7

“Listen up!” drill instructors both alien and human shouted at us as we crowded together down on the cold morning beach. “You will bring nothing with you. You will leave all personal objects behind on this beach before getting inside transport craft.”

Hoppers flew in over the Long Island Sound. They kicked up saltwater spray as they overflew the beach, and then dropped down to pick up recruits at the front of the line.

“Devlin!”

Rakwon and Cee Cee broke out of line, like many of us milling around the back, to say good-bye. It had been only a few days, and yet it felt like a graduation of some kind as we quickly hugged each other. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“Peacekeeper forces,” Rakwon said. “Manhattan. If I keep in line, in a few years I could get a promotion.”

“Peacekeeper? They gave me a whole big story about being desperate for soldiers in the CPF.”

Rakwon shrugged. “They were talking about the ‘repacification’ process. We’ve been out of the news loop here all week. I think there are more riots or something. Well, at least I’ll get to see my family on weekends. I can take a message to your family for you, if you want.”

“No.” They didn’t want to hear from me. “What about you, Cee Cee?”

“Recruits: in line!” an instructor shouted.

“Orbital counterforces. Drones and links,” Cee Cee shouted as she ran back to her place. “I might even get to fly a Stingray . . . if they pass the human pilots emergency authorization act.”

“Good luck,” Rakwon said as he ambled quickly away.

“No!” an all-too-familiar voice screamed from behind us all. We turned to see Ken dragged out through the doors and thrown into the sand. He staggered to his feet, lurching back toward the struthiform instructors that had thrown him out. His voice broke with emotion as he screamed, “You can’t do this. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be! I’m from a Landed Family! I was born, and trained, to be an officer. Do you even know how much was invested in me?”

The nearest struthiform slapped him with the back of a feathery hand. Ken fell awkwardly into the sand. “Get in line,” the alien snapped.

Ken crawled on his hands and knees, nose dripping blood down onto the sand. In just a single morning he’d fallen a long way from being the strutting leader of his instant crew. He crawled into line behind me, and someone helped him to his feet.

He looked at me with bruised eyes and a swelling lip. “You too?” he asked numbly.

“Light infantry,” I confirmed, not quite sure whether I should enjoy his humiliation or hate the aliens that had backhanded him so casually. “I’m going to Icarus.”

I wanted to ask if he was okay. But he very obviously wasn’t. It was a stupid thing to want to ask. I didn’t bother.

Ken swallowed. “You know what happens to human infantry.”

“What?”

“We die.”

+  +  +  +

The hoppers landed us at the flowerlike structures of the new Lakita Singh Air and Space Port. Instructors pushed and herded us into a launch terminal, then yelled at us some more.

“This is your buddy,” a human instructor said. He shoved a nervous recruit at me. “Put your hand on your buddy’s shoulder. Hold tight. Now, you are responsible for your buddy. Anything happens to your buddy, it’ll happen to you. When I ask you where your buddy is, you won’t tell me, because you’ll be holding your buddy’s shoulder and it’ll be so obvious where he is, you won’t have to say anything. Got it?”

I nodded.

The instructor shook his head, like my father when trying to teach me some complex piece of math that I just couldn’t quite get the first time around. “You don’t nod. You answer with a ‘yes’ and an ‘instructor’ in there, son. The Hamptons may be run by aliens that don’t allow us to use ‘sir,’ but we can work around that. You’re still CPF. And it’ll be all-human CPF for you lot. So my rules apply. Let’s try that again: got it?”

“Yes . . . instructor!” I fumbled. His eyes narrowed, then he nodded and moved on to the next recruit.

“What’s your name?” my shoulder buddy asked. We were standing awkwardly facing each other, an arm each on a shoulder, like at a dance.

“Devlin. You?”

“Keiko.”

We’d been lined up against the walls of the terminal. This was a wing for launches headed for orbit, not flights around the world. Since the occupation, the Accordance had dis­mantled most of the smaller airline hubs in favor of incredibly high-speed rail. But international flights and flights to space were still served.

LSP had once been something else, before the aliens had deemed it unusable and demolished it. Another set of letters. “At least,” my father had told me, “they kept a human name on the port.”

Most of the humans in the port flaunted expensive suits and waited in glassed-off areas with subdued lighting. They sat on lounge chairs where attendants came by to take their orders. We watched them eat, laugh, and sashay around.

Someone pushed a pink dog in a stroller back and forth across the waiting area, cooing at it, feeding it tiny snacks.

The hushed, quiet space behind that glass could have been mine. I could have been mixing with those upper-class civilians, enjoying finger food and traveling the world. If I hadn’t thrown away my usefulness as a propaganda tool.

Now . . . I rubbed my short hair.

What was taking so long? We’d been just sitting here for twenty minutes, hands on shoulders, bored.

“Look at that,” Keiko said with wonder in his voice. “I saw her get hauled off for beating a kid up. You saw that, right?”

I leaned far forward. At the very end of the line the girl with silver eyes and still-purple hair sat on the ground as two human instructors conferred over her.

“Smell that,” I said, my attention drifting across the hall as my stomach growled.

For those in a hurry, a Brooklyn brownstone had been pulled apart, brick by brick, and painstakingly reassembled in the terminal. And on the steps, in front of it, an “authentic” food cart sold hot dogs and cheeseburgers.

“Did you get a chance to eat before getting shoved out to the beach?” Keiko asked.

“No,” I said. “Look, we’re about to be shot off to who the hell knows where. We’ve been drinking balls of juice in round slime containers. Because it’s optimal and easy to feed us that way. This might be our last chance to eat something real for a long, long time.”

“We have to stay put,” Keiko said. “They’ll kill us. . . .”

I looked down the line. The instructors were still focused on paperwork and the purple-haired girl. “Last chance,” I hissed. “Even if I get in trouble: It’ll be all on me. I promise, it’ll be worth it.”

Recruits on either side had been listening in. “Just grab my shoulder when he goes,” someone suggested.

“How you gonna pay?” someone else asked.

I glanced back down the line. The instructors had their backs to me. I let go of Keiko.

“Shit, man, don’t do this,” he whined.

I lit out away from the group, quickly, just to get distance. Then I walked casually over. “Hey,” I called out.

The older lady at the cart looked startled. Her blue eyes darted back and forth. “I can’t help you run, son,” she hissed. “It’s humans-only in this terminal anyway, you can’t go anywhere without passing a checkpoint.”

“No,” I spread my hands. “This is our last chance to get any real food. Before . . .”

She let out a deep breath.

“Look, my father’s name is Thomas Hart. I don’t have any way to pay on me, they took everything away, but if you contact him, he’ll . . .”

“What do you want?” she asked quickly. She just wanted to get rid of me, I realized.

“Anything I can carry,” I said quickly. She slid me a box of doughnuts and five hot dogs on a cardboard tray. I eased back across into the line.

“Holy shit, holy shit,” Keiko hissed as I slid back into line. “Holy shit.”

“Come on. Pass these along. Hurry up! Drop the box on the floor when we’re done, put a doughnut in your pocket, a hot dog in the other.” I stuffed my hot dog into my mouth.

Oh man. Never had street food tasted . . . So. Fucking. Good.

“Move on up!” the instructors shouted, turning around, their paperwork done. Actually, no, I realized: A struthiform instructor had arrived. The human instructors had been waiting for the real leadership to show up.

The doughnut scraped sugar on the outside of my pocket, but I wiped it off best I could.

“Let’s go! Keep it moving! Get aboard the jumpship.” I chewed my hot dog surreptitiously as I passed the instructors waving us through down to our new transport.

The wedge-shaped jumpship’s blistered and pockmarked skin, which I’d glimpsed near the docking tube, meant it had seen quite a few reentries. There were no portholes, no screens. Just ribbed metal hull and foam seats for us. Two carapoid pilots sat behind a bulkhead and door, however. They shut it as we entered.

“Buckle in. You should know how to use a buckle. So get it done already! You, sit. Sit there. With your buddy.”

Minutes later the ship rose through the air. I could feel engine pods under our feet, and then even heavier Accordance engines kicking on behind us. This was no hopper. The engines behind us growled with energy and shoved us back into our seats. Manhattan’s Accordance-spired skyline fell away as we tilted toward the clouds and flew up.

With alacrity. The pressure of acceleration continued to press on my chest. Whenever I thought the squeezing had to stop, it continued to press harder.

Until, with a gasp, it went away.

Weightlessness. A big smile grew on my face, despite myself. There were no portholes, but I knew we were in orbit. I knew that from here, if I could see anything, I’d be looking down at the continents and the curve of the Earth.

“What the fuck is this?” an instructor asked, unbuckling herself to rise up into the air to grab at something.

It was a doughnut, trailing sugar glaze in the air.

“What is unauthorized food doing on my transport?” the instructor shouted. Her ponytailed hair bobbed behind her as she looked around. “Who did this?”

She only got a series of blank looks from my row.

Another instructor bounced up into the air. “Don’t anyone unbuckle. We’re going to search you. . . .”

Ken raised a hand. “Instructor: I know!”

“Rat motherfucker,” I hissed. I barely had time to say even that. One very angry instructor’s face was right up in mine as she positioned herself in the air next to me.

Then the other.

The yelling began, and behind them, Ken held up a doughnut of his own and took a bite with a big smile.

It looked like his natural state of asshole had come back online.