Mothership (30 page)

Which is more important to save—the individual or the group?
The memory pops into my brain, completely unwelcome and highly inconvenient, given the time crunch I’m facing. At the time the answer to that question seemed so cut and dried. Now . . .

I sit down at the desk and put my phone down. Tears are once again in my eyes, but they aren’t tears of joy or emotional overload this time. No, these are just tears of acceptance.

“Elvie, what’s the matter?” Ducky asks. “Why are you sitting down? You have to get to the Dumpster.”

“I’m not going to the Dumpster,” I tell him. And as soon as the words leave my mouth, I know they’re true.

“What do you mean you’re not going to the Dumpster?” Ducky screeches. “Elvie, you have to get out of there right now. You only have three minutes and twenty seconds. Three minutes nineteen.” His voice is becoming more and more panicked.
“Elvie—”

“Ducky, there are girls left on this ship. Lots of them. And Cole. They’re planning on escaping on the captain’s yacht, but this doucher has the whole ship rigged against them. They’re headed straight into a trap. If I don’t fix this, they’ll die for sure.”

“Elvie,
you’ll
die for sure! Just get off the ship. If there’s
some bad guy up there messing with you, then you have to get away.” He is practically crying. “You’re a badass, Elvie, but you can’t take on an evil space invader by yourself.”

“Oh, yeah?” I say. “Watch me.”

Just yanking the wires out of the wall works for most of the lap-pads, but in order to deactivate his overrides on the yacht, I’ll have to go inside the system and reestablish manual site control. But first I need to clear a path for Captain Bob. If I can fix everything in time, the gang should be able to launch the yacht without falling into a trap. Ignoring the shrieks of outrage emanating from my phone, I focus on normalizing the environmental settings and deactivating the final few blast doors in the space between the group and their destination. I’m just disengaging the last door when I hear a loud clunking sound. The floor vibrates for a few seconds, and my phone skitters across the table before I manage to catch it.

“What was
that
?” Ducky asks.

“The Dumpster disembarking,” I reply. And—quite stoically, I think, for a girl whose only way off a dying ship has just jettisoned into space—I return to my de-sabotage. I reestablish manual controls on the yacht. “Almost . . . there.” A few more quick keystrokes, and . . . “Done!” The yacht, and the path to it, is safe.

“Great,” Ducky says. “Now go, okay? You’re freaking me out. Go join the others on this yacht thing and get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Ducky,” I tell him, trying to sound calm and at peace, if only for his sake, “I’m too far away now. I’ll never make it before they get there and leave.”

The individual or the group. I guess I’ve made my choice.

“Then there’s got to be another way!” Ducky is pleading with me now, desperate, and I want to cry even more for knowing that all I’ve done by getting in touch with him is give him a front-row seat to my inevitable demise. “You’ve got to try! You’ve got to figure out
something
! Call Cole. Tell him to wait. Tell him you’re coming.”

I never in my wildest dreams thought Ducky would suggest that I ring up Cole. It’s not a half-bad idea, actually, and it just might work, if only . . .

“I erased it,” I tell Ducky, staring at my phone. Suddenly that move seems like the dumbest of all my teenage girl drama queen moments.

“Elvie, it isn’t that I doubt your resolve as an independent woman, but I also know for a fact that somewhere in that jumbled brain of yours you’ve got the damn thing memorized. Now
think
.”

And wouldn’t you know it, the Duck is right.

“Stay on this line,” I tell him.

I dial the number, seriously doubting that Cole brought his Nokia with him during a covert rescue mission. But it doesn’t matter, because when I hit send, nothing happens. The call loading screen just spins its cute overly designed wheels.

“It won’t go through,” I tell Ducky when I switch back to him. “The signal is still scrambled. The saboteur doucher must have it set up so he can send signals from here but keep the rest of the ship scrambled. He must be . . .” And suddenly it all becomes remarkably clear, like, hello, freaking
lightbulb
. “Shit, Ducky. He must have been signaling his buddies this
whole time. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a whole fleet of them on their way right now.”

“Very astute, Miss Nara.”

When I hear the hard voice behind me, I tense up like I’ve just heard a ghost. With a surreptitious flick of my index finger I turn off my phone, disconnecting me from Ducky, the last image of his face going white as he wonders what horrible fate stands behind me. If this is really the end for old Elvie Nara, I don’t want my bestie to have to witness it.

“Kindly place your hands behind your head and stand up slowly,” says the voice. It’s low and raspy, raw from the day’s excitement, no doubt.

“So I guess this is it, then,” I say as I rise.

“It is,” he replies.

At first the nauseating scent that hits my nose befuddles me. The stench of brussels sprouts.

It’s the goddamn cook?

But no, that’s not the monster who’s been making my life a living hell for the past twelve hours. Underneath the smell of vegetables is a more familiar scent, with fonder memories attached. Brut aftershave and peppermint. I stand up and turn around to face the saboteur, at last.

“Hello, Dr. Marsden.”

“Hello, Elvie,” Dr. Marsden says, with the same genial smile he always wears on his face—despite the fact that he’s pointing a ray gun directly at me.

My hand twitches, creeping ever so slightly closer to the ray gun stuffed down my boobs, but one look at the doc’s face, and I know he’s watching me like a hawk. I’d never reach the thing before he disarmed me. “I thought you were going to be Fred,” I tell him, trying a different tactic. I gesture to the chef’s jacket the doc has slipped on.

“Oh, this?” he says. “Just a little bit of subterfuge, along with the body you no doubt discovered outside my office. No one would spend time searching for a dead man.”

“Too bad,” I reply with a forced casual shrug.
Keep up the banter,
I tell myself.
The bad guys never shoot you while you’re bantering.
“I had a great line all prepared if it was the cook.”

Dr. Marsden cocks his head to a sharp angle. “I’d hate a good one-liner to go to waste. Please share.”

“First Seafood Surprise Fridays, and now this.”

His smile broadens. It’s so genuine and warm that you’d never know he was a mass-murdering shithead. “You always were my favorite, Elvie. Such an agile mind.”

“True,” I say, all nonchalant-like. “So. You gonna put the gun down or what? We both know you’re not going to shoot me.”

“I’m not?”

“Not while I’m carrying your precious Jin’Kai cargo in my uterus.”

For the first time Dr. Marsden’s smile drops. “My, you have learned a lot, haven’t you?”

“I saw the list,” I reply, my confidence growing stronger with every syllable. If there’s one thing I’ve figured out today, it’s that these hottie evil alien dudes have baby fever. I’ve got something they want, and my only way out of here is to use it to my advantage. “I know I was ‘processed.’ And I’m pretty sure your bosses would be sort of pissed if you guys went to all this trouble and then zapped your incubator.”

“Elvie.” The doctor’s tone is serious but calming, the voice he once used to make me more comfortable during exams. An unexpected shiver runs down my spine underneath my thermal suit. “I hate to break it to you, but you haven’t been processed. The child you’re carrying now is the one you came here with.”

“I . . .” My brain is spinning. I haven’t been processed yet? This should be good news, if it weren’t for the ray gun trained at my forehead. “But the list . . .”

“The list showed what I wanted it to. It was important that my superiors believe you had been processed.”

“Why?” I ask, truly puzzled. The doc is sabotaging our efforts to escape, while he’s also hiding things from his own people. What is this guy playing at?

“Why?”
he repeats, as though the answer is, like, überobvious. “To protect you, of course.”

“Gee, I’m touched. Are we having a special moment or something?”

The smile slowly creeps back onto his face. “I’m not going to kill you, Elvie.” He does not lower his gun. “I’m sure we can find a use for you yet. So bright. And so much potential.”

And okay, maybe I should just go ahead and take the compliment from the creepy dude with the gun aimed at me, but for some reason I’m not feeling so friendly. “Too bad Carrie and Danielle didn’t have any potential,” I spit. “Maybe you could have spared them, too.”

“Sorry?” To his credit Dr. Marsden’s looking genuinely confused. Although maybe they teach you that expression in evil alien medical school, I don’t know.

“Carrie and Danielle. Remember them? The two girls you murdered in the hangar with your fancy little sabotage?”

“My goodness, you went through the
hangar
?” Dr. Marsden says. “I’ve been trying to shepherd you to the captain’s quarters, not pick you off like flies. Why wouldn’t you simply take the path through the ballroom? I left that wide open.”

Shit. I didn’t even
think
of that. “That would’ve been, like, a million times easier,” I agree.

“A pity, I’ll admit, but all things considered I’m relieved
that it’s you who made it through the gauntlet.” He raises an eyebrow thoughtfully. “Of course, who else but you could adapt so readily to such a terrible situation? You are a special one, Elvie Nara, there’s no doubt in my mind. Hopefully someday you’ll understand just how special.”

“If you try to pull some lame-ass ‘I’m your father’ bullshit right now, I’m gonna lose it,” I tell him.

His smile only broadens. “I do so envy your wit. Now, please be civil and step aside so I can return to my work, will you? We can talk more once your friends are in hand.”

I might be doomed, I think, but if I can just keep the doc talking, there’s a good chance I might buy the others enough time to get away safely.
Keep talking, Elvie. Keeping talking . . .
“Seriously, though, Doc,” I say. “I don’t understand why you’re doing all this.”

And to my relief he’s still feeling fairly chatty. “Well, Elvie, you see, my people, the Jin’Kai, left a planet called Horon-4 more than a century ago—”

“No, I know
that
part,” I say, before realizing I should probably let him prattle on as much as he wants. “I mean, you have to realize that the way things are going, you guys are going to run out of hosts eventually. Earth is the sixth colony, right? That means there’s no more after this. Where do you parthenogenetic freaks go from here?”

“Ah, yes,” the doc says. “Manifest Destiny with an expiration date. But as I think you’ve learned by now, things aren’t always what they seem. Have faith that there is a plan at work. And now you must let me get back to that work.”

“Maybe it’s time you took a coffee break.”

Not the best line in the world, admittedly, but when I see who’s said it—standing behind Dr. Marsden outside the doorway—I break into a broad grin.

Dr. Marsden turns to see who it is, interrupting our expository interlude just in time to make out a Cole-shaped blur zooming at him with tremendous speed. In an instant Cole has knocked the gun from Dr. M’s hand, and the two are fighting. I mean,
really
fighting, like in those old superhero flat pics where the guys just wail on each other, jumping off walls and busting out kicks and punches that have their own special sound effects. You can practically see the
FWOOSH!
es and
KAPOW!
s appearing over their heads as they pummel each other with attacks that no one should be able to inflict—or survive. It’s another example of some of the tremendous differences between the Almiri, the Jin’Kai, and little old me and the rest of humanity.