Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel (8 page)

How?
he asked desperately as he twisted against the mattress beneath him.

You will know your path when you see it,
the voice said.

He knew the voice was telling him to trust himself, and he tried to believe he was equal to the task before him. He had faith in the voice but not enough to keep from being afraid.

CLUES

Seth huddled in a corner of the conifer bay behind the juniper bushes. The heat lamps were programmed for springtime, but it was still only a chilly fifty degrees, and he shivered. For the moment, this was the best hiding place. Two hours before, he’d heard a couple of Kieran’s guards enter the bay, and they’d strolled through it, peering between the needles, looking for him. He lay perfectly still, not even allowing himself to breathe until they’d disappeared behind a stand of Douglas fir. Since then there’d been no one, and he’d had some time to think about who could have caused those thruster bursts. Who would
want
to send the ship off course?

Considering that everyone on board, even the orphans, desperately wanted to recover the captives being held on the New Horizon, only one possibility made any sense: There was a stowaway from the New Horizon on board.

Seth rubbed his palms against his arms, letting the friction warm him. The first step to finding the saboteur would be to figure out how he was able to program the thruster misfires, which could only have been done from the well-populated Central Command or from the radioactive engine room.

Seth could never get within a mile of Central Command, but it was unlikely the saboteur had operated there, unless the culprit was Sarek or Arthur, or Kieran himself. Unlikely. That left the engine room, if Seth could only get down there. The entire section had been sealed off to control the radiation, so the only way into the engine room would be through an outer hatch. The main problem: The engine room hatches had been designed to vent gas, not for ingress. They were barely large enough for an adult man to fit through the opening. But getting there was only half the battle; the entire area was flooded with radiation. He knew that OneMen were equipped with radiation shields and oxygen. If only the engine room hatch was big enough to fit a OneMan! Seth leaned back, his arm behind his head, and thought.

OneMen were really glorified space suits. They were bulky because of the outer metal shell, the oxygen tanks, and the rocket packs on the back. But inside each OneMan was an inner sleeve that served as a second layer of protection. If that could be removed from the bulky parts of the OneMan, the wearer would easily fit through the engine room hatch.

It was worth a try.

Seth got up, brushing off juniper needles, and crept to the empty corridor, his father’s portable computer tucked under his arm. When he was sure no one was around, he sprinted to the outer stairwell, up seven levels for the starboard shuttle bay, and slipped through the doorway.

The shuttle bay was eerily quiet. Here was where the majority of the Empyrean crew members had met their deaths, and it felt like a tomb. The visors of the OneMen hanging along the walls were as eerie as death masks.

He went to the nearest OneMan and, using the automated system, lowered it from its housing and removed the helmet. He plunged his hand between the soft fabric and the hard shell. The fabric looked metallic and it felt like flexible plastic, but Seth knew it was an advanced carbon polymer modeled after the fibers of a spider, the strongest filament known. It was perfectly airtight and lined with micron-thick lead. It would protect him from the engine room radiation, and once he’d disconnected himself from the air tanks, there’d be at least a few minutes worth of oxygen within the suit for him to breathe, enough to get a look around, but not for much more.

He released the connectors that held the envelope in place and pulled it out by the collar. It looked like a silvery jumpsuit. Seth pulled it on, and the remarkable fabric stretched to accommodate his long frame. Fitting the helmet over the envelope, he heard the automatic click sealing him inside. His ears popped reassuringly when the pressure seals engaged. He climbed into the outer-shell OneMan, leaving the lower connections between the shell and the fabric envelope open so that when the time came, he could simply leave the shell.

He was ready.

“The engineers designed something well for a change,” he muttered.

He engaged the thrusters to lessen the weight of the vessel, turned on the oxygen from the tanks, and walked with ponderous steps over to the smaller air lock that was meant for OneMen. Once inside the air lock, he felt as though he’d stepped into a coffin. The heavy metal doors slammed closed behind him, and he jumped inside his suit when the air lock cleared itself with an explosive rush.

He felt the metal shell of the OneMan expand with the pressure difference. Now all Seth had to do was open the outer doors, and there’d be nothing between him and the rest of the universe.

He’d never admitted this to anyone, but space walks terrified him. He’d had to perform several after the damage Kieran had done to the atmospheric conditioning plant. Seth had acted as foreman, teaching the other boys how to use the complex tools, showing them where to make the repairs. The entire time he’d been quaking in his suit, covered with cold sweat, his heart racing. When he looked in any direction in space, there was nothing between him and eternity. The feeling of his own smallness before all that vast, empty cold made his bile rise.

It would be even worse this time: No one knew he was going out here. One wrong move could send him spinning away from the ship, and there’d be no one to come looking for him.

He couldn’t let himself think of that.

“I’m not afraid,” he told himself with a shaking voice, took a deep breath, and opened the outer doorway.

The door yawned open to the awful blackness of space. The stars were crisp pinpoints, so thickly strewn in places that they looked like foam. They were so far away. Seth swallowed bile.

“It’s just the sky,” his father had said once, when Seth admitted he was afraid to try flying a OneMan. “If you were on a planet, it’d be the same thing. No walls. No windows. Nothing but nothing above your head.”

Seth had only nodded at this because he didn’t want to say anything stupid, but in truth the thought of walking a planet’s surface gave him a terrible feeling of vertigo. If he could live his entire life on the Empyrean, he probably would. Because now, standing on the edge of the air lock and looking into eternity, he was utterly terrified.

“Don’t piss yourself, Ardvale,” he whispered ferociously.

He took a deep breath and stepped off the air lock platform.

And he was falling! Not falling; he was being left behind by his home ship, the rivets and portholes and gunmetal coating of the Empyrean dissolving into a terrifying blur of grays and blacks as the ship sped forward without him. Seth helplessly waved his arms—
Oh God, oh God
—before he remembered his thrusters. He pressed the throttle and screamed as his vessel jerked toward the Empyrean. Quickly he backed away from the huge ship, avoiding a crash by less than four feet.

His gorge rose. For a moment he was paralyzed with terror, but he forced his eyes open and swallowed bile as he scrabbled with the attitude, pitch, and yaw until he flew in a parallel course with the great ship.

He punched at the thruster controls, and finally he was accelerating at the same rate as the Empyrean, and the illusion of falling ceased. He found himself hovering near a porthole, and looked in to see that he’d fallen to the level of the rain forest bay. He had several more levels to go before he reached the engine room at the bottom of the ship.

Seth eased back on his rear thrusters just enough to move slowly down the gray landscape of the Empyrean. He kept his eyes on the hull, focusing on the rivets that lined each slab of sheet-metal skin, and then the small valley between the domes of the sewage and the water-purification systems. He floated over what seemed an infinite row of portholes, and he checked each one for a human face, but no one looked out as he passed. He should have been happy no one saw him, but instead he felt irrational disappointment, and that made him realize how alone he was.

He shut out this thought and turned his suit toward the port side. He could sense the bottom of the Empyrean looming at his feet like a horizon. He saw the hatch to the engine room below him and reached for the thruster control, but he fumbled and instead engaged an attitude thruster.

His body rotated madly, and he was falling once more, sailing over the hull in a mad spin. The pink nebula they’d left behind loomed in his vision, ready to swallow him whole.

Did he scream?

In a panic Seth tapped the emergency tether and a cord shot out, aimed for the Empyrean like it was supposed to be, but he was spinning, and the cord wrapped around his waist, shortening with every turn. As he was pulled backward, he stared at the immense nebula, so silent and dense. It had enveloped the Empyrean for four years, rendered the ship essentially blind and deaf, allowing the New Horizon to sneak up for a surprise attack. Now it looked so calm, and he caught his breath as he gazed on the arms of magenta gas spreading away from its center, the shades of bluish gray tucked into pockets where the gas was most dense. He’d hated it when they were inside it, but now he could see that it was beautiful.

I’m going to live,
he told himself.
I won’t die out here.

The enormous rear thrusters of the Empyrean swung into his field of vision, and Seth jammed the joystick forward, aiming for them, knowing that he could be caught in the exhaust and incinerated instantly. He already felt the heat on his face, and a slick layer of sweat coated his skin. “No, please,” he whimpered.

Stiff with terror, he pushed his vessel as fast as it would go toward the hull, holding out the clawlike grippers of his suit, praying under his breath, “Come on, you bastard, you son of a bitch. Let me live.”

He felt his grippers contact the hot metal of the exhaust tunnels, and activated the magnetic arm, which clamped on to the hull.

Seth didn’t know how long he clung to the outside of the Empyrean, gulping air, gritting his teeth, willing himself not to break into a million pieces and cry like a baby. His heart flung itself against his rib cage again and again.

“You’re not dead,” he said savagely to himself. “Don’t be such a goddamned coward.”

Sweat poured into his eyes. He checked the temperature gauge in his helmet; it flashed a red warning signal. The last thing he wanted was to release his grip from the hull, but he had to or he might burn up. He rotated the arm until his thrusters were pointing downward again, careful to get the angle just right. Then he engaged the thrusters until he felt the familiar g-force on the soles of his feet.

“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.