Flame (37 page)

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 scanned 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.

Now Waverly rested a hand on Seth’s shrunken shoulder. She liked touching him there because she was the only one allowed. He smiled as they walked to the door of the shuttle bay. “Did our Golden Boy make a good speech?” he asked her.

“You didn’t listen?”

He shrugged. “I may have caught some of it.”

“I know you don’t think the Captain deserved to be the first one buried there.”

“He was monster,” Seth said quietly.

This was an old argument between them. The Captain had always maintained his innocence, insisting that Waverly’s father and Seth’s mother, along with their colleague Dr. McAvoy, had acted alone to sterilize the women of the New Horizon. When the Captain learned of their betrayal, he said, he alerted Captain Takemara of the New Horizon, who insisted they be executed for treason against the mission or his ship would attack. Rather than put his crew through the trauma of a public trial, Captain Jones had opted to deal with the criminals quietly. Then Anne Mather took the helm of the New Horizon and began her plans to attack the Empyrean from their hiding place in the nebula, unbeknownst to Captain Jones. Over nine years, he never changed a detail of the story, but Seth didn’t believe a word of it.

Waverly wasn’t so sure. Whenever Waverly broached the subject with her mother, she was so evasive, and became so angry, that Waverly suspected Captain Jones’s story must be true. At the very least, it was clear that her father had been involved in committing a terrible crime that led to a great deal of bloodshed. Over the intervening years, she’d come to accept that she would never know for sure if Captain Jones was a conspirator or not. After a while, it stopped mattering to her. She knew that Seth clung to the idea that his mother had been an innocent scapegoat, and she did her best to avoid the subject altogether. Let Seth have the memory of one good parent. Let her mother believe she’d protected the memory of her dead husband. They’d both been through enough.

So instead of responding to Seth now, she reached for his hand, held it to her lips, and kissed it. He smiled at her as he pulled her along the corridor toward their apartment.

Their apartment was immaculate, just the way Regina Marshall liked to keep it. Waverly’s mother had never fully regained her old spark, but slowly she’d emerged from her fog and was helpful and productive.

As Waverly was drying her hair after a long hot bath, Seth knocked on the bathroom door. “Video call for you from the New Horizon.”

She went into the master bedroom, wrapped up in a fluffy white robe, and engaged the com signal. “This is Waverly.”

“Congratulations,” Kieran said after a pause. His image was grainy, but she could see his smile just fine.

“And to you. I heard a newborn crying. That makes five?”

“Her name is Waverly,” Kieran said and grinned as he watched her try and fail to suppress tears.

It was awhile before she could speak again. “Thank you, Kieran. I’m just glad to know you and Felicity are so happy together.”

“It was all meant to be,” Kieran had said to her with a peaceful certainty.

“Oh Kieran.” Waverly laughed, shaking her head. “We’ll never agree about this.”

“I know. But I can’t help it. It’s how I see things.” He tapped absently on the desk in front of his com console. “You know, if I hadn’t swallowed those explosives, if they hadn’t operated on me to get out that detonator, they’d never have found my defective heart valve. I’d have died of an infarction before the age of thirty. Tell me you don’t see the hand of God there.”

She shook her head. “I just don’t see the patterns you see.”

“Because you refuse to see them,” he teased.

“You see them because you
want
to.”

He surprised her by laughing. “Maybe you’re right.”

“What? Is that doubt I’m hearing?”

“Without a healthy dose of uncertainty, faith isn’t faith. It’s zealotry.”

They shared a long, quiet smile before she said, “You know what, Kieran?”

“What?”

“I think you’re an excellent pastor.”

“But never captain,” he supplied for her. Indeed, when the doctor and Jared Carver had been publicly shamed, Selma Walton had taken over the vessel and exonerated Kieran of any blame associated with the Pauleys’ bomb plot. Kieran then joined the political faction that insisted the pastor and captain roles be kept separate by law. Seth had been surprised by this, and Waverly knew it redeemed Kieran in his eyes. The two men would never be friends, but she felt they’d at least forgiven each other. Now Kieran smiled at Waverly. “I’ll leave those nasty moral compromises for you pagans.”

“We’re so grateful.”