Caretaker Read online

  “How can you tell where they begin and end?”

  “Listen. As you go over the rooms, you’ll hear the hollowness under you. Air whooshing right below you. The bigger the whoosh, the bigger the room. When you reach the walls, there’s a solid sound; the whoosh of air is deadened. See, the secondary room here is smaller. Next we’ll go over the hall, which is a huge empty sound, but only lasts for a dozen feet or so . . .”

  “We should try walking in the huge empty space next time—” Ethan nearly ran into Kaia before he realized she had stopped. “What—”

  “Shhhh,” she said, tilting her head to the side. “Back up.”

  “Are you kidding? I can’t—”

  “Ethan, BACK UP! I need to listen to something.” There was a puzzled edge in her voice.

  He braced his elbows on the floor of the shaft and pushed backwards, using his knees for extra traction. Going backward was definitely harder than going forward. He thought about grumbling, but Kaia moved backward with such ease that his pride wouldn’t let her know how hard it was for him.

  They backed up about twenty feet, and then Ethan rested on his stomach while Kaia crawled forward and backward, cocking her head at different angles as she crawled. Every time he tried to ask her what she was doing, she shushed him and hissed, “I’m listening!” Finally, she said, “huh.”

  “What?”

  “Well . . .” she said slowly, “Something’s strange here. I can’t figure it out, but it sounds like there’s a weird little room here, like a closet, in the secondary nav room.”

  “Maybe there is.”

  “But there isn’t. None of these ships have one. There’s no reason for one. Why would there be one here?”

  He wondered if she’d been in the shaft a little too long. He’d tried listening, and he couldn’t hear a difference between being over a room and being over a wall. “Maybe you’re not hearing it right.”

  She made an annoyed sound.

  “I just mean, well . . . it’s been five years, you know . . .”

  “Not for me. I was crawling through these tunnels a couple of weeks ago. This ship is different.”

  “Okay. You know, my knees are killing me.”

  Kaia’s tone changed. “I’m sorry, Ethan. Let’s get you out of here.” She started to crawl forward again. “You’ll like this next bit.”

  They’d crawled another ten minutes when Kaia said brightly, “There we go!”

  Ethan glanced up and saw that the shaft widened ahead. He also saw that the bottom dropped out. “You have a way of dealing with that gaping hole, I assume.”

  Kaia laughed as she reached the hole. “Of course.” With agile grace, she reached up, swung her legs around, and dropped them into the hole in one fluid motion. For a moment, Ethan thought she was suspended in midair, but as he approached he saw a perpendicular shaft extending above and below this one. Inside it, along the wall, was a ladder.

  “Tricky,” he said as she laughed and began to descend. “What does a ship like this need with secret passageways?”

  “Not secret passageways. Just maintenance access. How do you think they put one of these things together?”

  After twenty more minutes of climbing through the shafts, they emerged through a vent panel in the lower deck hallway. Ethan stood up and stretched his arms and back. “Not my favorite way to get around the ship.”

  “Effective, though, huh?” Kaia’s voice was still slightly distracted. He could tell that she was thinking of the unexpected room they’d gone over.

  They crossed the hall to the main door of the passenger hold. Kaia stepped aside so Ethan could open the door. He stepped up, barked the access code, and then stood still to be scanned. The door slid open, and they stepped inside.

  The shadowy, cavernous room yawned around them. The bulkheads at the end of each row of stasis chambers stretched away on either side of them. In front of them the bulkhead read Θλ.

  “Theta lambda.” Ethan said. “We’re near the middle. Computer, give us the coordinates to Phillip Reagan’s chamber.”

  “Passenger one sixteenPhillip Reagan—is in Epsilon twenty-six,” the computer responded.

  Kaia hesitated.

  “What, you don’t know how to get to Epsilon?” he teased.

  “Actually, I don’t. The chamber labels went on with the finishing. Long after my step in the ship-building process was over.”

  Ethan grinned. “Finally,” he said, “something for me to teach you about the ship! This way.” Ethan turned to the right and headed confidently past the bulkheads. “See, the rows are marked with the letters of the Greek alphabet. Once they’ve gone through the whole alphabet, they go to two letter designations: Alpha alpha, Alpha beta, Alpha gamma, Alpha delta, Beta alpha, Beta beta, Beta gamma, Beta delta. Then, you can count from the front chamber, which starts at one here in the front, to get to the right chamber.”

  They passed several more bulkheads before finding Epsilon row.

  “He should be down here.” As they passed the upright chambers, with their sleeping cargo standing inside them, Ethan pointed out the numbers on the engraved plates below each clear door. “We’re looking for twenty-six.”

  Kaia was practically running down the row in front of him, ignoring the numbers as she looked eagerly at each face. Ethan saw the number twenty-six and called her back.

  “Here, Kaia. Here’s twenty-six.”

  She turned and came back quickly. When her eyes fell upon the man in stasis, though, her face fell.

  “What is it?”

  “Ethan,” she said with a tiny shake of her head, “that’s not my father.”

  Ethan looked at the man. “Well, they look . . . a little different in the fluid . . .”

  “Ethan,” her voice was shaking, “Ethan, my father is fifty-five years old, big, strong . . .” her voice trailed off as they both looked at the small pale man in the chamber. “They can’t look that different.”

  “Computer,” Ethan said, “give us the coordinates for Phillip Reagan.”

  “Pasenger 116—Phillip Reagan—is in Epsilon twenty-six.”

  Ethan checked either side of the chamber. “Is this chamber labeled wrong?”

  “The chamber is correctly labeled, Mr. Bryant.”

  “Then where is Reagan?”

  “Phillip Reagan is in Epsilon twenty-six,” the computer said.

  Kaia was pale. “No, he’s not. That is not my father.”

  The computer didn’t respond, but Ethan saw her trembling and stepped over to her. “It’s probably just a mistake in the roster.” He tried to sound comforting. “Maybe he was boarded in the wrong order. Look around. He’s probably in this guy’s chamber here somewhere.”

  This seemed to encourage her and she set off down the row again. Ethan turned to inspect the passengers toward the other end of the row. Suddenly he heard her call out.

  “Ethan!”

  Ethan hurried off toward the sound of her voice. He found her near the end of the long row.

  “What is it?”

  “Something’s wrong. I mean—” her voice faltered. “This is supposed to be the ship’s military contingent . . . they should all be here in the same area . . . “ she waved her hand down the row. Ethan gave the passengers a closer look and immediately saw the problem. The people on this row were all like Passenger 116 young, thin, pale. Some of them looked to be little older than children.

  “They don’t look very military.”

  “Somewhere here should have been my dad’s lifetime friend and his lieutenant, Case Jenkins. When I asked where he was, the computer directed me to this man.” Kaia tapped the glass of a stasis chamber holding a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid. “Do you think—” she hesitated. “Could they all have been mislabeled?” Her eyes showed deep doubt at the proposition.

  “Maybe. Let’s look some more. I’ll go over one row and you keep looking around here.” Kaia nodded and let him leave. When he was out of earshot, Ethan spoke quietly, “Com
puter, bring up the holoscreen.” Immediately, it hovered before him. “Show me a picture of General Phillip Reagan.”

  The picture of the blonde man in Epsilon twenty-six hovered in front of him.

  “Cross-check that photo,” Ethan said.

  “The passenger pictured is General Phillip Reagan,” the computer said with finality.

  Kaia’s voice startled Ethan from behind. “Ethan, something is going on.” He turned to see her staring, wide-eyed and shaking, at the floating image. “Someone has removed the entire military contingent from this ship. We are defenseless.”

  Ethan shook his head slowly. “But Kaia, that doesn’t make sense. Who would do that? Why?”

  He looked into her eyes and saw suspicion. “Perhaps you can tell me, Mr. Bryant.”

  He took a step toward her. “Kaia—”

  She stepped back. “Stay there. I want to know what is going on. Right now. Where is my father?”

  “I have no idea where your father is. The computer seems to think he’s in Epsilon twenty-six.”

  “He’s not.”

  “So you said.” Ethan’s eyebrows drew together. “Kaia, I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do.”

  “I didn’t think of it before,” she said, shaking her head quickly, “but your story is pretty suspicious.”

  Ethan could tell she was growing agitated. “Kaia—”

  “Very convenient,” she went on, “that David keeled over just as you were supposed to go into stasis.” She looked him in the eye, and the acidic tone he remembered from their first few encounters had returned. “You killed him, didn’t you?”

  The words hit Ethan. “Kaia—I’ve never killed anyone.”

  “Prove it,” she said, fury burning in her gaze as she walked back and forth across the end of the row.

  “I—I can’t, Kaia. You’ll just have to trust me.”

  “Sure. Trust you. Like everyone else here trusted you. Why would you want to hijack a passenger ship?”

  “Kaia—”

  The metallic sound of the computer’s voice rang through the room. “I’m detecting elevated heart rates and adrenaline levels, Mr. Bryant.”

  “Not now, computer.” Ethan didn’t take his eyes off Kaia. “Listen—”

  “I WON’T listen! You killed David, and now I find out probably my father, too! You took my whole future!” Her eyes widened. “And I’m probably next.”

  Ethan reached toward her, his eyes pleading, but she lashed out, knocking his arm aside. She spun and ran away from him down the aisle. Before he could stop himself, Ethan was running after her. The grays and pinks of the chambers blurred in his peripheral vision. He saw her turn, dart up the central aisle, and then veer right down another row. She was fast. He pushed himself.

  When he reached the center of the row, she was already rounding the other end of it, heading right. Just as she moved out of his view, Ethan heard a small cry. When he reached the end of the row, he saw her on the floor fifteen feet ahead, clutching her ankle, her face a mask of pain. He sprinted to her.

  “Kaia, are you okay?”

  As he leaned down, she pushed him savagely away, catching him off balance. “Leave me alone! Murderer!”

  He fell back against the bulkhead and slid to the floor. When he looked up, the holoscreen had suddenly appeared in the air in front of Kaia. She sat transfixed as she watched the surveillance video of David McNeal helping Ethan into the stasis chamber.

  The broad-shouldered blonde soldier swung the door of the chamber wide for Ethan. “Last but not least.” McNeal said. His voice was deep and musical.

  Onscreen, Ethan was still standing in front of Aria’s chamber, one hand on the glass. “She’ll be okay?”

  “She’ll be just fine.” McNeal gazed at Aria’s sleeping form and then put a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “It’s scary to see them so still, huh?”

  “I just—” Ethan swallowed. “I can’t imagine the next half-century without her.”

  A shadow passed across McNeal’s face. “Yeah. It’s hard to be apart, even for a little while.” Then, regaining his military persona, said, “But once we get you in the chamber, it won’t feel like long at all. Just a real good night’s sleep. C’mon. You’re aging as we speak.”

  They both laughed weakly,then Ethan allowed himself to be directed to the chamber. As he stepped inside and began to turn around, McNeal convulsed once, horribly, then slumped against the big steel and glass door.

  Watching, Kaia covered her eyes briefly, and then looked back up.

  On the screen, Ethan was moving a shoulder under McNeal’s arm, supporting him.

  “McNeal! McNeal, what’s wrong?”

  When the Caretaker spoke, the words were slurred and strained. “I’m . . . I can’t . . .” his free hand went to his head.

  “What should I do?”

  “The . . . hold.” McNeal mumbled, “computer . . . holoscreen map . . . to the . . . caretaker’s hold.” The map appeared, and the two on the screen moved painfully through the shining silver halls, the surveillance cameras tracking them seamlessly from passenger hold to hall, deck to deck, until they reached the wide couch in the caretaker’s hold. Ethan helped McNeal onto the couch, where the big soldier lay breathing heavily. The tape sped up, showing McNeal’s still form and Ethan moving about the hold, trying to make the ill man more comfortable, then stopped as Ethan sat on the low table beside the couch during the last moments of David McNeal’s life.

  The soldier stirred slightly and opened his eyes, “you . . .” he whispered, “protect . . . them . . . until . . . “ In his eyes burned the frantic need to communicate and the frustration of being unable to.

  “You’re going to be alright,” Ethan said. “Just rest. You’ll feel better soon.”

  McNeal shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “Not . . . better. Every . . . everything . . . wrong . . . I’ll . . . miss her . . . waking . . .” Then he shuddered and was gone. The onscreen Ethan closed McNeal’s eyes and wept.

  On the floor of the passenger hold, as the holoscreen faded, Kaia wept, too. She held her ankle with her right hand and covered her face with her left. Her shoulders shook.

  Ethan moved carefully to her. When he was beside her on the floor, he reached across her shoulders and gathered her to his chest. He rested his chin on her head. Tears slipped down his own cheeks as he felt her clutch his shirt and tremble against him. He held her a long time.

  As her tears subsided, she curled tighter into his embrace. “I’m sorry, Ethan,” she said quietly.

  “I know.”

  “He was right. Everything’s wrong. We should be . . . together.”

  Ethan nodded against the top of her head.

  “I miss him so . . . deeply,” she mumbled into Ethan’s chest. “I thought we’d have so much time to be together. I was actually a little worried about spending our whole lives only seeing each other. I worried we’d tire of each other. Now . . . now I wish we’d gotten the chance to tire of each other. I can’t believe I’ll never see him again . . . never hear him say my name . . .”

  Ethan’s embrace tightened as she spoke. Waves of his own loneliness and longing washed over him. They fell into silence then and sat breathing together.

  When she finally shifted away from him, she winced and took a sharp breath. She reached down for her ankle.

  “Are you alright?”

  “It’s just a sprain.”

  “Let’s get you back to the hold.” Ethan stood and carefully helped her to her feet. They made their way through the passenger hold and up to the caretaker’s hold. As they walked, Ethan suddenly felt Kaia’s shoulders shaking again.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Is that why you’re crying?”

  She shook her head, no.

  “David?”

  Kaia nodded again. “I was just thinking how . . . you came this same way with him . . . then. I wish I’d been here for him.”

  Eth
an thought for a few steps and then said, “I never understood that last thing he said. In fact, I’d forgotten it until today. He didn’t want to miss you. Didn’t want you to wake up without him. I’m sorry I didn’t remember it so I could have told you earlier.”

  Kaia shrugged. “At least you remembered the surveillance footage and called up the holoscreen.”

  Ethan stopped walking. “I didn’t.” His brow furrowed as he tried to recall the moments after Kaia had fled.

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. It just . . . it came up on its own. Computer?” He switched to the commanding voice he usually used to speak to the computer.

  “Yes, Mr. Bryant.”

  “Did you project the holoscreen without being commanded to do so?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bryant.”

  Kaia raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s never done that before,” he said. “Computer, why did you project the holoscreen?”

  “As I mentioned, Mr. Bryant, your heart rate and adrenaline levels were elevated to dangerous levels. The conflict between you and Ms. Reagan seemed to center around a misunderstanding over the incident in the surveillance log from Day 1, so I deduced that reviewing the scene may help alleviate the tension and bring your heart rate and adrenaline level back into an acceptable range.”

  “Thank you, computer. It seems to have worked.” Ethan glanced down at Kaia again.

  “Creepy,” she said under her breath.

  Ethan said nothing, unconcerned about the computer’s actions as her tears subsided.

  As they walked on, he felt an almost fierce protectiveness about this girl. There hadn’t been a moment, day or night, since she awakened that she wasn’t in his thoughts. It had been so long since anyone had held such fascination for him. And they had not been this close to each other since he’d first carried her to the caretaker’s hold when she’d fainted. Since then he’d come to know her, had seen her laugh and shared some of her pain. He’d been impressed by her expertise and intelligence and had seen her both vulnerable and strong. Feeling her arm around his waist, feeling the way she leaned into him as they walked, filled him with excitement and apprehension.

  “You shouldn’t walk on that,” he said sternly.