Glow (6 page)

“You don’t look well. Did they…,” she began, but with a nervous look at the woman with the gun, she seemed to rethink what she wanted to ask. “What happened?”

“Electrocuted.”

Mrs. Alvarez placed a hand on Waverly’s cheek and looked at the reddening burn on her hand, which had begun to weep clear fluid. “This child needs a doctor,” she said to the woman.

“There are doctors on the New Horizon,” the woman said curtly. She had a fleshy, pinkish face that didn’t match the rest of her body, which was lean and narrow.

“She can’t wait that long,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “She’s been electrocuted!”

“We’ll see to her right away,” the woman said, and then in a low voice muttered, “Remember what we talked about.”

Mrs. Alvarez nudged Waverly’s shoulder. “Go in, honey. They’ll help you as soon as they can.” But her anxious face didn’t match her soothing voice.

Waverly started up the ramp but stopped. Something the strange woman said hit her:
There are doctors aboard the
New Horizon
.

“We’re going to the New Horizon only if the Empyrean depressurizes, right?” Waverly asked the woman holding the gun.

“Yeah,” the woman said curtly. “Just go up and sit down.”

Waverly was about to go up when she heard shouting. She turned to see streams of people running across the bay, shrieking and waving their arms. The woman shoved Waverly up the shuttle ramp, but she tripped and fell. Mrs. Alvarez dove to help, but the woman hit her with the butt of her gun, and Mrs. Alvarez rolled off the shuttle ramp and onto the floor.

Piercing noises echoed through the bay, and Waverly watched as some of the people who were running toward them fell down. Mrs. Slotsky, Mr. Pratt, and Mr. and Mrs. Anguli all collapsed onto the floor and lay still. Mrs. Anders, little Justin’s mother, fell with her eyes open, staring at Waverly, who watched, waiting for the woman to blink, move, get up. But she didn’t. She just went right on staring.

Waverly felt faint and had trouble understanding what she was seeing. She wanted to scream, but her throat felt like it was filled with gel.

These strangers were shooting guns at people. These strangers were killing her friends.

More and more people poured into the shuttle bay. Some rushed to their fallen friends, others took cover behind shuttles. Mrs. Oxwell ran through the doorway and stopped, searched the chaos, pointed at Waverly, and shouted, “They have them on that shuttle!”

Everyone seemed to forget about the guns, and they started running toward the assailants again. Waverly’s breath came in great gulps as she watched her friends crossing the room. One of the strangers screamed, “They’re going to mob us!”

More piercing sounds echoed through the shuttle bay, hurting Waverly’s ears. People kept falling down: Mr. Abdul, Jaffar’s dad. Mrs. Ashton, Trevor and Howard’s mother. They fell and lay still.

“Don’t, please don’t,” Waverly said to the woman who had hit Mrs. Alvarez on the head. But the woman looked too terrified to hear her. She kept pumping the trigger of her gun, and people kept falling.

Waverly felt hands on her back, and Felicity crouched beside her. “You’ve got to come up.”

“They want to take us away!”

“Look around you. They’ll keep shooting as long as we’re here. You’ve got to come up!”

“Waverly!” It was Kieran, running toward her with Harvard Stapleton. “Get off the shuttle!” he screamed. His face was red, and spit flew from his mouth. “Get off now!”

“The longer you stay here, the more people will get shot.” The voice was right above her, and she looked up to see the man with the scar standing over her. To prove his point, he fired his gun into the onrushing crowd.

“He means it, Waverly,” Felicity said.

“Let’s get out of here!” the man with the scar yelled ferociously, then he knelt at the bottom of the ramp while his comrades boarded the shuttle. When he saw Waverly’s eyes on him, he aimed his gun at Kieran. “Do I shoot him or not?”

There was no decision to make. She had one choice only.

Waverly leaned on Felicity as she limped up the ramp.

“No, Waverly!” she heard someone bellow, not Kieran, someone else. She turned for one last look at her home and saw Seth. He stood next to a OneMan, all elbows and knees, his hands in his hair, head bleeding, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Don’t do this, Waverly!”

She shook her head, tried to yell, “I’m sorry,” but she could only make herself whisper.

She dragged herself up the ramp with Felicity, and it closed behind her with a hollow report.

LEFT BEHIND

One moment Kieran had been staring at Waverly’s slender back, imploring silently,
Don’t go. Get off the shuttle
. She’d turned, she’d looked at Seth Ardvale, she’d shaken her head at him, and then she’d limped up the ramp, and the ramp closed, and she was gone.

A woman wailed as the shuttle engines hummed to life. They coughed orange fire, then burned blue, their photon exhaust casting a sickly glow over the bodies of those who had been shot. People backed away from the craft, staring. Kieran looked at the faces nearest him, desperate for someone to do something, but everyone seemed paralyzed. Mrs. Anderson’s mouth hung open. Mr. Bernstein dropped to his knees as the shuttle rose from the floor and made the slow turn toward the air lock doors.

“Override the air lock!” Seth yelled. He started for the controls himself, but his hands went up to his head and he fell to his knees.

Suddenly the room was full of action again. A dozen people ran for the control panel near the huge doors. Harvard got there first and punched at the keypad, but the panel lights were dead. He slammed it with his fists and cried, “They fixed the doors to respond only to commands from inside the shuttle!”

“Go through Central Command,” Kieran shouted at Harvard. “They can lock the doors from there.”

Harvard yelled into the intercom, “Sammy! Do you hear me?”

Nothing but silence.

Harvard clicked the transmission button several times. “Central?… Hello?” He looked at Kieran in horror. “No one’s there.”

They’d all run to save their kids. Everyone had abandoned their posts. Forty-two years of peaceful isolation had made them totally incompetent in the face of attack.

“I’ll go,” Kieran said, and ran back the way he’d come, past Seth, who was on his hands and knees, dazed, staring at a pool of vomit.

“Everyone into a shuttle!” he heard Harvard scream.

When Kieran made it to the corridor, he closed the shuttle bay doors as a precaution, and then he turned and sped down the abandoned gangway. The ship felt empty. Corridors that had once been crowded with farmers and engineers, teachers and trainees, families and friends, were now deserted.

How many had died already? How many more?

Where was his dad?

Kieran shut out those thoughts and ran at top speed up four flights of stairs until he burst into the administrative level of the ship, where he hooked a left and pelted down the corridor into the Captain’s office. He was hoping that Captain Jones would somehow be there, sitting at his desk like always, calmly in control. But of course the Captain wasn’t there. He probably wasn’t even alive.

Kieran ran to Central Command, where the officers controlled the various systems aboard ship. Usually this room was full of people, all of them talking through intercoms, communicating with various parts of the ship, dealing with maintenance issues. But now no one was here. The room seemed very small.

Kieran jogged around the semicircle of computer displays, looking for the one that controlled the shuttle bay doors. But none of the workstations were labeled. Kieran groaned in despair. He caught his reflection in the porthole and stared at it as though it could tell him what to do.

“The Captain’s computer ought to be able to do anything,” Kieran said to his reflection. He sat down at the Captain’s chair. A computer display attached to a flexible arm slid in front of him. Along the right-hand edge of the screen was a row of buttons, and Kieran tapped the one marked “Port Shuttle Bay” from a scrolling list. An inserted video image of the bay blinked to life, and Kieran saw a shuttle in launch sequence moving toward the air lock doors, which were still closed. He tapped the button for the door controls that said, “Lock.” There was no way the enemy shuttle would be able to leave now.

He leaned back in his chair and sighed in relief. He’d done it.

But the video flashed to Harvard’s panicked face. “Unlock the door!” he screamed. “They’re already gone!”

“But they’re still in launch sequence!”

“That’s
us
!” Harvard screamed. “Open the air lock doors!”

Kieran fumbled to enter the unlock command, and a video display popped up showing the air lock doors creeping open. They were so slow.

How much time had he cost them?

Harvard was back on-screen. “Where are they, Kieran? Can you see them on the outer vid displays?”

Kieran’s fingers had never felt so clumsy as he scrolled through the video images outside the ship from cameras that monitored the engines, the communication antennae, telescopes, and radar. Each display showed only the static cold of the outer hull, until Kieran found the aft view, where a tiny speck caught his eye.

He magnified and saw a shuttle craft edging past the engines, heading toward the starboard side. It looked like a tiny ant crawling past the enormous exhaust tunnels.

Kieran patched the display through to Harvard’s shuttle. “They’re back near the engines,” he said.

“Why back
there
?” Harvard asked.

Kieran magnified further and saw a second, smaller speck hovering next to the rogue shuttle. He could barely make out the humanoid shape of a OneMan.

“Is that OneMan ours?” Kieran asked.

“That OneMan is moving toward the coolant system!” Harvard cried. “Kieran, get all the boys to the central bunker!”

Could they really intend to sabotage the reactors?

Kieran clicked onto the vid display in the auditorium and saw that the boys were still there, huddled in groups on the floor. He saw Sealy Arndt in the crowd, still nursing his torn ear. Kieran didn’t like Sealy, but the boy would be able to motivate the rest of them to move. Kieran turned on the intercom to the auditorium and spoke into the Captain’s mouthpiece. “Sealy, gather up all those boys and bring them to the central bunker
right now
! The reactors could blow any second!” Sealy looked into the camera, confused, until Kieran added, “Move your
ass
!”

Sealy grabbed a couple of boys by the shoulder and shoved them forward. He was rough with the stragglers, but it was what they needed to wake up. Soon all the boys were marching out of the auditorium.

Now that he had a moment, Kieran wanted to check on his mother.

Kieran looked at the video display of the starboard shuttle bay, ghostly and empty, the air lock doors closed. No one was there. He magnified the image to look for some sign, any sign, of his mother. What he saw startled him. The shuttle she’d entered was gone. It wasn’t in the bay anymore. They must have left during the skirmish.

Where had they gone?

Kieran flipped to a view of the port side bay, hoping to find his mother’s shuttle there. Instead he saw dozens of sprawled bodies lying in awkward positions, looking broken and wrong. He could see only a few faces, but he recognized them all. Anthony Shaw, who had taught Kieran how to shuck corn; Meryl Braun, who made popcorn for the kids on movie nights; Mira Khoury, who had a beautiful singing voice; Dominic Fellini, who welded metal sculptures out of worn spare parts. All of them gone. Snuffed out. Finished.

The people who did this had Waverly.

Kieran flipped back to the aft display and saw that the enemy OneMan was hovering over the starboard coolant system. He wished he could see what he was doing, but he could guess. They were trying to disable the engines, the only source of power on board. If they succeeded, every plant aboard the Empyrean would be dead in a few days. Every person would be dead in a week, of cold or asphyxiation.

Maxwell Lester’s voice came over the intercom. “Kieran, we’re suiting up right now to go after that OneMan. Go to the maintenance screen and find the reactor management system. Tell us the readings.”

By the time Kieran found the right screen, several of the boys had come into Central Command and were watching over Kieran’s shoulder. Kieran could hear the rest of the boys across the hallway in the central bunker, many of them crying or talking in hushed voices. Unlike the adults who were panicked, the boys seemed shocked into solemn quiet.

“Any of you know how to find the coolant readings?” Kieran asked the room at large.

“I’ll look,” said a weary voice. It was Seth, who limped to a vid display and flipped through the screens, cradling his head in his hand.

“You probably have a concussion,” Kieran told him.

“No kidding,” Seth muttered as he squinted at the schematics in front of him. Kieran wondered how he could be so familiar with the computing system, but he knew Seth spent a lot of time in Central Command with his father, the ship’s head pilot.

“The coolant looks normal,” Seth said to Kieran, who relayed the message over the com system.

“That’s good,” Maxwell said over the intercom. “Now I want you to do a head count of the boys. Once you know they’re all there, I want you to seal off the central bunker.”

“I can’t do that!” Kieran protested. “What about everyone else on the ship?”

“Once we get the reactor sealed off, you can let us in. It’s just a precaution.”

Kieran saw that he was right. “Seth, will you do the head count?” he asked.

Seth made an announcement for all the boys to report to him in the corridor outside Central Command, then struggled to his feet to do the count. Kieran flicked to the vid display outside the ship.

The enemy OneMan was still over the coolant tanks, its thrusters glowing as it kept its acceleration even with the Empyrean’s. The shuttle from the New Horizon was nearby. The Empyrean’s shuttle was speeding toward the enemy craft, and from the other end, three OneMen were traveling along the length of the ship, toward the enemy. He had no idea what they intended to do. There wasn’t much they
could
do. There were no weapons on board the shuttles or on OneMen.