“I’ve got the help files up,” I told her. “I’m figuring it out.”
We sat down in the two cab chairs, looking out toward the vehicle lock.
“That was a statement, not a question,” Amira said.
The entire rover jerked forward. “Got it,” I muttered. Just a test, to see if I had it figured out. I could drive the damn thing now.
“The doors require an authorization code,” Amira said. “Why do you think they left all the keys inside?”
Damn. “Wait, how do you know they left the keys in?”
“I snuck back here the first night. Took a look around. Always know your landscape. And your exits.”
“But you didn’t leave,” I said.
“Not then.”
I looked anywhere but at her. Thinking. Then I stabbed the controls forward. The rover lurched on, picking up speed. “I watched a recruit die while I was in the sickbay,” I told her. Knowing what I knew about Amira, about that nano-ink, if she’d been in here and there was a code, she knew it. “How many more are going to die? That struthiform, the scarred one: It calls itself Shriek? It told me about its dead home world. That the Accordance is slowly losing and falling back. And what are we going to get, for dying for them? Will they leave Earth, finally? Am I crazy for wanting to run?”
“I’m not going to open that door for you. You have no idea how stupid this idea is, do you?”
“I’m not going to slow us down. I know it’s on manual now, so as long as I’m pushing these controls we’re headed for that lock.”
We stared at each other.
I continued, “If you’re in the rover and we crash into the wall, you’re going to have to come up with some kind of story.”
Amira didn’t reply. But the massive locks split apart, the gentle thrum of their separation accompanied by a steady rumble and the high-pitched whistle of escaping air.
I let go of the controls and we ground to a halt, half-in and half-out of the locks. The inner door was closing quickly behind us to prevent more air from getting out. I had been holding my breath. Amira was shaking her head.
“I’m masking everything. Including the damn loss-of-air indicators you just set off. By the time they notice what happened, we should have at least a day. You have food with you, water? Suits in the locker?”
“Yes to all three. Do you want to use a suit to get out?”
“No. Take us out.”
I stared at her. “You’re coming with me?”
“Without me you won’t even make it out of the base’s perimeter without setting off every zone alarm out there. Come on, let’s go.”
Still unsure, I gently moved the rover the rest of the way out. The outer metal maw closed behind us.
My eyes adjusted to the vista of gray hills and pitted craters in the gloom of distant lights. I eased us out and away.
Amira muttered directions to me, guiding us around craters and the bases of hills as she used satellite data to map a course that wouldn’t get us stuck somewhere.
“You did the right thing at Tranquility. I like that. But this? A very stupid idea,” Amira said. “I just wanted to put that out there.”
I’d been tense, waiting for something like that. “It’s the only idea that guarantees we don’t die in some pointless, far-off, alien war.”
“It’s a stupid idea for you. Your family will pay the ultimate price if you go AWOL here.”
I flushed. “Maybe they should’ve thought about that before becoming terrorists.”
“Oh, come on.” Amira shook her head. “Even you don’t believe that. Protestors, irritants, problem makers. Yeah. But your parents weren’t setting off backpack nukes in downtown Atlanta to take out Accordance oversight buildings. And you’re lucky to have them. Some of us aren’t that lucky. But there are others who will pay a big price if you go all the way with this.”
“Who’s that?” We dipped into a crater and the tires kicked up dust. It hung in the air behind us for an eerily long time.
“Your arm, asshole. Zeus isn’t quite right in the head as it is. What do you think happens to everyone after we’re missing? Zeus may be an alien, but I can still spot a sadistic, disaffected shit who’s abusing command easily enough.”
“That’s not an argument for me to go back. I’m done with it. I’m done with it all,” I said grimly, looking out over the blasted lunar landscape. Now that we were ten minutes away I’d flicked on the lights. Driving near blind, depending on Amira’s instructions and the instruments, had been a bit unnerving.
“It’s a good thing I have a strong survival instinct,” Amira said. “Because I wouldn’t want to be back there when the shit hits the fan. You might toss them under the bus, but you’re not taking me down with you. No one drags me down. No one.”
A long stretch of flat lunar plain opened up in front of us. “Look,” I started to say. But I didn’t get to finish arguing about whether I was dragging her down or not. Amira slid out of her seat and jammed a baton up against my neck. “Hey!”
Lightning struck me. It leapt through my spine, up and down my ear, through my head, and out through my nose. I tasted ozone so deep in my sinuses, I breathed, spit, and coughed it.
My entire body spasmed, then seized. I tried to scream but managed only a gargle and fell over onto the floor.
Amira let me hit it, my head bouncing off the metal floorboards. She squatted next to me as I struggled to breathe. Every cell inside me ached and protested. “I survived the Pacification, Devlin. I fought Accordance on the street. I helped lure their foot soldiers in to kill traps as a child. I kept people on the block out of their systems. I kept one step ahead of them for a long, long time. And now that’s over. So understand me: I have no love for Accordance. But I can’t have you fucking us all over, particularly me, because you had a bad few days and need to mope. Understood?”
I managed a moan.
“At the very least, I’m saving your ass. You know your tattoo and rank, here on your arm, you know they have a transponder buried in them? It lights up on a ping; that’s how I followed you. Wanted to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid. Lucky me. But we have to head back before someone realizes you’re missing. I can only delay and hide our little unauthorized lunar hike for so long.”
She pulled out a couple zip ties. “What . . . ,” I managed.
“For your own safety,” she said, and zip-tied my arms to my legs. “Don’t want you getting jumpy.”
“Are you going to turn me in to Zeus?” I demanded sullenly.
Amira sat down and turned the rover around, heading right back for the camp. “As I said, he’s a sadistic fuck. I wouldn’t do that. But if we get discovered sneaking back in, I’ll shove your zip-tied ass out in front of me as chum for that tentacled shark. Got it?”
I swallowed. “Got it.”
16
I sat in a small bubble of my own angry silence. My wrists were starting to go numb, and even though Amira had taught me how to get out of them, while electrocuted and lying on the ground, I hadn’t been able to move a single muscle.
My fingers hurt at this point. But I wasn’t going to ask her for anything. And I particularly wasn’t going to beg for my restraints to be loosened because I was uncomfortable.
The gray landscape, most of it shadowy in the dark because we’d killed the lights again, ghosted by the cab windows.
It felt like it was taking longer to get back. I leaned my head against the chair and closed my eyes, drifting off to the thump of the soft tires against lunar dirt.
“What was that?” Amira asked aloud, startling me out of my stupor.
“What?” Damn it. I spoke before remembering I was giving her the angry silent treatment.
She was looking through the upper cab windows. Up at the dark and stars. “Something . . . just grazed the sensors. Like an absence—”<
br />
Amira jerked back in her seat, her whole body taut with pain. At the same moment, the rover’s interior lights flickered, then shut down. It coasted along on momentum, bouncing over a hole, and came to a stop. Amira grabbed her head and moaned.
“Amira?”
The sounds of fans circulating air faded away. An eerie quiet fell inside the rover.
“Amira?” I was a little freaked out. “Amira, what’s wrong?”
We were busted. Fuck. We’d been caught, the rover disabled, and soon Zeus would come striding toward us. I was going to be deep in the shit any second now, and she was going to . . .
Blood streamed from Amira’s nose. She rocked back and forth, mewling.
“Amira, are you okay?”
She pulled her hands away and looked at me. I gasped. Blood trickled out of the corners of her eyes, like red tears. “It hurts,” she hissed.
“Can you see?”
Amira took a deep breath and wiped her bloody cheeks off with the backs of her wrists. “Yeah. Yeah, I can see. I lost some function, but I can see.”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Some kind of electromagnetic pulse. Anything nonhardened burned out. Some of my ink’s military-grade; it’s still running. Civilian stuff’s mostly shot to shit.”
I briefly imagined nano-ink sizzling all throughout her body, wrapped around nerve endings and skin as it bubbled and sparked. I shuddered and twisted my aching hands.
Amira saw the movement. She leaned halfheartedly forward and pulled a knife out of a hip pocket. After cutting me loose, she sort of hung there, holding the other seat and closing her eyes for a moment. “The air isn’t being recycled,” she said in a shaky voice. “It’ll be okay for a while, but we need to check the suits. We’ll use the rover’s air until it’s stale, and while I see if we can get a signal out, then switch to the suits.”
I looked over her shoulder. “I don’t think that’s our biggest problem.” This wasn’t something Zeus was doing to us, I realized. Not punishment for stealing the rover. Not anything.
She turned. The lip of the crater above us glowed red, reflecting flashes of fiery heat. The horizon lit up, like lightning flickering away in a distant storm.
Then more red flashes danced out in the open, the hellish glow increasing. Balls of fire, dissipating quickly as the air vomited up into the sky, rising into the black night of the lunar dark before fading away.
“That’s a lot of air lost to burn that long and high in the open vacuum,” I said softly.
“It could be an industrial accident.” Amira staggered to her feet. “The mass driver isn’t too far away from the base.”
“With an electromagnetic pulse? You said you sensed something in the sky.”
She grabbed my shoulder and limped back toward the suits. “I thought I did. It could be anything.”
“And the only way to know is to climb up and take a peek. How far away were we? Do you remember?”
Amira opened the locker and touched the nearest suit’s collar. Lines throughout the suit glowed briefly yellow. “The suits are hardened, ready for a variety of outside jobs.” She breathed with relief, resting her head against the locker’s edge.
“There might be painkillers in the first aid kit,” I said.
“No.” Amira straightened with effort. “Might need it for later. Save it for when we know what’s happening.”
We pulled the shapeless suits on. Amira pointed out the controls on the left forearm’s inner surface. Tap to make the materials tighten and shape to my body. Not too different from the backup manual controls for our fighting armor, really. But this one didn’t slither into my back and link up to my thoughts.
“Don’t use the common channel or speak while we’re out there,” Amira warned, before I tapped to make the helmet slide up out of the fabric and lock into place.
I nodded.
We bounded our way across the dust and up the side of the crater. The last hundred feet were steep: a rock climb, though falling would likely not be as dangerous as back on Earth. It was hard to figure out what a dangerous height would be, but we flirted with it.
I mostly worried about missing a handhold in the dark, and we weren’t using any lights, even though the suits had built-in spotlights for just this sort of situation.
Huffing, I finally pulled myself up to the rim of ragged rock and looked out over the shadows and dirt between us and the conflagration.
The training base burned. The cap over the entire crater drooped, melting over what structure remained. Blackened spars jutted out in irregular directions.
Something moved above it. A charred, translucent jellyfish. It was massive. Almost as big as the base itself. We watched as bioluminescent light filled its interior, then traveled down through the long tentacles reaching the ground.
The behemoth’s surface boiled with movement; not a single space remained still. Tiny sticklike insects fell away like dandruff, a cloud of brown that swooped around and clustered tighter as it dove into the ruins of the base.
I jumped as a hand grabbed my shoulder. “Hey,” Amira said. “I’m patching a direct line via physical contact so we can talk.”
“Those are crickets,” I said. “Easily a hundred of them. This is a Conglomerate attack.”
“Raptors are on the ground,” she said, and pointed.
She was right. A dozen of them loped over boulders, clad in armor, kicking up dirt as they ran toward the base from where they’d been lowered by a tentacle away from the structures.
“Oh shit.” Two rocky humanoid figures walked out from the interior of the Conglomerate ship. They leapt off from the edge of the gelatinous-looking rim, falling slowly at first, then speeding up. They struck the surface, throwing dirt up all around them and leaving small craters from the impact.
“Trolls.” Amira’s voice quavered, just as mine had.
The two creatures towered over the raptors at their feet as they stood and thudded their way toward the base.
17
More explosions ripped the base as we watched in horror. People we knew were trapped inside. People we knew were dying in there.
“They’re switching to heavy jamming,” Amira said. “Anticipating that there’d be a lot of hardened equipment around. I can’t get the suit’s comm systems to make contact with anything.”
“So we have no idea if this is happening anywhere else? The moon, Earth, they could all be under attack and we have no idea?”
“We’re in the dark,” Amira said. And her hand squeezed my shoulder.
“Fuck.”
“This isn’t a large force, but I don’t know what that means. It could mean they’re just being detached to mop us up and all the action is elsewhere. Or it could be a sneak attack. And since we’re on the other side of the moon, we can’t even just wait to see if we spot any explosions on Earth to figure it out.”
“We could run until we get out of jamming range,” I said.
“And who knows how far that is? We have twenty-four hours of capacity in the suits. We probably blew out most of our air leaving the rover; it didn’t have a proper airlock.”
Another silent fireball rose above the base as something detonated inside. I flinched. Twenty-four hours of life left. My vision narrowed. What did that even mean?
The suit felt suddenly claustrophobic, my breathing loud and accusatory. Every breath, more air lost. Another lungful closer to a gasping death. “We’re fucked,” I said.
“We will be,” Amira said. “We have twenty-four hours to think of something. To find air. Survive. The longer we keep going, the more options appear.”
I looked out over the base, my heart pounding. This couldn’t be happening. “For what? To die a few days later? To walk out across the moon and see Earth burning like Shriek said it would? I don’t think I want to see that.”
The image of an Earthrise came to me, but instead of a rich blue sphere I imagined the Earth burning as it appeared over the lifeless gray lunar surface.
“I’m going to choose life,” Amira said. It sounded like her jaw was clenched. Fury filled my helmet as she continued. “Even if it’s not for very long. I’ve fought too goddamned hard for every little scrap I’ve gotten. I’m not stopping now. I think we might be able to walk to the mines. I’m not sure if we can make it, but I’m betting there are supplies there, for the humans who service the automated launcher.”
It was hard to hold two theories in my head at the same time, and try to figure out how to proceed while consulting both possibilities. One: The Earth and the rest of the moon were under attack. In that case, we were just buying time.
But if it wasn’t widespread . . .
“Surely you can’t attack an entire world without the Accordance noticing something,” I said. Two: only the moon was under attack.
“I was thinking that,” Amira said. “Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”
“We need our armor,” I said. “The rebreathers will give us enough time to walk out from under the jamming. Or at the least, get us to the mines for sure. How far away are they? Fifteen miles?” It had been hard to tell flying over. But I could see the launches from the base, so the launcher couldn’t be too far away.
“Maybe.”
“People can walk twenty or thirty miles a day, I think. But there are a lot of craters in the way to scramble through and around. I don’t want to end up passing out a few hundred feet away from the entrance of a mine and dying there.”
“Our armor is in the middle of a damn firefight,” Amira said, pointing at the base.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It doesn’t look like they’re taking prisoners from here. I’m not seeing anyone shooting back.”
“We don’t know what’s going on, but we know the crickets are mostly patrolling, so it’s a dozen raptors . . . ”
“And two trolls.”
“And two trolls.” I nodded.
The Darkside War Page 11