The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  Flashes lit up the air around me: people shooting at me. But I ducked and weaved all over the debris at the center like an insane rabbit while shouting obscenities at Ken, wherever he was. Through rubble, underneath, around. I even managed to wing a few people with shots of my own, though after I got too turned around, I stopped shooting to avoid friendly fire.

  Ken took the brunt of my shouting without saying a word, while I suggested what horrible things he did to squid-like aliens in return for their blessings.

  I kept it up for a good five minutes until a suit struck me from the side and knocked the air clean out of me.

  Ken’s angry face stared at me, visor to visor. “You call me a tentacle licker one more time . . . ,” he growled.

  I did worse.

  He punched my helmet with armored hands, while I laughed and lay in place. As long as he was focused on me . . .

  The glass in my visor cracked slightly. “Hey,” I said.

  A spiderweb of cracks spread out with the next punch, and gas seeped in. I coughed. “Hey, you’re breaking my helmet.” I tried to struggle free, but Ken had me pinned, and another member of his fist had my legs.

  He punched again, and now the acrid, yellow gas shoved its fingers in and filled my helmet. My eyes teared up, forcing me to close them. I gagged on the foul-tasting air.

  “I can’t breathe,” I yelled. “Get the fuck off me. Get off.”

  Ken didn’t say anything, kept punching, and glass shards hit my face as the visor completely broke. My nose ran, my throat screamed, I tried to hold my breath.

  The next punch, I realized, would be to my face. With nothing to protect it, Ken might yet kill me. I rolled slightly over, jamming my face into mud and gas, and Ken continued hitting me, forcing my face down into it.

  “That’s enough,” Zeus said over the common channel. “Red Fist has it.”

  + + +

  By lunchtime the next day I had blown the last of the mud out of my nose, but still had the aftereffects of inhaling the gas. I’d spent the night in one of the medical pods, the cold biometallic arms wrapped around my chest as it monitored my lungs for any lasting damage.

  Amira joined me to watch the twinkle of the mass driver’s launches.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Not looking forward to running; still hurts a little to breathe. But they say I’m ready.” I slurped one of the energy spheres. I was getting better at doing it without making a mess of myself. “I’m glad that half-cyborg struthiform wasn’t on duty. Did you talk to him?”

  “A cheerful one. He refused to tell me his name. It was his ‘gift’ to me.”

  “I think I’d be in even more of a foul mood if he’d talked to me while I was laid up there overnight,” I said.

  Amira laughed. I wasn’t sure if the warmth spreading through me came from the drink, or because Amira put a hand on my shoulder. “We didn’t win, but that was a smart move,” she said.

  She let go.

  This was a possible reopening of our friendship. I felt relieved, like that simple touch had filled a massive emptiness.

  “We keep getting matched up against Ken,” Amira said. “You notice that?”

  “They’re pushing us.”

  “Zeus is. I had some time laid up in the medic bay to poke around. This isn’t standard. Arms should be chosen by randomization for one-on-ones. Zeus keeps overriding. He’s having fun with you two.”

  “Well, it’s easy with Ken, isn’t it? Just toss him into the situ­ation—”

  Amira interrupted. “Get real. You’ve been just as eager to needle him. What you did yesterday was tactically sound. But don’t act like everyone didn’t hear everything over the common channel.”

  I pulled back away from her. “Oh, you’re taking his side here?”

  “Damn it, Devlin, there are no sides here,” she snapped at me. “There are only humans, who are not part of the Accordance. Who don’t get to vote in Accordance affairs, or rise to be in charge. We are a client species. We are their cannon fodder. Ken knows it. You should know it. Spending all your energy worrying about him means you aren’t paying attention to the real thorn in your side. So get your head out of your ass.”

  My ass? I opened my mouth to say something nasty back, and then closed it. Maybe I was tired from whatever they’d injected me with last night. Or maybe having my visor broken and staring a gauntleted punch in the eye changed something. But I bit my lip for once.

  “At the very least,” Amira said, “not being at each other’s throats for the rest of training will make things calmer, yeah? And then he’s out of your life, most likely.”

  Do the time. Get back.

  I wasn’t going to get back to Earth and my family if Ken punched my face inside out with power armor during a moment where Zeus couldn’t stop him.

  And besides, I didn’t want to endanger Amira’s goodwill. So I sighed and got up. “Okay.”

  I walked past the tables and across the mess hall. People glanced up, then realized my target. Conversation died down, more heads turned.

  “Hey . . . ,” I said, as earnestly as I could imagine. “Ken.”

  He turned around. His expression changed, lips tightening, a controlled anger settling into his jaw. “Come to personally surrender before the next exercise?” he asked. “Get it all over with?”

  “No.” I thought about sitting next to him, but then thought better of it when I saw that the rest of his arm looked just as hostile. “I wanted to come and . . .” I realized how this looked. I looked weak. Fumbling over my words. Trying to apologize. Trying to patch things up. As everyone stared.

  “Beg me to leave you alone?” Ken asked. “Put your hands together and get on your knees, ask pretty please?”

  People laughed. I flushed. “You know what, I tried. Fuck you.”

  I’d tossed a match. I knew it. Ken knew it. He shot up.

  “Look, let me take that back,” I started to say, trying to fix the crumbling bridge. But Ken shoved me in the chest. I wobbled back on my feet, arms flailing. More laughter.

  If I’d ever had any social capital in this room, it was all gone. “Stop pushing me,” I hissed. “I’m trying to talk.” I should have done this somewhere else, somewhere less public. Small gestures, leading up to a peace. Instead of this grand gesture.

  “No one here cares what you have to say,” Ken said, and stepped forward to push me again. “Go away.”

  I stopped his shove, blocking the movement and grabbing his hand.

  He looked at me, then stepped right in. With a sudden ferocity, we’d locked. Grappling, we swung around twice, and then Ken threw me. I hit the table, smashing globs of food and bouncing off.

  I launched myself forward and got one good hit. Right in the chin. Ken staggered back, and then we both exploded into an uncoordinated mess of punches and kicks, what little training we’d had forgotten as we tried to draw blood. Or at least a concussion.

  An armored tentacle wrapped itself around my waist and picked me right off the ground, yanking me away from Ken.

  Ken likewise hung two feet over the ground, his legs kicking wildly.

  “You useless fucking apes,” Zeus said. “You know, on our world Cal Riata like me used to find something shiny. Then we’d dangle it just out of the water by a riverbank until an ape like you would come down to the edge. Then we’d drag you under, drown you, and eat you. I can see the appeal.”

  I gasped, my waist squeezed so tight I could barely suck in half a breath.

  “Let’s fight,” Zeus said enthusiastically. “This is what you do, right? Constantly war with each other? Squabble for the slightest reasons? It’s in your nature. Between the fighting and your sexing each other every spare minute you have, it’s a wonder any time is left over for training. So let’s see it out.”

  Our nature? I coughed.


  Zeus marched us out into the crater, through the rumbling bay doors, curious recruits following along to see what would happen.

  But at a careful distance.

  Zeus dropped us on a beam of metal above a frigid pool of water and shoved a stick in each of our hands. “There.” He sounded satisfied, or maybe I imagined it. “Now you fight.”

  He left us shivering on either side of the beam and retreated to watch.

  Was this standard? Was it a part of training to set two recruits to fight each other?

  Ken moved across the beam toward me.

  I kept the sticks in each hand down. “I’m not going to do this; this is crazy.”

  “Crazy because you know you’re about to get your ass kicked.”

  I moved forward slowly. “This is what Zeus wants. A show.”

  Ken hit me in the stomach with one of the sticks. I doubled over, but didn’t hit back. He frowned, and paused, watching me, waiting for a return strike.

  “Hit him!” Zeus shouted, the voice echoing throughout the entire training ground.

  Ken glanced over, struggling between wanting to obey the command and having to hit someone not fighting back.

  “I’m done,” I said. “I don’t want to cause any trouble. I just want to focus on getting through this as best I can.”

  “Shut up!” Zeus ordered. “Listen up, apes, there’s no talking on the beam. There’s only battle.”

  Ken gave a halfhearted jab in my direction to see what would happen. I ignored it.

  “I’m going to make whoever falls off that beam run around this entire forsaken moon,” Zeus said. “With no food. Until you drop and beg for the chance to get back up here again.”

  Ken swallowed.

  “Hit him!” Zeus repeated. “Or I’ll extend the punishment to your entire arm as well.”

  Ken looked at me. “Fight.”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “Asshole,” Ken hissed, frustrated, and followed that up with a fast strike to my head.

  I wasn’t going to perform for the alien. I let the hit knock me off the beam. All the heat fled my body as I struck the water.

  Enveloped by the cold, I slid down through the water, trailing blood. The cold made it easy to just lie back and let it happen.

  I struck the bottom, fifteen feet below, in a state of calm.

  Fuck this shit, I thought.

  14

  “Unfortunately,” said a flat, toneless voice, “I recognize you. I apologize.”

  I tried to sit up with a gasp, but the familiar alien petals of a medical pod gripped my chest firmly. The struthiform with the burn scars stood in front of me.

  “Should I tell you my name?” it asked. “Would that be fair? I know your name now: Devlinhart.”

  I swallowed. It hurt. Something had been shoved down my throat and pulled out. Maybe I’d inhaled some water? I remembered being yanked out by tentacles and thrown onto the mud by a disgusted Zeus.

  “I’m Shriek, of the One Hundred and Fourth Thunder Clutch,” the struthiform said. “What was it like?”

  “What was what like?” I asked hoarsely.

  “Dying,” Shriek said conversationally.

  I stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

  “The Illustrious Leader, our Commander Zeus, left you in the mud without medical attention for a half hour, where you drowned due to inhalation of water when he yanked you out too quickly.”

  “The fuck?” I struggled to get out of the pod, suddenly feeling trapped and claustrophobic. The memory of water rushing up through my nostrils and gagging me filled the back of my head. “How long have I been here?”

  “A few days. I had you sleep. Your arm is unable to visit; they are too tired. They’ve been made to run a great deal.”

  I groaned. “Zeus.” If anything had thawed with the arm, it would be frozen again. They would hate me now.

  “Far be it from me, a simple rebuilder of broken tissues and bones, a low-ranking survivor who failed to die defending my home, to criticize a great leader like Zeus”—the alien glanced down at a readout—“but such instructing might be considered by some, though it is not my place to say this, somewhat callous and wasteful of life. Luckily for you, I am here.”

  Shriek leaned forward and delicately tapped my nose with the tip of a finger claw. I jerked back and coughed.

  “Yes, lucky for you,” the struthiform mused. “And soon you’ll be healthy enough to go back to training. And you, too, will be alive and full of vigor, ready to experience what it will be like to lose your own home world. Congratulations on not dying; the Arvani appreciate it.”

  I shook my head. “Lose our home world?” That didn’t make any sense. “The Conglomeration is light-years away. That’s why we’re going to be shipped far off. Why our volunteers have yet to come back.”

  “They are light-years away. But what are light-years to beings like the Pcholem, who run the Accordance’s starships? They live in the Great Ships, skipping from star to star. And for the Conglomeration, a light-year is a few months’ journey. Look at my scars, human. They’re closer than you think. If they found you like we found you, from all the noise you broadcast out to the suns, it will not take them long to come sniffing around to see if your genetic stock will add value to the Conglomeration. I wonder what they will use humans for. I’m told my kind were rapidly evolved into package delivery systems.” Shriek held up wing hands and looked at them. “I hear we can fly again now, even though free will has been bred out. I wonder if there is any joy in flying on your own.”

  Alarms wailed through the sickbay. Shriek snapped around and looked over at another pod. Someone flailed inside it, spitting blood as the head jerked back.

  Shriek ran over, waving wing hands and pulling up holographic interfaces and controls. Another struthiform joined him. I watched as they moved furiously around. Aliens, and yet the flurry of doctors around a hurt patient an all too recognizable activity.

  Then silence fell. A pale face slumped back in the pod as the machines all withdrew. I stared at the unmoving body on the table.

  “Who was that?” I asked. “Who was that?”

  “Don’t ask that,” Shriek told me. “You know you shouldn’t ask.”

  Another struthiform checked my pod over, and then released me. I stood by the open bio-mechanical petals, looking over at the cluster of aliens around the limp human body.

  “Go!” one of them ordered me firmly. “Now.”

  I cleared out of the sickbay, slowly walking back through a silent mess hall. The arms’ bunks were empty. I found mine and lay down in it, shaken.

  I hadn’t achieved anything with Ken. I’d shoved the arm into even more trouble. Zeus had an eye on me. It was all a mess. And what for?

  Just to survive? I’d watched someone die in a pod that had more medical technology in it than most of Earth had before the invasion. More medical tech than most people still on Earth had.

  That shaved head had just lolled. A stranger, but maybe someone I could have met, or gotten to know, while training here.

  Was it better to not know their names?

  Because we’re just cannon fodder for some upcoming clash of two alien civilizations?

  I curled up into a ball and shivered. “Fuck.”

  There was no way out. There was no coming back. I’d been fooling myself. The only way out would be the same way I came, I thought. I remembered landing at the base. The lunar vehicles sitting in rows near where the elevator had stopped.

  If I wanted out, I would have to get out.

  I had to get ready to get out.

  I sat up, looked around, and realized I had nothing to take with me. There was no “getting ready.”

  If I wanted to live, and not die in some alien war or right here in training, I needed to walk away now.

 
; But going AWOL on the moon was going to be hard. And as soon as I got to Tranquility City I would have to get a message to my parents to run so they could survive, too.

  + + +

  The lunar rovers, blocky and ungainly on their oversize balloon tires, looked like silvered alien beetles on wheels sitting in pools of shadow. Instead of massive compound eyes, there were cab windows. And awkwardly jointed arms folded across their fronts were mechanisms that kept the passengers inside.

  The rover nearest the bay airlock opened up when I tapped the door handle, swinging up over my head with a hiss. I jumped in and pulled it shut behind me.

  “Okay, that’s halfway there,” I said aloud. In the cab, what was clearly a key hung from a hook near the dash of somewhat familiar physical controls.

  There weren’t a lot of vehicles for humans to operate; the industry had been taken over by the Accordance. But I’d been in a few. Seen enough shows. I felt I could run this.

  They’d left the keys in the ignition, I thought. Idiots.

  I checked to make sure they had human suits inside the locker by the door. I didn’t want to make it all the way to Tranquility City, then get stuck because I couldn’t sneak in through a quiet airlock.

  There was a human-compatible suit in a baggie. I put my own bag of energy bars and liquid food bubbles next to it.

  Back in the seat I started puzzling over the controls. I found the language swap screen and watched the panes of information around me reconfigure into English. Alien glyphs shifted into readable figures and icons.

  And I would have to figure out how to trigger the vehicle airlock from here to get out onto the lunar surface.

  Sitting still, poring over the read me files, I jumped in place when a fist smacked the glass right by my left thigh. “Shit!”

  Amira stood in front of the rover, expression inscrutable.

  Shit.

  15

  “You can’t open the airlock yourself,” Amira said, brushing past me. The rover door shut behind her and sealed with a soft clunk.