Destination Unknown (5 page)

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Authors: Katherine Applegate

Tags: #Fantasy & Magic, #Science Fiction, #End of the world, #Juvenile Fiction, #Science Fiction; Fantasy; Magic, #Space travelers, #General, #Space flight

BOOK: Destination Unknown
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No sulfuric acid rushed in.
Yago breathed. Held it. Breathed again.
Suddenly the baby began to chuckle.
That sound, added to the tension of remaining a second longer in this space-going mausoleum, snapped something in Yago.
“Move!” he shouted.
He pushed past the doctor, elbowed Miss Blake aside, and all at once hung at the edge of a precipice. The shuttle’s cargo doors were open, exposing the lead-lined
Mayflower
capsule to eerie sunlight. It was a straight drop down the dull metal capsule, a straight drop down to a crash against the back wall of the shuttle’s cargo bay.
Yago windmilled his arms, trying to cancel momentum. The doctor grabbed the back of his shirt but the rotten fabric tore away.
Yago fell forward, screaming.
Mo’Steel’s arm shot out and caught Yago’s spring-green hair. He pulled Yago back inside and sat him down with his legs dangling.
“When you’re right on the edge like that, you don’t want to windmill, and you don’t want to go all spasmoid, you want to sit down,” Mo’Steel advised. “Use your heels, bend at the knees, move your butt back, and sit down. It’ll bruise your butt but that’s a lot better than falling.”
“Shut up!” Yago snapped.
Yago stared at the landscape, panting, and wondering how his body could still produce sweat, as dehydrated as he was.
The view was overwhelming.
Overwhelming.
Too
much color on the one side, too little on the other. The shuttle stood perfectly on the dividing line between the two environments.
Yago’s first thought was that it was all an optical illusion. A picture. But he could feel the awesome depths of the gray-shade canyons to one side, and feel, too, the restless movement in the greens and golds and blues and pinks on the other side.
He glanced up at the sky. He had to close his eyes. The sky was similarly divided, all in blue with flat-looking clouds with brown-purple edges on one side, gray on gray over the canyon.
The survivors were all silent, staring.
“What is it?” Errol asked.
“Artificial,” Jobs said. “Has to be. Nothing evolves naturally like this. This can’t be the natural state of this planet.”
Shy Hwang said, “Maybe it’s not real. Maybe . . . I mean, maybe we’re dead. Maybe we’re all dead.”
Yago snorted in derision. “Yeah, maybe it’s heaven. Right. We flew to heaven on a magic shuttle full of dead people.”
“The air seems breathable,” a woman said. “Of course, there’s no way to know what the nitrogen-oxygen-CO
2
ratio is, or what trace gases may be present.”
Yago, with his junior politician’s memory for names, remembered her as Olga Gonzalez, Mo’Steel’s mother. What was her job? Something scientific, no doubt—most of the Eighty had been NASA or NASA contractors.
“How do we get down?” 2Face asked.
The Marine with the unsettling baby in her arms stepped forward to get a better look down. “Spot me,” she said to Mo’Steel.
Mo’Steel put a sort of loose half nelson on her and two others in turn held Mo’Steel. Tamara Hoyle looked down at the drop, at least forty feet. She stepped back.
“Rope is out. First of all, I don’t think there’s any aboard, and second—judging by the way our clothes have rotted — even if there was, we’d never be able to trust it. But there should be plenty of wire on this ship. We braid it together and make a cable.”
“We can’t go ripping wire out of the ship,” Errol protested. “This ship is all we have.”
“This ship is never going to fly again,” Olga Gonzalez said.
“This ship is all we have,” Jobs said. “But we should be able to safely harvest wire from the hibernation berths that have failed.”
“Good. Let’s do that,” 2Face said.
And again Yago grated at her assumption of authority. Who was she to be making decisions? But now was maybe not the time for a fight. Although now was definitely the time to start looking at options. Surely one of these adults could be manipulated into pushing 2Face aside.
Yago surveyed the disturbing landscape. Maybe it wasn’t much of a kingdom, but it was going to be his.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“USUALLY THERE’S NO PAIN, BUT THIS MAY BE DIFFERENT.”
 
It took hours and Mo’Steel was growing ever more impatient. He assumed he’d be the first person down the wire, and he was totally adrenal. Slippy-sliding down a wire to be the first person to step foot on a new planet, that was exalted.
Besides, he had to get away from his mom. She kept bursting into tears over his dad and over the whole world and all. Mo’Steel had loved his dad, but he lived by the creed of no regrets. Sooner or later you were going to miss your grip on the world, you were going to push the limit too far, and Mother G. would grab you, run you up to terminal velocity, and squash you flat.
True, it wasn’t gravity that had killed his dad. But, Mother G. or whatever, the principle was the same: Sooner or later they canceled your account, had to happen, no point in boo-hooing over it. It was the
deal, if you wanted the rush of the big ride you had to accept the fact that every ride comes to an end.
Still, he would miss his dad. He’d gone to cheese, and Mo’Steel regretted seeing him that way. He regretted that memory maybe squeezing out the good stuff his dad had been.
“Come here, I need your help.”
It was the doctor. Mo’Steel glanced at Jobs to see whether his friend needed him, but Jobs was underneath one of the berths working away at removing wire and optical cable.
“All yours, Doc,” Mo’Steel said.
He stepped over a prone and still-staring Billy Weir, then climbed down the ladder to a berth where the doctor had laid Tamara Hoyle and her baby.
“You don’t faint at the sight of blood, do you?” the doc asked.
Mo’Steel laughed. “I’ve seen my own bones poking out through my own skin and didn’t faint,” Mo’Steel answered. It was something he was proud of. He was the Man of Steel, with more titanium and petri-dish replacement parts than the whole rest of his class put together.
The doctor nodded. “Okay. How about bashful? You’re not going to go all giggly, right?”
Mo’Steel frowned. What did she mean? Then he
looked at Tamara Hoyle and her baby. And the weird piece of skin that kept them attached.
He swallowed hard and tried not to lose his balance. Blood was one thing. This was different.
“Uh, maybe you need to get, like, one of the femmes,” Mo’Steel protested.
“I tried. That girl, the one in the frilly dress and the antique shoes? What’s her name? Miss Blake? She agreed to help, but I don’t think she’s physically strong enough. 2Face is stronger, but she’s busy and your mom, she’s . . . she’s upset. I need someone steady.”
“Okay,” Mo’Steel moaned. “Okay. Okay. I can do it.”
She drew Mo’Steel close and spoke in a whisper. “My surgical steel instruments are in decent shape, but I have no bandages, they’re all decayed. I don’t have a lot of confidence in any of my topicals; I don’t know what five centuries does to antibiotics or antivirals. I don’t even have soap or water. And I don’t have any idea what kind of shape our immune systems are in. But the thing I need you for is that this umbilical cord — if that’s what this is — is not normal. Usually there’s no pain, but this may be different. I need you to be ready to take hold of the sergeant in the event she begins to move around. Can you do that?”
Mo’Steel nodded, not trusting his dust-dry mouth to form an answer.
“Okay, Sergeant Hoyle — Tamara,” Dr. Huerta said to her patient, “this shouldn’t be any problem at all. If you feel any discomfort, just let me know.”
“I’m okay,” Tamara said. She stroked the baby’s head.
The baby opened its empty eyes and yawned. Mo’Steel saw a mouth full of tiny white teeth.
Good thing they had a doctor. She could deal with the baby. The baby scared Mo’Steel. Doctors were used to that stuff. Used to giant, silent, eyeless babies.
Right.
Doctor Huerta took up position at bedside, kneeling over the young woman. Mo’Steel squatted behind Tamara’s head, arms akimbo, ready to make a grab.
Doctor Huerta retrieved a piece of fiber-optic cable Jobs must have given her and began to cinch it around the cord, two inches from the baby’s side.
The baby turned its head sharply to look at her.
Doctor Huerta began tying off the cord close to the mother’s shoulder. Mo’Steel looked studiously away, suddenly fascinated by the bulkhead.
The baby stirred and a low, animal moan came from its mother.
“Did you feel that?” the doctor asked her. She held the scalpel poised in her hand, ready for the first cut.
Suddenly the baby lunged. Its chubby fist grabbed for the scalpel. Doctor Huerta yanked it away.
The baby bared its teeth in a dangerous scowl and, as Mo’Steel watched in growing horror, his mother’s face mirrored the expression.
Tamara made her own grab for the scalpel and caught the doctor’s wrist. The doctor lost her balance and Tamara let her fall.
Mo’Steel yelled, “Help! Help down here!”
The doctor fell straight back, hitting her head on the edge of the berth. The scalpel flew from her hand. Mo’Steel lunged for the doctor but he was awkwardly positioned and now, as he tried to lean over Tamara, the baby was clawing feebly at his chest and neck.
It didn’t take long to realize that the doctor was not moving. Wasn’t breathing.
“Help! Someone help me down here!”
Mo’Steel coiled his legs and leaped across Tamara, hit his head on the deck, and came up, brain swimming, swirling. The doctor was still. He fished for the scalpel but was knocked violently off-balance by a kick from Tamara.
He went facedown and the Marine was on him. They struggled, shoving and pushing to find the scalpel.
Jobs appeared, tumbling down the stairs. He stepped on the scalpel just as Tamara touched it with outstretched fingers.
“Cut the cord!” Mo’Steel yelled. He yanked Tamara back with all his strength. He was strong, but the whipcord Marine sergeant was stronger. Her hands closed around his throat and already he was seeing double as she stopped the flow of blood to his brain.
Jobs knelt, picked up the scalpel. He made a quick, slashing cut, severed the cord, and instantly the death grip on Mo’Steel’s throat loosened.
Mo’Steel pushed Tamara back and slid out from under her.
The Marine sat up, then bent forward and began vomiting. The baby lay on its back, gasping, staring blindly.
More people arrived, running to respond to Mo’Steel’s earlier cries.
Too late. Way too late. The doctor was dead.
CHAPTER NINE
“WE DIDN’T LAND. WE WERE CAPTURED.”
 
Miss Violet Blake’s mother was alive. Her father was not.
Violet had seen her father, and the image had been burned so deeply into her thoughts that she could not imagine ever closing her eyes again without seeing his poor face disfigured by those countless holes.
A hideous death. More horrible for her than for him, perhaps. He would have been, should have been, unconscious when the thing happened to him.
She prayed he’d been unconscious.
So many dead. A world dead. And now, new death, murder even, perhaps. Some said the Marine sergeant, Tamara Hoyle, had struck blindly, a panic reaction in part caused by the confusion of waking from a five-century nap. Mo’Steel said no, it had
been deliberate. The woman herself, the sergeant, said nothing and no one had yet questioned her.
What would Violet say to her mother when she awoke? How could she console her? She had never been close to her mother. Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake was her daughter’s polar opposite. An entrepreneur, a businesswoman who had built the software giant Wyllco Inc. from scratch, starting with three employees and some aging tablet computers. Her signature software
RemSleep 009
had made Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake a billionaire. And it had made her indispensable to NASA.
It would have been easier for Violet Blake if her father had been the one to survive. She’d always been her daddy’s little girl. It was her father who had first introduced her to art, to serious music, to literature. It was her father who had given her
Pride and Prejudice,
and it was there, in the mannerly, elegant, understated, and unhurried world of Jane Austen that Violet had found her place in the world.
Violet was a freak in the world of school, because to reject a world dominated by soulless technology, a world where no thought ever seemed to go unspoken, where no feeling went unexpressed, a world devoid of
politesse
, a world without delicacy or tact, to reject that world was seen as unnatural, perhaps
even dangerous. When she refused to wear a link even her teachers turned on her, demanding to know how she could stand being so “out of touch.”

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