Chapter Sixteen

Aegeus stepped into the containment unit that Maxim had indicated as the one that Fredrick had been in after they captured him. He hadn’t even known that these chambers existed during his time on the ship, and that made them seem even more imposing. They had carried on their lives during the crossing from Earth, enjoying the amenities of the ship without any knowledge that there was something as stark as these prison-like cells just above them. He looked around the room, seeing it from a completely new perspective. When they had first arrived at the ship after the long desert crossing that he had insisted on going on along with Maxim and Avery, they had done a brief search and found nothing. It was almost as though no one had been there as if nothing had happened though the group had only left the day before.

Now that he was standing in the containment unit, it was as though he could feel the traces of energy that were still there. He walked around the perimeter of the room, taking in every detail in an effort to notice anything that might be out of place.

“Anything?” he heard Maxim ask from the doorway.

His son had remained outside of the unit while he and Avery had examined it, not wanting to influence what they were seeing with anything that he might say.

“This is the containment unit that he was in?” Avery asked.

The human pilot who had been found in the first ship that had been redirected to Penthos sounded uncertain of what he was seeing, as though he expected to be able to notice something quickly and easily, and it made him question himself that he wasn’t able to.

“Yes,” Maxim said. “This is the only unit that we opened. We brought him in, locked him in, and didn’t come back to it until the next morning when we found that he wasn’t here anymore.”

A thought suddenly occurred to Aegeus and before he could evaluate it all the way through, he looked at Maxim.

“Lock me in,” he said.

Maxim looked at him with a startled expression in his eyes.

“What?” he asked.

“Lock me in,” Aegeus repeated. “Go out into the corridor and lock me into the containment unit.”

“Why?” Avery asked, sounding nearly as unsure as Maxim did.

“I want to see what Frederick did. We are thinking about this from our own perspective, from the perspective of captors. Let me see it from the perspective of the captive and I might notice something that we haven’t been able to before.”

Aegeus sat on the edge of the bed and watched as Maxim backed reluctantly out of the unit and closed the door. He heard the sound of the series of locks within the door clicking into place. Three. Four. Five. Even though he knew that he was in there under his own volition and that he was perfectly safe, the sound of the locks engaging and knowing that he was locked within the containment unit brought a sense of sickening dread into Aegeus’s chest. This was too familiar, but that was exactly what had compelled him to tell his son to lock him inside. He was the only one of the three men who really knew what it was like to be imprisoned. Though he had briefly heard the story of Pyra capturing the Mikana men within a small section of the meeting hall in the kingdom, that didn’t give them even the beginning of an understanding of what he had endured. They were kept within that space only for a matter of a few days and had been together in a space that they all knew. They were brought food regularly and though there was never a time when they knew for certain that they would get out of the situation, they witnessed Maxim’s escape and had the glimmer of hope of escape.

For Aegeus, that had never been a glimmer. It had never been a matter of believing that he would escape or hoping that he would survive. Those were never emotions that he was able to experience. Instead, he had to force himself to know that this was not his existence. During the long, excruciating stretches when he wouldn’t see another living being for months at a time when he would have only the cartons of emergency Earth rations that had been tossed into his cell to sustain him, he couldn’t afford even the tiniest bit of whimsy or softness. There wasn’t hope. There was only determination. It didn’t matter what he was going through. He had to get through it and he knew that one day he would get out and be able to return to the work that he had begun.

Being in this containment unit now was a stark reminder of those most challenging times. He rarely knew why Ryan did any of the things that he did while holding him in captivity. There were times when he had been left for months without attention and days without food that he believed the scientist was testing him, putting him through another element of the cruel experiments. He wanted to know Aegeus’s limits. He wanted to see what he could survive and just how close he could bring Aegeus to death before he wasn’t able to bring him back.

That was over now. As Aegeus sat in the containment unit, feeling the silence afforded by the soundproofing closing in around him, he suddenly felt freer than he had since the moment that Pyra and Eden stormed the laboratory and he was freed. He hadn’t forgotten that there were moments, moments before they had understood who he was when they nearly didn’t bring them with him. That time was brief, however, and they ensured that he was removed from the laboratory and brought where he would be safe and could undergo the healings that reversed the mutation and brought him back to who he had been. Those healings had been some of the most painful experiences that he had ever undergone, but they were worth it. He would have suffered far more to never have to see his skin the pale, sickly, slimy skin of a Klimnu and to never have to fight through the grisly thoughts, greed, and self-centeredness that threatened to take over more the longer that he was under the control of the toxins.

It had been weeks since that day, but it seemed that it wasn’t until this moment when it really fully sank in that he was free. Having the door closed in front of him reminded him of what he had gone through, but it also reminded him that it was his own decision that had put him into that space and that was keeping him there. In the back of his mind, though, he knew what Frederick must have been feeling when he was put in that unit. Whether he was the one who was posing a threat to the crew or only knew that there was another risk, being locked into a place like this was disheartening, hollowing in a way that couldn’t be described to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. Risking sinking back into the darkness that he had often lived in during his time in captivity, Aegeus tried to put himself into Frederick’s mind as he looked around the unit. What had he thought of in those first seconds when the door closed? What did he want to do or to say? What had he noticed about the containment unit?

Aegeus wondered if the pilot had been planning on escaping when he first heard those locks clicking into place if the thoughts of how he was going to get out were punctuated by the sound of each level of lock engaging, confronting his thoughts and telling him that it was impossible. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Or did the thought of escaping occur to him only after he was locked inside and had the feeling of never again seeing anything beyond the walls of this unit?

He looked around, wondering what Frederick might have seen or focused on when he was sitting where he was, something that might have triggered his thoughts of getting out. The room was incredibly sparse, containing only the bed that he was sitting on and a single cabinet for clothing that had no doors. There was no place to hide and nowhere that could be concealing a way to get out. He stood and walked over to the cabinet, pressing his fingers along the edge to detect any separation between the piece of furniture and the wall. It felt that it was crafted directly against the wall, almost as though it were made with the wall itself, affording no space for movement. He continued along the wall, scanning it carefully to check for any differentiation in the appearance that might indicate that the unit had been compromised.

As he looked at it, however, he knew that Frederick wouldn’t have had the time to somehow cut his way out of the unit and then fix the place so that it couldn’t be seen in only the short stretch that he was alone in the unit. There had to be something else. He took a few more steps and closed his eyes. He could feel his individual heartbeats and counted them. The rhythm seemed to mark the time ticking past, each beat a reminder of the time that he was spending in the unit. Every heartbeat was unique, never to be repeated. They were precious, numbered. He opened his eyes and looked up toward the ceiling, scanning it the same way that he had the walls, wondering if it was possible that he might have been able to escape through ventilation system that connected the chambers of the ship. Aegeus didn’t see any sign of a ventilation system but he did see something that caught his eye.

Aegeus heard the door the containment unit open behind him and turned to look over his shoulder at Maxim rushing in. His son looked nervous as if he had worried that the same thing that had happened to Frederick within the containment unit had happened to him when he was locked inside. Aegeus didn’t acknowledge the fear, wanting to move past it, not wanting to waste any more of his heartbeats dwelling on what was behind him. There was a time when he didn’t think that he would ever have any more and now he was committed to using each for more than fear and bitterness.

“What is this?” he asked, gesturing up toward the ceiling at the flat, narrow piece he had noticed set into the white panels.

The flat piece contrasted with the rest of the ceiling around it, made of shimmering metal and outlined with small round lights. The lights seemed to twinkle subtly, the color shifting slightly as the brightness seemed to cycle.

“I don’t know,” Maxim said, coming up to stand beside him and follow his gaze up toward the ceiling.

“That’s connected to the life force monitors,” Avery said. “It sweeps the room every few seconds and provides information to the ship’s main computer.”

“We used that system to check the entirety of the ship after Frederick said that there was someone on the ship that was a threat. There were no unaccounted-for life forms in any area of the ship,” Maxim said, sounding faintly embarrassed that he didn’t recognize this element of the technology that he had used.

“Avery said that it checks every few seconds,” Aegeus said. “Did you check more than once?”

“Yes,” Maxim told him insistently. “We monitored it for quite a while. Nothing changed. We also checked after finding out that he was gone and there were still no other life forms.”

“What did you see in this containment unit?” Aegeus asked, gesturing around him.

“What do you mean?”

“When you did the scan after you put Frederick into the containment unit and then again after you found out that he was missing. What did you see in here?”

“I don’t know,” Maxim admitted. “We didn’t really pay attention to it.”

Aegeus was frustrated by the response, but he tried not to show it. Maxim seemed as though he were on the edge and he didn’t want to upset him further. There was nothing that could be done about the oversight now. All he could do was try to piece together what he could from here.

“What I don’t understand is why the ship is still here,” he said.

“Why?” Avery asked.

Aegeus looked at the pilot, somewhat surprised by the question. The fact that the ship hadn’t been moved even after more than a day had passed without anyone being in it had been one of the first things that he had noticed, and something that had bothered him since noticing it. Yet the other two men hadn’t even considered it.

“However he did it, whatever led up to it, Frederick escaped. He got out of the unit and he managed to not be found while the rest of the crew was still here. The crew left. They took every single person off this ship and crossed to the compound. Yet, the ship is still here. Frederick was the pilot. He brought the ship from Earth. If he was cooperating with the enemies or was trying to threaten us in some way, wouldn’t he have taken the ship?”

“Maybe he left it here on purpose to lure us back so that the army could get to us,” Avery said.

“Or maybe he didn’t want the ship,” Maxim said. “Maybe he had no use for it.”

“Or maybe he wouldn’t use it,” Aegeus said. “If there really was a threat, there is the possibility that he didn’t escape, but that he was taken from the unit. If that’s the case, then he wouldn’t be able to take the ship. If he was really up to something, he would have taken the ship. They wouldn’t use it to bait us. They know that there is too much technology, too much opportunity on this ship. It would be too risky. The crew has already gotten a ship off the planet when the army was trying to control it. They know that it can be done again. There’s more to his disappearance than just getting out of the unit.”

Aegeus walked out of the containment unit and down the short distance of corridor to the elevator that would bring them back to the main level of the ship. He felt lost in his thoughts as they rode the short way up to the main level and then separated off to go to their individual passenger pods for the night. Memories of the brief time that he had already spent on the ship crossed through his mind as he made his way down the corridor toward the room that he had inhabited during the crossing. He remembered the look on Loralia’s face as she walked down the aisle toward her father as she prepared to marry Bannack and immediately he thought of Maxim and the news that he would soon be a grandfather.

The thought of his oldest son welcoming a child of his own was indescribable. He couldn’t wait to look into the baby’s face and know that he had another chance to be a part of a child’s life, to continue the legacy of his family. Even though he had been with his own sons throughout their childhoods, he felt as though he had disappeared from their lives at such a critical point. It had been totally out of his control, but that didn’t take away the pain and regret that came every time that he thought about all that he had missed. That wouldn’t happen this time. He wouldn’t let it happen. He had sacrificed so much of his life and he wouldn’t allow that to be in vain. It may have taken many years, but the army that he had envisioned had risen up and it was time to fight.