“Then suddenly Subspecies 48 popped on the scene. The Rippers had a fatal vulnerability to cancers but also the ability to rupture holes in reality, accessing dimensional fragments. This was a new development, unknown to the colonists, and nobody knew what to do about it. Some Houses took Ripper children and raised them within the settlements to study them.
“The mutations bloomed and bloomed, until one subspecies emerged as best adapted. It did well in almost every climate. It reproduced quickly, showed mental agility, and demonstrated decent DNA repair. At approximately six thousand planetary cycles, Subspecies 61 was declared viable. The colonists had done their job: they had created the type of human with the best ability to survive and prosper. Now nature needed to take over. All support for other strains ceased, as dictated by the Original Mandate. Ile must survive. Subspecies 61 became ile. Everyone else needed to die to make room.”
“Subspecies 61. Humans,” Karina guessed. “Us.”
“No,” Lucas said. “Them. Your neighbors, your friends. But not you.”
Her fever was now so high, she was freezing and melting at the same time. “You said them, not me. What do you mean, not me?”
“I’m getting to that. Other subspecies were dying out, while Subspecies 61 went on to multiply and claim the island.”
“The planet.” Karina didn’t need him to keep babying her.
“The planet,” he agreed. “The colony cities began to gradually phase out their technology. They were letting themselves disappear. But there was a protocol breach at one of the cities, as a result of which Subspecies 29, the one that had trouble with heat, discovered where they came from.”
“What do you mean?”
Lucas sighed. “I mean that the scientists at the Mare House f**ked up. Subspecies 29 produced several unusually smart children. A sudden explosion of kids with genius-level intelligence was rare and odd, so the idiots thought it would be a good idea to study them further. They extracted these children and raised them within Mare with the full knowledge of their history. Well, the kids grew up and decided they didn’t want to go gently into that good night while some other breed of human took over.
“There was a quiet coup. By the time it was discovered, Strain 29 and their captive personnel had genetically corrected their shortcomings. Now they had no trouble with heat and they bred like rabbits. They decided that they were more viable than Strain 61. They, not humans, were ile. A mistake was made and they decided it had to be corrected. They were ordained to take over the Earth.”
Now it made sense. “They became the Ordinators?”
“Yes.”
“So this is it? They’ve been trying to kill us off for thousands of years?”
“More or less. They went to war, using the colonists’ original technology. The other cities opposed them, but they were weak by that point and in the process of dissolving themselves, so they plucked people from different strains with combat potential. The Ordinators were broken and would’ve been wiped out, except they acquired Rippers and began hopping through dimensional fragments. Eventually, so did we.
“Strain 61, the ile humans, was reproducing too quickly, and their numbers grew too numerous. They saw us and started forming religions and folklore. We had to disappear.”
“So this is how it is,” Karina said.
He nodded. “People like me have been keeping the Ordinators at bay for over thirty thousand years. Occasionally they break through with a new weapon. Sometimes it’s a virus that kills the food supply. Sometimes it’s bubonic plague. Sometimes they find a way to fiddle with the climate. The problem is that the Ordinators breed faster than us, they’re better organized, and their job is easier: it’s much simpler to destroy something than to protect it.
“There were thirteen Houses, one for each landing site. They have one House, the House of Mare. There are probably between one and two hundred thousand of them. We are the soldiers of the remaining twelve Houses. There are maybe fifty thousand of us. We crossbreed and have children with weird powers instead of dying out the way we should. This is the planet where everything went wrong. As humanity moves closer and closer to interstellar space flight, the Ordinators are getting desperate, because once we reconnect with the root civilization, it’s all over for them. They abandoned the original mandate and they will be exterminated. They’re attacking with everything they’ve got and we’re losing the fight.”
She stared at him. “And where do I fit in?”
He took her hand and squeezed it gently. “You know why my people died out?”
“Because their own venom poisoned them?” Karina said.
“That. But also because the colonists had done some projections. It was decided that if we were allowed to exist, we would destroy the other subspecies and then die out before reaching the level of medical sophistication necessary to fix our defect. They poisoned us, wiped out the entire species almost completely. They were right—even now the synthetic substitutes are just a Band-Aid. See, if we could’ve overcome this handicap, they would’ve let us murder everyone else, but the problem is that only one very specific subspecies produces the hormones we need. The Base Strain. The donors. The ones who gave rise to all of us.”
She jerked her hand back. “You mean I am a descendant of the original colonists?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is. Your type has a remarkably stable genome.”
“But my parents were normal people!”
“They may not have known who they were. Maybe only one of them was a donor. A donor and Subspecies 61 will produce donor offspring.”
“But what about this?” She held out her arms, speckled with brilliant red. “Explain this!”
Lucas sat up. “When I fed on you, the mutation agent entered your bloodstream. In normal humans the mutation agent has grown weak over the generations. But I am carrying a near-full dose and I gave it to you during the feeding. You are changing.”
“Into what?!”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s in your DNA besides the donor genes. The mutation agent is an inhibitor. It will release the brakes within your body, short-circuiting your DNA repair, and let you develop into something that’s already there in your genotype, acquired over the centuries of crossbreeding with different human subspecies but suppressed. You could become Subspecies 61, but I doubt it. Chances are, it will be one of our subspecies instead.”