The Rathmore Chaos: The Tully Harper Series Book Two

by Adam Holt

  We had managed to get into an orbit around the Earth before the Mini-Mane presented us with another challenge. We gathered around the starmap and shook our heads.

  It was a question...in an alien language. At least we thought it sounded like a question. It ended on a high note, like when you ask, “Do you want a pizza?” The ‘za part is the highest note. Anyway, after the question, the ship gave us options. Each of the locations on the map glowed as the ship said their names—about thirty in all. Some of the names sounded familiar, but the writing below them was foreign, er, alien.

  “Okay, I got this,” said Buckshot. He cleared his throat. “Computer, take us on home.”

  The ship responded: an enormous red “X” appeared in the air. Then the question repeated. Buckshot tried again. “Computer, take us to the Ascendant home world.”

  Big red X.

  “Head to the home base.”

  Big red X.

  “Go home.”

  Big red X. Buckshot looked flustered.

  “This thing’s about as helpful as a snorkel in a sandstorm.”

  Two big red X’s.

  “Maybe she doesn’t like your accent,” said Sunjay.

  “I’m about as useful as a one-legged man in a butt-kickin’ contest,” said Buckshot. “Somebody else give it a shot.”

  We all gave it a shot, as Buckshot said. Lots of red X’s followed by the names of all thirty locations repeated.

  “Wait, we are idiots,” I said. Why are we giving it voice commands? We can probably just push the planet like an elevator button.” I reached toward one of the planets and it glowed more brightly.

  “Don’t touch it,” my dad cautioned. “That’s probably right. Now the problem here is that we have thirty choices. Which is the right one?”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling dense. “I guess we need more information.”

  “No, we don’t,” said my dad. “We have everything we need right in front of us. We just have to put it together correctly. If we can’t figure this out, we should just stay here and wait for the Ascendant to attack—and that’s not an option. Now everybody, think. Really focus. That’s an order.”

  The universe map taunted me and my mind spun with the opportunities: Venus, that fiery ball of gases; Mars, the red desert planet of my dreams; Jupiter, king of planets, with its rings and dozens of moons; Pluto, cold and alone; even another small planetoid that we had yet to discover. The Ascendant could be anywhere in that maze of moons and planets.

  No, no they can’t, I thought. They visit these other planets. There’s only one home world. How to find it? I thought back to my final vision when I put the Harper Device to sleep. Chaos awaits you, it told me, but do not fear. You will pass through ice and shadow before you see her again, but see her you will.

  “Any ideas?” my dad asked me.

  “My guess is an icy moon,” I said.

  “How do you know?” asked Sunjay.

  “I don’t, but I saw visions,” I said. “Like I told you before it’s not that simple. The visions are symbolic. Not like exact pictures of a place. You know this. Go ahead and name the icy moons in the solar system again.”

  “Okay, let’s see. Titan. It’s the biggest and circles Saturn. Also, Rhea, Mimas. Ganymede, Europa, around Jupiter. And, uh, Cassandra.”

  “No, Calisto,” my dad said. “These are good guesses, maybe better than planets. We’ve long thought that some of these moons could sustain life. They have water and oxygen, and if they had the Harper Device, what else would they need?”

  “Oh, chaos,” I said. “So the Harper Device told me I would descend upon the chaos. Which one might be—I don’t know—most chaotic? Crazy.”

  “Titan is probably the most chaotic moon in the solar system,” said my dad.

  “My guess, too,” said Sunjay. “It’s only a billion years old. It has a thick atmosphere. Numerous active volcanoes.”

  “Well,” my dad said, “it’s our best bet so far, but our best bet isn’t good enough. We need to be sure.”

  Buckshot sighed loudly. We all felt it. We had a treasure map in our hands, but there was no X to mark the right spot.

  “Mnmhhhhmfff….fflfeh...mflfff…flff!” A muffled sound drew our attention to the corner, where a duffel bag started to squirm like a caterpillar. A few seconds of confusion ensued, but then suddenly a hand emerged from the bag. It was attached to an arm, which reached out from the top of the bag and unzipped the zipper. From the bag emerged a head.

  “Janice Chan?” I asked, pointing at the duffel bag that turned into a girl. It was worse than being speechless. Only two words would come out of my mouth. “Janice Chan? Janice Chan. Janice Chan! Janice Chan!” I said her name about four million times. Janice floated free from the bag. She wiped her glasses on my shirt and stared right back at me. “Janice Stupid Chan. Stars, are you kidding?”

  “If you guys had done any research on the Three for Survival Project, you’d know where we need to go,” she said, crossing her arms.

  “Oh my gosh, Janice!” Sunjay pulled his hair. “I tossed the bag. I sat on the bag. You were the bag!”

  “I was right beside Little Bacon,” she smiled.

  “Pleased to see you again,” said Little Bacon, emerging from my pocket.

  “And you don’t think to mention this to me, Bacon?” I said.

  “I’m more suited for definitions than observations,” he said. I grabbed him from my pocket and flung him at Janice, who caught him and patted him on the head.

  “You’ve been in there the whole time?” I said. “I can’t believe this! You never left my room.”

  “Not until you dragged me out,” she said, picking lint off her black sweater. “I planned to hide out for a few minutes and see if you guys were really going somewhere. Then you came back for me and dragged me into your backyard.”

  Stars, I literally dragged her along for this journey, I thought. Of all the people in the universe, why her? Someone had better have some dire good reason. I’m looking at you, Harper Device.

  During this whole exchange my dad and Buckshot said nothing.

  “Boy howdy, what’s with all these clever girls wanting to be friends with you two swamp donkeys?” asked Buckshot finally. “I just don’t get it.” Sunjay and I were too dumbfounded to respond. Not my dad. He kept his cool.

  “Hi, Janice,” my dad said. “Welcome aboard.”

  “Commander,” she addressed him, “my apologies for showing up like this and disturbing your mission.”

  “Our mission,” I corrected her. “Why aren’t you apologizing to me!”

  “You don’t even know where you’re going, and it’s not your ship.”

  “It’s not his either—sorry, dad, but it’s not.”

  “What matters?” my dad said. That brought silence. My dad ran his hand along the red streak in his hair. “Let us focus on the right things. It doesn’t matter whose ship or whose mission this is. What matters is that we accomplish the mission. We’ll have time for apologies and bickering later.”

  He was dead right, as usual. Tabitha’s face came back to me in a flash, that last moment that we saw each other. The reality hit me: Janice was on board. There was nothing we could do about it.

  “Janice,” my dad said, “it sounds like you have done some research. What do you know?”

  “Okay,” she said, floating into the middle of the room. The virtual map flickered as she passed through the heavenly bodies. She pushed herself through the center of the sun, past Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, through the Oort Cloud. She stopped at Jupiter and started pointing toward moons. “Coolest map evs. Not you. Not you. Bangers! There it is. You’re just right. It’s this moon. Here’s where your chaos is.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “It’s easy, Tully. Whoever this Sacred person is, he told you to descend upon the chaos.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, but there’s chaos on lots of moons.”

  “I don’t think he meant it quite li
ke that, Tully,” she said. “He didn’t tell you which chaos, did he?”

  Which chaos? My dad nodded, like something made sense, but this was thoroughly confusing, just as bad as any Tabism that Tabitha had ever tabbed. “No, the Device just said that I would have to pass through shadow and ice before I descended upon the chaos and found Tabitha.”

  “Right,” she said, pointing at the moon. “Chaos isn’t just some thing or idea. It’s the name of a place on this moon. It’s a geographical term.”

  The idea hit me like a solar flare. All this time Sunjay and I had puzzled over maps and star charts, we never considered that the Ascendant told us exactly where they lived. It was hiding in plain sight. We’d probably run our fingers over that moon a hundred times and never looked at the word Chaos scribbled all over its skin.

  “A chaos,” Little Bacon said, “is a surface feature on several planets and one moon in our solar system. It is thought that lakes exist below such surface features.”

  “Oh, Stars,” said Sunjay. “She’s right. It was right there, and, wait, the Lord Ascendant. He said something about chaos, Tully. He said he would take you to stand trial for crimes on some chaos.”

  “Rathmore,” I said, cutting him off. I remembered the Lord Ascendant’s piercing gaze. “The Rathmore Chaos is where we must go.”

  Janice pulled out her holophone. She projected a screen of tidy notes beside the map. “Yep, that’s it. That’s the Rathmore Chaos, as in the proper noun, as in a location. And on the map, the name is in Greek. Check it out.” She held up her phone and it showed an English translation of the Greek words onto the screen. That was why the names looked familiar. They were in a foreign language, not an alien one. She pointed to one of Jupiter’s moons.

  Ευρώπη.

  The word Ευρώπη glowed brighter and lit her hand with a pale blue light. A brilliant red dot appeared over one point on the moon.

  “Well done,” my dad said. “Of all the moons in the solar system, we’ve long thought it might support life, but the Alliance lost every drone that we sent near her. All those ‘mechanical failures’ and ‘accidents’ now make sense. The Ascendant remained hidden until just now. Congratulations, Janice. You discovered life on another world.”

  Janice clapped her hands together. If there was one thing she loved, it was being right. “Shall I?” she said. She placed her finger on the dot.

  “No, Janice! We can’t take you!” my dad yelled.

  “If only Stanford could see me now,” she said. My dad reached for her hand, but before he could stop her, it was done. The map disappeared. Only a red line ran between the moon and our ship. The ship’s chairs strapped us in again and we began to accelerate in our orbit around the Earth, preparing to sail into space toward our destination, which was where exactly? Nobody had said the name.

  I expected my dad to stop the ship, to take Janice home. He won’t risk taking her with us, I thought. Then again, if we turn around now, more lives were at risk. He could have unstrapped and throttled us down—he still had his hand on the crystal—but he looked at the girl with her finger on the Ascendant home world. A light flickered in his eyes. I knew what he saw; there was something daring and clever about Janice Chan. And annoying. Oh, no, he’s really going to do it.

  “Buckshot, what do you think?” he asked, looking at Janice.

  “Shoot, Mike. Why not? But, stars, this ain’t much of a crew. It’s you, me, superpower boy, the question asking kid, and duffel bag girl. It feels more like carpool than rescue and recon.”

  “Mr. Lewis,” said Janice, “I admire you as an astronaut, but with all due respect, I get most of my homework done in carpool. It gives me time to do other interesting stuff, like study other languages and research the moons of Jupiter. I’ve got great notes on our destination. You could use a good researcher on this team.”

  Buckshot shrugged and looked at Sunjay and me. “Well, Little Miss Stanford gets a thumbs-up from me. And you can call me Buckshot.”

  “And you can’t call me Little Miss Stanford or duffel bag girl or anything else ridiculous,” she said. “And—oh, it’s so small…”

  Janice stared at the ceiling. Her mouth widened and she let her head fall backwards. I looked up to see what she was gawking at it—the Earth. That swirly blue and white ball of water and land and air and atmosphere and fish and clouds and religions and gummi worms and music and wars and monkeys and vegetables and paintings and touchdowns and video games and books and people and dreams. The place where humans come from. She had never seen her home world from here. I remembered my first look at the Earth from space on board the Adversity. Alone, trapped in a monkey cage, but feeling freer than I had in my entire life. And smaller than an atom. Almost everyone that we knew lived on that one blue dot on the black canvass of space. There were only two other moments in space that felt as peaceful and settling as this one. There was silence on board the Mini-Mane as, ever so slightly, the dot shrunk.

  “That is why we must go,” my dad said, pointing to the blue dot. “We have to protect the things we love, and it may cost us our lives. I do not think that any of you are too young to understand that. If you were I would turn this ship around in a heartbeat.”

  “Don’t,” said Janice. “Commander, I would rather die than—”

  “Uh, say ‘fight,’” said Sunjay. “Fight is a happier word.”

  Fight, but do not hate, I thought. That’s what the Sacred told me once.

  “Words are overrated,” Buckshot said. “We gotta put the world in our rear view and get this show on the road.”

  Janice turned to Sunjay, said something, and grinned, all kinds of confidence beaming from her bright eyes. Hadn’t we felt just like this, before we knew the kind of danger we faced? Was Janice Chan really up for that? Stars, was I? She complicated everything, her arrogance annoyed me, but we really had no choice. Maybe she earned it. After all, she did point us in the right direction.

  “To the Ascendant home world, then,” my dad said. “To the moon Europa.”

  PART TWO: PREPARATION

  “AWKWARD AND SUCTION”

  Why do we still have gravity?

  We were weightless for the first few hours on board the Mini-Mane. Then the alien ship slingshotted twice around the Earth and headed toward Europa. Somehow gravity returned as we flew toward our destination. Not quite what I expected. Gravity or not, my mind started to wander. Seriously, why aren’t we floating?

  In zero gravity I’d learned to fight. No, to battle. My instructor was Lincoln Sawyer. I was pretty sure that he was just a hunk of frozen metal floating out of our solar system now, but he’d taught me two rules:

  #1. Never let your guard down.

  #2. No pain, no gain.

  Those rules stuck with me, even when I used them against him.

  In zero G I learned to use my powers. If I hadn’t, we would never have jumped from the Adversity to the Lion’s Mane to save my dad-not like I did that by myself. Tabitha helped. She forced me into using my powers on our space jump. If she hadn’t, we would both be dead. In our last moment together, she pushed me again…into making the right decision. It was also the hard one.

  Tabitha, with her curly hair poofing out in all directions in zero G. Both times she sacrificed herself—once for me, and once for the world. How could I let a girl like that go? I asked myself that question every day since we returned from our first mission, and I was asking myself that again when my dad spoke.

  “Why don’t you three take an inventory of this ship?” he asked, checking our coordinates on the starmap. “Start on the lower deck and work your way up.”

  Sunjay and Janice looked pumped. She grabbed her holophone, pulled up a holographic screen, and scribbled “Inventory” in mid-air.

  Oh, yeah, upper and lower decks! The Mini-Mane was full of surprises. The second that Dad punched in our coordinates, the Mini-Mane expanded. The interior was made of black panels, and they shifted, rearranged, and expanded with a smooth sliding
sound. In minutes the Mini-Mane grew from alien clown car to an intergalactic yacht—smaller than the Lion’s Mane, but for five of us, downright palatial.

  The upper deck was unfurnished except for the bench seats. There was a shiny black floor, a fancy star map, and an enormous dome for a ceiling. The walls were dire cool. They shifted from one awesome cover photo to the next: the peak of Mount Everest, the Grand Canyon, the Tower of London all filled one wall. Each scene drifted around the room and occasionally shifted into an ocean scene full of whales, sharks, squid, and coral. Everything looked Earth-like until a saw-billed fish the size of a school bus floated past. It turned toward us, flashed purple, and swam away, followed by a toothy fish with paddles for fins. In the background, classical music played.

  “It’s like a fish tank, too,” I said. Sunjay looked at me. “Oh, sorry, conversation I was having with myself earlier.”

  “Do you think we’ll have to swim on Europa?” he asked.

  “There’s more water on Europa than on Earth,” said Janice. “On the outside it’s all ice, but there’s an ocean below.”

  “Let’s hope so,” said Buckshot, pointing at the creature, “I’d like to mount one of those hellbeasts on my wall when we get home.”

  Dad and Buckshot stayed upstairs while we inventoried the downstairs, which was shaped like a bowl and served as our living quarters. The room was pitch black until I hopped down from the ladder. Cue the creepy purple lights. Sunjay followed, eating beef jerky and carrying a water bottle, and Janice took notes. Little Bacon poked his head out of the pocket when he heard the word “inventory,” but I pushed him right back down.

  As we entered, black bunks folded out from the walls with alien-sized beds. Soft music played.

  “This ship can read our minds,” I said.

  “Doubt it,” said Janice. “Probably reads our body heat and movements. It can tell we’re sleepy.”

  “Who’s sleepy?” I said.

  “You are.”

  She was right, darnit, but we had an inventory to write. Janice flicked on her holophone and took notes. We quickly realized that the Ascendant had the same basic needs, even for hygiene: toothpaste, toothbrush, combs. They also have similar interests.