by Gorman, K.
“Yes.” Karin frowned. “Of course.”
“Then stop setting us up as your antagonists. This isn’t like you, ’Rin.”
They stared at each other for a few seconds, and the lull in the hallway began to peter off. Broken-off conversations resumed. One by one, people returned to their tasks.
She could still feel their attention, though. As if she were a bomb that could blow at any minute.
It wasn’t a secret what she could do with her new powers. In fact, she was willing to bet that the power of rumor had twisted the story of her versus the Centauri squad quite a lot. At least half of these people, if not more, had seen firsthand the literal bloodbath she’d left in the hallways of the compound. Hells, they were still cleaning bits of it six days later. And those who hadn’t seen―well, they would have heard from the rest.
And then there was the matter of the brain in the tank. Much fewer had seen what had become of Tia’s real body―the generals on scene had been very quick to shut that down and secure it―but rumor traveled fast, and the image of a cybernetic brain in a tank was hard to keep down.
She let out a breath and shook her head.
“Sorry. You’re right. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“It’s paranoia,” Nomiki said bluntly. “Comes with the supersoldier programming. You learn to deal with it.”
She snorted. “Really?”
“Really. It takes time, though.” Nomiki glanced to the side, her brow forming a crease that indicated she was analyzing something. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to come to the war room right now.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “No? Worried I’ll kill the general?”
Nomiki sighed. “Okay, first of all―we don’t say things like ‘kill the general’ in public corridors, even when joking. And second―no, I don’t think you would kill him, but currently, neither you nor Crane have the patience to make all the right social steps in order to deal with each other, and neither of you know each other well enough to make an accurate reading, especially given your new paranoia.”
Yeah. All right. That made sense.
“Plus,” Nomiki continued. “It’s a room full of people you are subconsciously going to think of as potential enemies, so you will likely always be one step away from fight mode.”
Karin winced.
Yeah, she’d been noticing that lately. Any time she went into a place with more than a few people, her brain worked in overdrive.
It was only when she was alone that she could actually let her guard down.
“You’re right. I hadn’t really…thought of that.”
Nomiki gave her a half-smile. Her hand came up to squeeze Karin’s shoulder armor. It was a testament to Nomiki’s strength that Karin actually felt the gesture under her armor.
“Go to our prep room and take a minute. Hells, take five hours. It’ll be at least that long before we hit Brazil. Gods know you need the rest.”
It would be more like ten hours before they reached Brazil, since they were against a tail wind for the return journey, but Karin saw her point―she’d hardly had any time to rest since she’d come out of the tank, and her body had gone under major modification. Her muscles were still growing, and her brain felt all tingly every so often.
Sometimes, she saw little flashes of light, like sparks―or stars. A definite signifier that she needed sleep.
“It’ll allow you to think things through, too. And who knows, maybe you’ll figure out how to find Sasha. That’s how it worked before with Tylanus, right?” Nomiki’s mouth quirked.
“I guess, yeah.”
It hadn’t been quite how it had worked―her latest communication with Tylanus, Dr. Sasha’s son who was project Tartarus, had occurred in dreams, and usually, it was he that reached out to her, though the last ones certainly implied that she’d been the one doing the ‘traveling’, so to speak.
Gods. Now that Nomiki mentioned it, she did feel tired. Not so much bodily, though her muscles ached, but in her mind.
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “I’ll go do that. Thanks.”
“No problem,” Nomiki said, giving her shoulder a pat before letting her hand drop and stepping away. “I’ll brief Crane. You get some rest―and I mean it: rest.”
“Yes, sis.”
She chuckled at Nomiki’s tone and broke apart, veering to the left as her sister walked off with a wave. Jon, moving with his usual careful competence, slid noiselessly around her, meeting her eyes and bobbing his head as he passed. He still carried the large gun in his arms. And the sight of him in the corridor, even more enormous in the klemptas armor, made her smile.
He could almost pass for a cyborg.
She watched them go, Ganis giving her a small wave with her suit’s mechanized fingers as she passed, then bobbed to the left, casually following her mental map of the ship as she took a stairwell down several levels.
And, almost as soon as she’d finished the first flight down, and the casual noise and busyness of the main corridor muted behind the hiss of the closing door, she felt her defenses begin to relax.
Gods, Nomiki was right. She had been on guard.
And apparently, being on guard turned her into a paranoid, trigger-happy bitch.
In her mind, Tia made a throat-clearing noise.
Just because you have heightened paranoia doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong.
Yes, yes, I’m well aware, thank you, she grumbled back. But I’d like to be able to think clearly, and she’s right―I can’t do that around other people, not if my brain is unconsciously tagging them as potential threats.
She’d have to ask Nomiki how she did it. Her sister did, after all, have a lifetime of experience as a combat Program.
Away from the main corridors, the ship seemed to slow down. Although there were still people―this was a Fallon warship, after all, and they were in an active wartime situation―there were less of them, and the ship was not currently on an active combat mission like it had been fifteen minutes ago. They had ten hours of flight time to tie up loose ends, and most of those had already been tied up. It also felt more comfortable down here. There was less staring. Although people did seem to do a double-take when they saw her, she was a familiar sight now, and they left her alone.
Plus, they hadn’t been upstairs when she’d let her powers run hot, so to speak.
Slowly, with every minute that passed, she relaxed.
By the time she got to their prep room, a small bay in a slightly busier part of the ship, given its location close to the main weapons store, her body allowed the rest of her battle instincts to settle down.
The door hissed shut behind her. She closed her eyes, let out a long, slow breath, and relaxed.
Slowly, the headache that had been building began to ease.
The bay was both a prep room and a rest hub. About four times the size of her small cabin on the Nemina, it had three bunks built into the wall, with the option of seven others available for pull-out from various locations, a small Mess station with a foodstore, fridge, and maker, and racks beside each bunk―which also doubled as benches―to help mount the armor for wear and disrobing.
Like most of the ship, it was at the peak of design, with each nook and cranny fitting in a smooth, well-thought out way, each running into the other with finesse, and colored with trim in the Courant’s theme―red for the blood of its namesake predecessor’s historical battle against the Alliance ship, Medusa, blue for the sea it was originally built in, and silver-white for its titular moon.
After a moment, she let out another sigh and relaxed her shoulders down. Then, she reached out for the light setting and, with an easy flick, switched the cabin into a dimmer mode.
Slowly, she felt the stress of the day leave, and her mind begin to clear.
Well, that was over.
Nomiki was right. She hadn’t had much time to rest―not really. Even the nine hours from earlier hadn’t been enough to make up for the lack of the last week.
From the moment she’d stepped out of the tank and laid waste to the Centauri squadron that had been threatening them, she’d been on a casual alert. First, it had been about the Cradle, and her need to protect Tia’s brain and consciousness. Then, it had been everything else.
She always felt like she’d needed to be ‘on’―to be accounting things, making sure everything had been done correctly, that nothing was going to happen. Sleep, she felt, was a risk. Especially in the beginning, with Nomiki injured and her trust levels very low.
And she’d been so tired lately.
Always, her brain was working. Running diagnostics, backtracking memories, keeping tabs on her new powers and any potential fluctuations in the fields of reality around them. That, and she was technically still healing from her fight with the Centauri’s former Grand Regent. Even if the wound had closed, it still itched, and the muscle ached underneath it. Then again, most of her muscles were aching these days.
That was the cost of bulking up so fast. Some of her bones had shifted, too, and she’d gotten taller.
Takahashi remarked on it during each of their checkups. Scans showed that she’d gained about a centimeter and a half of height so far, and that her bones had grown denser. Her breathing pattern had also changed, thanks to an increase in lung capacity, and her eyesight had definitely sharpened. She could see better at night, too.
She sighed―again. She’d need another check-up with the doctor when she came back from the mission. He was always waiting for her.
But that was later. Right now, her job was to relax. Rest.
She crossed the small room, pivoted, eased herself down on the center bunk, and ran a thumb across the surface of her armor, admiring it. The cave scuffle had lent new scratches to its surface―small tears and scrapes that registered as spider-thin lines that caught the light when she turned it. A bullet-path had skimmed the armor’s knee joint, and she connected it to the flash of pressure and alarms from when she’d disabled the man she’d pushed into the Shadow World. Another had blackened part of her thigh. She rubbed at it with the tensile material on the tips of her fingers, and part of it began to smudge away.
Suns, bullets. They had used actual bullets. And not even modern ballistics rounds like the group in Australia had―these had been antiques.
The last time she’d seen one of their ilk, it had been lying on the ground during a scrounging run. But, then again, this was Old Earth they were on.
Nowadays, if they wanted projectiles, people got more creative with them. Explosive bullets. Armor-piercing rounds.
A tingling sensation went through her brain, and something shifted in her thoughts. She caught a flash of brown eyes in her mind’s eye before Tia’s thought-voice came in.
Some used guns when I was growing up. They aren’t that ancient―not here.
At that, she hid a laugh. “Tia, you died seventy years ago.”
I like to think of myself as modern, she sniffed. I was at the height of technological advancement in my profession.
“Your profession didn’t use guns.”
No, but we had security. They used guns.
Karin frowned, thinking back to her time at the compound. Now that she thought about it, security then had been using bullet-guns as opposed to the laser style that modern societies preferred these days.
Lasers were easy to load, lasted forever, were more accurate, and less wasteful.
And they didn’t come with a kick like launching a bullet did.
She frowned. How had she forgotten that?
Maybe that had been part of the memories Tia had needed to strip and repress in order to transfer into her mind.
Her teeth bared involuntarily.
She did not like the idea of having lost things, though she knew she had.
Of course, if she’d really lost the memory, then it wouldn’t have returned, would it? She wouldn’t be able to tell what she’d lost―it’d just be gone.
Shit. She definitely didn’t want to think about that. There’d been enough holes in her memory before she’d let Tia fuck around with it.
She decided to switch topics. Slightly. “What are you up to in there? I keep feeling my brain working.”
In retrospect, that was a weird sentence to say. And she was glad she was alone with Tia when she said it.
Technically, they could have this entire conversation in thought, but she preferred to speak out loud when they were alone. It helped keep the two of them separate.
Minor upgrades. Some things we did in the tank need tweaks.
“Things such as bone density and muscle growth?” she guessed.
No, those are relatively automatic. I’m tweaking response and reaction time, amongst other, less exciting subroutines.
“You make me sound like a computer.”
Given that my main body exists as a cybernetic brain in a tank, I’m not sure what you expected.
She chuckled. “You got me there.”
All joking aside, the human body is very similar to computation, albeit less efficient in some areas and prone to strange, incurable deviations like the ALS that plagued me. It takes more time, creativity, and experience in biology to tweak, but―lucky for you―I have a lifetime’s worth of experience.
“Just very…old experience.”
It still works―but, yes, the modern nano was a nice upgrade.
There she went, speaking in computer terms again.
Karin gave her head a shake. “So what do you think? Have these goose-chase missions been worthwhile, or do you think I’m right and I should be exploring the alternate dimension powers instead?”
For a moment, Tia didn’t reply. The room ticked around them, quiet and empty. Relaxing. It felt dry in here, and cool, as opposed to the heat of the desert canyon they’d been in and the humidity of the jungle they were traveling to, and there was a scent to the air—metal with something akin to rubber.
I stand by my thoughts earlier: Yes, I think they’re stopping you from using your powers and keeping you busy, for whatever reason. It smells political, to me, but we don’t have enough information yet to diagnose it properly, so to speak.
Tia paused, and Karin felt the hesitation as the woman collected her thoughts and weighed her words.
These missions have been good in expanding your combat experience and test-running your combat routines in real-life scenarios, she said, her tone quiet and careful, clipped. However, you didn’t go into the Cradle to become a super soldier.
Karin sighed. “No, I did not.”
Dimensional transitions are new to me, as well. I never got to use my powers―not really, and most definitely not fully. They put my body to sleep long before I grew to my full potential.
“Men suck,” Karin said.
Yes, they do. That’s why we’re going to kill them.
“How do you know that they’re still alive? It’s been seventy years, and, as I recall, anti-aging stuff was still prohibitively expensive back then.”
They were alive eight years ago when they were experimenting on you, Tia pointed out. I’m willing to bet that they’re still here.
She winced as the memory of her being in the Macedonian Cradle came to her―and then again as she remembered the Lost baby they had found inside it, isolated but still remarkably…in stasis after all of these years.
Fallon had it, now. From what she knew, they were taking as good care of the child as they could.
Heads up, you’ve got company.
Karin snapped back to attention with a jolt, quickly scanning the room. For a second, it was as if nothing had changed. Everything was still quiet, subdued. Calming. The lights were as they had been, and she could feel them with her other set of powers, the now lesser Eos line.
But the air was different. And something in the back of her mind tingled, feeling the change in the dimension ripple.
Her eyes snapped to a spot next to the door, where the darkness lay thickest.
The Shadow shivered into being like a mirage
. Piece by piece, like an intelligent mist pouring in and solidifying. Her senses shifted, feeling the blur at the edge of its form on a visceral level now. It made her gut ring and caused the hairs on the back of her skin to shiver.
Then, it was there.
She stared at it. And, in turn, she felt it stare at her.
Neither of them moved.
Man, the Shadows have gotten fucking weird.
Not that they hadn’t been weird before, but they’d all, for the most part, stopped attacking when they appeared. Perhaps it had been Sasha who had egged them onto the attack in the beginning, but nowadays, they seemed more interested in staring at Karin and making weird comments.
She let out a breath, and settled in to wait, continuing to meet its gaze.
All right, let’s see where this goes.
Seconds passed. Then, half a minute. The Shadow didn’t move. In fact, only the occasional sway or rock, and the swirling of its blackness, gave away that it wasn’t stuck.
They do this when you sleep, too, Tia commented. It spooked me, at first.
That wasn’t surprising to her―the Shadows were, after all, bona-fide creeps. What did surprise her was that Tia had noticed them while she’d been asleep.
I don’t sleep, Tia said, reading her mind.
Karin’s eyebrow arched upward. “You realize how creepy that sounds, right?”
It’s tactically advantageous that I am aware of your surroundings when you are not.
“And here I am, wondering why I’ve been so tired all of the time.”
No, it’s not that. You still get your REM cycles. I monitor them, make sure your brain and body are doing their jobs. The Shadows appear every so often. I can’t see them with your eyes closed, but I can sense their presence through your other senses.
“My other senses?”
They mess with dimensional boundaries, Tia said flatly.
“Oh, do they?” Karin’s eyebrows quirked. That fact was fairly obvious―even a single glance at the Shadow would tell you that it was otherworldly.
But, as she cycled into herself and paid attention, she realized that she could feel it―like a presence coated in a piece of physical radio static.
