Flame: A Sky Chasers Novel

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  She hit the floor before she was aware her knees had buckled. She sucked in a chest full of air once, again, and then she tried to gain purchase on her hands and knees to crawl the rest of the way to Seth, but her arms were made of lead, and her spine sagged. She had to lie down. The force on her own body was enormous, making it hard to breathe, hard to think. What was this doing to Seth?

  Her face pressed against the floor. She could feel the sharpness of her cheekbone digging into the metal beneath her, and the sensation finally broke through her numbness. She cried. Kieran Alden was left behind to face those evil people alone. Her mind ticked through all the possibilities, searching for a different choice, another way to save the ship and Kieran at once. But it wasn’t possible. Kieran wouldn’t have wanted them to risk any more lives. He’d want them to run. She knew it as well as she knew her own character.

  When the inertia let up, Chris’s voice came over the intercom. “We’ve put some distance between us and them, folks. It’s not too late to take a shuttle and turn back, but if you want to do it, do it right now.”

  Waverly struggled back to her feet. Her left knee creaked painfully, but it held her weight, and she limped over to Seth’s gurney. He was as white as new wool, drenched in sweat, and his chest rattled when he breathed. She kissed his lips, once, twice, and took his hand …

  He opened his eyes and smiled. “Don’t let go,” he whispered.

  BEGINNINGS

  Kieran woke up groggy under a dim light. To his left his mother sat dozing in a chair, her cheek resting on the back of her hand. Someone took hold of his right hand, and he turned to find Felicity Wiggam smiling at him.

  “Hi,” he tried to say but sputtered into weak coughing instead.

  “Here,” she whispered and touched a drinking straw to his lips. He pulled in small sips of ice water, and his mouth and throat loosened.

  “Where…” He couldn’t get any more words out.

  “You’re on the New Horizon,” she whispered. “You were brought here for surgery.”

  The last thing he remembered was sitting on the stage on the Empyrean, discussing their new mission plan, and being gripped by a horrible pain.

  “Your heart stopped when they were repairing your small intestine.” For the first time he noticed tears clinging to her eyelashes. “They had to rebuild a defective valve.”

  This was too much to take in all at once, so he turned his mind to something easier. “Why weren’t you on the Empyrean?”

  Her mouth tightened with anger. “Avery didn’t tell me about the evacuation until it was too late for me to come, too.”

  Kieran looked at her hand and saw that her ring finger was now beautifully bare.

  “Kieran, you’ve been asleep for three days,” she said slowly.

  “Three days…”

  “They’re gone. The Empyrean had to leave. I’m so sorry.”

  She gave him time to absorb the full meaning of the words. The Empyrean was gone. His friends. His home. He’d never see them again.

  “Waverly sent this,” Felicity said and handed him a printout with a text message on it. He was too weak to hold it for himself, so Felicity asked, “Do you want me to read it?”

  He nodded.

  Felicity cleared her throat and began.

  “Dear Kieran, They sent an invading force to take back the Empyrean. We had no guns and no way to defend ourselves. I’m so sorry, but we had to run. I knew that you would never want us to put ourselves and all the little kids in danger for your sake. At least, that’s what I am telling myself right now. I hope you can forgive us someday. It’s not what I wanted. I’d hoped that you and I could spend the next ten years rebuilding our friendship. I think good friends is what we were always meant to be. I hope you feel that way too.”

  Felicity faltered, blushing deeply, and shot a hooded look at Kieran before continuing.

  “It might be a good thing that you went back to the New Horizon. Felicity is there, and I think you should steal her away from her fiancé. I know she would be happier with you, and I think you would be happier with her than you ever could have been with me.”

  Felicity gave a little embarrassed giggle, and Kieran smiled.

  “With Anne Mather gone, you can be a voice for good on the New Horizon. Be careful, because Dr. Carver and his son Jared won’t want to share power with you. Keep your head down, and stay away from them.”

  At this, Felicity made eye contact with Kieran but kept reading.

  “I love you, Kieran. I’ll always love you and remember you for what you are: a completely decent, brilliant man who, just like me, sometimes tried too hard. Live a good long life.

  “Remember me fondly, Waverly.”

  Only when Felicity looked at Kieran did he realize he was crying. His tears had seeped into his pillow and made his ears and neck wet. Embarrassed, he tried to wipe them away, but his hands were floppy and useless, maybe from weakness, maybe from drugs.

  Felicity reached for a tissue from his bedside table and, with tenderness, dabbed at the tears in the corners of his eyes. Then she smiled, and with her crystal blue eyes on his, unwavering, she bent over him and gently kissed his lips.

  PART FIVE

  GAIA

  I saw Eternity the other night,

  Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

  All calm, as it was bright;

  And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

  Driv’n by the spheres

  Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

  And all her train were hurl’d.

  —Henry Vaughan,

  “The World”

  SERMONS

  In the slender light of dawn, Waverly Marshall stepped off the shuttle onto the rocky soil and gazed across the hard, glistening ground. Wearing an airtight landing suit complete with heavy boots and a suffocating glass helmet, she walked down a gentle slope of black volcanic rock to stand on the pebbled shore of a vast ocean bay. The water crashed against the beach, a beautiful rushing sound that filled her ears, pounded her chest, ringing all around her. The sky glimmered with a pale pink light, blending into a deep blue overhead. As the orange sun pierced the edge of the horizon, the water glimmered in a line of shimmering brightness. It was the first sunrise she’d ever seen, and it was indescribably beautiful. As the sun brightened the sky, she saw a collection of clouds moving in over the water, long streams of what she guessed was rain falling in gray streaks.

  She wished Seth could see this.

  She was twenty-five years old now, but already she had a touch of gray at her temples, an annoying trait she’d inherited from her father. She walked toward the test animals in the pen she’d set up the night before. The goats were munching happily on the bale of hay that had been left for them, all three of them perfectly content and healthy. She lifted her walkie-talkie to her lips, which was patched into the shuttle’s long-range com system, and hailed the Empyrean. “You getting all this?”

  “Everyone on board is watching,” Arthur Dietrich answered, sounding tired. “How did you sleep?”

  “I didn’t.” She’d sat up in the pilot’s seat in the shuttle, unable to take her eyes off the meteor shower that rained down. The planet was passing through the tail of a comet and the show had been stunning. She didn’t regret staying awake for it. She’d have been too tense to sleep anyway, knowing what she was going to attempt the next morning.

  “The goats look fine,” she said to Arthur, and sent a video image for the crew in Central Command to see. Three goats, perfectly unaware of the momentous occasion they were a part of. With a deep breath she said, “I’m taking off my helmet.”

  “I’ll start the clock,” Arthur answered. His little boy’s voice had resolved into a smooth, sensitive tenor that perfectly suited his thoughtful personality. He’d never gotten tall, but he was handsome in a boyish, Germanic way, and he’d become one of Waverly’s best friends.

  Waverly released the locks on her helmet and lifted
it off. Was she afraid? Excited? There were so many emotions coursing through her she couldn’t begin to name them.

  A brief suction sound as the helmet lifted off, then …

  The air moved over her skin in the gentlest caress, lifting the hair from around her face, cooling her. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. The atmosphere smelled pure and fresh and perfectly safe.

  Through her headphones, she heard the distant sound of applause from the crew in Central Command. She was deeply honored to have been appointed the first human to breathe the air on their new home, and she knew that this image would be seen by countless generations for centuries to come. What had been the words? One small step for man …

  “Waverly?” Arthur called into her headpiece. “We agreed, no more than thirty seconds.”

  “Algae never killed anybody, Arthur,” she said, referring to the vast deposits of algae in the planet’s oceans, churning out the oxygen that would make life here possible. Thus far, no land-based life had been located. “The surveys showed there’s nothing airborne here to worry about.”

  “We agreed,” Arthur barked. “Put your helmet back on.”

  She groaned with annoyance but knew he was right. She replaced her helmet and listened as the air filter kicked into overdrive, clearing out any foreign particles. Compared to the air of the planet, the air inside her landing suit smelled disgustingly stale.

  “How does it look?” Arthur asked her. She thought she heard a tinge of jealousy in his voice. As the planet’s discoverer, he’d been the first choice for the journey, but then his beloved wife, Melissa Dickinson, the girl who had made life bearable for all the orphaned children on the Empyrean, had gotten pregnant with their first child, and she was too close to her due date for him to leave her.

  “It’s…” Waverly was at a loss for words as she took in every shadow cast by every stone, every glistening speck of mica and quartz in the gray igneous rock upon which she stood. The wind made a soft, whispering sound over the glass shield of her helmet, and she longed to take off a glove to feel it moving between her fingers. Soon enough. “It’s amazing. Beautiful. Big! Can we build a settlement here?”

  “We’re looking at a nearby site right now. It has a nice gradual hill above a substantial river. It ought to be safe from flooding but manageable for crops.”

  “Waverly,” Sarek interrupted. “Your launch window closes in two hours.”

  “Okay,” Waverly said, “I’ll start breaking down.”

  She unlatched the gate on the animals’ pen and herded the goats up the shuttle ramp. They resisted at first, obviously remembering the terrifying turbulence they’d experienced on the way down, but Waverly was able to strap them into their harnesses with relatively little struggle.

  Then with a sigh, she looked at the silver container she’d left just inside the shuttle ramp. A part of her dreaded what she had to do next, but a deeper part of her knew that it was time to let go of the past. She unscrewed the lid and stood still a moment, holding it tightly to her chest, remembering. She lifted the container over her head and let the wind carry off the remains. “Good-bye,” she whispered.

  Then she turned her microphone back on.

  “Did you do it?” Arthur asked. He sounded choked up.

  “It’s done.” Waverly watched the cloud of fine dust sail away on the breeze.

  “He’s the first one to make his home on Gaia,” Arthur said softly. “I think he’d like that.”

  Waverly heard a distant click, and static filled the signal. “Kieran? That you?” Waverly asked.

  “I’m here,” Kieran said after a pause. The New Horizon was very far away now, and two-way communication was becoming more fraught with cosmic interference and time lapse. They were lucky to still get a signal through. Kieran’s voice was deeper now, a little more gravelly with age, but he sounded so much steadier, more fully himself. “Felicity is here with me.”

  “Hi, Felicity,” Waverly said. “Glad you two could make it.”

  “We wouldn’t miss it,” Felicity said. Waverly smiled to think that when she and Kieran had been dating, she’d always been worried that he’d notice Felicity was the most beautiful girl on the Empyrean. Even way back then, deep down she must have known those two belonged together.

  “You have something to say, Kieran?” Waverly asked, glad there was someone else who could speak. Her heart was still too closed. She watched as the cloud of dust dissipated over the waves, falling to join the water. To have his ashes scattered on their new planet had been his dying wish.

  “Captain Edmond Jones was a courageous, brilliant man,” Kieran said, and he sounded as if he really meant it. “He fought for what he believed in, accepted his own shortcomings, and tried to make up for them. The Empyrean colony will forever feel his loss. May his spirit guide the settlers as they begin life on their new home.”

  “Amen,” Waverly said as her gaze trailed along the infinite horizon.

  “Amen,” Sarek and Arthur echoed, along with all the Command officers on the Empyrean.

  In the background, weaving through the static, Waverly could hear the cry of a newborn.

  “You guys had another baby?” she asked Kieran with mock incredulity.

  But he and Felicity had already signed off. Later Waverly would send them a text message to congratulate them.

  Waverly signed off the com link. Dry-eyed, she turned and walked back up the shuttle ramp as it closed, and up the spiral staircase to take the pilot’s seat. She engaged the engines, and the shuttle lifted off, leaving the ground of her new home. In the coming months the crew would begin the arduous process of bringing supplies down from the Empyrean storage bay, setting up temporary dwellings, and beginning the endless task of learning which plants could thrive in this new environment. The process of terraforming this planet would go on long after Waverly’s death, she knew, but she could hardly wait to begin.

  The journey back to the Empyrean took several hours, but Waverly enjoyed the view from her cockpit. She flew her craft with the port side facing toward the planet so that she could watch the mountains, the intricate coastlines, the patches of snow and ice over the poles, and the black volcanic soil of the continents rolling underneath her. She would never tire of looking at it.

  Soon the Empyrean loomed ahead of her, moving fast. It would maintain an orbit between Gaia and one of the larger moons, slowing itself using the opposing gravitational fields in a carefully choreographed dance designed by the geniuses Arthur Dietrich and his father. Within a few years the huge ship would slow down enough that it could assume a geostationary orbit over the colony and could be used to monitor weather activity on the planet and meteor activity in the solar system, as an insurance policy against cataclysm. Somehow Waverly thought they needn’t worry too much. They’d chosen a good home. She trusted everything would be all right.

  She guided the ship into the air lock and waited while Sarek repressurized, then she landed the shuttle inside the bay, waving out the blast shield at the crowd collected to welcome her back. Soon they trickled away, back to their duties, and Waverly settled in for her quarantine.

  Over the following week, a medical team wearing protective clothing put her through a battery of tests to make absolutely certain she hadn’t carried any alien contagion on board. Other teams took soil samples and air samples to search for microscopic life, but all their tests confirmed what they’d suspected: The planet would provide no real difficulties related to infectious disease. Gaia had all the necessary components to support life, but aside from the oxygen-producing algae in the oceans, which they’d found to be harmless, there was no other apparent life.

  When Waverly was finally released from quarantine, she saw that once again a crowd had collected at the feet of her shuttle. As she descended the ramp, she waved to Sarah Wheeler, who lifted up her daughter Samantha’s tiny arm in greeting. Randy held Samantha’s twin brother, named for his own departed father, José.

  Waverly scanne
d the crowd for her own family and saw her mother Regina standing off to the side, holding little Caleb. He jumped up and down when he saw Waverly, clapping his chubby little hands, and Waverly blew him a kiss. Her boy was so excited he could hardly contain himself.

  Waverly came cautiously down the shuttle ramp only to be tackled by little Josiah, who rammed his head into her stomach, full force. Her youngest child, he was always the first to demand to be picked up, fed, or cuddled. She never minded, though it made her worry Caleb wasn’t getting enough attention.

  “Did you get my wock?” little Josiah asked, blinking his huge crystal blue eyes.

  “I got it,” she whispered and handed him a small pebble that she’d actually found in the conifer bay. They hadn’t completed the toxicological analysis of the rocks from the planet, so she couldn’t bring him a real rock, but try explaining that to a three-year-old. After a brief visual inspection, Josiah immediately put the pebble in his mouth and thoughtfully swirled it around on his tongue.

  “You like it?” Waverly asked, laughing.

  He took it out long enough to say, “It’s okay,” before popping it back in.

  “That’s my boy,” Seth said from behind Waverly, and she whirled. He gave her his characteristic crooked smile. “Destined to be a geologist, I think.” Caleb tugged on his pant leg. From behind his back Seth produced a bundle of flowers and gave them to his five-year-old, then picked him up in his single muscular arm. The little boy proudly handed the bouquet to his mother.

  After nine years, Waverly was still in awe, still grateful, still amazed that Seth had survived his illness. Over the weeks following the Empyrean’s flight from the New Horizon, Dr. Anthony told her again and again to prepare herself, that Seth wouldn’t last much longer. Again and again, Seth fought his way back.