Mothership

by Martin Leicht

  Yow-za.

  After our search is over, we still haven’t come up with any more survivors. It’s just twenty-two girls, including myself, and six commandos.

  When the other girls finally haul their butts back from the changing room, the captain ushers us all out of the pool area into the hallway, barking at us to “Move, move, move!” I’m thrilled when the comm on his belt crackles to life, since it forces him to stop his I’m-such-a-badass-I-never-quit-shouting routine. He snatches the walkie and puts it to his mouth.

  “Yes, sir. Tango Leader here.”

  “Tango Leader, we’ve located the—”

  That’s the last thing I hear. For, like, a while. Not because the dude on the other end of the walkie stops talking. Well, maybe he does. I don’t know.

  But I’m thinking my deafness probably has more to do with the explosion.

  Now, when I say explosion, I mean a rock-the-entire-ship, knock-everyone-onto-their-asses kind of KABOOM. The explosion is a long way off, but it’s strong enough to send serious shock waves from one end of the Echidna to the other. The girders supporting the walls collapse and block off the hallway. There’s smoke in my eyes, and it stings so badly I have to squeeze them shut, tears pushing the burn away. When I open them again, I see Cole, his mouth moving frantically without making any noise. It takes me a moment to realize that he’s screaming—and that I can’t hear his screams because I am, at least for the moment, totally deaf from the blast. But my eyes still work, and I have the wherewithal to notice that Cole is frantically pointing at something above our heads. Dancing in the acrid smoke are several frayed wires, sparks flying from the ends.

  Natty is up on her feet looking at the sparks like a small child gawking at fireflies. Fireflies that could ignite and take off the top of her skull at any moment. “Natty!” I holler, but even I can’t hear my voice. Not wanting to take any chances, I reach over and grab Natty’s ankle, yanking it out from underneath her so that she falls to the ground face-first. Chipping a tooth is better than getting decapitated, I figure.

  Not two seconds after I tug Natty to the floor, the sparks from the wires ignite in the fuel-laced smoke. The secondary explosions pop like fireworks in rapid succession, and the force pushes me even flatter into the floor. And here I thought the worst thing I was going to have to deal with today was the ultrasound goo during my afternoon physical.

  I turn my head, and when I spot Cole about a meter away from me, eyes blinking in a way that lets me know that yes, he’s still alive and kicking, I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. But I suck it in again when he rolls over. There’s Britta, his girlfriend, safe and sound, wedged under the protective body shield Cole made for her with his six-pack abs.

  Peachy.

  I sit up and try to take stock of the situation. Natty’s rubbing her lip with a pout on her face, but she’s in one piece. Nearby, Ramona’s struggling to her feet and yanking down her faux-leather skirt. I’m pretty sure Other Cheerleader is wailing about her nail polish. Chewie is, well, chewing on her hair. And I count nine other girls, in various states of disarray.

  The rubble where the wall caved in is taller than I am, a mishmash of broken paneling, bulkheads, and smoldering comm panels. In the wreckage I make out a helmet like the one Cole had on earlier, crushed flat by the weight of the debris.

  As my ears slowly regain function, I hear the captain warbling into his walkie. “Goddamn it, do you copy?” he shouts into the thing. He shakes it, as though that might make his buddy on the other end pick up. Besides him, the only commando left standing is Cole. Just two commandos, and fifteen girls.

  Holy shit.

  Apart from the captain’s barking, and the sobs of the girls, the only other sound I can make out is a loud hissing.

  Now, there are only a few things that cause hissing on a spaceship, and none of them is exactly cause for a party.

  I waddle dizzily over to join the captain at the window—which, thank God, has not yet cracked, sucking us all out into the void. But, you know, the day’s not over yet. My head is throbbing from the force of the explosions, and my balance is only so-so, so I brace myself against the reinforced transparent aluminum that lets us look out at the stars. But what grabs my attention isn’t the pretty lights. It’s the same thing that the captain’s looking at. The gaping hole in the side of the ship, venting atmosphere.

  We are officially leaking oxygen into space.

  Why did I think Lower Merion was so bad again?

  “Alpha Leader, do you copy? Alpha Leader . . . Terrance!” The captain is starting to lose his shit a little bit, squeezing his walkie so tightly it could pop. It takes me a moment to figure it out, but soon it hits me—the reason the captain’s so shaken. It’s not the gajillion casualties. It’s not even the leaking O2. The damage around the ship was blown inward, meaning it came from something outside the Echidna.

  “That was your ship that blew, wasn’t it?” I ask him. He looks at me, resentment in his eyes, like it’s my fault or something. The glare lasts only a second, though, and then he composes himself.

  “Yeah,” he spits out, slapping the window with the palm of his hand. “It was our ship. Along with my commander, my squad, and the rest of your classmates.”

  I’ve heard, somewhere, that when people are faced with massive tragedy, their bodies tend to go cold. You know, “I shivered with the sudden chill that crept down my spine,” “A block of ice formed in the pit of my stomach,” that sort of thing. But me? When I find out that half my classmates have been blown to bits in a random space explosion, my whole body goes white hot. My cheeks burn, my forehead, even the sides of my stomach. I gulp down the lump in my throat, and even that feels hot. “Are you sure?” I ask the captain.

  “Yeah,” he says again. His gaze goes back to the stream of oxygen hissing out the window, pouring out into the atmosphere in tiny rivulets. I have a sudden urge to call Natty over to take a look. It is gorgeous, in a sort of holy-crap-we’re-all-gonna-die sort of way.

  “But how did it . . .”

  The captain tosses his now useless walkie into a pile of wall debris and pulls from his pocket what must be the sweetest-looking phone I’ve ever seen. It unrolls like an LED readout, but snaps into place when it’s extended. “Shit,” he growls, punching at it with his fingers. “I’m not getting a signal.”

  I pull out my own phone to see if I’ll have any better luck. Nope. Instead of the weak signal I usually get, there’s nothing. Which makes me suspect that the ship’s transmitter isn’t operating at all. So much for getting in touch with my dad or Ducky and filling them in about my day of happy fun time.

  I’ve got to admit, I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself. What I want to be doing is channeling my father, figuring out what he would do in such a situation. Instead the only thought that seems to be running through my brain is a pitiful Why me? But I’m ripped away from my pity party by the most annoying sound in the cosmos.

  “Cole, baaaay-beeee!” It is Britta, of course, moaning from the other side of the hallway. Probably in despair over the fact that she hasn’t been the center of attention for the past minute and a half. She’s sitting with her back to a crushed control panel, massaging her ankle like she thinks it’s going to pay for dinner afterward. “Cole, I think it’s broken! I think I broke my ankle!”

  Cole, who’s been sifting through the debris, hesitates for a second, but then heads back over to Britta, just like she wants. I fold my arms across my chest and totally don’t watch. What do I care if Cole hasn’t even bothered to ask how I am yet? Why would I care about that?

  I narrow my eyes and observe from behind a curtain of eyelashes as Cole takes Britta’s ankle in his hands—those hands that once pulled me in close for a kiss, his breath warming my skin—and puts slight pressure on it. “Does that hurt?” he asks. Britta gives a melodramatic little squeak of agony, and sets her ankle delicately into his lap. And is it just me, or has the ankle that he sprained, like, fifteen minutes ag
o healed remarkably quickly? “I’m going to wrap it,” he tells her. “That will relieve some of the pain. Hey!” he calls over his shoulder. “Is there a med kit? I need something to wrap Britta’s ankle!”

  “I can help!” comes a call. And then this girl named Carrie—who, even on a ship full of unwed expecting teen girls, has managed to get herself dubbed “the slutty one”—comes bounding over. She’s wearing a sleeveless gray tee and a skirt so short it makes her look like the head counselor at tramp camp. “Let me just . . .” From the debris she pulls a shard of aluminum and worries at the hem of her skirt. Once she’s got a tear going, she yanks all the way around until she’s pulled off a swath about twenty centimeters wide. She hands the strip of material to Cole and smoothes her now 100 percent ho-approved mini-mini over her thighs. “For Britta’s ankle.”

  “Uh,” Cole says, his brain clearly unable to process such X-rated altruism. “Thanks.”

  Cole ogles Carrie’s tuchus just a little too long as she walks away, causing Britta to cough loudly. He turns back to her and shakes his head as if to clear the image, then begins to wrap her foot. Britta preens.

  God, I think while watching them, how did I ever fall for that dinkus? Sure, he’s hot. Sure, when he holds you, the entire universe disappears.

  But he’s just such a turd.

  I vow, right then and there, that when I get back home, right after I finish French kissing the soil we land on, I’m going to call Ducky, tell him to come find me, and give him a giant bear hug that’ll make his eyes pop out. Because I cannot, at this moment, think of a single person I want to be around more.

  There is a loud ka-CHUNK! sound, and a mild vibration rocks the floor. The hissing stops, and I breathe a sigh of relief. But Other Cheerleader starts whining.

  “Oh, God!” she wails. “Another explosion! The whole ship is going to blow up!”

  I am suddenly nostalgic for my brief period of deafness.

  “The ship is not blowing up,” I tell her, rolling my eyes at her general retardation. “That’s the vacuum shield closing.”

  “And that’s . . . good?” Carrie asks, putting her arms up to readjust her ponytail. Seriously, that girl needs to invest in a bra.

  “The ship has fail-safe shielding in case of a hull breach,” I say. “It’ll keep the oxygen from leaking out too quickly, which should give us plenty of time to reach the escape pods.”

  Other Cheerleader doesn’t seem as thrilled about this knowledge as I am. She sticks her hands on her hips and sneers at me. “What’d you do, like, memorize the manual?” She turns to Britta. “Where did this blubber butt even come from?”

  From the other end of the hallway comes a meek “Excuse me,” and this quiet girl, Heather, rises shakily to her feet, pushing her bangs off her forehead. “I think you meant ‘From where did this blubber butt even come?’” Other Cheerleader rounds on her with a face-melting glare, but Heather seems undaunted. “You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition,” she explains. “Actually”—she puts a hand on her midsize baby bump and begins to rub it thoughtfully—“it might be more accurate to use the word ‘whence.’ It’s a bit archaic but perfectly applicable in this instance. ‘Whence did this blubber butt even—’”

  “Um, Elvie?” Ramona says, pointing out the window. “Did you mean those escape pods?”

  Well, shit.

  There they are, out the window. Every single escape pod on the whole damn ship is launching straight to Earth, just the way they were meant to in an emergency. . .. Except, of course, for the minor problem of us not being on them.

  I’m thinking that right about now would be a good time for some leadership from our saviors.

  “Well, shit,” Cole says.

  The pandemonium that erupts is overwhelming. The majority of the girls explode into wailing and chattering, and they clamor at the captain. The action hero does his best to get the screaming girls to calm down, but to no avail. Even Ramona looks a little shaken up. I haven’t heard her make a single ironic comment in, I don’t know, thirty whole seconds.

  A hailstorm of überhelpful exclamations flies around the room.

  “How are we going to get home?”

  “I want to call my dad!”

  “We’re gonna die! We’re all gonna die!

  “I want to call my lawyer!”

  “What about my baby?”

  “I want to call my dad’s lawyer!”

  “Does your phone work? My phone’s not working. How am I supposed to blink about this if my phone’s not working?”

  For once Natty seems to be the sole voice of reason. “How did all the escape pods launch on their own?” she asks.

  Cole squints his eyes, which is what he does when he’s thinking hard about something. I’ve seen him do it, like, twice. “Those pods should only activate manually,” he says. Shows what he knows.

  “They could’ve been activated remotely from the bridge,” I inform him.

  “Wait, what?” Carrie screeches. And I think somehow her boobs get just a tad bigger when she’s freaked out. “How could that even happen?”

  “Of all the days to wear my Jimmy Choos,” Other Cheerleader moans. “What was I even thinking of?”

  Heather raises her hand. “Again,” she says, although clearly no one has called on her. “‘Of’ is a preposition. So you really shouldn’t end your—”

  “Spare us the phonics lesson, freakazoid,” Britta snaps.

  “Actually,” Heather squeaks, “it’s more grammar than phonics, but I can see where you’d get—”

  That’s when Captain Overreaction aims his ray gun and fires a shot into the floor. The zip-crack! silences everyone.

  “Enough!” he shouts at the cowed girls. “We need to get to the bridge and get our bearings. Find a way off this ship before the air runs out, or worse. Hopefully we can get a signal out from there too.” All around there are slow nods. A few sniffles. The air in the room is becoming a little clearer. Finally someone has a plan. “Archer,” the captain continues, “can you call up the ship schematics on that wall console?”

  Cole disengages from Britta, who’s clinging to him like a frightened bunny, and looks skeptically at the fried panel on the wall. The screen is shattered and the frayed circuitry behind it is visible. He taps it tentatively, and a shower of sparks flies out from the cracks, sending all the girls screaming again.

  “Uh, it broke,” Cole says.

  The captain walks over to the panel to look for himself, although he’s clearly not going to find any useful information there either. Ascertaining that, dur, the panel is not functioning, he turns away from the debris back down the hall, toward the pool. “We’ll just have to get there the old-fashioned way, then, won’t we?” he says. “Ladies, let’s move out.”

  “Sir?” I holler as he passes. But he doesn’t turn. “Hey, bucko!” I shout again. “Yoo-hoo!”

  At that he turns around. You can tell just by the look on his face that he’s certainly never been yoo-hoo’d at before.

  “Is there something on your mind?” he growls. His eyebrows curl upward in annoyance. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone snarl with their eyebrows.

  “Oooh,” Britta fake-whispers to Other Cheerleader. “Hippopotabutt’s in trouble!”

  I ignore her.

  “That’s not the fastest way to the bridge,” I tell the captain.

  He pauses for a second, glancing down the length of the hall. Then, with a decisive breath, he turns back to me. “You know the way?” he asks.

  I nod. “It’s only a few decks up from here. We can take the back stairwell behind the pool’s laundry closet.”

  “There’s likely to be more debris blocking other areas off,” Cole offers. Britta has her arm slung around his neck and limps next to him. It’s all I can do to keep from pulling his ray gun from his hip and vaporizing both of them. Clearly Cole came all this way for her. Clearly he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me. Clearly I just need to get over it.

&
nbsp; I stand up as straight as my pregnant back will allow. “I know the layout of the Echidna backward and forward,” I tell the captain confidently. “I’ll find the way.”

  “Captain,” Cole puts in, “we should go with your initial instinct and head back the way we came. If there’s damage throughout the rest of the ship, we should be in territory we’re familiar with.”

  “I’m familiar with it,” I reply.

  “Elvie, c’mon. This is—”

  The captain holds up his hand for Cole to stop. He looks at me, and then looks at Cole. “Archer,” he says finally, “you couldn’t crap in a bucket if it were strapped to your ass. We will follow the lady.”

  So just like that I’m bumped up in rank to navigator to the bridge, leading a group of survivors in an emergency escape attempt from a reeling spaceship that, according to our pretty-boy rescuers, was until just recently controlled by aliens. My dad would be so proud. I bet even the king of disaster plans didn’t have a folder for that in his crisis survival drawer.

  We’re just turning the first corner—the captain and me in the front, and Cole and the fab fourteen in tow—when I realize something. “Hey,” I say, squinting up at the captain. He really is handsome, in a preppy catalog-model sort of way. “You got a name?”

  He jerks his gaze away from his phone, which he’s unsuccessfully been jabbing at for the last two minutes. “Pardon?” he replies.

  “Your name,” I repeat. “You know, ‘Je m’appelle Monsieur LeDouche,’ that sort of thing?” I am going for humor, for some sort of normalcy, but the captain—surprise, surprise—does not crack a smile. “It would really help the running narrative in my head if I actually knew what to call you.”

  The captain pinches the bridge of his nose. When he does finally speak again, his voice is such a low grumble that I can’t make out the words, but I get the gist.

  “Fine,” I say, shrugging my shoulders as if all my conversations go this way. “From now on I’ll just call you Captain Bob. How do you like that?”