Dark Energy (10 page)

He stood up and the girls thanked him and shook his hand.

I took his arm and walked him to the door.

“I think you're getting too excited about this,” I told him. “Promise me one thing: you won't fall in love with some pretty Guide engineer and get married, because that would be the worst kind of wicked stepmother. An alien wicked stepmother.”

“Aly.”

“Promise me.”

“Pinkie swear,” he said, and held up his little finger. I yanked his pinkie with mine.

“Good. And no pinkie swearing with the pretty Guide engineers. I've seen their tight outfits. What's the deal with those, by the way?”

“Not sure. They're not the mummy wrappings they
looked like on TV. When you're up close they look more like strips of cloth all sewn together. Very weird.”

“They seem to be designed for wardrobe malfunctions.” I didn't know how to get him to spill.

“They do. The Guides don't seem to care, though. Or, at least, they don't seem to know anything different. Have you seen all the wounded?”

“Of course. It's hard to watch TV and
not
see them.”

“Imagine you were in a spaceship going nine hundred feet per second and you hit the ground. The only way they survived is by skimming like a rock across water. It slowed them down. It was a crash landing, but it was a really amazing crash landing. They totally could have made a crater out of Iowa if they didn't know what they were doing.”

“Dad, you're doing your
Wait, there's more
voice.”

He frowned. “Deep inside the ship, in the heart, as far as we can tell, there was a mass suicide. We think it was the only one. But I want you guys to be ready.”

“How many?” I asked, feeling like I'd just been punched in the chest.

“We're still counting, but it looks like it will be more than a thousand. And the strangest part? Sometimes they stabbed themselves in the heart or slit their own throat or slashed their wrists, but all of them—every single one—had a wound in their abdomen.

“Think about it—a spaceship crashes going Mach One,
and eighty percent of the injuries are puncture wounds to the abdomen, after which they killed themselves. It's just so weird. It has to be a clue.”

“Why don't you ask somebody?”

“Like I said, they don't tell us much.”

“That's superweird.”

“It is,” he said, and looked at his watch.

“Go, have your nerd fun,” I said.

“You follow the rules.”

“How much trouble can I get in between now and tomorrow morning?”

“I don't want to think about it.”

When we got to the admin office, it was locked, but there was a night number for the secretary posted.

Dad talked to the secretary, who then gave him the headmistress's home number. He explained the situation and all of the great press the school could get for this, and before the call was over, the headmistress had offered to let us visit the crash site
and
to buy $3,000 cameras for the three of us girls. Score.

“Agents,” Dad said when we got to the front door, “tomorrow evening I'm taking my daughter and her two roommates with me onto the ship. They will be gone for several hours. Oh, also, her car is being delivered, so it needs to be allowed through the gate. The headmistress will brief you on all of this in the morning, and I'll contact the FBI office just so we're all on the same page.”

The agents didn't seem used to taking orders from civilians, but they nodded. “If you clear it with them,” one of them said, “then we'll be okay.”

Dad hugged me, and it was the first time I noticed he was still holding the cup of pickled herring.

“You only eat two bites of pie, but you take the herring?”

“The pie was on a ceramic plate. This is a disposable cup.”

“Gross, Dad. Gross.”

“Love you, Aly.”

“You, too.”

When I made it back to the cafeteria, Brynne sat on the couch giving a neck rub to Malcolm, who was sitting at her feet and blasting the hell out of pixelated aliens on the TV. Rachel was curled up on an oversized chair, staring at the sudoku puzzle in the newspaper like she was doing it in her head. Maybe she was. Was that possible?

I crossed the room and sat down at Suski's table. He was in no mood to talk to me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to talk to him. A thousand suicides? I couldn't wrap my brain around it.

Why did a thousand people commit suicide inside the ship, Suski? Why were they all stabbed in the stomach before they killed themselves?

Suski looked at me from across the table. There was something in his eyes. It wasn't just stoic staring. There was hurt in there. Or maybe I was projecting that on to him, seeing
what I wanted to see. I met his gaze and held it, but below the table my hand began to shake.

What had happened on that ship in the week that it was sitting in the dirt by Lakeville? What were they afraid of?

Was it a fight? The losers got stabbed in the stomach?

I glanced up at Suski. He was on the winning team. Was he a good guy or a bad guy?

I
hadn't been sure how to explain it to Coya, that we were going to investigate her home. But she was up in the library watching a video for history class.

Rachel and Brynne hadn't seen the ship in real life and were completely awed by it even in the waning evening light. The National Guard officer at the entrance to the site was considerably less awed by us. He looked at all of our IDs, and even though our names were on the list, he called my dad and asked if we were really the Alice, Brynne, and Rachel that he was waiting for. Dad confirmed our identities and confirmed the identity of Bluebell, and soon we were heading down a hardpacked dirt road away from I-35 and toward the enormous object that was blocking out all the skyline. The guardsman had hung a tag on my rearview
mirror—a big green 16—and as we drove, traffic directors motioned me to take this road and then that road, and we got closer and closer to the ship.

It was completely overwhelming. I had been to the Grand Canyon once and had been stunned by the size of that—that something could be so incredibly massive, it stretched from horizon to horizon. This spaceship felt a little like that. It was an enormous wall of darkness that rose higher than I could see and in both directions away from us. In fact, at one point Rachel pointed up through the sunroof and said that it was above us; we were under the curve of the cylinder.

One more guard guided us toward a parking lot that contained about eighty cars and a dozen large tents.

“Do you think we're going to see more aliens?” Brynne asked.

“I don't know,” I said, pulling into an empty spot. “Dad said he was working with alien engineers. But I think they'll just be like Coya and Suski.”

I dialed Dad's cell, and he answered quickly. “You're ten minutes late.”

“I didn't want to get pulled over and miss this completely.”

“Good. You're in the parking lot? Wait—I see you.”

A moment later he was at my car shaking Brynne and Rachel's hands again and generally acting like he was powered by coffee and excitement.

“Did you sleep last night?” I asked.

“Sleep is for the weak,” he said, motioning us toward one of the tents.

“You can't have a heart attack and leave me an orphan. You know I'd just blow all our money on drugs and rock 'n' roll.”

“All the best heroes are orphans,” Dad said. “You'd be in good company, if you went on a quest or something.” He looked at the other girls. “You're not orphans, are you?”

“Not me,” they both answered.

“You'll never amount to anything. Anyway, here's the deal. You're going to get suited up. I'm going to give you a pad of stickers that have numbers on them. We're going to go through the ship, find rooms that haven't been touched, and take pictures of them. Treat it like a crime scene—don't touch anything, just take pictures, and one of these numbered stickers needs to be in every shot. Every room has a number, and every picture from that room uses the same number. Clear as mud?”

We nodded.

“We're exploring places in the ship where no one has gone?” I asked. “You're sure this isn't dangerous? What if we find another . . . you know.” I still hadn't told the girls about the suicides. I don't know why. I just hoped it wouldn't come up.

“That's why you'll have your big strong father with you,” he said. “I work for NASA, you know.”

We entered the tent. It was brightly lit, with shower stalls lining every wall.

“We're taking showers?”

“When you come out of the ship,” he said. “Just a precaution. Decontamination.”

“What about our clothes?”

He walked to a row of shelves and pulled down bundles. “Hospital scrubs. Now, go change.”

After we changed, we climbed the ten stories to the top of the scaffolding, wearing bulky safety glasses, latex gloves, and hard hats with chin straps.

“I can't believe we're doing this,” Rachel said, her camera swinging around her neck on its strap.

“It's going to be a short climb down once we get inside,” Dad said, shouting to be heard over the cold October wind. “You have to remember that the entire ship is curved in a big circle. When the ship was in motion, rotating, you could jog around the inside of the cylinder—all the way around the ship until you got back to the same place.”

“Just like
2001
,” Rachel said.

Dad turned back to look at me. “Someone knows good culture.”

“Rachel's one of those show-off kids,” I said, and she turned and grinned at me.

“The point is,” Dad continued, “we're going to have to climb back down with ropes, to a place where it's flatter.
Don't worry—it's not that steep. I assume none of you are afraid of heights or you wouldn't be standing up here on this scaffolding.”

“Dad?” I asked. “Are there aliens inside?”

“A few,” he said. “But we probably won't see them. They've gone with some of the more technical teams to check out the engines.”

We reached the top of the scaffold, and the door that we knew so well from TV. I stopped and turned, looking out at the mass of tents and army vehicles. The sun was setting, leaving a few beautiful strands of orange and pink before it dropped behind the horizon. I tried to imagine what it looked like in the morning, or at night. This was the aliens' first view of our world—their first view of what their new life would be like.

It looked scary.

“Here,” Dad said, shoving something into my hand. I took it and held it up. A breathing mask—not just a little flimsy paper one, like the kind they had handed out to the aliens on the ground, but a big one, like a gas mask. It was heavy, and I pulled it over my head awkwardly, watching Rachel and Brynne do the same with theirs. Dad helped us tighten the straps and get them in place.

“Okay,” he said. “This is it. Are you ready?”

I had butterflies in my stomach—giant, alien butterflies with extra wings and bad attitudes.

Rachel was already nodding, and I heard her muffled “Yes.” Brynne followed suit. So I pretended I was courageous, and I stepped forward and was glad I had a mask covering most of my face.

Dad led us to the door. There were large halogen lights set up, flooding the hallway with light.

I didn't see any of the ship's lights—maybe the walls glowed or something when the ship was running. This “door” was a hole in the floor of the corridor. The hull was more than a foot thick, and we could see the jagged marks of whatever cutting tool the aliens had used to get through.

It wasn't as steep as I had expected, looking down the hall—maybe a ten-degree downward slope. There were several nylon ropes running from somewhere above us. Dad instructed us to grab a rope and start heading down, but I was too in awe of the spaceship, of crossing the threshold. The walls were all some kind of silvery plastic something. It appeared that they'd once been gleaming and shiny, but the handprints of fifty-five thousand people had turned them into a smudgy mess.

Fifty-five thousand
aliens
.

Dad led the way, holding on to one of the ropes at about waist height and walking down the slope. Rachel followed after, and then Brynne, and then me. It felt a little bit like the county fair funhouses that we went to when I was a little kid, where the floors weren't straight and you couldn't keep your
balance without a hand on the wall the whole time. There were numbered stickers everywhere, sloppily applied by the first photographers who had taken pictures of this hallway.

“Is all the power off?” I tried to shout through my massive filter.

Dad looked back. “There is some power still on in other parts of the ship—there are still life-support systems running, heating and air flow. In some places the lights work, but not here. All of that is up toward the front of the ship. It's one of the mysteries, because back here is where most of the people lived, as you'll soon see.”

Before long, the curve of the ship got flatter, and we didn't need the ropes to help us descend. I dropped mine and let my hand skim the wall. It was smooth, and my latex glove slid across it easily. Every twenty or thirty feet there was a thick ring protruding from the floor. They made convenient places to hang utility lights.

“What are these rings for?” I called to Dad.

“We don't know,” he said with a shrug.

“Haven't you asked the aliens?”

“Not a priority yet. Bigger fish to fry. But my guess is that they're some kind of tether for when the ship is in zero gravity. When it's not spinning. They've been really useful for our guys who are climbing into the hard-to-reach spots. The rings are all over the place. Every room, every hall.”

We reached a point where the ground was almost level,
and a long hallway extended to our left, toward the front of the ship. Most of the electrical cables headed that way, and that was where we went.

“These marks,” Dad said, pointing to a big red sticker next to a door, “mean that a room has been photographed. We'll keep going until we reach a room that hasn't.”

All of the rooms with red dots were dark, no one bothering to light them now that pictures had been taken.

The spaceship definitely didn't look like something out of
Star Trek
. It was too dirty, too cluttered. Too lived-in. There was debris scattered all along this corridor—blankets and wrappings and plastic containers and shreds of clothing. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like down here for the last four or five days as fifty-five thousand aliens, many of whom were wounded, waited in the dark for their turn to leave.

But it wouldn't have been dark, would it? They'd have had flashlights and glowing orbs and magic crazy alien lights. They were the Guides, after all. They were here to teach us a better way of life, and that meant that they couldn't have suffered too much. They had to have taken care of themselves somehow.

We walked for what felt like half an hour until we finally reached a door that wasn't marked.

“Here we go,” Dad said. He turned on a lantern and led us into the room.

It was wide and square, with rows of what looked like countertops—like it was a lab of some kind. On the far side was a long row of tall, thin cabinets.

“Okay,” he said. “Remember, long shots and close-ups. And make sure one of these number stickers is in every shot. This room is number . . .” —he pulled off the top sticker—“2139. So make sure the number 2139 is in every—”

His phone rang. (The Velvet Underground. I'd picked it out for him.) He talked for thirty seconds, but I could tell he was leaving.

“I'm sorry, girls, but I need to be elsewhere.” We all began to protest but he held up his phone. “Don't worry. This is easy work: sticker, point, and click. You can do it. I'm not going far. If you need me for any reason, you can call me. This ship gets amazingly good reception. Like it was made for it or something.”

“Do we open doors?” Brynne asked, looking at the cabinets on the far wall, which suddenly seemed more ominous.

“Yeah,” he said, “but keep your bearings in mind. Everything on that wall is tilting in toward us slightly, so it might come falling out.”

“And NASA is cool with us letting stuff fall and break?” I asked.

“Ideally, you won't let anything break,” he said. “But mistakes happen, and we're severely understaffed and trying to get this ship inspected and documented ASAP. Open the
cupboards slowly, and try not to let anything fall.”

“What if there are jars with alien life forms in there?” Brynne asked, and I couldn't tell whether she was scared or hopeful. “What if we stumble onto a bug collection?”

“First,” he said, “everything in this ship has already crashed at six hundred miles an hour. So, anything fragile has already broken. Second, if there's a bug collection, take a bunch of pictures before everything gets away.” He smiled at that.

“Are you sure you work for NASA?” Brynne said. “And you're not just Alice's big brother?”

“He's my dad,” I said. “He's always like this.”

“Seriously, girls,” he said. “We don't know how long we'll have access to this ship. We don't know if the Guides are going to seize it back in negotiations and live in it, or what. And we don't know whether the UN is going to send in its own inspectors and take the project over. I wouldn't have asked you to come if we didn't desperately need manpower.”

That answer seemed to pacify everyone, including me, although now I had the heebie-jeebies about alien bugs.

“How far do we go?” I asked, as he moved toward the door, leaving the lantern in the room for us.

“As far and as long as you're willing to stay. Are you girls okay?”

We all nodded, our big gas masks bobbing heavily on our faces.

“Then I'm going to go,” he said. “Love you, Aly.”

“You, too.”

We spent half an hour in the first room and probably took a couple hundred pictures. For a room that looked like a lab, there was hardly anything in the drawers. We found that they opened in a rather high-tech fashion—with a little push, they'd pop out slowly, almost like they were automated. But there wasn't power on in this room, so it must have been some kind of pneumatics. Rachel said she'd seen similar drawers before and they weren't an example of amazing alien technology, but I was still impressed.

The tall, skinny cabinets had tools in them that looked like farm instruments. Long sticks with hooks, loops, or spikes on the ends. There didn't seem to be anything special about them except that the sticks looked well worn, like they'd been used a lot over a long period of time. I couldn't figure out what the aliens would have done with them, though.

Aside from that, the only other unusual thing in the room was that the ceiling was high—I'd noticed that in the hallway, too. If I were designing a spaceship, it would be more economic on space, with ceilings that barely fit me. But maybe this ship was like my BMW—all about comfort. Maybe that was why there were only fifty-five thousand aliens on board, instead of a hundred thirty thousand.