But more importantly, why did he start killing now?
Orion may believe that the frozen military personnel will force the people born on the ship to be soldiers or slaves . . . but why did he start unplugging them when planet-landing is impossibly far away?
He’d hidden from Eldest for years before Elder woke me. He could have stayed hidden if he hadn’t started killing.
So I guess my real question isn’t just why, but . . .
Why now?
3
ELDER
I STARE AT MARAE, MY MOUTH HANGING OPEN. “WH-WHAT the frex do you mean?” I finally stammer.
Marae rolls her shoulders back, straightening her spine and making herself appear even taller. My eyes flicker to the other Shippers, but I notice that hers do not. She doesn’t need them to affirm who she is or what she believes. “You have to understand, Eld . . . Elder,” Marae says. “Our primary duty as Shippers is not to fix the engine. ”
My voice rises with anger and indignation. “Of course your frexing duty is to fix the engine! The engine is the most important part of the whole ship!”
Marae shakes her head. “But the engine is only a part of the ship. We have to focus on Godspeed as a whole. ”
I wait for her to continue as the engine churns noisily behind us, the heartbeat of the ship.
“There are many things wrong with Godspeed; surely you’ve noticed. ” She frowns. “The ship isn’t exactly new. You know about the laws of motion, but have you studied entropy?”
“I . . . um. ” I glance around at the other first-level Shippers. They’re all watching me, waiting, and I don’t have the answer they want to hear.
“Every
thing’s constantly moving to a more chaotic state. A state of disorder, destruction, disintegration. Elder,” Marae says, and this time she doesn’t stutter over my chosen name. “Godspeed is old. It’s falling apart. ”
I want to deny it, but I can’t. The whirr-churn-whirr of the engine sounds like a death rattle ricocheting throughout the room. When I shut my eyes, I don’t hear the churning gears or smell the burning grease. I hear 2,298 people gasping for breath; the stench of 2,298 rotting bodies fills my nose.
This is how fragile life is on a generation spaceship: the weight of our existence rests on a broken engine.
Eldest told me three months ago, Your job is to take care of the people. Not the ship. But . . . taking care of the ship is taking care of the people. Behind the Shippers are the master controls, monitoring the energy sources applied to the rest of the ship’s function. If I were to smash the control panel behind Marae, there would be no more air on the ship. Destroy another panel, no more water. That one, light. That other one, the gravity sensors go. It’s not just the engine that’s the heart of the ship. It’s this whole room, everything in it, pulsing with just as much life as the 2,298 people on this level and the one below.
Marae holds her hand out, and Second Shipper Shelby automatically passes her a floppy already blinking with information. Marae swipes her fingers across it, scrolling down, then hands it to me. “This past week alone we’ve had to perform two major fixes to the internal fusion compartment of the solar lamp. Soil efficiency is way below standard specs, and the irrigation system keeps leaking. Food production has barely been sufficient for over a year, and we’ll soon be facing a shortage. Work production has decreased significantly in the last two months. It’s no small thing to keep this ship alive. ”
“But the engine,” I say, staring at the floppy, full of charts with arrows pointing down and bar graphs with short stumps at the end.
“Frex the engine!” Marae shouts. Even the other Shippers break their immobile masks to look shocked at Marae’s cursing. She takes a deep, shaky breath and pinches the bridge of her nose between her eyes. “I’m sorry, sir. ”
“It’s fine,” I mutter, because I know she won’t go on until I say this.
“Our duty, Elder, is clear,” Marae continues, clipping her words and holding her temper in check. “Ship over planet. If there is a choice between improving the life aboard the ship and working on the engine to get us closer to Centauri-Earth, we must always choose the ship. ”
I grip the floppy, unsure of what to say. Marae rarely reveals what she’s feeling, and she never loses control. I’m not used to seeing anything on her face beyond calm composure. “Surely we could make some sacrifices in order to get the engine back up to speed. . . . ”
“Ship over planet,” Marae says. “That has been our priority since the Plague and the Shippers were developed. ”
I’m not going to let this go. “That’s been . . . ” I try to add up the years, but our history is too muddled by lies and Phydus to know exactly how long that’s been. “Gens and gens have passed since the ‘Plague. ’ Even if the ship is the top priority, in that amount of time, we must have come up with some way to improve the engine and get us to the planet. ”
Marae doesn’t speak, and in her silence, I detect something dark.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I demand.
For the first time, Marae turns to look to the other Shippers for assurance. Shelby nods, a tiny movement that I almost don’t notice. “It was before I was named First Shipper. Before you were born. The First Shipper then was a man named Devyn. ” Marae’s eyes flick to Shelby one more time. “Information about the engine has always been—selectively known. ”