“One, two, three,” he whispered, and the grip released.
As slowly as he could, Seth guided the OneMan back to the starboard side and found the engine room hatch again. He lowered himself over the hatch controls, attached his tether to the hook by the door, and, with a badly shaking hand, hit the manual release lever on the small hatch.
An explosion of debris caught him in the face. He lost his grip on the door and he was blown backward.
I’m dead, he thought with detachment, but when he had the courage to open his eyes, he saw that his tether had held and that he was hanging over the engine room hatch.
“There shouldn’t have been any air in there,” Seth said aloud. “Dad vented it the day he…” He couldn’t finish the thought. His voice was shaking, and he took four deep breaths to try to steady himself before this next, terrifying part. “You’re going to do this fast,” he said to himself.
He called up the command to release his helmet from the outer shell of the OneMan, but his finger hovered over it.
“I’m not going to die,” he said to himself, then repeated it, more firmly. “I won’t die.”
He enabled the command, and the outer seals released with a hiss.
The absolute cold of outer space hit him like a bucket of liquid nitrogen, and he forgot how to breathe. His mind felt flattened. I can’t do this, he told himself, but somehow he slithered out of the metal cavity, holding on to the ship with one aching hand. He left the shell hovering from its tether outside the engine room as he pulled himself through the doorway, and then he closed the hatch behind him.
It was just as cold in here as it had been outside. Seth took four agonized, jerking steps toward the computer array and, with hands that shook so hard he could barely control them, found the command to repressurize the room.
Air rushed around him, enveloping him in warmth. He collapsed into a chair, huddled in a ball, helpless against the mad spasms in his muscles, and waited for his mind to turn back on.
But he couldn’t wait long. Already the air inside his suit was overmoist and stifling. He’d have to be quick.
Teeth still clacking, he took his first glance around. Somehow it was surprising that the lights still worked and the signal buttons still blinked on and off. Everything appeared to be working, but even with the blowouts, there would still be a fine coating of radioactive particles clinging to every surface. To breathe them in would significantly shorten his life. Someday this room would have to be meticulously cleaned with specialized equipment. Until then, it was a no-man’s-land. Any maintenance to the engine would have to be done from the outside; Kieran better hope that pushing the engines so hard wouldn’t result in total engine failure. Seth shook his head in frustration. For a smart guy, Kieran frequently acted like a fool.
This room was where Seth’s father had spent his last few days, working in radioactivity without a protective suit, desperately trying to save the ship after the sabotage by the New Horizon attackers. “You were a bastard,” Seth muttered, “but you found a way to die a hero.”
Cringing against his muggy recycled breath, Seth walked to the aft side of the room and looked over the metal floor, which was marred with patches of dried blood, and into the corner near the door where he found dozens of discarded ration containers. Others like them must have been what hit him in the face when he opened the hatch.
Seth leaned over the pile of garbage and poked through it with the toe of his boot. Some of the containers still looked moist.
Someone must be camping out down here. But how, with all this radiation?
Seth went to the tool cabinet, where he located a Geiger counter and took a reading, gasping in surprise when it showed radioactivity levels within normal range. Several more readings confirmed it.
How? Cleanup after a radioactive event was arduous and highly technical. Someone must have vacuumed up every last bit of dust from the instruments, the floor, the ceiling, the portals. The entire place had to have been wiped down. The air filters would have needed changing, the room would have had to be hooked up to the air ventilation system again—the list of tasks was endless, and the job would have been dangerous. There was no way Kieran would risk an inexperienced crew to come down here for cleanup.
That left one possibility: The saboteur had done it.
Seth took a deep breath, disengaged his helmet, and slowly pulled it off. He drew in a single, tentative breath. So far so good. The air was fresh and smelled pure. The suit itself felt damp against his skin, which gave him a chill, so he took off the entire thing, folded it, and put it with his helmet by the hatch.
He went again to the pile of garbage in the corner and poked through it. Some of the food scraps looked fairly fresh. He found a stack of uneaten rations in the corner cabinet. In the janitor closet he found blankets and a bedroll on the floor, along with grav bags of water. Someone was camping out down here. He must have fled when the decompression alarm went off.
A chilling thought came to Seth then. What if the saboteur was still here? How long had there been a vacuum in the engine room? Seth had repressurized quickly, so the saboteur would have been exposed to the vacuum of space for only ten or twenty seconds. Was that enough time to kill someone? Maybe not. If someone had been in here, that person might still be alive, and maybe even conscious.
He rushed to the tool cabinet, chose the heaviest wrench he could find, and held it tightly in his sweaty palm, eyeing the doorway that led to the reactor rooms. There was a port reactor and a starboard reactor, and each of them sent power to the thrusters and the rest of the ship. It was possible that someone could hide within the housing for the reactors, between the tubes of metal, or down among the snaking pipes for the coolant system. Seth took two deep breaths and opened the door for the port-side reactor.
The room was dark, and Seth switched on the light. He felt claustrophobic here, because the immense room was packed with hundreds of rods of plutonium, deep pools of deuterium, and endless tubes that circulated the coolant. The turbines made a nagging, humming sound that tickled the inside of Seth’s ear. He climbed up onto a large metal box that must house one of the coolant control systems and looked around the huge room. There were a million hiding places here. He’d never be able to find the saboteur this way.
Suddenly his ears popped, and he heard a loud creak coming from the door to the reactor room, as though it were being pulled against its seals. He ducked down and waited, but there was no other sound or movement.
He went to the door and looked through the glass peephole. The engine room looked just as it had, but when he tried to pull open the door, it felt as though a thousand-pound weight was holding it in place.
He was trapped!
He pounded on the door, yelling, when a blinking message on the com screen to the right of the door caught his eye. “Repressurize main room,” it said.
What?
Seth selected “Yes,” and he heard a great whoosh of air. Suddenly the thousand-pound weight against the door was gone.
He ran back to the engine room, and stopped dead in his tracks.
His helmet was gone! So was the silvery inner sleeve, taken from where he’d left them by the hatch! Seth ran to the hatch porthole and looked outside to where he’d tethered his OneMan. That son of a bitch had stolen it! He must have slipped out of the starboard reactor room when Seth was looking for him on the port side.
That must have been how he’d survived the decompression, too. He’d been in one of the reactor rooms, behind a pressurized door.
Seth kicked at one of the chairs in front of the control desk, and it went rolling across the room. He picked up the wrench and slammed it against the metal wall again and again, swearing, sweat stinging his eyes. When his rage was spent, he stood panting, a grimace on his face. He’d been so close to catching that bastard!
Whoever he was, he was sure to do more damage. Seth had to get a warning to Kieran.
Seth climbed up to the surveillance camera above the contro
l desk and pointed it at the corner of the room, where he gathered a pile of the empty ration containers. Next he found a pad of paper and a heavy black pen, and wrote in block letters, SABOTEUR FROM THE NEW HORIZON ON BOARD, HAS BEEN CAMPING HERE. RADIATION LEVELS ARE NOW NORMAL.
He doubted Kieran would believe him, but he had to try.
He went to the emergency lever on the wall by the door and, bracing his feet so that he could run, pulled it down. An alarm pierced his ears, and he knew it would sound throughout the ship.
Now all he could do was run.
OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION
“You haven’t been attending services lately,” Kieran said to Sarah Hodges. He leaned back in his desk chair, pressed his fingertips together, and studied the girl.
Sarah glowered at him, twisting in her seat. Her hair was greasy, pulled back into a ponytail, and her fingernails were cruddy. She’d been assigned to dig up stray potatoes for the last few days, a task no one liked. Kieran had thought his offer to switch her to combine duty might have loosened her tongue, but she’d remained as uncooperative as ever.
“Don’t you like services?”
“I guess not,” she said flatly.
“Why not?”
“They remind me too much of that woman.”
“I’m nothing like her.”
“How do you know? You’ve never met her,” she sneered.
Yes I have, he almost said, but he didn’t want his conversation with Mather to be known yet. He still hadn’t watched the vid files she’d sent, and he hadn’t heard from her again or tried to contact her. Right now, he was focused on finding Seth Ardvale before he could do any more damage.
Kieran leaned his elbows on his desk, and the chair creaked under him. The milky scent of red bush tea hovered in the air. “Where were you on the night the thrusters misfired?”
“I was in my quarters. When I heard your announcement I went to the central bunker. Waverly was there with me.”
“That’s what she says.”
“Looks like we have our story straight,” she spat.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that people don’t like being questioned as though they were criminals.”
“That’s not my intention, Sarah.” Kieran sighed. She was only the third person he’d interviewed, after Sealy Arndt and Tobin Ames, who’d both been early supporters of Seth. Word was already getting around. He’d have to write his sermon for this Sunday very carefully, find a way to get people back on his side. “It’s not that I think you had anything to do with the thruster problems—”
“Oh, isn’t it?”
“I’m just trying to get a picture of what happened that night,” he said, though in fact his suspicion of her was more acute than ever. She was Waverly’s friend, and she seemed like the type of recalcitrant person who would sympathize with Seth. But right now, he needed to get her guard down. “You might have seen something without realizing it. It’s the only place I can think of to start.”
This was intended to mollify her, but she folded her arms over her chest and stared stubbornly at him.
Suddenly the lights in the room flashed, sending weird shadows over the bust of Harry Truman that stood in the corner of the office. An alarm shrieked through the ship.
“Oh my God,” Sarah said. “What is that?”
“Stay here,” Kieran said as he shoved back from his desk and bolted for the door. He ran down the corridor to Central Command, aware of Sarah’s footsteps behind him. When he got there, he found Arthur and Sarek leaning over a vid screen, looking baffled.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Someone pulled the emergency alarm in the engine room,” Sarek said.
“Why?” Kieran started toward his chair but stopped cold. “Did you say the engine room?”
“Yeah,” Sarek said, visibly shaken. “That was after two decompressions a few minutes apart. I thought they were instrument malfunctions, but now…”
“Look.” Arthur pivoted the vid screen toward Kieran.
It showed a pile of what looked like ration containers, and a sign in bold letters. Kieran read it, shaking his head. “But that room is flooded with radiation!”
“Not according to the note,” Arthur said, but he didn’t appear to believe it.
“The repair crew did vent it before leaving,” Sarek said thoughtfully.
“Yes, but there’d be residue!” Kieran insisted.
“I know,” Arthur said. “It’s strange.”
“Well, someone has definitely been living there,” said a female voice.
All three boys turned to see Sarah Hodges looking at the vid screen over their shoulders. She returned their gazes with a cool stare.
“What are you doing here?” Kieran asked her, annoyed.
“This is my ship, too,” she said. “I can be here if I want.”
“This is a restricted area,” Arthur said.
She glared at each of them in turn. “The more you guys act like you’re in charge, the less people trust you.”
“Can you run back the image?” Kieran said, ignoring her for the moment. “Did the camera see who pulled the emergency alarm?”
“I’ve tried that,” Sarek said, and ran the video back. The image showed the engine room control panel, then instantaneously flashed to a view of the pile of trash.
“Weird,” Sarah said pensively. “The opposite should have happened.”
“What do you mean the opposite?” Kieran said.
Sarah looked at Kieran defiantly, keeping her mouth closed.
“Something is wrong with the motion detectors,” Arthur said. “We’re working on it.”
“I know exactly what’s wrong,” Sarah said with a smug smile.
All three boys looked at her and waited.
“Oh, I’m not telling you what it is.”
“How do you know? Are you in touch with—” Kieran almost named Seth, but bit back the words. “Did someone tell you about this?”
“No, it’s just obvious what the problem is. I’m surprised you guys haven’t thought of it.”
“Sarah,” Kieran said in a dangerously low voice. “You tell me what you know.”
“I will, when you stop acting like this ship is your own personal cult.”
Kieran stared at her insolent face so hard he thought he could light her freckles on fire. “Throw her in the brig.”
Arthur looked at him, surprised. “Kieran—”
“Do it!”
“You’re a rat!” Sarah yelled as a bewildered Sarek called two guards into Central Command. Sarek mumbled orders to them, and they flanked Sarah, dwarfing her by over a foot, but they didn’t intimidate her. “I’ll make you regret this!” she snarled at Kieran as one of them took hold of her elbow.
“How did Seth get down there?” Kieran barked at Arthur, who stared at him, wide-eyed. Sarah could still be heard swearing and yelling all the way to the elevators. “Arthur! How?”
“I don’t know,” Arthur said quietly. He wouldn’t look at Kieran directly, clearly very upset. “That whole level is sealed off.”
“Sarek?” Kieran said.
Sarek engaged the security software and searched the com system data on the different doors and bulkheads that had sealed off the lower levels to contain the radiation. “Nothing has changed,” he said. “The elevators are all still sealed.”
“What about the stairwells?” Arthur asked from the corner of the room.
“Check them individually,” Kieran said with a sinking feeling.
Sarek scrolled through the many doors on the lower levels. “There it is. The starboard stairwell. It looks like someone manually opened the seal.”
“How did we not see that?” Kieran asked angrily.
“It’s not like I have nothing else to do!” Sarek snapped.
“Where are the radiation suits?” Kieran barked.
“The infirmary, I think,” Arthur said, his tone blank, his face unreadable. Kieran could se
e Arthur didn’t approve of what he’d done to Sarah, but right now he didn’t care. “You can’t go down there.”
“If the seal is broken, the damage is done,” Kieran said bitterly. Seth Ardvale should be thrown out an air lock for this.
Kieran ran down to the infirmary, where he found Tobin Ames and Sealy Arndt talking. The rest of the ward was empty. The eight surviving adults, bedridden and weak with radiation sickness, had all been moved to the long-term-care unit next door.
Both Tobin and Sealy looked at Kieran warily. “You going to question me again?” Sealy asked.
“No, Sealy,” Kieran said with a sigh, then added, “I really just thought you could help with the investigation. Seth must be behind the thrusters—”
“That bastard can rot in the brig for the rest of his life, for all I care,” Sealy said, looking at Kieran angrily. “But I’m starting not to trust anyone who thinks he’s in charge.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” Kieran said, wounded. Everything had been going well until the girls got here. Now everything felt out of balance, like he could lose control at any second, and the crew might erupt into the same insanity that nearly got him killed once before. “Where did you guys put the radiation suits when the patients came in?”
Tobin pointed to a cabinet in the corner of the room, and Kieran opened the door. The suits were smelly with body odor and filthy, almost unwearable.
“Didn’t you guys ever clean them?”
“We hosed them down as best we could and ejected the dirty water. That’s all we had time to do.”
Kieran chose the least-offensive one and slung it over his shoulder.
“Where are you going?” Tobin called after him.
“None of your business,” Kieran called back, and marched to the starboard elevator bank. On the ride down, Kieran put on the suit. He zipped up the leggings and the bodysuit, pressed all the seals closed, but waited to put on the helmet. The faceplate was grimy, and he wiped at it with his fingers, which left a nasty brown film under his nails. Then he put on the rank helmet, wrinkling his nose against the odor.
Spark A Sky Chasers Novel Page 7