by Gorman, K.
DEUS
©2020 K GORMAN
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Contents
ALSO IN SERIES
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Epilogue
Epilogue 2
FROM THE PUBLISHER
ALSO IN SERIES
BLACK DAWN
RENEGADES
BLOOD TIES
WORLD SHIFT
DEUS
Chapter One
“Ten contacts, all hot.” Reeve’s voice buzzed over the comms line. “Karin, do you see them?”
“I see them,” she confirmed as her HUD updated, painting the targets on the map image in the top corner of her visor. She hunched down next to the front tire of an old, worn-out pickup, the specialized Fallon blaster in her hand pointed at the ground.
Like her suit, it ran in stealth mode, its normal running lights off. Only its slight, barely-audible supersonic whine and the notification in the bottom corner of her HUD indicated its active status.
She glanced around. The small farm was located near the southeastern outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, and according to UN reports, disguised an underground missile operation. A paramilitary group had taken residence and had been moving equipment into the site over the past few months.
On flyover, it wasn’t much to look at―a basic barn, farmhouse, and outbuilding setup with several old agricultural drones rusting in the fields. But a deep, secondary scan from one of the orbiting Alliance ships had picked up a large gravitational anomaly in the building.
Either a piece of old terraforming equipment, a ship with a substantial engine and weapons drive, or a very large bomb.
Given that Melbourne was on Old Earth and the planet, by definition, did not need any terraforming, she didn’t think it was the former. Which left either a gunship or a bomb in the possession of a dodgy group of militarized individuals.
“Time ’til go?” she asked.
“Two minutes,” Reeve answered. “Recon drone incoming.”
A soft whir sounded in the air, and a new tag appeared on her HUD. The drone, about the size of a Novan gravball disc, flew overhead, rotors humming like a small fan, and banked to go around the back of the barn.
She settled in, lifting her gaze to the rest of the scenery. The farm was peaceful. November meant early summer to this part of the globe. Semi-dry fields rolled away at her back, cut through with swaying lines of wooden fencing and a thick riparian where the hills uniformly dipped for a stream. A quarter moon hung above the foothills, waxing gibbous, and a blanket of stars filled the dark blue expanse above.
From where she knelt, she made out the movements of several satellites. A chorus of sound undulated in the fields and forest around her―frogs by the stream and irrigation pond, along with the occasional caws and chirps of nocturnal birds. Bats winged past the barn, attracted to the insects gathered by the light in the windows.
With her new, upgraded senses, the night came to her with a clarity she’d never before received. She had little trouble seeing through the dark, especially with the quarter moon in the sky and the vast scattering of stars above her. Where before, the dimness would turn the shadows into blurry, indistinct shapes, her vision could now compensate for the low light conditions. Her hearing, too, had improved―to the point where she could hear the occasional mutter of conversation from the barn just over a hundred meters away.
One of the men, a tall, thickly-muscled, black haired brute with at least one firearm on him, kept walking by the windows.
She glanced down at where his shadow fluctuated the light reflected off the grass in front of her. Either this group was overconfident in their security, or they had a few surprises up their sleeve.
Granted, they probably didn’t expect three genetically modified superhumans to come raining on their parade.
She and Nomiki weren’t normal. As former subjects of an experimental genetic engineering project, they were chimeric mixes of over thirty different genetic sources that had been pieced together, artificially born, and shipped off for a childhood of brainwashing, surgery, chemical treatments, and medical tests.
Nomiki had been developed under Program Enyo, which turned her into a bioengineered supersoldier in both brain and body, with a surplus of athleticism, a mind for strategy and combat, and a curious brand of selective psychopathy that didn’t so much ‘turn off’ emotion as partition it behind a glass wall for analysis.
Jon had been developed as Program Ares, another member of the war pantheon―though he, notably, had been re-engineered after birth, and well after having grown up into maturity.
Karin…
Well, she was different than both of them. Initially developed as Program Eos after a Grecian Titaness who brought the dawn, she’d recently had her bioengineering changed to reflect Program Eurynome instead. Though originally the Eurynome Project’s first creation, the Eurynome Program had gone on to become the base structure of every single
program thereafter.
Which meant that, in addition to being a powerful creation Program with the ability to manipulate dimensional boundaries, she also had the basis for every single god and goddess Program that the Eurynome Project had ever created, which included the combat specs reserved for the war pantheon sets.
A little over a week ago, Karin had all the combat ability of a wet noodle.
Now, she had over fifty confirmed kills on her record and the ability to gut someone in a second flat.
Of course you do, said a voice in her head. I wouldn’t be riding around in a body that couldn’t defend itself. I just emphasized Eurynome’s base combat coding a little more for our purposes. Ares, in particular, has a vengeance streak that I’m particularly fond of.
That came from Dr. Tia Sarayu, former lead geneticist of the Eurynome Project―and its first human trial.
Part of her psyche had been uploaded into Karin’s head a week ago, and she’d been making herself at home ever since.
You keep saying ‘base mold,’ Karin thought back, and all I can think of is the stuff that grows on bread after I’ve left it too long.
That’s funny, Tia replied. Normally, I get people thinking back to renovating the crown and base molding of a room.
Normally. Technically, Karin was her only normal. Except for a handful of typed commands across a computer interface, Tia hadn’t spoken to another human being, thought-speak or otherwise, in over seventy years. All that remained of her was a brain and brain stem in a tank, wired through with cybernetics and connected to a computer whose hardware was slowly corrupting.
Just one of the weird, fucked up discoveries they’d all made when investigating the Eurynome Project.
The comms beeped once, warning them of the minute marker, and a countdown flashed up in the right corner of her HUD. Another notification informed her that both Reeve and the war room on the FSS Courant, the Fallon ship in charge of the op, had linked into her suit’s feed.
She glanced over to where her sister crouched beside a tractor, still as a stone, the moonlight reflecting off the armored slope of her back. Behind Nomiki, Jon’s hunched form appeared twice as large. Although they all wore Fallon’s state-of-the-art klemptas armored suits, Jon’s musculature made him a size of his own. He looked like a chunk of metal parts, or one of those bulky, heavily-armored paladin class characters Karin occasionally saw in netgame advertisements―too large and unwieldy to be anything but a fantasy.
He made it work, though, and not just in the hulking smash that those characters were stereotyped into. He proved fast, quick-thinking, and lethal.
He just also happened to be able to use a wall as a door with that armor.
At the side of the screen, the countdown reached ten.
A slip of energy shivered in her gut, and within the span of a few moments, everything focused. The heart rate monitor on the left slid up a few numbers as her body prepared for combat, and the clarity of the scene around her sharpened, attention darting to the slightest movement. The area slipped into her mind’s eye as her brain pieced every pertinent bit of information into a map. It was like feeling a computer amp up its frame rate and processing speed, or an engine shift gears on an uphill.
Nomiki had once described to her how it felt―how her brain and body slid fluidly into combat readiness. It was almost exactly what Karin experienced now.
Before, with her normal human response, all she’d picked up during combat situations was adrenaline, panic, and blind fear.
Now, she morphed into a smooth, efficient killing machine.
She wiggled her fingers and rolled her shoulders, instinctively reaching for the dimensional fields, asserting her grip on them, and let out a slow, grounding breath as they connected.
Then, the countdown reached zero, and they were moving.
The farm’s inner lot raced by in a whisper, their boots silent as they ate up the distance. Karin checked her sprint as she came to the doors, reaching for her powers. Instead of the light that had answered her call for the last two decades, the very fabric of the universe rippled at her fingertips.
She tore through it like paper.
The doors ripped apart in three places, and they burst through in a shower of broken wood, dust, and splinters.
The five occupants of the room shouted in alarm and jumped up from where they’d been seated. Two of them went for their guns.
She shot an auto-turret under a support beam before it wound up, sinking three blaster rounds into its computer casing, and sliced the second and third in half with her powers―they split between worlds in a spray of sparks and briefly grinding machinery, their other halves vanishing from the normal world to clunk harmlessly to the floor in the Shadow world, a parallel dimension that ran close alongside theirs.
By the time she’d turned back to focus on the humans in the room, Jon had already shot the firing arm of one gun-wielder, and Nomiki was in the process of launching herself over a table at the other.
Her sister shoved the man hard into the wall. While he staggered, she grabbed his gun arm. He fought her, but she captured it in a steel grip and snapped it up, then down, breaking several bones.
He dropped the gun.
Then, she stepped away.
For a moment, the room went quiet. She glanced at the other three men. Jon was by them, instructing them to kneel, a few plastic bindings already in his hand to restrain them for the second fire team to deal with.
“Karin, you stay here. I’m going to check the other rooms.”
Nomiki gave a wave before vanishing down a small hallway to the left. According to the map, there was a kitchen and a bathroom back there, along with a few offices. The building had originally been a barn and still looked like one on the outside, but it clearly hadn’t functioned as one in a long time. Though it retained much of its original bones, such as the remnants of a hay loft and stalls, the interior façade now suggested more ‘metal shop’ than ‘farm animal.’ Tracks had been installed into the floor for moving heavy equipment, with a few mechanical rigs attached to the rafters. One stall had been retrofitted with plastic-glass barriers, a holoview training program―a VR headset, harness, and large, omnidirection treadmill used largely for training combat strategies―next to one of the barn’s main windows.
Whoever these people were, they clearly hadn’t been trying to hide very much.
“Clear.” Nomiki walked back out of the hallway. “I thought there were ten contacts. Reeve?”
“Lifescan picked up ten,” he confirmed over the comms. “Check for doors. Maybe they went under.”
They hadn’t found the entrance to the silo yet. Karin broke away, already sweeping the room with her gaze.
She wished she could take her helmet off. Right now, the suit was only inhibiting her senses, and current technology lacked the AI advancement to make up for it. It wasn’t like in a television show, where a HUD would simply tag a thermal print on a wall as a clue, or scan the air currents for changes to find a hidden door.
But then, perhaps they didn’t need to for this one.
“Found it, maybe. There’s a sub-room off the kitchen that leads into a tunnel.” Nomiki tagged it on the map.
Karin scanned it, frowned, and opened the door on her left, revealing a small laundry closet with another door grafted onto its other side.
Smart. They’d put it in the middle of the office area so that it wouldn’t be as obvious and so they would have multiple ways to enter in case of invasion.
“Another one here. Going in.”
A presence came up behind her, large and quiet―Jon, appearing somehow even bigger in the tight space. She crossed the room and opened the next door, finding Nomiki already down a small ladder and heading into a cramped tunnel.
She holstered her blaster on her thigh, gauged the distance, and jumped down. The suit negated the fall impact, spreading most of the force into its plates rather than into her bones. She moved out of the way for Jon, following Nomiki into
the next tunnel.
It was a small, cramped affair, likely a secondary tunnel as she couldn’t see them moving much equipment from here. Jon didn’t have to hunch, but he did enter at an angle, the same way he went through doors in his armor.
Her suit registered a temperature drop of three degrees as they kept walking, the sounds of their steps echoing on the round, concrete walls. Two incandescent lights were all that lit the entire hundred meters, leaving most of it dim and dank. A door at the end led into a larger tunnel that angled down.
A whir sounded behind them, and their comms crackled.
“Wait for the drone,” Reeve said. “We’ll update maps and visuals.”
“More like give them a hundred-credit skeet disc to shoot at,” Nomiki said as it flew past her shoulder and banked into the next tunnel.
We could just port into the Shadow world. Do a quick exploration without shots firing at us, then come up in a place they won’t expect.
That was one of her main powers, now, porting things to and from the Shadow world. Even the way she phased between dimensions and sliced things in half was a subset of that power.
But, so far, neither Fallon nor the Alliance―nor Earth or Mars, for that matter, since technically, they were part of this mission, too―had found a way to patch comms signals between dimensions, and command liked to have eyes on the ground.
