Seeder Saga (7 page)

Captain

Captain Sarah Miller was exhausted. She was alone in the control station, awaiting orders. She ran a systems check for what seemed like the millionth time.

The monotone male voice of the computer said, "All systems are optimal."

She already knew they were, but she had to be sure.

She watched the
Earth tumble below on her little monitor. They were only in orbit to fuel up and that had happened over an hour ago. Hopefully they'd take off sooner rather than later.

She shook her head sadly as she thought back over the past twenty four hours. The training she'd endured just to get here was so intense that not everyone survived it. Within an hour of passing that frightful
fake test, she'd boarded a rocket with her new crew and launched into Earth’s orbit. Everything had happened so quickly it made her head spin.

Just yesterday she
had been tricked into believing she had already launched towards the seed planet they were to colonize. In her mind, the mission had already gotten underway. What she hadn’t known was that she was actually still on Earth in a lab, being evaluated. Her fellow crew members had been tricked in the same manner. Two of them didn't survive the ordeal. She made it out alive and so did Jack Mayberry, her second in command.

The training left her conflicted and it also left her completely drained, emotionally and mentally. In a way, she couldn't wait to go into stasis just to shut her thoughts off for a
while.

She was thankful that those responsible for putting her through the training weren't coming on the journey with her. The
Earth was doomed and they deserved nothing better than death for what they'd done.

Jack came up behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder. The contact made her flinch.

He said, "Sorry. I guess you're still a little jittery from the training."

She shot back angrily
: "Yes I am. I wasn't lucky enough to pass the tests early like you did. I had to watch Emma go unconscious twice and die of cyanide poisoning. I was the one who had to administer chest compressions to Johnson when he went into cardiac arrest, and then I had to watch him die too."

He said defensively, "You know I had no control over any of that. I was just as clueless as you were. I just got taken out of the experiment before things went really bad."

"I'm just saying, if I got here because of trial by fire, then you got here via trial by luck."

"Wait a second. You can't hold any of that against me. I passed the test early. That's the only difference between us."

"Well, I'm still your superior officer, so get the hell out of my sight."

Jack shook his head sadly. Just because he had been removed from the experiment early didn't mean he got to turn a blind eye to what had happened afterwards. He
’d watched the remaining crew members spiral out of control. He’d watched the testers as they created more and more chaos inside that fake spaceship. He’d seen it all from a dozen feet away on monitors.

But he also knew Sarah was right. He'd gotten off easy. He might have cracked too if they'd left him in there. He got lucky. She didn't.

He left her to check on the colonists. There were two thousand of them and they were mostly in stasis already. There were a few cowards who were still stalling, but they'd all go to sleep eventually.

The sleep wasn't really sleep at all. Their bodies would be frozen in time for four thousand years. When they woke up they'd be in orbit around the seed planet. The seed planet had already been given a name
, but the mission commander had explained to the crew that they could name it whatever the hell they wanted once they touched down.

Jack didn't give a shit about the name. After the testing he'd went through just twenty four hours ago, his only concern was getting to the planet in one piece.

If the testing did anything for the surviving crew members, it conditioned them to expect the worst.

Take Off

Sarah said dryly, "We're all ready up here."

A few seconds later a male voice came over the speaker
: "Ground control to orbiter, we're a go down here too. Just give us a timeline and we'll hand the controls over to you."

"Now's fine. Everyone's on ice."

"Controls are yours. Godspeed."

Disgusted
, she said, "This had better be the real deal this time. I don't want to have to go through another fake launch just to prove myself to you bastards. If this is a test, I swear I’ll kill you."

"This is the real deal. Good luck."

"Screw you, ground control." With that she switched her comm off, double-checked that all the stasis pods were occupied and operational, and then set the
Seeder
to launch from the fueling station. Just as the boosters kicked in, she disrobed, attached the IV's and got into her coffin-like stasis pod.

Hers was not beside all the others. Hers was all alone in the command station
. If shit went down, the captain could be woken first and be able to take immediate action. She hoped it wouldn't come to that, but then again, her spirits were dampened by the testing she'd just gone through. She could only imagine the worst.

Just as the door to her pod hissed shut, s
he whispered, "I hope you all bake to a crisp down there."

The IV's began to pump and the pod had all the atmosphere evacuated from it. It then filled with a frigid mist that felt oily on her skin. Just before she blacked out from oxygen deprivation, her body was locked in time by the chemical cocktail.

Danger

The thaw hurt more than she thought it would. Apparently the test had faked more than just the situations; it had faked the details too, because the thaw from the test hadn’t been this painful.

A human voice called out to her over the intercom. “I apologize for waking you so far ahead of schedule
, but I had to be sure you were alone when we spoke.”

She was still unhooking the IV’s when she said, “Uh huh. You better have a great reason for doing this.”

“My name is Greg from ground control. I need to debrief you on your crew.”

She wrapped the thawing blanket around her shoulders and waited for the disembodied voice to continue.

“Your crew members have been put through some horrific scenarios and we can’t be sure they’re still as emotionally sound as they were when we recruited them.”

“Hurry up
, for Christ’s sake. I’m freezing here and now I have to wait a full three hours before I can go back into stasis.”

“This info is for your own protection, should the worst of our fears come to pass. I’m sending you the results of the tests on each crew member.

“Okay. I don’t care. Just send it.”

“I need a secure link and then I’ll transmit.”

She gave him the secure link, hardly giving a spare thought to why he didn’t already have one.

He said, “Read them over but do not try to contact me. Good luck
, Captain. I hope this information finds you well.”

When the dossiers came through and she glanced them over, she knew why Greg from ground control was so paranoid. She already knew about Jack. His report was mostly clean. It made mention of his keen intellect, composure, diligence, and physical strength. It touched on the fact that during the testing it appeared
he might’ve been about to crack or give up, but then it went on to say that he’d muscled through it. She remembered that. She remembered his bout of negativity, but under the circumstances that was normal; they’d all feared the worst during the test, because they didn’t know it was just a test.

Emma and Johnson had both died. She didn’t bother to read Johnson’s report because she had watched him unravel when their situation became impossible. He’d had a fatal heart attack right in front of her right after a colossal freak
-out.

But she paid close attention to Emma’s report
. The testers had deliberately murdered her and she wanted to know why.

The report stated that when it was obvious Emma was no longer productively contributing, she had to be taken out of the test before she skewed the results. But because they’d already sealed the subjects inside the phony spacecraft, the only way to negate her involvement was to immobilize her. When Sarah and Johnson had decided to place her inside a pod to test why the pods were malfunctioning, the testers saw a golden opportunity and pumped her IV’s full of cyanide. Then the report went on to cite some bullshit
legal precedents no one had ever heard of outside of law school about how it wasn’t considered a crime to dispatch her because she’d signed her life over to the program and the testers were above reproach. The language made Sarah sick to her stomach. They’d killed an innocent, sweet-natured woman and excused themselves of the crime with paperwork full of legal terminology.

Sarah knew it would have been just as easy or even easier to pump her IV’s full of morphine
, but that wouldn’t freak out the rest of the crew the way the cyanide poisoning had.

For a moment afterwards, Johnson
had been so confused he’d believed the ship’s computer was trying to kill them. That kind of paranoia is hard to fabricate without the right ingredients, and the testers had a whole pantry full of sadistic delights to push them to their limits.

Sarah closed out Emma’s dossier in disgust. She was glad to be leaving
Earth behind forever after what she’d been put through. She just hoped the colonists weren’t as cruel and manipulative, or else the Seed planet would go to shit the way the Earth had.

There were two more files. One file was much larger than the other. She read the names off: Michael Stevens and Jane Hotchkiss. They were the only two survivors of their four man crew experiment. Jane’s was the smaller file so she read that one first.

In a nutshell, Jane had completed her test admirably, for the most part.

Sarah checked the dates for the test. Jane’s group had
started their testing just ten days before Sarah’s group started theirs; ending on the same day Sarah’s started. Jane and Michael were probably almost as exhausted as Sarah and Jack were.

The only pause for concern
came when she read that Jane’s crew had turned on each other rather than trying to reconcile the situation or fight their way through it, and Jane had run off and hid from them in a cupboard. At first Sarah was mildly disappointed by her actions until she read that the fighting had turned deadly. Who wouldn’t get sick of that much aggression?

But because of her perceived cowardice, when the test ended, she was demoted from captain.

That explained why Jane had given her the evil eye when they met during the launch from Earth into orbit. But Jane’s cowardice and her resultant demotion was hardly Sarah’s doing.

So Jane was only here because she was small enough to fit inside a kitchen cabinet and cowardly enough to let her crew murder each other without intervening in any way.

She closed the report and moved on to Michael’s. When she was finished, she had half a mind to jettison his frozen carcass out into the void.

Michael had performed quite well during the trials. But that
had all changed when it was discovered that one of the crew members had purposely jettisoned several colonists—actors—and then set up a fellow crew member to take the fall. She’d semi-thawed the patsy crew member so he'd move into a different position and then she refroze him. When the others saw that he'd moved since they'd put him on ice, they suspected he'd come out of stasis to kill the colonists. But because refreezing so soon after a thaw was dangerous, the guy was dying a slow and painful death as his cell walls were ruptured by the crystallized water within them.

Th
e scenario turned Michael Stevens into a bloodthirsty killer.

He was the reason Jane
had hid in the kitchen cabinet; she thought he'd come for her next.

Sarah closed his dossier. Why would the testers deem a guy like Michael fit for this sort of duty? Just ten days ago he'd killed two people. Not for the first time, Sarah got the sinking feeling that they were all just being tested again. A wild
card like Michael would give them all fits in a simulated test setting.

She made a mental note to talk to the other two members of her team about Michael as soon as it was time for them to wake up. Jane might have further insight
s about the man.

She browsed through the dossiers one last time, focusing mostly on Emma’s. Something about it didn’t ring quite true. The tests had fooled them all too easily. Her suspicions demanded she s
ought out the truth, so she called down to ground control and asked to be put through to Doctor Davis, the doctor in charge of the sadistic, deadly experiments. In less than a minute, his familiar voice came over the comm.

She cut right to the chase. “This is Captain Sarah Miller
on board the outbound vessel
Seeder
.”

The throat cleared and a few seconds later the doctor said, “Go on
, Captain.”

“I’ve been poring over the test results of my crew members and something doesn’t feel quite right about them.”

Davis cut her off with, “You can not have those files. Who gave you them?”

“
Screw you, Davis. My question is this: Why did we fall for your charades?”

“I don’t know what you mean. We put obstacles in your way, some easily overcome and others impossible to overcome. You were simply evaluated on how you performed.”

“I mean, why were we so easily tricked by your tests? We’re all extremely intelligent and yet none of us figured it out.”

“Oh, yes. We administered a mild morphine cocktail while you were in your mock stasis pods.”

“So you drugged us? Wouldn’t that skew your results?”

“We didn’t feel we had given enough to any of you to completely cloud your judgment.”

She didn’t know she’d been drugged. She hadn’t felt it at the time. But she was glad there was a reason none of them had figured out they were being tested. She didn’t feel like such a dipshit anymore.

She barked accusatorially, “Do you blame yourself for the deaths of the four crew members who didn’t pass your tests?”

“Actually, there was an entire four man crew who all perished while under our observation, so the number of fatalities is technically eight.”

“
And you feel no remorse for that, do you, you piece of shit?”

“I already explained this to you. This mission to the
seed planet is a multinational, multibillion dollar endeavor. We couldn’t risk it failing because of inept personnel.”

“And do you know that this is not a secure channel we’re speaking on
, and everyone at mission control has heard your confession?”

“I have done no wrong. Our experiments are completely legal under the circumstances, not to mention that they were also sanctioned by the President of the
United States.”

“I don’t care about legalities. I don’t care if you go to jail or not. I just want people to know what you’ve done. You’re a sick man and I can only hope you get what’s coming to you one day.”

With that, she switched channels and asked ground control for a secure channel to the guy who had sent her the personnel files. She felt like an idiot when she said, “I only know him as Greg. I didn’t get a last name.”

Ground control came back moments later to tell her there was no Greg in the program.

"Whatever," she sighed.

The guy from ground control said, "When did Greg get a hold of you?" There was tension in his voice.

"Maybe forty five minutes ago. Why?"

“This is a matter of
national security, so this is strictly confidential, do you understand?"

"Of course. Who cares? I’m in outer space, dummy."

Forty two minutes ago
, a nuclear warhead was launched into space. We tried to track it to see where it would land. We thought the Chinese might be striking Japan again, or even United States soil, but so far the warhead hasn't touched down."

"Does that mean what I think it means?"

"We don't know yet. What did Greg say to you?"

"He sent me files on my crew. He said it was important."

"Good. I'm going to go into your computer and find out where he sent the files from." After a few seconds he said, "The files were sent from China. The warhead was fired from China. I'm going to go out on a limb and say he only contacted you to get a reading on your location. That’s why he asked to send those documents, to get your bearings. Make a mild course correction and you should be okay. We'll do our best down here to find the nuke before it finds you. Once we do, I'll let you know when you're out of danger."

"Jesus Christ. Why would the Chinese want to shoot us down?"

"Probably because we excluded them from the mission."

"What are you talking about? There are a bunch of Chinese colonists here."

"We excluded the Chinese government, not the citizens. And now I'm pretty sure they took more offense to our slight than they let on. Now, enough yapping. Change your heading already."

"I changed it while you were talking."

"Send me your new coordinates so I can draw up a new course once the danger has passed."

"You'll have to forgive me, but I think I'll wait to give you my coordinates until
after
the nuclear threat is over. I don't know you any better than I knew Greg."

"Copy that."

Sarah was sweating. She had no idea the Chinese would go to such lengths to exact revenge. It was mindless rage. The
Seeder
program was trying to ensure the human race lived on past the destruction of Earth, and those idiots were trying to spoil that chance, for their own petty revenge. Once again, she was glad to have left that cesspool behind.

For a split second she worried that one of the Chinese colonists
on board might be some kind of sleeper agent. Maybe one of them had a beacon or something that the Chinese nuke could home in on? But then the call from Greg wouldn't have been necessary, would it? She dismissed the paranoid suspicion out of necessity. It made no sense, and if she wanted to check into it, it would take her all damn day to find, and then wake, those of Chinese descent. They'd all been searched anyway, inside and out. There was no way someone could get on board with anything out of the ordinary.

She told the computer to watch out for projectiles closing in from the rear. She had never prayed in her entire life
, but she considered it now. If the warhead was guided, then any course correction she made would be useless because it would just chase her tail. Maybe she could outrun it? There was no way to know what she was up against until she saw it for herself, and by then it might be too late.