Free The Darkside War by Zachary Brown Page A

already, now we’re going to get noticed again?”
    â€œThat’s not fair,” Keiko said. “As your buddy, I’m going to catch all that shit too. So the least you can do is help me take a dump.”
    I groaned as Keiko raised a hand and waved.
    â€œWhat is it?” the nearest instructor asked, her ponytail whipping around.
    â€œI need to use a bathroom, instructor.”
    â€œBuddy up. The nearest one is right across the museum. You have ten minutes. If you’re not aboard . . .” She let the missing words hang in the air.
    I wondered what they did to recruits absent without leave here on the moon. The Accordance owned it outright, now. It didn’t belong to humans anymore, even though they could see Tranquility City’s lights from Earth.
    Humans hadn’t been using the planets and their moons, the Accordance had noted. It was better they be developed by a civilization actually able to do so. It would happen anyway. That was the stick. The carrot was the offer to keep autonomy by signing off.
    On Earth, humans still demanded the right to run them­selves directly despite occupation, and would cause trouble to keep that. Here? The Accordance could do anything they wanted.
    Be careful up here, I thought. Make it out the other side.
    â€œWhere’s the museum, instructor?” Keiko asked.
    She pointed between the restaurants across from us. Hand on shoulder, Keiko and I crossed the hundred yards of common area.
    The Apollo Cultural Heritage Preservation Site. The pictures I’d seen had never shown it surrounded by a pair of restaurants filled with tired-looking lunar miners in overalls.
    On the other side of the translucent doors I saw a familiar boxy shape.
    Keiko made a strangled sound. “Bathrooms, here we go.” Right outside the museum, between the nearest restaurant and the museum.
    â€œI’m going to let go of your shoulder now,” I said.
    â€œYeah, whatever.” He scurried inside, and I heard a stall bang shut.
    And just on the other side of the wall from where he squatted, something that took humanity decades to create gathered dust in an exhibit. The pinnacle of achievement in outer space. The farthest a human had ever gone from our world. The Apollo Lunar Module descent stage.
    The Accordance had crossed stars. We had made it to the moon.
    Keiko clamped his hand on my shoulder and I yelped. “You look deep in thought,” he said.
    â€œYeah, well.”
    We crossed back. “What were you thinking so hard on? How much we’re going to kick ass at training camp?”
    I opened my mouth to answer, but the response never came. A wave of hot energy smacked into the back of my head with a roar. The explosion came a split second later. Or, at least, my awareness of it did.
    Things spun around me until my head smacked into the steel-and-concrete ground.
    Everything faded. I lay still, blinking and looking at the world askew.
    The roar hadn’t stopped. It kept thundering on. A wind rushed past me up toward the ceiling. I wiped blood on my sleeves and twisted around. “Keiko?” I croaked.
    People ran past us, trying to get through the ten-foot-thick doors that trundled toward each other to seal off the human section. They dodged chunks of metal and dirty moon concrete and just barely slid through.
    A flurry of sharp dust whipped around, stinging my throat as I tried to pull in a deep breath.
    â€œRecruits: on board, now!” an instructor shouted. “In, in, in!”
    â€œKeiko!” I staggered back in the direction I’d been tossed from and away from the airlock where the instructor stood. “Keiko.”
    â€œRecruit!”
    I glanced back. No gray shapes stood in line anymore. They’d all boarded. Gotten safely inside the craft that would take us to our training camp. If I ran there, I might make it in. They would have to shut the door soon, to stop losing air.
    Because that was what