The Travels of Scout Shannon: Books 4-6

Chapter 12

12

The doctor injected Shadow with a single nanite and prescribed a day of low activity while the healing happened unseen inside of Shadow’s body. Then he played with the dog for far longer than he had taken for diagnosis and treatment, gently tussling with him and rolling him over to scratch his belly.

Scout wondered if this was still going to be the norm in galactic central, that her dogs would charm the pants off of everyone they met. Why did no one in space ever have dogs?

The door chimed, and Caleb signaled for it to open. Sparrow was standing outside, Gert sitting close at her side.

“Emilie and Geeta are going to be staying in the intensive care wing, but I was wondering if you would like to walk the dogs around? I can give you a tour of the ship,” she said.

“Shadow can walk short distances, but watch him closely,” the doctor said, suddenly serious. “If he starts to limp or favor that leg, you should pick him up.”

“Okay,” Scout said. “Thank you.”

“I think a tour is a splendid idea,” Caleb said to Scout and Sparrow. “I myself need to get back to the Months. We are nearly at the barricade, and they will need my assistance negotiating the bureaucracy.”

“Is it worse than Space Farer bureaucracy?” Scout asked. She had spent an entire day being processed there. Granted, she and her dogs had all needed medical care and food, but still.

“This is far worse,” Caleb said, “because it’s not routine. We’re in the midst of a cutthroat legal battle. Scores of lawyers throwing everything they have at each other over even the simplest of actions. It’s a miracle anything gets accomplished at all. But once we’re past it, we’ll be on our way.”

“Have you been to galactic central?” Scout asked.

“No, not yet,” Caleb said. Another wave of melancholy washed over him, and Scout could just imagine the dreams he’d had for the future that were all dashed now.

He was in pain enough just knowing Viola was gone. Scout was glad she hadn’t told him the whole story. It would only have made things worse.

Caleb and the doctor stepped out of the room, but Sparrow and Scout lingered a moment as the two dogs greeted one another as if they had been separated for years and not just a matter of minutes. Gert sniffed at Shadow, especially at the site where the doctor had injected the nanite, but seemed to conclude that this was still her Shadow and not some Shadow doppelgänger.

“What would you like to see first?” Sparrow asked brightly as they turned and started back down the glowing hallway. Apparently, they were being sanitized again, to prevent hospital germs from spreading to the marketplace.

“I don’t know,” Scout said. “I don’t even know what’s on this ship.”

“It’s amazing,” Sparrow said as they emerged into the noisy marketplace. “It’s not like on Amatheon Orbiter 1. No one is here just because they were born here. They want to be here.”

Scout looked around. She didn’t feel that vibe, but she didn’t want to argue. Maybe she’d sense it later after she spent more time here.

Or perhaps not. Sparrow had grown up in space, where life was very regimented. Scout had grown up inside the confines of a protective dome, but she had been about the same age as Sparrow when it had been destroyed. She cast her mind back to her first days alone with Shadow, crossing the prairie on her bike, finding little towns hiding amongst the tall grasses. She hadn’t even known such places existed before her family died.

Those towns had been founded by people fed up with the rules inside the domed cities, preferring to find their own means of protection against the—at that time infrequent—solar storms. She had found their pioneer spirit contagious and had never spent more than a night or two under a dome since.

Maybe she did know what Sparrow was feeling. Freedom. But freedom at such a young age was scary and exhilarating all at once.

“Do you have a job here?” Scout asked.

“Not yet, but I will,” Sparrow said. “The Months took me in because they said they owed it to my brother. They told me to just wander the ship until I found my place. So that’s what I do. I watch people doing stuff, and if it looks interesting, I ask questions. Everyone is super willing to show you anything. I’ve learned so much more in the last few days than I ever did in school.”

Scout smiled. She remembered that feeling too. “What do you like best?” Scout asked.

A big grin spread across Sparrow’s face. “Engineering. Do you want to see?”

“Yes, let’s,” Scout said. Partly she was humoring the kid, but more than that, engineering sounded like the sort of place that would have a lot of wide-open spaces and fewer people, particularly compared to the marketplace.

Sparrow led the way to the far end of the market, pausing only once to procure a paper cone filled with fried dough dusted with cinnamon and sugar. She shared this treasure with Scout. Scout had never had such a thing, but it didn’t disappoint. How could something that was largely air on the inside be so delightful?

Then they were back in the part of the ship that looked like it had been tunneled from a single brick of metal. Each turn Sparrow took brought them to a hallway even more sparsely lit until they were so deep inside the ship the lights only came on as they walked under them and blinked out behind them. Scout had walked through hallways like that before on Amatheon Orbiter 1, but she still found the experience more than a little unsettling.

“You’ll like my engineering friend,” Sparrow said as they walked. “He’s been to the surface a few times. That’s where you’re from, right?”

“Right,” Scout agreed. “Is he from there?”

“No, just visits,” Sparrow said.

“Like secret spy stuff?”

“Yeah, I think,” Sparrow said. “He is one of the sneakier pilots. He can get down and back without the upper management at Amatheon Orbiter 1 even knowing he’s there. They watch pretty closely, you know.”

“I got that impression,” Scout said. “What does he do?”

“Uh, maybe he’d better explain that,” Sparrow said, her cheeks flushing brightly enough to be apparent even with her dark skin in the dim lighting. “Sometimes I talk too much.”

“Understood, I won’t press you,” Scout said.

“Here we are,” Sparrow said, taking a few running steps forward into the cavernous space at the end of the corridor. Gert trotted at her side, giving a happy bark that was lost in the immensity of the space.

A few lights were spaced along the walls, hooded to direct their light down to the floor. But most of the light came from a glowing blue cylinder sitting in the middle of the room. It glowed too intensely to look directly at, and yet the room around it was so large that even this light could barely reach the walls and the ceiling high above was lost to shadow.

“This is the engine!” Sparrow said, running again with Gert keeping pace beside her. “It’s what makes the ship so fast. It bends space-time!”

Scout had no clue what that could even mean. She nodded and smiled, picking up Shadow to carry him inside. It felt like her footsteps should be echoing in such a large, empty space, but something was swallowing up all the sounds, even Sparrow’s voice as she ran too far ahead of Scout. Scout walked faster until she reached where Sparrow stood at the very end of the glowing cylinder.

“What did you say?” Scout asked.

“I said isn’t it awesome?” Sparrow shouted. Scout would swear that glowing thing was sucking in all her words. Even standing next to her Scout could barely catch them.

Scout looked up at the cylinder. It pulsated from white to blue, and Scout had the disturbing sensation that it was looking at her, all the way inside her.

Judging her.

“Maybe you want to step back.”

Scout took a moment to put the sounds together in her head to form words, then another moment to realize it wasn’t Sparrow speaking that time. Then a hand closed on her shoulder, gently guiding her back.

That pulsating . . . it didn’t seem to be making a sound, and yet something in her chest heard it. Not a feeling like when she was close to a rocket launching and felt that low rumble in her chest; this was different. It was like it was humming at two different frequencies, and her ears couldn’t hear it, but her heart could.

“Keep stepping back,” the man guiding her said, and Scout saw that he had put an arm around her shoulders to keep her moving, step after step, further back from that glowing thing.

“What is that?” Scout asked. Her voice sounded hoarse like she hadn’t used it in days.

“Just the engine,” the man said. “Some people respond to it differently than others.”

“Sorry, Scout,” Sparrow said sheepishly. “I forgot about that part.”

“Don’t forget it again,” the man said to Sparrow in a voice that was both stern and fond at the same time. “This was a mild reaction to the warping field.”

“You didn’t feel it?” Scout asked.

“Never do,” the man said, letting go of Scout to continue walking alone through the semidarkness.

“Me neither,” Sparrow said with beaming pride. “That’s why I’d make such a good engineer.”

“It takes more than that,” the man shouted back. He must have learned how to pitch his voice inside this strange room. Scout could hear him quite clearly even though Sparrow’s words still seemed muffled.

“I have to study,” Sparrow said.

“Was that your friend?” Scout asked. She hugged Shadow tighter and looked down at Gert. Whatever strangeness Scout had just experienced didn’t seem to have affected the dogs at all.

“No, that’s his dad,” Sparrow said. “Hey, Mike! Where’s Tom Tom?”

“Off duty,” Mike said. He didn’t shout, and yet it was like he was speaking right next to Scout’s ear.

“I know what that means,” Sparrow said with a roll of her eyes. “Back to the marketplace. Unless you wanted to see more here?”

“No, I’m good,” Scout said, trying to swallow. Her mouth had gone almost painfully dry.

She had seen quite enough of engineering.