A Stranger Thing (The Ever-Expanding Universe)

by Leicht, Martin

  “The Almiri’s name is Cole,” I inform my mother for the umpteenth time.

  Zee rolls her eyes. “Well, Cole, would you mind taking a closer look for us?”

  “Uh, sure,” Cole tells her. “Yeah, no prob. If it’s the ship, I’ll just, like, wave my arms, like this.” And then he waves his arms over his head back and forth to demonstrate. Honestly, I want to say something snarky, like Oh, but if you go all jazz hands on us, we should stay put, is that it? But it’s been sort of a long three days. So I just nod before he trudges off across the ice toward what, we hope, is our destination.

  When he’s out of earshot, I wheel around on Zee. “Look, I know you don’t like the Almiri. I get that. You’ve been pretty clear about it. But lay off Cole already! He’s been nothing but lovely to you. He also happens to be the father of your granddaughter, like you care.”

  Zee has a very strained expression on her face. Her mouth is a thin straight line. “I apologize,” she says coolly.

  And then we stand, shivering in the snow, and wait for Cole to do something. Jeez, you’d think the superhuman might be a tad quicker about things. I glance at Zee several times, trying to think of something to ease the tension, but nothing comes to mind. Dad, meanwhile, keeps busy by swinging his arms and kicking his feet in what I hope is an attempt to avoid turning into a life-size FrozePop, and not the onset of some sort of brain-freeze delirium.

  Finally, when Cole is almost nothing but a speck, he whirls around and begins jumping up and down, waving his arms like a doofus.

  “Well, there you are,” Mom says. She starts walking across the ice. “It appears your boyfriend has found what we were looking for.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I say, startling myself. I mean, I guess Cole and I never officially had the whole “I’m your girlfriend, you’re my boyfriend” chat, but I always figured that was because chats like that are sort of moot when the hypothetical girlfriend and boyfriend already have a very real baby together.

  At least I think that’s why we’ve never had that chat.

  Dad is raising a frozen eyebrow in my direction, like even he’s surprised by this sudden revelation. I try to shrug it off. “He’s just . . . Cole,” I explain lamely.

  “Well,” Zee says, the kind of “well” that means that what you said makes you sound like a total chromer. “Let’s not keep your Cole waiting.”

  • • •

  All the relief I felt when we first spotted the Echidna has abandoned me now that we’re standing at the base of the crash site. In place of that relief there’s a pressure weighing down on my chest, making it difficult to breathe. Unless the air has magically grown exponentially denser in the past five minutes, I’m pretty sure that this is the beginning of a panic attack. Gaping up at the remains of the ship where I nearly died half a dozen times just a few weeks earlier, I’m suddenly wondering why I was so desperate to come here in the first place, just to get some stupid computer files.

  Granted, those stupid computer files could provide info that would help protect me and my baby, not to mention shift the balance in a war that will determine the fate of the entire planet. But, still.

  The wreck juts out of the ice at a fairly low angle. The back end—maybe about a third of the ship or so—is visible above the ice, meaning that whatever’s left of the front end is submerged underwater. The thick layer of ice we’re currently perched on—which I can only assume formed up around the wreck after the ship crashed through, solidifying it all into one massive shipsicle—creaks and moans under the stress of the massive cruiser. More likely than not, the ship is slowly sliding down into the depths. It could probably break through completely and plunge into the darkness at any moment.

  “We’re gonna be in for a world of suck if water has flooded the lower levels,” Cole says, scouring the ship’s exterior to find a point of entry.

  “Well, Dr. Marsden’s office was fairly far back,” I reply. “So with any luck it won’t be flooded.”

  “We got all the files from his office,” Cole reminds me. “I thought you wanted to check out the maintenance locker where he was hiding.”

  Right. I shake my head, trying to remove the freeze from my brain. Stay sharp, Elvie, I tell myself. You’re going to need all your wits about you today. “Yeah,” I say. “Right, the maintenance locker.” The maintenance locker on the bottom of the ship, where Dr. Marsden was manipulating me and the rest of the Hanover girls like puppets, sending more than a few of us into the arms of untimely death. Where I nearly lost Cole. Where I shot my former physician and confidante three times in the chest, close enough to feel the heat off his wounds before he toppled over the edge of the railing. Chances are, that’s where we’ll find any secret files Marsden was hiding from his superiors. There or on his corpse.

  “Dearheart, are you all right?” Dad asks beside me. “You look pale.”

  “I’m fine,” I lie, trying not to tremble. “Let’s just find a way in and get this over with.”

  Easier said than done. While there is a butt-ton of structural damage all over the ship’s exterior, there’s no real serviceable way to get inside on the ground. After taking about fifteen minutes to carefully pick our way around the perimeter, we finally determine that the only opening that looks feasible for us to tackle is a good forty meters aboveground, near what appears to be the rear end of the lido deck. It is, I surmise after a good two minutes of blinking at the sun glare off the ship, the hole created when the Almiri rescue ship exploded, thanks to Dr. Marsden’s sabotage.

  Well, at least the dude did something helpful.

  “Great,” I say with a harrumph. “So not only do we have to climb all the way up there, but then we have to backtrack all the way down to the hull section.”

  Dad looks up at the icy surface of the hull and whistles. “I sure wish we hadn’t lost the climbing gear,” he says.

  “It’s only a few dozen meters,” Cole says nonchalantly. “Piece of cake.”

  “Cole,” I say, darting my eyes not-so-subtly toward my slightly paunchy middle-age father. Cole makes a face like he just got an easy question wrong in Trivial Pursuit.

  “Oh,” he says. “Right. Well, the outside is pretty banged up. We should be able to find decent handholds.”

  “I don’t know, Cole,” I say. “I think it might be too dangerous.” I’m superskeptical, and not just because I’m pretty positive Dad’s going to bite it only a meter off the ground. I don’t fancy the idea of me getting halfway up the icy metal wall and then slipping and bouncing all the way down like a pachinko ball either.

  “There’s no point wasting time chewing it over,” Zee says, finding a few low-lying grips. “This is the only way in. So we might as well get started.” And just like that, she’s climbing slowly but steadily up the side of the wreck.

  My mother is remarkably spry, but even so, after a few meters she loses purchase on one of the grips and slides right off. Cole catches her before she can land on her butt, and she wriggles out of his arms like he has mutant cooties.

  “Are you o—” Cole starts, but Zee cuts him off right away.

  “I’m fine,” she says—pretty nastily, considering Cole just saved her tailbone from a real whomping. “Just need to try again.”

  “There’s no way we can all make it up that way,” I tell her calmly. Like I’m explaining to a two-year-old that the square blocks can’t fit in round holes.

  “There’s no other way, Elvan,” she replies. “What would you suggest?”

  “I suggest we let the superdude here climb up and see if he can find something to lower down to us. There’s probably all kinds of crap up there. Chances are, there’s something we could use.”

  Zee looks mad, and I can’t tell if it’s because she thinks I don’t believe she can make the climb, or because my idea is just way better than her brilliant trial-and-error-butt-flopping-on-the-ice method. Nevertheless, she nods in reluctant agreement.

  “Right-o, be back in a jiff,” Cole says, and
before I can blink, he’s already halfway up. In another moment he’s disappeared into the crater. From overhead I hear him whistle. “This place is a mess,” he calls down. “I mean, if you thought it was trashed before . . .”

  “Cole!” I yell up. “Be more productive!”

  “Right,” comes the reply. “Productive. Good.”

  Me, Dad, and Zee stand around in awkward silence for a few moments, waiting for Cole to find something useful. I feel like we’re playing an eyeball-only variant of hot potato: I dart my eyes back and forth between my parents, always looking away the second they return my glance, and they’re doing the same thing. Our eyes bounce around like that for a while, until finally Zee breaks the silence.

  “I could have made the climb,” she says indignantly.

  “I have every faith,” is Dad’s warm reply. My mother looks at him and searches his face, as if wondering if my sarcastic nature has become contagious. When she studies that earnest gob of his, though, she seems to realize (or maybe remember) that Harry Nara doesn’t have a sarcastic bone in his body. The smile that creeps over her face then is the first real emotion other than contempt or anger that I’ve seen from her since her semihuman moment in the ice crevice after Bernard died.

  I rub my dad’s arm gently through his thermal sleeve, mostly just to keep him warm. He leans down and whispers in my ear, the pitch of his voice at clear Dad Frequency.

  “So you and Cole are having problems?” he asks quietly, so Zee won’t hear. “Is it something you want to talk about?”

  “No. Not problems,” I say as I take my hand back. “Maybe a discussion for another day, Dad. When we’re not, like, about to scale an icy metal wall.”

  “Right,” my father says. “Right, good call.”

  “Hey!” Cole cries from up top. “Guess what I found?” Before we can start playing Twenty Questions, two long cables come snaking down the side of the ship, the length hitting the bottom with several meters to spare. Cole emerges from the hole and slides down the side, gripping one cable in each hand as he goes. He lands on the ice with a soft thunk and spins around to face us, smiling.

  “Nice job,” I tell him. “Where’d you find them?”

  “In that utility closet where we found your classmates from the On Your Own class,” Cole replies.

  “How do you know it’s the same closet?” I wonder.

  “Well, there were twenty-odd sacks of flour wearing diapers all over the floor.” He frowns. “I’m sad to say most of the flour babies did not survive the crash.”

  “Well, worst-case scenario,” I say as I gather up one of the cables, “we don’t find any useful information, but we whip up a few dozen cupcakes for the trip back.”

  “I don’t think the kitchen’s still functional, Elvs,” Cole adds, serious. I think I hear Zee snort, but it might be my paranoid imagination.

  “Just . . . help me tie this up, you goof.”

  The climb up takes about ten minutes. Even with each of us tethered to the cable, the surface is so slick that we have to watch our footing very carefully as we pull ourselves up the line. I’ve got one line wrapped across my shoulders and around my waist like a harness, and Dad has the other. Zee shimmies up the line ahead of me, and Cole climbs just behind Dad. Cole wanted to side with me, but I made sure he went with my father in case the old man slipped and needed catching. Which turned out to be an excellent plan, since Dad loses his grip no fewer than three times on the way up.

  Exhausted and with beads of sweat frosting over on my forehead, I finally make it to the opening, and soon enough I find myself back in the belly of the beast.

  The lido deck is just as trashed as Cole described, although I don’t know what I expected from a cruise liner that barreled headfirst into the ground from outer space. Honestly, I’m amazed that the thing’s still in one piece. Because of the angle that the ship landed in, the floor is tilted fairly steeply, like a funhouse of suck. It’s not impassable, but it does require a little forethought before each step to avoid face-planting. The wall that separated this outer area from the pool inside is completely smashed away, and it looks like all the pool water was flung against the far wall, along with lounge chairs and assorted pool toys, where it all promptly froze into a sort of mural. Over time, snow and frost has accumulated along the exposed wall, and I’m thankful that most of the cloudy ice obscures some of the more morbid objects I imagine came in with the pool water.

  “Well, lead on, MacDuff,” Dad says to me brightly. “You’re our guide now. Which way?”

  “Funny how I always end up the guide on this boat,” I grumble. I point to the door on the opposite wall, which has remained mostly shielded from the elements. “We can go through there and see if the stairwell is passable. If it is, we can take it all the way down to the bottom level. If not, we’re going to have to zig-zag arou—” Dad grabs my arm as I’m about to lead the group to the exit.

  “Hold on a second, dearheart,” he says, his voice suddenly deathly serious. He walks over to a wall console that used to sit next to the side entrance into the pool area. The screen on the console is completely gone, leaving the guts of the wiring underneath exposed.

  “What is it?” I ask as I walk over to him.

  “Elvie,” he intones gravely. “Tell me what you see.”

  I stare at the panel for a few moments. I want to say it’s just a bunch of junk, but I know my dad, and he wouldn’t halt our search before it even began without good cause, so I take another look. LED backlights, all pulverized, magnesium filaments . . .

  “The power coupling,” I say.

  “What’s a power coupling?” Cole asks.

  “They’re conduits for the electricity these computer consoles use,” I explain. “Like wiring but without the wires. One module is connected directly to the power source, and it transmits the energy along a beam to one or more satellite modules throughout a piece of equipment.”

  “So what’s wrong with the power coupling?” Zee asks, stepping forward to take a look for herself.

  “It’s missing,” I say.

  “Not missing,” Dad says. “Removed. Very precisely, I might add.”

  “Which means . . . ?” Cole asks. The freezing sweat on my brow starts to thaw a little bit as fresh perspiration wells up underneath it. I swallow hard to get the lump in my throat down before I answer.

  “We’re not alone.”

  “What do you mean, we’re not alone?” Cole asks. “Just because a couple of pieces of junk aren’t there doesn’t mean much. They could have fallen out or been crushed by something, or—”

  “No,” Dad corrects him. “The seals that lock the modules into place are intact. These have been removed manually. And that’s not all.” He shifts over to the poolside wall, which has been broken through. The steel panels that used to reinforce the plaster foam outer wall have mostly buckled and bent, or come loose altogether, leaving mounds of now-frozen dust at the base. Dad bends down and brushes away one of these piles, revealing a perfect twenty-centimeter-diameter hole in the floor.

  “This is where the titanium supports should be anchored,” Dad goes on. “Even if this wall was blown out on impact, it shouldn’t have collapsed completely. And the support frames would still be here.” He stands up and dusts off his pants. “Those supports have been removed too. And that’s no easy task.”

  “Meaning,” Zee says, “that whoever’s here has access to some pretty heavy machinery.”

  “Or they’re very strong,” I say, almost in a whisper. We all stand in deathly silence for a minute as Dad and I look at each other, quietly assessing the new threat. Finally, Cole adds his two cents.

  “So what are we talking about here? I thought you guys said this was the wrong pole for polar bears.”

  “Oh, Cole, for Christ’s sake,” I start in on him. “The Jin’Kai are here!”

  But Cole just shakes his head. “That doesn’t make sense,” he replies. “Desi sent out the misdirecting distress signal, remember? Th
ere’s no way the Jin’Kai could have located the crash site.”

  “Not those Jin’Kai, you beautiful moron. The ones who were already here.” He blinks at me, still not understanding. “The Devastators are still alive.”

  “We need to leave this level—now,” Zee says, suddenly very tense.

  “Right,” I agree. “But we better be careful—”

  “Not that way,” she says, stopping me from moving to the door. I freeze, listen carefully. Far away—but much closer than I’d like—I hear the sound of metal on metal.

  Boots. Heavy boots on stairs.

  And they’re getting closer.

  “Come on!” I scream-whisper, and I bolt toward the side door to the ruined pool area. The others fall into place beside me, slipping and sliding as we do our best to run down across the icy floor.

  “Where is this headed?” Zee huffs as she runs.

  “The pool?” Dad asks, huffing even harder. “That will just lead us to the locker roo— My God, Elvie, you are a clever little rascal.”

  “Don’t get too excited just yet,” I say as we careen past the side of the now-empty pool, thankfully devoid of any of the frozen corpses I was afraid of finding. “This might not be any safer.”

  We make it to the locker room. The rows of lockers, which are about two and a half meters tall and twelve lockers deep, have collapsed like dominoes. I maneuver around them, fingers pinching the walls for a grip against the incline, and head to the opening in the wall to the back left. Above, the sign remains hanging: DIRTY LAUNDRY.

  “Where does this lead?” Zee asks, looking down the dark chute.

  “Down to the main laundry room,” Dad chimes in. “If I’m not mistaken.” He knows he’s not. “I’ll go first. It could be a very bumpy ride.” And he swings his leg over the edge and hoists himself inside. It’s a tight fit for him, but he’s got enough clearance that he should be able to slide down easily, assuming the chute hasn’t buckled and broken anywhere along the way—which is entirely possible. But seeing as the other option is facing a group of ruthless extraterrestrial meanies that Cole once described as a cross between the Alien and the Predator, I’m willing to take my chances. Dad looks at me and nods, his expression a mix of fright and exhilaration.