Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel (17 page)

Now there was a thoughtful pause before the applause, but when it finally began, it was loud and prolonged. Kieran nodded. He felt certain now that he’d be elected.

The voting took a matter of minutes, with each crew member dropping small ballots in a box. Tallying the votes by three independent counters went quickly, too, and they did the counting right on stage. Sarah watched the process with squinty eyes, casting furious glances in Kieran’s direction. He tried to look confident as he sat in the front row, but he couldn’t stop himself from worrying. What would he do if he were no longer Captain? He wasn’t sure life would have the same meaning for him anymore. He
had
to win.

You will win,
said the voice in the back of his mind.

He sat up straighter. Where was his faith? If he was truly meant to lead the Empyrean to New Earth, the way he believed, then of course he would win. He shouldn’t fear.

When finally the three counters—Harvey Markem, Alia Khadivi, and Melissa Dickinson—approached the microphone, the murmuring conversations in the room died away, and everyone looked at them expectantly.

Harvey cleared his throat, his face bright red under his orange hair. “Sarah Hodges won ninety-one votes. Kieran Alden got one hundred and forty-nine. Kieran Alden is—”

Harvey’s voice got lost in the crackle of applause and cheers. Kieran stood, and the applause rose to a crescendo as he mounted the stairs to the stage and walked to the podium. He couldn’t help smiling. When he looked down at Sarah, she was sitting with her arms crossed over her chest, scowling. Waverly was sitting a few rows behind her, looking unsurprised.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said with a smile, holding up his hands for them to quiet. After a while the cheering died down, and people sat to listen to his speech. “First off, I’d like to thank Waverly Marshall for calling this election.”

Waverly watched him, impassive. If she heard his sarcasm, she didn’t let on.

“I just want you all to know that I’ll continue to lead this ship.…” Some people in the back coughed, and he waited for them to quiet. But then several more kids in the back started coughing, and some of them stood up, their hands covering their faces.

And then they fell down.

His speech forgotten, Kieran watched as the sickness seemed to spread from the back of the audience forward. More and more kids were grimacing, choking, doubling over, tears streaming from their eyes. It moved toward the stage like a wave. “Evacuate!” Kieran cried into the microphone. People in the front rows stared at him blankly. “Evacuate immediately!” he screamed. “Exit through the front doors! There’s some kind of gas! Go!”

It seemed to take hours for them to stand up, look around, see the crew members falling down in the back, grasping at their necks, struggling for breath, before they began to understand.

The auditorium erupted into chaos.

Kieran looked over the crowd, first for Waverly, who was holding two little girls, one on each hip, running awkwardly for the nearest exit. Next he registered Sarah Hodges, who was pulling a little boy behind her, covering her nose and mouth with the collar of her shirt.

Then he saw Arthur.

He was lying on his back, spread-eagled in the middle of the aisle.

Kieran didn’t think. He dove.

He swam through the crowd, pushing against shoulders and sweaty foreheads, fighting through them to get to Arthur. Twenty feet to go. He couldn’t see him through the crowd slamming him backward—an endless stream of terrified, tear-streaked faces rushing at him down the aisle. Kieran felt a horrible, caustic sting in his throat, his eyes, his stomach. And the taste was like orange juice that had sat out too long. He thought he would vomit, but he realized he shouldn’t breathe it in. He clamped his mouth closed, willed himself not to inhale. He plunged against the current of fleeing kids—ten feet more—and he thought he caught a glimpse of yellow hair on the floor. Then he lost Arthur completely, but he walked forward blindly, until he stepped on him.

He reached for Arthur’s hand, missed, then made a desperate swipe again, and this time made contact with his leather belt. Kieran wrapped his fingers around it and pulled until he could get his other arm underneath Arthur’s waist, and then somehow, he didn’t know how, he lifted the boy over his shoulder and began to run.

His lungs ached. It hadn’t been twenty seconds since he started holding his breath, but the strain of carrying Arthur made every muscle in his body cry out for oxygen. He fought the instinct to gulp air, and instead focused his eyes on the door, which was at least seventy feet away. He groped, blinking tears out of his stinging eyes, feeling along a row of seats with his legs until finally the door was in front of him.

He threw his weight against it and staggered into the corridor, which was full of sick kids, coughing kids, crying kids. He limped to the elevator, wheezing, barely able to breathe. His throat felt narrow and swollen, and he felt hemmed in by all the kids who had piled into the elevator with him. By the time the elevator opened to the madness of the infirmary, Kieran’s vision had turned gray. Panicked kids were packed into the waiting area, and there wasn’t a free chair or bed to be had. He gently set Arthur down on the floor and stood up to find Tobin.

He felt a wave of vertigo rise like bile from his stomach.

A loud crack resounded through the crowded room, quieting the crowd as people looked around for the source of the noise. Kieran realized it had been the sound of his own head hitting the metal floor. He hadn’t felt a thing.

THE CENTRAL COUNCIL

The day after the attack, the ship felt eerily quiet as Waverly walked the corridor to Central Command. The crew had been badly scared, and most of them stayed hidden in their quarters, many of them shirking their duties to do so. She still had a sore throat, and her eyes stung from the toxic gas, but she was unscathed compared to some other people. Several kids, including Kieran and Arthur, had been badly affected and were receiving oxygen therapy in the infirmary. Beyond that, few details had been released.

Waverly turned the corner and saw that more graffiti had been added to the walls outside Central Command. There was a drawing of the Central Council, all seven members, and in front of them, on its hands and knees, was a figure Waverly could only assume was meant to be her, looking ready to perform any number of lewd acts.

The first thing she’d do as a Central Council member would be to clean up this damn hallway.

Waverly took a deep breath, made a fist, and knocked on the door of Central Command. She heard the whirring of a video camera, and looked up at the empty black lens trained on her. Sarek Hassan’s voice crackled through the intercom, “What is it, Waverly?”

“I’d like to use the com system to call a meeting of the Central Council.” This was an excuse. There were other places she could make an announcement from, but she wanted to know what was going on.

There was a brief pause, then the door slid open to Central Command looking dark and empty without Kieran in the Captain’s chair and Arthur in the number-two spot near the portholes. Of the usual command crew only Sarek remained, seated at his spot at the main com board. Matt Allbright, Kieran’s chief henchman, stood behind Sarek, looking over his shoulder at the com screen.

“Who’s doing that graffiti?” Waverly asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Whoever it is wears a black hood over their face,” Sarek said, sounding annoyed by it himself. “Anyway, it’s the least of our worries.”

“Which station should I use for the announcement?” Waverly asked.

Sarek nodded toward the Captain’s chair. She sat down in it, put the headset on, and engaged the system. “Attention Central Council members, this is Waverly Marshall, and I’m calling a meeting. Please report to the council chamber in five minutes.”

She stayed seated and looked across the aisle at the screen that so absorbed Sarek and Matt. It was a view of the corridor outside of the auditorium. They must be looking for video evidence of the terrorist planting the gas.

“Did the cameras capture anything?” Waverly asked.

Sarek jerked his head toward her angrily but seemed to calm down when he saw she was looking at the screen with grave concern. “Not a single image on any camera has ever caught him.”

“He must be disabling them somehow,” she said.

Sarek looked at Matt, whose face was impassive, then grudgingly said, “He is.” He fast-forwarded the image to a completely white screen that lasted for several seconds. “We think he’s shining a laser into the lenses of the cameras as he passes by. We’d seen this white screen several times before we realized what it was.”

“So you’ve never gotten his image, not once?”

“Not anything we can work with,” Sarek said darkly. “All we know is that he’s big.”

He flicked the screen, and a shadowy image of a hulking figure in a hooded jacket appeared frozen, arm upraised, a device in his hand pointed toward the camera. The hood cast a shadow over his features.

Waverly shook her head, though she knew it didn’t really matter. Any stranger on board would obviously be the terrorist, and any crew member would instantly recognize him. So why was he bothering to hide himself? “How’s Kieran?”

“He’ll be fine in a day or two. So will Arthur.”

“Has anyone been able to figure out what that gas was?”

Sarek shook his head. “Nothing we had in our stores. He must have made it in the lab. We think it must be like the kind of stuff used in crowd control back on Earth during the Water Wars. Not lethal, but it’s incapacitating.”

“Why would he do that?” Matt said in his deep baritone. “Why not finish us off?”

“It’s a warning,” Waverly said. “He’s trying to scare us. Next time he’ll use something worse.”

Matt and Sarek looked at each other.

“What?” Waverly asked them. “Guys?”

Matt stared stubbornly at the screen. Sarek avoided Waverly’s glance.

“There’s a Central Council now,” she told them, “and I’m on it. If you’re withholding information from me, I can sic the Justice of the Peace on you for obstruction of an official investigation.”

Sarek held up a hand. “Okay. There was a note.” Sarek raised his eyebrows at Matt, who pulled a key from a chain around his neck and went to a cabinet behind the Captain’s chair. From it he pulled a red metal canister, the kind used by farmhands for drinking water. It was wrapped in a clear plastic bag.

“We found this in the lighting booth at the back of the auditorium.”

Waverly took it from him. Fastened to the canister was a note written in bold black lettering:

ATTACKS WILL INCREASE IN SEVERITY UNTIL YOU SIGN A PEACE TREATY WITH THE NEW HORIZON.

“Peace treaty?” she said. “How can we sign a peace treaty if they won’t even answer our hails?”

Sarek’s expression darkened but he said nothing. Waverly filed this away for later. Now wasn’t the time to press him.

Waverly pushed the bag at Matt, who took it from her. The note had the kind of twisted logic Anne Mather used. Those words were probably dictated by the woman herself.

“I want to know everything you’re doing to find that bastard,” Waverly said to Matt. “Come with me.”

“Now?”

“You’re making a report,” she barked. She didn’t care about how bossy she sounded. “When Matt comes back, Sarek, I want you to come tell us what you know, too.”

Sarek looked at her doubtfully, but she stared him down, and he finally gave a terse nod.

She marched out of Central Command and down the long hallway to the chamber, where she found the rest of the council already waiting for her. The council chamber was a domed room—one of the few rooms in the vessel with an almost panoramic view of the starry sky—so it was one of the few places where the nebula they’d just finished traversing was still visible. It was huge, pink, with tentacles that spread away from its center. It looked vaguely like a squid. She shuddered and turned away from it.

Alia Khadivi sat at the table twisting her big turquoise ring around her finger, her enormous dark eyes glistening in the lamplight. Tobin Ames sat with his hands woven together behind his neck, and he watched Matt cautiously through his overgrown brown bangs. Melissa Dickinson, Sealy Arndt, and Harvey Markem lined the other side of the table. The two huge boys dwarfed mousy little Melissa, but she seemed unaware of the effect and smiled shyly at Waverly, who took the seat they’d left open for her at the head of the table.

“Thanks for coming,” Waverly said. “Unfortunately, Arthur Dietrich is too unwell to be here, but I’ll catch him up later. Matt Allbright is here to report on the progress so far in the investigation to find the terrorist. Matt?” Waverly swiveled her chair to face him.

At first Matt stared at the center of the table, seeming tongue-tied, but he cleared his throat.

“The fact is, we have very few leads. There is no clear video trace of the terrorist, so we can’t learn where he’s living, how he’s getting supplies, or whether he’s in contact with the New Horizon.”

“Well,” Waverly said. “You have the white screens he’s leaving behind. You can follow his movements that way.”

“Maybe,” Matt said, “but it’s hard to search for a white screen that lasts for only a second or two. We’d have to fast-forward through days’ worth of video, and we’ll probably miss a lot of them. Instead we’re concentrating on trying to learn if he’s in contact with Anne Mather.”

“Are you monitoring outside transmissions?” Waverly asked.

“There are ways to encrypt transmissions to make them sound like background radiation. So far we’re not seeing anything like that originating from the ship, but we’ve got to assume that he has superior technical knowledge to us.”

“Have you physically searched the ship?”

“We go out on patrol every single day in pairs.”

“And do you randomly change the timing of where you go?” Waverly asked.

Matt looked at her, blank.

“If you want to catch him, your movements have to be unpredictable,” Waverly said, surprised Kieran hadn’t thought of this. “Also, you shouldn’t be talking or making any sound. If he can hear you coming, he’ll be able to get away easily.”