Across the Universe

74 ELDER

“YOU KILLED HIM.”

Orion looks up at me and grins, clearly pleased with himself. “You’re welcome,” he says.

Part of me thinks this is a great thing, killing Eldest. He was a tyrannical dictator. He was cruel. He never saw anyone on this ship, even me, as a real person.

But he’s also the man I’ve lived with for three years, the one who had the biggest hand in raising me, and the one I always used to think I could turn to.

And now he’s just a gooey mess.

I want to ask why, but I know why.

Despite myself, my eyes fill with burning tears. He was the closest thing to a father I had.

Orion sets the bucket down. He walks toward me, his hand outstretched. I take it without thinking — my eyes are still on Eldest’s motionless body.

“I knew you’d be on my side!” Orion says, churning my arm up and down in an enthusiastic shake. “I wasn’t sure — you’d been under Eldest’s thumb for so long, and you didn’t respond to the unpluggings like I thought you would — but I just knew you’d be on my side in the end.”

“Your side?” I shift my blurry gaze from the dead Eldest to Orion — who, as the Elder older than me, is technically now the Eldest of the ship.

“When I started saying I didn’t like the way of things, Eldest sent me to Doc. Told him to stick me on the fourth floor. Didn’t he, Doc?”

Doc nods mutely. His eyes are wide with shock, or terror — I cannot tell which.

“Doc was my friend, weren’t ya, Doc?”

Doc doesn’t nod this time, just stares down at Eldest’s body. “I thought, with enough Phydus…” he whispers. I turn my face away from Doc. He always did think that anyone could be cured if he threw enough drugs at him. Doc never believed people were more powerful than medicine.

“Couldn’t let Eldest find me, so the first thing to go…” Orion raises his hand to where his wi-com should be, and he mimes clawing at his neck. When he opens his hand, I see a snaking scar across his thumb. “It was terrible. Worst thing I ever did, ripping that out of my own flesh, with my own hands. Felt like I was ripping my soul out.”

There is silence in the room, punctuated only by the occasional drip of Phydus on the ground.

Orion continues. “When Doc saw the wi-com dot was gone, and since Eldest hardly ever leaves the Keeper Level… it wasn’t hard to hide the truth from them. The old Recorder had… an accident, and I blended into my new life.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell?” Amy asks, her eyes locked on Doc.

“I didn’t know,” Doc whispers apologetically to Eldest’s body. “I thought — I’d hoped — suicide.” His eyes raise to Orion. “I thought — that night, at the Recorder Hall. That was you.” He pauses. “But it had been seventeen years….”

“You could have found me if you’d just gone next door. You know, the whole first year I stayed hidden, behind the walls, sleeping with the wires and pipes. But then I realized you and Eldest weren’t even looking. I just had to give myself a new name, a new home, and the idiots you made accepted me without question.

“But,” he continues, turning to Elder, “I always felt bad. About what I knew Eldest was doing. So much about this ship is wrong.” His eyes bore into mine. “You’ve only just scratched the surface with Phydus. Have you learned about the ship’s engine?” I nod. “Good,” Orion says. “And you knew about the mission, obviously?”

“The mission?” I say.

“The real mission behind this ship?”

“What do you mean?” Amy asks. She walks over to me and weaves her hand in my mine, giving me her strength just as I gave her mine when she cried.

“Have you never questioned why we’re here?” Orion asks me, ignoring Amy.

“To operate the ship—”

“The ship is on autopilot. It can get to Centauri-Earth without us.”

“To—”

“No,” Orion cuts me off before I can begin. “Whatever Eldest has told you was a lie. He kept much from you, after I betrayed him. No, there is only one reason why we’re aboard this ship, and that reason lies beyond this door.” He points to where the cryo chambers are, where Amy’s parents are.

“What do you mean?” Amy says again, her voice more urgent.

“You know at least what the frozens are here for, right?”

“They are experts at terraforming, and environment, and defense.”

Orion snorts. “They are experts at taking the planet away from us.”

“You don’t make any sense,” I say, squeezing Amy’s hand tighter.

“They’re the colonists, not us. Never us. When we finally land, they’ll use us. As slaves in their terraforming, and — if there are hostile aliens on the planet — as soldiers. They plan to work us or kill us. They put our great-great-great-whatever grandparents on this ship so that they could breed slaves and soldiers. That’s all.”

Amy gasps. “That’s why you’re killing the ones with military experience. You think they’ll make the people born on the ship fight when they land.”

“I know they will!” Orion roars. I can see the Eldest in him now, when he shouts. “And if there are no hostiles to fight, then they’ll use that military experience to force us into slave labor. It’s the perfect plan: growing expendable people while they sleep!”

“But why me?” Amy says, her voice a desperate whisper. “When you unplugged me, surely you could tell I wasn’t my daddy? Why didn’t you put me back in before I melted? Why did you let me wake up?”

A slow, evil smile spreads across Orion’s face. His gaze pierces mine. I clench my fists. Orion cocks an eyebrow at me.

“I keep my secrets,” Orion says, glancing at Amy.

“Daddy isn’t a slave driver,” Amy says. “And if there were ‘hostile’ aliens, he wouldn’t force you to fight.”

Orion shrugs. “How do you know that for sure? And,” he adds before Amy can say anything else, “either way, better safe than sorry.”

“Your kind of safe means killing my dad!”

Orion glances behind her at Eldest’s body. Clearly, he has no hang-ups about killing.

“If you don’t like it…” he says, walking over to the cryogenic freezing tube on the other side of the room. He opens the door and sweeps his arm to display the interior. “By all means, refreeze yourself. Sleep until we reach planetside, and see what kind of man your father really is. That is,” he adds, thinking, “if Elder and I decide to let your father live until planet-landing.”

“You’re as evil as him!” Amy hisses, pointing at Eldest’s lifeless body.

“But you know what’s really gonna twist you?” Orion asks. “The fact that Elder sort of agrees with everything I’m saying.”

“No, I don’t—” I start when Amy looks back at me with her beautiful accusing eyes.

“And the fact that Elder here’s the one who gave me the idea for unplugging them in the first place.”

Amy covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes fill with disgust, and it’s directed at me.

“Don’t believe him,” I plead.

“No, really, it’s true. You have realized that, haven’t you, Elder?” Orion sneers, laughing, and I wonder how much he knows. I search his face, and see mine in it. We share the same DNA, but we aren’t the same person. But maybe the same emotions and self-doubts and fears are woven into our identical genetic code.

“Why don’t you tell her?” Orion continues. “Or would you like me to?”

“Tell me what?” Amy asks.

I stride across the room to where Orion is standing beside the cryogenic freezer. My hands are clenched into fists.

“She’s a pretty thing,” Orion whispers to me, low so Amy and Doc can’t hear. “Very pretty. Is that why you did it?”

“Shut up,” I growl.

“Don’t let her get in our way.”

I know that there are all sorts of logical reasons why I should do it. Orion is as crazy as Eldest, his method of control just as twisted, if not more so. I’ll never be able to talk him out of killing the frozens, and he needs to be punished for the deaths he has already caused.

But those aren’t the reasons why I shove Orion into the cryofreezer and lock him inside.

“Let me out!” Orion screams.

I spin the dial. Cryo liquid held in the tank over the freezer bursts open, pouring blue-specked water over Orion’s head.

“Frex!” he splutters. He claws at the door, his face twisted with pure terror. Amy comes up beside me, watching Orion through the little window in the door. When he sees her, his eyes fill with an evil glint. He opens his mouth to shout something at her.

I spin the dial again.

The cryo liquid pours faster, filling his mouth, drowning him. His face is under the liquid now, his cheeks puffed out, his eyes bloodshot and popping. One hand presses against the window, and I notice the jagged scar on his thumb, the only thing that separates his thumbprint from mine.

“Freeze him now, or he’ll die,” Doc says. “He might die anyway.” He shrugs. “You didn’t prep him for freezing.”

I look into Orion’s eyes and see myself in them.

I slam my fist into the big red square button.

A flash of white steam escapes the box.

Orion’s face is pressed to the glass, his eyes bulging.

But he can no longer see us.