Survival

by K. A. Applegate

  SURVIVAL

  REMNANTS #13

  K.A. Applegate

  CHAPTER 1

  “YOU COULD HAVE PREVENTED THIS.”

  Tate turned to face the door.

  There, in the gloom of the immense doorway, a darker shadow. Still, silent, watching her.

  It was Yago. And in that split second, Tate knew.

  The little seedling that had filled Jobs with hope for new life on Earth was a fake. A trick.

  Yago and the Troika had created it and used it to lure everyone onto the surface. The seedling was nothing more than part of an elaborate plan to hijack the ship.

  Fear rushed through her Jobs, Mo’Steel, Billy, 2Face, the others — they were all stuck on the ashy, dead planet. They had little water, practically no food. And they were going to die unless she did something to help them.

  She was their only chance. She was alone on the ship with the bad guys: Amelia, Duncan, Charlie — and Yago.

  When had they joined forces? Didn’t matter.

  Why would Amelia cut a deal with Yago? That didn’t matter, either.

  Four against one. Not such hot odds. That mattered.

  “You can leave now,” Yago ordered. A giggle escaped and he put a hand to his mouth.

  Weird. He was acting manic, cartoonish, crazy.

  Tate hesitated. Her thoughts were jumbled. The viewscreens showed Earth below them, still close. She could see Violet and D-Caf and the others, all looking up at the ship. They were close enough that she could make out their stunned expressions. They were helpless. No way for them to do anything from the planet’s surface.

  Could she tackle Yago? Yes, she could do that or — or worse. But he didn’t seem to be controlling the ship. Amelia must be doing that from somewhere down in the basement.

  Okay. Tate had to get down there. She had to stop Amelia somehow. Forget about Yago. He was just a distraction.

  Yago stood aside and Tate walked slowly from the bridge, wondering if her fury would make the Mouth appear and half-hoping that it would.

  The Mouth was a mutation. Somehow — Tate didn’t understand how — she’d changed, or been altered, in the five hundred years since she’d left Earth. Maybe low-level radiation had twisted her DNA as she lay sleeping in her crude hibernation berth aboard the shuttle. Maybe the mutation would have occurred even if they hadn’t been sucked into this much bigger ship.

  Maybe. But Tate suspected Mother had something to do with the mutation. When you came right down to it. Mother was mixed up in most things that had happened since they woke up from their five-hundred-year sleep.

  Mother was the massive alien ship that surrounded Tate. A ship the size of Detroit. She’d been a home to the handful of people who’d escaped Earth just before an asteroid rammed into the planet and destroyed seven billion people. A home — or a prison. Depended on how you looked at it.

  Mother was also the computer that ran the ship — the ship’s consciousness, personality, brain. A computer so advanced she could feel loneliness, could plan strategy, could exercise free will.

  Mother was a power. That’s why the scared, lost band of Remnants had been fighting for control of her ever since they’d mysteriously woken up here. They’d fought aliens in the beginning — and when they’d finally managed to overpower most of the aliens, they began fighting one another

  Tate hadn’t seen this last move coming, though. She hadn’t expected the hijacking. She’d never dreamed Amelia, Duncan, and Charlie would form an alliance with Yago. Yago had fooled them all into thinking he was insane. Or, maybe he’d fooled the Troika into thinking he was sane.

  “You haven’t won yet, Yago,” Tate told herself. “This game isn’t over until I’m dead.” She came out into the still, echoing corridor. The elevator was directly ahead of her — maybe two hundred yards away. Tate sprinted for it, expecting to be stopped, attacked.

  Her back quivered with nerves and she had to fight an urge to keep looking over her shoulder Yago had a gun.

  Tate was still about fifty yards from the elevator when the ship accelerated upward awkwardly, knocking her to her knees. Amelia — somehow Tate was sure it was Amelia and not Charlie or Duncan — was flying the ship with the skill of a clumsy child. Tate hoped she didn’t crash the thing.

  A low moan, a sound of suffering, rose up around Tate until she was engulfed in sound. It came from the walls, the floor, the air. The sound was soft at first, but grew quickly in intensity until Tate clasped her hands to her ears to block it out.

  Mother was crying.

  The ground under Tate’s feet shook. A hot, dry wind sprang up from nowhere. The towering walls of the fortress Billy had built to protect them vibrated and began to break up into chunks.

  “Bad,” Tate mumbled as the wind forced her to her knees, then down onto the floor. “This is very bad.”

  The environment Billy had created was dying. That had to mean — what? That Amelia had somehow severed Billy’s connection to Mother? That Billy was dead? He was down there on the surface with the others. Had someone just attacked him?

  Worry and guilt stabbed Tate. “You could have prevented this,” she told herself angrily. She could have saved Billy and ruined Yago’s plan.

  They’d been on the bridge. Tate, 2Face, Billy, and Mo’Steel. Tate felt as if a long time had passed since then, but probably it had been less than ten minutes ago.

  Billy and 2Face had argued. 2Face wanted Billy to go down to the surface to see the little seedling that had filled Jobs with hope for new life on Earth. Billy had resisted and 2Face had bullied him off the ship. Tate knew 2Face enjoyed showing her power, flaunting her influence over Billy.

  So why didn’t I stand up for him? Tate wondered. Billy had earned her loyalty. The deadly, bloody war with the aliens — the Meanies and Riders and Squids — had ended only because Mother had chosen to merge with Billy’s mind.

  Who knows why? Maybe Mother “loved” Billy — if you believed a computer could feel love. Maybe Billy was her only choice, the one living thing on the ship smart enough to communicate with her without going mad. Whatever the reason, Billy’s relationship with Mother had allowed him to protect the Remnants, to create food for them, to build walls for them.

  Billy had kept them all alive.

  So why had Tate let 2Face bully him?

  “Stupid,” Tate muttered at the floor. “Lazy. Stupid.”

  As if agreeing with her, the wind picked up. Tate was caught in the middle of a tornado.

  Debris swirled around her head. Fast. Then slow. Then fast. A chunk of something glanced off her shoulder, whacked her ear, and went skidding across the floor.

  The walls Billy had created kept dissolving, revealing the monumental geometric architecture of the alien-designed ship. Tate cowered on the floor, hands over her head, until the wind abated and the savage moaning let up somewhat.

  As soon as she was able, Tate stumbled to her feet and ran for the elevator. How much time had she lost? Three minutes? Five? She didn’t know. Too long. Anything could be happening on Earth. She had to get control of the ship and get back to her friends.

  Mother was picking up speed now, moving more smoothly. They’d probably already traveled thousands of miles.

  Tate reached the elevator. She half-expected it to be disabled. Yago could have pulled the plug, flipped the switch. Or Amelia. But when Tate stepped onto the platform, it immediately dropped away, silently and fast enough to make her nauseous.

  This was normal. This was good. A ride on the elevator always made Tate feel like vomiting. Mother hadn’t been built for humans. Aliens that resembled overgrown translucent starfish had built her. Shipwrights. Apparently the Shipwrights didn’t have very sensitive inner ears. They liked a good fast drop.

  The elevator stopped. T
ate moved cautiously into the basement. The “basement” — that was their nickname for the lowest level of the ship.

  Tate wasn’t particularly fond of the basement. She tried to avoid going down there. She was from LA. City femme. She knew how to navigate a grid of streets. She could handle gangs of punks, or turf wars at the local mall. These things she understood.

  Wide-open spaces weren’t her thing. And the basement was essentially ten to twenty square miles of nothing. In all that space, there were only a couple of scattered enclosures, a few pits with computers. The exterior walls of the ship were so far off, Tate couldn’t even see them.

  Tate turned quickly to the right, then the left — scanning the vast expanse surrounding her.

  No sign of Amelia or the others. Maybe they were in their mysterious hideout, the corner of the basement where they’d hidden from the rest of the Remnants for some private reason.

  Made sense.

  Walking there would take half a day. By the time she got there. Jobs and the others would probably be — but Tate couldn’t think about that.

  The others were tough, she reminded herself. They’d survived battles and sieges. They could handle being marooned on Earth for a few hours. She just had to find Amelia quickly. She headed off in what she hoped was the right direction.

  “To us,” Amelia said. She smiled slyly at Yago.

  “To us,” Duncan and Charlie echoed mechanically. They were smiling steadily at Yago, too.

  Their expressions were dreamy, almost— hungry.

  Yago lifted an imaginary glass. “Cheers!” he said with a sarcastic smirk. “Too bad we don’t have any champagne for the toast. Then again, maybe that’s for the best since we don’t have any glasses, either.”

  Yago was being a brat. Ruining the celebration. He knew that, but he couldn’t help himself.

  He was grumpy. He had a dull headache behind his eyes. Low blood sugar, felt like. He needed a snack.

  But even something as simple as having a snack was impossible because the food had disappeared along with everything else Billy had created. Yago had foreseen this problem way back when they’d first discussed tossing Billy off the ship. He’d raised his concerns.

  Amelia had promised to handle it. But now they were sitting at one of the Shipwrights’ ugly too-tall tables with nothing in front of them except dust. Maybe not even dust.

  Forget champagne. Yago wanted a soda. His throat was dry and slightly sore. He wanted ice cream. Preferably soft-serve.

  “Vanilla chocolate swirl with jimmies,” Yago said challengingly. “Is that too much to ask?

  ‘Cause if it is, I could make do with an ice-cream sandwich.”

  Amelia smiled coyly, as if Yago had made a charming joke. The other two stared benignly back at him, expressions fixed. Their faces were blank screens. Nobody home.

  Yago turned his gaze on Charlie. “You hungry at all?”

  No reply. Charlie seemed to be daydreaming. His brain was somewhere far, far away.

  Yago ran a hand in front of Duncan’s face. He didn’t even blink.

  Yago raised an eyebrow. “They okay?” he asked Amelia suspiciously.

  “Just tired,” Amelia soothed him. “The last few days have been — stressful. For all of us.”

  “Yeah,” Yago said, sitting back uneasily. Amelia hadn’t mentioned Tate yet. That little screw-up, that little problem. Their stowaway. Well, he certainly wasn’t about to bring it up.

  Let Amelia take responsibility.

  “I was worried that seedling wouldn’t fool them,” Yago said. “Especially Billy Weird. Guess he wasn’t as smart as I thought.”

  “He’s very smart,” Amelia said matter-of-factly. “It’s just that you’re smarter.”

  Yago rocked back and forth, trying to lull himself, wanting to let Amelia’s praise just wash over him.

  Nothing doing.

  Amelia — there was something wrong with Amelia. Yago couldn’t quite grasp it, but something —

  She was a good-looking femme. Long dark hair. Sparkling gray eyes. Slim figure. Amelia was definitely the best-looking femme onboard.

  Only — well, suddenly it seemed to Yago that there was something wrong with her mouth.

  Her tongue.

  That was it.

  Somehow her tongue seemed too large, too mobile. Yago stopped rocking. He wondered if he’d been hasty casting off Violet, Olga, Noyze, and 2Face. It seemed the best-looking femme onboard was hiding some weird secrets.

  CHAPTER 2

  MOTHER WAS NO PLACE TO SHOW WEAKNESS.

  Amazing. Charlie thought.

  He could see. Not just perfectly — superhumanly. As if his cerebral cortex were plugged into a scanning electron microscope. Yago was now a trillion vibrating cells. Charlie could even see inside the cells where the mitochondria floated dreamily around their hairy nuclei.

  This was cool. He’d always had poor eyesight. He’d been “four eyes” all through school and those endless summers at camp. Sometimes kids could really be jerks. Although, come to think of it, his roommates at the loony bin had called him “four eyes,” too. Well, what did that prove? Charlie supposed it proved adults could be jerks, too. Not exactly a stunning revelation.

  Thank god he’d sucked it up and gotten that laser surgery a couple of months before the Rock hit. Wouldn’t want to be “four eyes” on Mother. Mother was no place to show weakness

  — not even a reliance on contact lens solution.

  Well. No need to worry about that anymore. He wasn’t “four eyes” any longer. In fact, he wasn’t even sure how long he’d be “two eyes.”

  “I — am — evolving!” Charlie sang to himself in a theatrical mezzo-soprano.

  ‘ Why are you so happy?” Duncan asked in grumpy mindvoice. “Suddenly we’ve got insect-o-vision and it won’t turn off. Ask me, that’s not very evolved.”

  Charlie ignored Duncan. A matter of principle.

  He didn’t like having Duncan whining in his head. He didn’t like having Duncan in his head, period. Let Amelia and Duncan play with their mindvoices. Charlie wasn’t interested. If he had something to say, he’d open his mouth and say it. At least, as long as he had a mouth.

  Besides, he was busy studying Yago’s cells. Amelia was handling Yago. Slowly revealing his new station in life, letting him down easy. That left Charlie free to stare. Charlie wasn’t sure which was more enticing — studying a single cell in all of its gorgeous detail or pulling back for a wide shot of the entire glorious collection.

  Those cells could stop his thirst and control the pounding in his head. Turns out, turning into some nameless creature wasn’t all fun and games. He was getting bigger and more complex by the minute — which Amelia assured him was a good thing. But his cells couldn’t divide fast enough to keep up with demand. Eventually his body would reach equilibrium. But until then — things were mighty uncomfortable.

  Charlie subtly shifted closer to Yago. Maybe if he was fast, he could get to him before Amelia noticed. Once the cells were absorbed, she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

  “Not yet,” came Amelia’s voice in his head. She sounded amused, even loving, “Soon, but not yet. We need him for now.”

  Charlie thought some very unkind things about Amelia — she shouldn’t be able to hear what he was thinking! That wasn’t moral, that wasn’t right. Then he remembered that she could hear even that.

  “Our time is coming,” Amelia said. She sounded so smug, Yago wanted to laugh in her face.

  The Troika — that’s what the other Remnants called Amelia, Charlie, and Duncan — liked to brag about how they were evolving into “higher beings.”

  Whatever Maybe they were. So far, Yago wasn’t impressed. Duncan and Charlie looked like zombies with their vacant stares. Even worse, they looked fat. Bloated. Not pretty. Like they were retaining water, maybe. And Amelia — well, Yago refused to think about what was happening with her tongue.

  “Our evolution is picking up speed,” Amelia
stated serenely.

  “Hey, great,” Yago said with a roll of his eyes so subtle Amelia probably didn’t even notice it. “I’m happy for you. Let me know if I can do anything to help.”

  “Actually, I was just getting to that,” Amelia said smoothly.

  Yago raised one eyebrow. Amelia knew him well enough to understand she’d have to pay for any favor he granted her He pretended to be indifferent. But, actually, he was eagerly considering what he could get out of the deal. He wouldn’t negotiate for food — Amelia had already promised him that and he intended to hold her to her promise.

  But what about Tate? Someone had to go after her, track her down, and — deal with her.

  Yago preferred to stay as far away from the Mouth as possible. That was just common sense.

  He’d tell Amelia to send one of her flunkies. Let Duncan or Charlie risk their lives. Yago’s was too precious.

  “How can I help?” Yago asked graciously. He would be dignified about this. Let Amelia keep her pride.

  “You will bring all of the living creatures on board to us,” Amelia said calmly. “You see, as we evolve, we’re getting bigger. More — dense. We require additional material in the form of living cells.”

  “What?” Yago snorted, unable to believe what he was hearing. Forget about the freaky-monster stuff. Amelia actually had the audacity to give him orders? “You want me to go round up the Meanies and Riders?” he demanded rudely. “If you need more cells, then why don’t —”

  Yago didn’t finish the sentence because he suddenly found himself on the floor, unable to breathe. Amelia was right in his face, hovering over him, eyes wild. How had she gotten so close so fast? Yago hadn’t even seen her move.

  Yago gasped, or tried to. No air entered his lungs. None escaped. Something — something was squeezing. Crushing his Adam’s apple. His hands went to his throat.

  Something was wrapped around his neck. He clawed at it, desperate to pry it loose, wanting air. What the — it felt like a moist, bumpy snake — oh, god, it was Amelia’s tongue! That’s why she was hovering over him! Yago’s head swam with dizziness and disgust.