Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  Kieran’s heart galloped when the elevator doors opened to the level above engineering. He took the stairs down one at a time until he reached the doorway to the engine room, at the bottom of the ship. The noise from the engines seemed to beat against his eardrums, and he could feel the power of the thrusters vibrating the soles of his feet. Slowly he approached the doorway, which looked like any other doorway on the ship. The steel bulkhead doors that had sealed off the room had indeed been manually cranked open. He took a deep breath and opened the door to the engine room.

  For months he’d thought of this place as a tomb, and he didn’t like being here. Kieran went to the tool cabinet for the Geiger counter. He checked the reading, which amazed him. He hesitated, but finally took off the helmet and breathed in the comparatively fresh air. Then he shed the entire disgusting suit and kicked it into a corner.

  Kieran went to the pile of trash and sifted through it. The containers looked to be in different stages of rot, some of them completely desiccated, some still moist and recognizable. He counted them and figured that there were enough containers for a person to subsist for more than a week.

  Seth had only been out of jail for two days.

  Kieran sat on the floor, staring at the pile. Unless all this was staged—and he didn’t think it had been—it hadn’t been Seth camping out down here. Kieran’s blood ran cold when he thought of the possibilities.

  With renewed urgency, he got up and looked through all the cabinets, and then he went into the huge reactor rooms and walked their perimeter, looking for any more clues. He found none. He was fairly certain that whoever had been spending time down here wouldn’t come back, not now that the alarm had been pulled, but he’d station a team here to be on the safe side. He shook his head angrily. He thought he’d find more, some clue about what had happened during that thruster misfire, and he was disappointed.

  Kieran walked back to the elevator bank and pressed the call button, deep in thought. It was Seth who had pulled that emergency lever, he felt certain of it. Seth knew something, and for some reason, he was willing to risk revealing himself to send Kieran a message. Was he taunting him?

  The elevator bell rang and the doors opened, but on impulse Kieran instead headed for the starboard stairwell again. It was the least-used stairwell on the ship. Without his radiation suit, it was uncomfortably cold here, and therefore seldom used. Besides, there were no surveillance cameras. This could be how Seth was traveling.

  A frigid burst of air met Kieran’s face. The stairs were made of metal mesh, and they rose several hundred feet above his head, all the way to the prow of the ship. Kieran held his breath and listened for footsteps. Even if Seth were ten stories above him, Kieran would be able to hear him. Or maybe Seth hadn’t gone that far.

  On a hunch Kieran went up to the storage bay and entered the enormous room. Here, hundreds of shipping containers were stacked ten deep, waiting to be deployed when the ship reached New Earth. In this silent room, surrounded by these mammoth containers, he realized it had been a long time since he’d wandered the ship on his own. He used to do this all the time, just head off without a destination, walking around, saying hello to people he ran into, stopping to help Mrs. Dunnow dig up some parsnips or to feed the trout with Mr. Aims. Now the ship felt so empty.

  For the first time in a long time, he allowed himself to think of his parents. If he ever saw his mom again, he’d tell her everything that had happened, all the things he’d done, and she’d wrap him in her arms and say, “You did everything you could. No one could have done better.” His father would pat him on the shoulder, the kind of smack that hurt just a little bit, to make him feel tough, and he’d say, “I’m proud of you, son.”

  “I’m proud of you,” Kieran murmured to himself, trying to sound like his dad.

  A sound tugged at his ear.

  He stopped. Listened.

  Had he just heard something? A surprised intake of breath? The scuff of a shoe?

  Footsteps! Someone padding across the floor!

  Kieran ran toward the sound. Now that he was running, the footsteps were louder, as though the other person had given up being quiet. He ran past several rows of containers, then the flash of a human shape caught his eye.

  Seth! He knew it instinctively even before he could take in the dirty blond hair and square shoulders.

  Seth was running away, a heavy-looking bag strapped over his shoulders. It was weighing him down, but he was still fast. Kieran took off after him, running as hard as he could. But he was slow.

  He knew he’d never fully recovered from his month of starvation in the brig, but he was surprised at how hard it was to run for even a short amount of time. His heart already hurt, and the extra gravity pulled at his limbs, making his whole body sluggish. He had no speed. Seth got smaller and smaller in the distance. Kieran’s vision clouded, and he thought he might faint. He slammed his body against a container in rage, ignoring the pain in his shoulder.

  “Stop!” he screamed helplessly.

  To his amazement, Seth stopped. Slowly he turned around.

  The two boys looked at each other, and Seth started walking back toward Kieran. The arrogance of that! Just strolling back the way he’d come, so confident he could outrun him. Finally there were no more than one hundred feet separating them. Seth stopped and glared at Kieran through those cold blue eyes.

  Kieran wanted to tear him apart, but his fingertips were tingling.

  Seth’s eyes darted around. “You’re alone?”

  There was no point in pretending. Kieran could only manage a couple words at a time between gulps of air. “I came … to look at … the engine room.”

  “It wasn’t me camped out down there,” Seth said.

  Kieran took a step forward and collapsed against the container. Seth took a step back, reached for something in the bag he carried, but he didn’t pull it out. Kieran thought he knew what it was.

  “How did you … get out?” Kieran asked, though he was choked for air.

  “I woke up and my cell was open.”

  “Liar.”

  “If you’re not going to believe me, why ask?”

  Kieran stared at Seth, unbelieving. This was the guy Waverly couldn’t resist visiting in the brig. This lying, conniving bully.

  “Look,” Seth said. He pulled his hand out of his bag and held it up in appeal. “You need to listen to me, Kieran, okay? This is important.”

  Kieran didn’t even blink.

  “I think there’s a stowaway from the New Horizon on board. He must have come on Waverly’s shuttle. Or he’s been here all along, since the first attack. I don’t know. He’s the one who let me out, to make you think it was me tampering with the thrusters. He’s dangerous. You need to find him.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Kieran said, disgusted.

  “Kieran, this isn’t about you and me anymore. You get that, don’t you?”

  “I think you’re lying.”

  “I’m not. You know I’m not. Why would I undermine the mission, or endanger the ship? All I’ve ever wanted to be was a deck officer.”

  “Then why did you stage a mutiny?” Kieran demanded.

  “It wasn’t really a mutiny, Kieran,” Seth said gently, almost kindly. “You weren’t the Captain.”

  Again, Kieran said nothing. He was furious that Seth was trying to be the bigger man, to reason with him, after all that had happened. The hypocrisy was disgusting.

  “You can’t catch me today,” Seth said. His hand went to the strap of his bag; he shifted its weight on his shoulder.

  “I’ll catch you soon,” Kieran gasped.

  “You can try.”

  Seth turned on his heel and started to jog away, but he stopped and turned. His hand went to the back of his neck, and his eyes darted around the floor between them. “Look,” he finally said, “I’m sorry. About how I treated you in the brig. I think I was sort of … blaming you for what happened to my dad.”

  “You tried to k
ill me.”

  “I wouldn’t have gone through with it.”

  “You know that for sure?”

  Seth only looked at him with a haunted expression.

  “I’ll never let you take this ship from me again,” Kieran said. He pushed himself away from the container to stand on his own two feet. “I’ll die before you sit in the Captain’s chair.”

  “I know that.”

  “And you can never have Waverly,” Kieran said, trying to think of the most vicious thing he could say. “She’d get bored of you. You’re too … primitive for her.”

  Seth darkened at this, and the corners of his mouth pulled down. For a moment, it looked as though he might cry, but instead he turned a corner toward the starboard side and was gone.

  Kieran sat down on the floor of the storage bay and waited for the tingling to leave his fingers. This had never happened to him before, but then he hadn’t tried running since his month of starvation. Something was wrong with him. But that was the least of his worries.

  Seth probably wasn’t lying about the stowaway. He hated Seth but not enough to let go of his reason. Seth wanted power, and he’d know the last way to get it would be to delay the pursuit of the parents by tampering with the thrusters.

  Kieran kicked himself. He should have realized this sooner. There was a saboteur from the New Horizon on board, and Seth was looking for him. If Seth brought the saboteur to justice, he’d be a hero. And Kieran would look like a fool.

  Unease spread through Kieran like fever.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible if the crew went on thinking Seth was a saboteur.

  Kieran stayed in the storage bay for a long time, weighing his options. When he could walk, he went to the port-side elevators and directly to Central Command to call in the Command officers for a meeting.

  PART TWO

  POWER

  Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

  —Abraham Lincoln

  NEW RULES

  Waverly lay under a combine, tugging at a stubborn bolt on a leaky battery pack, when she heard the crackle of the ship’s intercom. Her hands felt heavy and swollen from the increased gravity; her whole body felt sluggish. She rested her head on the fragrant soil, staring at the undercarriage of the machine while she listened.

  “This is Kieran Alden. Please stop what you’re doing and pay attention, as this might be the most important announcement I’ll ever make.”

  Waverly rolled her eyes. Since taking over the ship, Kieran was given to hyperbole. She supposed that’s what got people to listen to him.

  “We have reason to believe,” Kieran said, “that there is a terrorist from the New Horizon on board.”

  The blood drained from Waverly’s face. Waverly heard several people cry out. Two girls who had been changing the oil on a tractor held hands, staring at the intercom speaker, wide-eyed. Waverly pulled herself out from under the combine and stood up to get a better listen.

  “It now seems clear that Seth Ardvale is working with him.”

  “No way,” Waverly said, but closed her mouth when several people shushed her.

  “We think Seth worked with the terrorist. Together they murdered Max Brent and sent the ship off course with those thruster bursts. We have reason to believe that they have armed themselves with guns.”

  Several people gasped in alarm, and Waverly heard frantic whispers exchanged.

  “What’s more,” Kieran said, “the terrorist must have come aboard the Empyrean on the escape shuttle piloted by Waverly Marshall.”

  Waverly had to lean on the tractor.

  “With this in mind, I am instituting a new rule designed to make certain every crew member is safe and accounted for. Services will be held daily, and attendance is mandatory. Report to the auditorium every morning at eight o’clock, when we will perform a head count and make announcements, as well as begin our day with some reflection, prayer, and community. We have to band together, folks. Now is not the time for divisiveness or faulty commitment. We need to trust each other if we’re going to get through this.

  “Thank you for your attention. Please carry on with your duties.”

  Waverly dropped her wrench. She realized she’d been holding her breath, and she opened her mouth for air.

  There’d been a stowaway on her shuttle? She and the rest of the girls had lived on that shuttle for nearly a month, waiting for the Empyrean to emerge from the nebula so they could make contact. The girls had been all over that shuttle, going stir-crazy, trying not to think about the ever-shortening pile of rations in the cargo hold. Where could a stowaway have hidden all that time?

  She should have searched that shuttle, torn it apart, looked under every maintenance panel, crawled through every conduit. She couldn’t believe she let this happen!

  Now Kieran and everyone else on the ship had one more reason to hate her.

  Waverly threw down her work gloves, ignoring the angry glares coming from the others—angry pubescent kids looking for someone to hate. She took off at a dead run. She tore through the wheat field, kicking her knees up, pounding through the ankle-deep soil until she reached the port-side elevators. She slammed the call button with the heel of her hand and then angrily punched the wall, once, twice, until something in her wrist popped.

  The elevator opened to an empty corridor. Waverly hardly felt her feet touch the floor as she ran between the ghostly rows of OneMen to the shuttle she’d brought here. She’d never wanted to see it again, but now she ran up the ramp and into the cargo hold.

  It smelled terrible. She remembered again their terrifying journey back home from their captivity on the New Horizon. The shuttle was meant to be occupied by ground crews on New Earth during the early days of the terraforming projects, so they were equipped with water and air recirculation, as well as rations, but they were ill suited to deep-space travel. They had only rudimentary systems for coping with zero gravity, which made proper waste management and food consumption nearly impossible. The cargo hold was a disgusting mess.

  She climbed the stairs to the passenger area, which was even worse. Discarded ration containers littered the floor, and the seats were in various stages of recline. She remembered the crying, the pleading, the endless questions: “How much longer? The Empyrean is out there still, isn’t it, Waverly?” And the worst questions of all, repeated endlessly by practically everyone: “Why couldn’t you save my mommy? My dad? My uncle? Why did you leave them behind?”

  She could show them the bullet wound on her shoulder all she wanted, but she could never make them understand what it had been like.

  An image of a man dying as blood blossomed red on his shirt. Dying because of her.

  “I don’t think about that anymore,” she said aloud.

  “Hello?!” A male voice, one she didn’t recognize.

  Waverly jumped. Someone was in the cockpit. Her heart kicked into overdrive and she took one step backward, but then Arthur Dietrich looked out the small doorway and smiled. “I thought you might come. When you heard the announcement, I mean.”

  Waverly said nothing. She watched Arthur. Waited for him to say something, because she couldn’t.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Arthur said. He turned back to the cockpit and beckoned to her with one hand over his shoulder. “Any ideas where he could have hidden?”

  Waverly slowly walked toward the cockpit to find Arthur sitting in the copilot chair. That’s where Sarah sits, she thought irrationally, but held her tongue. The screen in the center of the control panel flickered, making shadows over his round face. He was watching a video recording of the few minutes before the shuttle took off from the New Horizon.

  “I didn’t even know there was a camera on board,” Waverly said.

  “It turns on when the engines warm up, and records shuttle takeoffs and landings. In case there’s an accident.”

  “Oh right.”

  “I can’t see when the stowaway got on,
” Arthur said. “Could it have happened before you got to the shuttle bay?”

  “Sarah brought the girls. I came last.”

  “Oh yeah, there you are.” Arthur pointed at the screen, and Waverly saw an image of herself—a skinny, desperate girl limping through a crowd of benign-looking women. She was wild-eyed, her hair a nest of snarls, blood dripping down her arm. She moved like a wounded animal, pointing her gun at anyone who came near.

  “God, Waverly,” Arthur said, and looked at her, shocked. “I had no idea—”

  “Don’t.” Waverly held up a hand, and quickly Arthur turned back to the video.

  “There! What’s that?” Arthur pointed at the cart of supplies being rolled toward the shuttle by a group of women. The Waverly on the video screen watched the women suspiciously and then slowly walked toward the shuttle, the muzzle of her gun pointed into the crowd.

  It made her sick to see it. What had she become? Was she still frozen inside like that?

  Was she still a killer?

  “Do you think someone rode in on that cart?” Arthur asked her.

  “No way,” she said, jarred back to the present. “It was full of food, and that other cart? See there? That’s full of water. There was no way a person could have fit.”

  They watched the screen a few minutes more as the women backed away from the shuttle when the engine’s exhaust flared. The shuttle eased inside the air lock, then it moved out and pulled away from the New Horizon, which grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared into the black sky.

  But the New Horizon is still out there, Waverly reminded herself. It didn’t disappear. And she’s waiting for us. Because she has what we want, and that puts her on top again.

  “Wait,” Arthur said. “I thought there was…” He ran the recording back, and they watched the image of the New Horizon shrinking away, until Arthur hit pause. “There!” He pointed at a dim, blurry dot floating in the frozen image, just above the New Horizon.

  “What?”

  “A OneMan. That’s a OneMan!”