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“What are you doing?” Waverly asked. Her voice sounded grated and papery, but she forced herself to take a deep breath.
I’m not going to let him make me weak.

“We’re attacking, my dear. What did you think we were going to do?”

Waverly could tell from the background around him that he was transmitting from Central Command. She couldn’t see them, but there must be people all around, listening. She remembered what he’d said to her, about how she’d turned the tables on Anne Mather in her brief speech on the New Horizon all those months ago. She glared into his desiccated, scowling visage and said, “You’re a murderer.”

He shook his head, a patronizing smile on his lips as though she were nothing more than a mouthy kid. “You have no credibility, Waverly, after the way you lied in your testimony. Anne Mather was a godly woman, and you tried to destroy her.”

“You
wanted
me to,” Waverly said to him. “You got her out of the way and now you’re going to put your son in charge. That was your plan all along, wasn’t it?”

“Jared,” the doctor said with a flick of the wrist. Jared Carver appeared, leaning into the screen from behind the doctor. His features were puffy, and he looked like he was still drugged, but he scowled at Waverly with a fierceness that frightened her.

“You cooked your testimony up yourself, Waverly. You
admitted
it to me.” He pulled his small com unit from his pocket—the guards must have returned it to him—and he flicked a button. Waverly could hear her own voice coming out of it, and Jared sneered at her as it played. She looked dispassionately at his twisted features and wondered how she’d ever thought him handsome.

But that
was
her voice sounding out from his clever little device: “I lied during my testimony against Anne Mather,” she’d said. He turned the device off with a grim smile.

“You forced me to say that,” Waverly said. “You were going to kill me.”

“You’re the killer,” he snarled. “You almost overdosed me.”

“I was defending myself,” she said.

“You snuck up behind me and caught me unawares,” Jared said.

She was frustrated, and though she tried to hide it, she could see Jared smiling with satisfaction. He thought he had her. But then she got an idea. “My confession wasn’t coerced? Prove it. Play the whole recording right now.”

Jared’s features relaxed into a confounded pause. “I don’t—”

“It should all be there, right? The entire video file? I doubt you’ve had time to edit it. So play the whole thing for everyone in Central Command. Prove you didn’t coerce me.”

Jared glanced around him. Waverly wished she could see the faces he was looking at, but judging from his growing dread, she had him.

The doctor’s face appeared again, twisted with insensate rage. “We’re going to kill you” was all he said, then the screen winked off.

“We have to turn the ship,” Kahlil Hassan said quietly to his son.

The door to Central Command opened, and the man Chris walked in. “They’re sending shuttles?”

Sarek and his father nodded.

“We can’t leave Kieran!” Waverly said. She turned to Chris, and though she’d never met him in her life, she took hold of his hand in both of hers and pulled until he looked at her. “Kieran … he’s too important. We can’t leave him.”

“They’re launching OneMen,” Sarek called out. The screen he was watching showed a dozen OneMen leaving the two shuttles, all of them heading for different air locks all over the ship.

“Where are your guns?” Chris asked.

Sarek hid his face in his hands. “Only Kieran knows where they’re hidden.”

Everyone looked at him in horror as they absorbed this.

“Even if only two or three of them make it on board…,” Chris began. No one finished the thought for him.

“We can’t stop them,” Kahlil said. His tears frightened Waverly more than anything else so far. “We’ve got to run.”

“No!” Sarek said. “We can’t do that to Kieran!”

“Son,” Kahlil said, taking both Sarek’s shoulders in his hands, “too many will die. We have no choice.”

Waverly stood in the middle of the room, hands at her sides, her mouth hanging open, useless. She said nothing. She knew it was true. They had to run.

Gently Kahlil pulled Sarek away from the controls. The boy went to sit in a chair off to the side, where he buried his face in his hands. Chris sat down in the pilot’s seat and engaged the shipwide intercom. “Attention! A New Horizon landing party is almost here. We’re about to punch the engines, so get ready for some serious inertia. Please lie down on the floor.” He set the message to loop and turned up the volume. “We’ve got about a minute before they get here.”

“Seth,” Waverly said under her breath. What would an increase in g-force do to him? She took off at a run back to the shuttle bay. Rather than wait for an elevator, she took the stairs, bounding down the steps two at a time with Chris’s voice in her ear.

“Twenty seconds…,” he said as she rounded the landing. She’d gone another two flights when he started the countdown. “Minus ten … nine…”

She reached the shuttle-bay level and sprinted down the corridor.

“… six … five…”

She slammed into the doors and pounded on the controls to open them.

The doors slid open. Dozens of people were lying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, hands stretched to their sides in a surreal pose repeated over and over again. Where was Seth?

“… three … two…”

Waverly looked around frantically and spotted the doctor strapping Seth’s gurney to the wall.

She started running just as the engines engaged.

She hit the floor before she was aware her knees had buckled. She sucked in a chest full of air once, again, and then she tried to gain purchase on her hands and knees to crawl the rest of the way to Seth, but her arms were made of lead, and her spine sagged. She had to lie down. The force on her own body was enormous, making it hard to breathe, hard to think. What was this doing to Seth?

Her face pressed against the floor. She could feel the sharpness of her cheekbone digging into the metal beneath her, and the sensation finally broke through her numbness. She cried. Kieran Alden was left behind to face those evil people alone. Her mind ticked through all the possibilities, searching for a different choice, another way to save the ship and Kieran at once. But it wasn’t possible. Kieran wouldn’t have wanted them to risk any more lives. He’d want them to run. She knew it as well as she knew her own character.

When the inertia let up, Chris’s voice came over the intercom. “We’ve put some distance between us and them, folks. It’s not too late to take a shuttle and turn back, but if you want to do it, do it right now.”

Waverly struggled back to her feet. Her left knee creaked painfully, but it held her weight, and she limped over to Seth’s gurney. He was as white as new wool, drenched in sweat, and his chest rattled when he breathed. She kissed his lips, once, twice, and took his hand …

He opened his eyes and smiled. “Don’t let go,” he whispered.

BEGINNINGS

Kieran woke up groggy under a dim light. To his left his mother sat dozing in a chair, her cheek resting on the back of her hand. Someone took hold of his right hand, and he turned to find Felicity Wiggam smiling at him.

“Hi,” he tried to say but sputtered into weak coughing instead.

“Here,” she whispered and touched a drinking straw to his lips. He pulled in small sips of ice water, and his mouth and throat loosened.

“Where…” He couldn’t get any more words out.

“You’re on the New Horizon,” she whispered. “You were brought here for surgery.”

The last thing he remembered was sitting on the stage on the Empyrean, discussing their new mission plan, and being gripped by a horrible pain.

“Your heart stopped when they were repairing your small intestine.” For the first time he noticed tears clinging to her eyelashes. “They had to rebuild a defective valve.”

This was too much to take in all at once, so he turned his mind to something easier. “Why weren’t you on the Empyrean?”

Her mouth tightened with anger. “Avery didn’t tell me about the evacuation until it was too late for me to come, too.”

Kieran looked at her hand and saw that her ring finger was now beautifully bare.

“Kieran, you’ve been asleep for three days,” she said slowly.

“Three days…”

“They’re gone. The Empyrean had to leave. I’m so sorry.”

She gave him time to absorb the full meaning of the words. The Empyrean was gone. His friends. His home. He’d never see them again.

“Waverly sent this,” Felicity said and handed him a printout with a text message on it. He was too weak to hold it for himself, so Felicity asked, “Do you want me to read it?”

He nodded.

Felicity cleared her throat and began.

“Dear Kieran, They sent an invading force to take back the Empyrean. We had no guns and no way to defend ourselves. I’m so sorry, but we had to run. I knew that you would never want us to put ourselves and all the little kids in danger for your sake. At least, that’s what I am telling myself right now. I hope you can forgive us someday. It’s not what I wanted. I’d hoped that you and I could spend the next ten years rebuilding our friendship. I think good friends is what we were always meant to be. I hope you feel that way too.”

Felicity faltered, blushing deeply, and shot a hooded look at Kieran before continuing.

“It might be a good thing that you went back to the New Horizon. Felicity is there, and I think you should steal her away from her fiancé. I know she would be happier with you, and I think you would be happier with her than you ever could have been with me.”

Felicity gave a little embarrassed giggle, and Kieran smiled.

“With Anne Mather gone, you can be a voice for good on the New Horizon. Be careful, because Dr. Carver and his son Jared won’t want to share power with you. Keep your head down, and stay away from them.”

At this, Felicity made eye contact with Kieran but kept reading.

“I love you, Kieran. I’ll always love you and remember you for what you are: a completely decent, brilliant man who, just like me, sometimes tried too hard. Live a good long life.

“Remember me fondly, Waverly.”

Only when Felicity looked at Kieran did he realize he was crying. His tears had seeped into his pillow and made his ears and neck wet. Embarrassed, he tried to wipe them away, but his hands were floppy and useless, maybe from weakness, maybe from drugs.

Felicity reached for a tissue from his bedside table and, with tenderness, dabbed at the tears in the corners of his eyes. Then she smiled, and with her crystal blue eyes on his, unwavering, she bent over him and gently kissed his lips.

PART FIVE

GAIA

I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

And all her train were hurl’d.

—Henry Vaughan,

“The World”

SERMONS

In the slender light of dawn, Waverly Marshall stepped off the shuttle onto the rocky soil and gazed across the hard, glistening ground. Wearing an airtight landing suit complete with heavy boots and a suffocating glass helmet, she walked down a gentle slope of black volcanic rock to stand on the pebbled shore of a vast ocean bay. The water crashed against the beach, a beautiful rushing sound that filled her ears, pounded her chest, ringing all around her. The sky glimmered with a pale pink light, blending into a deep blue overhead. As the orange sun pierced the edge of the horizon, the water glimmered in a line of shimmering brightness. It was the first sunrise she’d ever seen, and it was indescribably beautiful. As the sun brightened the sky, she saw a collection of clouds moving in over the water, long streams of what she guessed was rain falling in gray streaks.

She wished Seth could see this.

She was twenty-five years old now, but already she had a touch of gray at her temples, an annoying trait she’d inherited from her father. She walked toward the test animals in the pen she’d set up the night before. The goats were munching happily on the bale of hay that had been left for them, all three of them perfectly content and healthy. She lifted her walkie-talkie to her lips, which was patched into the shuttle’s long-range com system, and hailed the Empyrean. “You getting all this?”

“Everyone on board is watching,” Arthur Dietrich answered, sounding tired. “How did you sleep?”

“I didn’t.” She’d sat up in the pilot’s seat in the shuttle, unable to take her eyes off the meteor shower that rained down. The planet was passing through the tail of a comet and the show had been stunning. She didn’t regret staying awake for it. She’d have been too tense to sleep anyway, knowing what she was going to attempt the next morning.

“The goats look fine,” she said to Arthur, and sent a video image for the crew in Central Command to see. Three goats, perfectly unaware of the momentous occasion they were a part of. With a deep breath she said, “I’m taking off my helmet.”

“I’ll start the clock,” Arthur answered. His little boy’s voice had resolved into a smooth, sensitive tenor that perfectly suited his thoughtful personality. He’d never gotten tall, but he was handsome in a boyish, Germanic way, and he’d become one of Waverly’s best friends.

Waverly released the locks on her helmet and lifted it off. Was she afraid? Excited? There were so many emotions coursing through her she couldn’t begin to name them.

A brief suction sound as the helmet lifted off, then …

The air moved over her skin in the gentlest caress, lifting the hair from around her face, cooling her. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. The atmosphere smelled pure and fresh and perfectly safe.