by Glen Zipper
The Xax, a bio-hacked humanoid race, had dispensed with their need for mouths and survived by absorbing free-roaming ambient energy from almost any source in their environment. If they weren’t unsettling enough to look at to begin with, the bulky universal speech synthesizers sharply protruding from their throats really made you want to avoid eye contact.
Compared to the Xax, the Aeson were downright cuddly. An amalgam of humanoid and feline physiognomy, each had light orange skin with an intricate network of black and white stripes, complimented by bright yellow eyes. Instead of speaking, the Aeson communicated through a relatively simple series of hand gestures. Thanks to already being in my third unit of Off-World Linguistics, I was almost fluent enough to engage in Aeson conversation.
More often than not we referred to the Genuvians as the “Grays,” a reference dating all the way back to the mid-twentieth century of our history when they made their first clandestine visits to Earth. Also humanoid, rarely taller than a meter, and, of course, gray, they had unusually large heads in proportion to their bodies, no ears or noses, very small mouths, and large, opaque black eyes with no irises or pupils.
The Genuvians’ preferred means of communication was telepathy, but being as telepathy caused excruciating headaches in humans, they had embarked upon the slow process of learning Earth’s many languages. Unfortunately, as they had no written or verbal language of their own, we were unable to reciprocate the gesture. Or maybe not so unfortunately. It was one less language for me to learn.
While none of these alien civilizations had directly intervened in our war with the Kastazi, all had provided us with valuable intelligence and passive support. Whatever their true motivation—whether it had been a moral imperative to fight against tyranny or just a fear of the Kastazi—the risks they had taken on our behalf had earned them not only our trust but also our loyalty. After the war we were proud to have made them the Alliance’s first three extraterrestrial members.
In the years prior, the idea of these worlds joining the Alliance would have been unthinkable. Relative to the Xax, the Aeson, and the Genuvians, we were still an inferior civilization, but war had accelerated great leaps in our scientific and technological advancement—transforming us into a formidable and valuable ally.
As I rounded the last corner toward my destination, I finally noticed the absence of all the California’s unique sounds and vibrations. After three months on the ship, it was a strange feeling to so abruptly acclimate to such different surroundings. By the time I’d arrived at my mother’s quarters I was ready to enjoy the comfort of something familiar.
The moment I stepped inside, I knew something was wrong. My mother always looked the same in uniform. The Alliance’s traditional dark blue had a way of altering her gentle features into something more formidable. Every soft corner of her face would narrow into something sharper. Her posture would stiffen as if constantly poised to salute. But her typical transformation was conspicuously absent. She just looked like my mom.
“What is it?” I blurted out.
“Ditto, sit down,” she answered, gesturing to a couch.
I sat, settling deeply into its cushions. I had forgotten what it felt like to sit on anything so soft. My mother pulled up a chair opposite me and rested her hands on mine. The reassuring gesture only made me more nervous.
“At 0600 this morning, a Scouter responded to a distress signal just outside the Outer Perimeter. An adrift vessel. Its fuel cells were severely damaged in a firefight.”
“Another smuggler’s skirmish.”
“Yes, probably. But that’s irrelevant. I called for you because of the ship.” She squeezed my hands. “It’s the missing Interceptor from the UAS New Jersey.”
My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. Two years before the war ended, the New Jersey was destroyed by an Interceptor stolen from its own hangar. Six hundred fifty-three souls died that day. One of them was my father.
There were no survivors who could tell us what had happened. The little we knew had been pieced together from the New Jersey’s final transmitted data and sensor logs. The most accepted theory was that a Kastazi sympathizer had perpetrated the attack. Someone who felt the walls closing in on them.
Eight years had passed, and the demise of the New Jersey remained the most horrifying enigma in Alliance history. Every day I prayed that whoever had done it would be found and brought to justice.
Sometimes I fantasized about finding them myself, but I never really thought through what I’d do if I actually did find them. Pull out their fingernails? Shoot them with a pulse pistol? Launch them out an air lock? It was ridiculous, but somehow the fantasy was enough. I think maybe it made me feel less powerless.
“Is the pilot still alive?” I asked.
“Yes, but he can’t be who we’ve been looking for.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s too young. He couldn’t have been there.”
“How young?”
“Just a few years older than you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. How could he have gotten his hands on an Interceptor?”
“He claims he traded for it.”
“I don’t buy that.”
“Nor do I, but he’s sticking to his story.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“He stopped talking once we made it clear we intended to take him and the Interceptor with us to Wolf 1061c. We’ve already loaded his ship onto the California. As soon as we’re done processing him, we’ll transfer him aboard too.”
“What about the Interceptor’s computers? There’s got to be something there.”
“He wiped them before we towed him in, but once we get to 1061c our engineers will rip her apart and go over every last scrap and circuit. If there’s something to find, we’ll find it.”
“That’s not good enough. You’ve got to push the guy harder.”
“It’s not my place. We need to let the Alliance investigators do their job.”
“Mom, please don’t leave this to someone else. This is personal for us.”
“Precisely the reason it’s inappropriate for me to be involved in the investigation.”
“I can’t believe this! What if they stash him away in some secret prison, never to be heard from again? We’ll never learn anything!”
“You’re being melodramatic.”
I lost my father when I was only ten. I had so few memories of him, all of them probably idealized over the years. In my mind he was perfect. The personification of everything good in the world. I wanted so badly to find someone to blame for taking him away from us. It was hard not to be melodramatic.
“But Mom—”
“Breathe, Ditto. Breathe,” she said calmly, again squeezing my hands.
It may have annoyed me, but it worked. As it always did.
A few deep breaths and some clarity returned.
The discovery of the Interceptor had to be just as upsetting for my mother. I lost my father, but she lost the man she had loved for half her life. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to . . .”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she said, letting go of my hands. “You should get back to the California for lunch. Please don’t say anything about this to anyone. Until we have Captain Marshall’s authorization, it needs to stay confidential.”
I stood and flattened the creases in my uniform. “Okay.”
My mother paused and tilted her head at me, no doubt trying to determine if my wheels were still spinning. Which, of course, they were.
“One more thing before you go,” she said. “We need to talk about this morning’s Blink Drill.”
“Gentry reported JD.”
“He reported you.”
Reported me?
“I didn’t do anything.”
“John was insubordinate. And so were you.”
“I was trying to help.”
“You escalated the situation.”
“No. I defused it before JD c
ould make it worse.”
“He’s risking his future, Ditto. I don’t want him risking yours as well.”
“I’ve worked too hard to get here, Mom. I’m not going to let anyone take this away from me. Not even JD.”
Mom paused, her mother’s intuition scanning me like a laser.
“I really wish I could believe you.”
She was right to doubt me. No matter the stakes or consequences, I could never turn my back on JD. If it ever came down to it, she probably couldn’t either. JD was family.
Captain Marshall and my mom had climbed the Alliance ranks together, their assignments bouncing us from one place to the next. The demands of their duties kept quality time in short supply, so each of our families kind of acted as a surrogate for the other. It was probably fair to say that in the days before the war, JD and I spent as many nights under each other’s roof and at each other’s dinner table as we did our own. “Parenting by proxy” is what my mom used to call it.
The war changed all that. Once the fighting got bad, almost everyone shipped off to the front—my dad aboard the New Jersey and my mom and Captain Marshall aboard the California. The only constant in our lives was JD’s mom, a civilian who stayed behind to care for us both at Camp Jemison.
One day before my ninth birthday, a Kastazi Striker regimen ambushed Camp Jemison. JD was caught in an explosion and nearly died. I got shipped off to the Farragut School for Girls and Boys while he was still clinging to life in the hospital. I begged the Farragut proctors to let me visit him or, at the very least, send a com. They always refused.
Just when I thought I might never see him again, JD arrived at Farragut. His mother had been killed. At the time I didn’t know how. Ten months had passed since I had last seen him, and he wasn’t at all the JD I remembered. Everything about him felt awkward. It was as though he was starting from scratch, slowly learning to be himself all over again. After everything he had been through, it wasn’t difficult to understand why.
I never tried to force our friendship back to where it used to be. Instead, I just waited and made sure he knew I was there for him. About a year after he arrived, the New Jersey was destroyed, killing my father and everyone else aboard. JD held my hand for hours as I cried. It was the first time he had touched me since before we’d been separated. It was then that I knew he had finally turned a corner.
Two years after my father died, the Kastazi found Farragut. I had almost no memory of that day. Maybe because it was just too painful to carry with me. One thing I would never forget, though: JD running through a barrage of Kastazi Eradicator fire to activate a perimeter defense grid. He saved my life and the lives of at least twenty other students. He was twelve.
I leaned in and kissed my mom’s cheek.
“Everything’s going to be okay. I’m going to be okay.”
She took my face in her hands and smiled warmly. “Okay. Almost happy birthday.”
I smiled back but said nothing. I was still fixated on the Interceptor and its pilot. I rarely interpreted anything as a “sign,” but it felt like my father might have brought me a birthday gift—an answer to the mystery that had been haunting me since the day he died.
CHAPTER 6
LIKO
I USUALLY SPENT MY LUNCH BLOCKS IN the ship’s library. No one really wanted to sit with me in the mess anyway, and besides, I enjoyed being alone with the library’s Historical Archive Terminal. One of the most exhaustive receptacles of mankind’s accumulated knowledge, the HAT indexed a nearly limitless database of books, journals, and other compendiums of knowledge from throughout our history.
Each day I spent countless hours losing myself in the details of the past. Its triumphs and tragedies. Its heroes and villains. Its discoveries and disappointments. They all offered me something the California and its complement could not: distraction and companionship.
As I spent more time with the HAT, my curiosity drove me to peek behind its curtain, and when I did, I discovered something rather remarkable. It turned out the HAT wasn’t a dedicated mainframe, as I had presumed. Rather, its software architecture pulled memory and bandwidth from almost every noncritical system on the ship.
It made sense once I really thought about it. As the HAT contained more data than every library in the history of mankind combined, it required a tremendous amount of processing power to function properly. The unintentional, or perhaps overlooked, consequence of this architecture, however, were the two security vulnerabilities it created.
In pulling memory and bandwidth from noncritical systems, the HAT also opened a backdoor channel to them. That meant anyone could use the HAT to send and receive messages through the internal communications server without going through Sentinel, the ship’s central computer. As I had no need to communicate with anyone in secret, this vulnerability held no utility for me.
I did, on the other hand, have a use for the architecture’s second vulnerability, the reciprocative data flow that gave me access to one of the California’s lowest-priority systems—the personal accounts of every student and cadet on the ship. I was tired of being bullied, and I wanted to know once and for all what everyone was saying about me behind my back. Regrettably, the moment I exploited the vulnerability, I had the karmic misfortune of crossing paths with Julian Lorde.
The irony was that he was snooping himself. Trying to hack into his girlfriend’s account for some childish reason. His skills being as cursory as they were, he inadvertently tripped a system-wide security firewall. I had to kill it quickly, or both of our breaches would’ve been logged. Problem was I could only do so from the trigger site—his personal console.
My only choice was to go to him and fess up. We were both in the wrong, so I thought it would be safe. Mutually assured destruction and all that. But Lorde surprised me. He saw it as an opportunity.
“We’re not the same, Chen,” he said. “If I get caught, I’ll be guilty of being a jealous boyfriend. If you get caught . . . my goodness. The son of an Axis operative rummaging through the personal accounts of everyone on the lower decks? How might that be interpreted?”
He was right. A charming guy like him, someone everybody liked, he could probably talk his way out of just about anything. Me on the other hand . . .
Maybe I should’ve just let the firewall stand. At least it would’ve ended there. But instead I gave in to Lorde’s demands. He quickly figured out there was another low-priority system I could access through the HAT—the Curriculum Database. In exchange for his silence, Lorde had me hack the exams for each of his courses as soon as they posted.
I didn’t understand the allure of cheating. The Explorers Program was supposed to be for students and cadets who wanted to learn, who wanted to be challenged. When I asked Lorde about it, his only response was, “Don’t be so naïve.”
It seemed obvious he wasn’t some mustache-twirling black hat who took pleasure in cutting people off at the knees. Most of the time he behaved like a decent guy. It was only at the intersection of opportunity and self-interest that he seemed to tap into his darker inclinations.
My guess was he was like a lot of people who grew up during the war. In those days almost anything could be justified if it gave you a better chance to survive. But for all its lasting consequences and traumas, the war was over. We lived in a different world, and it was time to let go of that way of thinking. Maybe, like some of the others, he was still struggling to figure that part out.
My nose suddenly twitched in defense to an invasive odor. Lorde’s aftershave. Thanks to its peculiarly sweet bouquet, I could always smell him coming. And as was normally the case, he greeted me with all the affection of a friend.
“Doing well, Mr. Chen?” he asked as he pulled up a chair.
“Day’s not off to the start I was hoping for.”
“Debate Theory?”
“You heard?”
“Vivien told me,” he replied, shaking his head with commiserative disapproval. “Ah, the sad confluence of hatred and stupi
dity. Annalisa is a small-minded bigot. Don’t take such nonsense personally.” It was stunning how he could so completely compartmentalize the fact he was abusing me in an even more despicable way than she had.
I pulled the microdrive from the archive terminal and placed it in his hand. “The new Stellar Cartography and Philosophy exams. They were uploaded last night.”
“Still insisting on microdrives, are we?”
“Would you prefer I sent you the exams unsecured through Sentinel?”
“Right,” Lorde conceded while placing the drive into his pocket. “You sure you don’t want to come to the mess for lunch?”
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, getting up to leave.
I turned my attention back to the terminal to wipe any digital fingerprints I might have left behind.
“Hey, Chen,” Lorde called out from behind me, inspecting the microdrive with a quizzical look on his face. “Why don’t you ever look at these exams for yourself?”
I hesitated to answer, presuming Lorde knew the answer and was just trying to lure me in to help him make a point. Nevertheless, I acquiesced.
“I’m trying to learn something.”
Lorde fussed with his cuticles, avoiding eye contact. “Knowledge is indeed power,” he answered. “But I might argue you’re concentrating on the wrong lesson.”
As he exited the library, the intention of his words sank in. Julian was telling me what he would do if he had people like Annalisa Vaccaro trying to trip him up at every turn. Right and wrong wouldn’t really be part of the equation. To him it was about survival. About taking every possible advantage before someone else who hated him did. As much as that kind of wartime thinking troubled me, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was right. That I was being naïve, just like he said I was.
CHAPTER 7
JD
AS ALWAYS, MY FELLOW CADETS AND I sat together in the California’s mess hall for lunch, our usual table closest to a large observation window with a view of the stars and beyond. Since the ship’s claustrophobic confines had only narrow portholes to gaze out from, a table with a good view was prime real estate.