Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Seth leaving the room, swinging his elbows behind him in that defiant, angry walk he had. Kieran thought of going after him, but maybe it was better if Seth stayed out of the way.
“We’re going into zero gravity in three hours,” he said over the muttering in the crowd. His voice cracked. “That means we’ve got a lot of work to do to prepare the ship.”
“Are they shutting off the engines?” asked Arthur Dietrich. The worry in his blue eyes was magnified by his thick glasses.
“Yes, Arthur,” Kieran said. “And you’re in charge of readying the central bunker, and reviewing with everyone how to operate in zero grav.” They’d been briefed about zero grav in their classes, of course, but never once in forty-two years had the ship ever powered down. Zero gravity would be a new experience for all of them, and there was a lot to know. How to eat, how to drink, how to pee, how to sleep … the list was endless, but Arthur could handle it.
Boys chattered in the back, and Kieran tried to yell over them, but his voice cracked again. He was too tired already, and there was so much work to be done.
He felt something being pressed into his chest and looked down to see that Seth had gone for the Captain’s loudspeaker and was offering it to him with a disdainful look. “Here,” he said, and walked away.
All the boys saw Seth offer this simple solution to Kieran, and all of them were looking at Seth, impressed. Kieran tried to ignore his own embarrassment that he hadn’t thought of the loudspeaker himself, and he pressed the microphone to his lips. “Listen up, now, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Kieran chose the best boys to head up the efforts. Mark Foster was in charge of the crew to close all the manual doors and vents in the forward bays, including the grain areas and the mills and processing plants. Hiro Mazumoto was in charge of securing the poultry farms and making sure the birds were fed and watered before the ship lost gravity. Arthur Dietrich took four boys to organize all the harnesses, suction bags, and other equipment that would be needed for zero grav. Kieran was almost done giving out the orders and was about to let the crews go when he felt a tug on his shirt.
“What does Dad want me to do?” Seth asked. He stood behind Kieran, looking over his shoulder at his notes. Kieran had been so absorbed, he hadn’t noticed him there.
“Uh…” Kieran ruffled through his notes. “You go with Arthur’s crew.”
“What about the farming equipment?” Seth spoke so loudly, the boys stopped to listen.
“Mason didn’t say anything about—”
“Someone better make sure all the harvest and planting equipment is tied down,” Seth said through the side of his mouth.
Seth was right. A loose tractor could punch through the hull if the engines reengaged unevenly. Kieran could feel himself blanching. He should have thought of this if he was really in charge.
“Actually, that’s right, Seth,” he said, trying to act as though he’d already considered it. But he could hear how inept he sounded. “Why don’t you head that up? Take a few boys with you.”
“Yeah, okay.” Seth rolled his eyes and walked away.
Several boys shook their heads with disdain.
Seth tapped his crony, Sealy Arndt, a short, squat boy whose blockish head seemed to rest directly on his hunched shoulders, along with several other smaller boys, and they all went to the elevators that led to the large equipment.
As soon as Seth left the room, Bryan Peters started to scream again.
Kieran didn’t have time to soothe him. Rubbing his tired eyes, he marched back to the control room, where he sat in front of his vid screen, watching each team’s progress, shouting orders through the ship’s intercom when he saw the boys missing details or if they weren’t moving quickly enough. Only Seth’s team moved with precision. Only Seth seemed to think of everything and knew how to do it all. When one of the smaller boys lagged behind, Seth grabbed his arm and barked orders into his ear. That made all the boys work faster.
Nearly three hours had passed before Mason’s haggard face reappeared on Kieran’s com screen. The man looked twice as exhausted as he had before. “How’s it going?”
“The boys in the poultry farm are feeding the last row of chickens, and Arthur is organizing the zero grav gear.”
“Call everyone back,” Mason said. “What doesn’t get done doesn’t get done. You’ll have to deal with the damage later.”
Mason’s voice sounded so sorrowful, so resigned. Kieran paused. What did Mason mean, you will have to deal? Why not we?
That terrifying question led to others, equally terrifying. How were the adults going to get back to the uncontaminated areas of the ship if the bulkhead doors couldn’t be opened?
“Mason,” Kieran said slowly, “once the engines are fixed, how will you get out of there?”
Mason just stared at Kieran.
“We could…” Kieran desperately reached for an idea, however preposterous. “Construct an artificial air lock outside the second bulkhead doors. Like a tent or something.”
“Kieran…”
“I know we’re just kids, but we could do that. And then you can come out of there!”
“A tent isn’t going to stop radioactive particles, Kieran, and you know it.”
“Or we could transport you out through the air lock. We could use OneMen—”
“Kieran.” Mason held up a hand. “There’s no time, son. And it wouldn’t matter anyway.”
Kieran lifted his eyes to Mason’s weary face. The man’s eyes met his, and all the truth passed to Kieran in an instant.
The adults weren’t planning on coming back.
Kieran’s face relaxed into a mask of horror.
“Listen,” Mason said gently.
Kieran could only shake his head. No. This wasn’t happening.
“Kieran, you’ve got to make an announcement. Get all the boys back to the central bunker, and get them strapped into their bunks, okay?”
Kieran opened his mouth to speak. He couldn’t. Seth’s father was going to die.
“You’ve got a half hour!” Mason yelled hoarsely. “Do it!”
Kieran reached for the speaker to make a general announcement. He pressed the button, cleared his throat, and somehow made his voice work. “Everyone. All boys. Report back to the central bunker immediately. We’re going to zero gravity in thirty minutes.”
He set the message to loop and leaned back in his chair. He could hear the baby screaming in the other room. Until now, Kieran had been too busy to notice. But there was something in the little boy’s voice that sounded different.
Mason was still on the vid screen, looking at him. “You’re doing great, Kieran.”
“Thanks,” Kieran said, but he knew this wasn’t true. The boys were falling apart. “What’s going to happen?”
“You’re going to be okay. You just have to hold out until the shuttles can redock. I’m sending you a personal text with all the security codes for ship’s functions.”
“I can’t run this ship,” Kieran said. “I don’t know—”
“Hey.” Mason’s smile was gone. He was deadly serious. “There’s no one else.”
What about your son? Kieran wanted to ask.
Distantly, Kieran heard little Bryan hiccup, and hiccup again. Someone should give the poor kid—
“Oh, my God,” Kieran cried, and stood up. “I’ve got to go!” he yelled at the screen. Without waiting for Mason to say good-bye, he ran down the corridor at top speed toward the dormitory. He found Bryan lying on the floor, waving his arms at the ceiling weakly, still screaming, but mournfully. That’s what had changed in the baby’s cries. Before he’d been crying for help, now he was crying in despair. Kieran scooped the little boy into his arms and carried him to the galley, where he filled a grav bag with water.
The baby reached toward the tap with plump hands, nearly toppling out of Kieran’s arms. Kieran held the container to the little boy’s lips and watched with relief as the
baby sucked down the water in great, frantic gulps.
How long since anyone had given the poor little boy something to drink?
The baby emptied first one grav bag and then another, before he finally pushed the container away and leaned against Kieran, content and sleepy, his fingers flexing in the fabric of Kieran’s shirt.
Kieran carried the boy into the dormitory, slipped a grav harness around him, laid him down on a cot, and fastened him into a thin blue sleeping bag that was tethered to the bed. When he looked up, he saw that almost all the boys had returned from the rest of the ship and were standing in groups, waiting for instructions. Kieran pointed at Arthur. “Tell them what they need to know about zero grav.”
Arthur clapped his hands to get their attention, and then he demonstrated how to put on harnesses and how to hook into their bunks. He showed them how to use a grav bag for drinking and how to use the vacuum bags for waste. Kieran wandered up to the front of the room and stood next to Arthur, slipping into his own harness.
It took a lot of cajoling, but soon all the boys were fastened to their bunks and waiting for the engines to turn off. That was when Seth and his crew returned.
Kieran handed out harnesses. “Quick, put these on!” he said. Seth’s team was struggling into their harnesses when a strange shudder went through the ship. A weird hum seemed to vibrate through his rib cage, and then slowly, Kieran felt the soles of his feet grow lighter as the first thruster was shut down. There were only two more to go. “Hook into your cots!” he yelled.
The second thruster shut down, and Kieran felt a strange vertigo.
The younger boys hurriedly tied themselves down, but Seth and his two friends stood next to Kieran, knowing smiles on their faces. They were laughing at him. Kieran knew it was a mean bully trick, but he still felt foolish. “You heard me,” he tried to shout, but he sounded weak.
“Who’s going to switch over to secondary power?” Seth asked loudly enough for all the boys to hear. They looked at Kieran, waiting to see what he had planned.
Kieran opened his mouth, but he didn’t even know where the power switches were. In Central Command? Or were they in the engine rooms?
As if on cue, the third thruster shut down. All the lights blinked and went out.
A few of the younger boys screamed.
“Where is it?” Kieran could hear himself muttering, but he heard no response. A flashlight turned on, and Seth held it to his own face, making his features monstrous.
“I’ll take care of it.” Seth pushed himself up from the floor, his flashlight wavering over the room to create long shadows, and pulled himself along the ceiling conduits toward Central Command.
Kieran stood still, fighting against the sickening feeling in his limbs, and waited. After what seemed an eternity, the lights snapped back on. They were dimmer than before, but at least now he could see.
He looked down to find that he was floating two feet above the floor. He had a horrible, disembodied feeling and tried to wave his arms to steer himself, but he succeeded only in spinning, which made him feel like throwing up. He stopped moving his limbs and waited to drift to the ceiling, where he could get some leverage.
Seth floated back into the room, an insolent grin on his face. “Don’t worry, boss,” he said. “You can’t think of everything.”
Some of the boys laughed. As Kieran tied himself into his cot, he knew what they were thinking. That Seth would make a better leader than he would. Seth, who screamed at crying babies and pulled little boys by their arms.
Seth must not be allowed to take over.
GOOD-BYES
Kieran hadn’t slept in more than forty hours. Six hours without engines had turned into ten, which turned into twenty. By now, the crew had stopped making estimates.
If the engines couldn’t be fixed soon, the crops, forests, and orchards would start to die. If the plants were lost, there’d be no point in fixing the engines, because there’d be nothing to replenish the ship’s oxygen. The Empyrean would become a metal tomb.
Kieran was overcome with a fit of nervous energy and unhooked his harness to float over Sarek Hassan’s shoulder at the com displays. Sarek seemed to tolerate his presence a little better than the other boys. As one of the few Muslims aboard the Empyrean, Sarek had always been reserved, associating more with his family than with kids his age. He liked to go jogging with his father through the immense granary bays, so he was taut and lean and very strong. He was also unreadable. He had deep-set eyes in a bronze face, and though he seemed always aware of what was going on, it was as an outsider, an observer. This quality reminded Kieran of Waverly, and it made him feel as though he could trust the boy.
Sarek acknowledged Kieran’s presence with a brief nod.
“Don’t worry,” Kieran said as he hovered over the boy. “I won’t throw up on you.”
“You better not.”
Kieran had always thought zero grav would be fun, but it was disorienting and frustrating. It upset everyone’s stomach, made faces and hands swell up, and gave everyone headaches. Every motion sent Kieran’s body into an unpredictable spin, and the only way he could function was to strap himself to something.
“Any word from the shuttles?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be.
“Don’t you think I’d tell you if I’d heard something?”
“But have you checked all bands?”
Sarek rolled his eyes. “Are you deaf? There’s no word. From anyone.”
Kieran trembled, from exhaustion mostly but also from anger. All the boys had begun speaking to Kieran this way, and now even Sarek was joining in.
“Sarek,” Kieran said, his voice pinched with anger, “I asked you a question. Did you check all frequencies for communications in the last hour?”
Sarek stared at Kieran as though he were an idiot.
“If shuttle B42 is trying to communicate with us, don’t you think we’d better be listening? They could be injured, dead, drifting, anything.” Kieran was so tired, his tongue felt clumsy in his mouth, but he made himself enunciate each word. “Every hour, on the hour, you are to check every frequency for any kind of communication. Text. Voice. Video. And when I ask if you’ve done that, you are to answer…” Kieran waited for Sarek to finish his sentence for him.
The boy stared, mouth stubbornly closed.
“You are to answer yes. Because you will have done it. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Because if you don’t, I will assign someone to the com console who does understand.”
Without acknowledging Kieran, Sarek extended his finger and tapped the console, rhythmically, pointedly, scrolling through each frequency. His posture, his expression, the way his eyes fixed on the screen, all indicated supreme and utter boredom. When he was finished, Kieran said, “That’s right. Every hour, Sarek. We don’t know who’s on that shuttle, or who they might be trying to reach.” Kieran’s anger had subsided, and now he felt exhausted. “Maybe your parents—”
“No! They’re all gone. Everyone’s gone.”
“We don’t know—”
“You don’t know anything!” the younger boy spat, and turned his back on Kieran.
Kieran knew that Sarek was only feeling what everyone felt, what Kieran himself felt. The only remedy would be if the missing shuttles docked and everyone’s parents and sisters poured back into the Empyrean so things could go back to the way they were before.
They never could, though. Their peaceful way of life had been destroyed forever by people who were supposed to be their friends. To think of Waverly under their power? That was unbearable. If they laid a hand on her …
Kieran ached at that thought, so he pushed it away.
He decided to try lying down again. He hadn’t been able to sleep in so long, maybe now he could quiet his mind.
Kieran unhooked his harness, drifted up to the ceiling, and pulled himself along the conduits that housed the electrical wires. It was the best way to get around in zero gravity, and he wondered if the
engineers had designed the ship this way on purpose. He drifted into the bunker dormitory, hooked his harness loosely to a cot, slipped into the blanket envelope, and closed his eyes. Dreams flickered, and he wanted to give himself up to them, but he could hear a conversation from across the quiet room.
“One of us will have to override the bulkhead doors from Central Command,” said one voice.
“We can do that before we leave.”
“No. Someone should stay behind.”
“I want to come with you guys.”
“You’re the only one whose folks aren’t down there.”
“I don’t know where my dad is!”
Kieran wanted sleep so badly. But he knew what the boys were planning. It worried him that he hadn’t anticipated it. Wearily he unhooked himself from his cot, pushed up to the ceiling, and pulled himself along the conduits until he was hovering over the four boys.
“You can’t go down there,” he told them.
Tobin Ames glowered at Kieran. “We weren’t talking to you.”
“I don’t care who you were talking to. If you try to go down there, you’ll kill everyone on the ship.”
“No, we won’t. We’ll have to open the first bulkhead, but we’ll seal the second, which will keep the radiation out of the upper levels.”
“Okay. And then how will you get back? You’ll have to seal off the third bulkhead, right? So we’ll have lost another level.” Kieran passed his hand over his face while he considered. “So there goes all the exotics and tropicals, the entire rain forest. The lungs of the ship. We’d run out of oxygen before we got to New Earth.”
“My mom’s down there!” Austen Hand protested. “And they won’t answer the intercom anymore. I can’t just let her…”
The boy couldn’t finish the sentence. He buried his face in his hands.
“We’ll just open the bulkhead for a second,” Tobin pleaded.
“A second is all it would take to kill us all. Not right away, maybe, but slowly and painfully. Not to mention what it would do to our fertility. And if that goes, the mission is over.”
“There are no girls anyway,” Austen pointed out sullenly.