Spark A Sky Chasers Novel

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  Marjorie Wilkins and her sister stood on their chairs in the front row, hands raised over their heads as they screamed their helpless rage into the air. They’d received no video from the New Horizon. In fact, that was probably the source of most of the ire in the room—to see friends get news from loved ones and to go without it yourself. It would be enough to turn anyone savage.

  And savage they were. Red faces bawled, clenched fists pumped the air, voices rose in hoarse cries for revenge. Kieran stared, amazed. He didn’t recognize them. He had no idea how to talk to them. When he got ahold of himself, he raised his hands over his head and yelled into the microphone, “That’s enough! Stop! Stop!”

  Slowly the crowd settled down, looking at him expectantly.

  “I know you want revenge for what they’ve done to us. I do, too.”

  “Damn straight!” Marjorie screamed, and several people laughed.

  “Let’s skip the negotiations!” a boy yelled from the front row. “Let’s get them!”

  Several cries of approval answered this.

  “We have to be realistic!” Kieran said loudly over them. “We all want to punish them, but in a fight on their turf, we might be the ones getting punished.”

  “Fearin’ Kieran!” someone screamed from the back, and several people started chanting it, first in soft voices, but the volume mounted, and soon the entire congregation was yelling at the tops of their lungs, some of them defending Kieran, most attacking.

  Kieran licked the sweat from his upper lip, tasted its salt. He’d been here before, standing in front of a crowd that wanted to condemn him. He’d felt this terror before, and it had almost beaten him.

  No, he told himself. No.

  “Shut up! All of you!” he screamed into the microphone. Ignoring him, Marjorie Wilkins lunged over the back of her seat to swat at a boy who was jeering at Kieran with his tongue hanging out. The boy shook her off, and she fell down. Overtaken with a fresh surge of anger, Kieran’s voice trebled in volume as he bellowed, “SHUT THE HELL UP!”

  His voice was so loud in the speakers it drowned out the chanting, and the jeers petered out as people looked at him in surprise.

  He let them look, waited for the silence to expand to the outer walls of the room. When he spoke again, his voice was even, modulated, quiet.

  “If you think for one second that you’re going to walk in there, shoot a bunch of adults, and then walk back out with our parents, you’re fooling yourselves.” He took the microphone off of its stand and jumped off the stage to walk up the aisle, looking at every face he passed. “I saw what they did to our crew in the initial attack, and I’m telling you, we can’t beat them that way. Get that through your thick skulls.”

  A murmur of annoyance spread through the crowd, but he squelched it by yelling over them.

  “And you can all go to hell if you think I’m a coward! Tomorrow I’m going to the New Horizon all alone to negotiate with those murderers. They’ll be able to kill me on the spot if they want to. And why wouldn’t they? I’m nothing to them.”

  He’d reached the back of the room, which had gone silent. Most of the eyes he met seemed embarrassed, though a few people looked at him with insolent grins.

  “I’ve already told Anne Mather that I’ll allow her no immunity from war crimes charges, not on our ship, and not on New Earth, either. She’s got reason to get rid of me, but I’m betting my life that she won’t.”

  He found the insolent faces in the audience, and he stared each of them down as he backed up the aisle again toward the stage. Some of them tried to hold his gaze but eventually dropped their eyes. Marjorie Wilkins, her shirt torn and hanging on her lanky frame, looked chastened and sheepish.

  “It’s time for all of you to grow up. You might want some final showdown like in the storybooks, but this isn’t a storybook. This is war. And I can tell you, as someone who watched our families blown out an air lock with my own eyes, war doesn’t have a happy ending. Not for anyone.”

  He took the stairs two at a time back onto the stage and stared out over the congregation, which looked back at him, cowed and quiet. And then he said, “Let us pray.”

  To his surprise, every head in the room bowed down, even if some were more reluctant than others.

  The rest of the service was peaceful, though he noticed a few people walked out. He decided he didn’t care about them. Maybe he didn’t have the approval of everyone on the ship, but that wasn’t what mattered now. Human beings might be thinly disguised savages; that’s what the history books seemed to say. But peace was always better than war. He was doing the right thing by trying to talk to Mather, and he wasn’t going to let anyone make him doubt himself ever again.

  When he’d said the last amen, he walked to Central Command without meeting anyone’s eyes and took his post, watching the point of light on the long-range radar screen as it crept nearer and nearer the center. That point of light was the New Horizon, and when it finally reached the center of the screen, he’d be able to look out a porthole and see it looming once again in the sky. Then it would begin.

  At bedtime he went alone to his quarters and ate a plain meal of dry bread, cold chicken, figs, and raw asparagus. He chewed without tasting, his eyes on the circle of starry sky framed by his porthole. When bedtime came he lay down with a cool cloth across his eyes. He wanted sleep, but he couldn’t stop himself from going over the negotiating points he’d memorized. Though no amount of rehearsal was going to make this conversation easy (Mather was too wily for that), it made him feel better to know what he intended to say. It gave him some small illusion of control.

  In the wee hours, he bathed and put on his best clothes, then went to Central Command to sit with Sarek while he guided the ship to the rendezvous point. Sarek looked like a haggard old man, cruelly overworked. Once again Kieran felt the loss of Arthur. He’d kept himself from thinking about the betrayal of his most trusted friend, but now he wished he could talk things over with that owlish boy, who would have reasoned through every step in their plan, looking at it from all angles, considering many perspectives at once—a talent few possessed. The only two people he knew were capable of this type of thinking were preparing an attack he’d never approved. Now that he was about to board the enemy ship, though, Kieran supposed he was glad there was a group of kids ready to meet violence with violence, if it should come to that.

  “Are you nervous?” Sarek asked him, breaking through his thoughts. Sarek’s eyes were ringed by blue circles so dark they looked like bruises, and the skin around his mouth had creased into parentheses—features Kieran had seen only on much older adults. Sarek was working himself into exhaustion, and no matter what Kieran did, no matter how many times Matt Allbright offered to take over for him so he could get some sleep, Sarek would irritably shake his head. Kieran thought he knew why: because sleep was impossible anyway. Until his father was safely aboard the Empyrean, Sarek would stay in his chair.

  “Nervous about what?” Kieran asked with a sarcastic smirk.

  “Talking to that woman. Going on board that ship.”

  “Of course I am.”

  Sarek looked at him pensively. “What about the Central Council?”

  “What about them?” Kieran said, annoyed.

  “Are they up to this?”

  Kieran laughed. “No. But they think they are.”

  “Well,” Sarek said ruefully, “that’s half the battle.”

  “Promise me that you won’t open the shuttle air lock for them until you’ve heard from me that Mather’s going to betray us. Can you do that?”

  “I’ve written new encryption codes. They won’t be able to leave without me opening the doors from up here.”

  “Good.” The two boys stared at each other, faces blank, until Kieran gathered the courage to say, “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Shut up,” Sarek said.

  Kieran wanted to hug him. H
e was suddenly haunted by the thought that this could be the last time he’d ever see this boy who had stood by him through all these months of struggle. But Sarek wouldn’t want a hug. He didn’t like sentimentality, and, anyway, Kieran didn’t want to think he might die today. That would only make him more afraid. And he couldn’t succeed with Mather if he was overcome by fear. So he settled for patting Sarek on the back and saying, “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Yep,” Sarek said, and turned back to his screen as if this were any other day.

  Kieran walked out of Central Command, past the endless graffiti depicting him as a coward, as a capitulator, as an evil dictator, as a saint. He took the stairs down to the port-side shuttle bay, where he found Waverly standing outside a shuttle with its ramp down. She was pacing back and forth nervously, wringing her hands. As he approached he saw beads of sweat in the hollow of her neck, and the skin around her eyes was pulled tight. He was close enough to smell her shampoo when she finally noticed him. She stopped pacing and stood in front of him, just two feet away, looking without speaking.

  “You guys all ready?” he asked her. His voice sounded strained in his own ears, but the anger was gone from him. Now that the day had arrived when their fate would be decided, everything felt clearer.

  “We’ve practiced ourselves almost to death,” she said. “I think we’re ready.”

  “Good.” He prodded at the floor with the soft toe of his shoe. “So you’ll wait to hear from me?”

  “Of course.”

  “And I don’t need to say this, probably, but…” He glanced at her, saw that she was listening. There was no trace of defensiveness in her eyes. She was trying to be stoic, as always, but fear ebbed off of her. “You know they’ll probably kill me if you try to board while I’m still negotiating.”

  “Kieran, we’ll wait to hear from you.”

  “I’m trusting you with my life.”

  “I know that,” she said softly, but she looked away.

  It seemed there ought to be something more to say, but no words came to him. He turned to go, but she lunged at him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and hung on.

  He was shocked and didn’t move at first, but soon his arms found their natural position, wrapped around her, his hands pressing against the bones of her back. She smelled like he remembered, felt almost like he remembered, though her softness was gone. They held each other like that for … he didn’t know. It could have been seconds or minutes, until finally she let him go and, wiping at tears, turned and ran back into the shuttle. He watched her go, remembering that terrible day he’d watched her board another shuttle to face a horrible ordeal at Anne Mather’s hands. That terrible day he’d begged her to stay, get off the shuttle, don’t go. He wanted to beg her to stay now, but instead he turned and walked out of the shuttle bay, the only sound in his ears the scuff of his soles against the cold metal floor.

  He walked across the ship to the starboard shuttle bay and the shuttle nearest the air lock doors. When he pushed the button to lower the cargo ramp, the seals popped open, sounding like an eggshell cracking. This shuttle had never been opened before, not since it was loaded onto the Empyrean back on Earth, and it smelled of ancient glues and sealants. He sat in the pilot seat and patched in to Central Command. Sarek acknowledged him with a cursory grunt, and Kieran listened to him breathing as he waited, tense and quiet.

  Kieran watched the radar screen as the blinking point of light showing the New Horizon slowly edged its way toward the center, finally getting near enough to trigger the ship’s collision protocol. A light flickered across his screen, and the words “Object approaching” flashed urgently, casting a sickly green light over the cockpit.

  “They’re here,” Sarek said.

  Kieran’s armpits were soaked. His hands shook as he warmed up the engines, and he rubbed his palms together, trying to calm the mad trembling of his fingers. The shuttle engines purred and the craft lifted off the floor, then slowly he pivoted it around to face the air-lock doors.

  “Sarek,” he said, but the doors were already opening. As gently as he could, he guided the shuttle into the air lock and waited for the sound of the hydraulics closing the door and then the explosive sound of the air being pulled away until all that surrounded his ship was a vacuum. The doors in front of him opened, and his heart jerked in his chest.

  “Oh God,” he said. The New Horizon hung right in front of him, hulking and silent and waiting to swallow him whole. Suddenly, he didn’t know if he could really do this. But then he found he was doing it. The shuttle was pulling out of the Empyrean, poking out its nose like a lizard leaving its hole. Soon there was nowhere to go but into that woman’s clutches.

  “Sarek,” Kieran said with a nervous chuckle. “Just tell me I’m not a human sacrifice, will you?”

  Sarek laughed grimly. “You know, Kieran, maybe it’s true, what they say.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You do have a messiah complex.”

  Kieran smiled and finally said what he hadn’t been able to say before. “I love you, my friend.”

  There was an awkward pause. Sarek wouldn’t meet his eyes in the vid screen, but then a smile seemed to lighten his face. “You’re not my type.”

  Kieran laughed. “I’ll take that as an ‘I love you, too.’”

  Sarek’s smile wiped away, and he blinked away tears. “Be careful, okay?”

  Before he could answer, Sarek severed the com link.

  Kieran was on his own.

  THE PARTY

  Kieran guided the shuttle into the air lock on the New Horizon, holding his breath until he heard the outer doors close behind him. When the inner door slid open, he was surprised to see a crowd of people clapping and cheering as he nervously set the shuttle down on the floor. He looked at them through the porthole, flabbergasted. They were all wearing simple white tunics and black pants, with sandals on their feet. Many of the women held wobble-headed infants and lifted their tiny hands to wave at Kieran. Anne Mather stood at the center of it all, smiling as though welcoming a wayward son.

  Kieran walked down the shuttle ramp and into Mather’s waiting arms. She was surprisingly small for such a formidable woman, with a pigeon figure and rosy cheeks. Her skin was smooth, though he could see a webwork of capillaries just under the surface. Her nose was shiny with oil, and her teeth looked like they’d been stained by tea or coffee. He was surprised, not just by her short stature, but by her obvious human fallibility. She ages. She weakens. One day she will die. Until now he’d thought of her as a timeless monolith, one who was despised and feared, like a demon-goddess.

  She kissed both his cheeks, then took his hand and turned around to face the crowd. “Let’s show Kieran Alden a real New Horizon welcome!”

  The crowd erupted into robust cheers. Waverly and the girls had described a crew that had been weakened by years of low gravity, but he saw no sign of it now. Everyone here looked healthy and strong. Kieran tried to count the people; the crowd couldn’t number more than fifty, but they filled the shuttle bay with their voices. Kieran didn’t know what to do, so he waved at them. He felt off balance, and he supposed that’s exactly what Anne Mather wanted.

  “Can we talk?” Kieran asked her. He was aware of the half-moons of sweat seeping through the fabric of his shirt, and his palms felt sticky. Despite the cheery welcome, he’d never been more afraid in his life. He raised an eyebrow at the woman to show her these theatrics didn’t impress him. “The celebration seems … premature. We haven’t agreed on a treaty yet.”

  “All in good time. First I wanted to welcome you aboard with a banquet.”

  He opened his mouth to refuse but was swept up by a crowd of women who drew him across the shuttle bay, chattering in his ear about how happy they were he came, it was so nice to see such a young, handsome man, and already piloting shuttles! How remarkable! He looked for Anne Mather, who walked at the rear of the crowd, a smile creasing her face, though her eyes were narrow and watchful.
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br />   They led him to the stairwell and up. Kieran looked behind him to see a long stream of people coming up the stairs. He became aware that they were singing a song of celebration, though with the echo in the stairwell, he couldn’t make out the words. The tune was just familiar enough to create a surreal effect. He hadn’t expected anything like this, and it made his head swim.

  They led him to the central bunker. All the cots had been removed, and in their place were dozens of banquet tables with white tablecloths. The entire room was lavishly decorated with palm fronds and bouquets of Asian lilies, irises, sunflowers, and ferns. Someone took his hand, and he turned to see Mather smiling at him. She pulled him toward a stage set with a long, narrow table, where a dozen aging adults were seated, waiting with austere frowns on their faces. He took his place at the table, just to one side of a podium, and looked up disbelievingly at Anne Mather, who held up a hand for the crowd to settle down.

  It had to have been choreographed, because once the room had faded into silence, someone hummed a note, and then the entire crowd took up a melody. It was a three-part harmony with Latin words repeated over and over, sung by voices of all ranges. It was beautiful, but Kieran was filled with a sense of foreboding. There seemed to be a strange disconnect between the reality of the situation and what was happening here. As though none of these people were willing to acknowledge the terrible wrongs they’d committed. How could he negotiate with such people?

  When the song finished, Anne Mather took the podium. She smiled down at the crowd—at her congregation, Kieran realized—and said, “Dona nobis pacem. ‘Give us peace.’ I can’t think of a more appropriate way to begin this day! Now, let’s bow our heads and give thanks for the presence of our friend Kieran Alden.”