Captain Davis doesn’t speak.
“I’ve got enough vaccine for everyone on board Godspeed. I’ll leave it here with you.” The woman waves her hand again, and the men cover the crates and take them away. “Once your ship is vaccinated, we’ll talk again and help you land the ship on the planet’s surface.” She looks around her, her eyes lingering on the curving metal ceiling. “I imagine you’ll be glad to get off this outdated hunk of metal. Bit claustrophobic.”
The image cuts to black.
“What is this?” I ask softly. “None of this lines up with what we thought happened. . . . ”
Chris doesn’t respond. I glance back at him. His jaw is fixed in a hard line, his startlingly blue eyes flashing. He looks furious.
The screen’s image shifts, and I turn to it again. Now Captain Davis is in a laboratory—the gen lab, on the cryo level. Two men and a woman in lab coats stand around a young girl, maybe fifteen or so, with long dark hair and narrow eyes that remind me of the captain’s. She sits on a chair in the center of the lab. Behind her, I can make out the Phydus pump—but it’s not pumping Phydus. Instead, a large vat labeled VITAMINS AND SUPPLEMENTS stands next to it. Over the girl’s shoulder are the cylinders of fetuses from Earth, but none of them contain clones of Elder. Not yet.
“Is it reversible?” Captain Davis asks one of the men in the lab coats.
He shakes his head. “From what we can tell, the ‘vaccine’ does nothing but turn a person into an obedient dog.” He hands Captain Davis one of the syringes the woman with black hair gave him.
The man in the lab coat shakes his head sadly at the girl. “We’d tested it . . . we had no idea our volunteer would be affected in this way.”
“Maybe you should have tested it before you accepted my daughter as your volunteer,” Captain Davis growls. “You should have known better than to test it on a human subject so quickly.”
The scientists look nervously at each other, all scared of the captain’s wrath. The only person in the room who doesn’t show any emotion is the girl. His daughter.
“We’ve isolated the compounds within the ‘vaccines,’” the woman continues, her voice high and scared. “There is gen mod material there and another drug, one we’ve never seen. When injected, a person becomes . . . well, a person becomes this.”
They all look at the girl on the chair. She stares vacantly back.
“What is this drug?” Captain Davis grinds out, furious.
“We’re calling it Phydus. When taken orally or injected into the bloodstream, it makes a person temporarily obedient. When it’s combined with gen modifiers, though, the condition becomes permanent.”
“This is what the FRX wants from us. Mindless workers. Perfect slaves.” Captain Davis looks bitter and enraged. I think for a moment he’s going to punch his own daughter, but he spins away from her instead.
“You know from our communication with the first colony on the planet that the FRX was pressuring them to increase production of solar glass and make more weapons,” the woman in the lab coat says. “After trade negotiations crumbled, we never heard back from the colony again.”
Captain Davis gapes at the woman. “Do you think . . . the entire first colony? They’re already drugged into slavery? Transformed into something not entirely human?”
“It must be,” the woman says. She sounds as if she’s about to cry. “Maybe the FRX tricked them like they tried to do with us, calling it a vaccine. Maybe the FRX found a way to force the drug on them. Either way . . . ”
“Either way, it’s too late for them.” Captain Davis’s face crumples. “And her.”
“We’re working on a drug to inhibit the properties of Phydus.” One of the male scientists steps forward. “We might be able to find a cure.”
Captain Davis whips around to his daughter, a sudden look of hope crossing his face—one that fades just as quickly. “And if we land and give the cure to the first colony?” he demands. “The FRX will just do it again. They want their glass, their weapons. There aren’t enough of us, even if we joined forces with the colony, even if we could cure them.”
“If the FRX is that determined to control us,” the woman says, “what can we do to save ourselves?”
The camera shifts again. A group of people are at the table in the navigational room, deep in conversation.
“They voted,” a young woman says. “The majority of the crew want to land the ship.” She is fierce, this woman, tall and dark with wild hair. She wears vivid red, but everyone else in the room wears muted colors. And they all already look defeated.
Captain Davis slams his fists against the table. “Don’t they see the danger in that? Don’t they see the terrible fate that’s befallen my little girl? The FRX doesn’t want a colony, it wants slaves!”
“We can fight—” the young woman starts.
“How? We don’t have many weapons, not ones like the FRX has. If they can’t control us with Phydus, they’ll drop solar bombs on our heads.” Everyone but the young woman seems to agree with Captain Davis.
“So—what? We’re going to just stay on the ship? Forever?” she demands.
Captain Davis spreads his empty hands out in front of her. “What other option do we have?”
“We will fight,” the woman in red says. “We’ll fight you if we have to!”
“No,” Captain Davis says simply. “You will not.”
The image fades out, but it doesn’t matter, I know what happened next. I can see it in my mind as clearly as the images on the video. Captain Davis uses Phydus—not the drug mixed with the gen modifiers that the FRX gave him, but a variation of it—to control the rebels and contain the ship. Fear of Phydus kept them from landing, then use of it kept them subdued.
This is where Orion’s twisted mind latched onto the idea of us all being turned into slaves or soldiers. Because it already happened once before.
Suddenly, another image appears on the camera. No sound. Just the girl, Captain Davis’s daughter. She looks leaner and fiercer, but at the same time, she’s subdued, controlled. A tame lioness. She sits on the stool, staring vacantly ahead. I wonder what happened to her. I wonder if the Inhibitors ever worked on her.
The camera zooms in closer to her face. Her startling blue eyes. Such a strange color, almost clear, with irises . . . unusual irises . . . .
I’ve only ever seen eyes like that once before.
I’m suddenly aware that Chris has not spoken in a long time. I turn slowly.
His gun is leveled at my head.
64: ELDER
Bartie stands by the door to the bridge of the auto-shuttle. His eyes are still wide and disbelieving as the vid feed continues playing for Amy to see on Centauri-Earth. Godspeed is our—his—home. It’s a spaceship, yes, but also part farm, part bio-dome, and all used and old and lived in. The auto-shuttle is made of gleaming chrome and white. It looks pristine, especially compared to us, covered in gray dust from the destruction of the Plague Eldest’s statue.
His eyes linger on the window over the control panel. He’s seen the stars and the planet once before, from the bridge of the shuttle before we departed. But since then, he must have given up any hope of seeing them again. There were no hatches, no workable doors on the rest of Godspeed.
“I’d almost forgotten . . . ” he says, staring.
I grin at him. “Wait till you see it from the planet’s surface.”
I can tell by his face that he’s not quite registered what’s in store for him.
“We should leave as quickly as possible,” I add, bringing us back to the serious task at hand.
Bartie makes an all-call to the ship’s inhabitants, letting them know first of my arrival with a new shuttle and second that he’s planning on moving everyone out to it. He gives orders to slaughter any remaining livestock and package it for transport and that only items linked to our survival can be taken.
I watch him as he commands his people—because they are his people now, not mine. Bartie recognizes something in my look because he smiles at me. “I know, when we land, it can’t be like it was before,” he says. “I don’t plan on overthrowing whatever rule you have on Centauri-Earth. I just want to make sure we survive.”
I shake my head. “It’s not like that. The frozens woke up, and they have their own ruler. Amy’s dad actually. And it’s not like we’re sitting around trying to make a government. All we’ve been doing is surviving, and we haven’t been very good at that.”
“Maybe we’ll be able to help when we land.”
“Will they fight against leaving?” I ask, remembering the last time we tried to land.
Bartie shakes his head. “I’ve already told them about the black patches. They’ve all known the end was coming. This . . . this is the only hope we’ll have to survive, and they know it.” He shifts. “I should help prepare everyone,” he says, heading to the door.
“I’ll make sure everything’s ready here,” I say. The auto-shuttle was designed specifically for people and cargo transport, but I want to make sure everything’s packed as efficiently as possible. I don’t want more guilt on my hands, not after letting three people die in the original shuttle landing.
As I turn to go, I notice the vid feed I’d played for Amy on the planet finishes. I move to disconnect the AV player—why didn’t she say something when the vid stopped?
I touch the controls for the com link. Amy’s voice fills the bridge. “What are you doing with that gun?” she says, her voice crackling over the intercom.
I freeze. Something is very wrong.
“You’ve realized, haven’t you? Looking at that video. You realized my eyes are like hers.” Chris’s voice sounds harsh—desperate. “You didn’t want to see before,” he continues. “You and your father—you didn’t want to see what was always right in front of your faces.”
“Oval irises,” Amy says, then pauses. “I’d noticed your eyes were different, but not that they were . . . ”
“That they weren’t normal?” Chris spits out bitterly.
I try to remember Chris’s eyes. I never really looked at him that closely before, and when I did, I was distracted by the way he seemed to show Amy special attention. He has oval irises? Just like . . . just like the girl who was injected with the gen mod compound.
“How?” Amy asks, her voice taut with fear. I imagine Chris with a gun, pointing it at her. “You’re—you’re in our military,” she stutters. “You were one of our people—frozen. . . . ” Her voice trails off.
I try to remember the list of military personnel that Orion gave me. There were so many names on it—but was there a Chris? No . . . I don’t think so. . . .
Why had I never thought of that before? Orion taught me to question everything.
Chris echoes my train of thought. “It was easy,” he says. “Your father left the shuttle the first time, looking for the probe—do you remember? He left with nine people but came back with ten. With me.” His voice is mocking, gleefully crushing Amy’s trust. “I’m a descendant of the original colony that you humans”—he says the word with disgust—“decided to genetically modify.”