Glow (18 page)

“Watch it,” Seth warned.

Kieran pulled back on the joystick to clear it, but the bottom of the shuttle grazed the outer hull, making a horrifying sound of metal scarring metal. The shuttle seemed to get caught on something momentarily, but then it released.

“Watch it!” Seth grabbed the joystick at his knees, pulled it back, and the shuttle hovered upward.

“I’ve got it,” Kieran said. “You can let go.”

“Don’t do that again,” Seth said breathlessly, his hands hovering over the copilot joystick in front of him.

“What’s the matter? Scared?” Kieran asked him.

“Shitless.”

Seth muttered into his microphone, asking Sarek to check atmospheric conditioning for damage.

After a few breathless minutes, Kieran saw the Empyrean’s aft thrusters ahead and knew that the engine room air lock must be somewhere to the left. “Where is it?”

“I don’t see it.”

The com beeped, and Seth answered. “What?”

“Let me talk to Kieran.”

It was the voice of Mason Ardvale. Kieran had thought the man must be dead. He hadn’t spoken to him in forty hours. “I’m here, Mason.”

“You’re a crazy damn kid, you know that?”

“Says the man who wants to blow himself out an air lock.”

“We have to vent the poison.”

“Fine by me. But you’re not doing it until I come get you.”

The man laughed, but it was a bitter, humorless laugh. “What makes you think the shuttle can dock with the engine room?”

Kieran’s body seemed to lurch as the blood drained from his torso. “The air locks don’t
match
?”

“The engine room air locks are designed for venting gas.” Mason coughed weakly. “They can’t even fit a OneMan.”

“But that’s crazy!” Seth cried hysterically. “Who would design a ship that way?”

“In any normal scenario, we’d have gotten about twenty warnings before the engines went critical. The regular crew of six could have handled any normal kind of breakdown.”

“The designers never imagined a
meltdown
?” Kieran cried.

“They never thought of
sabotage
.” Mason spoke calmly, in a monotone. “Otherwise, don’t you think we would’ve tried, son?”

Kieran looked at Seth, who blanched to hear his own father call someone else “son.”

“So there’s nothing we can do?” Kieran asked.

An agonized silence filled the cockpit. A sheath of sweat slathered Kieran’s skin, and he felt cold.

The man sighed. “Look, this’ll probably kill us, but you can try to position the cargo hold over the air lock, and when we decompress, we might blow inside.”

“Well, yeah! Let’s do it!” Kieran said.

“You don’t understand something,” Mason said grimly. “The force of the blowout could damage the shuttle. It’ll put a spin on it you might not be able to control. That’s why we hoped you kids wouldn’t try this.”

“God,” Seth said. He slumped in his chair, staring at the controls in front of him, blank. He lifted his eyes to Kieran’s, all his willfulness drained out of him.

Kieran stared back at the other boy. He might be stuck looking at Seth Ardvale’s face for the rest of his short life as they drifted away from the Empyrean, spinning like a pulsar. But what choice did they have?

“Okay, we’ll try it,” Kieran said. He felt physically sick, and his head pounded painfully. He took his hands away from the joystick for a moment and flexed his fingers to stop his trembling.

“When my eyeballs stop bleeding, I’m going to tan your hides,” Mason said.

“If you can see to catch us, old man,” Seth said, and the two of them laughed in their sullen way.

“Okay, Mason, what do I do?” Kieran readjusted his grip on the joystick.

“You’ve got to get the shuttle over the port side hatch.”

“There it is!” Seth said, pointing to the right.

Kieran saw the oval shape of the air lock jutting up from the hull of the Empyrean, and edged the shuttle over to it until the air lock came into view on his vid screen. Seth pressed a button, and the words “Docking Sequence” appeared at the bottom of the screen.

Kieran lowered the shuttle over the air lock.

The craft lurched to a stop, and the sound of metal on metal whined through the shuttle.

“God,” Seth said as he pushed a button that sucked the air out of the cargo hold into the reserve tanks so it would be available to repressurize.

The two boys looked at each other. Seth was biting the inside of his cheek, a nervous habit that distorted his face. Kieran licked his lips and said, “We’ve docked, Mason. Whenever you’re ready.”

“Okay. The second you hear the decompression, close the shuttle doors, do you hear? You’re going to have to be fast, or we’ll bounce out.”

“I know, Dad.” Seth sat with his finger poised over the button.

“On the count of three,” Mason said.

Kieran gripped the joystick, careful not to jolt the ship. His eyes were on the shroud of the nebula that waited to swallow up the last few adult crew members of the Empyrean.

“One.”

Kieran took a deep breath. He imagined the vacuum of space, the way it would give them frostbite instantly, collapse their lungs, boil their blood.

“Two.”

Seth opened the shuttle air lock doors to receive the crew. Kieran tightened his fists over the joystick.

“Three.”

A percussive sound slammed Kieran in the chest as the air from the Empyrean exploded out of the air lock, and suddenly the shuttle was spinning at an impossible velocity, so quickly that the universe had become a blur of gray and pink. Kieran felt his eyes crossing, and he closed them, holding the joystick, waiting for his head to clear enough that he could open them.

When he did, he gasped.

They’d already spun so far away from the Empyrean, the ship had shrunk into the distance, looking no larger than a jellyfish. Oh God. It swung out of view from the shuttle portholes, back in, then out, as the shuttle spun away from it, completely out of control, hurtling into the nebula like a rock skipping endlessly across waves of rushing water.

SPIN

For a time, all Kieran could do was hold on to his seat. Spots crowded his vision. He thought he might black out.

Cautiously, he opened his eyes. It made him dizzy to look through the portholes, so instead he focused on the joystick in front of him. The pilot’s terminal screen was blinking with a message: “Enable Attitude Adjustment.” He tapped the screen, and suddenly the ship came alive as dozens of thrusters began firing at random intervals.

“Dad!… Dad!” Seth screamed. Kieran couldn’t bear to turn his head to look at the other boy, who was pressing the intercom switch. “Can you hear me?”

“Are they back there?” Kieran asked him.

“I don’t know!”

“Did you close the hatch and repressurize?”

“Yes!”

“They probably blacked out,” Kieran said.

“I’m going down there.”

Seth reached for the buckle on his harness, but Kieran shouted, “Not until we stop this spin. You’d get beaten to death.”

“Then get it under control!” Seth shouted.

“I’m trying!” Kieran shouted back.

Had the spinning slowed down, or had Kieran gotten used to it? He couldn’t tell. The Empyrean was no longer visible through the cockpit portholes. Kieran hoped this meant that the shuttle was merely facing away from the ship, because the other possibility was too horrible: that they’d already drifted so far, the ship was invisible.

“Do you know how to run a nav system?”

Seth scoffed at this. “In this nebula?”

Red letters flashed across Kieran’s screen: “Attitude Adjust Failure.”

“Damn it! The gyroscope was damaged!” Kieran spat. The screen flashed, “Enable Manual Controls.” Kieran would have to stabilize the shuttle himself.

He punched the screen in front of him, and suddenly the thrusters all stopped firing.

“Can you feel which way we’re spinning?” Kieran asked Seth, knowing it was a ridiculous question.

Seth didn’t even bother answering.

The only way to slow down the spinning would be to fire a thruster in the opposite direction of the spin. Kieran closed his eyes and imagined the shuttle from the outside. The cargo hold was toward the aft and on the bottom of the shuttle, so when the blowout hit, the shuttle would have been thrown end over end. The ship was probably spinning nose down, so that meant he had to fire thrusters that would push the nose of the shuttle up.

Kieran pulled back on the joystick. The shuttle lurched wildly. Kieran heard the sound of Seth retching, and an acrid odor filled the cockpit. He kept pulling back on the joystick, praying under his breath, “Please please please please.”

“Stop! Stop!” Seth yelled as he wiped his chin on his sleeve. “There it is!”

Kieran opened his eyes and saw the Empyrean, gray and tiny as a pebble, blurred in the nebula. It must have been two hundred kilometers away or more. Acting purely on instinct, he let up on the joystick, then engaged the rear thrusters. He felt the back of his seat pushing against him. The Empyrean seemed to wobble as the shuttle rocked up and down, but it stayed in view as the thruster pushed the shuttle slowly toward home.

“I think you did it,” Seth said.

“It’ll be a few minutes before we have to dock.” Kieran nodded. “Let’s check on the others.”

He unhooked his harness and followed Seth down to the hatch that opened the cargo hold, dreading what he would find there. His heart thumped in his chest, and the veins in his temple felt swollen and itchy, as though all the panic and fear of the last few minutes (hours? days?) had collected there and was trying to get out. Seth pulled on the handle, heaved the hatch open, and looked inside.

Nothing but darkness.

“Hello?” Seth called. Kieran had never heard him sound so much like a little boy.

A groan struggled up through the darkness. Kieran flicked on the light just inside the hatch. What he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life.

They were huddled in a corner of the hold, bleeding, their faces swollen and puckered with frostbite, their eyes shut and oozing, encrusted with clotted blood. He barely recognized any of them. But they were alive.

“Can any of you speak?”

Weakly, one of the twisted figures held up a thumb. Kieran squinted at the face until he recognized Mason Ardvale, Seth’s father, who said, “You saved us all, Kieran.”

No word for his own son.

Seth stared at his father, his face blank. The boy seemed hollowed out.

“I better fly us home.” Kieran put his hand on Seth’s shoulder. “Good job.”

Seth shook off Kieran’s hand. “You think I need that from you?”

Kieran dropped his hand. “I was just trying—”

“Stop trying to act like you’re in charge,” Seth said. “No one trusts you.”

“You made sure of that, didn’t you?”

“Go to hell,” Seth said before pushing himself toward his father.

Kieran watched the boy take off his shirt and press it against a deep cut on his father’s forehead, lovingly dabbing at the crusted blood, whispering in his father’s ear. Kieran missed his own father terribly in that moment, but there was no time to dwell. The docking system in the cockpit was pulsing an urgent tone, and he had to get back.

He strapped himself into his seat and tried to guide the shuttle straight back to the Empyrean, but something was off. He couldn’t seem to approach it dead-on, but the Empyrean seemed to be slipping farther away the closer he got, as though the ship itself were …

“Sarek!” Kieran shouted into the com link. “Have the engines come back online?”

“Yeah! They just reengaged!” Sarek’s excited voice bounced through the wires. “We have gravity, not much, but more all the time! Did you get the crew out of the engine room?”

“Yes, we did. And they’re alive.”

Kieran heard a hundred and twenty boys whooping for joy.

“Listen, Sarek, is there any way you can stop the Empyrean’s acceleration? Just until we land?”

“Uh…” There was an uncomfortable pause. “I have no idea how to do that.”

“Okay, Sarek. Don’t worry about it.” Sweat beaded on Kieran’s upper lip, and he licked at it nervously. It probably wasn’t safe to take the engines offline again. They might not be able to turn them back on. But trying to land the shuttle on a moving target would make this twice as hard. Kieran wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, took hold of the joystick, and pushed it forward, giving the shuttle enough velocity to keep pace with the Empyrean.

As Kieran watched the Empyrean get larger in the cockpit windows, he imagined the shuttle and the Empyrean from above, visualizing the trajectory the shuttle would have to maintain in order to enter the air lock correctly. Kieran realized he’d have to travel much faster to catch up with the Empyrean.

Kieran pushed the thruster controls to their maximum capacity and was thrown backward into his seat. He could barely lift his arm to steer the ship, and it took all the strength in his abdomen for him to lean forward enough to reach the joystick.

Instead of aiming straight for the Empyrean, Kieran aimed the shuttle for a point ahead of the ship, trying to guess where the shuttle and the Empyrean would intersect. He held steady, ignoring his trembling limbs, the fearful warnings from Sarek coming over the com system, the ache forming at the back of his neck and in his crushed chest. This was going to work.

Soon the Empyrean dominated Kieran’s visual field. He was almost there. He searched the bubbly surface of the ship, looking for the familiar octagonal shape of the shuttle bay air lock, until finally the orange lines emerged out of the mist of the nebula. The docking bay looked tiny as Kieran aimed the shuttle for it, forcing the ship into a diagonal trajectory. The outer air lock doors opened, and Kieran eased back on the acceleration. He could breathe again, and his limbs weren’t so heavy. He bit the side of his cheek until he tasted blood. “Come on, come on,” he muttered.

The reality of landing a physical shuttle was more intuitive than a simulation. Kieran held the joystick steady as the shuttle glided slowly through the outer air lock doors. The ship bumped the ceiling on its way in, then screeched along the walls. But they were in. The outer doors closed around the shuttle, the air lock repressurized, and the inner doors opened onto the shuttle bay to a crowd of hopeful boys.