Angry Ghosts (18 page)

Two load lifters converge at the head of one of the conveyors, carefully placing the parts they carry; and the group watches intently as the parts are pressed together, heated, welded, and bombarded by a high-intensity beam. Sharon, Ortega, and Gregor step from behind Keller to get their own look at the finished frame roll
ing off the back of the assembly line. One of the load lifters dutifully retrieves it and marches away while the others arrive with more parts for the conveyor.

“
What are you making
?” Ortega asks loudly.

“
Some of the ships tethered to Cadre One have been supplying us with power for centuries
,” Munro shouts. “
In that time, their reactor housings have eroded significantly. These supports will keep them from caving in
.”

Curiosity draws Gregor toward the room, but Munro’s arm drops like a steel gate. “
I’m sorry, Lieutenant. No access without thermal-impact armor
.”

Gregor blinks and looks into Munro’s stern but friendly face. He nods in understanding, backing away from Munro’s one-man barricade, and the colonel hauls the heavy door shut. With a great clang, the noise of manufacture abates.

“The next bay is our genetic engineering and incubation facility,” Munro announces in a much calmer tone. “This is where
we
come from.”

He leads them down a sleek metal corridor
with several rooms and passages branching off from its gently circular path. Stopping at a floor-to-ceiling round door, he inserts a pass key, removes his glove for a handprint panel, stoops close to an eyepiece, then speaks his name and rank into a microphone. The automated security panel switches each identifying LED to green and refers him to a small touch pad where he enters a private password. At last, the security checks are complete, and the tall door sinks back before rolling aside like a giant cog.

“This way,” Munro announces pleasantly and
he steps inside. His guests follow until they catch sight of the door’s profile, which even to guess, is at least a full meter thick.

“I’d say you’re serious about protecting this room, yes?” Ortega asks rhetorically.

Munro turns on his heel. “Of course we are. This is our future.” Reaching just to his side, the massive colonel taps a code sequence into a panel, and the giant wheel-door rolls back into position. It halts, then fully recesses into the doorway. The central maglock rotates, extending multiple pistons into place with series of sharp clanks. Room lighting fades out entirely.

Somewhere
ahead of them, a door slides open with a gentle hiss, and Munro beckons the colonists through into darkness beyond. Stepping through, they are greeted by the faint gurgling of fluid in pipes and the soft whirring of many small electric motors. As their eyes adjust they become aware of a dim, omnipresent red glow throughout the room.

Keller stretches h
is hands out ahead of him, his eyes beginning to perceive outlines and shapes. The dimensions come into focus, and he finds himself in a room full of floor-to-ceiling cylinders, the middle thirds of which are transparent.

Sharon steps close to one, gently caressing the plexi-steel, straining to see its contents.
Inside, she discovers a thin tether running from the top of the transparent section down to a tiny, bean-shaped object that drifts in invisible currents.

“Embryos…” she notes aloud.

“That’s correct,” Munro confirms. “Once we have constructed viable gametes, we selectively pair them, and the ones that begin meiosis, we transfer here.”

Ortega, Gregor, and Keller follow Sharon’s lead, peering in at the tiny blobs suspended in the cylinder’s fluid.

"Who will they be?" Sharon wonders aloud.

"We always hope for Operator class," Munro answers. He holds his dwarfed arm up, contemplating it momentarily in the dim red light. "We don't get many anymore."

"What do you mean? Why not?" Gregor asks, turning from the cylinder in front of him.

"No matter what we do, we simply can't shield this room enough from ionizing radiation. Chromosome breakage yields defects that are difficult to manage. Add to that, our DNA is...brittle. No matter how perfectly our engineers design the source product, disorders and mutations during incubation are far too common."

Munro turns a full circle, peering into the many cylinders surrounding him with the adoring eyes of a gardener inspecting his seedlings.

"We were reluctant to share this information with you, but now that we have agreed on how to
combine our gene pools, well...you can see how much we need you." The huge colonel stands upright and smiles. "With your arrival, we can make significant health gains in our population."

Keller
nods to himself, acknowledging the weight of Munro's words silently. He stands back from the tank before him, again noticing the red glow. Try as he might, he cannot find the source. Munro watches him pan his head about in vain and ends the mystery.

“We discovered the embryos benefit from modest sensory stimulation as they grow, so we provide visible, tactile, and audible input. The red light is an ambient Holoprojection. For some reason, embryos raised under this hue are slightly healthier than others.”

Sharon presses her hand against the clear tank surface, feeling its warmth and a subtle throb. Lowering her ear down to the glass, she hears what she suspected: the gentle
lub-dub
of a human heartbeat. She grins.

Munro sees her smiling against one of the tanks
and steps over beside her. “I’m told the first generations were raised in darkness, with no biorhythmic stimulation. Most of them lacked social instincts and would isolate themselves from others. Often, they developed
severe
behavioral disorders. With decades of experimentation, we discovered that simulating the interior of a human body produced individuals with significantly improved cooperative instincts. They proved to be far more productive and dependable than their predecessors.”

Gregor grunts cynically as if mocking an advertisement. “Building better people through
eugenics
!”

“Precisely!
” Munro beams.

“What kind of disorders?” Sharon asks with genuine interest.

“From what I was told, they tended to be obstinate, refusing to work or participate in any way. They would harm themselves, and at times”—Munro gets a morose look about him—“they would harm others. Sadly, the early years were filled with many failures as we blundered through the human genome. In trying to keep our own genetic defects at bay, we frequently caused them.” He gingerly places his large hand against one of the cylinders, looking into it deeply. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like then… to have to discover the results of your failures on living children…” Munro trails off, not permitting himself the indulgence any longer, and he takes his hand off the tank.

“What happened to them?” Ortega asks.

“They were reconstituted, of course.”

All four colonists
perk up at once.

“Reconstituted?”
Keller asks.

“Yes, reco
nstituted,” Munro repeats. “It's a selective lobotomy to remove the defective neural structures, which are replaced with implanted chipsets. The individual is no longer capable of highly skilled tasks, but they are rugged laborers and can be programmed for a wide variety of basic functions. This way, they can still contribute as useful cadre personnel.”

The colonis
t officers stiffen rigidly, fascination replaced by moral outrage. The four look at each other; and though they want to blast Munro for his Mengela-esque medical practices, they bite their tongues.

Munro canno
t help but notice the change in his guests’ postures and expressions. He lets some of the air out of his chest, taking a cautious half step toward them.

“Is something wrong?”

Gregor, Sharon, and Ortega will not look at him. Even Keller’s instinct is to turn around and walk back to his ship, but he forces himself to confront what he sees, to confront the idea of medical dismemberment for the purpose of slave labor.

He thinks back to the meeting a few hours ago with O’Kai and the other cadre officers; and he hears the counselor’s voice reminding him to look pa
st the surface, to first accept and then
try
to understand.

They have no concept of pr
operty. They share everything, even themselves. It isn't about oppression...it's bigger than that. It's more important than that.

As he surveys the room with the cylindrical tanks around him, it
finally dawns on him how much effort goes into maintaining their population, how much is invested in every embryo.

It's easy to feel superior when your survival isn't
so uncertain
, he thinks, and it shames him that for even a moment he placed Munro and the cadre beneath him.

Munro still looks inquisitively at him, but
Keller does not answer. Rather, he calms his mind, taking in the whole of his surroundings: the soft red glow, the gentle
lub-dub
, and the warm air.

This is where they come from. This is their mother.
They have to do what they must to protect her.

From the security measures to get in, it also occurs to Keller that few cadre personnel
would have even seen the inside of this room. And here, Munro has welcomed them in without reservation.

“What you describe, Colonel,” Keller replies at last, “shocks us. To have our minds removed and our bodies used against our will is terrifying.”

Munro squints, wanting to understand. “Why? Wouldn’t you
want
to be a benefit to the others? By your rank, I can see that you have a structure of authority and compliance. Isn’t it better to have everyone contributing to the same goals?”

“Of course,” Keller concedes, “but our compliance is obtained willingly. To have it forced from us would destroy what we are entirely.”

Munro nods reassuringly. “I can’t see how, but… We would never attempt any such procedure on you or your crew.”

Ortega, Gregor, and Sharon t
urn to look at the huge man, trying to gauge his sincerity.

“I have your word?”
Keller asks.

With complete authenticity, Munro replies, “To us, Captain, saying is the same as doing.”

The more that Keller interacts with the cadre, the more he understands that lying is simply an impossibility for them. But a queer emotion lingers, reminding him how fragile civil liberties are and how easily they disappear in times of insecurity.

Keller relaxes, releasing the air in his chest. “T
hat’s a relief. For us, reconstitution would be a fate worse than death.”

“Worse than
death
?” Munro asks in disbelief. He scrunches his face as if trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. “All we have are our lives. We work to extend them as long as we can, but when we die, we’re taken from our siblings to oblivion. There is
nothing
worse than death, Captain!”

The four stand in silence, feeling the gravity of Munro’s conviction. Ortega’s faith tempts him to debate, but faith has been dreadfull
y scarce in Keller since Earth's annihilation. The elder captain cannot help but admire Munro’s zeal for life, especially when it is a life of labor, pain, and sacrifice.

“Thus far,” Munro announces, “you’ve seen our primary reactor facility, life support, sensors, maintenance, recycling, engineering, manufacturing, and incubation. That leaves MedLab. This way.”

Munro moves briskly from the soft red glow to the giant wheel-door and taps in the necessary code. The door's pistons retract from the doorjamb at once, and it slides out, then rolls aside.

“Unfortunately, I cannot take you inside
the genetic engineering portion," the colonel states. "Viruses are frequent by-products of our work there. You could fall ill and die within days.”

“Then how do
you
work there?” Sharon asks.

The group steps past the huge door, and Munro returns it to its place. Striding down the metal corridor, he answers, “Most of the work is done via remote. We design the chromosomes from the safety of our laboratory, and machines perform the actual assembly. When ma
intenance is required, a technician suits up and crawls through the access corridor. Anyone going in is inoculated against our most recent set of viral threats. Upon exit, the air in the corridor is evacuated to space, and the individual endures a three-stage chemical and radiological decontamination process.”

“Sounds pretty harsh,” Ortega notes.

“It is sufficient to maintain our safety.”

Ortega leans closer to his captain. “I’ll bet Saha
ra would love to see that place.”

Munro slows his gait and cocks his head. “Suh-hah-ruh?”

“Sahara Taggart,” Keller explains. “She’s our chief medical officer, currently in cryo-freeze.”