by Glen Zipper
Finally, I saw the California in the murky distance. I shook my head to convince myself it wasn’t an illusion spawned by my panic-stricken mind. JD and Julian were already there, shepherding our people up the gangplank. Ohno, Bix, Anatoly, Nick, Fuller. Even Liko. They had all made it.
JD reached out for me as I ran up the gangplank’s steep incline. Completely out of gas, I stumbled and fell off the side. JD leapt to the platform and offered me his hand. I took it and looked up into his eyes.
JD shuddered and let go of my hand. A black ring spontaneously consumed the skin around his neck and grew outward from there. He never once stopped looking into my eyes until he was . . . gone.
Gone!
I lived inside that moment for what felt like an eternity.
There was no sound.
No light.
Just him and me, in a bubble, vanishing from existence together.
I closed my eyes and stood alone in the darkness. The ringing in my ears returned. Beneath that were layers of shouting voices and the shrill, piercing noise of Eradicator blasts firing from every direction. Then I felt something tugging at my arm.
“Vivien!” a voice cried out, piercing the wall of commotion.
It was Anatoly, trying to pull me up the plank.
“Get her up here! We’ve got to go!” Gentry shouted from inside the ship.
“I’m trying!” Anatoly yelled back to him.
Liko jumped to the platform to help.
I was only a shell. An empty vessel, incapable of putting one foot in front of the other. As the smoke cleared, I saw two students, Jagdish Patel and Dominique Parry, pinned down behind a supply drum. Completely defenseless, their eyes were filled with terror. I broke free from Anatoly, but Liko grabbed my shirt.
“Let me go!” I demanded.
Liko pulled me close. “It’s too late! You can’t help them!”
A hand reached between us and pried me free. It was Julian. He looked at me sorrowfully. “Let her go,” he told Liko. “She’s gone already.”
He understood. JD was part of me. Without him I didn’t exist either.
As soon as I ran, I felt the tingling energy of an Eradicator beam against my face. It was a near miss, but the radiant heat of the blast was enough to bubble a small patch of skin running along my jaw line. I evasively tumbled into a diving roll and came to rest at the feet of two dead Aeson. Both still clutched their Stingers.
The Aeson sidearms were almost as powerful as Eradicators, but not nearly as cruel. One blast, maybe two, were sufficient to breach the Kastazi’s armor, bringing death instantly and without pain.
I took their Stingers in each hand and fired wildly as I ran. The farther I made it, the more things slowed down. I was adapting to the adrenaline. Regaining my focus. At the last possible second, I clocked a Kastazi firing at me from three o’clock. Ducking under his blast, I slid behind the supply drum.
“Get ready!” I shouted at Jagdish and Dominique. “When I say go, you run behind me!”
Panicked, they vigorously nodded.
I popped up and sprayed cover fire.
“Go!”
We ran back out into the open as I showered the Kastazi with Stinger blasts from all angles. A few meters from the gangplank, I stopped and covered Jagdish’s and Dominique’s backs. Once Gentry and Julian pulled them safely inside the ship, I dropped my Stingers and waited.
I was ready to die. I wanted to.
Ten meters to my left, a Rapax took aim at my chest, but someone took him out before he could fire. In the distance I saw Bossa lowering the barrel of a dead soldier’s pulse rifle. Then he disappeared into the Delphinium like a phantom.
No more than three minutes could have passed since we had spilled under the bulkhead, but it felt like time had nearly stopped ten times in that space. Now, once again, every second felt like an eternity.
I wanted to let go. Just let it be over. But then my emptiness began to fill with the memory of all I had lost.
My father.
My mother.
Now JD.
No.
Not me.
You don’t get me.
My anguish giving way to fury, I sprinted up the gangplank into Gentry’s and Julian’s waiting arms. They pulled me inside, and we took cover behind the California’s closing hatch.
Fuller took hold of my face and held it in his hands. “Everything in its right place. Everything as it’s supposed to be.”
I didn’t understand, but his words brought on a strange feeling of déjà vu.
“What does that mean, Doctor?”
“Sentinel has everything you need,” he answered, sliding out the hatch just as it closed.
Julian reached for its controls, but Gentry stopped him. “We can’t. He’s gone.”
“We need him!”
“He gave us what we need. Nick.”
The California rattled as she took fire from the Strikers hovering all around her. Each impact felt strangely muted.
Ohno craned her neck, trying to make sense of the soft hits reverberating off the hull. “At this range the Strikers should be tearing us apart!”
I pulled a command control module from its mount beside the hatch. As soon as I touched it, Sentinel gave me access to every one of the ship’s systems without prompting me for a Command Key.
“It recognized your biosig,” Bix observed. “It’s not supposed to do that.”
“No, it’s not,” I answered, holding the module out toward Gentry.
“What are you doing?”
“Restoring you to command. You’re the ranking officer. This is your ship.”
Gentry hesitantly took the module and peered at the survivors standing behind me. Nodding in unspoken agreement with whatever their faces were telling him, he handed the module right back to me.
“Your orders?”
Stunned, I didn’t know how to react.
Another series of soft impacts landed against the California.
Liko stepped forward and repeated Gentry’s gesture. “Your orders?”
Then Jagdish and Dominique. “Your orders?”
One by one, like a chorus of echoes, every student did the same.
Finally, Nicholas stepped forward. “Good to see you again, Vivien,” he said, his voice finally returned. “Your orders, please.”
The Holoview lit up to display countless Strikers raining fire on us, but their plasma tracers bounced off the California as harmlessly as rain.
“Grids?”
“Ninety-five percent and holding,” Bix reported. “The grids’ energy matrix is entirely different. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“Staxx made some upgrades.”
Bix scanned his console. I could see a raging torrent of data reflecting in his glasses. “Not Staxx. This is Fuller’s work. And it’s not just the grids. It’s everything.”
I leaned back, settling into the captain’s chair. “Blow the moorings and take us out of the berth at quarter speed.”
“Aye,” Julian confirmed while reversing throttle.
Our bodies jerked slightly as the ship pushed back from the platform.
“Go, no go for shipwide vitals?”
“Go for vitals,” Anatoly replied.
“Go, no go for Navigation?”
Gentry consulted his console. “Go for Navigation.”
“Rotate at one-hundred eighty degrees.”
Julian adjusted his yoke. “Aye. Rotating one-hundred eighty degrees.”
“Go, no go for propulsion on full?”
“No go,” Liko reported from an auxiliary console. “Stand by. Checking on Ohno’s progress.”
Cold starting the California required a hands-on jump start. It wasn’t a job that could be done remotely or alone, so Ohno enlisted a contingent of students to help her seed antimatter plasma into the ship’s engines. Anything less than exacting precision had the potential to blow the ship to kingdom come.
“Talk to me, Liko. What’s goin
g on down there?”
Bix swiveled to face me. I recognized a familiar excitement peeking out from under his otherwise distressed posture.
“I can show you.”
“No time for riddles, Bix.”
“No time to explain.”
Bix swiped his console, activating a flash of blinding light. As my eyes came back into focus, I saw everything. Not just what was in front of me, but literally everything on the ship. A fierce wave of nausea nearly sent me tumbling from my chair as images streaked through my mind faster than I could process them.
“Breathe. You’re going to be okay,” said Bix. “Fuller gave you a direct cortical interface. Every camera on the ship. They’re your eyes.”
The engine compartment. Medical. The hangar. Every one of the decks. Visuals of each flew past me as if rotating on the fast-spinning blades of a pinwheel. “It’s too much! I can’t handle it!”
“Breathe. Let your brain adapt.”
I inhaled and exhaled in deep, even breaths. The pinwheel began to slow, just like Bix said it would.
“Concentrate. Use your mind. Tell Sentinel what you want to see.”
I thought of Ohno and everything else fell away, leaving only the engine compartment and bridge. I saw both at the same time without any confusion or disorientation.
My nausea subsiding, I observed Ohno shouting orders. Students scrambled around the compartment with surprising synchronicity and purpose, manipulating the engines’ many controls at her strict direction.
“She did it! Propulsion at the ready and standing by,” Liko announced, telling me what I had already seen for myself.
“Commence countdown for full propulsion.”
“Commencing countdown.”
I turned my mind to Weapons Control, Delta Deck’s manual-targeting theater. As fast as I summoned the thought, I could see inside its pitch-black confines. Six students stood in a V-shaped pattern, with Nick positioned at their head. Each wore blue glowing Holovisors that provided them a 360-degree view of the ship’s outer perimeter.
“Ten seconds to full propulsion.”
I hit my com, broadcasting wide to the ship.
“Attention all decks. This is the captain.”
A full squadron of Strikers circled off our bow, regrouping in a coordinated attack pattern.
“None of you are soldiers, but you all know how to fight.”
Nick and his team slowly raised their hands, revealing the motion-sensitive gloves that were their targeting controls for our full weapons arsenal.
“Five seconds to propulsion,” Liko called.
“Together we are stronger than the enemy.”
The Strikers dove and unleashed plasma fire at us. The flaming bolts bounced impotently off our grids.
“One second,” Liko said.
“We are not the Resistance . . .”
My vision expanded, showing me the face of every living soul on the California all at once.
“We are Devastation Class.”
“Go for full propulsion!” Liko exclaimed.
“Now let’s show the Kastazi what that means!”
The California darted forward like a missile—piercing through the first line of Strikers like a razor-sharp bayonet. Bouncing off our grids like flies, the Kastazi ships plummeted down upon the planetoid’s rocky palisades in flames.
Nick and his team waved their arms, together choreographing a devastating attack on the next wave charging at us from a distance. With every turn of their wrists and twitch of their fingers, a barrage of plasma rained down on the hostiles like a hurricane. The Holoview danced with light and fire while the weapons console incessantly chirped confirmations of their kills.
Beyond the chaotic symphony of destruction, a Kastazi War Cruiser coasted through the planetoid’s narrow passage to block our escape. Before we could engage her, the Delphinium shot out from underneath us like a bullet. Firing supercharged plasma from her forward guns, she opened a gaping hole in the Cruiser’s starboard hull. A half rotation of Nick’s fist sent a phasing torpedo right through it. Another half rotation detonated it, obliterating the Cruiser in a bluish-white ring of flames. Bossa twisted the Delphinium through the blazing wreckage, punching his engines to their limit.
We barreled through the passage after him, but just as we surfaced, an oversized Striker closed on us, maneuvering more dynamically than the rest.
“RAF,” I said, recognizing the hostile as a Rapax Attack Fighter. “Kill it, Nick.”
He and his team immediately took aim.
“Wait! Hold fire! Hold fire!” Bix shouted.
“Hold fire!” I repeated into my com, trusting his call.
Bix pointed to a biosig on his console. “It’s Fuller!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. He’s at the controls.”
“Open a—”
Before I could finish my sentence, the RAF vanished like a ghost.
Gentry squinted his eyes at the Holoview. “What just happened?”
“I think he . . .” Bix trailed off.
“Think he what?”
“Blinked.”
“How can that be possible? The Kastazi aren’t Blink-capable.”
I gawked at the barren Holoview, dumbfounded.
“What do you want me to do?” Julian asked.
“Point us back toward the base,” I answered, shaking off my distraction.
“Aye, bringing us around.”
The California rotated to face the crater leading to the planetoid’s interior.
The base lost, my call was clear. Still, I looked to Gentry to push me across the line.
“Finish it,” he said.
I said a silent prayer for any Resistance fighters left alive. Nothing about it felt superstitious that time.
“Fire Fusion Package.”
Nicholas and his team clasped their hands in front of their chests in unison, launching seven torpedoes in the same V-shaped configuration—one at the bow, three port side, and three starboard. Meeting five hundred meters in front of the California, they assembled into one and disappeared inside the crater.
“Detonate package.”
Nicholas separated his hands, triggering a chain reaction of nuclear annihilation. The planetoid burned like a cinder, its many crevasses and canyons erupting with incandescent molten rock.
Together, we watched in silence.
“What do we do now?” Bix asked, violent, spitting flares of magma filling the Holoview just beside him.
“What JD told us to do. Get Nick home.”
“Home? How are we supposed to get home without help?”
“Search Sentinel’s registry for anything new or out of the ordinary,” I answered, thinking back to Fuller’s last words to me. “Tell me what you find.”
CHAPTER 49
VIV
“IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU REALLY ARE. What matters is who you were supposed to be. You can still be that person. Help is out there. Find it. Then follow the Beacon. If you don’t, it’s over. Not just for me. Not just for this ship. For all of us.”
Standing in pitch black, I couldn’t see a thing, but the peaceful beauty of Sigma 547-T wasn’t very difficult for me to imagine. Just as it had in my time at Farragut, my mind often drifted to its distant paradise to find comfort.
“I never got a chance to soak this place in. How about you get me back here so I can.”
Of all the files Staxx had uploaded to Sentinel, the one pertaining to Bossa was perhaps the hardest to believe. If the intel was accurate, it meant everything he’d tried to tell me about the New Jersey was true. It also meant he was much more than just another Outer Perimeter scavenger.
A pop of static flitted past my ears.
“Is that it?” Bix’s voice descended upon me from the darkness.
If I hadn’t gotten my message right yet, it was unlikely I ever would.
“That’s it. Overwrite file Nixon Delta One, save, and export to Sentinel.”
�
�Copy. Saved and exporting program update to Iso-Rec file registry.”
The lights came on, revealing a barren compartment. Bix sat behind a soundproof glass partition. Arranged around me in a circular configuration was an array of heat-sensing cameras that had been tracking my every movement and linking them to my pre-ingested avatar.
“All right, let’s go.”
Making my way out the door, I couldn’t shake the feeling that leaving behind a message meant I wasn’t entirely confident in what we were about to do.
Waiting for us inside Sentinel had been something far more difficult to grapple with than anything Staxx had left behind—a file packet we had taken to calling Mindbomb. Authored by Fuller, its encryption was so complex that not even Bix could crack it. Liko had no better luck, but did eventually stumble upon something else. A not-very-well-hidden message in the packet’s metadata:
V_Nixon_eyes_only_
Fuller wouldn’t have locked his message in a box with no key, so I knew there had to be an answer. After days of fruitless brainstorming, it finally occurred to me that it might just be the most obvious one.
V_Nixon_eyes_only_
What if it meant exactly what it said?
My eyes only.
Following my hunch, Bix linked the file packet to the bridge’s new cortical interface. With a swipe of his console and a flash of blinding light, Fuller’s message was revealed to me. And then, just as quickly, it was gone.
Well, almost gone.
Despite his message being wiped from my memory, I was somehow certain the amnesic effect was intentional and necessary to protect our mission.
I remembered Fuller’s instructions for Phase One, the first steps of a plan that would get us to Earth safely and draw the Kastazi into the beginnings of a trap.
I also knew there would be three phases in all—the details of the other two buried somewhere deep inside my mind and set to be triggered by my intersection with certain unknown future events. Sort of like a “mindbomb” waiting to go off.
An echo of a larger understanding remained as well, its remnant giving me the confidence to believe that Fuller’s puzzle pieces would eventually fit together—allowing us to breach the Kastazi’s defenses and fulfill our mission of resurrecting the Gen One Hybrids. Everyone else, however, was left in the unenviable position of having to take their confidence from me on faith.