Devastation Class

by Glen Zipper

“I have to ask you to step away.”

  “It’s fine. I just need to see it for a minute,” said Viv, walking right past Saad.

  “I said you’re not authorized, cadet,” Saad answered, grabbing her by the wrist. “And if you take another step toward that Interceptor, your mother can come collect you from the brig.”

  I noticed Viv’s fingers begin to quiver. A sure sign things were about to escalate.

  “Saad, is it?” I interjected.

  “Yes, cadet.”

  I motioned over to the side.

  “Can you and I . . . ?”

  Saad nodded and followed me until we were a few feet away from where Viv was standing.

  “She’s been waiting to see that thing for eight years,” I said quietly to Saad.

  “I have my orders.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m just asking for a little compassion here.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “Look at her. Put yourself in her shoes.”

  Viv remained frozen in the same spot, her focus on the ship unbroken. I didn’t need to explain anything to Saad. Everyone knew the story behind that Interceptor.

  I saw a crack in Saad’s demeanor. “Don’t put this on me, man,” she said. “I’m just doing my job.”

  “Did you have anyone aboard the New Jersey?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  “No one’s saying you don’t care, but you can’t possibly understand.”

  Exhaling in frustration, she craned her neck to see if the other NCOs were watching us.

  “Give us two minutes. Two minutes is all we need,” I persisted.

  Viv looked over at us for a verdict. She made direct eye contact with Saad.

  “Two minutes,” I repeated.

  “One minute,” Saad reluctantly conceded. “Do not go inside. Do not touch anything. Anything. Are we clear?”

  “Crystal. Thank you.”

  I gave Viv the thumbs-up, and she sprinted right for the Interceptor. I followed closely behind.

  The moment I got a clean look at the ship, she took my breath away. At thirty meters long, with a wingspan of half that, the flat black Interceptor was undeniably a bird of prey. With the cockpit camouflaged, bladelike chines ran aft from the needle-sharp nose along the sides of the gracefully sloped forebody, contributing to its superior aerodynamics in atmosphere. The primary thrusters and armaments burst outward from its fuselage, casting an ominous, jagged shadow over where we stood.

  Viv slowly walked along the length of it, tracing her fingers across its razor-sharp lines. Despite Saad’s admonishment, I wasn’t going to tell her she couldn’t touch it. I knew she needed to.

  Battle scars tattooed the fuselage. The ship looked angry. Vengeful, even. I noticed what first appeared to be more battle damage on its tail, but upon closer inspection it seemed like a deliberate yet hasty attempt to laser-blast away the New Jersey’s designation flag.

  “You see that?” I asked Viv.

  “See what?”

  “The tail.”

  Viv spun around the back of the vessel and checked it out for herself.

  “Why would anyone do that? There are a hundred other ways to identify where she came from. There’s no practical purpose.”

  “Maybe it was emotional. Flags hold meaning to people. Maybe whoever did it—”

  “Didn’t want to remember,” Viv finished.

  “You all right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Viv replied, stepping back to take it all in. I could see some of the weight had already lifted off her.

  “Ready to go?”

  “Right behind you.”

  I waited, but she didn’t move. “You coming?”

  “I want to talk to the pilot,” she said, her eyes still locked on the Interceptor.

  “That’s gonna be harder. Once he’s transferred to the California, they’re gonna stash him in the brig.”

  “Any ideas for how I might get past the guards when they do?”

  “Honestly, no. Not really. Not yet, anyway.”

  Viv turned. Her intensity seemed to have cooled a bit. There may have even been a hint of a smile. “Not yet.”

  CHAPTER 10

  VIV

  TWO MINUTES LATE FOR FIFTH BLOCK, JD and I quietly slid into our seats next to Bix. Surrounded by students, our cluster of blue uniforms only served to further disconnect us from our civilian shipmates. There were seventy-seven of them on the California, and only seven of us, so, of course, we stuck out like sore thumbs.

  Seven cadets wasn’t a random number. It corresponded to the number of bridge officers on every Alliance ship during peacetime. One for each station, including the captain.

  For every Explorers Program, thousands of candidates competed intensely for seven spots on usually no more than three Alliance ships. Our class’s year had three participating vessels—the California, the Estonia, and the Normandy—and the competition had been typically fierce. Eight thousand candidates for twenty-one slots.

  The competition included every type of testing you could imagine, with a heavy concentration on mathematics, advanced sciences, and critical analysis. Combined with extensive mind puzzles to evaluate your integrative reasoning, logic, and cognitive strengths and weaknesses, the tests were designed to separate those who knew how to study from those who knew how to think. If you had the brainpower to get past all that, you were just getting started.

  Next came the punishing long days and short nights of boot camp. Day one, our drill sergeants greeted us with the ominous but undeniably accurate “Welcome to the Suck.” Reveille came every day at 0430. Wake up, enjoy your runny egg PRM, and set off on a five-kilometer run. And that was just the beginning. In eight weeks there were enough push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups to last a lifetime, topped off with daily hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, flight readiness, and zero-gravity training. You were physically and emotionally spent by dusk, if you even made it that far.

  There was a 50 percent dropout rate over the first seven weeks. The remaining number of candidates was cut in half again in the eighth week, when you had to get past the Crucible: the final test in candidate training, representing the culmination of all the skills and knowledge we cadets were expected to possess. It included a total of forty-eight kilometers of marching, grueling combat situation simulations, and a serious deprivation of both food and sleep. Anytime a student aboard the California was foolish enough to make a crack about Bix’s size, I took great pleasure in reminding them that he had, in fact, survived the Crucible. That tended to shut them up real quick.

  Of course, getting past all of the academic requirements, mind puzzles, boot camp, and the Crucible guaranteed you absolutely squat. From there you were submitted to special skills qualifiers for Command, Piloting, Communications, Navigation, Analytics, Engineering, and Medical. Candidates who failed to show a special aptitude for at least one of the seven disciplines were out of luck.

  After all that there was yet another hurdle to clear, one that was impossible to prepare, study, or train for—the Psych Ops testing. They never even showed you the results. You just submitted to the testing and waited to see if you had been selected. And if you were, it meant you were the best of the best. The elite.

  If you didn’t want to put yourself through the torture required to become a cadet, you could always apply to the Explorers Program as a student. The student requirements were almost exclusively academic, with the selection process weighted heavily toward diversity. If you were a cadet candidate who made it past the Crucible and skills qualifiers but didn’t make the final cut, you were offered an automatic student invitation. Not a lot of people took advantage of those automatic bids because of how much pride it required them to swallow. Julian was one of the few who had.

  If your mother or father was an active Alliance officer, that made you a Legacy. Despite some people whining about special Legacy privileges, the only thing the designation really helped with w
as your assignment requests. No doubt, this explained how JD and I managed to be assigned to the flagship together. If anyone wanted to throw stones at us for that, I didn’t really care. I knew we belonged on the California regardless of who our parents were.

  After everything we had been put through to become cadets, it was nearly impossible to step aboard the ship without a little bit of a chip on our shoulders. That was strike one against us with the students. Strike two was probably the handful of privileges we had that they did not. Access to certain restricted areas. Fewer course requirements. A slightly later curfew. All of it well earned. Not only because of everything we had endured to qualify as cadets, but also because of all the other responsibilities we were burdened with that they were not. Things like bridge duty, utility and maintenance details, and Command Ops training. If we weren’t in one of our courses, sleeping, or eating, most of our time was spoken for with one obligation or another.

  Strike three was definitely that we were entrusted with a measure of authority over the students. Explorers missions only took place on ships embarking upon low-priority, routine diplomatic or transport missions. These low-priority missions required much smaller complements—usually not more than a skeleton crew of NCOs, who were housed separately on their own deck. Without much adult supervision for students on the lower decks, the command staff trusted us to make sure that keeping general order never became their headache.

  Our authority had its perks, but the trade-off was that if a student’s behavior ever required the attention of an officer, we had failed—which, putting it mildly, was frowned upon by the captain. So sometimes we had to be tough with the students to avoid those kinds of situations. Sure, they might have resented it, but the bottom line for us was it was always better to have a cranky student than a cranky captain.

  I looked around me. What we’d come to know as a lecture room didn’t really look like a lecture room or any other kind of classroom: thick bulkhead walls with crisscrossing latticed support girders and a floor of interlocked mesh alloy plates with bright, colorful wires easily visible beneath them. This room, like many others on the California, was a retrofit. Yes, there were desks. And a Visioslate. But it was never intended for us. It was originally an ammunition locker. Or Alliance infantry barracks. Or protein rations cold storage. It was hard to tell. Without a war to fight, the mighty California wasn’t much more than a whole lot of empty space. But it was home for now. Our empty space.

  Bix leaned intently forward on his elbows as Professor Jones wrote a ridiculously long, complicated equation on the Visioslate. JD doodled on his desk’s console. I tried to focus on the equation, but my mind drifted back to the Interceptor and its pilot.

  Upon completing the equation, Professor Jones tapped the Visioslate with her finger, and a glowing blue star appeared over the numerical string. “This equation is your road map to the chain reaction in a blue giant star. Something incredibly beautiful, but also something incredibly complex.”

  The same equation and glowing blue star on the Visioslate appeared on each of our consoles. I glanced down and attempted to make sense of it all, but all the numbers and symbols did was make my head hurt. And then Bix laughed out loud. Not good. We were supposed to be the ones setting an example.

  I kicked his chair, but it was too late. In a fraction of a second, Professor Jones dematerialized from the front of the room and rematerialized right next to Bix. All Preceptor Synths, like Jones and Sigvaatsan, were adept at that little trick. It seemed to startle Bix even though he’d fallen victim to it many times before. I sat up a little straighter. I didn’t want to appear distracted and have her materialize by my side next.

  Bix’s posture slumped as “Professor Jones” looked down at him. “Cadet Bixby, do you care to share what you find so amusing?”

  Even though she was little more than an electromagnetic projection of ones and zeroes, she still managed to convey the intimidation factor of a real professor. “Not really,” he replied.

  “No, please. Share your wisdom with us,” Professor Jones insisted.

  Bix looked in JD’s direction, seeking his approval. Bix wasn’t as brave as he was brilliant, but he always seemed to find the courage he needed when JD had his back. They had a big brother–little brother dynamic. It was endearing.

  JD nodded reassuringly at Bix. Watching their subtle interaction made me smile.

  Bix shrugged and stood up. “Well, it’s just that you’re overthinking it.”

  “Overthinking it?” Professor Jones replied.

  “Yeah. We’re always trying to impose our confusion upon nature. Nature is simple,” Bix explained, gesturing toward the mathematical statement on the Visioslate. “Nature doesn’t need all that . . . stuff.”

  “Would you care to enlighten us?”

  “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “By all means,” the Synth demanded.

  JD and I shared a knowing look, proudly anticipating what would come next.

  Bix reluctantly made his way to the front of the room. Sweeping his hand across the Visioslate, he erased two-thirds of the equation. The glowing blue star disappeared. He replaced the original equation with a much simpler one and tapped the surface with a finger. The blue star immediately reappeared.

  “Yep,” Bix softly muttered to himself in satisfaction.

  Professor Jones materialized next to him and silently processed his simple mathematical genius as if frozen before it. This was not an uncommon occurrence—his outsmarting a Synth to the point of freezing its program.

  Then, just as I prepared to get up and reboot her, she returned to operational status. A slight flicker of her image told me she was receiving new data.

  “Cadet Marshall,” she called out, “please report to Gallipoli Station. You will be issued a Blue Pass at Receiving. You’ve been summoned by the captain.”

  “Well,” said Bix as we walked together down the Gamma Deck passageway without JD, “I guess that was about the Blink Drill this morning.”

  The day’s blocks concluded, a constant flow of students shuffled past us in either direction. I gestured with my hand for Bix to keep his voice down.

  “Yep, probably,” I answered, trying not to let on how concerned I was. “The captain will get his pound of flesh, and then it’ll be done.”

  “Really? How long do you think he’s going to keep tolerating this?”

  “For a while. It’s his son,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I believed he’d be so lenient.

  “Well, I for one am very concerned. He’s getting worse.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Bix. Talk is dangerous. These things take on a life of their own. We should stop talking and deal with it. Ourselves.”

  “I’ve already tried that. You have too.”

  “We haven’t tried hard enough. We’ve both been afraid of pushing too hard. Of alienating him. We need to let go of that. Take the gloves off. We can—”

  I was interrupted by a small commotion coming from just around the bend of Gamma Deck’s central junction. First it was a muddle. Then I heard the voices of two Alliance MPs barking at students to clear a path.

  And then the MPs emerged in front of us. Between them, a prisoner, his hands cuffed in front of him. The Interceptor’s pilot. It had to be. He couldn’t have been a day over twenty-five, although with his shaggy hair, patchy beard, and general scruffiness, he could’ve passed for older. As he approached, I zeroed in on his eyes. They were cerulean blue, but I recognized something darker lurking beneath.

  Walking past me, he smiled, and I inexplicably flinched. Then, as he disappeared down the passageway, he looked back at me, seemingly tickled by my reaction. Having carried so much dread in my expectations, it was almost a relief to be disarmed by the pilot’s whimsy. He was not at all what I had expected. Not even close.

  “So that’s our bad guy?” Bix quipped skeptically.

  “We don’t kno
w what he is yet,” I replied. “But one way or another, I’m going to find out.”

  CHAPTER 11

  JD

  THE OFFICERS’ MESS ON GALLIPOLI WAS AT least three times the size of the one on the California. Like Alliance regiments aligned in tight formation, at least sixty dining tables sat empty in perfectly even rows. Similar to the one on the California, a long observation window traversed the length of the room, with an unfettered view of gleaming stars and distant worlds. The slightest sound, even the squeaking of my boot against the leg of my chair, seemed to echo from every wall. The room made me feel small.

  I’m sure that’s exactly what my father wanted.

  He was ten minutes late. Undoubtedly, that was intentional too. He wanted me to sit there alone, agonizing over my fate. By the time he arrived, I’d be so anxious and inside my head that there’d be no arguing. He’d dole out my punishment, and I’d take my licks without protest or complaint.

  Finally, a door slid open at the far end of the mess, and there he stood. He took a moment to regard me with some rehearsed disappointment before marching toward where I was seated. When he sat opposite me, he didn’t offer the slightest acknowledgment. Not a smile. Not a nod. Nothing. Instead he slapped a rigid file folder down on the table and slowly leafed through its contents. All my disciplinary reports, including Gentry’s latest.

  Paper. A nice touch. It added to the ceremony of my punishment ritual. I watched as he licked his fingers and turned each page slowly, his head down, shaking ever so slightly in frustration. I focused on the deep graying at his temples.

  Eventually he looked up and leaned forward. It was hard to escape the metaphor of the wide shadow his broad shoulders cast over me. “I’m finding it difficult not to be insulted.”

  “Insulted? Insulted by what?”

  “That you can sit there across from me, look me in the eyes, and honestly believe I don’t know exactly what you’re up to.”

  “Dad, I . . .”

  The creases in my father’s forehead scrunched more tightly together. “Are you having trouble seeing my uniform from where you’re sitting, Cadet Marshall?”