Seeder Saga by Adam Moon Page B

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