Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel (30 page)

And this time, she had no one but herself to blame.

Still, she wanted to say good-bye to him. She wanted to wish him luck. She wanted … She didn’t know what she wanted. But she couldn’t let him see her. So she left the shuttle bay and went to her quarters. She boiled a mash of grain and beans and ate it without seasoning. Her eyes trailed the words of one of her mother’s old mystery novels as she sat curled on the sofa in the shape of a sea prawn. And when she went to bed, she stared into the dark with round eyes, trying to forget Seth, the prisoner, Anne Mather—everything. She tried to forget herself.

THE LAST AMEN

“Thank you all for coming.” Kieran looked at his dwindling congregation as he massaged the wooden podium with his fingers. He wasn’t feeling inspired for this sermon. He was too afraid.

“Tomorrow morning, early, we are going to meet our enemies for the first time since the attack. This time, I hope, our encounter will be a peaceful one. I know you want revenge. I want that, too. But my job is to keep you safe. That’s why I’m making a deal to try to negotiate a peaceful resolution to our conflict. If that doesn’t work—”

“Then what?” someone cried from the back of the room. “You’ll bend over and kiss their asses?”

Kieran looked up, stunned. He scanned the congregation for the speaker, but with the bright stage lights shining in his face, he couldn’t see into the back of the room.

“No,” he said. He glanced over the rest of his sermon, realized how bland it was, crumpled it up into a stiff ball, and threw it backward over his shoulder. Some people laughed, and a few people sat up straight in their chairs. “No. If they don’t give us our parents immediately, and if they try to board this vessel or in any way make a hostile move, then … the Central Council and I have agreed that we’ll take back our parents by force.”

A whoop issued from the back of the room, and several catcalls joined it, and then suddenly the congregation was on its feet, clapping and hollering for joy. “We’ll kill them! Kill them all!” someone screamed over the applause. Several boys started chanting, “Anne Mather’s head! On a stake! Anne Mather’s head! On a stake!” Soon the entire audience had taken up the battle cry, and the room broke into a frenzy of bloodlust.

Marjorie Wilkins and her sister stood on their chairs in the front row, hands raised over their heads as they screamed their helpless rage into the air. They’d received no video from the New Horizon. In fact, that was probably the source of most of the ire in the room—to see friends get news from loved ones and to go without it yourself. It would be enough to turn anyone savage.

And savage they were. Red faces bawled, clenched fists pumped the air, voices rose in hoarse cries for revenge. Kieran stared, amazed. He didn’t recognize them. He had no idea how to talk to them. When he got ahold of himself, he raised his hands over his head and yelled into the microphone, “That’s enough! Stop! Stop!”

Slowly the crowd settled down, looking at him expectantly.

“I know you want revenge for what they’ve done to us. I do, too.”

“Damn straight!” Marjorie screamed, and several people laughed.

“Let’s skip the negotiations!” a boy yelled from the front row. “Let’s get them!”

Several cries of approval answered this.

“We have to be realistic!” Kieran said loudly over them. “We all want to punish them, but in a fight on their turf, we might be the ones getting punished.”

“Fearin’ Kieran!” someone screamed from the back, and several people started chanting it, first in soft voices, but the volume mounted, and soon the entire congregation was yelling at the tops of their lungs, some of them defending Kieran, most attacking.

Kieran licked the sweat from his upper lip, tasted its salt. He’d been here before, standing in front of a crowd that wanted to condemn him. He’d felt this terror before, and it had almost beaten him.

No,
he told himself.
No.

“Shut up! All of you!” he screamed into the microphone. Ignoring him, Marjorie Wilkins lunged over the back of her seat to swat at a boy who was jeering at Kieran with his tongue hanging out. The boy shook her off, and she fell down. Overtaken with a fresh surge of anger, Kieran’s voice trebled in volume as he bellowed, “SHUT THE HELL UP!”

His voice was so loud in the speakers it drowned out the chanting, and the jeers petered out as people looked at him in surprise.

He let them look, waited for the silence to expand to the outer walls of the room. When he spoke again, his voice was even, modulated, quiet.

“If you think for one second that you’re going to walk in there, shoot a bunch of adults, and then walk back out with our parents, you’re fooling yourselves.” He took the microphone off of its stand and jumped off the stage to walk up the aisle, looking at every face he passed. “I saw what they did to our crew in the initial attack, and I’m telling you, we can’t beat them that way. Get that through your thick skulls.”

A murmur of annoyance spread through the crowd, but he squelched it by yelling over them.

“And you can all go to hell if you think I’m a coward! Tomorrow I’m going to the New Horizon all alone to negotiate with those murderers. They’ll be able to kill me on the spot if they want to. And why wouldn’t they? I’m nothing to them.”

He’d reached the back of the room, which had gone silent. Most of the eyes he met seemed embarrassed, though a few people looked at him with insolent grins.

“I’ve already told Anne Mather that I’ll allow her no immunity from war crimes charges, not on our ship, and not on New Earth, either. She’s got reason to get rid of me, but I’m betting my life that she won’t.”

He found the insolent faces in the audience, and he stared each of them down as he backed up the aisle again toward the stage. Some of them tried to hold his gaze but eventually dropped their eyes. Marjorie Wilkins, her shirt torn and hanging on her lanky frame, looked chastened and sheepish.

“It’s time for all of you to grow up. You might want some final showdown like in the storybooks, but this isn’t a storybook. This is war. And I can tell you, as someone who watched our families blown out an air lock with my own eyes, war doesn’t have a happy ending. Not for anyone.”

He took the stairs two at a time back onto the stage and stared out over the congregation, which looked back at him, cowed and quiet. And then he said, “Let us pray.”

To his surprise, every head in the room bowed down, even if some were more reluctant than others.

The rest of the service was peaceful, though he noticed a few people walked out. He decided he didn’t care about them. Maybe he didn’t have the approval of everyone on the ship, but that wasn’t what mattered now. Human beings might be thinly disguised savages; that’s what the history books seemed to say. But peace was always better than war. He was doing the right thing by trying to talk to Mather, and he wasn’t going to let anyone make him doubt himself ever again.

When he’d said the last amen, he walked to Central Command without meeting anyone’s eyes and took his post, watching the point of light on the long-range radar screen as it crept nearer and nearer the center. That point of light was the New Horizon, and when it finally reached the center of the screen, he’d be able to look out a porthole and see it looming once again in the sky. Then it would begin.

At bedtime he went alone to his quarters and ate a plain meal of dry bread, cold chicken, figs, and raw asparagus. He chewed without tasting, his eyes on the circle of starry sky framed by his porthole. When bedtime came he lay down with a cool cloth across his eyes. He wanted sleep, but he couldn’t stop himself from going over the negotiating points he’d memorized. Though no amount of rehearsal was going to make this conversation easy (Mather was too wily for that), it made him feel better to know what he intended to say. It gave him some small illusion of control.

In the wee hours, he bathed and put on his best clothes, then went to Central Command to sit with Sarek while he guided the ship to the rendezvous point. Sarek looked like a haggard old man, cruelly overworked. Once again Kieran felt the loss of Arthur. He’d kept himself from thinking about the betrayal of his most trusted friend, but now he wished he could talk things over with that owlish boy, who would have reasoned through every step in their plan, looking at it from all angles, considering many perspectives at once—a talent few possessed. The only two people he knew were capable of this type of thinking were preparing an attack he’d never approved. Now that he was about to board the enemy ship, though, Kieran supposed he was glad there was a group of kids ready to meet violence with violence, if it should come to that.

“Are you nervous?” Sarek asked him, breaking through his thoughts. Sarek’s eyes were ringed by blue circles so dark they looked like bruises, and the skin around his mouth had creased into parentheses—features Kieran had seen only on much older adults. Sarek was working himself into exhaustion, and no matter what Kieran did, no matter how many times Matt Allbright offered to take over for him so he could get some sleep, Sarek would irritably shake his head. Kieran thought he knew why: because sleep was impossible anyway. Until his father was safely aboard the Empyrean, Sarek would stay in his chair.

“Nervous about what?” Kieran asked with a sarcastic smirk.

“Talking to that woman. Going on board that ship.”

“Of course I am.”

Sarek looked at him pensively. “What about the Central Council?”

“What about them?” Kieran said, annoyed.

“Are they up to this?”

Kieran laughed. “No. But they think they are.”

“Well,” Sarek said ruefully, “that’s half the battle.”

“Promise me that you won’t open the shuttle air lock for them until you’ve heard from me that Mather’s going to betray us. Can you do that?”

“I’ve written new encryption codes. They won’t be able to leave without me opening the doors from up here.”

“Good.” The two boys stared at each other, faces blank, until Kieran gathered the courage to say, “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I mean it.”

“Shut up,” Sarek said.

Kieran wanted to hug him. He was suddenly haunted by the thought that this could be the last time he’d ever see this boy who had stood by him through all these months of struggle. But Sarek wouldn’t want a hug. He didn’t like sentimentality, and, anyway, Kieran didn’t want to think he might die today. That would only make him more afraid. And he couldn’t succeed with Mather if he was overcome by fear. So he settled for patting Sarek on the back and saying, “I’ll see you soon.”

“Yep,” Sarek said, and turned back to his screen as if this were any other day.

Kieran walked out of Central Command, past the endless graffiti depicting him as a coward, as a capitulator, as an evil dictator, as a saint. He took the stairs down to the port-side shuttle bay, where he found Waverly standing outside a shuttle with its ramp down. She was pacing back and forth nervously, wringing her hands. As he approached he saw beads of sweat in the hollow of her neck, and the skin around her eyes was pulled tight. He was close enough to smell her shampoo when she finally noticed him. She stopped pacing and stood in front of him, just two feet away, looking without speaking.

“You guys all ready?” he asked her. His voice sounded strained in his own ears, but the anger was gone from him. Now that the day had arrived when their fate would be decided, everything felt clearer.

“We’ve practiced ourselves almost to death,” she said. “I think we’re ready.”

“Good.” He prodded at the floor with the soft toe of his shoe. “So you’ll wait to hear from me?”

“Of course.”

“And I don’t need to say this, probably, but…” He glanced at her, saw that she was listening. There was no trace of defensiveness in her eyes. She was trying to be stoic, as always, but fear ebbed off of her. “You know they’ll probably kill me if you try to board while I’m still negotiating.”

“Kieran, we’ll wait to hear from you.”

“I’m trusting you with my life.”

“I know that,” she said softly, but she looked away.

It seemed there ought to be something more to say, but no words came to him. He turned to go, but she lunged at him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and hung on.

He was shocked and didn’t move at first, but soon his arms found their natural position, wrapped around her, his hands pressing against the bones of her back. She smelled like he remembered, felt almost like he remembered, though her softness was gone. They held each other like that for … he didn’t know. It could have been seconds or minutes, until finally she let him go and, wiping at tears, turned and ran back into the shuttle. He watched her go, remembering that terrible day he’d watched her board another shuttle to face a horrible ordeal at Anne Mather’s hands. That terrible day he’d begged her to stay, get off the shuttle, don’t go. He wanted to beg her to stay now, but instead he turned and walked out of the shuttle bay, the only sound in his ears the scuff of his soles against the cold metal floor.

He walked across the ship to the starboard shuttle bay and the shuttle nearest the air lock doors. When he pushed the button to lower the cargo ramp, the seals popped open, sounding like an eggshell cracking. This shuttle had never been opened before, not since it was loaded onto the Empyrean back on Earth, and it smelled of ancient glues and sealants. He sat in the pilot seat and patched in to Central Command. Sarek acknowledged him with a cursory grunt, and Kieran listened to him breathing as he waited, tense and quiet.

Kieran watched the radar screen as the blinking point of light showing the New Horizon slowly edged its way toward the center, finally getting near enough to trigger the ship’s collision protocol. A light flickered across his screen, and the words “Object approaching” flashed urgently, casting a sickly green light over the cockpit.

“They’re here,” Sarek said.

Kieran’s armpits were soaked. His hands shook as he warmed up the engines, and he rubbed his palms together, trying to calm the mad trembling of his fingers. The shuttle engines purred and the craft lifted off the floor, then slowly he pivoted it around to face the air-lock doors.