Thetis--The Deep Sky Saga--Book Two

by Greg Boose

  Jonah keeps rising, tightening his grip on the boy’s ankle. As soon as the birds shove the boy’s body into the yellow leaves, Jonah watches the electric creatures race in like little lightning bolts along the underbelly of a cloud. It’s only a matter of seconds before they reach the boy and consume him, and then they’ll move right on to Jonah. With his free hand, Jonah punches upward with all his strength, busting a hole through the canopy, sending several of the birds diving out of the way. He lets go of the boy’s ankle and grabs the yellow leaves just as the electric creatures reach the boy, immediately melting his skin.

  He punches and punches at the leaves, his knuckles bleeding against the tiny branches, and as soon as the hole is big enough, he pulls himself through and rolls onto his back in relief, sinking a few inches before holding still. A hundred birds escape right after him, exploding from the canopy with a deafening collective cry. Jonah hears the electric creatures buzzing right below him, so he quickly finds the strength to get to his hands and knees and crawl toward the river. When he gets to the stone embankment, he sits and pulls his knees up to his chest, rocking back and forth as the waterfall roars behind him. The sun is almost gone. With shaking hands, he empties his pockets and spreads the items out next to him: his sheaf, the captain’s sheaf, a ring of keys, the tiny notebook, a couple of crystal shards, the unusable blue handgun, and one small verve seed. Jonah picks up the seed and holds it up to his face, examining its ridges, and then he tosses it in the river hoping to never see another one. He knows he could use the type of energy boost a seed would give him at that moment, but he doesn’t want that type of help ever again. If he’s going to get back to his friends and get rid of Mirker and stop Dr. Z from killing again, he’s going to do it alone.

  He unfurls his sheaf and nods at its screen. It comes to life, practically blinding him in the evening light. Jonah steals a few moments with his family photo, gaining an ounce of strength from his mother’s eyes, and then flips through the applications until he finds the Thetis Bible. He hasn’t looked at it since the week before entering the wormhole, and he immediately scrolls for the map section. The map of Thetis is anything but complete, but it covers thousands of miles in every direction outside of the village. The drones have been busy, Jonah sees.

  Jonah is tempted to search the map for alien spheres and caves and symbols, but the battery drains quickly, so he finds his exact spot on the map—the bottom of the multi-tiered waterfall—and zooms in. His fingers spin the map around, scanning for a way up the mountainside and back to the village. He looks for worn paths, creature trails, anything, but finds nothing. His fingers pinch and swipe, covering so many different angles of his surroundings, that he grows dizzy with frustration. Suddenly, though, his sheaf connects to the village’s communication system; the Thetis document begins to update, and when the status bar completes, the map refreshes with that day’s date: 29 OCT 2221.

  And then there Jonah is, an image of him standing on a cliff just hours ago, surrounded by the Module Eight kids and Dr. Z. And there’s a frozen image of Mirker climbing up the backside of the mountain. Jonah moves the map around, finding the incomplete sphere with Everett inside. He spins the landscape here and there on his sheaf until he sees it: a narrow path through the vegetation, just on the other side of the river bank. Captain Tejas. She must not have gone over the waterfalls. She hacked her way down here.

  Jonah gathers his things and then leaps, launching himself over halfway across the river. As soon as he hits the water, he swims with all his might, knowing there could be something waiting for a meal, or a crack in the riverbed that leads to another underground canyon. He makes it to the other side and then walks carefully along the bank until meeting the mist of the waterfall. Jonah takes another look at the map on his sheaf, finds a few markers in the nearby jungle, and then jogs along the stones to find path.

  The jungle sings and growls as Jonah sprints through it, his broad shoulders banging against black trees covered in thick brown leaves that shatter when touched. He jumps over trickling red streams and scurrying herds of fuzzy black rodents, pushing himself as fast as he can go, but after a half hour, his empty stomach drops him to the sideline. When was the last time I ate? he wonders.

  There’s a sudden series of cracking noises far off on his left, and Jonah holds his breath. The cracking gets louder and louder, and Jonah doesn’t waste another second; he bolts up the path, ignoring his shrinking stomach as he plows through branch after branch, brown dust exploding behind him in thick clouds. Finally, the path ends with a black wall of rock. Out of habit, Jonah looks for an alien symbol to manipulate and separate the rock like curtains, but it’s just a flat wall of disappointment. The cracking noise reappears, and Jonah pulls the broken gun out of his pocket and flattens his back against the wall. Sweat beads down his arm and slips between his fingers and the gun handle. He raises the gun and waits for Dr. Z or Mirker or a herd of mimics to appear. He waits. And waits. But the noises stop. He looks to his left for a way out, then to his right, and there he sees a trampled section of black dirt at the base of the wall. He reaches the climbable section of the wall and up he goes. The sun sets behind him, and Jonah never looks back.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Jonah crouches just twenty feet from the village fence. He listens for the buzzing of drones and the voices of patrol units, but all he hears is his own heaving breath and growling stomach. A soft white glow rises above the fence where two small drones circle the middle of the village. With the gun in hand, he sprints to the hole in the fence he and Griffin made, but finds it blocked with a freshly cut log. He moves swiftly along the perimeter, stopping only to check the trap door he escaped through the day before when the Module Eight kids were hot on his trail. When he finds it locked, he keeps running until reaching the closed gate. How is he going to get inside this time?

  While he paces next to the gate, there’s an uproar on the other side of the fence. A few seconds pass before Jonah hears the distinct, amplified voice of Commander Mirker: “Never again. We said never again would we let our community be taken over by the insolent and unruly who choose selfishness over the whole. Have you forgotten? Have you all forgotten?” Cheers and boos answer Mirker’s booming voice before he continues, “And so we have a choice, to banish these three traitors—they are not children, they are not; they are full-grown traitors—who can just come back in here to ruin us, who can just sneak up on us when we least expect it to sabotage what we came here to accomplish like Captain Tejas. Or, we can end their acts of terrorism right here and now, taking them down to the pit where I will personally pull the trigger. Because we have so much more to accomplish here.”

  As the villagers inside yell and bicker, as some decry Mirker’s suggestion while others cheer it on, Jonah knows who Mirker is talking about. He pictures the man standing over Paul, Vespa, and Brooklyn, their hands bound behind their backs while bags cover their heads. Jonah’s skin blisters with rage. He has to get inside. He has to save his friends. He has to take down Mirker before it’s too late.

  Jonah shoves his fingers in between the gate doors and pulls, but they don’t give an inch. He runs over to the keypad and rips the keychain from his pocket, but there’s nowhere to stick a key.

  Mirker’s voice booms: “So, I will be taking them down to the pit, or perhaps we should do this right here, in front of everyone, so that you all can witness what happens when you don’t follow the rules here.”

  There’s a gunshot, a sudden cracking pop that causes Jonah’s knees to give. He falls to all fours and sucks wind, his vision tunneling to the black soil squeezing through his fingers. Vespa? Brooklyn? Paul? Which one went first? Which one was punished for Jonah’s actions? He scrambles back over to the gate and presses his eyes into the door cracks, desperately trying to see what happened, to see which friend is slumped over on a stage, but there’s no one in sight. The congregation must be closer to the middle of the village. Everyone must be there. Even the guards mu
st be watching.

  Jonah pounds his fist on the gate in frustration. He backs up and kicks the door with his heel. He doesn’t care if they hear him. He just wants inside. He takes the gun out of his pocket and whips it against the wood, the small weapon bouncing with a quiet thud. Desperate, Jonah reaches into his pocket to throw something, anything, else—and he finds his sheaf. Jonah holds it over his shoulder to launch it into the gate, hoping to watch it shatter like his heart just did thinking about Vespa’s hooded body taking a bullet to the back of the head, but at the last second, he stops from throwing it. Instead, he lets it fall to the ground where it unfurls at his feet.

  Mirker shouts something and people shout back. Jonah can’t tell if they agree with what’s happening or not. Everyone seems angry. No one seems satisfied.

  With a tear crawling down his cheek, Jonah falls to his knees and nods at his sheaf. He’ll run through its remaining battery by staring at his parents. And then the sheaf will die. And then his friends will die. And then he will die attacking Mirker.

  But before he can open up the photo, he sees an icon reminding him the sheaf is on the village network, connected to the main server. Jonah immediately gestures at the icon and then blows through the folders until finding one titled SECURITY. The battery is at four percent. The screen fades in brightness. Jonah finds a folder for the front gate and opens the utilities and applications inside, hoping to find the right button to separate the doors above him. What he wouldn’t give to have Kip with him at that moment. Or Richter or Hopper, any hacker that could easily infiltrate the system. He clicks on each icon, popping up screens asking for codes and commands he’ll never know.

  In anguish, Jonah closes his trembling fingers in front of the screen, bringing him back to the server’s top folder. The battery is at three percent. The screen dims some more. He points at the folder and sits back on his heels, seeing an icon for the village’s drones. Jonah opens the folder and scrolls through them without thought until seeing which ones are active and outlined in green. The first one he opens brings up a video, streaming a drone’s live view. In less than a second, he sees Mirker standing on top of a rover, a handgun pointed in the air. People circle all around. And sitting in the rover’s seats with gags over their mouths are Paul and Vespa, with Brooklyn’s head resting on Vespa’s arm.

  Jonah watches for a few seconds, and when Brooklyn sits up straight before leaning back on Vespa, relief melts his shoulders. They’re all still alive. His friends are still alive. Mirker must have fired a warning shot. The drone then circles around for a different angle, and twenty feet away, several people kneel and rush around a body lying in a pool of blood. Jonah tilts his head in front of the screen, unconsciously urging the drone to get a better view, and that’s when he sees the controls in the bottom corner of the video. Jonah nods and opens the controls and tries one of the green arrows, and immediately the drone shoots forward and away from the gathering. He’s steering it. The screen dims and goes black for a second, but when it pops back up, Jonah finds the drone still moving under his command. He turns the drone around until it’s heading straight for the gate, the video swaying high above the fence.

  When he pictures the inside of the gate and its surroundings, it hits him: He knows what he can do with the final moments of his sheaf. The red button halfway up the wall enters the drone’s video feed, and he aims right for it. It slams into the button, and then the screen goes black and the sheaf dies, curling up in his hand and shrinking. Jonah covers his face in anguish, knowing this was his only shot, but then there’s a low whirring noise in front of him: the gate doors begin to separate. The drone landed a direct hit. He shoves the sheaf into his pocket and runs.

  As soon as there’s enough room between the doors, Jonah dashes inside the village and turns sharply to his right, hiding behind a row of tents. Finally, he peeks around the corner of the farm building and sees the gathering. Mirker stands on the rover, his friends sit in the seats. A group of men and women point fingers at Mirker, shouting for him to stop. Several villagers surround a body on the ground. And that’s when he sees who’s been shot: Freeman.

  The man huffs for air while holding a woman’s hand. A tall bald man applies pressure to Freeman’s side, which spills more and more blood into the growing pool beneath him.

  “You had us! You had our loyalty!” Freeman yells. “What more did you want?”

  Mirker points his gun at Freeman’s face. “I wanted your trust, not your loyalty. I want all of your trust!”

  Jonah watches Freeman take his final breaths, desperately reaching his other arm at those around him until it falls across his chest and slides to the ground.

  The bald man jumps to his feet and shouts, “You killed him! You son of a bitch! He was just… You’re out of control and we’re not going to take it anymore. Put down your gun, let go of these kids, and get your ass to—”

  The bullet rips through the man’s chest, spraying red on those standing behind him. He falls backward, dead before hitting the ground. Everyone stays silent for a second, whipping their heads back and forth from the dead bodies to Mirker, who stands on top of the rover and shrugs before reaching down and grabbing Brooklyn by the collar. He lifts the small demic up to his face, whispers in her ear, and then holds the gun up to her temple.

  Jonah bolts out from behind the farm building, and when Mirker catches sight of the cadet, he drops Brooklyn onto Vespa’s lap. Mirker snarls and aims his gun at him, but Jonah changes direction, diving behind a clay barrel of water just as Mirker fires. The barrel shatters and collapses, soaking Jonah, who lies on his chest with nothing between him and the commander. Mirker smiles and takes aim again, but then the rover jumps under his feet, causing the man to stumble over the roof and land on his back. Paul, with his hands tied behind his back and gag in his mouth, has his foot on the accelerator and his eyes on Jonah.

  Paul can’t get his hands under his legs in time to grab the wheel and the villagers scatter as the rover gathers speed. Jonah gets to his feet and runs behind the nearest tent. And from there, he zigzags his way toward the back of the village, hands covering his head, knowing that Mirker is probably right behind him, waiting to get the shot. Jonah locks his eyes on the Woesner Telescope rising out of the sea of tents, and he picks up speed. He skids to a stop in front of its door and immediately shoves each key from Tejas’s key ring into the lock until one finally clicks. As soon as he’s inside, he dives under the desk and pulls the chair in front of him.

  Now what? he thinks. Surely, the villagers will revolt now, but will they stop Mirker from hunting Jonah down in cold blood? Jonah thinks about Tunick, Mirker’s son, sitting cross-legged in front of the purple fire, his body splitting into two as the verve entered Jonah’s mind. He sees the same madness in Mirker, the same God complex. Jonah and Vespa were able to get the upper hand on Tunick, so he knows it’s possible to take down his father, too.

  Next to the door, Jonah spies a charging station blinking with tiny green lights. He quickly pushes himself forward and pulls out his sheaf, and in one quick motion, he wings it toward the tiny lights. The station and sheaf communicate midflight, and the sheaf takes the perfect turn and slaps itself against the station where it immediately begins to glow with an incoming charge. He sits back under the desk and hugs his knees to his chest.

  The room hums from the monitors above him and beeps from the telescope that shifts slightly every ten seconds. Jonah continues to hold his breath, losing himself in the sounds, wracking his brain for what to do next. If he had a working gun, he could scale the lens of the telescope again and take Mirker down from the roof. He pictures the villagers helping his friends off the rover which has crashed into the fence, untying their hands, hiding them from Mirker who stalks the grounds searching for Jonah.

  The beeping from the telescope grows louder. The bottom of the lens protracts, lighting up, as the tube shifts up another few inches. With his eyes on the window in the door, Jonah pushes asi
de the chair and crawls to the telescope lens. He presses his face up against the eyepiece. The Silver Foot Galaxy glows in his eyes, its stars bright and ghostly, surrounded by the moving lines and numbers in the telescope’s field. It takes Jonah a few seconds to recognize that one of the stars is moving. Jonah cups the lens with his huge hands and zooms in. The numbers on the screen rise, and the lines from the edges of the screen come together to form a square around the moving star, which Jonah now sees isn’t a star at all. It’s as clear as day. What he’s looking at is the ship that once sat at the bottom of the cavern on Achilles. And it’s heading toward Thetis.

  Jonah watches the ship for a full thirty seconds, forgetting to breathe, forgetting that Mirker could be right on the other side of the door with his gun aimed at Jonah’s head. Faces of those who boarded the ship a week ago flash through his mind: Lark, Krev, Camilla, Hopper, Hess, Aussie, Malix, Christina. Vespa said others ran up the ramp at the last second, too, other runaways from Thetis. They did everything they could to steal the ship and get away, and now here they are, coming back. Or, at least one of them is coming back.

  The telescope continues to track the ship, and Jonah continues to battle his thoughts. He needs to warn Vespa and Brooklyn. He needs to know who is on board and what they want. He needs to get out of this building to save his friends before he finds out what “Sacrifice Jonah Lincoln” means on Tejas’s notebook in his pocket. He looks over at his sheaf, hoping its battery fills up quickly.