Devastation Class

by Glen Zipper

  Bix stepped out from the adjacent control room, a frustrated look on his face.

  “Third time you’ve recorded that message?” he asked as we began walking toward the lift. He was already struggling to trust the life-and-death plan I had relayed, with two-thirds missing, so the distraction of my message in a bottle to Bossa was clearly rubbing him the wrong way.

  “Fourth,” I replied.

  “I still don’t understand the point of this. If he ever gets your message, it means our plan failed.”

  “Which is exactly why we’d need his help.”

  “And you really think he’s the right guy to be our last-hope Hail Mary?”

  “You saw Staxx’s files same as I did. If they’re accurate—”

  “If they’re accurate,” Bix cut me off. “Everything in those files is conjecture, pieced together from dribs and drabs of disparate intel. There could be ten other explanations for who he is and where he came from.”

  “He’s obviously had extensive Alliance training. You saw how much he knew about this ship and all of our protocols.”

  Bix stopped in his tracks and looked at me as though insulted. “What?”

  “Don’t patronize me,” he replied. “This isn’t about who Bossa really is or how much he knew about this ship. You want to believe what’s in those files because it’ll finally give you your answer about what happened to the New Jersey.”

  “You think I’ve lost my objectivity?”

  “I think that’s definitely a question worth asking,” he answered just as the Command Synth materialized before us.

  “Yes, Joseph.”

  In the fourteen weeks since we’d escaped the Resistance base, the Command Synth had become a ubiquitous presence and constant resource to us all. Giving it a name helped everyone feel more comfortable engaging with it. Particularly the students.

  Joseph hesitated before responding, as if considering the gravity of what he was about to say. Command Synths were programmed to mimic human behaviors, but something about his countenance felt uncannily real. Perhaps too much time in his company had started to blur the lines for me.

  “You’re needed on the bridge,” he finally answered. “It’s time.”

  Bix and I stood in the quiet as the lift whooshed us up to the bridge. Even after all our preparation, I still didn’t feel ready. I wasn’t sure I ever would.

  “Tell me the Beacon is going to work. No matter what.”

  “It will,” Bix replied. “I followed Fuller’s specs to a tee.”

  In addition to Mindbomb, Fuller had left cache upon cache of specifications for new technologies inside Sentinel for us. Like the stealthing field generator that had allowed us to traverse the expanse undetected behind a phasing particle field.

  “You’re absolutely sure there’s no way they’ll be able to detect it?”

  “No shot. Not even if they cut Nick in half.”

  The lift opened to the bridge, and, as was often the case, I almost expected to find JD waiting there for me. It was like a nightmare I hadn’t yet woken from.

  Gentry, now serving as my first officer, sat at Communications. Our chemistry wasn’t perfect, but over time we had forged a mutual respect. Together we had decided to assign Nick to Weapons and also slotted Liko at Safi’s vacant Navigation station, where, with a little help from us, he quickly got up to speed. As usual, Ohno and Anatoly occupied their posts at Engineering and Medical.

  I missed having my hands on the controls, but Julian was a capable replacement for me at Piloting. Each day I’d stare at the back of his head, trying to make sense of his truth. In the days after Gallipoli, he had both loved and betrayed me and displayed the best and worst parts of himself. As much as I tried, I still couldn’t understand him—let alone trust him. Regardless, survival required us to cooperate without enmity. So that’s what we did.

  “Report,” I called out, easing into my chair.

  “Confirmed sensor hit,” Gentry responded, swiveling to face me. “UAS Vanguard patrolling Sector Delta Six One.”

  “Farther out than we expected.”

  “But still inside Earth Corridor. Exactly what we needed.”

  “How is it that we’re only seeing them now?”

  “Our sensors were looking for the wrong thing,” Bix answered, settling himself into Analytics. “I’m seeing signatures similar to Alliance and Kastazi, but not quite either. Very strange.”

  A proximity alarm sounded as the California entered the Vanguard’s estimated sensor range.

  “Bring it up on the Holoview.”

  “Activating Holoview.”

  The Vanguard flickered to life in front of us, its fuselage retrofitted in bizarre patterns of hexagonal scaling.

  Julian leaned over his controls, gawking at the sight. “What is that?”

  “Some kind of reactive shielding,” Bix posited. “Their entire hull is energized.”

  “Instead of grids?”

  “In addition to grids.”

  “Focus, people,” I said. “This is it.”

  The alert grew louder and more frequent.

  “We’ve run through this a million times,” I continued. “Now we do it for real.”

  “Five thousand meters,” Liko announced. “We’ve crossed the threshold.”

  “Drop stealthing field integrity by four percent.”

  “Aye,” Ohno confirmed. “Dropping stealthing field integrity by four percent.”

  “Do it slow. Make it look like we’re damaged and bleeding ions.”

  “Copy that.”

  Another alert sounded.

  “They can see us,” Gentry reported.

  “Good,” I replied. “Grids?”

  “Stable. Holding at one hundred percent.”

  “Everyone on Beta Deck in their safety positions?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Dampening matrix?”

  “Active.”

  “Nick, the Beacon?”

  “Cycling pattern initiated per Doctor Fuller’s instructions.”

  A new alert chimed from Communications.

  “It’s the Vanguard,” Gentry confirmed.

  “Knock, knock,” Anatoly pondered aloud.

  “All right,” I responded. “Let’s open the door.”

  “Aye, opening com.”

  As soon as the link went live, I recognized who it was.

  “Identify yourself.” It felt surreal to be staring at the face of Mathias Strauss on my Holoview. Captain of the UAS Vanguard, he was a legend of the Nine-Year War.

  I paused to consider everything I knew about him. It came as no surprise to see him as a traitor. Even when he was “one of us,” he had earned himself something of an ugly, bloodthirsty reputation.

  “Identify yourself,” Strauss insisted a second time.

  “My name is Vivien Nixon. Captain of the UAS California.”

  Strauss took two steps forward, his face filling the Holoview. “No. You are a child playing a dangerous game.”

  “Let’s just get on with it, shall we?” I baited him, staying on plan.

  Strauss angrily punched his fingers against his command module, and a three-dimensional identification photo appeared on the Holoview alongside him. John Douglas Marshall: Age 18. My heart broke all over again as JD’s image rotated on a 360-degree axis.

  “John Marshall—where is he?” he demanded.

  “KIA,” I replied.

  Strauss’s angry expression gave way to something that looked a whole lot more like anxiety, as if JD’s demise had some greater consequence than I could have known. “I am placing you and your crew under arrest as enemy combatants of the Alliance. Lower your grids and prepare to be boarded.”

  Not yet. I had to take it further. Make him believe we were ready to die.

  “I’m afraid you have it backward,” I answered. “We’re all that’s left of the Alliance. You and your crew are treasonous cowards and Kastazi sympathizers. So just in case it isn’t clear . . . no, I will not be lo
wering my grids.”

  Gentry anxiously glanced over his shoulder at me, concerned I was overplaying things.

  “Then you leave us no choice but to destroy you,” Strauss replied, looking suddenly more emboldened.

  “Give us your best shot,” I countered, knowing we had to take a beating in order to draw him in.

  “We will,” Strauss glibly replied as six hulking hostiles materialized from behind stealthing fields, three on either side of the Vanguard. The sight of the ships took my breath away. A peculiar amalgam of both Alliance and Kastazi technology, each was twice the size of the California.

  One ship or seven, it made no difference. We still had to take it all the way to the brink.

  I faced Strauss, narrowed my eyes at him, and issued the command I knew could very well be my last if everything didn’t go according to plan.

  “Fire all weapons!”

  We bombarded the hostiles with everything we had, but nothing in the California’s arsenal came close to penetrating any of the ships’ defenses.

  “They’re absorbing our plasma fire!” Bix shouted. “Phasing torpedoes aren’t getting through either!”

  The Vanguard returned a volley of plasma fire at us. The streaming flares’ incendiary radiance saturated the bridge in bright orange light.

  “Incoming!” Gentry yelled.

  Absorbing a thunderous impact, the California rattled down to its substructure.

  “Their weapons’ yield is off the charts!” Bix hollered.

  “Grids falling fast. Down to forty percent,” Ohno reported right after him.

  “Now?” Gentry anxiously urged me.

  “No, not yet,” I asserted, holding firm. “Maintain position, keep firing.”

  The Vanguard launched another sortie at us, sending a wave of electromagnetic interference sizzling through our coms system.

  “Brace for impact!” Anatoly shouted.

  The Vanguard’s strike landed like a punch to the gut, its concussive force slamming my head back against my chair.

  “Grids at ten percent!”

  “Now?” Gentry asked again, shouting above the California’s creaking hull.

  I nodded. “Now,” I confirmed. “Show them our cards.”

  “Aye. Deactivating dampening matrix.”

  The Vanguard’s plasma cannons glowed hot, charging for another barrage.

  “We can’t take another hit,” Ohno warned.

  Hovering menacingly before us, the Vanguard edged closer but did not fire.

  “What’s happening?”

  “They’re scanning us again,” Bix reported.

  “Anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Come on . . . Come on . . . You should be able to see him by now.”

  Bix’s shoulders slumped in relief at the sounding of an alert.

  “That’s it,” he said, acknowledging what we had all been waiting for. “They’ve locked onto Nick’s signature.”

  The Vanguard powered down its weapons, and one hostile broke from formation, aligning her nose only a few hundred meters off ours.

  Then the Holoview abruptly dropped to static.

  Gentry pushed away from his console. “That ship. It’s overriding our coms system.”

  A silhouette gradually bled its way through the nebulous soup of gray-and-white fuzz. At first I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, but as the shadowy figure came into clear view, there was no denying it was real.

  “Mother?”

  “I’ve targeted forty-seven biosignatures on Beta Deck. Surrender or I will kill them all. You have five seconds to comply.”

  “Mom, no! It can’t be . . . You can’t . . .”

  “Three seconds.”

  Another figure stepped into view just beside her. Captain Philip Marshall.

  “They’re arming weapons again!” Bix shouted.

  “What is this? What are you—?”

  “One second.”

  I felt like I was about to crumble, but I had to finish the last piece of our plan.

  “We surrender,” I said, setting Phase One into full motion.

  EPILOGUE

  LOCKED IN AN EMPTY DARKNESS, THERE WERE no memories to fill my dreams. I possessed no identity or purpose. There was only pure existence. Then came flashes of experience. I recognized them as my own, but they neither pleased nor disturbed me. That was because emotion came last, traumatically invading the peace of my blissful nothingness. As I opened my eyes, it wasn’t like waking up. It was like being born.

  I could feel a bed beneath me, its frame rattling with the familiar vibration of a slow-moving ship. A small beam of starlight filtered in from a porthole above, dimly illuminating the cramped quarters of what looked like an old Alliance science vessel. I slid my feet to the floor and stood.

  “Welcome back,” a voice called out from the shadows.

  My brain still searching for focus, I couldn’t quite place it.

  “What happened to me?”

  “You died. Do you feel rested?”

  I felt more than rested. I felt perfect. I ran my hands down my torso. My skin was smooth and pristine. I lifted my shirt to see if it was real. The ugly burns from my childhood were gone.

  My unseen companion stepped into the starlight. It was Dr. Samuel Fuller. “I decided not to restore your scarring,” he said. “It seemed . . . unnecessary . . . this time.”

  Fear and confusion infested my mind. Succumbing to dizzying panic, I braced myself against the wall. My hand came to rest next to a small com unit. Its display read UAS Tripoli. “What have you done to me? What do you mean, this time?”

  “I made a promise to your father. You were never supposed to know.”

  “Know what?!”

  “The truth.”

  Somehow I already knew. But I needed to hear him say the words. “Tell me!”

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve died. In the Kastazi attack on Camp Jemison, you weren’t just injured. You were killed. But I brought you back. I made you . . .”

  “A Hybrid? Are you telling me that I’m a Hybrid?”

  Fuller smiled at me. “No, John Douglas. I made you something more.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We are thankful to all our incredible friends, family, and colleagues who encouraged and supported us on our journey to bring the world of Devastation Class to life. While there are many who endured our constant creative anxieties and all too often cancelled plans, we want to thank those people without whom Devastation Class would still be confined to our imaginations.

  FROM GLEN

  My brother, Ralph Zipper, for telling me it was okay to stop being a lawyer, and promising to catch me if I fell. My mother, Dorothy Golaine, for bringing me into this world, and never delivering on the threat to take me back out of it when I misbehaved.

  FROM ELAINE

  My mother, Joanne Parnell Mongeon, for encouraging me to be a writer and creator for as long as I can remember, seeing the storyteller in me when I didn’t, and providing infinite love and support. My siblings, Daniel Mongeon and Deborah Mongeon, for igniting my love of sci-fi and cheering me on. My chosen families—my women, my dudes, my people, my cheerleaders—for inspiring me, filling me up, and holding me up.

  FROM BOTH OF US

  Tom Forget, for being the first person to read the beginnings of our idea—then called “California”—and insisting it had to be written as a novel.

  Charlie Olsen, our friend and agent, for believing in us from day one and fighting for our vision ever since.

  Hannah VanVels and Jacque Alberta, our editors who helped make our good ideas better and our bad ones die peaceful, dignified deaths.

  Amy Nickin, Erica Barmash, Lee Goldberg, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Richard Heller, Mark Merriman, University of Pennsylvania professor Mbacke Thioune, Lindsay Williams, and Thom Zimny, whose guidance and counsel steered us through so many storms that otherwise surely would have sunk us.

  Michelle Holme, who captured so much of the
essence of the Devastation Class world in a single, striking image.

  And, again, to our fathers and Anthony the dog. It breaks our hearts that we cannot share this time with you, but they are still filled with endless love and gratitude because you made it possible.

  CONNECT WITH GLEN ZIPPER AND ELAINE MONGEON!

  GLEN

  Twitter: @Zipper

  Instagram: @glenzipper

  ELAINE

  Twitter: @E_Mongeon

  Instagram: @elainemongeon

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  GLEN ZIPPER PRODUCED THE OSCAR-WINNING DOCUMENTARY UNDEFEATED, and the hit Netflix series Dogs. Born in New York City and raised in Fort Lee, NJ, Glen currently resides in Los Angeles, where he enjoys motorcycle riding and stopping to pet every dog he sees.

  AWARD-WINNING FILMMAKER ELAINE MONGEON WROTE AND DIRECTED the short films Good Morning for Warner Bros. Pictures and Swiped to Death for Hulu and the Sundance Institute. She also served as an associate producer on Magic Mike XXL. Elaine has a love for the outdoors and has been known to spend her time traversing glaciers in Canada and precision motorcycle riding.