connected and listening via helmets.

  I fumbled around and faced Katrin with my rifle. Then I shot her three times, nearly point-blank, as she jumped into our midst.

  “Fuck!” She sprawled, perfectly still, between us all.

  “I think they’re trying to flank us,” Amabel said suddenly. She was hunkered down just far enough away that I couldn’t see her through the muck whirlwind.

  “Where?”

  We were clumped together, and vulnerable. Huddling. Waiting for Casimir to start acting instead of reacting.

  And Ken’s team would be able to pick us off easily in a few bursts of fire.

  “I’ll look,” I said.

  “Devlin, wait!” Casimir ordered.

  I poked my head around the debris, not above it, flipping through types of imaging on my helmet to see if I could penetrate the artificial storm Zeus had whipped up for us.

  Infrared. UV. Something that turned the entire helmet into black-and-white scratches. Was that radar? On thermal, something warm loped at us.

  “There,” I said, moving my rifle and firing. Once, twice. “Got it!” A driver bounced, lifeless, across the ground toward us.

  “Dev!”

  Something smacked into me from above the debris pile. My suit lurched to standing, against my will. My visor went dark.

  “Well done,” Zeus said into my ear as I was yanked around to fire on my own team. “You’ve gotten yourself killed and become a walking corpse because neither you nor your arm covered an attack from the air.”

  It was all over in seconds. The storm faded away, and I regained control of my armor.

  Zeus descended from the ceiling to point out to the other arms what we’d done wrong. Ken watched us, triumphant, from farther up the hill.

  After we were dismissed, the arm trooped toward the racks by the bay doors leading into our barracks to shuck our armor.

  Casimir got up in my face. “That was all on you, Hart,” he hissed. “You shot us all.”

  I should have argued back, but for some reason I couldn’t find the energy. Katrin was the first one to try to kill us in that exercise. And we shouldn’t have all been huddled behind that rock pile together playing defense.

  But I didn’t say anything. I was just going to keep my head down and get through it.

  In my sweaty grays I headed for lunch, stomach grumbling. This was all play, anyway. There was no blood leaking out of anyone into the dust. No real explosions.

  It felt like we were playing on a distant, dreamy stage.

  Amira sat at our arm’s table. “You guys got your asses handed to you,” she said with a half smile.

  “Yeah,” Casimir grumbled.

  “Looks like you could use my help. So I’m back.”

  Our arm had its full strength back—Amira was okay to train.

  The only good thing to happen so far today.

  I leaned on the edge of the table, and no one said anything. I kept quiet, and listened to Amira and Casimir break down what had gone wrong.

  “You should have kept your head down,” Amira said coldly. “That’s when it spotted you.”

  I smiled to myself, kept my face blank, and just nodded. She was talking to me again. That was a step in the right direction.

  13

  Three days. More drills. More drivers taking over suits and creating chaos within perfectly executed plans. Casimir stopped yelling at me after he ended up shooting us in the back when one landed on him.

  A quiet peace developed between my arm and me. I kept my mouth shut, and they let me slowly ease my way back in.

  We began to improve. Not as fast as the Arvani instructors wanted, though. Zeus and his two fellow instructors would stomp around the crater’s obstacles in their armor to yell at any number of recruits. But by now we knew to sweep the air, the ground, and our perimeter. We could leapfrog our way forward and attack another arm.

  Not bad, I thought.

  “When do you think they’ll give us the real weapons?” Haselda asked at one point. “Instead of the toys.”

  “We’ll be playing laser tag until we stop getting our suits taken over by the mechanical training drivers,” Amira said. “Right now toys are all we’re ready for.”

  On the fourth day, all the arms gathered in front of Zeus.

  “Four to eight arms,” he declared, “make a fist.” He pointed at us. “You on the left will be Red Fist. On the right, Yellow Fist.”

  We stood in the heart of the Yellow Fist.

  We broke apart quickly, shepherded to either side of the crater on a run led by struthiform instructors.

  “Your job is to take, and hold, the structure in the center of the training grounds.” A ragged set of pylons and concrete had extruded itself from the ground. It looked somewhat like an ancient Greek ruin, but with alien curves and script on the broken columns.

  “Who’s in charge of the team?” someone asked over the general frequency.

  “Fist,” someone corrected.

  “Whatever. Who’s in charge?”

  “Commander Zeus didn’t say.”

  “We have fou
r octaves; one of us will need to figure it out,” Casimir’s voice broke in. “Everyone else: Shut up.”

  There was a pause. Then, “I’m good with Casimir.”

  “Cas for me.”

  “The other fist is moving.”

  “Let’s go!” Casimir ordered.

  We bounded across the training ground, around caustic pits and mud-filled trenches, making the run back toward the center. It was exhilarating, until a bank of mist began to bubble out of the ground.

  We slowed, suddenly unable to see more than a few feet in front of us. The edges of pylons loomed out of the murk at us. An acrid taste, like tear gas, briefly slipped through my suit’s air before it switched over to internal recycling of air.

  The common channel filled with a few coughs.

  “I’m down!” someone cried out.

  “Who said that?” Casimir asked, frustration in his voice.

  And then the common channel erupted in chaos. Within minutes, Red Fist had taken a chunk out of us as we tried to organize.

  Recruits lay scattered in unmoving suits, swearing and apologizing.

  Instead of trying to hold the structure, Red Fist had run right through it to come out on our side and cut us in half.

  “Now all we have to do is hunt you down and pick you off,” said Ken over the common channel, glee in his voice. “Or do you want to just surrender now, Casimir, so we can all head in for lunch early?”

  Commander Zeus interrupted, “There’s no early lunch; you fight until I call an end to it.”

  “Casimir,” I said on our arm’s channel, working very hard to visualize sending the message correctly and not accidentally broadcasting to everyone. “If it’s Ken, let me go out there and run around, create some chaos.”

  “That’s a waste,” Casimir replied.

  “No. Ken hates me. He won’t be paying attention if I’m running around shouting at him. Seriously, toss me out there, then counterattack.”

  Casimir was quiet for a while. I had almost never interrupted his plans, until now. Finally, grudgingly, he said, “Okay.”

  I leapt out from cover. I was good at sprinting, and the current gravity setting in the crater was comfortable. I ran and shouted on the common channel, “Ken: I’m coming for you!”