Glow

Chapter 5: Left Behind

left behind

One moment Kieran had been staring at Waverly’s slender back, im­ploring silently, Don’t go. Get off the shuttle. She’d turned, she’d looked at Seth Ardvale, she’d shaken her head at him, and then she’d limped up the ramp, and the ramp closed, and she was gone.

A woman wailed as the shuttle engines hummed to life. They coughed orange fire, then burned blue, their photon exhaust casting a sickly glow over the bodies of those who had been shot. People backed away from the craft, staring. Kieran looked at the faces nearest him, desperate for someone to do something, but everyone seemed para­lyzed. Mrs. Anderson’s mouth hung open. Mr. Bernstein dropped to his knees as the shuttlerose from the floor and made the slow turn toward the air lock doors.

“Override the air lock!” Seth yelled. He started for the con­trols himself, but his hands went up to his head and he fell to his knees.

Suddenly the room was full of action again. A dozen people ran for the control panel near the huge doors. Harvard got there fi rst and punched at the keypad, but the panel lights were dead. He slammed it with his fists and cried, “They fixed the doors to respond only to com­mands from inside the shuttle!”

“Go through Central Command,” Kieran shouted at Harvard. “They can lock the doors from there.”

Harvard yelled into the intercom, “Sammy! Do you hear me?”

Nothing but silence.

Harvard clicked the transmission button several times. “Central? . . . Hello?” He looked at Kieran in horror. “No one’s there.”

They’d all run to save their kids. Everyone had abandoned their posts. Forty-two years of peaceful isolation had made them totally in­competent in the face of attack.

“I’ll go,” Kieran said, and ran back the way he’d come, past Seth, who was on his hands and knees, dazed, staring at a pool of vomit.

“Everyone into a shuttle!” he heard Harvard scream.

When Kieran made it to the corridor, he closed the shuttle bay doors as a precaution, and then he turned and sped down the abandoned gangway. The ship felt empty. Corridors that had once been crowded with farmers and engineers, teachers and trainees, families and friends, were now deserted.

How many had died already? How many more?

Where was his dad?

Kieran shut out those thoughts and ran top speed up four fl ights of stairs until he burst into the administrative level of the ship, where he hooked a left and pelted down the corridor into the Captain’s office. He was hoping that Captain Jones would somehow be there, sitting at his desk like always, calmly in control. But of course the Captainwasn’t there. He probably wasn’t even alive.

Kieran ran to Central Command, where the officers controlled the various systems aboard ship. Usually this room was full of people, all ofthem talking through intercoms, communicating with various parts of the ship, dealing with maintenance issues. But now no one washere. The room seemed very small.

Kieran jogged around the semicircle of computer displays, look­ing for the one that controlled the shuttle bay doors. But none of the workstations were labeled. Kieran groaned in despair. He caught his reflection in the portal and stared at it as though it could tell him what to do.

“The Captain’s computer ought to be able to do anything,” Kieran said to his reflection. He sat down at the Captain’s chair. A computer display attached to a flexible arm slid in front of him. Along the right-hand edge of the screen was a row of buttons, and Kieran tapped the one marked “Port Shuttle Bay” from a scrolling list. An inserted video image of the bay blinked to life, and Kieran saw a shuttle in launch se­quence moving toward the air lock doors, whichwere still closed. He tapped the button for the door controls that said, “Lock.” There was no way the enemy shuttle would be able to leave now.