Devastation Class

by Glen Zipper

  No, no, no! This can’t be real!

  I squinted at the one photo that was hers. I couldn’t see it clearly, but my memory filled in the details. It was a photo of her and me. We had taken it the day before we left Earth. There was so much hope and possibility in our expressions. That’s why she’d kept it. It wasn’t about memories. It was about the here and now. And the future.

  Please, no . . . It can’t be.

  Julian crouched beside me, gently placing his hand against my back. I wanted him to look at me, but instead he stared straight ahead, focused on some distant point out in the darkness. Was he thinking about Safi or himself?

  “We can’t let this stand,” I said, turning my attention back to the picture.

  “We won’t,” JD replied, most likely placating me. “Take a moment here. I’m going to do one more sweep. Rendezvous on the bridge in ten minutes?”

  “Okay.”

  JD sprinted away, his boots pounding against the deck until their racket slowly faded into silence.

  “Are you afraid?” Julian asked me, his gaze out into the stars growing more distant.

  No, he wasn’t thinking of Safi. Or of me. He was thinking of himself. And he was afraid.

  “Yes, Julian,” I said. “I’m afraid too.”

  After that it was like he was invisible, leaving me alone opposite the California’s gaping wound and the stars beyond it.

  My fingers began to quiver.

  The Kastazi have to pay for this.

  Somehow we’ll make them pay for this.

  CHAPTER 21

  JD

  MY HAND GREW TIRED PUNCHING SEQUENCE AFTER sequence of override codes into the door. Bix had taught me only so many. Another minute longer and I would’ve found a way to blow it open. Then, just as I was about to give up, the keypad turned from red to green. Its lock disengaged, the door slid open. Nick stood there waiting for me. Just as I expected, he was completely unscathed.

  “What are you?”

  “By virtue of your question, it would appear that you already know the answer,” he replied.

  His inexplicably surviving the attack alone could have justified my suspicion, but it was something else that made me almost positive I was right. The strange, ominous feeling he had always given me suddenly felt uncomfortably familiar. Only one other thing had made me feel even remotely that way before. And it too could have survived the Kastazi attack without a scratch.

  Charlie.

  “I need to hear it from you.”

  Nick watched me intently as I waited for his response, seemingly taking measure of even the slightest twitch of my eye. Just like a Command Synth would. “I’m not anything like the Hybrids the world once knew.”

  His admission stunned me despite my suspicions. Hybrids of the past—the ones like Charlie—looked human at first glance but upon closer inspection revealed themselves to be anything but. Their eyes were too bright, their skin too pristine, the movement of their limbs too smooth. Nick exhibited none of these all-too-perfect imperfections. Any physical difference between him and a human was imperceptible.

  “You don’t need to fear me,” he added, noticing how anxious I must have looked.

  How could I not be afraid? Designed as expendable, emotionless soldiers to fight on behalf of the Alliance, the Hybrids had been hacked by the Kastazi and turned against us. Not just turned, but pushed far beyond their impassive nature into something far more cunning, vicious, and diabolical. Through their corruption they became brutal, heartless killing machines, wreaking terror and suffering wherever deployed.

  Thousands of our citizens had perished at their hands by the time Dr. Fuller managed to crash them with a poison-pill virus. By then the Alliance had almost been destroyed from the inside out by the very creations that had been intended to help save it.

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Because in me Doctor Fuller has perfected his vision.”

  Perfected? Nick shouldn’t even have existed. After the war the High Command had banned Fuller from developing his Hybrids any further, seizing and storing all of his surviving creations in military black sites. Most Alliance citizens wanted them destroyed once and for all, but it was naïve for them to think our leaders wouldn’t try to salvage one of their most valuable weapons.

  “No, that’s not possible,” I replied. “Fuller couldn’t access the Hybrids thanks to High Command.”

  I might’ve imagined it, but I could have sworn I detected the corners of Nick’s mouth bend ever so slightly toward an indignant frown.

  “They took the past away from him. I am the future,” he admonished. “The doctor’s final objective realized.”

  Suddenly I felt naïve myself. The doctor was known to be many things, but a compliant functionary was not one of them. Would he have simply given up on his Hybrids at the behest of the High Command’s bureaucratic wagging finger? “What do you mean? What final objective?”

  Nick looked perplexed. As if the answer was all too obvious.

  “Life, of course,” he said, speaking the words as though he truly believed them. “Life was his final objective.”

  Artificial intelligence earnestly claiming sentience was nothing new. Command Synths routinely performed the same parlor trick to carry out their core directives. In fact, they were expressly programmed to do so.

  Regardless, I had neither the time nor the patience for an existential debate on consciousness. I wanted to know where he had come from. Why he had been made a cadet. How much my father had known.

  “The Kastazi attacked Gallipoli,” he declared before I could ask a single question.

  “How could you possibly know—”

  “I possess the capability to recognize energy signatures and other peculiarities of specific technologies. Put more directly, I can feel them.”

  It took a moment for the enormity of his assertion to sink in. That he could literally feel our enemy’s presence.

  “And now? Can you feel them now?”

  Nick solemnly nodded. “The captain must take evasive action immediately.”

  “We have no captain. There’s only us. We were cut off from Gallipoli. Lost all our NCOs and nineteen students. Lewis was killed. Gentry completely broke down. We took command. If we hadn’t, the California would’ve been destroyed along with the station.”

  “What’s our condition?” he queried without emotion, rolling past our mutiny as though it were just another detail.

  “Gamma Deck starboard side is gone entirely. Primary engines are compromised. It’s a miracle we have any propulsion at all.”

  “Blink Reactor?”

  “Damaged and offline. If Bix can’t fix it, you’re going to be our only shot at survival.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no time. I’ll explain on the way to the bridge.”

  “I can’t come with you,” Nick called out as I turned to leave. “The Kastazi energy signature activated my self-termination failsafe.”

  I thought my head was going to explode.

  “Self-termination? You mean . . . kill yourself.”

  “Doctor Fuller coded the failsafe into my programming. What happened before must never be allowed to happen again.”

  “Disregard the failsafe. That’s an order.”

  “I can’t. Once the termination countdown begins, I cannot override it.”

  My mind raced. If Fuller’s final objective had been to give Nick life, why would he have deprived him of its quintessential essence: the right of self-determination?

  “Do you feel pain?” I prodded him.

  “In a manner of speaking, but not in the sense that you would understand it.”

  “Fear?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about anger? Can you feel anger?”

  “I can. I do.”

  “Safi’s dead, Nick. They killed her. And they’re going to kill the rest of us if you don’t help us.”

  I searched for the slightest hint of emotion, bu
t he gave me nothing.

  “You know how she died? She got sucked into space and suffocated out in the vacuum. She suffered, Nick.”

  Still nothing.

  “I know she meant something to you,” I said, stepping closer.

  Then, finally, a glimmer of something behind his eyes.

  “You say you’re alive. Prove it.”

  Standing alone under the lift’s strobing lights, I wondered if I had done enough to elicit whatever seeds of self-determination Fuller might have planted in Nick. He had asked to be left alone. To be given a chance to consider everything I said, and also to contemplate the idea I had not yet confided in anyone else. We were running out of time, and we couldn’t wait much longer. If his suicidal trigger proved more formidable than his will, I was going to need to find yet another option. One I wasn’t sure existed.

  In the quiet whoosh of the lift’s upward trajectory, something else dawned on me. I wasn’t afraid anymore. On the contrary, I was exhilarated.

  At first the idea that our horrific situation could give me any nourishment felt repugnant, so I tried to reject it. But then I recognized it for what it was. The fever of my fear had broken, and I was finally stepping into the bright light of what I had always been meant to be.

  How could that not feel good?

  How could that not feel right?

  The lift stopped with an abrupt jerk and opened to the bridge. Viv was sitting still in the captain’s chair with Lorde standing stiffly by her side.

  “Report.”

  Neither Viv nor Lorde budged.

  Then I felt the cold barrel of a pulse pistol against my temple.

  “The report, sadly, is bad news.”

  I recognized the voice immediately. Bossa.

  “Guns. I don’t like ’em,” he continued. “But you have really put me in a pickle here.”

  Holding perfectly still, I pointed my eyes toward his weapon. “Where’d you get that?”

  Bossa adjusted the weapon in his hand. “When a ship like this one gets rattled, dangerous things tend to fall out of the cupboards.”

  “He was hiding on Beta Deck and took us by surprise,” Viv explained, slowly getting up with her hands raised high. “Said he’d kill us if we didn’t take him to the bridge to disengage the hangar lockdown.”

  “I told you there’d be consequences if you tried to trick me. And here we are.”

  When I rotated to face him, the barrel of his pistol slid right between my eyes.

  “Your friends got me up to speed,” he continued. “Cadets in command of a battleship. A sad state of affairs, to which I am surely just one more needless headache. Let’s make this easy. Release my ship from the hangar, for real this time, and I’ll be on my way.”

  “Leaving the California right now would be ill-advised.”

  “Suddenly concerned for my welfare, are you?”

  “You don’t have any idea what’s waiting for you out there.”

  “Sure I do,” Bossa answered. “Doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together. The farther the Alliance pushes into the Outer Perimeter, the more likely something new pushes back.”

  The Frontier, ranging five systems across the expanse from Earth to Xax, Xax to Genuvia, and Genuvia to Aeson, was as far as we had explored. The Outer Perimeter marked everything beyond it, including the unexplored depths of space from which the Kastazi had emerged and to which it then retreated. The Alliance had finally just begun to traverse it.

  “No, not something new,” I warned him. “The Kastazi.”

  Bossa smirked as if I had just delivered a bad joke. “If you think I’m going to buy that one—”

  “It’s them. I promise you,” I replied.

  “It was a Kastazi Destroyer that attacked us,” Viv added as she stood and edged closer to us, Lorde sticking right behind her.

  Bossa swung the pistol in their direction. “Back off!” Sweat beaded on his brow, and he gripped his pistol more tightly. “Let’s move a little faster, shall we?”

  “You do understand you can’t outrun a Destroyer. Not even with an Interceptor,” Viv said.

  “I don’t run. I’m a lot better at hiding.”

  The lift opened and out walked Bix, purposefully striding onto the bridge, oblivious to the scene unfolding right in front of him.

  “We won’t be Blinking. The damage to the CPU is much worse than I . . .” Bix finally noticed what was happening and stopped in his tracks.

  Bossa waved his pistol toward Viv and Lorde. “You, little man, over by those two.”

  Bix raised his hands and hastened over to them.

  Just then an alert sounded.

  Bossa craned his neck around the bridge. “Go check that proximity alert,” he said to Lorde.

  The bridge of every Alliance ship had a seemingly endless array of alarms and alerts, each with its own unique ping, blip, or chime. The fact Bossa could so quickly recognize something as specific as a proximity alert was disquietingly without explanation.

  “Long-range sweep has reacquired the Destroyer,” Lorde reported, swallowing hard before delivering the rest of the message. “It’s on a direct intercept course with the California.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Maybe two hours,” he replied. “Give or take.”

  “The hangar. Now,” said Bossa, shaking his pistol to regain my attention.

  I nodded to Viv. “Do it.”

  “That Interceptor has answers,” she replied. “Answers I’ve been waiting on for a very long time.”

  “I’m sorry, but right now we have to prioritize the safety of this ship.”

  Viv returned to the captain’s chair and reluctantly entered the necessary commands. “Security protocol disengaged.”

  Bossa lowered his aim ever so slightly.

  “Get off the bridge, Bossa. We did what you asked.”

  The proximity alert still chiming, Bossa hesitated. “If you can’t Blink, you better get ready for a fight,” he said, offering his unsolicited advice.

  “We can’t fight,” Bix replied. “We have no weapons.”

  “What do you mean, you have no weapons?”

  “Our weapons systems were still being reenergized on Gallipoli. We had to launch before we could get them back online.”

  “Can’t Blink, can’t fight? So what are you going to do?” Bossa asked, an edge of agitation in his voice, likely due to our lack of ideas.

  “It’s not your problem, Bossa,” I indignantly replied.

  “How many souls are you carrying?”

  “What do you care? You’ve got your ship back. Time for you to go hide.”

  “How many?” he insisted.

  “Sixty-five. Almost all of them students,” Viv answered.

  “Students?”

  “Yes, students. This is an Explorers mission.”

  “I don’t know what an ‘Explorers mission’ is, and frankly, I don’t care. But you can’t just lie down and wait to die!”

  “That’s not our intention, Bossa,” I answered. “And if you weren’t pointing a gun at our heads, we’d be working on our options.”

  “Probes,” Bossa said matter-of-factly, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Probes?”

  “Yes, sensor probes.”

  “Of course!” Bix exclaimed.

  “Help me out here, Bix,” I said.

  “All our sensor probes are powered by a small fusion generator. We probably have enough time to modify one to overload.”

  “You mean turn one into a bomb.”

  Bix shuffled his feet. He tended to do that when he got excited. “Yes. Exactly. And if we launch it with enough force out of one of our bays . . .”

  “ . . . you’ve got yourself a torpedo,” said Bossa.

  I turned my attention to finding a flaw. Lorde beat me to the most obvious one. “The impact won’t be strong enough. The Destroyer’s grids will be able to withstand the blast.”

  “Then you’ll just ha
ve to drop its grids first,” Bossa stated.

  “And how are we supposed to do that?”

  “Only one way I can see.”

  Viv and I shared an uncomfortable glance. If Bossa was intimating what we thought he was, it was crazy—bordering on suicidal.

  “There’s got to be an alternative,” I said.

  “There isn’t,” he replied.

  “How does that not in and of itself get us all killed?”

  “If you reroute enough power to your forward grids, you give yourself a chance. A real one.”

  Bix knew exactly where we were going. “It could work. It really could.”

  “And then what? If we take out one ship, how many more will come behind it?” Lorde protested.

  Out of time and without any other viable options, we had to try it. “Right now it’s all about buying time,” I replied. “Bix, get started on those probe modifications.”

  “Aye,” Bix confirmed as he scurried toward the lift.

  Bossa blocked his path. “First things first. The little man comes with me.”

  “No way. That’s not the deal.”

  “There is no deal. You want me to trust you? We tried that once already.”

  Thrusting his forearm under Bix’s neck, Bossa dragged him backward toward the lift.

  I instinctively sprang forward.

  Bossa squeezed Bix’s neck harder. “Don’t come any closer,” he cautioned, hitting the lift’s keypad with his elbow.

  Keeping my hands in the air, I stepped closer anyway. “Please don’t do this.”

  The lift’s doors opened to darkness, its lighting having failed entirely.

  “Now it’s your turn to trust me.”

  I focused on Bossa’s trigger finger as he pulled Bix into the lift. Adrenaline rushed through my veins, but there was nowhere for me to channel it. I was absolutely powerless.