The onboard lab was just as robust as the facility at Merckon Prime. It was equipped with a fabrication plant to handle on-the-fly engineering requirements as the mission evolved, which could also manage emergency repairs to the ship or a partnering rig. An internal hangar bay housed a complement of scientific atmospheric drones called DIVE probes; two of them had been launched shortly after the Lycidas left port. A repair tug and a drop shuttle capable of reaching Brotherhood from Zeus orbit filled out the ship’s flight capabilities.
All the working crew, of whom there were just nine, were trained by the Navy and doubled as the security detail. As such, a cache of personal weapons and assorted tactical kit were on board, locked in an armoury. Viola had protested against bringing the gear aboard, but the corporate mission planners insisted. There was a heavy Ceti presence around Zeus, and it was likely they would need to deal with the cartel to gain access to rigs of interest. Although they had ample financial backing to negotiate deals, it wasn’t difficult to foresee complications that might need a gun to resolve. Though very polite and generally attentive to the needs of the research team, the crew mostly kept to themselves.
Viola suspected that was because of the man they reported to: Captain Abel Mohib. A stern, gruff man, she had disliked him from the moment they had been introduced. He treated everyone with a lurid mix of contempt and condescension, demanding reverence for ‘his’ ship and of his command. Their first conversation resolutely established the ‘jurisdiction’ that Viola was expected to honour for the duration of the mission. She might be the authority on all research decisions, but he had final say concerning the safety of the ship and the mission completion parameters – which meant it was over whenever he said it was.
Captain Mohib was almost certainly ‘insurance’: a corporate man with steep incentives to protect Travis Mareck’s investment in the Lycidas and the discoveries they made. Viola had not seen or heard from the CEO since Cerlis Tarkon had humiliated him in his own club. But his presence was felt through Captain Mohib. More than once she had caught him taking an extra stare at her and the female scientists aboard. There was something familiar about him that she couldn’t place.
Upon reaching the observation deck, she was met by a chorus of greetings. No crewmen were in sight, but all twelve members of the research team were present. The ‘deck’ was a small armoured bubble made from the same transparent alloys as biodomes; you felt like a specimen beneath a lens when wandering across it. But the experience was as visceral as being in space. The Milky Way filled the view above them; you could almost feel the craft’s momentum here. The bubble was located atop the ‘highest’ point on the main superstructure, which was the conning tower on the former gas freighter.
Gavin and another researcher named Karyn Breznyk made their way over to greet her.
‘Hello again,’ Karyn said, extending her hand. ‘I have some news: We have DIVE data.’
She was as young as Gavin, a recent graduate from the Academy of Sciences, and untainted by the realities of corporate-funded research. She was an engineer, and had developed most of the instruments used for studying the chemical composition of Zeus’s cloud layers.
‘Did you look at it?’ Viola said sternly.
‘I had to,’ Karyn replied defensively. ‘Just to make sure everything worked properly.’
‘It wasn’t an accusation,’ Viola said. ‘What did you find?’
Captain Mohib interrupted their conversation through the room’s intercom.
‘Attention crew and passengers,’ he announced. ‘I am now adjusting our flight attitude for burndown.’
Viola felt nothing when manoeuvring thrusters fired somewhere along the Lycidas. Their view of the Milky Way began to rotate as the ship veered from the direction it was travelling in.
‘Both probes vanished at a depth of 190 kilometres,’ Karyn resumed. ‘But—’
‘The bright star above the bubble entrance is Eris,’ Captain Mohib announced. ‘We’re about 172 million kilometres from there. The fainter one, marked here with the green beacon, is Eileithyia.’
‘But what?’ Viola prompted.
‘One took much longer than the other to reach terminal depth,’ Karyn explained quietly. ‘We lost contact with one at 96 klicks, then reacquired it at 122. Only the heartbeat broadcast was working then.’
Viola kept her demeanour impassive.
‘That’s interesting,’ she said coolly, as Gavin and Karyn both waited for her to show a hint of excitement.
One of the scientists looked up and pointed.
‘There’s Sol,’ he said.
A murmur spread across the crowd. Firstborns had the deepest devotion to the system of their origin. They looked upon it with sadness, fear … and, perhaps, some misplaced hope.
‘To Earth!’ a burly meteorologist named Ewan MacKilgore said, thrusting his beverage towards the ‘sky’.
One of the other scientists, an unpleasant but talented planetary science expert named Dylan Ofstursson, raised and joined him.
‘To the squids!’ he said, making a crude reference to the Arkady.
‘To Dr Silveri!’ another scientist said, drawing a chorus of approval.
Viola obligingly raised her beverage.
‘To scientific discovery,’ she said. ‘Cheers to you all!’
Captain Mohib’s voice interrupted again.
‘Commencing burndown ignition in three. Two. One. Mark,’ he declared. A half-kilometre from where they were standing, the ship’s main sequence thrusters began throttling up to one hundred per cent output.
‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You are now halfway to Zeus.’
There were more cheers from the group, but Viola was barely paying attention to them as Karyn continued.
‘Those probes entered the same zonal band, three thousand kilometres away from each other,’ Karyn said, her voice nearly a whisper. Gavin nodded at her with a wink, taking a sip from the tube. ‘The weather at 122 was consistent for both probes … high winds, heavy lightning, strong updraughts, but … I may be crazy, but I think that the probe slower to fall hit something solid – at least, something much denser than the atmosphere.’
‘There are simpler explanations, the simplest of which is that it just malfunctioned,’ Viola said, registering Karyn’s expression change from hopeful to disappointed.
‘Have the orbital plans been finalised yet?’ Gavin asked.
‘Yes,’ Viola said. ‘Moving this heap once we set orbit is expensive.’
‘Are we confined to the temperate zones?’ Karyn asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Viola explained. ‘The equator is dangerous. That’s what the DIVE probes are for. Your theory isn’t strong enough to reconsider our plans. What’s more, the rig that produced our largest hunter sample to date is in the southern zonal. I’m going to pay them a visit.’
‘Why not interview them remotely?’ Gavin asked.
‘Because I want to see it for myself,’ Viola said. ‘We need to rule out the chance it was drawn to that specific rig. Or better yet, find evidence that others like it will return. Have you told anyone else about this?’
‘No,’ Karyn said. ‘The data arrived just before you got here.’
‘Publish the atmospheric data,’ Viola directed. ‘Weather and chemical composition only. Nothing else.’
Karyn looked shocked.
‘But that’s … against the rules?’
‘I make the rules,’ Viola said, narrowing her eyes. ‘The other data is embargoed until we can rule out a technical issue. Are we clear?’
The two young scientists exchanged glances before answering in stereo.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ they said.
‘Viola, stop being such a child and reply to this immediately.’
It was a strange way to be productive and motivated all at once.
One by one, Viola was letting all the messages from Klaus play through her earphones as she worked from the office overlooking the lab deck. Most of the equipment w
as still wrapped in storage bags for the journey. Soon this place would be a hive of research, with fresher samples to biopsy, better sampling of the Zeus troposphere, and better screening for bacteria and microbes. She suspected the Arkady ecosystem extended far beyond the large genus types that harassed mining rigs.
‘This is intolerable. I’m your father. Return my call!’
Multitasking was easy. Like everything else about her, the skill had been honed during the relentless regimen imposed on her by Klaus. He was always testing her limits, constantly subjecting her to cognitive challenges under physical duress. Once, when she was just eight years old, he strapped her to a bolted chair and forced her to work through a series of spatial reasoning challenges. When she got one wrong, the test was reset. The goal was to answer one hundred correctly within five minutes, and he refused to release her until she passed.
Later that morning, somehow, she succeeded, and was rewarded with six straight hours of sleep and a light meal, followed by a new, borderline inhumane, physical challenge. It was like that nearly every day for years, in brutal clips of two to three weeks at a time, until she was admitted to Orionis University at the age of twelve. Viola didn’t remember every detail of those days, which she attributed to defensive selective memory.
‘How could you leave without telling me? You don’t understand what you’ve done!’
The Zeus atmosphere was a primordial soup loaded with all the raw ingredients necessary to support life: abundant water, carbon-based organic compounds, and energy from the planet’s core. It was unfathomable that humans had been in Orionis for almost two centuries without studying this planet in detail. The trove of Helium-3 in the thermosphere was what drew civilisation here, but the real story was the water in the troposphere. Atmospheric pressure at that depth was three to seven times that of sea level on Earth. It was unknown what depths the Arkady could survive to, and discovering that was key to understanding their origins.
‘You do realise you’re not in charge of the science mission?’
Viola had been forced to be dismissive about Karyn’s theory on the fate of the DIVE probe. In fact, there was no doubt in her mind that it had struck something much, much denser than the surrounding air: tissue, almost certainly. She just needed time to confirm it, which meant distracting her colleagues. If there was to be a groundbreaking Arkady discovery, she needed to find it before anyone else could twist its potential into something that could benefit Travis Mareck.
Again, at the thought of Travis, she felt a strange, distracting physical sensation that was both repulsive and irresistible. She needed to get to the bottom of that, and soon.
‘Viola, all of your selections are Mareck’s people. There is not a single person on that ship you can trust.’
She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt genuine love for Klaus Silveri. The notion was just as sickening as the thought of Travis Mareck. Perhaps the two were connected, she mused, as if there was time to psychoanalyse herself. Both men were abusive, deeply insecure, and controlling; and both had somehow become crucial figures in her synthetic life. Travis always threatened to take away her Arkady research. Klaus always threatened that she’d be a failure. She was subjected to enough negative reinforcement to make a normal person wither into psychosis.
But not enough for the amniosynth creation of a psychopath. Though she was so very tired of being threatened.
The only challenge, Viola thought, arose from not knowing who else knew what she was – when people found out, how might it change their perception of her? All this time, she had believed she was firstborn and mingled freely among them. No one knew she was really a ‘ghost’, which all but proved that the modern interpretation of the Heritage Act amounted to racism: a societal mandate to protect a privileged class that was fearful of their own creation. Now she was on the other side of it. And the irony was, if Klaus’s claims about her abilities were to be believed, this side was the superior one.
‘I know what Cerlis told you. She had no right.’
Merckon’s investigators had discovered several interesting facts about the rig where the hunter tentacle had been found. The location was unremarkable, but the rig itself was in terrible condition; it was miraculous that it was still maintaining orbit at all. The operators were a family that went by the surname Lethos; the youngest on board was a boy of just eleven. They were leasing the rig from Ceti, and had fallen on deep financial troubles.
But according to the report, there were no functioning point defences or radar systems on board. It might be the most vulnerable rig on the planet.
‘Working late?’
Viola never bothered to look up from her console. She had been aware that Captain Mohib had been standing in the doorway for nearly a minute.
‘Solid observational skills,’ she said. ‘You should be a scientist.’
He was wearing a throwback Navy overcoat adorned with Merckon insignia on the lapels. That he was clearly annoyed at her tone delighted her.
‘Are you looking at the DIVE data?’ he asked, walking closer.
‘You are well informed for a freighter captain,’ she said, shutting everything down.
‘This ship is my business,’ he said.
Viola smiled at him.
‘And the scientific data is mine,’ she said.
‘You realise that information falls under the purview of—’
‘That is what we agreed to, right?’ she interrupted, beaming the loveliest smile she could. ‘Or did you have other plans?’
This was a career Navy man accustomed to having his orders followed without question, and Viola was having none of it.
‘I want to know what it is about that data you find so interesting,’ he demanded.
‘I find all kinds of data interesting,’ Viola said, pushing towards the door. When she was alongside him, she grabbed a rail to stop herself, and the momentum carried her long ponytail into his shoulder.
‘Do I make you uncomfortable, Captain?’ she asked.
He laughed.
‘Only the thought you’re withholding mission data from me,’ he said. ‘Did the probes hit something or not?’
Viola smirked.
‘Do you believe every fairy tale the children tell around here?’
‘I see,’ he said through his teeth.
‘I doubt it,’ she said, gliding away.
From the privacy of her cabin, Viola played the final message in the queue.
Mace Merckon commissioned me to help develop amniosynthesis in 2657. The scientists I worked with believed that we were building something to help ensure the survival of our species. And though we understood the harm this biotechnology could potentially cause, we believed that good would prevail over evil.
I could tell you precisely how complex molecules would interact with each other, but I couldn’t discern which applications of amniosynthesis were considered ‘evil’. Lance Alyxander and Masaad Obyeran left Orionis to create their own empires with it. Were they not repopulating the human race, as was intended? Did the augmentations they applied to make amniosynths better adapted for life in space help assure ‘our’ survival? Did those changes make them ‘superior’ to the generation of humans who left Earth? Which of these applications is morally unsound?
I cannot say. For every living amniosynth born to either House, dozens were terminated, either for the sake of experimentation or because they were accidental abominations. One could argue those creatures had to die so today’s generation could live. By that reasoning, amniosynthesis is Darwinism, and moral considerations do not apply.
But I would rather be remembered as the scientist that brought dirt to our world. I thought I had left amniosynthesis behind when Mace Merckon contacted me again, as he lay dying of old age. He … coerced me to create a new kind of amniosynth. You see, the Independence War had just begun. The highborns were alarmed by Ceti’s power, and, fearing they would use nuclear weapons against them, sought a new way to repopulate the species. But
not just with any humans. Only … them.
Viola, the captain of the Lycidas is not Abel Mohib. That man is Travis Mareck, augmented to disguise his identity. You are biologically attracted to him, and all highborn males, because you are genetically predisposed to be. As the potential progenitor of a post-war human race, Mace Merckon wanted your instincts hardwired to protect the continuance of dominant highborn lines. You should assume Travis Mareck knows, and that as a firstborn with highborn lineage, he will attempt to exploit this.
You know who I am. I never wanted to be a father, let alone raise a child. And yet, as little as I understand of love, I thought it might help if you believed you had a real mother. That was a mistake, and I regret it.
I had to be harsh. I was forced to learn your limits. You didn’t turn out the way I expected. You became so much more. You are, without question, my greatest achievement. Now that you’re aboard the Lycidas, there is nothing else I can do to help you, except pass on what I’ve learned, and share the truth with you.
No one deserves your fate. But you represent a giant leap for humankind. Mace didn’t know everything else I put into you. You are so much stronger than you think. In the days ahead, you will need to call on that strength to survive.
I now understand the difference between good and evil. I did not expect to end up caring for you so much. And I know that you will never forgive me.
Viola pulled the earphones out, and watched them float away.
22
JAKE
I’ve been trying really hard not to lose my patience.
In the last month, Dusty has had a rough time recovering from a broken back, orbital bone, jaw and mouth palate, plus swallowing his two front teeth. The attack left him traumatised, not so much because of physical discomfort, but for the fact he felt a spiritual connection to the assassin who beat his face in.
He just couldn’t forgive the Minotaur for shooting her. Dusty didn’t feel it was fair to judge her ‘for just doing her job’, and that her hostility didn’t marginalise the ‘magic’ they shared before she tried to kidnap him. He believed they might have worked things out and lived happily ever after.
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