by K. Gorman
Just as it roared and made to lunge, she threw her arms forward.
The light whipped past her and Baik in a bright blur. For half a heartbeat, she couldn't see.
Then, the creature screamed.
Light snapped and popped around it, coalescing into something hard and bubbling that clung to the thing in strands and globules. It thrashed, snarling and struggling against her power. A bubble of light popped on its shoulder with a loud hiss, and she caught sight of that blackness beneath writhing, fighting back. Parts of it unraveled, spilling into the air in a fog similar to that of the Shadows’. Black and white flickered together like a strobe. Marc and Baik stopped firing, uncertain at the spectacle.
“For fuck's sake,” she yelled at them. “Get it!”
A moment later, several blaster rounds pelted into its head. With a snarl, she poured more energy into her attack, focusing on a particular thick rope of light that had wrapped around the thing's throat.
She felt something give.
The creature's scream cut off. When she looked up, she saw that her light had cut cleanly through it. Jagged, asymmetrical pieces remained frozen in the air, suspended like a post-death Shadow. The next blaster round, Marc's, shot straight through its head and hit the wall in a shower of sparks.
Slowly, it began to fade.
Silence returned. As she dropped the contact and let her light dim, she thought she saw a darkening of something against the ceiling, little more than a flicker. As she glanced up, following it, something touched the front of her mind. She got a brief flash of the creature, its intelligent, familiar eyes.
Then, Baik shifted beside her. The next thing she knew, his super-powered blaster was pointed at her head. He stared down the hall. “Drop it.”
Marc had already aimed his blaster at Baik. An unhappy grimace stiffened his expression as he considered the situation, looking from Baik to her and back again. Then, with slow movements, he activated the blaster's safety and put it on the ground. His hands rose in the air.
“Good. Now kick it over and put your hands on your head.” Baik brought his own hand up and reattached the earpiece that had either fallen out or been tugged out during the fight. “Security, come to section B, third floor. I've got them.”
*
They weren’t taken back to their cells. Instead, they were led to what Karin guessed to be the complex’s command center, going up two floors and toward the back of the building.
It fit more in line with the gymnasium and laboratory that she’d seen earlier rather than Baik’s plush, wood-paneled office, but had a more temporary feel, as if the room had not been built for it, though it was hard for her to imagine what it had been built for—a big, open-space conference, perhaps? With the concrete decor of a bomb shelter adorning the walls? The tables were all adjustable, half of them able to fold down flat. The holoscreens and computer stations connected together with thick bundles of cords and cables that snaked across the floors like fat pythons. On the table just in front of them, a soldier managed a set of five holoscreen points that were so crammed together that a few of their base systems overlapped each other, tilting the screens askew. She couldn’t have fit her pinkie finger between them.
Not that she could have tried, anyway. About fifteen soldiers occupied the area, most between them and the room’s two doors. Baik stood in the far corner, speaking with a tall, lanky woman who she gathered to be the leader of the soldiers—or at least, the leader under him. David hunched over the screen of a netlink just behind him, doing some kind of work. She and Marc had been shunted to a series of chairs that were as temporary as the tables, not tied up or bound by any means, but definitely under scrutiny by the rest of the room’s occupants.
She’d come out largely unscathed, both from their escape and from her woefully short clash with Baik, but Marc sported numerous new bumps and bruises, along with a series of scratches on his shoulder and forearms from the broken glass and a bleeding cut above his eye that had soaked enough into its bandage that she could see it through the other side. He had an ice pack in his hand that he’d been alternating between his elbow and knee, but now, it simply rested in his palm as he stared into the middle distance, lost in thought. They’d given him a shot of nanos about twenty minutes before, so she guessed their anesthetic effects had kicked in.
She ticked her gaze back across the room, watching Baik and those around him. The people here seemed to be treating him differently. There was the eyes-down, make-sure-you-look-busy-in-front-of-a-superior-officer feel among the rest of the room, yes, but there was also something more—as if, in addition to that, they were all watching him.
But maybe she was reading too much into it. Or maybe that’s how they worked in the Alliance. What did she know? Her only experience was with the Fallon military, and they were operating with quite a few relaxed formalities right now.
Her jaw clenched as her mind turned to thoughts of Chamak. Where would Nomiki be right now? And Soo-jin? Was Fallon already on its way over, or had the Alliance found something to stop them? If the latter was the case, Nomiki would probably try and break out on her own. And Generals Brindon and Crane were wily enough to let her do it—but that carried some risk for them. Nomiki operating as a free agent made her a loose cannon. She would be just as liable to show up, kill her way to Marc and Karin, and take them into the wind as she would return them into Fallon’s protective enclave of warships. Or switch teams and join the Alliance.
Hells, she may be more likely to do that, depending on where the Alliance was with finding Dr. Sasha.
Nomiki didn’t have set loyalties—except to Karin. Nomiki would kill her way through half the system in order to find her. Which was why Karin was so sure she was on her way.
But that didn’t matter now. There were other things to think about. Things like Shadow monsters, and weird episodes of psychic static that blocked out the stars and gave her fits.
She gave her head a little shake and refocused it on Marc. “How’s your eye?”
He gave a little jerk when she spoke, like he’d been pulled out of some thought, then winced. His shoulders went up in a shrug. “I’ve had worse.”
Her gaze dropped to his hands as he made a gesture. Three of his knuckles had swollen up on one hand, along with the base of his left thumb. She gave his wounds a quick measure in her head, weighing them against a few others she’d seen before her lips curled up at the corners. “So, not enough to get you another combat disability bonus?”
It was a joke. He’d half-paid for the Nemina out of a combat injury pay on his last tour before retiring from the Fallon service.
At first, she worried that she’d misjudged and that the joke had fallen flat, but then his mouth quirked up.
“Well, they technically did take me back just before we embarked on Manila.”
“You signed the contract?”
“Yep.”
She shot him a grin. “Damn, dude, they’re going to owe you a lot of overtime for this.”
“And maybe another disability.” His gaze slipped up, and he nodded across the room to where Baik stood. “You think I can get him to hit me harder next time?”
All right, if he was joking that much about it, he must be fine. Or feeling the effects of nano anesthetic. That stuff was potent. And weird. She’d broken her arm a couple months ago, and Soo-jin had needed to strap her other hand to the leg of the table so she’d stop poking the numb limb.
“He did get shot, didn’t he?” She squinted, trying to pinpoint the piece of Baik’s shoulder that should have been injured. The blood was still there, which made it easier to locate, but the man didn’t seem to notice. If he’d swapped out for a new uniform jacket, she doubted she would have found it. “I swear I saw that part.”
“Yep. I shot him.”
“Okay, then—he’s clearly not hurt now.” He hadn’t even been wincing, or compensating for the shoulder, as far as she could tell. “Is that also due to the quicksave?”
�
�Yep.”
She turned her squint onto Marc. “Then how come you don’t have one of those? They seem pretty fucking handy.”
The soldier manning the five monitors closest to them glanced up at the profanity. He’d obviously been half-listening in on the conversation, which was probably why they had been positioned so close to the bank of holoscreens—close enough to keep an eye on, but not so close that they got much idea of what was going on. The graphs and numbers and communications data windows that she could see through the back of the screens were just far enough away that she had to focus to make out any of the letters and numbers, and what she had made out had been boring and useless out of context.
Marc chuckled. “Probably because they’re three-hundred-and-fifty million credits on the open market, and you need a license to get them.”
Her eyes went wide. “Three hundred and fifty million?” She attempted to pick her jaw up from where it had fallen to the floor. “Who in the fuck has that kind of money? On a military salary? I mean—no offense, but…”
“He’s a Fulani prince.” The soldier at the station half-glanced over his shoulder after he’d spoken, likely checking that Baik was still all the way across the room before he turned back and met her gaze with a puzzled frown. “You didn’t know?”
“Well, he’s from Fallon, and I grew up on the other side of the gate—so, no, we didn’t. In fact…” She turned her eyes up to Marc, one eyebrow rising in a question. “I had no idea Alliance even had royalty.”
“Yep,” Marc said. “Left-over from pre-Alliance days. Half of them are actually responsible for the democratic republic system it operates on today.”
Huh. And here she’d thought it’d been born out of Old Earth’s fine examples, but perhaps people had wanted to get away from those old connotations.
A blob of white in her peripheral vision moved. When she glanced up, Baik had started toward them. She straightened, bumping Marc with her elbow to get his attention. “Time to zip the gossip.”
It felt like the entire room watched as Baik stopped in front of them, his arms crossing over his chest as he gave them a glance-over. He had definitely healed faster than them. Even his hands, which must have gotten a battering considering all the hurt he’d inflicted on Marc, appeared normal, the joints unswollen and the skin healed. Only a few caked smears of blood remained next to one of his knuckles.
Maybe he had more than the quicksave among his augmentations. If he had that much money to throw around… Well, she imagined he bore a striking resemblance to the target customers of Seirlin Genomics’ body-mod catalogue, especially the ones listed among the holovid of the fighting man punching the hell out of some poor bag.
Plus, he was pretty. She wondered if there’d been any modifications on his face to make him look that way, with the squarish jaw and perfect nose. Anyone with three-hundred-and-fifty-million to blow on a quicksave probably had money for other enhancements, as well.
“You tried to escape,” he said.
She let out a bark of laughter. “Do you blame us? There was a giant, chimeric Shadow monster going on a kill spree outside our door.”
“You would have tried, anyway. Don’t lie. We’ve been listening to your transcripts.”
She doubted that. The whole point of transcripts was that they were written. He couldn’t have listened to them—but she suspected that was a picky point to bring up now.
Instead, she merely lifted an eyebrow. “Again, do you blame us? You’ve abducted me, involved me in scientific experiments, and are forcing me to heal people, all under the implied threat that you’ll shoot my boyfriend if I don’t. What would you do?”
“It’s not about what I would do, but what I have to do to keep you in line.” His gaze narrowed on her, mouth turning into a grim twist. “What do you know of the monster that attacked tonight? Is it one of yours?”
She stared at him. “Did you miss the part where it came after me? And the part where I blew it up?”
“That your light harms it implies a connection,” he said. “I’m suspicious about connections.”
“By that logic, I guess the Shadows are my fault, too. Gee, sure wish I could control them.” She rolled her eyes with a huff, feeling part of her spine crack as she leaned back and crossed her legs. “Don’t you think I would have tried that a little earlier, and much more successfully, if I had that power? Wouldn’t I have made it attack you?”
Marc cleared his throat. “Well, Karin, to be fair… it is a little weird.”
She gave an undamaged part of his arm a friendly whack, turning her flat stare in his direction. “Marc. You’re not supposed to be agreeing with him.”
Baik watched this exchange, and for a moment, she thought she caught some amusement under his steady, stoic expression, a throwback to the person she’d met in his office earlier.
She forced herself to meet his gaze and not get sidetracked by the dark stain of blood that cut across the shoulder of his uniform and marred the rank insignia on his breast—Sol, is he really not feeling that wound, or is he just bullshitting us? The latter seemed a lot of effort to go through for two people he’d handily won a fight against. Plus, she had been shot in roughly the same spot about a month ago, and that was definitely not a feeling one could simply ignore.
Ergo, he probably had more than a quicksave under that skin.
“You are certainly entertaining prisoners,” he commented.
“Christ,” she hissed, an Old Earth mannerism she hadn’t used since her university days. “We wouldn’t want to be boring.”
His eyebrows twitched, the first sign of life beyond the mask.
Beside her, Marc let out another long-suffering sigh. “You sure you and Soo aren’t long-lost sisters?”
“We’ll have to ask her purity-cult family. I’m sure they’d know.”
“She told you about that?”
“Yep. Just before we left.”
“Hmm.”
It felt like Marc had something to add to that, but he didn’t share it. He didn’t move, but a slight shift in his body posture moved his shoulder down closer to her. He glanced up to Baik, watching him.
Baik met his gaze. Something passed between the two men for a few seconds, visible in the slight shift in expressions, a relaxation of the jaw muscles for Baik and a slight raising of the eyebrows for Marc.
Then, Baik gave a nod. He turned to David who, as always, had found a place to stand close to Baik’s left elbow.
“Come. We’ll take you back to your rooms. But first, I think it’s time to show you something.”
Chapter 15
He didn’t look like a prince. At least, so far as she could tell. There weren’t any princely insignia on his jacket, anyway. Only his military rankings—a set of three V-shaped stripes on his epaulets and a colored band on his breast marking him as part of the Alliance, in case the white of his high command uniform wasn’t enough of a clue—and blood.
Lots of blood.
It stood out, shocking against the white, and thick enough to be more than a simple stain. It coated the material, both front and back, outlining in exact detail where it had run down. Her eyes kept going to it, and when he turned his back to lead them up the hall, it gave her an ample opportunity to stare at him.
Yep. Marc had definitely shot him. And—yep—he had healed. But not fully. This close, she detected the slight tilt to the man’s movements. A blaster shot was nothing to sneeze at.
“This is a research facility, in case you hadn’t guessed yet.” His head half-turned in their direction as he spoke, looking up from a message he’d received on his netlink. David walked beside them, a silent presence who occasionally glanced in her direction. “From part of the old government, and somewhat disused nowadays.”
Was he supplying them with information now? Perhaps he thought they’d earned it, considering she’d dealt the killing blow to the monster—hells, she was still coming to grips with that—but, on the flip side, if he felt comfortable wit
h giving them information, then that meant he was confident that they wouldn’t escape.
“It’s seen many uses across varying disciplines, including biology, astronomy, and quantum physics,” he continued, turning his attention back to the front.
That explained the weird, multi-disciplinary labels she’d seen across the doors earlier.
“What is it now?” she asked.
“Now, it’s studying you.”
She made a hissing noise through her teeth, part of it a laugh. “Don’t I feel special. Have you guys managed to nail Seirlin Biocorp’s heads to a post yet?”
“Seirlin Biocorp has been aiding our efforts to combat the Shadows. I’ve met with some of them, and they’ve given us their full cooperation. Dr. Ma is actually one of their scientists.”
Her fist tightened at her side. So much for freezing their accounts and taking them to task as Fallon had done. Somehow, the Alliance just kept finding new ways to disappoint her.
Then, his last sentence registered in her brain and she stopped walking. “What? She’s from them?”
“Yes.” Baik, sensing she’d stopped, paused to glance back, a single eyebrow lifting as he turned his cool gaze on her. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“You guys realize that they systematically experimented on and murdered over two hundred children, right?”
And that was just the number she’d guessed from her twenty years with the organization. Hells knew how many they’d actually killed in their seventy years of operation.
“I’ve been told that the Eurynome Project was a rogue offshoot from the main conglomerate. Besides…” His eyebrow twitched up, his cool gaze giving her the impression that he was looking down at her as if she were some slow, ignorant child. “You do realize that we are at war, don’t you?”
Fire sparked in her blood. She held his stare, constraining her features against the mix of anger and violence that bubbled against the inside of her skin, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he could make her this angry.
