A Stranger Thing (The Ever-Expanding Universe)

by Leicht, Martin

“This area was underwater after the initial impact,” Marsden says. “The cruiser broke through the ice, and we were completely submerged for, oh, fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. The prow caught the worst of it, flooding the bridge all the way through the hangar and into the engine/repulsor stores. This area was one of the last places the water reached before the ship crested and came back up.”

  “And the ice just froze up around it,” Dad says matter-of-factly. “Extraordinary.”

  “Nothing does the trick of reviving you after getting shot like waking up submerged in freezing water,” Marsden says wryly. “We’re holding steady for now, but I have no faith that the ship will stay above sea level much longer. That’s why your arrival is so fortuitous. Now, Harry,” he goes on, taking Dad by the arm and leading him into his old examination room, “let’s see if there isn’t something we can do about that knee of yours. There must be some bandages still in their wrapping.”

  Zee follows Marsden and Dad into the exam room, leaving me and Cole behind, both of us still experiencing massive character-shift vertigo.

  “What’s he up to?” Cole whispers to me. “Wasn’t too long ago he wanted both of us dead.”

  “All I know,” I answer, “is that he could have vaporized us all in a heartbeat back there and he didn’t. Whatever he’s up to, we’ll have to get it out of him, fast.”

  I turn to join my parents, but Cole touches my arm to stop me. “Elvie, we can’t trust him,” he says.

  “Yeah, dur,” I reply. “But we need to find out what he’s doing, and we can’t exactly do that in the hallway.”

  “Okay,” Cole says, thinking it over. “But, like, we should be clever about it. Sneaky.”

  I open my mouth to tell Cole that cleverness has not exactly proven to be one of his strengths, but I shut my yap instead. I’ve been snarky enough for three lifetimes, and poor, sweet Cole doesn’t deserve any of it. “Good plan,” I agree. “Now, c’mon, let’s not leave the grown-ups alone too long.”

  “ ’Kay, only . . .” Cole’s hand still lingers on my arm. “What did you mean before, when you said I wasn’t your boyfriend?”

  I kiss him on the cheek. “I was trying to throw Marsden off balance,” I say with what I can only hope is an encouraging smile. “Y’know, sneaky?”

  He moves his hand from my arm and touches his cheek where I’ve just kissed him. “Yeah,” he says, smiling back. “Yeah, sure.”

  I enter the exam room, Cole right behind me. Dad is up on the exam table, which is, of course, tilted at such a teeter-totter angle that he’s forced to grip the edges to keep from sliding down. Meanwhile, Marsden is wrapping a thick tan bandage around my father’s pant leg, chatting and laughing with my parents like he’s the family MD.

  “Normally this would go against the skin,” Mardsen says. “But I figured it was a bit chilly in here to have you strip down to your skivvies.”

  “Quite,” Dad agrees with a laugh.

  Uh, hello? When my Dad found out that Randy Bird had thrown a basketball at my head in sixth grade PE, he practically led a campaign to have him expelled from the school, and now he’s sitting around chortling with my attempted murderer? “I want to know what the hell your game is, Doc,” I say, hands tight around the ray gun.

  I hope that was sneaky enough for you, Cole.

  “Elvie!” my parents say in unison. As if I’m a disobedient child.

  “Dad, Zee, you don’t know what this guy is capable of,” I tell them. “And I’m not buying the ‘Good Doctor’ act one bit. So tell me what you’re up to, Doc, or I’ll fry your ass with this goofy ray gun of yours, and this time I won’t stop till I know you’re good and dead.”

  Marsden smiles and continues wrapping Dad’s knee. “Don’t be too hard on her, folks, she’s not wrong,” he says. “It’s no use arguing that we are anything beyond allies of convenience.” He looks up at me. “Yet allies we are.”

  “Not yet,” I answer. “Not till you tell us everything that’s going on. Why you’re hiding from the Keeny . . . Kyni-goats . . .” Damn, it’s difficult to be threatening when you can’t even pronounce half the words you’re saying. “Devastators,” I say at last. “And why you’re so interested in hybrids. Everything.”

  “Well,” Marsden replies lightly. As though angry girls with ray guns shout at him every day. Maybe they do—I don’t know, I haven’t been reading the dude’s diary. “I imagine we’re both interested in the crossbreed situation, Elvie. That is why you’re here, isn’t it? Looking for any files you might have missed detailing my tests?”

  Like I said before: perceptive.

  Dr. Marsden finishes fastening the bandage on Dad’s knee and rises up, sauntering over to the nearby counter and lackadaisically browsing through the cabinets, looking for who-knows-what.

  “Your questions are interrelated, Elvie, so I’ll give you one big, messy answer. The situation, in a nutshell, is this: The Almiri see you as a threat. My brothers the Jin’Kai see you as a nuisance. I see you as a savior.” Mom, standing beside Dad, lifts her head on her neck a little, listening. “And I’m not alone,” Marsden continues. He finds some gauze packs and a slender pouch of antiseptic gel and takes them out. He walks back over to Dad and gingerly lifts up his hand—and it’s only then that I realize that Dad’s palms are practically shredded. I guess he had even more difficulty navigating the hallway than I thought. “The Kynigos, or ‘Devastators,’ are what you’d call the old guard of the Jin’Kai,” Marsden goes on, beginning to clean and dress Dad’s wound. “They’re not a very flexible bunch, and they like to get their way. It was their . . . enthusiastic approach to breeding that forced the Jin’Kai’s hand when it came to reappropriating the other Pouri colonies. Unfortunately, we as a species don’t seem to have learned much from our mistakes. There was a notion that, with time, more worlds with viable hosts would be discovered beyond the original six colonies. I’m sad to say that this notion never quite came to fruition. And here we are, on the cusp of taking the final colony, which will buy us, what, a hundred years? Two? Our growth is exponential. We need another solution.”

  “I’ve got a great solution,” Cole suggests. “We wreck your sorry asses and send you all packing back into outer space.”

  “Let me be very clear about this,” Marsden replies, his voice deathly serious. “You have no chance, no chance, to survive the war that is to come. My predecessors have not just conquered but consumed five other worlds before this one. I am part of the vanguard generation, sent to Earth to quietly create a foothold for our fleets that are en route.”

  “Fleets?” I ask, already feeling the dread rising in me. “How many?”

  “More than you can count,” Marsden says bleakly. “And more than this modestly populated little rock can sustain. Fifty years ago a small band of us arrived on the planet, and today we already outmatch the Almiri strength.” He turns to Cole. “The Earthbound Jin’Kai represent less than two percent of the total strength of our forces. Your kind lost this fight before it even began.”

  Okay, so dread officially risen. If what Marsden is saying is true, then a few files in a computer aren’t going to help us any. After all, how are a bunch of ones and zeros going to help against an intergalactic force of highly advanced warriors who outgun and outnumber us by a factor of who-the-shit-knows?

  But Marsden isn’t done there. “Our inevitable military victory won’t help us survive long after your demise, however,” he continues.

  “Is that supposed to, like, cheer me up?” I ask. “That you guys will be dead too, eventually?” I roll my eyes. “Hey, we can stop now, guys. Mission accomplished! Woo-hoo!”

  Marsden ignores my little bout of sarcasm. “As I see it, there needs to be a change in the Jin’Kai culture if we are to bring to an end our history of self-defeating genocide. I am one in a minority of the vanguard who believe that there is a way to prevent the tragedies of past mistakes. And all of my work has been toward achieving this end.”

  “Your ‘work,’ �
�� Cole growls, “included the slaughter of countless numbers of our offspring.” I have to say, I’m pleasantly surprised that Cole’s the only one of my cofighters not taken in by Marsden’s good nature. I guess, ’cause, you know, the doc tried to break open his face and stuff. “How many sites like this ship were there before we found out about what you were up to?”

  “Enough,” Marsden answers coolly. “My work was progressive but ultimately useless . . . until I found you, Elvie.” He turns and looks me right in the eye. “I knew from the first bio-scan that there was something different about your baby. After I ran more tests on you, I realized what I had in you: the answer. A host with the ability to carry an infant without becoming infertile. After still further tests I found even more good news: You weren’t a fluke. The genetic indicators in your DNA pointed to hereditary traits.” He points to Mom. “The mutation was dominant, and that meant it held the solution to our ever-encroaching crisis.”

  “You were looking for a way to replicate the ‘mutation,’ as you call it,” Zee says, nodding like this all makes perfect sense. Like the doctor’s discussing how much garlic to add to the marinara. “To find what made us different from our Almiri fathers.”

  “And I was this close to finding it,” Marsden tells her. “Until, of course, this buffoon and his cohorts came and ruined everything.”

  Cole glowers under the accusation. “You mean when we saved everyone on this ship,” he says.

  “Did you, now?” Marsden muses. “I wonder, what was the school enrollment before your little visit?”

  “You mean before you started drowning—”

  “Cole!” I put up a hand to shush him, which startles him into silence. I can feel Cole getting hotter, and he’s got every right. But the last thing we need right now is Archer vs. Marsden, Round Two.

  “None of this explains why you’re hiding from your buddies upstairs,” I put in.

  Marsden turns his attention back to healing Dad’s hands. “When the Almiri attacked, the faculty went to our containment contingency plan, and reinforcements were contacted. But I knew that when they came, all my work would be in danger of being exposed, and destroyed. The Jin’Kai can be just as set in their ways as the Almiri. What I was doing—looking for a way to alter our species—would have been considered tantamount to treason.”

  “It was Fred who contacted the Jin’Kai.” I realize the truth as the words come out of my mouth. “The cook. He contacted them, and you killed him for it.”

  “And you’ve been hiding like a rat in the walls ever since,” Cole says.

  “How have you survived?” Zee asks. And, honestly, I’m not thrilled with the way she’s eyeing at him. I mean, I’m not gonna lie—the dude’s good-looking. But that’s not what seems to be interesting my mother. She seems actually . . . taken in by his rhetoric.

  “I was fortunate enough to secure a stash of food from the vending machines,” Marsden answers.

  “Is that what the others have been living off?” I ask. “Pregnant-lady ice cream flavors?” I snort at the idea of all those badass predators on a major sugar high.

  “Not quite,” Marsden says. “You trapped a full squadron of Earthborn Jin’Kai and Kynigos in that shuttle before you escaped, am I right?”

  “At least a dozen or more,” I confirm.

  “Well, in these past few weeks I’ve spotted only four Kynigos and no Earthbounders,” he says. “So you do the math.”

  Yee-uck.

  “Elvie, you must see what I’m getting at here,” Marsden continues. “Almiri, Jin’Kai, it doesn’t matter. The two species have built-in expiration dates. The precious Code isn’t going to hold forever, and what then? Eventually we will both go extinct and take the human race with us. You, and those like you, are the only hope for any of us.”

  To my horror, Dad has joined my mother in the nodding-in-agreement thing. Can’t they see that the dude is a scheming rat? A scheming, conniving, homicidal, duplicitous, majorly hunky rat.

  Still . . . he kinda has a point.

  “So what are you proposing?” I say. Beside me, Cole bristles. But I decide, for the moment, to listen to the doc.

  “What I’m proposing is that we help each other in order to help each other,” Marsden says, tossing the last of the cleaning gauze in a heap in the frozen corner. He hands my dad a cream to apply to the scrapes. “You want to see my research? I’ll give it to you. On one very reasonable condition. I need off this ship. So do you. So we help each other get free. And when we’re free, I’ll show you everything.”

  “You’ll show us first,” I say, stroking the gun with one hand for emphasis.

  “Very well,” Marsden says. “We can gather my records before heading to your transport.”

  “Transport?” Dad asks, giving me a look.

  “Well, you didn’t walk here, did you?” Marsden asks with a smile. But when no one answers, his smile slowly fades. “Did you?”

  “We came via dogsled,” I explain. “But it sort of got . . . eaten.”

  Marsden frowns but doesn’t seem flustered. He merely shakes his head as if weighing his options. “Then I suppose we must resort to a variant on my original plan.”

  “Plan?” Leave it to my father to cheer up at any mention of a plan.

  Marsden turns to my dad, like he knows the guy’s his best shot at supporting what I am almost positive is about to be a truly preposterous scheme. “With any luck that skiff the Kynigos are building down there is close to operational. If we can find a way to neutralize them—”

  “Excuse me?” Cole says. “Elvie, this is so totally a trap.”

  “Let’s hear what he has to say,” Zee puts in.

  I nod in agreement. “If it is a trap,” I tell Cole, “then we’re already in it.” Cole harrumphs, totally exasperated with me, but he doesn’t say anything else. I turn back to Marsden. “You give us your files. We help you get control of that skiff thing of theirs. And then we head back to the camp at Cape Crozier.”

  “An Almiri camp?” Marsden asks disapprovingly. “So this lot”—he jerks a thumb at Cole—“can arrest me?”

  “We came to find your research to show the Almiri, to show them that the hybrids aren’t a threat to them,” I say. “If your work is as convincing as you claim, then who better to show it to? Who knows, you might even be able to convince them to work with you.”

  Marsden thinks on this for a while. “I don’t trust them,” he says finally.

  “Perfect,” I reply. “ ’Cause I don’t trust you.”

  He gives me that big smile again, his eyes twinkling in what always appears to be admiration. He throws up his hands in resignation.

  “Very well,” he says. “I suppose it’s only fair that if I ask for your faith that I show some in return. Then it’s agreed. There’s just one more thing that I’m going to need from you.”

  “And what’s that?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.

  “First,” he says. “You’re going to need to promise that you won’t freak out.”

  Chapter Ten

  In Which an Ice-Cold Dip Lands our Heroine in Hot Water

  “Elvie, this is crazy,” Cole says in one of his trademark “duh” statements of obviousness.

  “Keep your voice down,” I say. “They might be in there right now.”

  Cole, Dad, and I are making our way down the ladder slowly, heading toward the familiar maintenance entrance to the hangar bay. It’s harder than it should be—due to the tilt of the ship, the ladder is pitched about forty degrees, and it feels more like climbing down the side of a steep, icy hill than anything. At least last time we needed to come down this way, we had a cable to tether us. Now we’re forced to shift from one rung to the next with the knowledge that if we let go, we’re going to slide down a long way, with only our chins slamming into the remaining rungs to slow our fall. It’s terribly cold down here, worse than the rest of the ship, and even through my gloves my fingers burn with the chill. From what Marsden said, a good deal of the ha
ngar is now underwater, with multiple potential hull breaches. Normally the part of a sinking ship you’d want to avoid. Except that, as part of Marsden’s plan, this is exactly where we need to be.

  “I don’t understand why you two need to be doing this,” Cole says. “If the Devastators are building their ship down in the hangar, that’s almost definitely where they’re going to be.”

  “That’s what the distraction is for,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, like that’s going to work.”

  “You doubt my programming skills?” Dad chimes in through heavy breaths as he eases one leg down to the next rung. Cole is beneath me on the ladder while Dad is above me, and I suck in my breath every time Dad makes a move, afraid that he’s going to slip and make a squashed Elvie sandwich. As if on cue, the rung breaks free as Dad puts his weight on it and he loses his grip.

  “Ow!” I holler as the frozen rung hits me in the face. Luckily, Dad finds another handhold and steadies himself.

  The broken rung bongs and clatters as it makes its noisy way down to the bottom of the chute. The three of us freeze, holding our breath and waiting, but after a few minutes it becomes fairly clear that no one has been alerted to our presence.

  “Sorry,” Dad whispers down to me, chagrined.

  “No worries,” I reply, rubbing my forehead as we start down again. I return to my conversation with Cole. “Look,” I say, “we have no idea if that thing they’re building is up and running yet. And the best two people on board to figure that out are the inimitable Harry Nara and yours truly.” To be honest, this part of Marsden’s crazy plan is the one I mind the least. After several days of feeling completely out of my element while having to contest with, y’know, the elements, I’m glad that the task set before me is to deal with wires and circuits instead of wind chills and wildlife.

  “It just seems that big tough Dr. Marsden should be the one facing off with these guys, instead of traipsing off to find some baby that’s probably long gone.”

  Dr. Marsden insists that the Jin’Kai baby—the one that my classmate formerly known as Other Cheerleader gave birth to only minutes before the Devastators decapitated her—is still very much alive, and that the Devastators are keeping it somewhere on the ship. Marsden claims that he only wants to protect the child by “rescuing him” from a bunch of meanies who don’t care about him. Personally, I think Marsden doesn’t want the other Jin’Kai unearthing any “off the books” tinkering that may have gone on while he was engineering those rapidly developing fetuses. If I’m right, it might mean that the good doctor has already started experimenting with mutating the Jin’Kai DNA to create hybrid attributes.