Free Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel by Amy Kathleen Ryan Page A

thickly strewn in places that they looked like foam. They were so far away. Seth swallowed bile.
    “It’s just the sky,” his father had said once, when Seth admitted he was afraid to try flying a OneMan. “If you were on a planet, it’d be the same thing. No walls. No windows. Nothing but nothing above your head.”
    Seth had only nodded at this because he didn’t want to say anything stupid, but in truth the thought of walking a planet’s surface gave him a terrible feeling of vertigo. If he could live his entire life on the Empyrean, he probably would. Because now, standing on the edge of the air lock and looking into eternity, he was utterly terrified.
    “Don’t piss yourself, Ardvale,” he whispered ferociously.
    He took a deep breath and stepped off the air lock platform.
    And he was falling! Not falling; he was being left behind by his home ship, the rivets and portholes and gunmetal coating of the Empyrean dissolving into a terrifying blur of grays and blacks as the ship sped forward without him. Seth helplessly waved his arms— Oh God, oh God —before he remembered his thrusters. He pressed the throttle and screamed as his vessel jerked toward the Empyrean. Quickly he backed away from the huge ship, avoiding a crash by less than four feet.
    His gorge rose. For a moment he was paralyzed with terror, but he forced his eyes open and swallowed bile as he scrabbled with the attitude, pitch, and yaw until he flew in a parallel course with the great ship.
    He punched at the thruster controls, and finally he was accelerating at the same rate as the Empyrean, and the illusion of falling ceased. He found himself hovering near a porthole, and looked in to see that he’d fallen to the level of the rain forest bay. He had several more levels to go before he reached the engine room at the bottom of the ship.
    Seth eased back on his rear thrusters just enough to move slowly down the gray landscape of the Empyrean. He kept his eyes on the hull, focusing on the rivets that lined each slab of sheet-metal skin, and then the small valley between the domes of the sewage and the water-purification systems. He floated over what seemed an infinite row of portholes, and he checked each one for a human face, but no one looked out as he passed. He should have been happy no one saw him, but instead he felt irrational disappointment, and that made him realize how alone he was.
    He shut out this thought and turned his suit toward the port side. He could sense the bottom of the Empyrean looming at his feet like a horizon. He saw the hatch to the engine room below him and reached for the thruster control, but he fumbled and instead engaged an attitude thruster.
    His body rotated madly, and he was falling once more, sailing over the hull in a mad spin. The pink nebula they’d left behind loomed in his vision, ready to swallow him whole.
    Did he scream?
    In a panic Seth tapped the emergency tether and a cord shot out, aimed for the Empyrean like it was supposed to be, but he was spinning, and the cord wrapped around his waist, shortening with every turn. As he was pulled backward, he stared at the immense nebula, so silent and dense. It had enveloped the Empyrean for four years, rendered the ship essentially blind and deaf, allowing the New Horizon to sneak up for a surprise attack. Now it looked so calm, and he caught his breath as he gazed on the arms of magenta gas spreading away from its center, the shades of bluish gray tucked into pockets where the gas was most dense. He’d hated it when they were inside it, but now he could see that it was beautiful.
    I’m going to live, he told himself. I won’t die out here.
    The enormous rear thrusters of the Empyrean swung into his field of vision, and Seth jammed the joystick forward, aiming for them, knowing that he could be caught in the exhaust and incinerated instantly. He already felt the heat on his face, and a slick layer of sweat coated his skin. “No, please,” he