by Greg Boose
“Well, now that’s pretty damn interesting. This thing’s filled with methane, for one,” he says before licking the powder from his fingers. “And this… Huh. It might be…it might be a close relative to the saltpeter we have on Earth, or could it be some kind of charcoal-sulfur mixture? I’m sorry, but that’s really pretty interesting to me.” His tongue crawls over the fronts of his teeth. “And there’s something else here, something…must be a natural flash powder? I guess that would explain why these things explode like they do.” He stands and twists around at the wreckage behind them. “So it looks like we basically crash-landed on a minefield.”
“Well, now that’s pretty freaky,” a boy says from the shadows.
A hand grabs Jonah’s wrist from behind. He spins and wrenches his arm out of the grip, ready to fight like he’s back in Cleveland. He’s relieved to see it’s just Dr. Z.
“Jonah, I need to talk to you. Wait. What’s all this blood on your back?” She pulls down his collar. “Jesus. Come with me, hurry up. We found two cases of medical supplies, and we need to clean this and sew it up. And how’s your nose?”
Jonah stretches his lips and tries to wiggle his nose. The disconnected bones rub against each other painfully. “Definitely still broken.”
“I’ll try to set it.”
It’s been five hours since the crash. On Jonah’s left, four men, two women, and several cadets dig shallow graves for the dead, their sweaty clothes shining in the fiery glow. Dr. Z guides him another hundred yards to a makeshift hospital, which is nothing more than a circle of sleeping containers and a few launch seats, all softly lit by three electric lanterns. When Jonah arrives, a shadowy man kneels over a sleeping container. He pulls a sheet over the head of a small body, and then he places his palms on his face and steps away, slumping into the darkness.
“How many are we?” Jonah asks with a lump in his throat.
“How many are we? You mean, how many of us are alive?”
Jonah watches the man stagger and disappear into the shadows of the evening. “Yeah.”
“From my last count, there are sixteen adults and forty-four kids left. Total.” Dr. Z circles around the wounded and kneels next to the newly covered body. She peeks under the sheet and closes her eyes. She then picks up a rock and chucks it into the night air. It takes her a few seconds before whispering, “Forty-three. Forty-three kids. Forty-three k—Jesus.”
“That means one hundred and eighteen people are dead or missing,” comes a whisper at Jonah’s feet. He looks down to see a demic boy sitting up in a sleeping container. He’s sixteen or seventeen years old, tall, with tight blond curls pulled behind his ears and a perfect oval face. His right arm hides inside a hastily made sling. “That’s about, what? Sixty-seven percent of us?”
The staggering figures run down Jonah’s throat, choking any words that pop into his mind. A movie of faces from the ship plays behind his eyes. Different run-ins and passersby. Table mates. Teammates. Manny. His math teacher. The two older demic girls who invited him to game night the day before the wormhole. The navigators. The captain. The captain. The moment Jonah sees Captain Tolivar’s drooping cheeks and his friendly brown eyes, he stops the movie. “Wait! What about the captain? What about him and the first officer and the others? Where are they? Are they—?”
“They’re dead.” Dr. Z sighs.
“But are you sure? Because I saw the Support Module, and it looks like it’s still in really good shape. They could still be alive in there.”
The doctor pulls Jonah away from the others. “Listen to me. What I am about to tell you is very sensitive, Jonah. Do you understand me?”
Her voice scares him, and he’s not sure if he really wants to hear what she is about to say. “Yes. I understand.”
“Most of the senior cadets know this already, so it’s just a matter of time before you hear it from one of them or somewhere else, but we’re trying not to incite any more panic tonight than there already is. We’ll have a meeting tomorrow morning and tell everyone then. The thing is, Jonah, that the captain and the first officer, and two other flight officers… They were shot. They were killed. Somebody shot them and we’re pretty sure that’s why we crashed.”
Jonah stumbles backward, his eyes stuck on her cracked lips. “What do you mean? Why would somebody shoot them?”
“We don’t know. A few people are in there right now, in the Support Module, trying to figure it out. They’re looking for clues, treating it as a crime scene.” Dr. Z sets her slight jaw and flares her nostrils before continuing. “It’s truly unbelievable. It’s absolutely despicable and really beyond words. All these kids… And right before we got to Thetis. A day away. I just don’t get it. This whole place is a crime scene.”
Jonah staggers past her into the makeshift hospital, a hospital that wouldn’t exist if someone hadn’t shot the captain and his crew. He figured they crashed from a mechanical failure. He just guessed something was wrong with the ship and Captain Tolivar had done his best to keep them alive, a hero in a time of emergency. But now, in crashing waves, it hits Jonah that someone aboard the ship, someone he has lived with for over a year, has killed 67 percent of one hundred seventy-seven people. There are only fifty-nine of them left.
“Are you okay?” the doctor asks.
He turns to say that he’s not, but his knees begin to shake. It’s barely noticeable at first, and Jonah thinks he’s merely giving in to the day’s events and the fresh news of the murders, but then one of the electric lanterns tips over and a few people scream out in the darkness. The boy with the sling stands up and cries, “Earthquake!”
Jonah freezes at the word, the word, his parents’ word, and he grabs the nearest empty seat and steadies himself, desperately trying to push away visions of his parents being crushed by a falling ceiling. Dr. Z stands over the wounded, her arms up and out like a mother bird shielding her eggs.
The shaking gets more violent, and a thunderous rumbling comes from Jonah’s right. He squints into the night and the wildfire beyond, and soon a dozen kids, Garrett, and the silver-haired professor sprint toward them, all of them screaming, most with their hands behind their heads.
“Run!” shouts Garrett. “Run! Get out of the way!”
A blur of something large and black suddenly bounds past Garrett like a ghost. Another blur flies past, just missing him. Garrett then changes direction and darts right through the hospital, jumping almost thirty feet over the wounded, calling for everyone to get out of the way.
Two big black shadows charge up the plain, side by side, chasing after a thin crowd of kids who stumble in every direction on the shaking ground. The shadows separate and dart around a pair of demic girls holding hands. The girl on the left trips, yanking the other girl down, and a huge black beast jumps over them at the very last moment. In the faint light, Jonah catches a glimpse of the thing’s powerful back paws and whip-like tail. Another one comes into view: It’s as tall and as large as a moose, but it moves with the agility of a jungle cat. A thick blanket of black wool hangs from its haunches and from under its belly, and as it jumps over the two fallen girls, its coarse hair sweeps along their backs. The two demics jump to their feet still holding hands and run for the hospital lights. But when they are just steps away from Dr. Z, a beast comes out of the darkness and rams into the girl on the right.
She’s blonde and petite and she goes airborne like a dead leaf in a tornado. She lands somewhere in the dark, out of sight. The other girl shrieks, dives into the dirt, and then claws her way behind Jonah, who pulls the launch seat between him and the action.
Dazed by the collision, the beast backs up a few feet and swivels its shaggy neck toward Jonah and the girl. Its head is double the size of a moose’s, and its face is all nose, a jet-black, pebbled mess of wet skin. Out of its one nostril drips a thick stream of yellow liquid. More beasts and people charge by, but all Jonah can concentrate on is the domed, percolating section of skin on top of this beast’s nose. It slowly rises in
the shape of a mushroom. The stem of skin underneath is beet-red and inflates like a balloon. It gets to the size of a basketball, and just when Jonah thinks it’s going to pop, a dozen tiny holes flap open, sending gusts of air in every direction. The air blasts the wool off the animal’s face, revealing four milky white eyes and several hollow stumps of bone. The beast steps in Jonah’s direction and growls.
Dr. Z pulls a syringe out of an open kit. “Just hold on.”
The stem on its nose empties, and the wool falls back over the muddled eyes. Jonah steps backward, and the beast lowers its hind legs. The mushroom on its nose begins to inflate again, and thick yellow bubbles froth and fall out of its nostril. The animal unhinges its lower jaw, and two rows of rotten teeth drop more than two feet and bounce into place. Some rise into ten-inch spikes.
Dr. Z comes in from the side on her toes, the needle in her right hand. She gets close, and all she has to do is jump, stab, and run away, but the animal dips further down, and then pounces at Jonah.
The demic boy with the blond curls sends an echoing, haunting scream into the air as Jonah throws his arms up over his head. The beast’s front paw crashes into his elbow, spinning him backward. He falls on his stomach, crawls a few feet, and then flips himself over to find the beast standing directly over his legs. The mushroom on its nose deflates, and to Jonah’s horror, its milky eyes begin to rise out of its skull on dripping yellow sticks. The animal sets a paw on Jonah’s chest, pinning him to the ground. Somebody yells for him to move, to spin away, but he’s absolutely paralyzed with fear; all he can do is stare at the jaw of rotten teeth rocking back and forth under its head. The air turns sour.
A burst of adrenaline finally pumps through his body, sending him into action. He swings and punches at the paw. Once. Twice. Three times. The beast raises its head and then slams its other front paw onto his chest. The impact empties Jonah’s lungs, waters his eyes, finishes the short fight. The animal doesn’t waste any more time; it swings its jaw toward Jonah’s throat.
A blue beam of light zips in from the left, slicing right through the beast’s neck. Its severed head flips in the air and then lands on Jonah’s heaving stomach. With a thud, the beast’s massive black body falls on its side, where its paws jerk wildly and claw into the dirt. In shock, Jonah bats the head off him and takes a gasping breath of air.
“You’re such a Firstie, man.” Jonah whips his head to see Paul holding an LZR-rifle at his side, its long gray barrel glowing with tiny white lights.
As quickly as the adrenaline arrived, it also disappears, and Jonah drops his head back to the ground in trembling relief. He almost died. Again.
Dr. Z rushes over and places a hand on the headless beast’s chest. “Damn it, cadet! You didn’t have to kill her!”
Paul laughs. “You serious? That snout was about to eat my little First Year here. And it was either that thing.” Paul then nods his head at Jonah. “Or this thing. And as the highest-ranking cadet alive in this awful, horrific fucking mess of a moon, I’m going to need every cadet I can get. First Year. Fourth Year. Whatever year.”
A couple more beasts thunder past, and Dr. Z has to shout to be heard. “You could have tried to scare her first, you know! You didn’t have to shoot her head off! She was just running away from the fire. That we started. We probably destroyed her home.”
Paul picks at his teeth with his thumbnail. “That snout was about to stomp on top of every single person in this sickbay, including you. I should be hearing some gratitude instead of some attitude. I had to kill it.”
Dr. Z points her finger at Paul’s chest. “No, you didn’t. So stand down, cadet, and get that gun away from my patients.”
“Why do you keep calling it a snout?” Everyone turns to see a woman sitting up in a sleeping container. The left half of her thick black hair has been shaved off, and a perfect line of stitches holds together a bloody section of skin. She raises her hands over her head in exasperation. “How do you already have a name for it?”
Paul runs a hand over his smooth head and then touches the cut around his neck. “It has a long ridiculous Latin name that some demic asshole on Thetis came up with, but I can’t recall what that is right now. It’s easier to just call them snouts because that’s their fucking nickname. Didn’t you read your Achilles report? These things are pretty high up on the old food chain here. I’d say this pretty little lady was about four years old. Maybe pregnant.”
A girl standing on the perimeter gasps.
“Oh my god,” Dr. Z whispers.
Jonah gets to his feet and wobbles to the empty launch seat. He’s lightheaded, working on autopilot. He doesn’t care about the snouts or the food chain that he’s not on top of; all he wants to do is sit down, breathe, and get away from everyone.
“I said, ‘Maybe.’” Paul then walks around the corpse of the beast, examining its belly. “Or maybe not. Probably not. But snouts produce about two calves a year, if I remember correctly. So what? Nobody read the Achilles report they put together on Thetis? Because if you did, it shows where the snouts sleep, what they eat, who their natural predators are, everything.”
The boy with the sling clears his throat. “Who are their natural predators?”
Paul wheels around. “Roopers, mostly. These little monkey-rat-devil things that live high up in the trees. They hunt the snouts for breakfast at the break of dawn. Drop down in swarms as thick as blankets. Gnaw the snouts right to the bones in a couple minutes.”
“I thought you said snouts were high up on the food chain,” Dr. Z snaps.
“They are. They’re still pretty high up there. Jesus Christ, people. We were just on a spacecraft for three hundred eighty days and you guys didn’t read the report on Achilles?” He marches over to Jonah who turns his head away in embarrassment. “What about you, Firstie First Year? You read it, right, cadet?”
Before Jonah can come up with an excuse, the woman with stitches saves him. “Oh, get off it. That file is over twelve hundred pages long, kid. I didn’t get to every animal. So calm down and stop acting like you’re running the show here.”
“I am running the show here!” Paul barks. “There’s not one officer still alive, so I’m the one who’s going to keep all your asses safe.”
“You’re a kid,” the woman says, sighing. “You’re not in charge of shit.”
Paul leans his rifle onto his shoulder and pats it silently, staring the woman down. Jonah looks for an escape route. Dr. Z can stitch him up in the morning, he thinks.
“But how do they even know what animals are on this moon? I didn’t know they flew up here and scouted this place,” the boy with the sling says. “I didn’t know they explored Achilles.”
Paul drops the rifle into his arms and sweeps the barrel back and forth over the plain, eyeing a few straggling snouts lumbering by. Paul says, “They didn’t fly up here, ya moron. They scouted Achilles and Peleus from down on Thetis. They have that Woesner Telescope down there. Heard of it much? They can practically see everything that goes on up here, and on Peleus, and on a couple of the other planets in the Silver Foot. That thing’s so powerful they can see little bugs shitting out turds up here and then watch even tinier bugs eat ’em up. You’re a demic, kid, how the hell did you not know that?”
“I spend a lot of time in the lab,” the boy mutters. “But now that I think about it, yes, I did know about that. About the telescope. I’m just a bit discombobulated, considering everything.”
A thought springs into Jonah’s mind. If they can see bugs on Achilles, surely they can see them. He stands up, knocking his seat over, and waves his hands up at the sky and rotates in circles, still feeling the beast’s weight on his chest. “So they can see us right now? They should be able to see me?” He yells and waves his arms wider. “Hey! Hey! We’re here! We’re right here!”
“Fucking stupid-ass Firsties.” Paul covers his face. Jonah grows red but continues to wave his arms. He doesn’t care how foolish he looks. He just wants to get to Thet
is and away from this mess.
“Sorry, Jonah,” Dr. Z says. “Not possible. We’re on the wrong side of the moon. We probably won’t be visible to Thetis for at least two months or so.”
“Forty-one days,” the boy with the sling says. “I mean, judging by the time that the sun set today. That’s when both of our rotations would make it possible. That’s when they’ll be able to see this spot. This exact spot right here. But I could be off by a day or two.”
“You could be,” Paul sneers. “And you probably are.”
Humiliated, Jonah slumps back into the chair. Could he make any more mistakes today? His eyes hurt. His legs and shoulders hurt. And after the close call with the snout, his stomach has been in pulsing knots. It’s been over eighty hours. He needs to sleep.
“But can’t we just call them?” The girl who gasped from the perimeter walks halfway into the light. She has long brown hair that reaches her waist.
“Now that would be nice.” The silver-haired professor enters the group from the opposite direction. He’s out of breath, hands on his hips. “That would make things a bit easier, right? We could just call them up and ask them to swing on by and pick us up?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Let’s do that. Exactly.”
“Exactly. The only problem is that our communication system is totally one-hundred percent down,” the professor says, sighing. “For the time being, anyway. And the crash site is so huge, it’ll take us days to find everything we might need to fix it. Hell, we still don’t know where Module Eight is.”
“What?” Paul yells. “How the hell is that possible?”
“How the hell is it possible? It’s just gone, kid. We think it may have bounced down into the jungle. That’s how that’s possible. And have you seen how large that jungle is down there? A couple of guys stopped looking at nightfall. The team got too spooked.”