Achilles

by Greg Boose

  “Jonah!” Manny shouts from below. A launch seat rises from a thick ribbon of metal at the base of the room, and Manny falls into it, holding his arms out wide, allowing the belts to connect around his body. “Get to your seat, J!”

  The rest of the seats unfold from the floor in a perfect square, sliding along thin grooves, locking into place as compressed air hisses from their bases. Bulbous helmets climb over the seats’ shoulders, connected to three gray tubes. Jonah eyes his seat and starts downward, but something stops him. On the other side of the level, stuck to the wall at an odd angle, is his sheaf.

  The siren suddenly goes silent, and the speakers in the ceiling pop and fizz with static. Jonah keeps waiting for the captain’s voice to come through, to tell them to prepare for deployment, that everything will be okay, but it never does.

  Down below, a Fourth Year punches the intercom panel: “Hey! HEY! What’s going on? What’s happening?”

  “Try Module Seven!” a Third Year named Daniel cries. “Check on Ruth! My sister! My twin sister! Please!”

  “Shut up!” the Fourth Year yells over his shoulder.

  “We’re going to die!” another boy wails.

  Out the window, the ball is much closer. The ghostly flames outside the window change color, grow longer, and begin to shoot away.

  Everyone else secures their helmets over their heads while Jonah swings his feet behind himself and plants them on the wall. He crouches like a snake about to attack and launches himself at his sheaf. He sails through the rumbling air, batting away three empty sleeping containers with his huge hands. As soon as he reaches the wall, Jonah grabs his sheaf and rolls it up. Then he springs toward the floor, where a few of the boys actually raise their arms, cheering him on.

  Jonah is just a few feet from the ground, floating downward like a balloon with a small leak, when gravity is suddenly restored in the ship. He crashes onto the corrugated metal floor and a bolt of pain shoots across his shoulders. He wobbles to his feet and bounces off a few boys before falling into his seat. He extends his arms, and belts shoot out above his shoulders and between his legs, attaching in a series of clicks. He’s strapped in tightly, and after securing his helmet, he looks over at his right hand to be sure he’s still holding his sheaf. Once he sees it’s still there, he stares up at the ceiling and waits for the ship to rise out of its decline, or for the truss to spread open and drop the modules, but neither happens.

  Then, to everyone’s relief, the ship begins to level out, as if someone has finally taken control. Jonah holds his breath as everyone’s seats automatically compensate, swiveling and moving along a series of grooves cut into the floor and walls. Quickly, they’re locked along the wall, which has now become the floor. Maybe they won’t be deploying after all, Jonah hopes, and they’re heading back out into the Silver Foot galaxy so they can come in slower.

  But then the ship dives again, and the pinging comes back, more powerful than ever, and everything becomes a blur; nothing has an outline or an individual noise. Their seats move along the walls for a second time, but some boys get stuck along the way. Jonah no longer knows which way is up; either he’s upside down, or the others are. Tethered sleeping containers ricochet against the walls like horses trying to break out of their reins. The ship keeps diving. It’s only a matter of seconds before they crash and die, Jonah thinks, and he clenches the sheaf in his hand.

  Something screams along the outside walls, and suddenly the pressure inside Jonah’s helmet disappears. Oxygen is sucked out of his body so fast it feels like his lungs have been turned inside out. He rips off his helmet and finds the level filled with screams. The ship changes direction again and Jonah’s head is forced to his left shoulder, and it’s then he notices the chair next to him is empty. He struggles to look back up and after a few seconds sees a boy named Blaire, a Second Year, unconscious and tucked deep inside his sleeping container. His long brown hair peeks just over the edges of his blankets. Sleeping pills, Jonah thinks.

  “Blaire!” he shouts.

  The ship hits the ground. There’s a deafening roar of metal scraping rock, and the boys empty their throats, lungs, guts, everything. There’s an explosion, and the ship bounces back into the air, high and in a gradual arc, and then all is eerily still and quiet. The screaming stops. No one makes a noise; they just look at each other in disbelief. It’s like they’re headed back out to space and everything has been fixed, that this was all a dream. Upside down, Jonah almost laughs, believing again that it’s just one of his hallucinations. But then they descend once more, and this time when the ship hits the ground, metal grinds and pops and something explodes in the module below or above. The craft violently stops as if it’s rammed something immovable, and the truss outside snaps. Jonah’s module is released from the metal network, thrown high into the air, and the cadet adjusts his grip on his sheaf while he watches this new world flip over and over and over outside the windows.

  The module slams into the ground, and a jagged black boulder tears through the wall just below Jonah’s feet, barreling inside like a shark attacking a school of fish. The tip of the boulder cuts right through Daniel, severing his torso clean from his legs, and then it bites its way through the opposite wall. Suddenly the module is in two separate pieces. As the other half rips away, Jonah sees a cross section of the other ten levels of his module: several demic girls, still in their seats, spiral out into the ether; some already dead with their helmets on, some alive and screaming. A young boy sails out of the first level, his arms swinging at his sides as if he’s trying to fly. As the other half of Module Six spins off in a different direction, Jonah watches Blaire’s tethered sleeping container whip outside and slam against the outer wall, knocking him halfway out. Blaire’s eyelids burst open, and a second later, he’s crushed as the module section rolls over him and then out of sight.

  A wave of rocks sprays Jonah’s face, choking him, stinging his eyes and cutting his cheeks. Something hits his nose and he feels the bones shatter. Clumps of soil attack his ears, clogging them, and something sharp drives along his neck. His module tears apart some more and a rush of wind blows over him, and then, in an instant, Jonah’s seat comes to an abrupt, violent stop. Jonah jerks forward, ejecting debris from his throat and mouth. He takes a deep breath and coughs and coughs and coughs. When he blindly brings his trembling hands to his face to carve the dirt from his eyes, Jonah begins to cry. Not because of the crash, or because of what happened to Daniel or Blaire or the young boy who tried to fly, but because he realizes he no longer holds his sheaf.

  Chapter Two

  Jonah rubs his knuckles into his eyes, grinding stone and soil into their corners. His eyes burn and fill with water, and he can’t keep them open for more than a split second, catching just blurry images of whites, browns, and reds. He takes a deep, quivering breath and instantly smells his own blood, and the last two minutes of chaos catch up with him.

  He just crashed. The Mayflower 2 just crashed and people died. Kids died. Blaire was smashed. Daniel was cut in half. Those girls spiraled into the air, screaming. But he’s not dead. Somehow, he’s still alive. The moment Jonah understands this, he goes stiff in his seat, and his body begins to talk to him, radioing in injuries from his face and left elbow, his shoulders and neck. Everything seems to hurt. And something feels wrong with his forehead; pressure and blood pool together in the front of his skull—just below his hairline.

  Among all the aches and throbbing pains and the jarring flashbacks from the crash and the thick layer of dirt coating his throat, Jonah realizes there’s an odd pull to his arms. It’s like they’re floating. His knees and feet feel strangely weighted, too. He finally dares to open his eyes for more than a second, and the sight immediately makes him vomit. The mixture of bile, dirt, ash, and crystal orange doesn’t shower down his chest, though; it strangely and softly floats to the ground in a fuzzy orange cloud.

  Jonah is fifty feet above the ground, hanging horizontally in what’s left of his sleepi
ng level. The back of his seat is to the sky, his arms and legs swaying beneath him in pain. Directly below him stands a gnarled, charcoal-black tree with long skinny branches that are as pointy and sharp as spears. A few tips stop just inches from the toes of his bare feet, daring him to fall. Jonah coughs, spits, and gasps for a good lungful of air, and in between, he prays his belts stay together.

  Tears help clear his eyes, and soon he can keep them almost halfway open. The seat to Jonah’s left is empty, its belts ripped apart, and two seats over, a Third Year hangs crushed and bruised like a piece of rotten fruit. The boy’s right arm is missing at the shoulder, the tip of his tongue blue and bleeding between his broken front teeth. Most of his face is scraped away, showing bone and purple muscle. Jonah knows the boy can’t still be alive, but he keeps staring at him anyway, waiting for the Third Year to catch a gasping breath or throw an insult his way.

  He screws his index fingers into his ears, clearing away what he can, and then excruciatingly shifts his body so he can look to his right. Manny. Manny hangs just like him, but he’s a dozen feet higher up on the wall. Gray dirt coats his black hair, and the bottom half of his face is covered in blood. His arms dangle below him, swinging in opposite directions like pendulums.

  “Manny?” Jonah wheezes. He waits more than thirty seconds before catching enough breath to say his name again. The oxygen is different here on Thetis.

  The fingers on Manny’s left hand twitch and curl inward. Jonah doesn’t want to, but he laughs. Then he sobs gratefully. He’s not the only survivor. He’s not the only one. “Manny, wake up. It’s J. It’s Jonah. Wake up.”

  Gray sheets float off Manny’s hair as he raises his head. His eyes remain shut, glued with soil and blood.

  “Wake up. You have to wake up.”

  A stripe of saliva falls out of Manny’s destroyed lips. It stays connected for more than ten feet before it separates and drifts onto one of the sharp branches below.

  “Manny. Can you hear me?” Jonah whispers. “Manny? We crashed. We’re alive, though. We have to… Can you hear me?”

  Manny’s arms stop swinging; they slowly rise to his chest, his neck, his chin, and his lips. Somewhere, far in the distance, there’s an explosion and several people scream. Men, women, and kids, all calling out at once. These noises were always out there, Jonah realizes, but they’ve just now taken hold of his brain. There are more survivors. Some yell for help, others yell names like Franklin, Olivine, Brooklyn, Roberto. A woman wails for a doctor. Another woman yells for a knife.

  “People are coming,” Jonah says as he watches Manny’s hands slide over the belts on his seat. “We’re going to be okay.”

  Manny’s hands continue to touch his belts. Soon he finds the release clasp, and his fingers begin to circle it.

  “No!” Jonah looks down at the tree branches. They look like they’re made of half wood, half rock, and they stick out in all directions like quills on a giant porcupine. And between the razor-sharp tips and the massive trunk, each branch is lined with giant clusters of spikes, baby porcupines clinging to their mother. “Manny, stop. Don’t touch your belts, okay?” The boy doesn’t listen. His fingers keep digging into the clasp. Jonah’s voice gets stronger. “Jesus! Stop moving your hands! You open that clasp and you’re going to die, Manny! Just—come on! Wait. Someone’s coming. Listen to me!”

  Someone is coming. A man shouting for survivors sounds like he’s just on the other side of the module wall.

  “Help us!” Jonah calls, bargaining with his shredded throat. “Module Six! Level Ten! Hurry!”

  Manny’s thumbs burrow under the tip of the release clasp. In horror, Jonah shouts, “Stop! Don’t open your belt!”

  The boy groans and drops his head, but his thumbs get leverage, and their curling knuckles start to lift the clasp.

  “Help us!” Jonah cries, his voice now sharp and loud. His eyes are glued to Manny’s moving thumbs. “Hurry!”

  A dark bare foot appears under a crooked rip in the module piece, far down on the left. A man calls, “Anyone in there? Anyone alive?”

  “Hurry, please!” Jonah shouts. The foot disappears, and Jonah hears the man circle the module, looking for an opening. Near the base of the tree, Jonah eyes a large hole. “On the other side! Keep going to where the trunk is!”

  But it’s too late; when Jonah looks back up at Manny, the boy’s thumbs pull up on the clasp. There’s a click, click, click. The belts break away, zipping up over Manny’s shoulders and down between his legs.

  “No!” Jonah screams.

  A black man in a red Mayflower 2 jumpsuit ducks through the hole the exact moment Manny leaves his seat. In what feels like slow motion to Jonah, Manny’s upper body sags and then he falls. Jonah roars and reaches for him, his long arms stretching, popping away from his wrecked shoulders, but he’s just too far away. His fingertips barely brush the boy’s passing leg.

  Manny’s chest hits a nearby branch, and he immediately flips backward. A gaping red hole, wider than Jonah’s outstretched hand, appears under the boy’s neck, and it pumps out three large clouds of blood like a smokestack. Jonah watches in disbelief as the First Year falls farther down the tree, his body snagging and tearing along the cluster of spikes like a bag of sand. Manny flips again and again until finally his stomach slams into a baby porcupine. Tiny tips go right through him and out the boy’s back, pointing up at Jonah, maroon with blood.

  All Jonah can do is stare. His insides churn with a black mass of heat, his throat stiffens with adrenaline, and his brain clears of any thought, but his eyes just stare at the cluster of bloody branches sticking through Manny’s back.

  The man below roars like a wounded lion, pulling Jonah’s eyes away from the cadet, his one friend. Jonah and the man look right at each other, neither saying a word.

  “Okay!” the man finally says in a shaky voice. “Okay, kid! What should I do? Tell me what you want me to do here!”

  The man below runs and leaps over a splintered edge of the trunk, and Jonah thinks he must still be hallucinating because it looks like the man jumped more than ten feet high. The man then stands directly below Jonah and holds his arms out wide. “You okay? I don’t know what to do here, kid. How do I get you out of there?”

  “I don’t know,” Jonah whispers. His seat begins to whine and creak. It leans forward a few degrees and then there’s a pop, like a bolt coming loose. He freezes every muscle, keeping his stare on the man below, pleading with himself not to look at Manny. He finally recognizes the man as the quiet computer engineer from the Progress Support Module. Jonah opens his mouth to say something is wrong with his seat when the base pole slips past a notch with a resounding clunk, and the seat begins to slide down the metal grooves of the wall, right toward the tree.

  “No, no, no, no!” the engineer yells.

  Jonah glides helplessly down the curved wall. A branch grazes his left knee and the tip of his nose. New tears blind his vision. After ten feet, though, the seat catches in a slot and stops abruptly. Manny is off to his left; when he wipes away the tears, he can see him out of the corner of his eye. Jonah is now forty feet above the engineer who curls his arms, ready to catch him. Between the two of them are dozens of razor-sharp branches, each lined with several of the clusters. The tree is so thick that Jonah can only find one small opening free of branches, but reaching it would require him to leap more than ten feet to his right, which means it’s impossible.

  “Don’t move,” the man says.

  “I won’t. I can’t,” Jonah answers.

  The man sweeps his eyes over the massive tree. “Maybe I can climb to you? What do you think about that? Should I climb?”

  Before he can respond, Jonah’s seat begins to swivel. The backrest rotates, and in a few seconds, Jonah faces upward. He’s almost directly below the one-armed Third Year.

  “Whoa, okay. Things keep moving. Things are moving, huh? Um, hey. Hey, my name’s Garrett. What’s your name, kid?”

  “Jonah Lincoln,
” he calls over his shoulder. His voice doesn’t sound like his. Nothing feels real anymore.

  “Okay, Jonah Lincoln. I’m looking at this tree here, and I don’t think I can climb up there without killing myself, so I’m going to go get some more help. I’ll be right back, I promise, and we’ll get you down. We’ll find something to break all these branches away, and we’ll get you down. So, just hold on. Hold. On.”

  The seat whines some more, and the seat begins to tip backward. “No!” Jonah shouts. “I think…you have to catch me. I think I have to jump.”

  “No way, kid. Don’t even try,” Garrett says. “Just stay put. I swear I’ll be right back.”

  Something then shifts in Jonah, and his brain starts firing. He pushes away the trauma and the panic, his cadet training kicking in. “Look to my right. There’s a clear spot to my right.” He steadies his trembling hands long enough to pull on the belt clasp at his chest. His belts zip away, and he grips the sides of his seat so he doesn’t slide off.

  Garrett sounds terrified. “Right now? We’re doing this right now?”

  “I don’t think I have a choice.” Things come even more into focus, and Jonah carefully brings his knees to his chest and rolls onto his side. Every muscle feels bruised and weak. The seat creaks and tips downward a little more. Jonah scrambles to his feet and peers down at Garrett. “Here I come.”

  The man sees the tunnel through the branches that Jonah plans to jump through and shuffles underneath it. “You can’t jump that far. That’s too far. I’m telling you, just wait.”

  Jonah’s mind flashes to a scene on a rainy playground at the age of seven, when his foster father said he would catch him at the bottom of a slide. Jonah slipped right through the man’s fingers and hit the back of his head on the asphalt. Instead of scooping him up, the man just laughed and told him to get up and stop crying like a girl. Jonah looks down at Garrett, knowing he can’t trust this man to catch him, but he takes a deep breath and tells himself he can make it. If he really wants to, he can make the opening. He kicks back his right foot and prepares to jump, but the distribution of weight is too much for the seat, and it breaks away before he can. He sidesteps onto the thin base pole at the last moment, barely catching himself from falling. The seat crashes through the tree, flipping and bouncing until it comes to rest on a huge cluster. Garrett covers his head as wooden shards fall, but they don’t seem to come. When he looks up, the shards float almost like feathers, and he bats them away with ease. Things are moving at an odd pace, Jonah thinks, but he doesn’t have the time to dwell on it. His bare feet cup the freezing pole, and he flattens his palm against the wall.