by Gorman, K.
Or in the ground, as their current subterranean mission was shaping up.
She unholstered her blaster and picked up a jog, following Nomiki. For several minutes, they moved, their comms silent except for the occasional heavy breath that their suits neglected to mute. Reeve opened a view of the drone’s camera into the left of their feed. It had found the end of their tunnel and shot through a few rooms―old maintenance and engineering, by the looks of their rusty equipment―before encountering a closed door that it couldn’t pass.
How useful.
They caught up to it a minute later, and Nomiki tried the knob.
“Locked.” She stepped away. “Karin?”
Karin lifted a hand, touched the dimensional boundary, and sliced through its deadbolts. “Not anymore.”
Nomiki pushed it open, waited a beat while the drone shot through and their HUD feed showed the next hallway as clear―then stepped through.
Ten seconds later, they were stepping into the dim metal walks that ringed the silo, their steps echoing down the shaft.
You know, I didn’t think Australia had missile silos, Tia commented.
Maybe it’s new, she thought back.
It doesn’t look new, Tia pointed out.
She had a point. There was more rust on the walks than she cared to trust, and the bunker’s thick concrete walls showed distinct signs of age. She wasn’t sure what the weather was like year-round, but something had certainly leaked on the far wall. Though no missile sat in the circular hollow, she saw evidence that one could have been there. Several mobile walkways sat in their ‘up’ position on the other side, their ends clearly shaped with padding to come up close and personal to a missile tip―although, now that she thought of it, they could just as easily fit some of the newer-model rocket-ships Alliance was coming out with these days.
She veered toward the railing and peered down into the silo’s well. The walkways went down another twenty stories or so, before ending in a small, flat basin that she decided hadn’t seen any large bursts of ignition fuel.
For good reason. I wouldn’t want to park here.
Don’t you call it ‘land’ or ‘dock’ when it’s a spaceship you’re flying, not ‘park’, what with you being a pilot and all that? Tia pointed out.
So long as it’s not ‘crash’, I’m happy, she replied back. Aloud, she said, “They have mech suits down there.”
“Mech suits and something with enough balls to cause a gravity anomaly,” Nomiki said dryly. “What fun.”
A shot streaked up from the mid-level and hit the ceiling above her. Blaster-fire.
“Turret,” she identified.
Nomiki sighed as another few rounds pelted into the metalwork above them and rained sparks of boltsplash onto their suits. “Jon?”
Without a word, he stepped up to the railing, located the turret, and started firing. The shots stopped a few seconds later, and something crashed loudly to the floor. Below, someone shouted. Different guns fired back, ballistic rounds this time.
Karin bit back a swear and phased, the platform shivering beneath her. “Guess they learned.”
“Guess they did.” Nomiki picked up a run. “Let’s go!”
The gunfire from below stopped soon after, their opponents likely realizing it was useless while they were still on top of the walkways. They met a second turret midway down, along with a second doorway. Karin sliced both the turret and the door, and Jon vanished down the hallway with his gun drawn. A third turret appeared under the nook of a fire suppression system, and she sliced through it before it could fire.
Three stories from the bottom, when the mech on the ground floor could sight them properly, the ballistic rounds started back up.
Metal screeched as shells thundered into the grating around them. Chunks of concrete spat from the wall, and pieces of sheered and smashed metal rained down on her suit. One round glanced off her thigh, the impact skimming the armor so hard, her entire right side vibrated with it. Nomiki sprinted forward and launched into a roll, tucking close to the wall.
Adrenaline slammed into her. Inside, something snapped.
For a second, her vision tunneled. Then, everything went crystal clear.
Before she knew what she was doing, she was moving.
She sliced a fire suppression tank on the next strut over, calculated a trajectory, jumped into a sprint, and launched herself over the rail.
The dimensional boundaries switched mid-air. One second, she was leaping into the line of fire, an open target, the cloud from the fire suppression unit only just beginning to spread…
Then, everything was quiet.
She twisted, executing a slow, controlled flip, accompanied only by the sound of her breath on the visor and the beep from her suit as it registered the disconnect.
For one long, quiet moment, she was alone, rotating in the air, with only the Shadows, beings from this side of the universe, to watch her.
Then, she pulled on her power, felt the world turn around her, and switched back.
She landed hard on top of the mech, nearly taking out its mounted gun.
The mech staggered back, off-balance. Hydraulics and machinery worked underneath her, loud and obnoxious. Pain shot up from the impact. The klemptas suits were extremely handy, and very good at what they did, but they weren’t heavy armor. She used her powers to slice a handhold into the mech to anchor her, then gave the mounting a savage kick.
It didn’t give right away, so she used her powers to slice through its base.
Below, she looked down into the angry face of the mech’s operator. Around them, the gas from the fire suppressant system was beginning to fill the silo, making the area thick with haze. She watched the pilot’s face twist below, then paused to notice the way the klemptas armor reflected in the window―she looked frighteningly anonymous, like an elite soldier from one of the Alliance’s more action-oriented netdramas, come to rain down terror. The pilot screamed something at her, and the mech’s hands and arms came up.
She glanced up, tilted her head, and watched as her powers peeled its metal fingers like a cheese slicer. Then, she reeled her elbow back and slammed her fist into the armored window of the mech’s cockpit.
The plastic-glass spider-webbed under her hit.
She smiled.
Though the klemptas armor absorbed most of the shock, several darts of pain snapped up from her knuckles―slamming normally-fragile finger bones into a thickly armored mech wasn’t usually a good idea, but the petrified shock on the pilot’s face satisfied something deep inside her.
She rocked backward, somewhat disappointed when the mech didn’t rock with her―in hindsight, a hundred and eighty pounds wasn’t all that much compared to a five-ton mech―then cut part of the mech’s foot off and rode it down when it fell, launching into a roll as it hit the ground.
She was on her feet a second later, spinning back to face it.
Either it had been designed poorly, or it was a much older model than she’d guessed. With both of its hands destroyed and one foot inoperable, it couldn’t get back up again. Even the gun components in its forearm weren’t working―she’d deliberately cut too far back for that. She shot the secondary component that came out before it could fire, the heat from her blast round making the edges of the metal hole glow.
“I’ve got a gunship over here,” Jon said over the comms. “Old, likely a counter-fed grav gen.”
Counter-fed gravity generator. Something even older than Tia, and something that was likely the cause of the gravitational anomaly the Courant had picked up in orbit.
Well, that answered some questions.
She straightened slowly. Around her, the extinguisher smoke continued to puff through the air, turning the silo into some hazy dreamscape.
“Bomb,” Nomiki said over the comms. “Sis, need you.”
She checked Nomiki’s HUD in the map―somehow, nothing had managed to shoot down the drone, though its feed was somewhat hampered by the gray clouds of
fire suppressant gas―holstered her gun, and headed over.
Below the last catwalk, a large space had been carved out beyond the silo’s boundaries. The silhouette of a table grew out of the gloom, followed by countertops and a series of reflective discs on the back wall. Nomiki stood by a support pillar on the left. On the other side of the room, a man cowered against the wall, an arm over his mouth in an attempt to stop the cloud from flowing freely into his lungs. His other hand was raised, a small remote clutched tightly in it.
Dead man’s switch, Tia identified. If he lets go, the bomb will detonate.
Behind him, a large machine sat across two worktables, looking like a big, mechanical version of one of those lighter dumbbell sets fitness studios sometimes tried to market to women. It was white, with several clear plastic tubes curving out and back into it. Three cylinders of blue liquid stuck out of the stop, looking ready to sink in, like valves on a trumpet.
She pointed. “Is that it?”
It didn’t look like any bomb she’d ever seen, but what did she know?
“Yep. It’s an older model Calpex with a nuclear load.”
“Huh,” she said.
With a twist of her fingers, she ported it and the detonator into the Shadow world, taking the man’s hand at the wrist. He screamed, and she closed herself to the other dimension as it detonated―but not before she’d felt the shockwave ripple the boundary.
Remind me never to visit Shadow Melbourne without a rad suit, she thought to Tia as Nomiki darted forth to subdue the man.
It wasn’t hard. He was preoccupied with the bleeding stump of his wrist. She doubted he was hearing much of what Nomiki said. Already, she could see signs of shock clouding his mind.
And pain.
Oh, it might be all right, Tia replied. It’s over sixty kilometers away, and it detonated within a silo. Plus, there’s no wind in the Shadow world.
Still, I think I’ll be directing my Shadow Australia vacation to different parts of the country.
I still find it hard to believe they have silos, Tia said. They didn’t when I was alive. Not overtly, anyway.
Karin shrugged. A lot can change in seventy years.
So it would seem.
“Is that the last of them?” she asked the comms.
Nomiki grunted. “You took out the mech?”
“Yes.” Karin glanced over. “He’s currently stuck in his cockpit, unable to roll the mech over.”
“Cool. Clear down here, then. Jon?”
“Clear,” came the answer. “There were seven in there.”
Which made two more than Reeve’s lifescan had picked up.
Oh well. It didn't matter. The place was clear, and the bomb dealt with.
“Good. Courant, we await your orders.”
A second later, their comms crackled. Not Reeve’s voice, this time, but General Crane’s.
“Good work. Stay there and await extraction. We’re sending a team down.”
Chapter Two
“Hold still,” Dr. Takahashi admonished. “This will only take a minute.”
Karin grimaced as he adjusted the diagnostics crown on her head, keenly aware of the sensor pads sliding against her scalp. Every tilt and movement made her skin itch―as if a hive of very active ants were crawling along her nerves―and her mind buzzed with restlessness.
She felt like she should be doing something. Like running. Or hitting things.
Instead, she clenched her hands into fists and flexed them again, taking deep, slow breaths to calm herself down.
The sun helped. Sort of.
She wasn’t sure if it was some small connection to her old Eos programming, which allowed her to absorb and manipulate light as if she were some complicated plant, but it helped.
Which was why Takahashi usually elected to do their checkups outside, as they were now.
Points to him.
She let out a slow breath, attempting to ground herself through the light’s touch. She’d been getting this way, lately. Antsy. Restless. Like both her brain and body had hard-wired into an unhealthy dose of Ritalin.
Everything felt different. Being out of the suit simply made that more apparent. Inside the suit, her brain could explain it away as part of its strength, speed, and balance augmentations―but in regular clothes with no augments? There was no ignoring it. She was stronger than before, with noticeably thicker musculature and denser bones, and her brain worked faster―as if she had a higher processing speed than those around her. Thoughts came quicker and more numerous, and with a laser focus she had only experienced during times of either deep study or on the edges of panic.
She noticed everything. And could process and react to it within the span of a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, she was having trouble turning it off. Most of the time, she couldn’t help but notice everything, which meant that her mind was in a constant, high state of processing. Especially in the halls of the compound. They grated on her like a pressurized tube, too constricting, loud―gods, the sound of the lights made a physical sensation on her skin.
It was like her head was being simultaneously smothered and squeezed.
Then, there was Tia.
The second personality who occupied her mind was not precisely the doctor whose brain and brain stem hung in a tank downstairs. They’d both undergone changes. As part of their deal, Tia had copied a stripped-down version of her knowledge, memories, and personalities, cutting away extraneous parts of Karin’s psyche to fit.
New memories, not Karin’s, flitted through her head along with new knowledge. She suddenly had random chunks of data and expertise on subjects she’d never studied, some of it so ingrained and second-nature that she had to remind herself that, for example, she had not been an expert on genetics and gene sequencing before last week.
The crown on her head beeped, and a data chart appeared on the screen of the netlink in Takahashi’s hands, but the doctor didn’t move. A new urge to get up and go somewhere flashed across her mind, almost dragging her with it, but she forced herself to remain put, clenching her teeth until the muscles along her jaw had grown rock hard.
As much as she’d like to pretend she was now invincible―that she was fine―she knew that was wrong. On the first day, the headaches had seemed normal. She’d just heavily modified her brain in some outdated mad science lab. A headache had seemed a small price to pay.
But then, it became more than that. It felt like her brain couldn’t shut itself down. She slept for three hours at a time, and would wake up like clockwork. Her muscles always had a stiffness when she woke, and she had to do stretches before it would go away. Once, she’d woken up with a charley horse. She’d bit into the blanket while watching the muscle move, then limped to the Med for a relaxant.
And, already, her memories were beginning to cross-wire.
Sometimes, she’d catch sight of a tuft of hair out of the corner of her eye, and it’d be black instead of blond. Once, she’d caught a brief glimpse of brown skin instead of her usual space-pale white―too fast for her to be sure whether it was a memory or not.
She knew why, too.
The brain filtered everything that the eyes saw. Unless they were working overtime, it filled in a lot of the scenery, and it did so with what it expected to see.
And now, she had Tia’s thoughts and expectations overlapping her own.
It made her feel loose, fragmented.
But, somehow, also complete.
It was a confusing time.
Which was why she’d agreed that daily checkups were a good idea. Checkups from an unbiased, third party source like Takahashi, as opposed to the memories and expertise of the Old World geneticist she currently shared her brain with.
A flash of a brain in a tank came to her…the shivery undulation of fiber-optics and circuit-wires that had fanned out from it.
Cybernetics.
Christ on a fucking cross.
A new urge to get up and go flashed through her mind. She resisted it
, digging her fingers into the prefab of the crate she sat on.
The diagnostics crown beeped again. She glanced up just in time to watch Takahashi’s normally-pensive expression shift into a contemplative frown.
“You’re running a little hot. Five degrees.”
She grimaced. She was no expert, but five sounded like a lot. “You think it’s from the changes?”
“Considering the fever is confined to your brain and brain stem? Yes, I think that’s likely.” An eyebrow arched upward. “I’ll remind you that most of this defies modern neuroscience. I find it worrying.”
“Yes, well,” she grunted, slipping the diagnostics crown off with a grimace and placing it on a nearby supply crate as she made to stand. “I find the imminent peril of being replaced by an alternate universe on the whim of a madwoman more worrying, so let’s continue to call it even, shall we?”
She’d said it with no small amount of bitterness―Gods, the whole entire thing was just so fucked up―but she couldn’t help the slip of fear that wavered into her tone.
For once, though, he actually seemed to notice. Dr. Takahashi paused, and his gaze slid from the diagnostics screens. Dark eyes, lined with thin wrinkles, met hers.
“You’ll get through this, Karin. You will. And I am here to help you do so.”
She tightened her jaw at the depth of his tone.
Something had changed in him. At some point in the last week, he’d acquired skin in the game. They all had, at one point or another. The crew of the Nemina had grown in number, but they had all fallen in to support her and figure out an end to this. Even when she was off on missions, they were still here on the ground, doing what they could to help.
There had to be a million other things Takahashi could be doing right now, yet he’d worked tirelessly to analyze what they had, and he always took time away from what he was doing to check up on her. Even when she was being such a crank.
A flutter of emotion churned in her gut. Grief, sadness, despair―but, almost as soon as the feeling crept up, it flitted away. What replaced it wasn’t cold, per se, not like she had envisioned it being. Instead it was just…absent. As if her emotional palette had simply grown smaller, and some of the colors had been cut out.
