Mothership Read online

  Based on his total nonresponse, I’m guessing Captain Bob likes it just fine.

  Suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulder.

  “Elvs, you okay?”

  I don’t turn around. I can hear Cole’s breath as he hustles to keep pace with me, and let’s just say I don’t exactly feel like talking. I take a conversational cue from Captain Bob and go all stony silent.

  “I didn’t get a chance to check on you earlier,” he says. “Did you get hurt at all in the blast? Any sign of brain damage? How’s your vision?” And he begins patting me down as we walk—my head, my arms, my legs. I rip his arm away when he starts to get fresh with the Goober.

  “Are you checking for internal bleeding or frisking me for a weapon?” I say.

  “Jeez, Elvs,” he says, “I was just worried about you. That’s all.” And he seems so genuinely hurt that for a second I actually feel bad for acting like such an ass monger.

  But just for a second.

  “Don’t you have some cheerleader’s ankle to be concerned about?” I snap.

  “Elvs.” His voice is soft. Soothing.

  I catch Cole’s eye then, and it all comes rushing back. God, I used to feel like I could stare into those eyes for hours, forever, just watching them stare back into mine. And right now, even though I want to hate him, the way I’ve been hating him for the past eight-plus months, somehow I can’t. Somehow the knowledge that this might very well be my last day as a living, breathing human being makes all the hatred melt out of me.

  Cole tugs on my arm, stopping my stride dead in the hallway. Then he takes my head between his hands—exactly the way he did that one beautiful afternoon—and gazes straight into my eyes. I stop breathing. Suddenly I’m not myself anymore. I’m not on a leaking spaceship. I’m not knocked up beyond all recognition. Suddenly I’m just a girl, gazing at a boy, getting goose bumps from the scent of his neck.

  “I missed you,” I whisper. But over the cacophony of stomping girls, I’m not sure he hears it.

  Cole holds me away from him, just a little, to look at me, and—God, I love those eyes—I wait for him to say something, anything, to make me believe that this “rescue” of theirs isn’t going as badly as it seems. I don’t even care if he lies to me, just this once, just so I won’t be so freaked.

  He blinks and then raises an index finger. “How many fingers am I holding up?” he asks.

  Ugh. I push the bastard away.

  “I dunno,” I respond, flipping him the bird. “How many am I?”

  I don’t need Cole, I decide as I regain my position next to Captain Bob at the head of the train, leaving the idiot to make his way back to his beloved cheerleader. I don’t need anyone. Our survival is in my hands now, and God forbid I eff it up because I’m too busy freaking over someone else’s boyfriend. No, I think, absolutely. I do not need him.

  Although what I do sort of need, I realize as my stomach begins to gurgle-gurgle, is a bathroom. Talk about wonderful timing.

  “You okay over there?” Captain Bob says, shooting a glance my way. I can’t tell if he’s talking about my little scene with Cole or the obvious dismayed look on my face, as I do my best to hold in what I’m sure will be one fiercely fragrant pregnant-lady fart.

  “I’m fine,” I manage to squeak out. “Just fine.”

  He curls his mouth to the side. “Good,” he says. “Because I’m counting on you.”

  I allow myself the tiniest of smiles. Yeah, I think, my dad would be pretty proud.

  “Hey,” Britta calls from the back of the line. “Does anyone else smell that?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  IN WHICH THE PLOT GETS, LIKE, SUPERTHICK

  I’m working hard at my role as human GPS, trying to get everyone to the bridge, only it’s not going quite as well as I might have hoped. The damage caused by the explosion has put some serious hurt on our little space academy, and we’ve already had to backtrack once, after hitting up the laundry room. Talk about nasty. Stacks of dirty sports bras are foul enough when they’re not on fire.

  And then of course I lead us smack into a wall of sparking debris.

  “Wow, Commander Elvie,” comes a voice from behind me, and I don’t have to turn around to know that it’s Britta. “You are, like, so good at this. Any other giant crap piles you want to lead us straight into?”

  I would like to lead a giant crap pile straight into her face.

  Ramona rolls her eyes at me as we turn a corner, then jerks her thumb in Britta’s direction. “You used to go to school with that thing?” I nod. Britta is again whining about the state of her precious ankle. You’d think she broke, like, nine of them the way she’s going on about it. “Rock-paper-scissors to see who gets to throw her out the window,” Ramona tells me.

  And we’re backtracking again.

  As we walk, I begin tuning into the various conversations behind me, less because I’m interested and more because I need something to think about other than, you know, our impending doom. But it turns out that most of the girls who didn’t get smashed to bits are as dull as rocks. “I knew there was a reason you weren’t returning my blinks, Coley. I just wish you’d told me you were leaving to become a space commando.” “No, seriously, I don’t get any reception.” “And then Tamara was like, ‘No, she didn’t,’ and I was like, ‘Did too,’ and she was like, ‘You cannot get high off fermented tuna.’” “I just wonder who our teachers really were, you know?”

  I stop switching brain dials and focus on the last conversation. A quick glance over my shoulder tells me that the two girls talking are Heather, the walking grammar lesson, and this other girl Danielle, who’s svelte and sporty despite her baby bump and will probably grow up to be an underwater prenatal yoga instructor herself.

  “I mean, I know they weren’t aliens, that’s all I’m saying,” Danielle goes on. “Because that doesn’t make any sense. Put aside for the moment that aliens don’t exist. Even if they did, why would they want to teach calculus to a bunch of pregnant girls?”

  Heather hmmms on that for a second, thinking before she responds. Finally she pipes up. “Well, that’s not all you’re saying, is it, since you continued speaking after that clause? Furthermore, you shouldn’t begin a sentence with ‘because.’”

  Danielle continues on as though Heather hasn’t said anything at all, which, when dealing with Heather, is probably the best course of action. “And anyway, the teachers didn’t even start attacking us until these guys showed up, you know? So, really, I think our ‘rescuers’ might be the ones to look out for.”

  I’m starting to think this Danielle chick might be one of the few mothers on this spaceship with some brains in her head. But I don’t get a lot of time to ruminate on what she’s said, because it’s at that moment that Ramona decides she wants to talk to me again.

  “How come you decided to keep it?”

  My head snaps up. She’s sucking down another clove—Lord knows where she found it—and she asks the question in this, like, totally nonchalant way, but it hits me hard.

  “Sorry?” I ask.

  “Why’d you decide to keep your baby?” Ramona asks, taking another nice long drag. “You miss the date for a reboot, or you just really into toilet training?”

  I contemplate how best to answer that. It’s not like the idea of “taking care of the problem” never crossed my mind. What accidentally knocked-up teen girl doesn’t at least flirt with the idea of getting a fresh start? But in the end that just wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it’s not like I had a whole ton of time to think about it. Dad told me once that it used to be, way back in the day, that a woman could terminate an unwanted pregnancy even several months after conception. I guess lots of people were freaked about that, and there were all sorts of laws and arguments about it. Finally with the Great Compromise it was decided that anyone who wanted to could get a termination, but only for the first two weeks after conception. These days it’s possible to find out if you’re preggers in as little as two hours, but a lot o
f girls don’t know until a month or so in, and by then it’s tough luck, Charlie.

  “I’m not keeping it,” I answer Ramona at last. “I’m giving the thing up for adoption, as soon as it pops. Already filled out the paperwork.”

  “Assuming we don’t all asphyxiate in the next hour,” she says.

  “Obviously.”

  She nods, thoughtful, then rubs her belly, the cigarette laced between two fingers.

  “You?” I ask. I can’t help it.

  She looks up at me and shrugs. “Officially? I’m ‘keeping’ it, but if you want to know, the thing’s really gonna be raised by my uncle Leroy out in San Mateo County. Apparently his wife has a dried-up prune for a uterus. They’ve been trying to get knocked up for years. Enter the family hero.” She takes another long drag on her clove. “Win-win, right? The kid gets parents who want it, and I get to play the part of the wild and crazy fun older cousin.”

  I smile.

  “When I first found out, I freaked, though,” she goes on. “I even went down to the clinic, the day after. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved Kyran and everything. That’s my boyfriend. But I didn’t exactly want to look like a swollen watermelon for the next nine months.”

  “So,” I say when Ramona stops talking. That can’t possibly be the end of the story. “What changed your mind?”

  “Oh.” She sucks down another lungful of smoke. “One of the doctors at the clinic. You know how they have that one room, before you go in for the actual operation, where they counsel you and make sure you’re mentally stable and yada, yada?” I nod like I know, even though I don’t, really. “Well, the doctor I saw kinda talked me out of it, I guess. He just brought up all these other options for me. He was the one who mentioned this place, actually.” She flicks the ash from her cig onto the ground, then smears it with her boot as she stomps. “Of course, now I get to thank him for all this. Dunno how he convinced me to change my mind. Probably didn’t hurt that he was dreamy gorgeous. Usually I don’t go for the dark, smoldering types. I like my boys just a little femme, like Kyr. But damn, he was smokin’.”

  Suddenly Ramona snaps to attention, like she’s doing a double take. “Jesus, I’m such a chromer. You don’t think that guy was in cahoots with our doucher teachers, do you?”

  I think on that. “Yeah, probably.”

  “Holy hell.”

  “Seriously,” I agree. “So what does, um, Kyran think about your whole give-the-baby-to-the-uncle plan?”

  “Eh.” She shrugs. “He didn’t seem to care one way or the other. He was so not happy about the clinic, let me tell you, but when it came to raising the thing?” She pauses as we navigate another tight corner. “Anyway, he skipped town about a week before I boarded. Last I heard he was moving to Indiana.”

  Huh. Sounds familiar.

  “Hey, does it bug you that they won’t tell us the gender of our stupid babies beforehand?” Ramona asks. “Like, who cares about the element of surprise, Dr. Marsden? Just tell me if the damn thing’s a boy or a girl so I know what genitals to look for.”

  “They wouldn’t tell you either?” I ask. Dr. Marsden told me that he was “restricting gender information” from me because he thought it would be psychologically damaging to know the gender of the baby I would never form mother-child bonds with. Not that I had a burning desire to know, anyway. I had multiple opportunities to learn the Goober’s sex in the five months before I got here, and I always declined.

  “God, I hope we make it off this spaceship,” Ramona says just as we turn another corner and get our first glance at the bridge. “If I’m going to asphyxiate in space, I’d really rather not do it next to those morons.” She motions back toward Britta and Other Cheerleader, who are fawning over Cole’s hair. Ramona stomps out the last of her cigarette as we reach the door to the bridge.

  The bridge is nothing special to look at, really. Just a dull gray room with operational terminals set up at the center console and along the side walls. No captain’s chair or photon torpedo launchers or anything like that. Basically it serves as the main hub of operations for the entire ship. Navigation, gravity, and O2 levels are all controlled from the main computer, while secondary systems like communications and temperature control are run by other servers that are hardwired to the main computer. There’s a small viewport that normally would have diagnostic overlays demarcating points of interest in the ship’s path, while along the left side of the viewport, screens streaming feeds from cameras spread across the hull of the ship would give external views from just about every angle. Now, though, the cameras are all dead, and only the physical window shows what lies ahead, without any indication of what we’re drifting toward. Students were never allowed in this area, primarily because one person with access to that main computer could do a whole heck of a lot of damage. Although the teachers liked to tell us it was off-limits because that’s where Professor Wilks let off his legendary moon rockets.

  While most of the girls make a beeline for the massive window on the far wall, checking out the spacescape and our leaking O2 situation, Captain Bob directs Cole to the main communications view screen. “Tell me when you’ve made contact with command,” he barks at Cole. “Byron will want to be notified of our situation as soon as possible.”

  I can see from Cole’s expression that he’s fighting back an “Aye, aye, Captain!” But he makes his way to the view screen without further comment. Britta, of course, follows him, simultaneously hobbling and chattering inanely in his ear. “And I was so worried that I didn’t get a chance to tell you we were having a baby,” she prattles on. “But I guess you sensed it? That’s so amazing, that you can sense something like that. I still cannot even believe you came all this way just to rescue me!”

  Meanwhile, Captain Bob heads for the main console, to check for himself what our situation is. I decide to follow him, hoping there will be something I can do to help.

  Unfortunately, so does Carrie. While Captain Bob jabs his fingers at the touch screen, she drapes herself over his back, her hair in his face.

  “Is there anything I can do?” she asks, her lips all pouty in this way that I’m sure she thinks is supersexy.

  Captain Bob doesn’t seem to have noticed that he’s got a boob-shaped tumor attached to him. “It’s encrypted,” he growls, jabbing away at the touch screen in a futile attempt to find the right pass code. “And the code provided by control isn’t working. I was hoping they wouldn’t have time to lock it down. Apparently they did.”

  “You know,” Carrie continues, trying to nudge Bob’s face her way by wrenching his chin back with her hand, “you sort of remind me of my ex, Giles. He had that sensitive Mediterranean thing going for him.”

  “Hey, Carrie,” I say, because I finally realize there is something I can do to help. “Why don’t you turn the ho meter down a few ticks until we get out of here, okay?”

  Carrie straightens up with a pout, but as she walks away, she stops and looks over her shoulder, giving Bob a choice view of her backside. “Just call if you need anything, gorgeous,” she coos.

  “Thanks,” Captain Bob tells me softly as I join him at the console.

  “No problem. You stick to the commando stuff, I can deal with twits like Carrie.”

  For the first time all day, I see what looks like a crack of a smile breaking through Captain Bob’s mask. But just as quickly it vanishes. “Anyway, I appreciate your assistance, Miss Nara. And thank you for getting us to the bridge in one piece.”

  I decide to go where Cole Archer cannot. “Aye, aye, Captain,” I tell him.

  Freed from the distraction that is Carrie’s sizeable rack, the captain finds the encryption on the computer far easier to crack. Within moments the computer’s main interface has sprung to life, and a few taps later, every console on the bridge is lit up and working again.

  “Oooooh,” Natty sighs from over by the window as she takes in the light display. “It looks just like Christmas!”

  Captain Bob and I ignore he
r and lean in close to the console to find out exactly how boned we really are.

  We are pretty supremely boned.

  The bad news is that the escape pods were in fact launched from the bridge, which leaves us no exit from the ship whatsoever. It also means, of course, that someone on board this ship must have launched them, and—barring the unlikely event that our little friend the pod launcher stuck his head inside an oven or something—that person is still on board, and still probably doesn’t like us very much.

  The really bad news is that, despite the vacuum shields activating, we are still leaking oxygen. Breathable air levels are down to about 58 percent. All those explosions must have burned up a considerable amount of oxygen even before we started leaking atmo. At this rate we’ll be drowning in our own air in less than forty-eight hours.

  And the really, REALLY bad news? The explosions also shoved the Echidna into a deteriorating orbit, which means that sooner or later the ship is going to get caught in Earth’s gravitational pull and crash onto the surface of the planet. Since these cruisers were built in orbital docks, they were never designed to land. Any navigational instruments will be useless once we start our descent.

  The ship is going down, and we’re going down with it.

  “How quickly do you think your people can get a rescue ship here?” I ask the captain. “I mean, you do have people, right? A backup plan?”

  In answer the captain turns to bellow at Cole. And is it just me, or do I detect a hint of panic in his voice? “Archer! What’s the read on the comm panel?”

  Even from here I can tell that the only thing Cole’s managed to bring up on the communications panel is static. Cole is frowning at the view screen, spinning dials seemingly at random. “It should be working fine,” he calls back our way, “but I can’t get or send any kind of signal.”

  “Another encryption?” Captain Bob asks. “Or maybe the transmitter’s offline.”