Destination Unknown (3 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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“It’s beautiful,” Jobs said. “The colors are so intense. How can it be real, though? Look at the way the river moves. Shouldn’t water move like water, no matter where you are? It’s more like . . . like it kind of smears past, like, like big sections of it kind of move together.”
“Maybe it’s ice. Maybe it’s not water at all,” 2Face suggested.
“Or maybe our heads are all messed up,” Mo’Steel suggested. “You know? How long were we asleep? You know your eyes don’t totally focus when you first wake up and stuff sounds too loud and all?”
2Face tore her gaze from the agitated, too-bright landscape. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s all in our heads.”
“This ship is standing upright,” Jobs said cautiously. “That’s impossible. Unless it’s real, I mean. But theoretically it’s impossible. So maybe this is just a dream.”
“Deep,” Mo’Steel mocked.
“Maybe my mom isn’t dead,” 2Face whispered. “Maybe none of them are dead. If it’s a dream. We don’t know, right?”
The three of them sat down, wedged uncomfortably together, hugging to keep from falling, sharing one seat until Mo’Steel leaped the gap to reach the chair occupied by the skeleton. “We’re going to need to bury him, I guess.”
“No hurry,” Jobs said darkly.
Mo’Steel pulled at the seat belt but it came apart in his fingers. The corpse shifted, slid, fell off the side of the chair, fell to the bulkhead with a sound like a dropped bundle of sticks.
“Sorry, Commander,” Mo’Steel said without seeming very disturbed. “What are we going to do?” Mo’Steel asked Jobs, sounding to 2Face as if it couldn’t possibly be his responsibility to figure it out himself.
2Face wasn’t sure she liked him. She was drawn to Jobs’s quiet, thoughtful way. But Mo’Steel had a way of being jumpy in his own skin, like there were too many calories being burned. He reminded her of the landscape she’d just observed.
“I guess sooner or later we need to go back downstairs,” Jobs said. His reluctance was evident in his look and tone. He didn’t try to hide the fact that what was down there in the
Mayflower
capsule horrified him.
2Face definitely shared that sense of horror. Pain was down there. Loss. Unimaginable loss.
Mo’Steel rocked back and forth on his heels and looked like he’d rather talk about something else. He stood up and looked out of the port-side window and yelped.
“Yah-ah-ah!” He pulled back, blinked, looked again. He pointed accusingly. “Okay, this is not certified organic. This is messed up.”
“We’ve seen it,” 2Face said, feeling a little annoyed.
“Uh-uh.” Mo’Steel shook his head vigorously. He pointed at the starboard-side window. “You’ve seen
that
. You have
not
seen
this
.”
Jobs frowned and with help from his friend made his way across to the far seat. He took a long look,
several breaths, and took 2Face’s hand to guide her across.
She pushed between the two guys and looked.
No, she had not seen this.
It was in black-and-white. Entirely. Not a splash of color, not a glimmer. The sky was gray with puffy white clouds. The ground was broken up into a series of deep channels or canyons cut deep around precarious mesas. Looming in the distance, rising up from the fractured plain was a massive mountain range, snowcapped at the jagged peaks.
No color. None. Light gray and medium gray and darkest gray shadows edging to black in the deep places.
They raced back at dangerous speeds to check the first view. It was still there, still a wild profusion of greens and blues and golds.
Two landscapes. Completely incompatible. Completely impossible.
“The dream thing is seeming more and more likely,” 2Face said.
“There should be a chronometer of some kind,” Jobs said suddenly. He began searching the ranks of dials, readouts, and switches. Most of the readouts were blank. But when he toggled certain switches some of the readouts came to life.
“There should be some kind of mission clock,” he muttered. “Time from launch or whatever. There. There it is.”
A small digital readout displayed a long string of numbers.
“It’s still running. Look. Not seconds, minutes. It’s only showing minutes,” 2Face said, looking over his shoulder.
“Two-hundred-sixty-two million, eight-hundred-seventeen thousand, nine-hundred-and-twelve minutes,” Jobs said. “Mo?”
To 2Face’s amazement Mo’Steel calculated instantaneously.
“Five-hundred years, twelve days, and some spare change, Duck,” Mo’Steel said.
CHAPTER FOUR
“WE HAVE TO DO WHAT WE CAN.”
 
As they descended into the capsule again, Jobs was grateful for the mysterious landscape of the planet. Grateful for the mystery of how the shuttle carrying the
Mayflower
capsule had come to land in so impossible a position. Anything that took his mind off the work at hand was welcome.
His father and mother were dead. If his brother, Edward, was still alive at all, he was unconscious.
Five centuries. They had drifted through space for five-hundred years. Not strange that the untested hibernation equipment had failed his parents, more surprising that it had preserved him. Nothing man-made worked for five hundred years.
Another mystery. More unknowns. So much better than the knowns.
“I don’t think we’d better open any of these units,” Jobs said. “Even if we see someone we think
is alive, we better let them be. I don’t understand how this system works. But it must have a programmed revival sequence.”
“I hear something,” 2Face said. “Listen.”
Jobs heard it, too. A human voice. Groaning.
Mo’Steel scrambled into the “basement,” through the hatch and then down the circular steps as fast as a monkey, sliding more than stepping.
“Someone’s alive down here,” he called up.
Jobs and 2Face followed at a more normal pace.
“How did he do that?” 2Face whispered. “The thing with the minutes, I mean.”
In a low voice Jobs said, “Mo’s crazy, he’s a wild man, doesn’t care about much except the next adrenaline rush. Doesn’t mean he’s stupid, especially with numbers.”
“Idiot savant,” 2Face muttered.
“Mo’s my best friend,” Jobs said. He would have said more, but Mo’Steel didn’t need defending. If 2Face was as smart as she seemed, she’d come to appreciate Mo’Steel. If not, well, that would be her loss.
“Sorry,” 2Face said.
They reached the level where Mo’Steel squatted beside a young woman. Jobs recognized the Marine sergeant. Her uniform, like his own clothing, was
brittle and in tatters, but the dark camouflage pattern was still recognizable.
She was not alone in her berth. A child lay there, a boy, seemingly asleep on her belly. It wasn’t a newborn. It might have been a two- or three-year-old. And there was a weird, cylindrical, almost translucent piece of skin that seemed to hold them together. It began near the sergeant’s shoulder and snaked its way into the baby’s side.
Tamara was awake. Confused, as Jobs had been on waking, sleepy.
“Take it easy, take it easy,” Mo’Steel comforted her in a gentle voice. “No rush. You’re not going anywhere yet.”
The woman blinked and tried to focus. She tried to speak but only a groan was heard.
2Face leaned over. “You’re on the shuttle still. We’ve landed. Somewhere. We don’t know where.”
Jobs pointed to a small round hole in the woman’s uniform near where the long, cordlike piece of skin started, and gave 2Face a significant look.
2Face tugged gently at the cloth. It tore easily. The bullet hole in her shoulder could be clearly seen as a neat round scar, lighter than the surrounding flesh.
Tamara seemed to be trying to form a question.
“You were shot. You may not remember it right away,” Jobs said. “A stowaway shot you. But it looks like it healed during hibernation. Maybe the machine . . . maybe just time . . .”
“No,” Tamara said, forcing the word out. “Baby . . . my baby . . .”
“She must have been pregnant when she went into hibernation,” 2Face said in a low voice. Then, loud enough for Tamara to hear, “The baby was born. God knows how. It’s right here. It’s on you. In fact, it’s attached to you.”
Tamara nodded slowly. Her hands felt blindly and Mo’Steel gently guided her fingers to her baby’s face.
The baby opened its eyes. Jobs recoiled, banged his head on the low deck above. 2Face cried out, an expression of pure horror.
The baby’s eyes had run, liquid, out onto its mother’s belly. It stared at them now with empty eye sockets.
“Wha . . .?” Tamara moaned.
Mo’Steel was the first to recover. “Nothing. Nothing, lady. Don’t worry, it’s okay.”
Tamara slipped back into sleep. The baby, at any
rate, blinked its empty eyes and seemed to be watching them with great interest.
Jobs, 2Face, and Mo’Steel pulled back.
“Radiation,” Jobs whispered. “Five centuries in space. This capsule is lead-lined, but five-hundred years of hard radiation while the kid is slowly, slowly somehow growing and, I mean, during cell division and all . . .” He stopped, unable to speak. He felt like a mountain was falling on him. Like a man standing on the beach as a tidal wave hits. He was being buried alive, smothered, crushed.
Way too much.
Jobs felt Mo’Steel’s hand on his shoulder.
“It’s woolly, Duck, but you gotta strap it up and keep moving. We can’t go all slasher chick and start screaming. There’s weirder stuff than this coming.”
Jobs nodded, but he wanted very badly to punch his friend in the face. He didn’t want to be comforted, let alone be told he had to be a good soldier and get on with his life. He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted to wake up and not be here. It was too much, too much. Impossible to process a tenth of it, a billionth of it.
His hands were shaking. A result of the hibernation? No. A result of waking up and seeing.
“We need to get some kind of grip on things here,” 2Face said. “Let’s check every berth. Let’s see what’s what. How about that? One by one, bottom to top, okay?”
“What she said,” Mo’Steel agreed. He was looking very earnestly at his friend.
Jobs covered his face with his hands. “As far as I know we have no food. No water. We’ve probably all taken a hundred lifetimes’ worth of radiation. I don’t know what that is outside there on the planet, but it can’t be natural. Maybe no air outside. My folks are dead. Yours, too, mostly. The whole human race is dead. Maybe just the three of us and . . . and that woman and some kind of mutant alien baby.”
“Yeah. Like I said, very woolly.”
2Face said, “Jobs, you said yourself: It can’t be. The planet out there, the ship standing this way. It can’t be. Not unless there’s something else.”
“Yeah?”
“So, what’s the something else, Jobs? Don’t you want to find out?”
He laughed bitterly. “You’re trying to appeal to my curiosity?”
“We have to do what we can,” 2Face said. “You’re right, the human race is all over. Except for us. Me, I’m not going to roll over and die. You want
to give up, Jobs, I can’t stop you, I guess, but I have to try. We’re
it
, however many of us are alive on this stupid ship. That’s not why we should give up, that’s why we can’t give up.”
“Well, good luck, Eve, go forth and multiply,” Jobs snapped.
2Face started to answer back, but Jobs saw Mo’Steel take her arm and shake his head. “He’s coming around.”
Jobs glared at his friend. “You think you know me, don’t you, Mo?”
“Yeah, ’migo, I know you. There’s some deep stuff to figure out here. You can’t leave it alone. I know you pretty good, Duck: You can’t leave it alone.”
Jobs nodded dully. He looked up at 2Face. The smooth half of her face was set, determined. The burned side, with its drooping eye, seemed to weep.
There was a poem in there somewhere,
Jobs thought.
He should formulate a plan. He should step up and try to figure it all out. But right now the strength wasn’t in him.
“Lead on,” he said to 2Face.
CHAPTER FIVE
“YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE.”
 
It had taken . . . how long so far? 2Face had no way of knowing. No watch, no clock, maybe no need for them.
It was taking a long time as time is experienced — subjectively. Time dragged when it was measured out in hideous deaths and uncertain lives.
And then there was the thirst. She wanted water. Needed it, and soon. And they had no idea where even to begin looking.
So they kept up the grim task of accounting.

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