by Glen Zipper
“I’m not worried about their health,” I replied. “I’m worried about what they might do next.”
“Don’t be. They’re not getting off Beta Deck.”
“Just like Gentry wasn’t getting out of his quarters?”
“We got caught with our pants down,” JD answered, scrolling through his console’s readout to avoid eye contact. “We’ll figure out how he managed that and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“Which is?”
“There’s fifty-eight of them and five of us. Whether we control Sentinel or not, we can’t keep this up forever. If they want us out, eventually they’ll find a way.”
JD angrily snapped his head up from his console.
“So you’re agreeing with Julian now?”
“I’m not agreeing with what he did. But what he said . . . he’s not wrong.”
I braced myself for a snippy retort, but it didn’t come. Instead he just stared ahead blankly.
“We beat them,” he finally replied after a long pause. “We can beat them again.”
“Beating them isn’t a solution. A solution is not having to beat them. That means finding a way to come together.”
“Good luck with that,” said Bossa, gesturing toward JD’s bloodied, swollen face.
Eager to change the subject, JD turned to Bix. “How’s the ionic footprint integrity holding up?”
“It’s dissipating rapidly, but I’m still getting readings.”
I massaged my neck, listening to the monotonous droning of the tracking algorithm’s feedback. “What if we lose it entirely?”
“We won’t,” Bix answered. “Taking into account the average range of a Genuvian ship and the dissipation rate of their wake, we have to be drawing close to their point of origin.”
“I’ll say it one more time,” Bossa said while comfortably splayed out on the floor, his bundled-up jacket serving as a makeshift pillow. “I’m not so sure you should be counting on it as a sanctuary.”
“Noted yet again,” I replied.
The algorithm’s feedback suddenly accelerated toward a fever pitch. The sound instantly made me feel exhausted. My adrenaline had already peaked and subsided too many times for one day.
“Grids to full,” JD ordered.
“Aye,” Ohno confirmed.
“Holoview, forward perspective.”
“Aye, forward perspective,” Bix acknowledged.
No more surprises.
Please let this be what we need it to be.
The Holoview flickered to life to reveal a jagged, pockmarked planetoid in the distance. Gray and lifeless, its surface was littered with seemingly endless crevasses and shadowy abysses.
Bossa approached the Holoview. “Congratulations. It’s a rock.”
My heart sank, but I wasn’t ready to admit defeat. If Bix said there was something there, there had to be something there.
I squinted my eyes at the display. “Are you sure your algorithm is functioning properly, Bix?”
“Yes. This is where the Grays started from. I’m positive.”
“Ohno, scan the surface. Look for anything out of the ordinary.”
“Way ahead of you,” she replied. “All I’m seeing is background radiation.”
Ohno’s report didn’t shake my confidence in Bix.
Something’s here.
There’s got to be.
“What kind of background radiation?”
“Sensors are having trouble isolating its wavelength.”
Bix suspiciously cocked an eyebrow. “Transfer those readings to my station.”
Ohno swiped her fingers across her console. “Transferring now.”
It took about three seconds for Bix to start laughing.
“What?” I asked.
“Our sensors are confused because it’s just a bit too clean.”
“Too clean as in . . .”
“Something inside that rock is trying to fool us,” he said excitedly as he swiveled to face us. “It wants us to see normal background radiation. But it’s too perfect. An all too human reproduction of something only nature could create.”
“So not a dead rock?”
A wide grin split Bix’s face. “It’s alive inside.”
“Alive with . . . ?”
“This camouflage has Fuller’s fingerprints all over it. Well, maybe not him, but definitely his tech.”
“Which means whatever’s inside that rock has to be Alliance.”
“Considering recent events, I’m not sure that’s good news,” Bossa weighed in.
Good point.
A proximity alarm sounded almost on cue.
Two spherical drones, each no larger than a transport shuttle, emerged from the inky blackness of one of the planetoid’s abounding caverns.
“They’re arming!” Ohno yelled.
The drones manipulated their structures, collapsing inward before reconstituting into self-propelled turrets, each brandishing four hyper-phasing rail guns.
I had seen drones like them before, but only in schematics for advanced theoretical weaponry.
“Those aren’t supposed to exist,” JD sputtered in disbelief.
Bossa ran back to Weapons and booted up its targeting screen. “We’re the ones who aren’t going to exist if you don’t move fast. Bring the plasma cannons back online now!”
JD raised his hand. “Stand by.”
“Are you crazy? Let me take them out!”
“Drones in firing range,” Bix reported.
JD stared intently at the Holoview as the drones swiftly descended on our position.
“Drop grids,” he ordered.
Ohno hesitated, waiting to see if I would object.
“Delay that order,” I instructed her. “Tell us what you’re thinking, JD. Quickly.”
“If this is where the Grays came from, we need to send a message to whoever’s in there,” he implored. “We need to let them know we’re on their side.”
I nodded to Ohno. “Do it.”
“Dropping grids,” she reluctantly confirmed.
JD anxiously drummed his fingers on his armrests. “Come on. Come on.” After a precarious silence, an alert sounded.
“Incoming com,” Bix announced. “Alliance priority band.”
“Open com,” JD replied, the tension slowly abating from his posture.
“Aye. Opening com.”
The visual was corrupted with interference, but we could see the shape of someone lurking beneath the static.
“Clean up that visual!” JD demanded.
Working his console, Bix brought the image into focus. Staring back at us was none other than General Aldridge Staxx, second in command of the Alliance forces. His close-cropped hair was grayer than I remembered, and his skin seemed to have sunken more tightly against his cheekbones. It was as if the events of the past few weeks had aged him years.
As his penetrating eyes moved across our faces, I sensed a myriad of emotions emanating from him. But, above all else, I sensed surprise.
“John Marshall?”
JD had tears in his eyes. “Yes, it’s me, General.”
Staxx paused to collect himself. “Son, where have you been all this time?”
“With all due respect, sir, I don’t even know where to begin. Request permission to be debriefed in person.”
Another alert sounded as the drones began to scan the California.
“Permission granted,” the general commented, his eyes pointing downward as he reviewed the data being fed to him by the drones. “The Gatekeepers will guide you inside.”
As soon as the com link closed, the drones reverted to their original configuration and circled back toward the cavern from which they had emerged.
“On to sanctuary?” Bossa skeptically remarked.
“Let’s hope so,” JD replied. “Take us in, Viv.”
“Aye,” I confirmed, pushing the throttle forward.
Gliding ahead in p
ursuit, we followed the drones in through the cavern’s mouth, and the Holoview faded to black as we plunged ourselves headfirst into the planetoid’s murky depths.
“Forward arc lamps,” JD ordered.
“Aye. Engaging forward lamps,” Ohno confirmed.
The space around us illuminated bright as day, revealing our narrow, craggy environs. Pushing deeper, I pitched the California upward, following the drones over a vast palisade of what seemed to be selenite crystal.
As soon as we crested the palisade’s peak, I saw the base. Carved into the reddish-brown bedrock, it boasted an intricate array of walkways and observation decks overlooking an enormous horseshoe-shaped docking platform. A smattering of vessels—Alliance, Aeson, Xax, and Genuvian—were moored all along its circumference. Battered and battle-scarred, they looked like tragic artifacts from an already-lost war.
The lights on the centermost berth flashed in progressive sequence, inviting our arrival. I eased us into its mooring, and the bridge shuddered slightly as the California gently came to rest.
“So what do we do now?” I wondered aloud, expressing the same thought that had to be going through everyone’s mind.
“What we said we were going to do all along,” JD responded as he slowly pushed himself up out of the captain’s chair. “We turn ourselves in.”
CHAPTER 42
JD
THE CONTENTS OF THE MEAL TRAY RESTING on the table had long since gone cold. Its three compartments held something resembling beans, something resembling rice, and something resembling nothing I recognized as edible. At least I wasn’t hungry. General Staxx had managed to deprive me of my appetite.
We had gone over the same details again and again. The attack on Gallipoli. Our engagements with the Kastazi. Nick. The Blink. Even our mutiny. I told him everything that happened honestly and truthfully, but nothing I said seemed to have satisfied him. Eventually he had grown frustrated enough to throw up his hands and move on to the others. Exhausted from his questioning, I was just glad to be left alone.
Confined to a small, dimly lit chamber, it didn’t take long for the shadows to start playing tricks on me. They seemed to crawl across the mineral-encrusted walls, giving menacing form to all the unanswered questions festering in my mind. After a while I had resorted to staring at a long, jagged crack in the pebbly ceiling just to avoid the unsettling sight of them.
Finally, the door opened. Flanked by two soldiers, one Xax and one Aeson, Staxx returned and reclaimed the chair opposite mine.
“You haven’t touched your food.”
Sitting up straight, I took my elbows off the table. “No, sir. I’m not very hungry.”
Staxx motioned to the Xax soldier, who briskly cleared my untouched meal.
“I spent the last two hours with your fellow cadets,” Staxx said. “Their version of events is exactly the same as yours. Chapter and verse.”
“That’s because we’re telling you the truth.”
He folded his arms, looking at me with indifference. Something about our story still wasn’t adding up for him.
“I also spoke to Ensign Gentry.”
I braced myself, expecting the worst. “If he told you we’re lying—”
“He didn’t,” Staxx cut in. “Accounting for some embellishments related to his opinion of you, I’d say the ensign’s recitation of facts was ostensibly consistent with yours.”
“If he gave you the same information we did, doesn’t that tell you something?”
“To the contrary—it’s only made me more confused.”
Until that moment I had presumed Staxx’s suspicions were rooted in something we had told him. Suddenly it occurred to me they were more likely rooted in something we hadn’t.
“What else can I tell you, sir? What do you need to hear?”
“You honestly don’t know, do you?” he asked, a hint of empathy breaking through his cold veneer.
“Know what, sir?”
Staxx gestured to the soldiers. “Leave us.” Following his order, they retreated to the corridor and secured the door behind them.
Locked in, just the two of us, the air took on an ominous weight.
“Why do you think the Kyoto attacked you?”
“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”
Staxx leaned in, narrowing his eyes. “They attacked you because you’re an enemy of the Alliance.”
The words came out of his mouth as clear as day, but I tried to convince myself I had misheard him.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“You are an enemy of the Alliance. As am I, and everyone on this base.”
“That’s ridiculous. We are the Alliance.”
“No. The Alliance belongs to the Kastazi now.”
As absurd as it sounded, Staxx’s sober tone imbued his words with an undeniable sincerity. He believed what he was saying.
“Everything you think you know is wrong,” he continued. “The world you remember is gone.”
Acid pooled in my gut in anticipation of where he was leading me. “I don’t understand.”
“This is going to be very difficult for you to believe. I won’t be able to provide you with an explanation. I don’t have one.”
“Tell me.”
Waiting for his response, I almost expected someone to wake me from a dream.
“Son, you haven’t been out there for three weeks,” he said. “The California has been missing for five years.”
CHAPTER 43
VIV
FIVE DAYS HAD PASSED SINCE GENERAL STAXX left us to our own devices in temporary barracks within the base’s sparsely appointed armory, which I estimated was about the size of the California’s gymnasium. Its perimeter was lined with barren weapons lockers, and enormous crates, already depleted of larger armaments of torpedoes and missiles, were scattered and stacked wherever there was room.
Perched high up atop one of them, Bossa watched us. He couldn’t possibly have looked any more bored, and I certainly couldn’t blame him. We were, yet again, behaving like children.
Caught in the middle of a scrum, I took an inadvertent elbow to the cheek from JD. I shook it off and yanked him backward while Anatoly pulled Cooper in the opposite direction.
“I’ll end you, Marshall!” Cooper yelled as he struggled against Anatoly’s powerful restraint.
“Let him go,” JD barked. “If he wants to do this, we’ll do this.”
“Enough!” I shouted.
Their fight, like all the others, wasn’t instigated simply by what had already happened between us. It was just as much about the stress of our impossible new reality, a nightmare where in the blink of an eye, almost everyone you knew and loved had already died.
Earth had fallen. As had Aeson, Xax, and Genuvia. The Alliance itself hadn’t been destroyed. It had been taken. Our bases. Our ships. Even our people. The traitors aboard the Kyoto were no aberration. Faced with extinction or submission, many of the survivors of the Kastazi second wave had made the same traitorous choice.
Gentry approached Anatoly from behind and rested a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s over.”
Initially assigned to soldiers’ barracks elsewhere inside the base, Gentry had returned to us only three days later. He had claimed Staxx sent him back to get things under control, but I didn’t believe it. Walking around among the Resistance’s rank and file, he must’ve felt like an outcast. They carried the wounds of having fought a losing five-year war while he had leapfrogged all but a few weeks of it. As strange a thought as it was, he was much more one of us than one of them. If I were him, I probably would’ve wanted to come back to the armory too.
Released by Anatoly, Cooper stood his ground and stared JD down.
“What’s this about?” Gentry asked.
“Does it matter?” JD angrily fired back before walking away.
I watched Gentry’s eyes follow JD and didn’t see the familiar anger I was expecting to find.
More one of us than one
of them.
I couldn’t get the thought out of my head.
The same sentiment applied to Julian, Liko, Cooper, and everyone else we had so recently pitted ourselves against. In the future we had arrived in, we all faced the same existential threat, and it was far worse than anything we had ever done to each other. Staxx’s shocking decision to hold no one to account for what had transpired aboard the California should have made that point clear.
Yet we were still at each other’s throats. Were our differences that severe? Did we really hate each other that much? Backed into a corner, up against an insurmountable enemy, it all suddenly felt so needlessly petty. Maybe that’s why neither side was letting go. Because it required admitting how foolish we had been.
Anatoly and I followed JD back toward the encampment we had built at the far end of the armory. Composed of an assortment of empty PRM pallets and the few scratchy wool blankets we had been provided, its exterior had the appearance of a child’s makeshift fort. Inside we rested on the flimsy mattresses we had pulled from our racks, and bided our time playing cards and reading old books from the California’s library.
The monotony was mind-numbing, but there was nothing else for us to do. Capable as we were, to Staxx we were a burden. Sixty-five liabilities who inconveniently required his feeding and watering.
Ducking inside the encampment, JD kicked an empty meal tray across the floor.
Ohno and Bix, busy tinkering with some contraption, flinched as the tray crashed against the wall.
“I know that look,” Bix asserted while Ohno grumbled. “Who was it this time?”
“Cooper,” I answered, massaging my still-throbbing jaw. “Again.”
JD plopped down on the nearest mattress. “We need to get out of here.”
I sat down beside him and inspected a little swelling over his eye. “Maybe we talk to Staxx again. Find some small job he’ll let us do.”
“Mop the floors? Hand out PRMs to the soldiers?”
Bix held up the contraption he and Ohno had been working on. “Or make repairs.”
“What is that?” I asked.
Bix tossed it back to Ohno.
“Fuse cartridge from a flash grenade,” she replied, catching it with one hand. “We found one smashed to pieces at the bottom of one of those munitions crates.”