by Glen Zipper
A welcome sound suddenly joined the snapping and popping of the ship’s melting components. The escape hatch being unlocked from the outside. As it fell open, smoke evacuated the compartment. Hoarding oxygen in desperate heaves, I could see two blurred silhouettes hurrying toward me through the dissipating haze.
The first silhouette to come into focus was Anatoly. I tried to warn him not to touch me but could only cough out the ashy phlegm clogging my throat. I cried out in pain as he lifted me from my seat. The other silhouette stepped forward to help him steady me. Julian.
“Where are you hurt?” Anatoly asked.
“My right arm.”
Anatoly and Julian adjusted their grips, trying their best not to aggravate my injury.
“Slow. Slowly,” Anatoly urged as they guided me through the hatch.
Gasping for clean air, I stepped down onto the hangar, bright light flooding my senses. JD and Ohno stood waiting. Bossa discontentedly hunched in a corner, cuffed to a heavy supply drum.
JD approached, barely managing to look me in the eye.
“Did we Blink?” I asked through gritted teeth.
Everyone exchanged loaded glances. Something strange was going on.
“Did we Blink?” I repeated.
“We don’t know,” JD finally answered.
“You don’t know?”
“We’re not in any danger. Scans show no Kastazi presence in any direction.” He glanced down at my injury. “Let’s get you to Medical so Toly can get a better look at that arm. Then I’ll tell you what I know.”
“I’m not going anywhere until someone tells me what is going on!”
JD hesitated and straightened his posture, as if bracing himself in anticipation of my reaction.
“We all lost consciousness the instant we activated the reactor,” he said, an abrupt hardening of his expression telegraphing an obvious reluctance. “When we came to, the Kastazi were gone.”
“They aren’t gone,” I replied. “We’re gone. We Blinked.”
“Yeah, that’s what we all thought too. Until we got the Nav Array back online, and it told us we went nowhere.”
“What do you mean we went nowhere?”
“I mean nowhere, as in we’re in the same exact spot we were before we Blinked.”
“The Array must be—”
“Broken? We checked it three times. It’s working perfectly.”
“So you’re telling me we haven’t moved an inch, and the Kastazi just disappeared?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
Distracted, I didn’t notice Anatoly sneak up behind me. Before I could stop him, he placed something just above the break in my arm. I dropped to a knee and screamed at the top of my lungs. The pain was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
“What did you do to me?” I shrieked.
Anatoly knelt beside me and gripped my hand tightly.
I felt like I was going to pass out.
“I attached a prototype Sanative Nanite Disk,” he said in a calm, assertive voice. “It’s releasing millions of microscopic nanites into your bloodstream.”
“It feels like it’s killing me!”
“It’s not,” he replied with the same assured manner. “The nanites are mimicking the path of your immune system’s phagocytes, repairing your splintered bone fragments at an accelerated rate.”
With my eyes closed he almost sounded like Dr. Green.
“The pain should almost be over,” he continued. “Just another few seconds.”
Right before my eyes, a thin, perfectly symmetrical scab formed over my wound. And the pain soon subsided, just as he promised.
“Bad magic,” said Ohno, eyeing the nanites’ handiwork with wonder.
“Good medicine,” Anatoly replied, confidently snatching the disk off my arm.
JD tried to help me up, but I waved him off. “What about Earth?” I growled. “Have you been able to raise Alliance Command yet?”
“All secure channels still dead,” he answered.
“What about the general bands?”
JD bowed his head. “Yes. Lit up with traffic. All of it Kastazi.”
If every signal bouncing off Earth was Kastazi, it could mean only one thing. Total occupation.
My head was spinning.
What really happened when we Blinked?
How could Earth have been overrun so quickly?
Where was the enemy, and when would they come for us next?
“We’ll get more answers soon,” JD went on. “All that matters right now is that you’re here and you’re alive.”
But I wasn’t supposed to be. The only priority should have been giving the California the best odds. Nothing else should have mattered.
“Why did you come after me?” I railed at him. “How could you have put so many lives in danger?”
His eyes fell to his feet.
“Answer me!”
“He didn’t,” Julian interjected, breaking a short but uncomfortable quiet. “The rescue attempt was a collective decision, but not a unanimous one. John was in the minority.”
I stood frozen in stunned silence. Leaving me behind would’ve been the right choice. It was what I had expected him to do. Still, it was almost impossible to believe.
JD really would have let me die.
And then, as painful as it was, I couldn’t help but ask the next obvious question.
“Who else was in the minority?”
Out of breath and drenched in sweat, Bix ran into the hangar before anyone could answer.
“Guys, come quick,” he begged. “It’s Nick. He’s dying.”
Nick lay supine on the reactor compartment floor, his dilated eyes staring off into nowhere. It was as though he were lost in a dream, his consciousness hopelessly adrift somewhere between our reality and something else. Suddenly he coughed out a long, wheezing breath, and the color in his face drained to a sallow, ghostlike pale.
While Nick’s CPU should have been impossible to crash, it seemed the reactor had accomplished just that. And based on the underlying principles of how all Hybrids functioned, each of us understood the nature of the terrible catch-22 unfolding before us. Nick’s body could not function without the systemic regulation of his CPU, and his CPU could not survive without the power source his body provided it.
JD turned to Bix. “What can you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think!”
“That’s all I’ve been doing!” Bix nervously chewed on one of his cuticles. “One thing. Maybe. It’s a shot in the dark.”
“What?”
“He’s still interfaced with the reactor. If I reboot the reactor, maybe it’ll reboot his CPU. I need sixty seconds to cycle through startup sequence.”
“Get started,” JD answered. “Anatoly, do whatever you can to keep his body going until the sequence completes.”
Anatoly didn’t hesitate. Dropping to his knees, he began to push down on Nick’s chest in even intervals with all his weight.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Nick’s body jostled violently with each heavy compression.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Hours earlier I had been ready to kill Nick myself, yet now the sight of him dying was almost too much to take.
One. Two. Three. Four.
I tried to find some hope in JD’s eyes, but he looked on mournfully as though Nick were already dead.
One. Two. Three. Four.
I turned to Julian next. Yet again, he wore the same distant, faraway gaze.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Ohno knelt down by Nick and lowered her head. It looked like she was praying.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Bossa made no attempt to take advantage of our unguarded moment. He stood there silently as Anatoly frantically persisted.
One. Two. Three. Four.
“Hurry, Bix!” JD hollered.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The mechanical hum of the reactor started
to escalate. It didn’t sound like it was rebooting.
It sounded like something was wrong.
One. Two. Three. Four.
“What’s happening, Bix?” Ohno yelled over the noise.
One. Two. Three. Four.
“The reactor. It’s melting down! I can’t stop it!”
One. Two. Three. Four.
Then came a burst of sparks and a slow-rolling haze of gray smoke.
It was over.
One. Two. Three. Four.
One. Two. Three. Four.
“Stop,” I gently urged Anatoly.
One. Two. Three. Four.
“Toly . . .”
I kept trying, but he refused to let go.
One. Two. Three. Four.
One. Two. Three. Four.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Finally, mercifully, JD rested his hand on Anatoly’s shoulder. After a few more fruitless compressions, Toly slumped to the floor, exhausted.
As I watched my comrades gather around Nick, it occurred to me what he had showed us in dying. He was no monster. He was our friend.
It shouldn’t have cost him his life to prove it.
I wanted to cry for him, but I had nothing left. With my mother, Captain Marshall, Safi, and so many others already lost, my capacity for grief was just about all used up. I was just . . . numb.
Ohno gently closed Nick’s eyes.
“You had no idea he was a Hybrid, did you?” Bossa asked us.
“Not until today, no,” Bix replied. “Before today, he was something else.”
“And what was that?”
“One of us,” I professed, coming full circle. “He was one of us.”
For a while we stood in silent vigil, none of us wanting to be the first to move on.
“What do we do now?” Julian asked, finally breaking the silence.
“We triage,” JD decisively answered. “Priorities are keeping the California out of harm’s way, confirming the rest of the ship’s complement is safe, and figuring out what really happened to us.”
I jumped in. “Ohno, Bix, report to the bridge. Ohno, you’ll make sure our immediate navigational perimeter is clear of any potential hostile activity. Bix, roll up your sleeves and analyze whatever Blink data Sentinel might have logged. We need you to get us some better answers.”
“Aye,” they both confirmed.
“Toly, you’re with me and JD. We’ll check on the students, verify they all came out of the other side of the Blink all right.”
“If what happened to us happened to them, they’re gonna have a lot of questions,” Bix pointed out.
“And we’ll answer them. We’ll tell them the truth.”
“What about me?” Julian inquired. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Your responsibility is Bossa.”
“Return him to the brig?”
“No,” I corrected. “Start by syncing his vitals into the biosig system. After that, cut off his signature’s access to everything but the hangar.”
“You’ve got your ship back, Bossa,” added JD. “Until you can repair it or we come up with another way to cut you loose, that’s where you live.”
Like a mouse being invited out of its trap, Bossa looked at us with equal parts relief and suspicion. Whatever he was thinking, he lodged no protest.
Our immediate plan of action may have been settled on, but Julian’s question still rang loudly in my ears. What do we do now? Without access to Earth or the support of the Alliance, we were alone, defenseless in the wilderness. The question of what to do next wasn’t going to be confined to the next few minutes or even the next few hours. It was a question we’d be asking ourselves again and again until something beyond our control answered it for us once and for all.
What do we do now?
CHAPTER 32
JD
I SAT ALONE, STARING BLANKLY AT MY personal console. In the two weeks since the Blink, I had entered only two of the daily logs that were supposed to be standard emergency procedure when communication with Alliance Command was lost. I had countless excuses for not doing them, but bottom line was I just didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to ritualize the litany of each day’s new challenges.
The challenges themselves were more than enough for me to handle.
“Cadet Marshall, John Douglas. Explorers Class D27. UAS California. Emergency Log entry. Priority One. Record.”
“Recording,” came the automated voice.
“Per emergency procedure, we have maintained our position and are continuing scans in random intervals, but as of the time of this entry, we have been unable to locate or make contact with any Alliance vessel, outposts, or buoys. For all we know, we might be the only surviving Alliance vessel in the fleet.”
I shouldn’t have said that. Logs were for recitation of facts, not commentary.
“Correction,” I said, rubbing my tired eyes. “Delete the last sentence.”
“Last sentence deleted.”
“Yesterday we were finally able to restore safe levels of atmosphere between Junctions 11 and 17 on Beta Deck, which allowed us to confirm what we had previously suspected. The bulk of the California’s PRM supply was lost during the attack on Gallipoli Station. Accordingly, we have been forced to reduce rations to one PRM per day to extend our remaining supplies for as long as possible. At our current rate of consumption, we will exhaust our food supply in approximately fourteen days. Stricter rationing will be instituted within the next seventy-two hours if we are unable to procure additional supplies or other means of nutrition.”
I was already certain the next seventy-two hours would come and go without anything changing. Two weeks had already passed without the slightest indication anyone would be coming to help us.
“We have yet to locate the seven additional pulse pistols that were taken from the damaged small-arms repository at Beta Deck, Junction 4. Subsequent to my prior log entry, Cadet Bixby programmed an energy signature algorithm into Sentinel that should be able to detect the location of any pulse weapon if and when it is charged.”
The missing weapons weighed heavily on my mind. Bossa had admitted to procuring his from the same cache, so we immediately searched the Delphinium for the others. When our search came up empty, the only remaining explanation was a student. Or, even more concerning, perhaps more than one.
“Searching the students’ quarters remains an option, but we’ve determined it would be ill-advised to take such aggressive action at this time. Persistent challenges to our authority have only been exacerbated by our imposition of stricter rations, and any further encroachment on the students’ privacy and personal liberties could quickly escalate what is already a very tenuous situation.”
We had asked Lorde to keep us up to speed on the general state of discontent pervading the lower decks. Seemingly sympathetic to our efforts, he agreed. What he reported back to us came as no surprise. The students had always been distrustful of us, but our taking command of the California and the unexplainable result of the Blink had sent them over the edge. It had gotten to the point where the students’ respect for our authority held by a dangerously thin thread, which in turn made maintaining order on the lower decks a near-constant struggle.
Their resistance to our command was understandable. No matter how justified we were, removing Gentry was mutiny. The only authority we had to act on was a moral one. Other than Lorde, none of the students had seen for themselves how close the ensign had brought us to destruction.
“At this time Ensign Gentry is still confined to his quarters. We will continue to evaluate his psychological condition and fitness for duty.”
The students’ questions relating to the Blink were equally understandable. Two weeks had passed, and so far Bix’s only theory was that Nick’s interface had somehow caused a Reverse Blink Field—essentially shielding the California from the reactor’s disturbance of space-time, and instead transporting the Kastazi vessels to the other side of its rift. The only problem with his
theory was that the Blink data logged in Sentinel seemed to indicate the opposite: that the California had, in fact, Blinked itself. It was confounding.
Disturbingly, a growing number of students had taken to actually believing we knew more than we were letting on. But considering how our circumstances had worsened their already-toxic feelings about us, nothing about it was particularly surprising.
“Despite our best efforts, we have not yet been able to determine what exactly occurred upon the Blink Reactor’s activation. As previously noted, our location was not altered by its operation, and the Kastazi vessels that had been attacking the California have not yet returned or reappeared. Our forensic analysis of all available data is ongoing.”
I leaned back in my chair and considered what else to report.
“We have granted Veen Bossa limited access to the bridge for the sole purpose of assisting us in partial restoration of the California’s weapons systems. He believes he can restore functionality to our cannons by seeding them with plasma ore from the Delphinium.”
Annoyed at myself, I slapped my palm against the desk.
“Correction. Delete Delphinium. Replace with ‘Interceptor.’”
I had fallen into the bad habit of referring to his ship by the name he had given it.
“‘Delphinium’ deleted. Replaced with ‘Interceptor.’”
“Cadet Sousa is currently assisting him, and they are making incremental progress.”
Bossa’s assistance was transparently self-serving. Unable to repair his ship, he had been left in a position where his fortunes were tied to ours. It was in his own best interest to make sure the California was not entirely defenseless.
“As we have been unable to restore Medical Synths to functionality, Cadet Kuzycz has been tending to the injured students, all but two of whom have been discharged from Medical. Cadet Kuzycz has included more specific details in his daily medical logs. Cross-reference and attach, Cadet Kuzycz, Anatoly. Explorers Class D27. UAS California. Med-Logs.”