Thetis--The Deep Sky Saga--Book Two

by Greg Boose

  Vespa leans closer to Jonah: “They carved the same moon-and-circle symbol into all the dead bodies. They’re covered with them. Absolutely covered.”

  Jonah almost vomits; he pictures the mangled corpses of his classmates and teachers and engineers lying head to toe, their skin covered in alien hieroglyphics, their bodies spelling out another warning. Don’t leave. He didn’t want to leave for Thetis, and now he doesn’t want to stay on Achilles. What are his other options? Back to Earth? Can this ship get them home?

  “There’s more,” Vespa says. “There’s…”

  Feet march past with strong, sour odors close behind. The tube running out of his skin bounces up and down as an arm bumps against Jonah’s. And then another and another bump past. No one says a word, though.

  “No! Hell no, man. Get out of here! You’re not coming with us!” Griffin shouts. “Get the hell out! All of you, get out!”

  The lavender man’s voice suddenly booms inside the ship, echoing up from the open door: “All the way to the back! Get to the back! Keep moving!”

  “They’re from Module Eight,” Vespa whispers. “They look like how Kip looks. And Jonah, listen, something else: Dr. Z is here, too. She’s alive. But she’s—”

  Dr. Z is alive? He immediately sits up straight. She’s the one who diagnosed his disease after the crash. She’s the one who knows how to save him. And Brooklyn. “Dr. Z! Dr. Zarembo, where are you? Dr. Z? It’s me, Jonah Lincoln! I’m right—”

  Vespa digs her nails into Jonah’s wrist. “No, stop. She’s like Kip and the others; she’s not talking. She’s totally messed up, too.”

  Griffin’s mouth appears next to Jonah’s ear: “The doctor helped the zombie kids with the bodies. She’s…she’s the one who cut the things in their skins.”

  Jonah doesn’t believe it. “Dr. Z! Please! I need your help! My eyes are totally blue now! And so are Brooklyn’s! We’re both blind!”

  A hand clamps hard over Jonah’s mouth. “Shut up, Firstie,” Griffin says. Then, to the front of the ship: “Kick the lady and these zombie kids off the ship before they kill us all, and let’s go already!”

  Jonah yanks Griffin’s hand away. “No, Dr. Z is—”

  Then Vespa’s palm quickly covers his lips. “Not right now, Jonah. Not right now.”

  He grits his teeth, leans back. Griffin isn’t telling the truth, he thinks. He knows Dr. Z; she’s one of the few people on this moon he can trust. There’s no way she dug up dead bodies and spelled out some sick warning. There’s no way she carved symbols into their skin.

  “Where is she?” Jonah asks Vespa.

  “She’s in the back. She keeps opening and closing her mouth like she’s talking, but she’s not saying anything.”

  “I’m telling you guys,” Griffin says. “Stay the hell away from her.”

  Jonah smells the lavender man. He takes a long wheezing inhale before shouting, “Okay, listen up! I know you all want to get to Thetis as soon as possible. I do, too. Especially after seeing some of this shit. But we’re going to fly back and forth for a bit and look for some important things that were on your ship. Now, has anyone seen something that looks like a satellite anywhere? I need to know that immediately. It’s green and looks like…like a satellite, I guess.”

  No one responds. Jonah thinks back to the crash. He never saw anything that looked like a satellite.

  “We need that thing, people. You have no idea how much we need that thing.”

  “Let’s just go already!” Griffin yells.

  The man grumbles. “Everybody lock in and shut up. We’re going to fly around looking for it.”

  The outside door closes, and the ship pressurizes. Jonah hears Griffin sigh and click his belts together. No one behind him makes a noise. The kids from Module Eight and Dr. Z can dig up fifty dead bodies and lay them out in a pattern, but they can’t put on their safety belts? The engine roars to life, and Jonah feels the ship begin to lift off.

  “Wait!” Vespa yells. “Oh my god, wait! Look! Stop! Go back down! Open up the doors!”

  “Yeah, yeah, I see him. Lower it back down!” the man yells.

  “Holy shit. It’s Cadet Sigg!” Griffin laughs. “Paul, you sly motherfucker.”

  Vespa’s voice is suddenly full of hope. “How can…I can’t believe it. We saw him…”

  “Die,” Jonah says. “He died.”

  The ship sets back down, and after a symphony of noises, the door opens, and a pair of feet immediately sprint over metal. They stop just a few yards from where Jonah sits.

  “Vespa?” Paul’s voice cracks and wavers: “You’re alive.”

  “I thought you were dead, that you died on the beach,” Vespa cries. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “Yo, cadet. Hell yeah. Good to see you, man,” Griffin says. “Sweet scars. Lots of blood, though.”

  Paul’s voice suddenly lowers. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Those kids from Module Eight…shit. They shouldn’t be on here. They need to get off. Right now.”

  “Sit down!” the man shouts. “We’re leaving! Now!”

  “Sir, you don’t understand!” Paul yells back.

  “Sit! Down! We’re not leaving anyone behind. Those are my orders, cadet. I don’t give a shit what they look like. As long as they’re breathing, we’re bringing them home.”

  Without another word, Paul drops down into the seat in front of Jonah. The backrest leans into the boy’s long legs, pushing them into the aisle. Vespa’s body shakes next to Jonah, bouncing with held-in cries. He doesn’t know if it’s because Paul survived, or if it’s because they’re finally leaving this god-awful moon. The door closes, and the ship starts to rise again.

  Jonah leans forward and whispers, “Were you just pretending to be dead on the beach? Why? And why were you out there hunting me down?”

  Paul shifts away from him.

  “Why were you hunting me? What happened to you out there?”

  The cadet still doesn’t answer him.

  Jonah breaks; he reaches over the seat and grabs the top of Paul’s shaved head and yanks it backward. “Why were you trying to kill me?”

  “That’s it,” the doctor with the gruff voice says as she charges toward him with a series of coughs. “No more out of you.”

  Before Jonah can shout again, an icy coolness runs from the tube into his veins, and a second later, his eyes close and he’s asleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hot, soggy air blows up and over Jonah’s skin, waking him with a jolt. He tries to jump away from it, to escape the soaked pillow under his neck and the damp sheet pulled up to his chest, but straps across his forehead and upper arms hold him to whatever it is he lies on. It takes a moment for him to realize that he’s moving; wheels squeak below him, struggling to maintain a straight line to wherever it is he’s going. Jonah opens his eyes to see blobs of whites and grays and browns. Something dark blue slowly crawls from left to right, a blurry glacier going in the opposite direction.

  “Jonah? Are you awake?” Vespa asks somewhere behind him. He hears footsteps now. Naked feet slap dirt all around him. Someone nearby cries for her mom and dad. A boy—is it Griffin?—says he can’t believe he made it here, after all this time.

  It feels like hours pass as Jonah struggles to turn his head from left to right. A fuzzy black shadow quickly moves toward his face. A second later, he feels Vespa’s hand on his. “We’re on Thetis. We’re here.”

  We’re on Thetis. Another dark blue blob crawls by in the distance. Everything reeks of salt and sulfur. The air is thick and suffocating; sweat drips into his ears and eyes and mouth. We’re here. Vespa releases his hand, and Jonah watches her shadow get smaller as her words bounce back and forth inside his head. When her words finally stop and settle, and Jonah can focus on them, two things hit him at once: They made it to Thetis—their final destination—and Jonah can see more than blackness. He can see colors. He can see shapes and movements. The medicine works.<
br />
  The combined revelations cause the cadet to struggle wildly against the straps; he grabs the edges of the bed and wrenches his shoulders back and forth. Someone pushes down on his chest, a woman shouts for him to calm down and relax and just lie back, but Jonah sees more blobs of whites and grays and browns, and the excitement is too much. He screams and rocks his body. He screams for Dr. Z and for Vespa and for his dead parents. The bed shifts sharply to his right and the wheels squeal and grind, and then Jonah feels his world tip over. For a moment, he’s suspended in the air, floating, stuck back up on the wall of his broken module after the crash with Manny and the Third Year with half his face torn off, and then a second later, his cheek bounces against the ground. Vespa shouts his name, Griffin laughs somewhere on his left, and then he falls back asleep with dozens of blurry shadows charging toward him.

  • • •

  The lights in the room are weak, but they buzz loudly, flickering on and off, on and off. With half-opened eyes, Jonah stares at a bulb above the door of his small room, its pattern hypnotizing him into a drooling stupor. He can’t see the details of the bulb—his sight isn’t completely restored—but more colors have begun to distinguish themselves. The bulb is yellow. Next to the door, hanging on the wall, are green rectangles. The door is brown with a dark square at the top, perhaps a window. Jonah rolls his head to the side and sees black squares just inches from his face, lit up with moving white lines. Thick white tubes descend from the squares and end in his wrist and chest.

  He closes his eyes and instantly sees Tunick sitting cross-legged in his cave, purple flames spreading out behind the man like wings. He watches Tunick lean forward and shove a verve seed toward his face. Behind him, Hopper and Michael laugh and dance. Aussie’s face appears on his leg. He watches quietly as her vomit drips over his pants. Jonah then sees himself leaping through the fire, running and escaping, and then there’s Bidson grabbing Tunick’s wrist and not letting go.

  “Bidson,” he mumbles. “Thank you so much. I never got to—”

  There’s a click and Jonah opens his eyes to watch the brown, blurry door slowly open. A large figure quietly enters the room and walks directly up to Jonah’s face, bending down to eye level, covering Jonah with mint breath. The cadet sees a long gray beard and tanned cheeks, wide shoulders under a dark green shirt. Two green dots stare at him for ten seconds before blinking. Before Jonah can ask who the man is, or how long he’s been lying there hooked up to all these machines, his right eyelid is pulled up and to the side. A tiny red light then blocks any vision he has, blinding him, and the cadet wrenches his face away from the man’s fingers. Jonah tries to shield his eyes with his hands but can’t; his wrists are strapped to the bed.

  “I know it hurts like hell,” the man says with a chuckle. “But I’ll tell you what: It’s a good thing it hurts, kid. Tells us that the medication is working. Looks like you just may see again. How about that?”

  A tear slides down Jonah’s face, and he tries hard to keep his lip from quivering, but there’s no controlling it. Back on that beach, before the ship from Thetis roared over his head, he thought he had days to live. Maybe just hours. And those final moments would be behind a cloak of darkness. And now he’s being told that he’s going to see again?

  “What about Brooklyn?” he asks.

  “The girl going through the same shit as you? She’s improving,” the man says. He lets out a string of dry coughs before adding, “But not like you, cadet. Not yet. But let’s give her time. See what happens.”

  “Is she going to live, though?”

  “She should. I think we got to you guys just in time. What a fucking disaster. You guys really screwed up. Fucked us all over. But yeah, it looks like you and the girl should be okay. Lucky sons of bitches.”

  Jonah lets out a quick, guttural sob, and then he laughs a laugh so loud he thinks anyone still on Achilles could hear him. His tears flow freely. He allows his jaw to tremble. He lets snot run out of his nose. He doesn’t care what this man thinks of him; all he cares about is his friend. As the cadet tries to catch his breath, his fear that Thetis is a bad place is momentarily gone; even if Thetis is a bad place, it’s a bad place where he and Brooklyn will be able to see. That gives him more of a chance.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s a few doors down, sleeping, totally out of it. But, I’m going to be honest with you, cadet, she—”

  The door clicks and opens again, and then a tiny woman framed with long, dark hair glides into the room. As soon as she clears her throat, Jonah instantly knows it’s the same doctor from the rescue ship.

  “And how is this one doing?” she asks.

  “Ask him yourself,” the man says. “He’s awake. And crying like a little baby.”

  Jonah laughs again and then sucks up any snot still dripping out of his nose. It hurts. It’s still broken, the shards of bone sticking into his cheeks. It’s then that he feels the stitches struggling to keep the skin on his back together. He feels another set somewhere on his left shoulder. The rest of his body is numb, though. He can only imagine how much medicine pumps through him, how many stitches are holding him together. It doesn’t even bother him, though; he only cares that these shadows have colors, and that these shadows are growing outlines.

  “Crying is a good enough sign, I suppose,” the woman says. She sits on a stool and pushes herself over to Jonah’s face to exam his eyes. The lights above the door continue to flicker on and off, on and off, and the woman’s face goes from white to black every other second. “Amazing. Your pupils are coming back to your eyes. It’s like they’re growing back. I can see a faded outline of your iris. And even the blueness of your sclera—that’s the white parts of your eye, if you didn’t know—they’re getting less blue. I’d say we got to you just in time.”

  “When?” Jonah whispers. “When can I see everything?”

  The woman stands and is immediately caught in a coughing fit that sends her stumbling into the wall. When she’s done, she apologizes and makes her way back to Jonah’s bed where she flicks a finger at one of the tubes sticking out of his wrist. “I guess we’ll find that out together, huh? Don’t strain those eyes too hard, though. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and waste what we’ve already accomplished.”

  Jonah smiles and closes his eyes, but then immediately opens them back up. He’s suddenly worried that if he closes them for too long, if he falls back asleep, that his sight will somehow disappear again.

  The man clears his throat. “Thank you very much, Dr. Kinney. That will be all for now. I know you have a lot more patients to get to.”

  The cadet watches the blurry woman make her way back toward the door, her shadow getting smaller and smaller. “More than I would ever like, sir. I still can’t figure out what’s wrong with most of them or how to get them to snap out of it just yet. Their eyes are…there’s just nothing behind them.”

  “Is it…” the man starts to say.

  “Verve? No. No traces in their systems.”

  “And what about Kip Kurtz? What’s the story there?”

  Dr. Kinney pauses. “I really don’t know. He’s not talking.”

  “That will be all, thank you.”

  It takes a moment for Jonah to remember they picked up the kids from the missing Module Eight. How they’re like zombies. How Dr. Zarembo and Kip are like zombies, too. How they dug up the dead and laid them out to spell “Don’t leave.” And then, of course, they all went and left Achilles. Jonah wonders what the repercussions will be.

  Once the door closes, the man begins to pace back and forth, grumbling like a grizzly bear. Finally, he sits on the doctor’s stool and takes a deep, strained breath.

  “My name is Commander Stennis Mirker, and I’m in charge here at the Athens colony. I know you’re in a lot of pain, kid, and that you’ve got a hell of a lot of medicine pumping through you right now, and that your eyes aren’t exactly the best, but I need to ask you a few questions
.”

  Jonah trusts the man’s voice, the way it seems to go up and down with empathy. A second later, though, he remembers that the name of the person in charge of the Athens colony is Captain Julia Tejas. She was all over the news for years leading up to the voyage to Thetis. He can picture her curly black hair pulled back over her thick shoulders, the way her hands flew around her head as she talked about the dangers that laid in front of her and her crew. Jonah remembers her first video sent to Earth from Thetis, how big her smile shined as she showed off their first working water well.

  “What about Captain Tejas?” Jonah asks. “I thought she was in charge.”

  The man takes another deep breath before standing back up. “Captain Tejas…is no longer with us. She disappeared. She cracked. Left us to fend for ourselves. Between you and me, cadet, she was never the same after the accident with all those kids a year ago. We haven’t seen her in a while.”

  “But…there was no accident with all those kids, right? We know that those kids didn’t actually die. They stole your ship and flew to Achilles. I met some of them. We all did. They…they tried to kill us. They tried to kill me.”

  Commander Mirker’s bearded shadow gets closer and soon a cloud of mint envelopes Jonah’s face. The man gently places his hand on top of Jonah’s as he asks, “Who exactly was there, kid? Who tried to kill you? What were their names?”

  The cadet pauses. Something keeps him from telling the truth. At least, for now. “I don’t know. They never said their names. But they chased us and attacked our camp.”

  “Do you remember what they looked like?”

  Jonah pictures Sean stumbling toward him in the canyon, blond curls stuck to his forehead, his arm dangling at his side by a thread of flesh. “I…I was blind. I couldn’t see anyone after the first day. I only saw the crash.”

  Commander Mirker puts his head in his hands. “That must have been pretty awful. All those people dying. Friends of mine died on your ship, you know. More than friends. People I had been waiting a long, long time to see.”