by K. Gorman
Well, fuck, guess she wanted that conversation to end.
Karin didn’t blame her for that. From what Soo-jin had shared of her family, they were part of a cult of ethno-purists focused specifically on the Korean geographical and cultural sphere. Though she hadn’t been a complete isolate, considering her family’s system-spanning scrounge business, some of the crazier aspects of the cult had begun to infringe upon her as she’d grown older—specifically about how and when she had sex, with whom she did it, and whether or not there was a marriage bond in place when it happened.
She still kept contact with them, but she’d definitely flipped the whole ethno-purity thing the bird and fucked off about as far away from Nova Earth as she could get while still remaining in the system.
They were also, however, the reason Nomiki and the rest of the Nemina’s crew had managed to get by Alliance security and descend down to Nova Earth in the first place. Even though it had proven useless in the end due to the planet’s surrender to Fallon forces, Soo-jin’s family had provided the freighter that had carried the Nemina past the Novan blockade and down to the surface where the scout’s built-in ident hacks had accomplished the rest. And they’d done it on the promise that Karin would heal their Lost.
It was quite a promise to make, considering she had been an Alliance prisoner when that deal had been made, but Soo-jin had convinced them to take it.
Which left her feeling a bit uncomfortable, especially since they had then refused the specialized glasses that the Novan production line was now pumping out. The glasses, lined with an electro-luminescent array on their inside, used some complicated biofeedback to react to the Shadow within a Lost and drive it out, effectively curing the person—which rendered her involvement unnecessary.
Their rejecting the offer of the glasses, which would have been much more efficient for all involved, and would have given them a leg-up on the rest of the system since they were reuseable, alluded to ulterior motives.
She suspected they wanted to see Soo-jin in-person. And she also suspected that their intents weren’t completely along the wholesome lines of seeing their estranged daughter again and having a heartwarming reunion.
After about a minute, the scream of the saw broke off. Soo-jin flicked a switch, and a series of clicks came as the anchor-points popped off the door. With the ringing in Karin’s ears, it sounded more like someone dropping a bunch of bottle caps on the ground than a series of high-tech stabilizers releasing their grip.
Soo-jin grunted, adjusted her grip, and hefted the saw higher, her face turning to a part of the door near the top right. “Fuck me, should’ve brought a stool.”
But, before anyone could offer to help, she lunged with the device, clunked the blade in place between door and jamb, and clicked the stabilizers on again. The blade screamed to life once more, and the metal sparked. A hot, burning smell filled the air, mingling with the dampness of Pomona’s off-ocean breeze and the slight pollution that hung in the mid-level atmosphere.
It took another five minutes, and three more saw points biting through the metal, before the entire door shifted. The saw let off a high-pitched shriek, and Soo-jin jerked it away, anchor points and all, as the entire door gave a visible shift.
Then, it fell forward.
Soo-jin scrambled out of the way as its surface tilted. It hit the floor with a resounding crash that shook through Karin’s feet and into her bones. She also jumped back, adrenaline spiking her blood like a shock of electricity. Standing almost directly in front of its path, she had a clear view of the dim corridor inside. A spot in the darkness inside drew her eye. Her attention dragged inside. The smell of must came to her, along with an old, dry scent that she had trouble identifying. Something stiffened in her gut as she stared, the world seeming to shut down and narrow on that one point.
Soo-jin lifted the visor of her face guard. “Well, that was a bit more dramatic than I’d planned for.”
Nomiki stepped forward. “That was pretty badass. You should be proud of yourself.”
“What can I say? Can’t let you guys have all the fun.” Soo-jin flashed a grin as she pulled the faceguard off the rest of the way and bent to replace the saw into her bag, turning its silicon-lined blade-guard over its edge to protect it.
Karin stepped forward, hands extending to help. “I can carry that for a bit, if you like—”
A series of beeps and whirs interrupted her from inside the door, followed by a distinct click and whir of mechanical parts. Her head snapped to the entrance just in time to see a flash of metal in the dim light. Two glowing red dots pulsed to life, and a dim figure unfolded itself from the wall just inside, standing at chest-height.
Her blood jumped in her veins as the dots jerked forward—toward her.
A sentinel.
A clunk sounded beyond the door. In the next second, it was sprinting for her.
Nomiki shoved her aside and met it with a screech of metal. She yelled, threw it off her, unsheathed her blades in a hopping step as they both rebounded, and followed it with a savage kick. The blow slammed the sentinel against the edge of the doorframe, less than a meter from Soo-jin, who jumped back with a yelp that was lost in the crash. A series of clicks and whines sounded as the sentinel’s AI used its magnetic grips and anti-grav stabilizers to save itself from a complete fall, the movement transforming it into something less bipedal and more alien as its ‘arm’ joints hinged backward to attach onto the wall.
Karin stared. Nomiki’s shove had put her closer to the wall than she’d liked, but it gave her an excellent view of the sentinel. Pomona’s disc-filtered light made a hazy sheen on the thing’s headpiece. Its metal limbs gleamed, their spindly structure and exoskeleton reminding her of a centipede as it raised itself. The nearest one lifted and reattached with a clunk, making the wall beside her reverberate with the force.
She sucked in a breath, snatching her arms back.
Big mistake.
Its head swiveled at the motion. Two glowing sensors locked onto her.
With a jolt, she realized that she’d become the closest target.
But, before she could even think, Nomiki was there, shoving her back—again—and the sentinel had a lot more to worry about. Laser-edged blades shrieked. The arm that had attached to the wall fell with a clatter, severed by a blow that left a single deep, smoking cut in the wall. A whine similar to a blaster sounded from the sentinel’s chassis, but another blade-strike ended that in a wail of screeching metal. Nomiki kicked the sentinel to the other side of the door hard enough to dent its fortified backplate.
Then, she stabbed down, rent the thing’s breastplate apart, and drove the tip of her blade into the spill of shock liquid and stabilizing gel that spurted out, straight through the power cell close to the bottom of its abdomen. Liquid hissed. Inside, the component lights flickered, and parts of the sentinel shivered, almost like an animal experiencing a small death throe.
It went limp.
Nomiki didn’t move. She waited, watching it. Liquid hissed where the laser-edges of her blades touched the gel. After a few seconds, she pulled her blade out and stepped back, cocking her head to the side to give the gutted sentinel a more-thorough examine.
“Well, that was fun. What do you think, Areen Type 3 Sentinel?”
The last bit, she directed to Marc, the only other person in the group with combat experience he actually remembered—Jon, despite his genetically-engineered badassery and military tattoos, was having the same memory issues that plagued both herself and Nomiki, needing to re-learn much of what his instincts told him.
Marc, who had frozen with his hand halfway to the thigh holster that carried his blaster, cleared his throat and assumed a more-normal stance, squinting down at the remains of the robot with a shuttered look Karin knew well. The inner gel slowly oozed out of its cut-open center, separate sublayers of the liquid sliding onto the deck with different levels of viscosity, gleaming wetly in the light. They reminded her of the beached jellyfish she�
��d seen once on Enlil, with the sun already cooking a skim onto its dead body. A dart of leaked lubrication oil slipped down, catching the light in a tiny, shimmering ribbon.
“Areen, yes,” he said. “But not quite T-3. Looks more like a between-model.” He paused, looking up. “A bit lacking from what I would have expected with this company.”
“Considering they dropped CO-83 shield drones on us the second we set foot in their Kirikishiko facility? Yeah, I agree.” Wiping her blade with a cloth she’d pulled out of her pocket, Nomiki turned her attention toward the inside. “So, anyone else want to go first?”
“Nah,” Soo-jin said, staring at the remains of the downed sentinel for a few seconds before she bent to continue storing her faceguard and saw. “We’re good. You can go first.”
Chapter Two
Stepping from the outside disc-light into the dark corridor inside felt like a slap to Karin’s senses. The dimness closed over her like a shroud, and the high angle of the ceiling made the walls appear to reach behind her back and curb her escape—as if she’d wandered into an elaborate live animal trap. The musty scent that she’d noticed before muddied the air, along with that old, dry smell from earlier. It struck at a cold feeling inside her that rose from the middle of her stomach like chips of ice. Her fingers curled into clenched fists.
This time, the smell was almost recognizable. Like a memory slowly sharpening into focus.
By the way it made her insides slowly turn, she doubted it was a nice memory.
Gods. I should have stayed on the ship.
Her eyes adjusted. The inside was dim, but not dark. A set of high, narrow windows allowed a partial light through their frosted glass, landing a muddled haze onto the small reception area to her right. Dark chairs lined the front and side walls, looking like hunched, hibernating insects with the arched metal that made their leg and arm structures. A solid-cut white desk sat near the back like an iceberg.
Flashlights clicked on around her as the group spread into the space, catching a gleam from the angled edge of the desk and flashing over the bulbous, algae-encrusted tank of a water machine next to it. The scattered brown leaves of a very dead potted ficus darkened the corner of the room. Along the left wall, a shallow nook—no more than a simple square cut into the wall and affixed with a mounted charging unit—told where the sentinel had been resting.
A screened emblem on the back wall caught her attention. Her fists clenched as Marc’s flashlight beam hit the lower edge of the design and followed it up, revealing the self-cannibalizing snakehead of the Eurynome Project.
For a few seconds, she found it hard to breathe. Cold clamped down on her ribs, and she caught a brief, ugly image of black ink on her wrist. Her feet rooted to the spot, muscles frozen like she was coming out of cryo. Memories batted at her, dull and jarring, like the slosh and clunk of boat buoys tossing against the dock in a storm. Unhappy memories. Children in a field. The smell of the clinic, and the trembling weakness that came after treatment. Friends disappearing over the years, one after the other.
Project Eurynome had taken her childhood. Hells, it had very nearly taken her life. And here she was, coming back to it, dredging up all the shit her brain had blocked out over the years.
But… the audacity of it stunned and enraged her. Before, she’d only seen the Ouroboros snake and egg imagery of the Eurynome Project either tattooed onto the underside of someone’s wrist or in the corner of paperwork belonging to the Project—as if Seirlin had wanted to distance itself from its weird, mad-science child program.
Seeing it here, not only stamped broadly onto the backdrop of the reception desk in a logo that had to be at least two meters high, but also intermingling with the swan wings of Seirlin’s usual branding?
It made her physically sick.
Cerebrally, she’d known just how interconnected they were. They had funded it, for saints’ sakes, not only providing the staffing and security but also allowing the program directors, the Corringham brothers, to pick from Seirlin’s best and brightest scientists. It had not been the simple rogue, offshoot independent the company had been claiming ever since she and Nomiki had broken into their Kirikishiko facility.
Hells, even if it somehow, by some loop of fate, had been independent, a project didn’t run for the better part of a century without oversight. It didn’t create children and fuck around with them without money, and money didn’t come without approval. It didn’t then create successful people like Lenora Pliska in the Sirius system without quite a bit more approval.
She knew all that. But seeing it here, in such broad, proud, unapologetic terms, gave rise to all the old anger that she had spent seven years repressing and the past three months embracing.
They’ll probably say this was an independent, too. That the Eurynome staff contracted the logo design without permission of Seirlin.
Her jaw muscles rippled, teeth grinding together. A quiet fury bubbled up in her veins, and it was all she could do to not start shaking.
It was just more bullshit. Exactly what they’d come to expect from these fuckers. And here they were, forced to take to the field and sort through the shit themselves.
She forced her gaze away from the logo—an impressive feat, considering its size—and tracked Nomiki and Cookie as they briefly inspected a security sensor that appeared to be defunct, then made a beeline for the reception desk.
“It’s been cleaned. Nothing here, just jacks and a few ports.” Cookie skimmed its surface, then bent down to look underneath, turning the flashlight in his hand to point at something below. The glow caught his face in an odd way, clashing with the light from the entrance doorway and putting a strange glare on his skin that looked false. “Yeah, just more empty ports down here and a broken power cable.”
“Let’s search farther in. Maybe they missed something.” Nomiki was already walking back, leading the way down the hall.
Missed something? In the dark, Karin’s lip curled. That was doubtful. Seirlin had operated this project for more than seventy years—they knew how to clean their tracks.
She swallowed as the others turned to follow, their lights going with them. As she closed her eyes, her power experienced a conflict between the lights going away from her and the natural light that extended from the doorway behind her—a strange feeling, like she was caught between two places, or tugged in two directions. She wanted to go back, to have the filtered sunlight of the disc touch her skin again as if she could drink it up, to get away from the dark.
A tingling began in her gut, then noticeably strengthened, as if someone had opened the tap on a hose. A second energy underlapped the light power along her bones, buzzing like electrical noise. As it spread, it deepened, shivering through her flesh and marrow like the reverberation of a whistle.
She snapped her eyes open, sucked in a shuddering breath, and shoved it back. She forced her light power on top, making it flow through her skin in a burst much stronger and more sudden than usual, and allowed it to illuminate the smooth white walls of the hallway.
Ever since she’d come back from the Shift Event, that weird dimension-split she’d done a week ago, her powers had felt a bit off—as if there were another layer trying to sneak its way into her skin. At first, she’d tried to tell herself that it was a simple side-effect from the weird shit she’d pulled, or some sort of ghost-reaction from that dimensional split, as if the huge display of power she’d pulled there had echoes that encroached upon this layer of reality.
But, deep in her gut, she knew that was bullshit.
Something had changed inside her that day, like a click deep down in her psyche, and she didn’t think it was going to change back.
In fact, it felt like it was still changing—as if it hadn’t quite finished yet.
And that scared her.
As the tingling subsided, the urge to run increased.
I keep swearing I’ll never leave the side of the Nemina’s dashboard again, and yet, here I am.
Besid
es, she couldn’t leave. They’d only just got here, and she’d be a wuss if she ran at the sight of the logo.
And Reeve was currently piloting the Nemina elsewhere as a diversion. She literally couldn’t get back on it.
With a jolt, she realized that she wasn’t alone—while Nomiki, Cookie, and Jon had gone ahead, both Marc and Soo-jin had hung back to wait for her. And neither made even the slightest attempt to hide it. Marc, of course, was close by her side, and she’d both known and expected that. Given her propensity to pop off into alternate dimensions or become a target for danger, his assumed stance as her personal safeguard was natural, and definitely welcomed. But it was a surprise to see Soo-jin still there. She stood to the left, slightly removed, her equipment bag hanging from one shoulder, pointing her flashlight into the far corners of the room.
Soo-jin nodded to a spot on one of the walls when she noticed Karin’s attention. “Look, you see that? They moved out in a hurry.”
She gave herself a shake and squinted down. Barely detectable even in the beam of the flashlight, the indentation in the wall was nearly two and a half meters long and folded so subtly against the rest of the white pre-fab that at first, she didn’t see it.
When she did, her eyebrows rose. “Holy, that’s big.”
“Yep. Heavy machinery, quick drop. I’m guessing they flew the stuff out of here.”
Karin scrunched her eyes narrower, examining the mark. “Flew, not floated?”
While it was certainly possible to fly things out—the place did have an outdoor-accessible front, after all—the logistics of that skewed with her pilot’s knowledge. For one, it required much more energy, efficiency, and manpower to pull it off. Just the idea of sitting in atmo with one of the hover-capable vehicles likely for such a drop, trying to line her up to the outdoor grating and keep her steady enough that they could load her like that, made her clench up. In space, it would be fine, but this was on planet. They were only ten floors up—the breeze could be unpredictable, and even in a city as organized and efficient as Pomona with regards to moving things…
