by K. Gorman
“I think your sister’s on the bridge, with Cookie,” she said. “No doubt terrorizing him.”
“I’m here for the juice, anyway.” She dipped her shoulder free of the doorway she’d been leaning on and slipped inside, hedging around the table toward the packet shelf, but she paused when she got closer, the tangle of wires catching her eye again. “Did you get anything from that?”
Soo-jin blew out a breath between her teeth. “Still figuring out how it works, actually. You’re right on the internal mechanism, but hells if I know how it managed to get lift.”
Karin had to scrape to recall when she’d said anything about an internal mechanism for the thing. Despite her long hours of slumber, her brain still felt like hot, moldable mush. She hesitated for a second longer. Then, with a glance to the door, she slipped back to the counter, retrieved the juice packet—she’d lived there so long, she could reach up and grab one on automatic now—and pulled a chair up to the long side of the table. “Any idea where it’s from?”
“Nope. No identity markers. What tech I recognize in here could have been bought off any of the Core planets—simple stuff like processors, cooling fans, micro-outlets…”
“Maybe Fallon will have some record of it.” She took a sip from the packet, savoring the taste. Apple flavor packets hadn’t been one of the most popular among the main planets, but they maintained a kind of steadfast sales rate and therefore tended to be the same price across the board. No chance that this was proper juice from a proper apple, but the fake flavoring hadn’t grossed them out enough to put them off. “Has Nomiki looked at it?”
“Yep. She had no clue.”
Karin grunted, chewing on the straw with her teeth and allowing her gaze to wander to varying parts of the table.
They sat in relative silence for the next few minutes, her taking slow sips and fending off the grogginess that was slowly dissipating from her brain, and Soo-jin causing the occasional clink or scrape as she fiddled with and squinted at wires. Karin wasn’t really watching, her mind instead wandering back to her and Nomiki’s conversation, and the one that had come before that.
Her entire childhood had been an experiment. That much, she’d known before. But she hadn’t known to what extent or end it had been. The people who’d raised them had given them a story about how they’d been cast-offs. When they’d been really young, it had always been about how their parents had sent them to the compound to cure some mysterious disease they were beset with and told them all about how they would eventually become well enough again to rejoin the world.
There’d been no mention of their parents except for that. Not one photo or call or letter. As a child, she’d found it easy to accept—children were gullible, after all, and the compound had raised them from even before birth.
When they’d grown older and started to question things, in came the story of the test tubes. The products of cast-off abortions, which was at least a little closer to the truth. Gone was all mention of parents, but they’d still kept the whole mysterious disease part. In the compound’s care, gene therapy would turn their corrupted DNA into perfect beings, created along programs they’d been treated under since before they were born.
Nomiki’s story, that they’d been created as some kind of human consciousness experiment in mimicry of mythological stereotypes… Well, it just fit in with the rest of the bullshit she’d been fed as a kid. The next logical step, so to speak.
And, despite its unbelievability, she could find little rings of truth in it as she looked back on her childhood. She doubted it was the complete truth—how could it be? It was absolutely ludicrous—but it put together some of the overarching threads she’d been seeing over the years.
She slumped forward on the table, pushing the heels of her hands into her forehead. “Sol, my life is so tocked up.”
Soo-jin, bent over and squinting as she sorted through the wires with a pair of tweezers, grunted. “You and me both, girl.”
“Nomiki found a Seirlin lab on one of Chamak’s moons and wants to make a stop there first. She doesn’t plan to tell Reeve about it until we divert course.”
That made Soo pause. She didn’t glance up, but her brows furrowed together as she stared at the patch of wires in her hand. “Wow. All right, then.”
“Yeah.”
“That’ll be… interesting.”
“I just had to get that out in the open.”
“Which moon? Baron?”
“Korikishiko.”
She gave a low whistle. “Kori? Money talks there, so I hear.”
“Yeah. We’re just going to check it out, she says, but with the way she tends to ‘check’ things…”
“It’ll be lucky to survive. Gotcha.”
Footsteps sounded outside, soft but direct. A second later, Nomiki poked her head around the corner, the straps of her exercise top visible at the top of her arm. “Hey, sis, got any hair elastics anywhere?”
“Yeah, sure.” Karin jerked her head back toward their cabin. “Locker, second shelf. Should be a couple.”
“Thanks.” Nomiki ducked back around the corner, and her footsteps retreated back up the hallway.
“Well, at least one of us is serious about her exercise.” Soo-jin dropped the tweezers onto the table with a clunk, then rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Well, she’s pretty much our only fighter. I mean—no offense, Soo-jin, but—”
“Oh, no, absolutely none taken. I’ve seen her move. I’m just scrappy and capable of firing a gun.”
“When’s the last time you slept?” she asked, eyeing her friend’s face. “I mean, I’ve been taking all the sleep schedule.”
“Actually, you haven’t. Cookie and I managed to get a couple hours in, your sister, too. With the four of us, we can kind of take on a single Shadow if it comes. Plus, your system is absolutely tocked up. You need it.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No buts. I still have your records for when you passed out. You’re fucked, girl. I mean, even if—”
A yell up the hall cut her off. Karin jumped at the sound of Cookie’s voice, his words registering a few seconds later with a jolt.
“Shadow! Shadow on the bridge, guys—help!”
The room passed in a blur. Her bare feet slapped hard against the metal, nearly rolling her ankle over as they gripped the floor and stubbing the base of her foot into the lip of the threshold as she narrowly cleared it. Nomiki came bursting out of Karin’s room as she sprinted by, but Karin got in ahead. She knew the ship, knew where to put her feet, knew how to grip the wall to keep her speed in the turn.
She spun around the corner and almost ran into Cookie, who had backed up nearly to the door.
Then she stopped dead, frozen, the sight taking the breath out of her in a cold rush.
The Shadow stood by the sensor station, Soo-jin’s normal post. As depthless a black as the deepest parts of space outside the Nemina’s windows, its body seemed to shift and undulate as she watched, her eyes finding it hard to focus on any one spot. The angle of their spaceflight had put Aschere and Lokabrenna, the system’s twin suns, into the corner of the left window. The glass’ auto-tone turned them into dark, vaguely purple smears of light, but they still cast a glow across the bridge, intermingling with the brightness of the holoscreens.
But none of their light touched the Shadow.
For all she could tell, it existed only as a rip in the fabric of reality. Something impossible that nevertheless stood, unerringly, on the bridge of her spaceship.
For a long few seconds, it didn’t move, only stood. Then, as Cookie backed up farther and a push from someone behind her made her stumble forward, its head turned.
Its attention grabbed her in an instant. It felt like it could see right through her, making her skin crawl as it stared straight into her guts, then moved its gaze upward to her lungs. Her brain hummed as its gaze settled on her head, as if it could read her thoughts.
Traces of light glimmere
d on her skin, her powers rising to the defense.
The whole room held its breath.
Then it turned back to the sensor screen and stooped forward. One long arm detached from its side and stretched ahead, moving to the controls.
“Oh, saints,” Soo-jin breathed in her ear. “What is it doing?”
Someone pushed around her, jostling her side, but she threw out an arm and caught them as they made to pass. “Wait. Just wait.”
Nomiki paused and hesitated. A shiver climbed straight up Karin’s spine as the Shadow mimed typing. Her heart fluttered in her chest, the pounding of her blood a roar in her ears. When the screen began to shiver in front of it, it straightened.
Within a second, it had swiveled, its body moving less like a human than a candle flame. A trickle of awareness flowed into her mind as it stared.
Then a word, not so much a voice as an idea, vibrated across her brain.
Eos.
By everyone’s collective wince, they’d heard it, too.
She stared at the Shadow for a long, disbelieving second. Then she straightened her spine and drew a low, short breath. “What?”
The word seemed to shock it. As if it hadn’t been expecting it. A shiver ran through its body, undulating at the sides.
Then it lifted its arm and started toward her.
Beside her, Nomiki moved. “Yeah… I don’t think so.”
In a slash of her knife, the Shadow was gone.
Chapter Six
Chamak Udyaan floated in the distance like a pearl. She’d seen it once before. As part of their expanded escape, they’d routed through the planet on their way out. Where Enlil had a jewel-like quality with its deep blues and greens, Chamak’s softer, paler hue gave off a mossier edge where the light refracted around its atmosphere. Cloud-cover on the surface gleamed with gold hints from the dual lights of Aschere and Lokabrenna, both now close enough to blaze bright in the Nemina’s forward windows. The glass’ auto-tone had already turned them into dimmer, purple-ish blots.
“So…” Karin switched her attention from the forward windows to the glowing route on the navigation dashboard in front of her, tapping the end of her finger against the armrest as she read through the route changes she’d just programmed. “Can I guess that you haven’t mentioned our detour to Reeve just yet?”
“I like to keep him guessing,” Nomiki replied, standing in what was fast becoming her usual spot behind the pilot’s seat. The chair bobbed as she leaned forward, bringing her head closer to the screen, her hair tickling Karin’s neck. “It’ll be fine.”
Somehow, Karin doubted the Fallon military would consider it ‘fine.’ Part of Nomiki’s investigation had turned up a branch of Seirlin Biocorp on Korikishiko, one of Chamak’s moons. She hadn’t had a chance to pay it a visit during her last time in the area—the Shadow attack had put a halt to that plan—but, now that she had a spacecraft piloted by her sister, she’d decided that they could have a small detour before everyone became entrenched in the military base.
Karin paused her finger-tapping, staring at the route. She really wanted to know what Seirlin had been up to. “Okay, here goes.”
Her card entered the reader with a jerk, and a second later, it had recorded her thumbprint.
The bridge gave a slight pull to the right as the Nemina made the correction, the horizon sliding away from the two suns toward the night-side of Chamak, where Korikishiko hung in the distance.
Within a minute, their comms alert chimed. Karin slapped at it.
Reeve’s face appeared on the dashboard, his eyes squinted in suspicion. “Where are you going?”
By the look of his bare shoulders and the wet muss of his hair, they must have interrupted his sani-shower. Movement behind him gave her a glimpse of Marc leaning against a panel in the background, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Just a quick detour,” Nomiki said, her voice smooth and direct. “Won’t take more than an hour.”
“We’re supposed to go to base.”
“We are going to base. Nostrum base.”
“Nos—” He appeared to choke down his next words, voice rising in pitch. “On Korikishiko? Seriously?”
“Yeah, you’re welcome to join. We just want to get some records before we’re grounded on Chamak. You know how these things are.”
“Nomiki, you can’t do this. We have orders. You know this—”
“Correction: you can’t do this. Orders are for enlisted people. I’m just a contractor.”
Huh. Somehow, that argument didn’t seem quite right. Glancing to the side, she caught Soo-jin watching Nomiki with a skeptical, squinted expression.
“You’re welcome to come with us,” Nomiki continued, parting her lips in a smile. “In fact, I’d love to have you along.”
“What the hell? No, Nomiki, you can’t—”
Leaning forward, Nomiki pressed her finger to the transmission switch. Reeve’s words cut off in a crackle of static. The bridge grew quiet.
Ahead of them, the Nemina had straightened its trajectory. Korikishiko lit up their screens with a quarter-face of sunlight. Even from here, the camera zoom could pick out the glitter of its main city.
A notification popped up in the corner a minute later. Karin brought it up, skimmed its text, and dismissed it.
“He’s corrected to follow us.”
Nomiki gave the screen a grin and made a gesture toward it. “See? Knew he’d come around.”
“I’m not sure come around is the correct term for that,” Soo-jin commented from the sensor desk. “Don’t they have to be in agreement with us to have come around?”
“Probably,” Nomiki said. “You guys getting anything?”
Since they’d decided on this plan after the last relay, they’d had to wait until they’d hit the planet networks before they could start pulling data.
“Yeah, starting to pull things,” Soo-jin said, squinting at her screen. “Looks like standard gene-mod bunk. Cookie?”
“Same here.” Cookie had set up in the navigation chair again, only two computers balanced on the desk this time. “Give us like… ten, maybe twenty minutes?”
“Coolio. I’m going to go sharpen my knives. See you around.”
Korikishiko, tidal-locked into a wide orbit around Chamak, held a thin atmosphere that had been artificially extended through some rudimentary terraforming. Although not as pretty to look at from space, its dented surface had brindled patches of silver and rust rising and falling into its gentle curve, and the sky took on a purple-ish gleam as the Nemina began her descent.
Unless that was the windows’ auto-tone at work again. Hard to tell with the sun in her eyes and the controls shaking in her hands.
Karin slapped at the entry notifications as they popped up, grumbling under her breath as turbulence made the bridge shudder around her. Reeve had called back twice. After the second, Nomiki had vanished into the back of the ship, a netlink in her hand, and Karin had heard her speaking in low tones. She’d returned a few minutes later. Reeve stopped calling.
Nomiki hadn’t said anything, but, by the lack of Fallon fighter-jets coming to escort them to where they were supposed to be going—she’d kept a close eye on the nearest cruiser—she assumed they’d come to some kind of agreement.
They landed in a street-side parking lot in the north-east of Korikishiko’s largest city, Ellora, close to the moon’s slow-moving terminator. The sky above took on a deep purple-ish tint, as if someone had inserted a lens between her and the stars, but a mix of blue and orange remained visible toward the horizon on the east. Korikishiko may have been tidal-locked with Chamak, but it did experience sunrise and sunset. They just took a month to cycle.
Lokabrenna shone closest, which explained the blue. Aschere, much bigger and with a more Sol-standard spectrum, held the other position. If she recalled correctly, Tala, Fallon’s other planet, currently orbited on Aschere’s side.
Some believed that Lokabrenna brought mischief.
“Hey
, Rin, help me with this? Strap’s twisted.”
Nomiki turned her shoulder to her, where the Nemina’s auxiliary lights illuminated her back, and Karin hesitated as she took in the modified gun harness that threaded across her back. It hadn’t been that long, relatively, that they’d been separated—only two months—but the pet name made a line of tension shiver through her back as she remembered what dream-Nomiki had said to her before.
They’re taking our memories, Rin.
They were. Had been, before they’d left. Images of their final days at the compound flashed through her—the empty halls, the way everyone seemed to be in a rush, distracted, the exhausted worry she’d seen on some of the doctors’ faces… Looking back on it now, it felt as though everything had been coming to an end, anyway.
If they hadn’t escaped…
“Rin?”
She popped out of her thoughts. Nomiki was looking back at her over her shoulder, her brows starting to come down in a frown. By the sharpness in her eye, Karin suspected she’d read more into her expression.
“Hold still,” she said, reaching for the strap. Running her thumbs under the harness, she found the twisted part under Nomiki’s armpit and smoothed it out. Something hard bumped her fingers toward her sister’s body, and she frowned. “Are you wearing armor?”
“Partial.” Nomiki flashed her a smile. “You like it?”
Karin’s frown deepened. “I thought we were only going to ask questions?”
“Yeah, well, can’t be too careful.” Nomiki double-checked the strap, then patted her arm. “Thanks, sis.”
Then she walked away, effectively cutting the conversation.
Karin narrowed her eyes after her, watching her go. Farther on, Marc and Reeve approached, the latter walking much faster despite being a good ten centimeters shorter. Even from this distance, she could make out the grim downturn of his mouth and the stony set of his eyes.
The Nemina’s ramp hissed as it retracted. Soo-jin stood next to it, and as the auxiliary lights shut off, the single red standby lamp illuminated her from behind, bumping over her dreads and tinting the shoulders of her shirt. With the ripped skinny-jeans, dark lipstick, and a kind of industrial, coarse-weave mesh shirt overtop her usual black tank, she’d shifted from engineer-practical to someone who could have fit in one of Nova Earth’s edgier subcultures. Catching Karin’s gaze, she tilted her head up, then toward Nomiki, putting an unvoiced question between them.
