It was over.
The round, freckled face of Arthur Dietrich appeared before Kieran. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Kieran beckoned him closer. “Throw them in the brig. Gather all the guns and bring them to me.”
Arthur fought his way through the crowd around Seth and yelled something at Sarek. Then Kieran saw something wonderful: Sarek, helped by eight other boys, dragged the snarling Seth out of the auditorium.
“You’ll regret this!” he screamed at Kieran before they carried him away.
Meanwhile, Arthur had gotten the guns and brought them to Kieran.
“Take out the casings,” Kieran told him, and watched his clumsy fingers work the mechanisms. A boy brought him a grav bag full of water, and he sipped at it eagerly. Arthur held up the ammunition casings for Kieran to see. “Okay. Now hide them where no one can find them, Arthur. Hide all the guns.”
Nearly tripping over his own feet, Arthur hurried off with the weapons.
“Kieran, are you okay?” Little Matthew Chelembue touched Kieran’s cheek with concern.
Kieran smiled. “Bring me some food.”
RECOVERY
For the first few days, Kieran could only sip broth and eat bread. He lay on a cot in Central Command, trying to answer questions about how to clean the air filters or how many chickens to kill for dinner, but most of the time he dozed.
As soon as he could sit up on his own, he watched the vid console that showed the cell where Seth, Sealy, and Max were locked up. Seth paced like a caged animal. Max was sullen. Sealy was quiet but watchful. If Seth ever figured out that Sealy had helped Kieran, he’d be in real danger. Maybe he could get Sealy out of there to a cell of his own where he’d be safe.
He put the thought aside. Sealy had been the one who broke Matthew Perkins’s arm. He claimed it was an accident, but Kieran thought it was only right that he serve some time in the brig, at least until Kieran had a better take on the political situation. The three ringleaders had caused complete havoc in their monthlong dominion over the ship, and many of the boys resented them fiercely. But Kieran suspected there might be an undercurrent of sympathy for Seth among the boys. At times he felt that he was being watched by unkind eyes. He’d have to take control of the ship with a firm hand to make sure Seth didn’t rise to power again.
“I’m glad you’re back,” Arthur Dietrich said one night. He and Kieran were becoming good friends, and they often talked late into the night after everyone else had gone to bed. Arthur hugged his mug of hot chocolate to his middle.
“Hot chocolate always reminds me of my mom,” Kieran said softly.
Arthur looked at him sharply. The boys had adopted an unspoken policy not to mention parents, or the girls, or anything from their past lives. It was one way of surviving. But tonight, Kieran wanted to remember. “She always put lots of cocoa into it, and a splash of goat’s milk. Made it creamy.”
“I like mine dark,” Arthur said.
“Where were your parents during the attack?” Kieran asked.
“I’m not sure. Dad was probably in the granaries. Mom might have been in her garden, or…” Arthur looked into his mug. “That’s the hardest part. I don’t know what happened to them, and there’s no one to ask.”
“I think my dad’s dead,” Kieran said, surprised at himself. It wasn’t something he’d allowed himself to think, and he just said it, as though he’d been certain all along.
“Really?” Arthur asked gently.
“Both my parents were in the starboard shuttle bay.” Kieran realized he’d never told this to anyone. “I saw Mom get on a shuttle, but…”
Arthur gazed out the porthole, and Kieran wondered if they were thinking the same thing: All those people were still out there, twirling in the cold darkness.
Kieran sank into silence, and Arthur sipped his cocoa quietly.
“You know, Kieran,” Arthur finally said, “Seth did try to kill you.”
“You don’t think that was a bluff?”
“It might have started out as a bluff, but I’m not sure it would have ended as one.”
Kieran squirmed in his seat. He didn’t like talking about that day.
“All I’m saying is … he’s still dangerous.”
“Yes, he is, and most of the boys know it.”
“Some of them want to break him out,” Arthur said, his cornflower blue eyes on Kieran. “If that happens, Seth could do a lot of damage.”
“That’s why we have to make sure he doesn’t get out.”
“You should let me get the guns from where I hid them.”
“No guns,” Kieran said, so firmly that the words raised a cough in his throat.
“We don’t know what will happen,” Arthur warned.
“True, but we can’t act like Seth. The only thing that proves we’re right is that we don’t act like him.”
“You found a way out of the brig. He will, too.”
“Maybe.” Arthur could be right, unless Kieran could bring Seth’s supporters around. “Who do you think is against me?”
Arthur thought hard about the question and wrote down ten names. At the top of the list was Tobin Ames, the boy who had planned to go down to the engine room to get his mother.
“Why don’t you send Tobin up to speak to me?” Kieran said.
“Are you sure?”
“I want to try talking to him.” He’d created this rift with Seth by ignoring him. He would try a different tactic with Tobin.
Tobin always reminded Kieran of a hedgehog, with coarse brown hair that stood on end, a rounded frame, and a shifting gaze. He looked sleepy when he approached Kieran’s cot. “Did Arthur wake you?”
“I was watching over my mom,” the boy said sullenly.
“How is she?” Kieran asked, keeping his voice low because he knew it made him seem wiser, calmer, more adult.
“She’s not too good,” Tobin snapped. “If you had let us go down—”
“We would all be dead. You know why we couldn’t go down there, Tobin. The only way to rescue them was the way we did it. Ask your mom.”
“I would…” The boy’s sentence trailed off.
So she was unconscious. She might be dying. They all might die.
“I didn’t call you up here to debate the past,” Kieran said, trying to sound as patient as he could. “I need a chief medical officer, and I hear that you’ve been poring over the instructional videos, learning a lot.”
“I’ve had to! They didn’t just have radiation sickness. They had decompression sickness, and cuts, and abrasions…”
“I’m putting you in charge of the infirmary,” Kieran said. “Choose three capable men to be your crew, and start training them.”
Tobin was so surprised that he lost his voice for a moment. “To do what?”
“Assist you. Arthur has taken inventory of the granaries, and the corn is almost ripe. We’re going to have to harvest soon. That means boys running equipment, working hard. There will be injuries. We need to be ready.”
Kieran didn’t add that the infirmary was the area where Tobin was least likely to do him political damage. If the boy took the job seriously, he wouldn’t have time to organize an uprising.
Tobin left the meeting that night looking confused, but he did assign three of his friends to help in the infirmary, and the four of them spent hours every day training themselves using instructional videos and the vast medical encyclopedia.
When Kieran felt well enough to walk, the infirmary was the first place he went. There were medications littering the cabinets and empty oxygen tanks on the floors, but all the patients had fresh sheets, and they seemed well cared for, even if they were still horribly weak.
Eight. Only eight adults left. Please God, don’t let any more die, Kieran prayed.
He sat next to Victoria Hand’s cot and searched her swollen face for signs of consciousness. She was the only remaining medical person on board, and they needed her badly. “Has she spoken?” he asked her son, Austen,
who sat in a chair by her bed.
“Not today,” the boy said. He looked ghostly, with his light blond hair and pale, sallow skin. “She was awake yesterday.”
“Has she been able to help you guys? Give you any advice?”
Austen shook his head.
Kieran took the woman’s reddened hand and squeezed it, hoping to feel something in return, but not even her breathing changed. He stood. “I think you’re doing a really good job,” he said to Tobin, who was standing behind him, looking on. “How’s your mom?”
The boy smiled. “She talked this morning. She knew me.”
Kieran sensed that Tobin had forgiven him. “What has she been saying?”
“We talked about Dad, mostly, where he probably is. What we’ll do when he comes back. She wants to make him a cake.”
Kieran smiled. “Can I have a piece?”
The boy nodded grudgingly. “Sure. You can have a piece.”
The next day, Kieran felt strong enough to survey the damage to the agricultural bays. He had no idea what forty hours of zero gravity might have done, and he was anxious to see for himself.
Seth had taken care of the most pressing issues, but there were still problems. The granary lights were much dustier than usual. A stand of aspens in the arboretum had fallen, and a team of boys was feeding them into the mulchers. In the tropics bay, a palm tree had toppled into a lemon grove, killing several smaller trees. The small herd of goats had sustained some injuries, but the chickens seemed healthy, though the coop was filthy. Otherwise, the damage was surprisingly minimal, and Kieran knew that if the boys worked steadily, they’d be able to make the necessary repairs.
But keeping them working was a problem. The mood on the ship was somber. More than six weeks had passed since the girls were taken, and with each passing day, the boys’ worry grew. They were no longer ruled by panic, but by a heavy despair. A few of them had stopped working altogether, and the rest were losing heart. Kieran knew he had to do something about it. He had to find a way to give them hope.
TRANSFORMATION
One evening, after a long day of running the combine in the cornfield, Kieran sat in the Captain’s chair in Central Command, watching the com terminal. The sensors would pick up a ship long before he got visual contact, but he still liked scrolling through the different outside views, peering into the murk of the nebula as though he might just catch a glimpse of the New Horizon or his mother’s shuttle. The only other person with him in Central Command was Sarek, eating mashed grain and beans, his face awash with the bluish light from his com screen. Kieran sipped a mug of tea from the Captain’s private reserves, a deep Earl Grey made from bergamot flowers and cured tea leaves grown back on Earth. It was fragrant, sharp without sugar or goat’s milk, and it focused his mind.
Sarek set his bowl down on his desk and rubbed his hands over his face. Always serious and quiet, he’d matured even more since the attack and had shouldered almost as much responsibility as Arthur.
“I never thanked you, Sarek,” Kieran said.
The boy turned. “For what?”
“For helping me out at my trial. I think you might have saved my life.”
“I don’t think so. Seth looked more scared than you did.”
“You stuck your neck out just the same. I appreciate it.”
Sarek’s black eyes fixed on Kieran’s. “Morale is low, you know.”
“How could it not be?”
“Matt Allbright didn’t show up to relieve me today. I found him in his mother’s bed. He said it’s pointless to keep trying because we’ll never find them. Too much time has passed. He’s not the only one saying it, either.”
“I’m not sure what I can do about that, Sarek,” Kieran said, wishing he were sure. He sounded like the old Kieran who never knew what to do.
“All I know is I’m doing more work with less time off,” Sarek said. “And I see more guys shirking their duty and sulking around. The ship can’t run like that.”
Kieran set his mug of tea in the cup holder next to the captain’s chair and leaned back. He’d come to trust Sarek almost as much as Arthur. He was reliable in a way few other boys were. “What makes the difference, do you think?”
The boy looked at him, puzzled.
“You haven’t given up. What’s the difference between you and Matt Allbright?”
Sarek leaned an elbow on the arm of his chair while he thought about it. He shook his head. “All I know is that I get up every morning, I point myself toward Mecca, and I say my prayers.”
“And that helps?”
Sarek shrugged. “It’s what my dad would want me to do.”
Kieran nodded, thinking back to that terrible night when he was nearly at the end of his strength, the night the voice came to soothe him.
“So you believe in God,” Kieran said.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Sarek seemed bewildered by the question. “It just seems obvious to me, I guess. That there must be something behind all this.” He gestured out the windows, where a star or two winked dimly through the nebula. “I mean, all of creation? You? Me? Just because of some cosmic accident? It doesn’t seem realistic.”
“I know what you mean,” Kieran said pensively. “But do you think we’re in the minority?”
“How do you mean?”
“Do you think we’re the only believers on board?”
Sarek shook his head. “Not by a long shot. Not anymore, anyway. Dad always said there are no atheists in foxholes.”
“Why wasn’t your family chosen to go on the other ship?” Kieran asked. It was something he’d often wondered about his own spiritual family, who had never quite fit in on the Empyrean.
Sarek shrugged. “I don’t think the Muslim families would have fit in on the other ship, either.”
Kieran nodded pensively.
That night, Kieran lay in the Captain’s bed and reflected on how he’d led the boys until now. He’d been practical, logical, and responsible, but he hadn’t inspired them.
“Am I failing them?” he whispered into the dark.
They need a vision, said the voice.
He sat up, his sheets rustling around his legs.
“Are you really there?” he whispered. “What do I do?”
Give them a vision.
“How?”
You’ll find the way.
“I need more than that!” he yelled.
But he was alone again.
A vision, the voice had said. That’s what the boys lacked. A place they could imagine as their destiny, some goal to work toward even as they grieved.
Kieran remembered the night when so many of the boys had learned they’d lost parents in the shuttle bay massacre, and the sermon he’d found. That sermon had given the boys enough hope to keep trying, or at least not give up, because, Kieran realized, it helped them to feel that they were still connected to their lost loved ones, as Sarek said.
He had to find more sermons like that.
He got out of bed, turned on the desk lamp, and scrolled through the Captain’s computer. He found the folder with the sermons in it and read through titles like “Barren of Womb, Fertile of Heart” and “Our Crops Are Our Children.” Few of the sermons spoke to the problems he and the boys faced, but he read them all. They talked about the greater mission and the glorious day when the ships reached New Earth and the work of terraformation could begin. It was a sacred mission, a pact with God and the rest of humanity, not only those back on Earth, but their children, and their children’s children, for millennia to come.
These words caught at Kieran, and he felt them to be true. The Empyrean’s mission was the greatest endeavor in all of human history. The continuation of Earth-origin life depended on it, and it must not fail. Surely this must be the work of God.
Why, then? Why had God let those people kill their families and take the girls away? Why would He put the mission in jeopardy? Unless … was that part of His plan?
Suffering has purpose, thought Kieran. His time of pain and starvation in the brig had purified him and made him ready to receive God’s message. God allowed the attack so that all the crew of the Empyrean would be open to His voice.
Kieran stayed up all night long, reading the sermons, taking notes, and writing down his own thoughts in the wreath of yellow light from his desk lamp. The more he wrote, the more strongly he felt that he was meeting his destiny. The voice had pointed him here, and he’d found what he was meant to do.
By morning, when the rest of the boys stirred from their beds and wandered into the central bunker for their breakfast, they found rows of chairs arranged before a podium. At the podium, wearing his black suit and tie, stood Kieran Alden, clean-shaven, reddish hair slicked back, fingernails spotlessly clean. Kieran fitted the loudspeaker to his mouth. “Please take a seat, everyone,” he said. “I have some thoughts I’d like to share with you.”
The boys hesitated until they saw the pieces of fresh bread with generous dollops of blackberry jam placed on each chair. Then they sat down happily enough.
Only about half the boys had come, but that was all right. It was a good start. He nodded at Arthur, who pressed a button on the intercom, and a recording of a Beethoven sonata began to play. Arthur dimmed the lights, keeping a single spot on Kieran so that he glowed. Kieran imagined himself reflecting the light in manifold, taking it into himself and releasing it as a gift to the sad, frightened little boys.
Could he really do this? Was he really this kind of man?
“Thank you for coming.” Kieran looked at his notes, which had seemed so brilliant the night before. Now that sixty pairs of eyes watched him, waiting, his words seemed thin and weak. He felt his light fade.
But thin and weak was better than nothing.
“We’ve been through a lot in these past months,” he began. “We’ve lost loved ones, been separated from our families, our friends, and we don’t know where they are or if they’re safe. Until this nebula clears, there’s nothing we can do but wait and hope for the best.”