Mothership (11 page)

“Archer!” Captain Loud barks at Cole. “Are you purposefully trying to jeopardize this mission, or are you just a
complete
moron?”

Ramona folds her arms across her pregnant-lady rack. “This is better than Soap Net,” she says.

“Are all our boyfriends here?” Chewie pipes up.

Britta is still plastering Cole with wet kisses. “You’re
so
heroic!” she gushes. “Rushing in here and saving us from these creeps!”

“Saving us?” comes a voice from behind me. “The teachers didn’t go all psycho until these guys showed up in the first place. What’s the deal? Who are you guys?”

But it seems that Captain Spaz Attack doesn’t really feel like chatting. The vein on his forehead is getting the workout of a lifetime. Pretty soon he’ll be able to bench press with it. Rather than deal with all our baby mama drama, he decides to pull Cole aside—well, “yank” is probably a better verb—to yell at him in private. Still, he isn’t exactly mayor of Shushville, and
the pool room is made for echoes, so we get the gist of things. A little bit of “If I even THOUGHT that you MANIPULATED your way onto this strike force . . .” with a generous helping of “. . . COMPLETELY disregarded the basic PRINCIPLES . . .” and a chorus of “. . . SUCH an idiot!”

Honestly, part of me feels sorry for Cole. The guy looks like he wants to drop a smoke bomb and ninja vanish. Still, I’m not really in a forgive-and-forget frame of mind at the moment. He actually thinks he can just knock me up, totally ditch town, and then show up a couple months later to rescue me from murderous aliens, only to start sucking face with his “real” girlfriend right in front of me? Beefcake,
puh-leez
.

While Cole practices his ghost impression—paper white, shaking, boo-hoo-hooing—one of the other commandos distributes towels and tells the girls still in their swimsuits to dart into the changing room to put on some real clothes. My sopping black V-neck and stretch jeans are sticking to my body, but my only change of clothes is back in my room, and now doesn’t really seem like the time to ask for a hall pass. It looks like I’ll be spending the rest of the day looking like a drowned marmot.

The plan, the commando tells us after Ramona digs it out of him, is to rendezvous with the other girls and commandos from the On Your Own class, then jettison out of here on the ship they rode in on, leaving the Hanover School for good and returning safely to our homes. I join two of the commandos in their attempt to check for survivors while waiting for the girls to change. I do my best not to look at Linda’s—or Lindsey’s—floating body, the bile once again rising in the
back of my throat. I try not to think about how they’ll tell her parents. How her folks will react to the news. Actually, it’s pretty easy not to think about things like that, what with Natty trailing behind me, yapping in my ear.

“Do you really think they’re going to take us home?” Natty asks, apparently oblivious to the dead teacher I’ve just uncovered smushed behind a lounge chair. I close my eyes for a moment, squeezing them hard so that it’s only pinpricks of light I see behind my eyelids. When I open them again, the dead teacher’s still there, but I swallow down the awfulness, make a mental note to tell the commandos about him, and move on down the length of the wall.

“Sure, Natty,” I tell her, although I don’t really know what to think. Obviously there’s a lot that Cole and the rest of these commando guys aren’t telling us. And yes, they’re being supermysterious and we should all be asking them some pretty important questions, like, you know, “Who are you guys?” But of the two opposing groups of sultry dudes on this ship, these are the guys who
weren’t
trying to drown girls in the pool, so, at least for now, I think I’m going to have to go on faith that Cole and his pals can get us out of here, and explain the rest later.

Really, what other choice have I got?

Finished with my inspection, I inch myself slowly away from Natty and join Chewie, who is cajoling a group of the commandos to take off their helmets. Her pout becomes even more pronounced as, one by one, she inspects their faces and discovers that no, her boyfriend is not on board. Although, based on the ravishing good looks of every soldier here, hotness is apparently a requirement for this particular strike force.

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 O
₂
. 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 ago 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.”