Devastation Class

by Glen Zipper

  Blindly operating my console, I input a sequence of commands. “Viv, transferring piloting controls to your station. Take us away from Gallipoli.”

  Viv’s console lit up like the Fourth of July, the throttle automatically rising to the level of her dominant hand. “Aye. Go for piloting.”

  She pushed the throttle forward, and three spheres immediately animated on her screen. One each for roll, pitch, and yaw. With polished, exacting movement, she made adjustments to each.

  The engines fired back up, and the California pitched hard to starboard, away from the enemy vessel. We all jerked sideways in our seats.

  I looked to Ohno. “I need more power, and we can’t burn the engines.”

  “I can reroute everything other than life support and defense grids, then try to alternate the plasma relays to keep us cool,” she replied. “I think I can make it work . . . or . . .”

  None of us liked it when Ohno used the word or.

  “Or what?”

  “Or we explode.”

  “Oh no,” Bix lamented, inadvertently invoking her well-earned nickname.

  Ohno entered the necessary commands to adjust the timing and flow of plasma fed to the ship’s nine engines. The California enjoyed a sudden, powerful burst of speed, quickly gaining a few thousand meters’ distance from Gallipoli. The Destroyer pivoted its trajectory to pursue.

  “Bix, prepare to activate the Blink Reactor.”

  Viv swiveled to face me. “What about Gallipoli?”

  “There’s nothing we can do to help them. We have to get out of here. Now.”

  “Our parents . . . All those people . . .”

  I wanted to try something, anything, to save them. But I knew I couldn’t. “It’s too late. We go or we die too.”

  “The reactor’s gone flatline,” Bix interrupted. “Must’ve taken damage in the attack. We can’t Blink. It’s not an option.”

  Weaponless and without any means of escape, there was only one thing left to do. Improvise. Just like we were trained.

  “Viv, put some more distance between us and that Destroyer,” I ordered.

  “Aye,” she confirmed.

  With a hard push of the throttle, the California heaved forward, placing us another few thousand meters ahead of the Destroyer’s pursuit.

  “Ohno, can you give us a shot at HIVE thrusters?”

  “I can give us a good burst, but that’ll be the end of our grids,” she replied.

  Lorde, who had been mute almost throughout, finally spoke up. “A good burst of HIVE thrusters?” he squawked. “The Kastazi can match our HIVE thrusters!”

  “I know. Stand by at targeting.”

  “But we’ve got no weapons!”

  “I said stand by!”

  I turned my attention to Anatoly, who was still attending to Lewis.

  “Leave him,” I ordered. “I need you at Navigation.”

  He reluctantly left the ensign’s side and took a seat at Nav.

  “HIVE thrusters at your ready,” Ohno announced.

  “Viv, stand by for HIVE on my mark,” I directed her.

  “HIVE standing by.”

  The humming buzz of our grids hissed with interference as a volley of hostile firepower narrowly missed our fuselage.

  “Whatever you’re doing, please do it faster,” Bix urged me.

  “Moving as fast as I can,” I replied. “Anatoly, plot in some coordinates.”

  “To where?”

  “Not here!”

  Anatoly pushed a glowing dot on his console up and across both a longitudinal and a latitudinal axis. “Aye. Plotting in coordinates to Omega Seven One.”

  The bridge angled slightly as the California adjusted direction.

  “We still venting plasma from the aft turbines?”

  “Yes,” Bix replied.

  “How long’s my tail?”

  He looked at me, confused.

  “How long is the plasma trail we’re venting?”

  “Oh, um . . .” he mumbled, settling his mind to making a series of increasingly complex calculations. “We’re moving too fast, I can’t give you an exact—”

  “Guess!”

  “I don’t know . . . A thousand meters!”

  “If you’re thinking what I am thinking,” Viv said, “we’re going to have to time it exactly right.”

  “We will,” I answered. “Bix, bring up weapons inventory.”

  “We have no weapons!”

  “Just do it!”

  The weapons cache was indeed empty. Absolutely no pulse torpedoes or plasma armaments of any kind. But the one thing I was expecting to find was still there: the low-yield explosives the California carried to dispatch hazardous interstellar flotsam intersecting her path. “We’ve got sixteen debris charges,” Bix reported. “That’s it.”

  “Only need one,” I replied. “Link the charges to weapons targeting.”

  “Linking charges to targeting.”

  The dim panel in front of Julian powered up and flashed. “Weapons targeting active,” he acknowledged.

  “On my mark, I want you to fire one debris charge directly into the plasma trail. You copy?”

  Lorde gulped as he realized what I was planning to do. “I copy.”

  Anatoly looked nauseous. He obviously had caught on as well. “I’m not sure this is going to work, guys.”

  “It might work,” said Bix.

  “It’s going to work,” Viv tried to assure them both—and also perhaps herself.

  “Well, if it doesn’t,” Ohno chimed in, her bio-reactive tattoos shifting from multicolored hexagons to sharp red and black blades, “it’ll be over quick.”

  I studied the Holoview and counted down: “And in three, two, one—fire charge!”

  “Charge away,” Lorde called out as he launched the projectile.

  We anxiously watched as the small debris charge, no bigger than a basketball, silently sailed from the California’s torpedo bay into the middle of the molten morass of vented plasma trailing from our aft turbines.

  I raised my hand in the air and clenched my fist. “Detonate charge!”

  “Detonating,” Lorde called back to me.

  The charge detonated on command. Its explosive yield was small, but still sufficient to ignite the plasma trail like a match lighting up a puddle of gasoline. The Destroyer, too close to evade, flew directly into the heart of the conflagration and was sent careening out of control.

  At the same time the ignited plasma raced back toward a catastrophic collision course with its source—the California’s engines. “Engage HIVE now!” I shouted.

  Viv punched her throttle hard forward, firing the California’s powerful High-Intensity Vectoring Engines. The ship instantly burst away at incredible speed, separating it from the plasma trail.

  Bix jumped from his seat. “It worked!”

  “We need to keep thinking. That ship will be back on top of us again. And soon.”

  Checking on Lewis, Anatoly bowed his head. The ensign was dead.

  An eerie silence washed over the bridge, the magnitude of our circumstances beginning to sink in. The horror of the attack. The almost certain loss of my father and so many others. And what we had done. It was mutiny.

  Pain crept into my body as my adrenaline dissipated. Suddenly every emotion was amplified. Every thought difficult to process.

  “Casualties?” I called out, gathering myself.

  Anatoly scanned shipwide vitals. “All twenty-two hands on Gamma Deck lost. We lost . . . seventeen . . . on Beta Deck.”

  Beta Deck. The students.

  Viv slammed her fist against her console.

  Bix shook his head in disbelief. “Maybe sensors are down and their biosigs just aren’t reading.”

  “No,” Ohno responded, her voice quivering. “There’s a massive hull breach by Junction 13. There’s no way . . .”

  Her throat tightened before she could finish, but we all knew what she was going to say. There was no way anyone in that section
could have survived.

  Everyone on the bridge moaned.

  “Keep it together!” I barked. “Damage report.”

  Ohno spoke up first. “Defense grids at three percent. Engines two, three, and nine offline. The Blink Reactor’s CPU is completely unresponsive.”

  “Repair estimates?”

  “Containment fields are now active on Beta Deck, and atmosphere is already being restored. The grids are easy. I just need to stabilize the power flow. The engines are more complicated. Lieutenant Baber never really let me get my hands dirty down there, but I’ll figure it out.”

  “The Blink Reactor?”

  “That’s a lot more AI than it is engineering. Not my department.”

  “Bix?”

  “The reactor’s CPU is really chewed up.”

  “Are we talking replace, or repair?”

  “Maybe neither. We don’t have a replacement, and if your name isn’t Sam Fuller, good luck repairing it.”

  “If anyone else can do it, it’s you.”

  “But . . .”

  Anatoly approached the vitals screen to get a closer look. His legs buckled. “Oh no. Please, no,” he cried.

  We all rushed to see what it was. Anatoly collapsed against the screen, plaintively resting his hand over the name of one of the casualties.

  Viv gently peeled his palm away. Beneath it was one name bordered in red. Diome, Safi.

  “No!” shrieked Viv.

  Julian pulled her close. Sobbing, she buried her head in his chest.

  Trying to maintain my composure, I scanned the scattered names of the dead to see who else we had lost. My eyes stopped on one name boxed in green, still very much alive. Smith, Nicholas.

  Bix noticed it as well. “Nick was locked in his quarters without access to a safety position,” he said. “He should be dead. Or at least severely injured.”

  “It’s got to be a malfunction,” I responded, even though it occurred to me it might not be. There was another possible explanation for the green box around his name.

  My first reaction was fear, but that quickly gave way to something more closely resembling relief. If I was right, all my lingering questions about Nick might be answered, and more important, there would be new possibilities for our survival when only moments earlier there had been few. Or none.

  Bix noticed my gears turning.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  I didn’t dare say what I was thinking. Not until I was sure.

  “Nothing,” I answered, “I’m just trying to think of what to do next.”

  “We’re going back,” Viv demanded, wiping her tears onto her sleeve. “We’re making repairs, and then we’re going back to get those bastards!”

  I wanted to do the same thing but knew we couldn’t. “Viv, the ship’s coming apart at the seams. And we have no weapons to fight with. If we—”

  “We’re cadets. We don’t run from a fight.”

  “It wouldn’t be a fight. It would be suicide.”

  “He’s right, Vivien,” Julian said, taking her hand in his. “Getting yourself killed is not what Safi would’ve wanted.”

  “Guys, who is that?” Ohno interrupted us as a glowing green box on the vitals screen approached a cluster of surviving students. Inside it was a name I didn’t recognize. Bossa, Veen. (P).

  “I have no idea,” Bix replied. “And what’s the P? I’ve never seen that.”

  Then the green box abruptly went dark. Not yellow. Not red. It was gone.

  “Prisoner,” I answered. “It stands for prisoner.”

  CHAPTER 18

  LIKO

  MY EYES FLUTTERED OPEN, BUT I WAS still in darkness. The faint sound of an alarm amplified as I started to gain my bearings. I tried to stand, but something was restraining me. I reached up and felt the two heavy straps of the safety harness crossing my chest. My flesh burned beneath where they held me in place.

  A series of sparks suddenly strobed through the black.

  In the first flash I saw my father standing before me, proudly wearing the leather and cloth brigandine of our Chinese warrior ancestors. And then, just as quickly as he appeared, he vanished along with the sparks’ light.

  “Are you injured?”

  My father’s voice eased my escalating panic. I desperately wanted to answer but couldn’t bring myself to speak.

  “Are you hurt?” he called to me again, his hand reaching out from the black and gently touching my chest.

  The second flash burned away my hallucination, revealing someone else. In the glint of light, I knew he didn’t belong. After three months in space, I could recognize every face aboard the California, and his was not one of them. He had to be an infiltrator.

  A third flash quickly followed, drawing my eyes to its source—a severed energy conduit hanging from the ceiling of the Beta Deck passageway. I began to remember. The crushing impacts against the California’s hull. The terrified screams of the other students. How I had strapped myself into my safety position just as the ship violently accelerated.

  “I’m going to get you out of this thing. Set your feet so you don’t fall.”

  The infiltrator yanked open the buckle at my sternum, releasing the harness’s straps. Despite his warning, I fell hard into a pool of syrupy liquid. At first I thought it was coolant from the severed conduit. But it was too warm. And the smell too familiar. It smelled like . . . copper.

  “Give me your hand,” he said, reaching down.

  A fourth flash became a series of cascading bursts as the conduit began to overload. For a few seconds everything around me was illuminated as bright as day. It was impossible to avoid the sight of the carnage.

  Two dead students, Jensen and Miller, were still harnessed into their safety positions. A piece of shrapnel had lodged in Jensen’s neck, unleashing an arterial effusion that streamed down the length of his body. I couldn’t tell what had killed Miller, but his head hung limply against his chest. His blood-soaked canvas knapsack lay just beneath his feet.

  A powerful urge to vomit finally pushed some words past my lips.

  “No. This can’t be happening.”

  “Stay focused on me,” the infiltrator said, pulling me to my feet. I could see his blue eyes in the faint amber glow of the dying conduit. They shifted restlessly, but not without purpose, searching the corridor behind me. “Can you stand?”

  “Yes.”

  Just then I noticed what he was holding. I couldn’t see it clearly, but its shape was unmistakable. A standard-issue pulse pistol. Why would an infiltrator be carrying an Alliance sidearm?

  “It’s all right,” he said, tweaking the weapon in his grip. “This isn’t for you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Do me a favor and check yourself for holes,” he said, ignoring my question.

  “I don’t think I—”

  “Just shut up and do it!” he insisted, waving his pistol.

  I ran my shaking hands all across my body. Every fiber of my being ached, but it seemed my only injuries were bruises and abrasions I had sustained from thrashing against my harness.

  “We good?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You have no idea what happened, do you?”

  “No. We were ordered to our safety positions and then—”

  “Forget it,” he interrupted me. “The hangar. Epsilon Deck?”

  “That’s right.”

  “If I were you, I’d move away from that live conduit and find a safe place to cop a squat until your captain sends an evac team down here. Sound like a plan?”

  All I managed was a nod.

  “Good.”

  As the infiltrator sprinted away, another flash lit up a small-arms repository mounted on the bulkhead beside me. Mangled from an explosion, its door dangled from its hinges. Inside were seven pulse pistols. In the next flash of light, I saw its contents more clearly. There were only seven pistols, but eight slots.

  CHAPTER 19

  JD

  TH
E KASTAZI DESTROYER HAD FALLEN OFF OUR sensors, but Viv continued to push the California’s HIVE thrusters to their limit. It was only a matter of time before they came looking for us, so we had to give ourselves as much of a head start as we could.

  Bix had broadcast an SOS on every secure Alliance channel, but there was no response from Gallipoli. Our presumption was it had been destroyed in the attack, so the silence came as no surprise. For Viv and me the tragedy went far beyond even its worst practical implications. Our parents were dead. The Kastazi had made us both orphans. As excruciating as it was, we didn’t have time to mourn. We had to keep moving.

  When there was no response from Gallipoli, we had sent ping signals to every Alliance beacon within sensor range. A ping back would’ve at least told us that our sector-wide communications channels were open and active, but those beacons had all gone silent as well.

  Cut off from communications, it was impossible to know exactly what we were up against. An isolated attack by a rogue Kastazi splinter cell? A full-scale invasion of a new, reconstituted Kastazi fleet?

  However dire the reality outside of the California, the situation inside her was just as grave. Shipwide vitals showed three more names had gone from yellow to red in the time since we had narrowly escaped the Destroyer’s assault.

  Still in crisis mode, no one was ready to put their lives back in Gentry’s hands, and regardless, we had already gone past the point of no return. To keep him asleep, Anatoly had administered a slight and very precise overdose of Morphalexine into his system. Nanocapsules of the powerful painkiller were standard issue in every bridge’s med kit.

  Relieved of command by force, Gentry never had the opportunity to sign out of his bridge Command Control Interface. This allowed Bix to reprogram the ship’s Command Priority Roster, removing Gentry and replacing him with ourselves. We were in total control of all the ship’s systems.

  As for the prisoner, Veen Bossa, we figured he had been freed when the attack caused a failure of his cell’s containment field. Hiding somewhere in the lower decks, his presence was an immediate threat. One we needed to neutralize quickly.

  Staying focused on the critical matters at hand, Ohno toiled underneath her console, trying to restore the Emergency Command Synth to functionality. The rest of us huddled as she worked away.