by Glen Zipper
I surrendered the captain’s chair to JD. He stood close and spoke in a pointed whisper.
“Please. I need him to be your responsibility.”
Looking into JD’s eyes, I wondered if we’d ever talk about the moment between us in the hangar. Everything about my energy was inviting him to at least acknowledge it. I waited without responding, hoping he’d fill the space with what I wanted.
Say something, John.
Say anything.
Still, he gave me nothing.
He knows it could compromise our ability to keep the ship safe.
He’s worried what the other cadets might think.
The Julian of it all is too much for him.
All the possible explanations running through my head were perfectly reasonable, but there was only one that felt scary. That he wished it hadn’t happened.
We couldn’t just leave it untouched. One way or another, we needed to address it. In the midst of everything else, though, I worried the right time would never come.
“I think we could all use a day off from Julian, don’t you agree?” I replied, moving on. “Myself included.”
I watched JD’s stiffness relent as he eased himself into the captain’s chair.
As I returned to Piloting, he entered some calculations into his console.
“Whoa!” Bix exclaimed, reacting to a set of new readings. “How did you do that?”
“The reason we haven’t found any supply buoys is because their power modules are exhausted. We needed to scan for their decaying radiation signature instead.”
“Oh man, of course,” Bix replied, all but slapping himself on the forehead. “I’m reading two Grade Alpha supply buoys only about a day’s travel from our location!”
We all exchanged hopeful but measured glances. Grade Alpha buoys were stocked with enough PRMs to fill the comestible reserves of two Devastation-class ships. If there were two of them, they could provide enough sustenance to last us over a year.
JD entered another sequence into his console. “I’ve set a course. Autopilot disengaged. Viv, the California is at your ready. Take us there.”
“Aye,” I confirmed.
Bossa crawled out from under the Weapons console. No matter how much we needed his help, his presence on the bridge was a bitter pill for me to swallow. I hadn’t forgotten a word of what he’d said to me in the brig. About my father. And the New Jersey. I promised myself he’d answer for that. One way or another. But this was not the time or the place.
Ohno emerged behind him, their sparring continuing uninterrupted.
“That would’ve gone faster if you hadn’t felt the need to second-guess everything I did,” Bossa spat as he dusted off his pants.
“It’s not called second-guessing when I’m actually correcting your mistakes,” Ohno shot back.
“There’s your way, and there’s my way.”
“I’m not exactly sure what your way is, but it would have melted the entire plasma canopy.”
“All right! Enough!” JD shouted. “Just tell me—are the cannons back online?”
“Sort of,” Bossa replied.
“Basically,” Ohno added.
JD rubbed his temples. “Brass tacks, please.”
“The California’s weapons systems weren’t designed to accept plasma ore from an Interceptor, so there’s a compatibility issue,” said Bossa.
“Of course. But what’s the upshot?”
“Your automated targeting systems are gonna be impossible to calibrate. You’ll need to have a human being at the trigger, not some Synth.”
“That we can deal with. Is there anything else?”
“Yeah, there is,” Ohno chimed in. “We won’t be able to modulate the plasma cannons’ yield.”
Bossa scratched at his stubbly beard. “You know what that means, right?”
I did.
And considering what the Kastazi had taken from us, I didn’t really care.
“It means we can only shoot to kill.”
CHAPTER 36
LIKO
TWENTY-SEVEN STUDENTS WAITED EXPECTANTLY OPPOSITE ME IN the mess. Six more than the last time we had gathered. I was struck by how differently they looked at me. Gone was their contemptuousness, and in its place stood their implicit trust just waiting to be claimed. If only it hadn’t required the threat of apocalypse.
“We need to get started,” I said, breaking through their nervous chatter. “We can only ghost our biosigs for so long.”
Having gained their attention, I continued. “We need to discuss some of the more difficult contingencies we might confront.”
A soft murmur of voices billowed up from the crowd.
“Nothing has changed. Our priorities remain the same. Chief among them, avoiding violence. What we must prepare ourselves for, however, is the possibility the cadets won’t be equally restrained in their response. If they resort to violence, we must stand ready to respond in kind.”
“And what if it comes to that?” Annalisa called out. In the time since the attack, she had become one of my closest confidants and allies. She already knew the answer to her question, but we had agreed that a small measure of theater might be helpful in moving us along. “How do we respond in kind?”
My eyes found Cooper Lynch. After being reminded that the tall, often cantankerous student from Perth had played a big part in instigating the infamous Camp Penbrook brawl with the cadets, I had made him one of my first recruits. It was suggested to me that his “authority issues” made him more inclined to join our effort to unseat the cadets.
Cooper snapped a bedsheet off one of the dining tables, revealing the seven pulse pistols.
Jagdish Patel, who’d had two of his ribs unceremoniously cracked by Vivien Nixon in the same Penbrook incident, reached for one of them. Cooper grabbed his wrist. “Careful.”
“We can’t activate them unless and until it’s necessary,” I clarified. “The cadets have programmed an algorithm that can track the weapons as soon as they’re charged.”
Without our access to intel on what the cadets were up to, we never would have known about the algorithm. And then we would have walked right into their trap.
“I know what you’re all thinking, but you have to understand who it is we’re dealing with. John Marshall, Vivien Nixon, Iara Souza, Anatoly Kuzycz, Roger Bixby. We’ve grown too accustomed to thinking of them as unseasoned cadets. Make no mistake—they’re already soldiers. That, above all else, is what they’ve been trained to be. And when you back a soldier into a corner, they don’t give up easily or surrender. They fight. That’s why we need to be ready for anything, even the worst-case scenario.”
I scanned the faces of the crowd, trying to gauge their reactions. We had done everything possible to protect ourselves, approaching only those we had been given reason to trust or had been vouched for—but the potential for leaks persisted. Mindful that a single person could have exposed us, I remained vigilant.
“Anyone who objects to the defensive use of these weapons, please step forward and be heard.”
If someone had stepped forward, it wouldn’t have changed our plans. It only would’ve served to identify our weakest links and provided us with an occasion to deal with them. I had already been advised on how to safely sequester any such liabilities until after the California was under our control.
“Anyone?”
I waited, but no one accepted my invitation.
“A question,” said Dominique Parry, one of Annalisa’s vouches.
“Go ahead.”
“Is it true? Did you really find a way to get Gentry out?”
“Yes,” I acknowledged. “I did.”
By necessity I was one of our movement’s most visible lieutenants, but Gentry was our true leader. Using the HAT’s backdoor channel to circumvent the cadets’ watchful eyes, I first contacted him shortly after the attack on Gallipoli. He confirmed my suspicions: that the cadets had seized control of the ship without justification or authority, pu
tting our lives in even more danger than they already were. After that there was never any other choice but to try to help him regain his command. Not only had he been guiding my recruitment efforts with his privileged knowledge of student behavioral profiles, he was also the architect of the endgame that would remove the cadets from command—seizing control of the ship by way of Sentinel.
But realizing our endgame still required surmounting two formidable obstacles, the first being access to the mainframe compartment, which required a facial-recognition ID and transdermal palm scan. The two security protocols were hardwired at the point of entry and nearly impossible to hack. Such impenetrability did, however, bring with it one very fortuitous silver lining. The cadets were as powerless as we were to make any modifications to the compartment’s authorization roster. Whereas Gentry’s facial ID and palm scan were still valid and active.
Consequently, and rather frustratingly, the challenge was not so much the compartment’s security protocols as it was Gentry’s confinement. We had been struggling to find a way to extricate him from his quarters, and finally, I thought I had stumbled upon the answer.
“We can try to ghost Gentry’s biosig readings the same way we’ve been ghosting ours,” I explained. “All the security protocols locking him in are keyed to his pattern. If we ghost his readings somewhere else—the bridge, for instance—Sentinel should interpret the readings as a malfunction and reset all the protocols. And if it resets the protocols—”
“It resets the lock,” Cooper said, admiring the simplicity of my solution. “His door opens.”
“Exactly.”
Presuming my biosig hack worked, the second obstacle—getting our hands on Sentinel’s Command Codes—still required its own solution. There was only one person capable of giving it to us. The same person Gentry had suggested as our first recruit. Julian Lorde.
“How close are you to getting the codes?” I asked him, my tone no doubt betraying some frustration with his lack of progress.
“The opportunity has yet to present itself,” answered Lorde. “I need you to remain patient.”
With the California listing in an ocean of uncertainty, I had no idea how much rope we really had to play with. The next catastrophic crisis could’ve been as little as minutes or hours away. Gentry needed to be returned to command immediately.
“Patience is a virtue we can ill afford right now, Julian. You need to stop being passive. Don’t wait for an opportunity. Take the opportunity.”
“That will require some risk.”
“Everything is risk right now. We need to act.”
Considering my words, his gaze floated to some unfocused point in the distance. By the time his eyes returned to meet mine, they had filled with a cold, detached resolve.
“I think I have a solution,” he replied. “But for it to work, I’ll need you to do more than just ghost a biosig. You’ll need to make five of them disappear.”
CHAPTER 37
VIV
WITH EVERY WAKING MOMENT OVERFLOWING WITH CONSTANT stress, the opportunity to close my eyes and grab a few stolen hours of sleep should’ve been welcome. But I dreaded the end of each day. Most nights I’d lie wide awake, staring at the ceiling, the low hum of the ship’s oxygen regulators droning an accompaniment to the scattered thoughts rolling through my unsettled, sleepless mind.
My mother’s fate.
The mystery of the Blink.
The Kastazi occupation of Earth.
The yet-unseen next lurking threat.
Julian lay next to me, just as he had every night since Gallipoli. I leaned in to the warmth of his body. But the closer we entwined, the deeper I sank into distraction. After a few more kisses at the nape of my neck, he stopped and pulled back.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Vivien. I know you too well. What’s on your mind?”
“You don’t have to read into everything, Jules. Things can just be off. There doesn’t always have to be a reason.”
“Things are off?” he replied, a tinge of insecurity creeping into his voice.
“Don’t you feel it too? Everything is falling apart all around us, yet each night we come here and act like nothing’s wrong. Why do we keep doing this?”
“We keep doing this because we love each other.”
Because we love each other. His sentiment struck an uneasy chord with me. On top of everything else, kissing JD had left me in a state of near-constant confusion.
“This is what we’re supposed to do,” he continued. “We have no idea what tomorrow will bring. We don’t even know what the next hour will bring. It could all be over in the snap of a finger. Every moment counts now.”
The more he talked, the worse I felt.
“I’m sorry. I’m just . . . scared,” I deflected.
“I’m scared too. In fact, I’m terrified,” he said, gently taking my hand.
“Are you?”
“Of course I am!”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
“It’s all a deception, my dear,” he replied with a disarming simper.
My stomach nervously stirring, I sat up and swung my legs off the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not going to be able to sleep. I might as well go back to the bridge and relieve JD.”
Julian pulled me down on top of his chest and wrapped his arms around me. “Don’t go. Talk to me. Tell me what’s making you scared.”
Our actions may have saved the ship, but from that point forward every soul on board had become our responsibility. Every day I woke up to the reality that a single mistake had the potential to cost everyone their lives. The pressure was unrelenting.
“That we won’t be able to keep everyone safe,” I lamented. “What about you? What scares you?”
“Losing you,” he replied without a second’s hesitation.
I sat back up. “Jules . . .”
Julian joined me at the edge of my rack. “It wasn’t as singularly a romantic thought as you might presume.”
“What do you mean?”
“What if something happened to you? What if something happened to both you and John? What then?”
“Ohno would take over, and if not her, then Bix, and if not him, then Anatoly. You know the chain of command just as well as I do.”
“And then what? Gentry?”
“I don’t know, Jules. I don’t think any of us has thought that far ahead.”
“It’s time to,” he asserted. “You can’t leave everyone’s lives in the hands of Gentry or a Command Synth. Not when there’s already a better option.”
His insinuation was clear. “And that better option would be you?”
“Is it such a crazy thought? I went through the same training as the rest of you. I even qualified for the command track. There’s only one reason I’m not wearing a cadet uniform—because I was a statistical casualty of an ill-conceived, nonsensical Psych Ops bell curve.”
“Julian, you know we can’t just—”
“Don’t quote protocol to me,” he interrupted, slightly raising his voice. “You threw protocol out the window the moment you removed Gentry from command. Think about what’s right. Listen to what your gut is telling you.”
I did check my gut, and I didn’t like what it was telling me. “You can’t possibly be suggesting we give you your own set of Command Codes.”
“Of course not.”
“Then what?”
“Upgrade me to command-level clearance, but set my priority level below yours and the other cadets’. If heaven forbid all your biosigs ever went flat, Sentinel would recognize my signature as the next option in the chain of command and automatically transmit its Command Codes to me.”
I racked my brain for all the reasons why it might be a bad idea, but his reasoning was undeniably sound. The Command Synth, intended for a limited array of crisis situations, was never going to be a workable long-term solution. That left Julia
n and Gentry as the California’s only viable alternatives. Regardless of who the right choice might have been if it ever came to that, a “post-cadet” contingency plan was certainly worth exploring.
“It’s a reasonable thought, but I’ll need to take it up with everyone else.”
The tension in Julian’s body spontaneously dissipated, and he leaned in to deliver an unexpectedly passionate kiss.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “I suppose I’m just relieved. I was worried you were going to be more resistant to the idea.”
Finally, mercifully, I felt myself growing tired. I fell backward onto my pillow, pulling Julian down beside me. His anxious heart pounded against my back as we nestled together.
No more talking. No more thinking.
I just needed to sleep.
CHAPTER 38
JD
WHATEVER FOCUS I HAD LEFT WAS QUICKLY dissipating. Already an hour past the end of my graveyard shift, Viv’s unscheduled priority meeting was still in full bloom.
“Maybe it will help if we take emotion out of the equation and go by the book,” Anatoly said. “By the book, Gentry should already be in command. He’s a commissioned Alliance officer. Maybe the answer is that simple.”
“But it’s not that simple, Toly,” Ohno countered. “He had a nervous breakdown right in front of us. We can’t just wipe that fact off the board and go ‘by the book.’ How do we know history won’t repeat itself in a similar situation?”
“What do you think?” Bix asked me. “You’re the only one who spends any time with him.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “He seems to have improved some, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you he’s had an epiphany we can count on.”
“It doesn’t sound like any of you are ready to go by the book,” Viv chimed in. “But if you throw out the book, let’s understand what that means. It means you’re throwing the case against Julian out the window with it too. He’s technically qualified for command and has already proven himself capable under fire. ‘The book’ is probably the only thing stopping you from making him the perfunctory choice.”