The Eurynome Code: The Complete Series: A Space Opera Box Set

by K. Gorman

  “We might be on our own,” Nomiki said. “Reeve’s heading for another scout to fly. If he’s able, he and the other scouts will rendezvous with us, but mostly, they’re heading out to provide a distraction while we head for land.”

  “Er… okay.”

  “We’re onto Plan D now, by the way,” Nomiki added.

  “Great.” Soo-jin leveled a stare across the bridge. “What does that stand for? Plan ‘if we all get dicked’?”

  “I believe that’s Plan F,” Karin commented. She frowned, narrowing her eyes as she ran over Nomiki’s words. “This sounds… suicidal.”

  “Not if the corvettes are already engaged,” Nomiki said. “We’ll be like a nest of tiny flies bursting out.”

  “I’m pretty sure Centauri has a large enough swatter for us. They have one hundred ships on the field.” The number had grown since they’d left the bridge, presumably as the Centauri launched the smaller fighter-class vessels that now appeared in the field map. “And they’re hugely advanced.”

  “Don’t be such a pessimist,” Nomiki chided.

  Karin gave her sister a flat stare. Nomiki was smiling.

  “Is there something you know that I don’t?”

  “Oh, plenty of somethings. You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “Something that improves our chances of not getting shot down before we hit Earth?”

  “Yes.”

  Karin waited. When Nomiki didn’t expand, she ticked her tongue against the top of her mouth. “Care to share with the class?”

  Nomiki made a gesture to the screen in front of her. “The last order came in. Manila’s going to drop us while she breaks atmo on Earth.”

  She stared at her sister in disbelief. “That sounds even more suicidal.”

  “No, that sounds awesome.”

  Across the room, Soo-jin beamed a wide grin over. The screen in front of her flickered, and Karin caught sight of what looked like a mirrored version of Nomiki’s dashboard—which meant she’d just read the same orders as Nomiki had.

  “We’re all going to die in a fiery chaos,” she told them.

  “No, it’s cool. They’ve run the specs. It’ll be intense, but she can handle it.” Nomiki gave the Nemina’s dashboard an affectionate pat.

  “Really?” Karin said, unable to contain the skepticism that took over her tone. “They remember how old this ship is, don’t they? A normal atmosphere run, I could see, but this is going to be…” She trailed off, frowning at the other two. Neither of them were paying attention to her.

  Why would they? She was only the pilot.

  “Sol’s fucking child,” she muttered. Then, her swearing redoubled as caught sight of three figures passing under the Nemina’s frontal cameras. “Clio’s hells, what the fuck are they doing here?”

  Dr. Takahashi, Dr. Tasuhada, and Commander Baik, now visible on the Nemina’s side cameras, all moved toward her ramp, two hovercrates trailing after them. The doctors, she could understand—if she were going to Earth to visit the compound, it made sense to have them with her—but Baik?

  She resisted the urge to smack the ‘ramp closed’ button. Barely.

  It wouldn’t close in time, anyway.

  This time, the grin dropped from Nomiki’s face. Her lip curled, reading a new message that popped up on her feed.

  “Baik’s liaising. Probably, they wanted to unload him. He was being annoying. He could, I suppose, be an asset. I’ll never say no to having another fighter…” Nomiki made a face, as if she likely would have said no to Baik joining them, fighter or not, then continued on. “The other two are for—ah, I guess that makes sense. Recon. Field research.” She lifted her gaze to meet Karin’s stare. “Your ship lacked science officers, it would seem.”

  “I thought we could just disassemble the Cradle and bring it back up,” she grumbled. “We are scroungers.”

  “Maybe we still can,” Nomiki said. “If you’re going to hook up with some random chick in a hive mind experiment, I’d rather you did it in the Manila’s advanced clinics rather than some concrete hovel on Earth.”

  Remembering Tia’s admission about the immovability of her Cradle, several doubts crept up in her mind about the feasibility of that plan.

  Yeah, it’s probably good the doctors are tagging along. Baik, however, can go fuck a thruster.

  They already had soldier people. A whole squad of three, and two of them super soldiers. Baik was no replacement for Lenora.

  Granted, he was better than Marc, what with his genetic modifications and augments and Marc’s old injury. He’d even bested Marc in a fight before.

  Hells. Nomiki was right.

  That didn’t mean she had to be happy about it, though.

  From behind them came the telltale sounds of feet tramping up her ramp. The Manila gave another shake. This time, on Karin’s Manila-linked screen, a flare of red snapped up.

  “Centauri has started firing,” Nomiki commented.

  “Fantastic.” She slapped the button to close the ramp, not caring if Baik and the two doctors had finished entering the ship, then flicked another switch to bring up her navigation desk. Her usual map appeared on the screen, though it took her a second to realign herself with the Sol system.

  Red splashed the screen again—so much that it drenched the small bridge in its glow. Another rumble, stronger and more long-lasting than the last, shook the floor beneath the Nemina. A second later, the deck’s gravity tipped to the side like a sailboat heeling with the wind.

  The Manila was on the move.

  Karin flicked the internal comms panel on, strapped herself in, and began to plan the maneuver.

  “Okay, party people. Strap everything down and find a crash seat. We’re about to do a bunch of fifty-G bullshit.”

  Chapter Nine

  Okay, fifty-G bullshit had been an exaggeration—Nemina’s grav generators would push that down closer to ten—but she hoped the number would impress upon both the doctors and Baik that they needed to get their shit together.

  Unfortunately, it worked. A few minutes later, Baik poked his head into the bridge.

  Karin froze, an intense mix of annoyance and dislike crawling through her nerves.

  Fuck.

  Slowly, and with great reluctance, she forced her fingers to keep programming her spin-out variables.

  He’d changed out of his command uniform, donning the type of gray-based camo she remembered him in on Nova—just where the hell did he think they were going? Siberia?—but it did absolutely nothing to detract from his features. If anything, he looked even more picture-perfect, the glow of the holoscreen hitting the planes of his face just so. And his eyes had a darkness that accentuated them, as if he had either lucked out in the beauty genetics lottery or had a high level of expertise applying guyliner.

  She suspected the former. Except, given his status as a literal Novan prince, she doubted it had been much of a ‘lottery’ situation. Genetic and bodily modification, she’d learned, were well accepted within the upper discs of Novan cities—and well within their pocketbooks.

  It pissed her off.

  She wanted to slap him.

  At least Marc had filled the other spot next to her and, with Soo-jin and Nomiki in the others, the only seats left were the two crash seats. Jon had claimed one of them, looking a bit like a slab of muscle with all the safety belts on. It would be a tight fit for whoever chose to take the one next to him.

  Baik glanced to him. Jon met his look in the flat, impassive way he had. After a few seconds’ impassive stare, Baik’s gaze slid to the screen beyond the navigator’s chair where Nomiki was keeping track of the feeds.

  Had it had been anybody but her sister there, she suspected he would have ordered them out of it and taken it for himself. As it was, she sat there. And her blades happened to be strapped to her legs within easy reach.

  He kept a respectful distance.

  She’d already kebabbed him once, when they first met.

  “Any news
?” he asked.

  Behind him, she caught the slip of a smile that crossed Jon’s face.

  Seemed she wasn’t the only one enjoying Baik’s discomfort.

  Her sister flicked a forefinger off the dash. “Manila’s called for back-up. They got the drone back through.”

  “That’ll be twelve hours minimum, though,” Marc put in on Karin’s other side. “Closest ships are circling Nova.”

  “We’ll all be dead in the next ten minutes, anyway,” Karin put in, her fingers flying over the dashboard console, feverish, re-checking her numbers. “This plan is insane. This is absolutely insane.”

  “Is that why you’re hard-pressed to keep that grin off your face?” Nomiki looked over, her tone drawn out in a toying fashion, a small, knowing smile on her lips. “Come, sister, you’re enjoying this. Admit it.”

  Karin met her sister’s gaze. The Nemina’s engines had come fully online, hot and ready to go, and a jittery sensation ran through her nerves—little thrills of excitement that fluttered up from her stomach, taut and tense, but much more enjoyable than the types of flutters her stomach had been feeling earlier in the cycle. Before now, she’d never really considered the meaning of the phrase ‘at the edge of one’s seat,’ but here she was, stiff and ready, hands veritably poised over the controls, waiting for the floor to, quite literally, drop out from under her.

  And Nomiki was right. Despite all the danger, she was enjoying this.

  They were literally pelting toward Earth—a near forty-degree angle into its gravity well, where one wrong move could lead to imminent death by fiery chaos—and she was having trouble hiding the grin that threatened to stretch across her face.

  “Okay,” she said, finally letting it out. “You got me there.”

  Nomiki reached over and patted her shoulder. “My baby sister’s growing up! I’m so proud.”

  Karin made a quick glance Baik’s way, and said carefully, “I’m one year younger than you.”

  “One year and twenty days.” She flashed Karin a grin. “And in case you’re wondering—this feeling you’re getting? It’s the same thing I feel when I’m about to lay down some whoop-ass.”

  From across the room, Soo-jin glanced over. “Is ‘whoop-ass’ Earth slang for serial murder?”

  “No, just regular murder,” Marc said. “It’s holy whoop-ass for serial.”

  “Unholy whoop-ass,” Karin lied, and Nomiki gave her a grin that quickly retreated as the floor’s G-forces doubled, making them all hold their breath and brace against their seats as their soft tissues attempted to flatten downward.

  After a palpable click, either from the Nemina’s onboard grav regulator or the Manila’s, the pressure let off.

  On screen, the Manila corrected its course thirty-five degrees.

  The plan, as she understood it, was not to perform a complete re-entry, but rather to skim in deep enough to cause a shitload of interference and drop the entire scout and fighter fleet from the aft three hangars at once. The Manila’s shields would protect them from re-entry burn for the first few seconds. After they left, they’d be on their own to figure their shit out.

  Hitting that atmosphere would be like smacking into sheet rock.

  Fortunately, the Nemina’s shields had been upgraded during her stint on Nova Kolkata’s base. That wouldn’t stop them from feeling like their brains were trying to leave through their nose during the spin-out hit, but it would stop them from crashing apart. She had run the numbers. The shield would protect them from impact and most of the heat. The Nemina’s klemptas paneling would deal with the rest that came through.

  After about ten seconds of screaming and near-death experiences, the friction and anti-spin sequences she had just set would have slowed them enough for her to regain control. If not, she’d actually set three minutes of them.

  The Manila’s linked feed showed a regular stream of Centauri fire impacting its aft and middle. After their initial assault, which had focused on the cruiser’s front where the bridge was located, the corvettes had been forced into an almost useless game of tag-along as the Manila charged for Earth. Even with the dampeners, the thrum of the Manila’s burst engines was palpable around them.

  Another thrill of excitement sent a zing of energy through her abdomen. She sucked in a slow breath, the jitters running through her, then re-focused on the commands in front of her.

  “Everything strapped down back there?” she asked Marc, then quickly amended it. “Everybody strapped down?”

  They been taking a laissez-faire approach to flying lately, which meant that only half of the things that should have been strapped down had been. Marc and Soo-jin were on the bridge now, but there had been a lot of swearing coming from the back half of the ship several minutes ago, and her mind kept slipping back to their new passengers. Baik, with his military experience, was likely just fine, but she doubted either of the two doctors had been anywhere near the kind of maneuver they were about to do.

  “I can only claim responsibility for inanimate objects,” he said.

  Baik took the hint. Unfortunately, he took it by buckling himself into the crash seat next to Jon as opposed to the ones in the rear of the craft out of her sight.

  When she glanced back, he looked model-perfect in his military camo and Novan-enhanced features.

  Briefly, she contemplated the ejection seats they used to have in aircraft—the type that launched someone straight out like a shot. Surely, they could work that tech into crash seats, could they not?

  Sol, he’s only been here a minute, and I’m already fantasizing about flinging him into space.

  “Any chance they can get that new Alliance transporter technology to, I don’t know, transport all of the Centauri fleet closer to Pluto?”

  Baik met her gaze with a frown. “What’s Pluto?”

  Soo-jin gave a loud snort. “And that’s why Karin’s piloting this one.”

  “Yes, I guess that top Novan education isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” Nomiki gave Baik a sidelong stare—the first time she’d looked at him since he’d entered—then returned her gaze to the feeds. “Pluto is the name of the most famous dwarf planet of the system. They translated it to Hades in the Alliance Standard Curriculum.”

  “I was wondering about that,” Karin said.

  Several of the flight manuals she had read mentioned Hades in correlation to Earth. Through her knowledge of mythology, she’d put two and two together—Hades was, after all, the Greek variant of Pluto—but she hadn’t been sure. These types of irregularities had been trouble for her and Nomiki, who had learned the system standard language through outdated materials while living on Earth.

  Hells, they might be seeing some of those materials soon. As soon as they managed to lose themselves on Earth, the compound was their first stop.

  On the screen, the slow curve of Earth’s atmosphere was drawing closer and closer.

  Another shivery feeling fluttered through her stomach.

  Before she could address it, a comms link popped up on her screen.

  Reeve.

  She slapped the notification to answer it. “Yes?”

  “Are you ready?

  “Yes.”

  “Good. One minute.”

  The link disconnected. In its place, a timer began to count down.

  The sight of it gave her heart a little jolt.

  Suns.

  She flicked the Nemina’s internal comms again. “Everyone, make sure you’re strapped down tight and that nothing heavy or sharp is going to fall on you. Now!”

  Then, making sure her own belts were tight—and ignoring the jittery shake in her hands—she tugged the Nemina’s manual controls from under the desk.

  They jerked into her lap with a heady crack that made her look down in alarm.

  Okay, someone must have really oiled these suckers. She locked them in place and rolled her shoulders, turning her entire attention to the screen.

  The Nemina hummed to life under her grip with a vibration
so deep, she felt it straight through her core. She got an image of the entire ship under her control, each cycle and vibration as close to her as the blood beneath her skin.

  On screen, the curve of Earth’s atmosphere loomed in front of the Manila.

  Then, contact.

  The floor heaved and bucked, yawning up like an ocean wave before slamming down with a jerk that pressed her hips hard into the belt of her safety harness. Cracks and groans echoed around the hangar, loud enough to come through the Nemina’s insulated double-hulls. From somewhere in the back came the sound of something rolling off a table and clunking to the floor.

  Marc let out a low groan. “Fuuuuck. That’s the cannelloni I bought.”

  “Cannelloni?” Karin asked.

  “Yeah. Pieces of wrapped pasta with stuff inside. Thought you might like them.” He eyed the timer. “You think I have time to—”

  “No,” she said immediately. “You’re not risking yourself for pasta.”

  Another shudder wracked through the Manila, heaving them up as if to prove a point. Her stomach flipped as it threw them back down.

  The timer on the screen hit thirty seconds.

  She gritted her teeth as they fell into silence. She needed to focus now. Her heart thudded, painfully loud in her ears. Lights and indicators lit up the main screen, tracking the ship’s journey through Earth’s atmosphere—or, rather, the journey it was not making. She couldn’t imagine how it must look from the outside, belly-flopping into Earth like some kind of military space whale. All three corvettes had jerked away, halting their tumble with a series of reverse thrusts so strong, they even flashed on the Nemina’s personal screen—a necessity, given their proximity to Earth and its gravitational pull.

  They danced above the Manila for the moment, as if awaiting orders.

  She remembered to breathe, sucking in a breath between her teeth that sounded more like the rattle of a snake.

  Twenty seconds.

  Nomiki’s face was a smooth, implacable stone, the glow of the screen sliding off its smooth planes. Beyond her, Jon showed some concern while Baik looked tense. In the other corner, Soo-jin started up a quiet, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ mantra that carried in the silence. Karin reached over and squeezed Marc’s arm where he was holding the chair’s arm in a death grip, then returned her attention to the screen.