Nausea pressed at the back of my throat as I grimly deciphered what the experiments had entailed, and how these humans had been altered, augmented, and died. The scientists had had several different theories on how to produce immortal life. None of the theories seemed to extend the lives of their test subjects. Actually, quite the opposite.

The first breakthrough had occurred not with any of the volunteers, but with embryos, genetically engineered from the scientists’ own DNA. Using the knowledge they’d gained from experimenting on their human subjects, the scientists had developed several strains of immortal or semi-immortal creatures, some more successful than others.

The project’s success was a race of semi-humans, intelligent, quick, deadly, and immortal. It was this species the scientists had made a few billion embryos of and shipped off to the other planets. Those embryos—the shipment Mara Zhu had mentioned…

With a jolt, I realized why the man whose office I was hiding in, the one with the deep set owl eyes, looked so familiar. In her strange inhuman way, Number One looked like her father. Which meant that, for Indigo…

I looked down at the image of Mara Zhu still on the tablet screen, anguish around her mouth, dark and solemn eyes. At least now I knew why she seemed so familiar.

Horrifying things had happened on this ship. The Ministers had been born out of those horrors, and their own creator had tried to destroy them as a belated attempt to atone for what she’d done. What kind of awful existence was that?

It’s a bitter thing when the people you’re meant to protect are ungrateful, One had said. Humans had forgotten this history—even Mara Zhu’s mention of violent native species in the Terra Nova and Maria Nova systems giving humans trouble was news to me. Humanity had not been native to the Sister Systems, but it hadn’t occurred to me that there had been creatures already living here when we’d arrived. The Ministers, perhaps, had never forgotten.

Sitting alone in the dark, surrounded by the images of dead monsters and dead men, I felt something I’d never thought I was capable of feeling: pity for the Ministers.

And then I heard something scrape outside. A footstep on dusty metal.

Something much larger than a cockroach approached.

I scrambled up, tablet in one hand, grabbing for my flashlight with the other. I’d bludgeoned a manikin once with this flashlight, and hadn’t broken it; if I had to, I could do it again, even though the sound and feeling that the skull had made when it broke under the force of my arm was horrific and I—

A figure stepped through the doorway and I brought the flashlight down, flinching all the while, towards its skull. A hand caught mine easily, arresting the flashlight, and while I waited for death to disembowel me with its makeshift claws a second flashlight flicked on.

Lieutenant Lantern-Eyes stood in the doorway, my flashlight caught in one hand, her flashlight lit in the other, and her club tucked under her arm. She gave me a baleful look.