The Mayflower Project

by K. A. Applegate

  Two minutes, Willett said. Theres a sort of carabiner on your belts. You can clip it to the loop on your lifeline and then clip the carabiner to the sail crank itself.

  Roger that, Jobs gasped.

  Roger that? MoSteel mocked. You gone astronaut now?

  One minute. Repeat, one minute.

  The mast rose. Up and out, impossibly far, with spiderweb veins extending much farther still, extending the Mylar for thousands of square feet. Fully extended, each sail could have blanketed a pair of football fields.

  Thirty seconds.

  Let me in, MoSteel yelled. He grabbed the crank and worked it like a fiend.

  Jobs found the carabiner and with numb fingers snapped it through the loop in his own lifeline. Now for MoSteel.

  Twenty.

  Where was his friends carabiner? Turn a little, Mo!

  Im turning as fast as I can!

  I mean your body. Turn this way!

  Jobs snatched the carabiner. It spun away, cartwheeling through space. A desperate lunge, a grab with clumsy gloved fingers.

  Ten seconds to burn.

  He snagged the carabiner. Snap!

  Eight . . . seven . . .

  He lunged, drew MoSteels lifeline up, and snapped the carabiner onto the handle.

  Six . . .

  MoSteel yelled, What are you doing? I cant turn the thing if

  Jobs pulled himself up, too fast, slammed his shoulder into the shuttle skin, spun outward, dangling in space.

  MoSteel grabbed his arm, pulled him down, yanked the lifeline, and snapped it into place.

  Three . . .

  See? Plenty of time, MoSteel said. Two whole seconds to sit here and chat.

  One.

  Less than twenty feet away, the orbiters engines exploded into life. No smoke, no roiling cascade of superheated gas, just a jet as neat and symmetrical as a gas stove.

  Jobs and MoSteel were slammed hard downward. Suddenly there was a downward. Suddenly there was weight as well as mass. Jobs was hanging by his waist, feeling like he weighed two tons. It was not the exorbitant acceleration of liftoff, but it still squeezed his lungs, bent him back, turned his spine into a letter U.

  He was upside down, hanging head downward now, a tin can tied to a speeding car. The lifeline was extended fully, and stretching. The cone of fire was only a few feet below, blue-bright, weirdly silent.

  Was he going to die? Was it now, his death?

  He remembered the kid, the strange sleepwalking kid, Billy Weir. Youll be there, hed said to Jobs. Youll be there.

  Where? There.

  The burn obscured a part of the planet turning beneath him. But the shuttle was rotating slightly at the same time, and now he could see the Rock.

  Mo! Are you okay?

  No answer. Maybe he hadnt keyed his mike. Maybe the burn was blanking out the signal. Or maybe Mo wasnt there to answer.

  The acceleration seemed to go on forever. He had been hanging there, dangling helpless, straining for every breath forever.

  And suddenly, all at once, it ended.

  The cone of fire was gone. The acceleration ceased. The ship was now moving at better than 25,000 miles per hour, but once again the sense of speed disappeared along with the sense of weight.

  No death. Not yet.

  You boys still there? Willett called.

  Im okay, Jobs answered.

  Aaahhhh! Aaaahhhh! MoSteel screamed into his mike.

  My friend is okay, too.

  Head for the airlock, you did good, the commander said.

  Jobs moved hand-over-hand with ease up the length of the lifeline. MoSteel met him at the crank and they unhooked.

  Okay, that beat The Pipe, MoSteel said.

  But Jobs didnt answer. He put his hand on his friends shoulder and pointed.

  MoSteel turned and the two of them hung there, suspended, side by side, as the Rock came to the end of its long trip.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ITS OVER.

  Up close, so near Earth, the Rock looked very small. Seventy-six miles in diameter, it was nothing next to the planet measured in thousands of miles.

  But, up close, so close, Jobs could see the speed of it. Against the backdrop of space you couldnt sense the awesome speed. But now, as it angled into the atmosphere, in the brief second in which it could be seen outlined against blue ocean, it seemed impossibly fast.

  The Rock entered the atmosphere and for a flash became a spectacular special effect: The atmosphere burned, a red gash in its wake.

  It struck the western edge of Portugal. Portugal and Spain were hit by a bullet the size of Connecticut. The Iberian peninsula was a trench, a ditch.

  The Mediterranean Sea, trillions of gallons of water, exploded into steam. Every living thing in the water, every living thing ashore, was parboiled in an instant.

  Portugal, Spain, southern France, all of Italy, the Balkans, the coast of northern Africa, Greece, southern Turkey, all the way to Israel was obliterated in less than five seconds. They were the cradles of Western civilization one second, a hell of superheated steam and flying rock the next.

  The destruction was too swift to believe. In the time Jobs could blink his eyes, Rome and Cairo, Athens and Barcelona, Istanbul and Jerusalem and Damascus were gone. Not reduced to rubble, not crushed, not devastated. This wasnt like war or any disaster humans understood. Rock became gravel, soil melted and fused, water was steam, living flesh was reduced to singed single cells. Nothing recognizable remained.

  The impact explosion was a million nuclear bombs going off at once. The rock and soil and waters that had once defined a dozen nations formed a pillar of smoke and flying dirt and steam. The mushroom cloud punched up through the atmosphere, flinging dust and smoke particles clear into space.

  Jobs could see a chunk of Earth, some fragment left half-intact, maybe twenty miles across, spin slowly up in the maelstrom. There were houses. Buildings. A hint of tilled fields. Rising on the mushroom cloud, flying free, entering space itself.

  The entire planet shuddered. It was possible to see it from space: The ground rippled, as if rock and soil were liquid. The shock wave was an earthquake that toppled trees, collapsed every human-built structure around the planet, caused entire mountain chains to crumble.

  The oceans rippled in tidal waves a thousand feet high. The Atlantic Ocean rolled into New York and over it, rolled into Charleston and over it, rolled into Miami and washed across the entire state of Florida. The ocean waters lapped against the Appalachian Mountain chains, swamped everything in their way, smothered all who had not been killed by the blast or the shock wave.

  People died having no idea why. People were thrown from their beds, dashed against walls that collapsed onto them. People who survived long enough to find themselves buried alive beneath green sea many miles deep.

  Jobs saw the planets rotation slow. The day would stand still for the few who might still be alive.

  The impact worked its damage on the fissures and cracks in Earths crust. Jobs watched the Atlantic Ocean split right down the middle, emptying millions of cubic miles of water as if it was of no more consequence than pulling the plug on a bathroom sink.

  The planet was breaking up. Cracking apart. Impossibly deep fissures raced at supersonic speeds around the planet. They cut through the crust, through the mantle, deeper than a thousand Grand Canyons.

  Now the Pacific, too, drained away. It emptied into the molten core of Earth itself. The explosion dwarfed everything that had gone before. As Jobs watched, motionless, crying but not aware of it, Earth broke apart.

  It was as if some invisible hand were ripping open an orange. A vast, irregular chunk of Earth separated slowly from the planet, spun sluggishly, slowly away. The sides of this moon-sized wedge scraped against the sides of the gash, gouged up countries, ground down mountains.

  And now this wedge of Earth itself broke in half. Jobs saw what might have been California, his home, turn slowly toward the sun. If anyone is left alive, he tho
ught, if anyone is still alive, theyll see the sunrise this one last time.

  Earth lay still at last. Perhaps a quarter of the planet was bitten off, drifting away to form a second and a third Earth. The oceans were gone, boiled off into space. The sky was no longer blue but brown, as dirt and dust blotted out the sun. Here and there could still be seen patches of green. But it was impossible to believe, to hope, that any human being had survived.

  All of humanity that still lived was aboard the shuttle that now slid slowly toward the distant sun.

  The mike crackled to life. Come on in, boys. Its over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  PUT ME TO SLEEP, OR KILL ME, BUT MAKE IT STOP.

  In his berth Jobs swallowed the tube, forced it down into his stomach. The transparent lid closed over him. Sleep. Sleep. Death. What did it matter? How did you live when your world was dead?

  He felt the drowsiness of hibernation. Do it faster, he thought, put me to sleep, turn off my brain. Turn the lights out on the movie in my head, the pictures of all the faces, all the people Ive known, the ones I liked and loved, the ones I cared nothing for, the ones I never knew.

  Put me to sleep, or kill me, but make it stop, he whispered.

  He was still awake to hear the distant, muffled explosion. A gun. Colonel Willett would not be coming along on this trip.

  Sleep took Jobs. And MoSteel. The hibernation equipment slowed their hearts and then stopped them. Slowed the bouncing electrical impulses in their brains, and stopped them. They were as dead as the people of Earth, but with at least a hope of rebirth somewhere, sometime.

  Tamara Hoyle was already deep in the hibernation death-sleep. But the technology had never been designed for pregnant women. The machine knew nothing of the fetus inside her.

  2Face slept, her berth between those of her parents.

  Yago slept, as alone now as ever.

  D-Caf slept, calm at last.

  Billy Weir lay unmoving, his body paralyzed. He could not hear. Could not see. Could not move. The hibernation equipment slowed every process, stopped every activity.

  But Billy Weir did not sleep. His brain did not shut down.

  The Mayflower fell toward the sun, accelerating all the while, faster and faster yet still painfully, pitifully slow in the distances of space. It would fall toward the sun for years. And slowly come around the sun, for years. And gain still more speed and race away from the sun and past the shattered remains of dark Earth for years stretching into decades.

  Centuries.

  And still, Billy Weir would not sleep.

  K.A. APPLEGATE

  REMNANTS

  2

  Destination Unknown

  "IF THIS IS A DREAM, IT'S THE MOTHER, FATHER, SISTER, AND BROTHER OF WEIRD."

  "You're alive," a voice said.

  A hand shook Jobs's shoulder, but gently, seemingly knowing the pain he was in.

  Slowly he revived. He saw a half-ruined face. A pretty girl, Asian, with half her face melted like wax.

  "You probably don't remember me," she said. "I'm 2Face. We met back on Earth. Do you remember Earth? Do you remember what happened?"

  He nodded dully. He looked, helpless to stop himself, at the filthy decay of his father's berth.

  "A lot are like that," 2Face said. "I don't think very many of us are still alive. On my way up here I saw a few who looked alive. Sleeping, still. And there are some that . . . Some, I don't know."

  Jobs searched her face. She looked as if she had been crying. But maybe that was because of the drooping eye on her burned side.

  "Do you think you can walk?" 2Face asked.

  "I don't know," Jobs said.

  "I think maybe we should get out of here," 2Face said.

  Jobs shook his head. "We have to help these . . ."

  "We're too weak. I keep falling asleep. I just heard you, so I climbed up here. But we have to get out. Outside. This place is . . . there are dead people everywhere." Her voice that had been so calm was edging toward hysteria. "There's just things, people, stuff you don't, I mean, I was climbing up here because I heard you moving and I passed by . . . and my mom . . . it's just . . . and they don't even smell, you know, not like dead people, like nothing, or like, like yeast, like bread . . ."

  "Take it easy, take it easy, don't think about it," Jobs said.

  "Don't think about it?!" 2Face screamed. "Don't think about it?!"

  Jobs grabbed her face in his hands. The melted flesh felt strange. She stared at him, wild.

  "We start screaming we're never going to stop," Jobs said. "My brain is ready to explode, my mom and dad and everything. But we have to think. We have to think."

  She nodded vigorously, searching his eyes as if looking for reflections of her own panic. "Okay, we stick together, okay?"

  "Yeah," Jobs agreed readily. "We stick together. Help each other. Neither one of us thinks too much, okay? We just try and figure out . . ." He couldn't imagine what he had to figure out. The images of his parents, the fear that his little brother might awaken and see them for himself, all of it was too much, like he was trying to take a drink from a fire hose, too much data, too much horror.

  2Face said, "Okay, come on, we stick together." Her calm had returned, almost as if it was her turn to be rational while he fought the torrent of fear and grief. "Okay, we need to find out what happened. Are we . . . I mean, where are we, the ship I mean? Did we land somewhere? Are we still in space?"

  "Yeah. Yeah," Jobs nodded, anxious to come to grips with simple problems. "Yeah. We're not weightless. Okay. We're not weightless. So we can't be in space. Unless we're accelerating. Then we'd have weight."

  "That's good, think about that," 2Face said.

  "Let's go up. To the bridge. We can see where we are."

  "To the bridge. Maybe the captain is up there, he can tell us, if he made it I mean."

  "He didn't," Jobs said, remembering a dull thump, the sound of a gun being fired. The sound of a man's choice not to live on when his wife and children and home and very species were gone. "Long story. There were some problems. Come on. Let's go to the bridge."

  Each step up the ladder was painful. But each step was less painful than the step before.

  They climbed past the place where D-Caf and his brother, Mark Melman, had stowed away. Where Mark had shot the Marine sergeant. What was her name? Jobs couldn't remember. Had she survived? How could she, she'd been shot, badly wounded when they bundled her into a hibernation berth. His own perfectly healthy parents had not survived, how could a wounded woman?

  And Mo'Steel. What about Mo? He should check on Mo.

  No. No more hideous plexiglass coffins. He didn't want to see any more horrors.

  They reached the crawlway that connected the cargo area to the flight deck. The hatch was open. Jobs went in first.

  He had to climb up. The tunnel was meant to be used either in a weightless environment or crawled through when the shuttle was at rest horizontally.

  The tunnel opened onto a space below the flight deck. It was mostly crammed with lockers. What they contained he didn't know, but water would have been his first choice. He was desperately thirsty.

  There was a ladder that in this position was more an impediment than a help. He crawled onto the flight deck. It was designed for horizontal flight, with the seats set in such a way that during the landing phase, the pilots would be positioned like the pilots of any commercial jet. So when Jobs entered the flight deck the seats were above him, over his back.

  He stood up and stretched.

  Looking straight up Jobs could see a sliver of light through the small cockpit windshield. Like looking up through a skylight. Strange. The sky was blue, and for a moment he felt a leap of irrational hope. They were home! On Earth. All of it a dream.

  But the blue of the sky was not the depthless, indeterminate blue of earth's sky. The sky seemed to be made up of blue scales. Dabs of blue and dabs of violet. Even streaks of green. And the cloud he saw was no cloud that had ever fl
oated through Earth's sky. It was white in parts, but also brown, with streaks of brown dragged across the white.

  The whole mass of the sky moved, vibrated. As if the wind blew, but blew nowhere in particular, just reshuffled the scales and smears of color.

  "What is it?" 2Face asked. She was staring up past him.

  "I don't know."

  He helped her to her feet. They stood on what would normally be a vertical bulkhead.

  The shuttle had landed. Somewhere. Gravity was downward, which meant that, impossible as it clearly was, it had landed nose up. It had landed in take-off position. Utterly impossible.

  The shuttle had no way to achieve this. The thought had been that the ship's computers would, on sensing the right circumstances, trim the solar sails to achieve deceleration and enter orbit around some theoretical, hoped for, prayed for planet.

  After that, the thinking was that any orbit would inevitably deteriorate, and the shuttle would then be able to land in its normal configuration under the guidance of a revived pilot.

  Of course, the shuttle landed on a smooth, paved runway. Not on prairie. Not on water. Not on mountainsides. Not in craters.

  Jobs knew (just as everyone aboard knew) what a mishmash of faint hopes and ludicrous delusions this mission represented. There never had been anything more than a disappearingly small chance of success.

  Fly through space toward no particular goal, have the solar sails work both to accelerate and decelerate and then have the absurd good luck to land on a planet with reasonable gravity and a very convenient landing strip positioned wherever they happened to touch down?

  Absurd.

  But to do all that and somehow end up vertical?

  "Maybe we're still asleep," Jobs muttered.

  "I don't think so, Duck. I don't have dreams like this."

  The voice was instantly familiar.

  "Mo?"

  Mo'Steel leaned out into view overhead. He was perched in the captain's seat. He was smiling, but nothing like his usual Labrador retriever grin.