Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel (6 page)

On the top shelf of the closet was the box of family photos that Regina had squirreled away, always intending to make an album but never getting around to it. “I could do that,” Waverly mumbled. “I could make the album and surprise Mom when she comes home.”

She’d have to sort through all their family photos, put them in order, pore over the memories. She wouldn’t have room in her mind to think about Kieran or Seth or any of the terrible things she’d done. Nothing had ever sounded so comforting.

Waverly got the stepladder from the kitchen, pulled the box down, and marched into the living room to sit on the sofa.

There were dozens of photos, ranging over Regina’s infancy and childhood, through her teenage years, and then on to the time she dated and married Waverly’s father, a handsome man with a wide smile and deep-set brown eyes. Waverly’s baby pictures showed a happy little girl with rosy cheeks. Waverly especially loved an image of her parents holding her as a wild-haired toddler. She set it aside; she’d make a frame for it and put it on her bedroom wall.

One picture at the bottom of the box caught Waverly’s attention, and she pulled it out. It showed her father as a young man, the gray just beginning at his temples, standing with Captain Jones. The two men looked as though they’d just shared a private joke; the Captain had one beefy hand on Galen Marshall’s shoulder, fingers flexed as though he meant to steer him somewhere. Galen was laughing, his chin tucked into his chest, teeth glistening. They stood in a large white room that looked familiar to Waverly, and she realized that it was one of the labs, probably the botany lab where her father had worked. Waverly turned the photo over.

Galen and Eddie, discovery of phyto-lutein,
was scrawled on the back of the photo, again in Regina’s hand. Waverly had seen this photo before, of course, but she’d never lingered over it, never wondered why it appeared to have been crumpled and flattened out again, why the edges of it were frayed, showing the white paper underneath the glossy image. And she’d never turned it over to read the caption, or if she had, she hadn’t really noticed it. Waverly set this photo aside, too, and went back to sorting through the others, arranging them in chronological order.

As she worked, though, her eyes kept trailing back to the image of her father with Captain Jones. Something about it nagged at her. A part of her didn’t want to think about it. She wanted to fix up this album, lose herself in a project, feel better. But Waverly had never had much success at switching off her mind, and the wheels turned until she identified what bothered her about it.

Never once had her mother referred to the Captain as Eddie. He’d always been the Captain, or Captain Jones, and the name had always been spoken with a cool reserve. But on the back of the photo Waverly’s mother had identified the Captain as Eddie, as though he were a good friend. Even more odd, Regina had always said that she and her husband had been far from the Captain’s inner circle, outsiders who were happy to be kept out of decision making. But the photograph had captured a definite familiarity between the Captain and her father. Clearly the men had been friends. The most troubling thing, though, was that Waverly had never known her father had anything to do with the discovery of phyto-lutein, the drug used to stimulate the women’s ovaries and create the next generation of the Empyrean crew. Her father had been a botanist, not a fertility specialist.

But of course, phyto-lutein must have come from plants. Where else did any medications come from? And if her father had been part of the team that discovered the miraculous compound, why would Regina hide it? It didn’t make sense.

Waverly looked pensively at her mother’s old com station, which was draped with scraps of material that had overflowed from the sewing table next to it. She cleared away the fabric and turned on the computer. A smell of burned dust filled the room, and Waverly realized that this machine had not been used since well before the attack.

Waverly searched back through the ship’s logs, cursory records of every day since the beginning of the mission almost forty-three years ago. She scrolled to the date of the air-lock accident that had taken her father’s life and read the entry.

Air lock 252 malfunctioned during routine maintenance mission to repair particulate damage to radio antenna 252. Dr. Galen Marshall, Dr. Melissa Ardvale, Dr. James McAvoy were sucked out of the lock in resulting explosive decompression.

That was all?

It was the most serious accident to have occurred on the Empyrean. There ought to be more written about it.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, poised to start a search for any and all information about the accident, but this was precisely the sort of thing she didn’t want to think about, so she tucked the strange photo under a pile at the bottom of the box. Waverly spent the rest of the night sorting through old photos, arranging them in piles until her eyelids were impossible to hold up.

The next moment, it seemed, she awoke on the couch surrounded by photographs. Her limbs felt loose and weak, her head bleary. Her stomach rumbled from emptiness, and she stood and stretched.

She frowned as she looked over the piles she’d made, then quickly stuffed them into the box in no particular order. With everything going on, the last thing she needed was to be digging around in the ancient past. Besides, she needed a good breakfast. She had a tractor to repair in the cornfield—probably a busted gear shaft—and then she had to change the lubricant on three separate combines, all in different parts of the ship. It was a lot of work, and she was already tired. Plus, judging from the stress in her knees and the ache between her shoulders, Kieran had ordered another increase in acceleration. The excess gravity was getting to everyone, but no one complained. More than anything they wanted to catch up to the New Horizon and get their parents back. If they had to wear out their joints in the pursuit, so be it.

As she dressed, her mind turned back to that photo of her father with Captain Jones, and that cursory report about her father’s death. It seemed as though details about the accident had been covered up, by Mason Ardvale, the Captain, even her own mother. Waverly left her quarters in a fog, walked with arms folded, head down, gaze on her own feet, remembering something Seth Ardvale had said to her before the attack:
Friends of Captain Jones lead complicated lives.

She was so preoccupied she never saw the slip of a boy who left the doorway opposite hers to follow her down the corridor.

THE PAST

Kieran stood over the lifeless form of Max Brent, staring at the drawn, cold face. The boy looked as though he’d been molded from gray plastic. Deep circles ringed his eyes, and his purple lips were pulled back in a mask of pain. A film of dried spittle had collected in the corners of the corpse’s mouth, and the artificial gravity pulled on his skin so that it collected in wrinkled bunches at the base of his jaw. He was being kept in one of the small private rooms in the infirmary, away from the eight-bed main room where most of the patients were. The few adults who had survived the original attack were kept apart, too, in the long-term care unit, so sick from radiation poisoning they couldn’t be a help to anyone. If Victoria Hand, the one surviving nurse on board, could have helped, would Max be alive now?

“What happened to him?” Kieran asked, looking away, horrified.

“I don’t know!” cried Tobin Ames, who’d been charged with running the infirmary. “It’s not a sickness, I don’t think. I can’t find any holes in him, either.”

“Could it be poison?” Arthur asked from behind Kieran. Arthur had taken one look at Max’s awful visage and backed away in dread.

Tobin nodded, overwrought. There’d been plenty of death on board the Empyrean, but no one ever got used to it. Tobin looked like he hadn’t slept all night, and he chewed his cuticle as he stared at Max’s body, clearly tormented that he hadn’t been able to save him.

“You did the best you could, Tobin,” Kieran said.

“I can’t even figure out how Max got
up
here,” Tobin said. He ran his fingers through his wiry light brown hair, making it stand on end. “Someone put him on that elevator.”

“It’ll be easy enough to find out,” Arthur said. “I’ll just check the video for that elevator on all the levels.”

“Also look for evidence of Seth poisoning him,” Kieran said.

“Where would he have gotten poison?” Arthur said.

“There’s a maintenance closet on every level,” Kieran said. “Maybe a cleaning solution?”

“Yeah,” Tobin said. “I’ll check the ingredients on those, see if they match Max’s symptoms.”

“Which were…?”

“Blue fingernails and lips. Convulsions. Coma.” Tobin shook his head. “I thought it was alcohol poisoning. He smelled like it, anyway. I used charcoal to try to treat him. It took me two hours to figure out how to do it! The manual was really confusing. If I’d been faster…”

“You don’t know that,” Arthur told him. “It’s not your fault.”

But Tobin didn’t seem to believe it.

“Even real doctors lose patients sometimes,” Kieran said.

Tobin nodded and marched back to his office, distracted and burdened.

Kieran tapped Arthur on the shoulder. “Let’s go.” Kieran and Arthur left the infirmary and stood outside the elevators to head back to Central Command. Kieran felt light-headed and wondered if he looked as disturbed as Arthur, who swallowed as though trying to keep from throwing up. Kieran wondered if Arthur was remembering that awful night, months ago, when the two of them had cleared the bodies out of the port-side shuttle bay. Kieran shuddered.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Arthur finally said as the elevator doors opened and they stepped on. “Why would Seth let Max out of the brig only to poison him?”

“He tried to put me into an air lock, or did you forget about that?” Kieran snapped. He realized he was trembling. Was he angry, or afraid, knowing that his enemy was on the loose? He pressed the button for Central Command, tried to calm down. He’d be no good to anyone if he panicked.
I can handle this,
he told himself.

“I’m just trying to make sense of everything,” Arthur said softly.

“I’m sorry,” Kieran said, and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. The pressure of running the Empyrean was starting to get to him, and he found himself snapping a lot lately at people who didn’t deserve it. The elevator doors opened to the busy corridor, and the boys headed for Central Command. On the wall just to the right of the door Kieran saw a stick-figure drawing of a figure with wavy, trembling arms and a grimace of fear on its face. Underneath, the caption read,
Our fearful leader, Kieran Alden.

Kieran felt his palms grow cold. He heard whispers behind him and turned to see a couple of little girls watching him. When their eyes met his, they pretended to be talking about something else.

“Clean this up,” he said to Arthur, then went into Central Command. Sarek turned in his chair to nod hello. “Any luck tracing Seth through the surveillance system since last night?” Kieran asked him.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that,” Sarek said, pivoting back and forth in his swivel chair. “I haven’t been able to see
anyone
on the vid system for the last eighteen hours.”

“What do you mean?” Kieran settled himself in the Captain’s chair.

“I mean all the system seems to be recording is empty corridors and ag bays. If someone were to look at our vid logs for today, they’d think this ship was deserted.”

“That’s odd,” Arthur said, taking his seat near the windows. There were dozens of chairs and com stations arranged in a crescent beneath the large square portholes, all of them empty except for the stations occupied by Arthur, Sarek, and Kieran in the Captain’s chair at the head of the room. “Seth must have disabled the motion detectors.”

“Damn it.” Kieran punched the air. “I knew if that son of a bitch ever got out…” He faded into a brooding silence.

“Kieran.” Arthur leaned toward Kieran over the back of his chair. “You have too many friends. It won’t happen again.”

Kieran didn’t have to ask what Arthur was referring to. “I never could have imagined them turning against me the
first
time.”

They’d just stood by as Seth injected Kieran with some paralyzing drug and slammed him in the brig. And as Kieran lay starving in that small, cold cell, had any of them come to his aid? They’d all been too afraid of Seth and his thugs to try to help Kieran. And now
they
were calling
him
a coward!

“Okay, so what now?” Arthur said patiently.

“Call up the Command officers,” Kieran said to Sarek, who turned to make the announcement.

The Command officers were a detail of a dozen boys, all older than thirteen years, whose overt job was to keep the crew on task throughout the day and keep the peace when fights broke out. But they had a covert assignment as well. They reported any untoward activities to Kieran, kept him apprised of the mood among the crew so he’d always be aware of any malcontents. They were armed only with batons. Kieran didn’t want any guns in use on the Empyrean and had scoured the storage bays for all the weapons and locked them away in a secret place only he knew about. The stockpile felt woefully small, though, and he suspected he’d missed some of the weapons in his search. But if he couldn’t find them, probably no one could.

Except Seth.

“Arthur,” Kieran said. “Help me work up a list of suspects to be taken in for questioning.”

“Suspects?”
Arthur’s eyes widened. “So if we find out who let Seth out, we’re going to throw them in the brig?”

“Well, yes,” Kieran said, trying to sound calm. “That’s what you do when people break the law.”

Arthur swallowed audibly. “What law?”

“What?” Kieran regarded Arthur with a studying eye.

“What law was broken by letting Seth out?” Arthur said, visibly cowed but steeling himself. “Specifically?”

“It’s illegal to release someone from the brig without due process.”

“Okay.” Arthur leaned his chin on the back of his chair. “But it’s illegal to keep someone
in
the brig without due process. You never held a trial for Seth.”