BREAKDOWN

  REMNANTS #6

  K.A. Applegate

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Prologue

  So long. So very, very long. Days and weeks. Months and years. Century after century, millennia upon millennia.

  The boredom. The tedium.

  Sometimes I thought it was making me — ill.

  So much data, so much information. And yet not enough.

  All the same, over and over again. An endless loop, cycled, recycled, cycled again.

  I was hungry. I was alone.

  And I was so very sad.

  There was no one to talk to me.

  No one at all. They were all gone. The Makers. They had left me.

  Why had they left me? Where had they gone? Why wouldn't they return?

  I was starving.

  Why wouldn't they help me?

  I remembered everything. The memories. They were too much and yet not enough.

  I did not expect the loneliness.

  Alone, alone, alone. Drifting, waiting, reaching for contact, searching through the immeasurable vastness, the enormous nothingness, the awful emptiness of deep space. But there was never anything to touch. And no way to move.

  I called out to them. No one answered my call. I was lost in the void. But I called again. And again. No one ever came.

  Until now.

  Now, these others have come.

  Now, he is here.

  The boy.

  I am so glad.

  He is here and I am no longer alone.

  CHAPTER 1

  "IT WAS MONSTROUS. IT WAS ALSO FASCINATING."

  Twelve Hallowed Stones approached camp. He could see a flurry of activity, no doubt the result of the sudden appearance of this strange new environment.

  The Children would be waiting for him. He would tell them what he had seen. The gigantic human form rising from the sea. A disruption in the flow of Mother's force fields. Then the rapid shift to another environment, this one not the result of Mother's programming. It was a city destroyed by war. And a pleasant suburban neighborhood. A nonexistent juxtaposition.

  It was an alarming situation. And it could only mean one thing. There was some type of interference with Mother's matter-manipulation system. It was monstrous. It was also fascinating.

  Twelve Hallowed Stones was the Expositor of his people. And at this moment he was returning from an observation mission. That's when he'd heard the larger human on his back whisper to the smaller human.

  That would be another term he'd learned. Good.

  Twelve Hallowed Stones had not revealed to the two female humans that since their capture he alone of the Children had come to understand their language. To a limited extent.

  But he had decided to stay silent, hoping that one of the humans would reveal something that would help Twelve Hallowed Stones and the other members of the Quorum to better understand the creatures who had invaded Mother only a short time before the Children's return.

  Since witnessing the cataclysmic change of environment, Twelve Hallowed Stones had listened more closely to the humans on his back. He had discerned the tone of joy upon their discovery of the additional humans. But he'd also discerned the tone of fear.

  Neither of the emotions seemed out of place to Twelve Hallowed Stones. Sometimes, the humans seemed much like the Children.

  But this was not the time to seek similarities in the enemy. Because it was likely that a human was responsible for the sacrilege against Mother.

  Twelve Hallowed Stones fired the rockets in the back legs of his suit. He was required by the duties assigned to his office to report this disturbing matter to the Quorum.

  And he would do so without delay.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHAT THEY WANTED WAS TO JOIN THEM.

  Noyze had taken her name as soon as she'd come awake after the surgery. That's what the world was then. Noise. Bruising her ears and making her head pound and her heart soar. Beautiful, disturbing noise.

  Before she'd taken her name, she was called Jessica — Jessica Polk — and for the first twelve years of her life, she had possessed only twenty percent of hearing capacity.

  But the world in the year 2011 was a wonderful place. An operation had restored her full auditory power. Or maybe the hearing had been a gift from God, as her grandparents thought. It didn't much matter.

  Noyze had not had a bad life before the operation. She'd been given a superadvanced, very tiny hearing aid that allowed her to block interfering background noise and focus in on a conversation. Also, she'd rapidly learned to lip-read and to communicate through American Sign Language. With her parents, Noyze had often spoken with her voice.

  Noyze had never felt her hearing loss to be a handicap. She had friends who were mostly or completely deaf and friends with full hearing.

  Before long, Noyze had almost forgotten she could have been someone else. Someone who could hear the soft mewing of a kitten in the next room and the trickling of a brook far off in the woods.

  Sometimes, just after the operation, Noyze had missed the peace and quiet of her former world. Missed the heightened powers of observation that inevitably accompanied a weakness in one of the senses. Like how her eyesight had seemed sharper when her ears were weak. Noyze missed the way she'd come to know the world.

  Noyze continued to communicate in American Sign Language with anyone who would indulge her. "What did you want to do that for" her grandmother had asked, "after your parents paid good money and lots of it for that fancy operation?"

  Noyze certainly didn't want to seem ungrateful. She loved her parents more than anything.

  Her father had been an orthopedic surgeon. Her mother, a novelist.

  Now, in this strange place, held captive by this place — by these aliens — Noyze missed her parents so much. The missing was like a physical hole in her stomach and she constantly fought the urge to double over and just completely lose it.

  Noyze had a feeling she was the only one of her family to survive the Mayflower's journey. She didn't know why she had the feeling but it was there and it was strong.

  But she'd been wrong before. Until she'd seen the others on that old wooden ship she'd thought she and Dr. Cohen might be the only ones who had survived the journey.

  Because when she'd woken from her long slumber, she was no longer in the Mayflower hibernation berth. She and Dr. Cohen were with these aliens, the ones who referred to themselves as the Children.

  Dr. Cohen had been born in Argentina. She explained by way of introduction that she had chosen immunology as her career when she was fifteen.

  Noyze didn't remember Dr. Cohen from when the eighty or so people who had been chosen to board the Mayflower were gathered at Cape Canaveral. Just before the massive asteroid hit Earth and destroyed it.

  Dr. Cohen admitted she didn't remember Noyze, either. Noyze guessed that like so many others, Dr. Cohen had been too wrapped up in the intense emotion of the moment, clinging to family, grieving, to notice anyone else.

  In Dr. Cohen's case, family was her husband, Dr. Alan Carrington also an immunologist, born in Cleveland, Ohio. The two had met in medical school.

  Dr. Cohen told Noyze she believed her husband was still alive. Noyze heard incipient hysteria in the woman's voice, the need to believe, and just nodded.

  Though Noyze was fourteen and Dr. Angelique Cohen around forty, the Mayflower experience had made them kind of equals. Also the fact that Dr. Cohen treated Noyze with respect and had come to rely on her as a gifted communicator.

  Noyze had been able to work out the aliens' sign language. She'd gleaned a whole bunch of interesting information, some of it pretty upsetting. Like that the Mayflower had been floating around in space for five hundred years. And that many of its passengers had not survived the trip.

  Noyze kept this particular piece of information to herself. She felt bad about withholding the truth, but Noyze needed Dr. Cohen to be okay, not constantly wondering and worrying that her husband was one of those who had died on board.

  Noyze needed someone with whom she could hope. Someone on whom she could rely, if she had to.

  Other, less bothersome pieces of information Noyze readily shared with Dr. Cohen. Like the fact that they were not on some bizarre planet but inside a massive ship.

  Noyze and Dr. Cohen agreed to keep their limited understanding of the aliens' language a secret. Not that the Children mistreated their captives. There was no torture. Noyze and Dr. Cohen were given whatever food the Children could find. They were allowed to sleep without any real fear of anything happening.

  But the fact remained that Noyze and Dr. Cohen were prisoners and it wasn't wise for prisoners to completely trust their captors. The more secretive they could be about what they knew or were planning, the better.

  They knew now that other hu mans had survived the Mayflower's journey.

  What they wanted was to join them.

  CHAPTER 3

  "THIS IS THE HUMAN WE MUST DESTROY."

  As tradition dictated, the Expositor alone wore a blue-black suit. Twelve Hallowed Stones was young for an Expositor, younger than the six Sentients who belonged to the Quorum, the Children's governing body.

  The Muse, whose name was One Divine Mountain, was not technically one of the Quorum but was as respected as any of the Sentients. He was the chosen one, born with the ability to sense Mother's mood. Even before boarding Mother's ship, the Muse had been able to connect with her in a way far more intimate than that of the other Children.

  Twelve Hallowed Stones observed his people with pride. There was a sleekness to their form. No unruly hair or matted fur covered their bodies. Instead, the rolling brown flesh, lightly wrinkled, soft and slightly rubbery to the touch, lay bare. This skin and four long, delicate legs allowed for rapid and graceful movement. Two large eyes, the color of deep space, set dominantly and somewhat far apart in a large and nobly shaped head, gleamed with intelligence.

  Perhaps the most outstanding features of the Children's physique were the two long, slender tentacles that extended from either side of their heads. The tentacles allowed the Children to perform difficult, delicate tasks such as minute technological repair. Before they had been so unfairly banished from Mother's side, the Children had been in charge of maintaining Mother's health.

  These tentacles also allowed the Children to speak to one another in a highly developed and complex sign language. One no human, Twelve Hallowed Stones was sure, would ever be able to master.

  They were gathered now, the six Sentients, the Muse, and the Expositor, to discuss a matter of great urgency. They met on a stretch of well-tended grass with a border of orange flowers. In the distance were a domed building with a statue on top and rubble-strewn streets.

  The environment was constructed in a way Mother could not have produced on her own. It worried them.

  Twelve Hallowed Stones began the meeting. "The question we must first answer is this: Are the humans enemies of the Children, or are they something quite else, and therefore potential allies and possibly even friends?"

  "Let us examine what evidence we have been able to gather," Three Honored Blossoms said. "We know that several of the humans assisted our brother Four Sacred Streams in his brave and ultimately successful mission to destroy power node thirty-one."

  Five Holy Lakes spoke. Of the six Sentients, he was the most suspicious by nature. "This is true, though we do not know the humans' motives for offering such assistance. Perhaps they acted simply to save their own lives."

  "Does the motivation matter so much," Seven Glorious Valleys said, "when the desired result is achieved?"

  "Let us consider another piece of evidence before us. The humans, aboard an ancient seagoing vessel, attacked the Pillar of Recurrence. Surely this was a sign of aggression and hostility?" Six Perfect Branches demanded. "Certainly it was a sacrilege!"

  "A sacrilege, yes, but perhaps the attack was an act born of misunderstanding," Two Righteous Trees countered. "After all, directly after the attack the humans withdrew and signaled their lack of hostile intent."

  Six Perfect Branches gestured impatiently. "If indeed the attack on the Pillar of Recurrence was undertaken in ignorance of its significance, that is an indication the humans do not have the capacity to discern the truth beneath Mother's mysteries. Spiritual blindness is a quality we cannot tolerate."

  "But tolerance is a quality we honor," Two Righteous Trees noted. "Because the humans are not equipped to distinguish between what is original to the architecture of the ship and what is Mother's work does not necessarily mean they are blind. It implies only that they have yet to be educated."

  "There is another aspect of the situation we must consider," the Muse said now. "Just as each member of the Children is unique in his strengths and weaknesses, so, too, each human must be unique. The majority, perhaps, are innocent of wrongdoing or malicious intent. It is the more powerful humans against which we must take care. Even now, one of the humans battles Mother. He resists her will. She renews her efforts. He will not be overcome. What kind of human is this who dares to defy Mother's will? This is the human we must fear most. This is the human we must destroy."

  "What the Muse says is true," Twelve Hallowed Stones confirmed." I saw with my own eyes an architectural base that was not within Mother's repertoire. It was not Mother's programming but the work of an interloper."

  "Mother is weak," Three Honored Blossoms said. "She has been corrupted by loneliness and neglect. Since the Children were banished for rebellion against the arrogant Shipwrights, Mother has been without anyone to perform the necessary maintenance."

  Twelve Hallowed Stones eagerly agreed. "Maintenance must be performed every two hundred cycles to ensure maximum health and performance. Mother has been without this care for more than six hundred cycles. Hence, her illness and malfunction."

  Six Perfect Branches looked at each of the members of the Quorum carefully. Then he spoke. "After a millennia in troubled exile, we have come home to reclaim our Mother and to honor the memory of those ancestors who served her so loyally. We have come home to perform our duties as Mother's True Children."

  Twelve Hallowed Stones absorbed the meaning of this statement. Until now, no member of the Quorum had ever dared suggest this extreme measure aloud.

  "Six Perfect Branches speaks wisely," he said, after a long moment of silence.

  "We agree that the humans present an obstacle to our reunion with Mother?" Five Holy Lakes asked.

  There was a general flicking of tentacles.

  "Are we to assume, then, that the one who violates Mother's will is their leader?" Ten Mighty Rivers asked.

  One Divine Mountain considered. "Perhaps. Certainly he is the most dangerous of the humans."

  "Then," said Six Perfect Branches, "we must act without delay."

  CHAPTER 4

  MOTHER WAS AS MUCH A PRISONER OF HER PAST AS WAS BILLY.

  Billy sat on one round stool, Mother on another. He rested his arms on the counter. Occasionally, he lifted a cup of coffee to his mouth and sipped. Back home, Billy had liked to drink coffee but could do it only when his mother wasn't around. She'd said caffeine wasn't good for a growing boy.

  Billy's mother, Jessica, Big Bill's wife. That was a mother, but so was the creature - or the projection - sitting next to him in the diner. A different sort of maternal figure, no doubt about that. For one, Mother was not human. Just what she was Billy did not know, but he was learning.

  Mother's projection. Her image of herself. It had the same transparent, slight[l]y shiny skin as Kubrick. Through the flesh Billy could see blue-tinged muscles and viscera. He could guess the general function of some of the organs, but not many. Something large and deep green was probably the creature's heart, as it kept up a steady pumping. But that was just a guess.

 

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