by K. Gorman
Ten seconds.
She breathed out, slow and steady, forced her shoulders to drop, and laid her fingers flat on the chair’s arm. Tension slid through her gut like an electric current.
Five seconds.
A mechanical clunk resounded through the hangar. The comms signals switched in the corner, flashing blue as they switched from internal to external feeds. The map in front of her froze, disconnected from the real-time app for a second before it jerked back to live again. The timer on her screen gave a warning beep and began to blink. She double-checked the shields.
Three.
Two.
One.
Zero.
The timer vanished, and the floor beneath them gave a jerk. Light flooded the hangar, a bright, screaming flash dampened immediately by the Nemina’s purple auto-tone windows. A rage of fire and plasma funneled below, so fast and superheated that it looked like a flow of rushing light. The other ships alongside turned into statues of light and shadow.
The floor swung out from below them, and the world around them tipped. A racing streak of plasma filled their screens. Everyone’s face took on a stark, comic-book light. She checked the shields again.
Then, the mag locks disengaged, and the Nemina dropped. The darkness of the Manila’s hangar slid away from them.
They had about three seconds to enjoy the screaming rage of the view and to marvel at the blue curve of the Manila’s shields holding off the atmosphere before they tumbled into the drop and the re-entry forces grabbed them like rocks skipping into a tornado.
The Nemina jerked so hard, it punched the wind right out of her. Sharp pain stabbed through her chest, indicating that she may have broken something—but that was all the time she had to think about it. In the next instant, they were tumbling and spinning through, her thrusters screaming as they forced the ship into the planet’s atmosphere and onto her predetermined course. Sky, stars, and ocean crashed together at the velocity of the spin. Her weight wrenched against her belt, the grav regulator buffering the centrifugal forces with the subtlety of a wind sock in a hurricane.
She squeezed her eyes shut as it felt like they wanted to leave their sockets. The Nemina’s shield warnings jabbed at her ears, flashing a red she could see through her eyelids.
Then, after a few seconds, the fire subsided. They began to even out.
She didn’t waste a second. As soon as she could, she took back control, a surge of adrenaline catching the yoke and holding it in fists made of iron. Turbulence rocked her grip like a washboard road, and they jerked to the side as a crosswind tried to take them down, but she kicked an extra thread of power from the thrusters, and they smashed through with a rattle.
Around them, the other scouts fell like comets, their blue shields making them glow against the backdrop of night.
One by one, they began to vanish.
Karin blinked. “Uh, what the fuck?”
“Oh—shit.” Nomiki lunged for something on the dashboard. “Karin, you’ve got to—”
A secondary menu popped up on the screen. Then, a notification appeared:
Camouflage engaged.
Ah. That must have been part of the upgrades the Nemina had undergone while they’d been on Chamak. Karin, wrestling with the shaking controls, gave it a flat look.
It might have been a good idea to tell the pilot about that. It wasn’t like they h—
All at once, her comms band screamed white noise, then cut off.
The map of the Manila froze on screen, along with every position of the scouts and fighters that had dropped out with them.
“And… that?”
When she didn’t get an answer, she glanced to Nomiki. Her sister had a deep frown on her face. She leaned forward, engaging the comms. After a few seconds, and several plaintive, ineffective bloops, the frown deepened.
“I have no idea.” Nomiki tapped several commands, the lines snapping up on her screen. “Manila’s not responding. Same with Reeve.”
“So…?” Karin lifted an eyebrow.
“So stay on course. We’ll get Cookie on it. Baik, you know anything about comms?”
“Only Alliance comms,” he answered.
“Good. Nemina has those, too. You can help. Karin, you have your route?”
No, not really. But the frozen map image was still up in the corner of the screen. Each of the dropped fighters and scouts had spread out in a multi-directional starburst, covering every direction except for one.
She took the hint. The Nemina’s thrusters kicked in with a vengeance, and the small craft shook hard from turbulence—but this time, the thumps and groans and rattles were familiar to her ears.
Above them, the flare of the Manila’s entry burn continued on, bright as a corona and searing the Nemina’s auto-tone windows a deep purple in response.
Below, the Earth opened up under her chassis. Huge. Nebulous. The deep gray of the ocean gave off only the slightest hint of blue. A gradient of shadow across the vista indicated late dusk, with the sun—the real sun, not Aschere or Lokabrenna, but Sol—driving a golden glow far behind her.
A mountain ridge appeared below her, and the middle of a string of islands—the Indonesian archipelago.
She settled in, drifting through a thin layer of cloud that vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and brought up a more-detailed planet-side map.
This, at least, came easy to her.
Chapter Ten
“That… does not look like Macedonia.”
Karin squinted at the map, trying to make sense of it as the warmth from the nano injection flushed her chest. She’d cracked a rib during spin-out and put deep bruises in her collarbones from where the safety harnesses had dug in. Actually, she’d managed to break something on damn near every person currently aboard the Nemina, the only exceptions being Jon and Nomiki—and possibly Baik, though she suspected his quicksave and medical patches had quietly healed him up before Soo-jin had flashed the medical scanner at him. As for non-organic breakage, the Nemina’s shields were recharging, and Cookie was still looking for a fix on the weird comms disruption.
But they’d been flying for six hours. Most of the ship had gone to sleep, anticipating a big day at the compound tomorrow.
If I can find our way to the right fucking country. She squinted at the map. Intermittent mountains and ridges of land folded it like wrinkled paper, mostly to the right, and the random scattering of towns and cities among them did not look at all familiar. She guessed the topography was similar to what they’d left—except the picture on the map looked a whole lot greener than she remembered. And wetter. It was wet in their current position, too. Rain flecked both the front and side viewing windows, turned into tiny, high-speed globules by the wind, and a low cloud occasionally flashed by. The Nemina rocked every few seconds, but the auto-pilot had her well in hand.
They’d taken a circuitous route, flying north first from where they’d dropped out near the Australasian-Melanesian border, and following their way up the trail of landmasses toward Southeast Asia and China, with the theory that the radiation levels in the north and south of China would further skew any tracking that the Centauri managed to do. The glow of the Manila’s atmospheric breach had vanished about five minutes after their drop, and the massive ship had pulled back into space.
Karin could only imagine the amount of energy the engines had needed to pull out of the gravity well. And to keep it digging in as long as it had.
A rumble of turbulence, extra strong this time, made the controls in front of her vibrate. She jerked, ready to take control back, but the autopilot handled it.
She looked back at Nomiki’s screen just in time to see her flip the map around. After that, the boxy outline of Macedonia seemed obvious.
“I feel stupid,” she said.
“Don’t. We were all raised on the Mercator Projection—north being the top, among other things. And our brains are not wired for recognizing thing when they’re upside-down.” Nomiki met her eyes. “It�
��s an evolutionary fault.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I read it in an article once.” She sniffed. “You’d think Seirlin would have fixed that for us, but I suppose we are earlier models.” She craned her neck back, twisting to gaze back over the chair. “How about you? How’s your upside-down recognition? Did they fix that for you?”
Karin hadn’t heard anyone coming up the hallway, but sure enough, Jon poked his head around the corner. His usual, neutral expression filled his face, which gave him a stony appearance, but she remembered the glint of amusement from earlier when Baik had first entered the bridge. He’d changed into a similar combat armor as Nomiki, his version larger and chunkier, and appearing more second-hand, with a couple of pieces that didn’t sit quite as well—but it seemed to work.
She wasn’t sure what agreement he’d signed with Fallon, but the empire’s tri-star arms decorated his shoulder in broad silver paint. Like Nomiki, he’d turned off the suit’s energy indicators so that the glow wouldn’t give him away.
“Upside-down recognition?” His eyebrow raised.
“The ability to recognize faces when faces are upside-down,” Nomiki explained. “Among other things. I read in an article that humans lack the ability, and I don’t think Karin and I have it, so I was wondering if Sasha fixed that for you.”
“I… haven’t noticed a difference,” he said.
“Between now and before you went under?” Karin prompted.
Unlike them, who’d been born into Project Eurynome, Jon had had a life before. He didn’t speak of it much, but he’d come into Seirlin Genomics as a person of average physical ability, wanting enhancements but having no money to pay for them. Dr. Sasha had offered a place in her own, special version of Eurynome, seeing the need to fill the Program Ares slot and give the project a speed boost with an already-grown specimen—at the same time seeing if the massive gene-changing content involved in the process could work on a normal, already-born person.
Of course, she’d neglected to tell Jon about a few of the details—such as the intensity and the mortality rate. And the fact that she’d never intended for him to leave her care and instead planned for him to be a permanent part of her project.
That’s what they assumed had happened, at least.
This was also the most she’d ever heard him speak. At least on a level she could actually hear it as opposed to the close mutterings with Nomiki he seemed to prefer. He had a smooth voice, accented in a way that reminded her of a second-language speaker from Eastern Europe, though how much his appearance was causing a bias in her judgment, she wasn’t sure. He certainly had the looks of an Eastern Bloc descendant, but all that became skewed since he had been born in the Sirius system rather than the Sol system.
The sound of feet shuffling along the corridor came to them. Cookie rounded the corner, glanced over the occupants of the bridge, then focused on Nomiki. “Comms are fine—on our end, at least. Whatever happened, it’s not us.”
“Good for a relationship, not so good for military strategy.” Nomiki tapped a finger across her suit’s bicep, her tongue coming up between her teeth as she stared at the screen, thinking.
“What can cause this?” Karin asked.
Cookie glanced to her. “A shitload of things can cause this, but I’m going to assume that Manila’s comms didn’t break and aren’t faulty, so… was there any interference? I was a little too busy holding onto my butt to notice.”
“There was,” Nomiki said. “Big screech of static, then they all disconnected.”
“Okay, so that may be a clue,” Cookie said. “Now, would that be interference by malfunction, or interference on purpose? Like with satellites or EMP? Intranet’s up, so we have ship network, obviously, so…”
Nomiki crossed her arms. “I’m pessimistic, and the timing was too perfect. Let’s assume it was on purpose.”
“We would have noticed an EMP,” Karin said.
“Centauri had a number of small field drones in orbit,” Jon said. “I saw them on the initial scans.”
Karin glanced to him. She shouldn’t be surprised. Despite his outward meathead appearance, his Eurynome program ran close to Nomiki’s. Though he lacked her sister’s experience, strategy was also his game.
“Earth also has a number of defensive wireless grids,” Nomiki said. “Or, at least, it used to.”
“Last I heard, their network was down.”
“That’s… plausible,” Nomiki ventured.
A pause fell over the bridge. When no one else offered any other insight, she let out a sigh.
“Well, this has been illuminating,” Nomiki said. “Let’s just assume everyone wants to kill us and no one wants us talking.” She nodded, then glanced up. “Cookie, you keep trying with the comms if you can. See what you can find. They’re our lifeline. Sis?”
Nomiki’s dark eyes turned her way, giving her a glance-over. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day, and you just had—”
“—treatment. Yes, I know.” She let out a noisy breath and gave the map, which still looked too green to her eyes, a dark scowl. When nothing else came to her, she stood. “All right. Wake me up if we crash.”
Chapter Eleven
“You got my message.”
Adrenaline shocked through her at Tylanus’ voice. He stood in front of her, tall and dark in the room’s shadows, his long black hair, loose and more than a little frizzy, hanging past his shoulders in a fluffy curtain. His eyes, the entirety of which were as jet black as a Shadow—pupil, iris, sclera, everything—watched her with a sharp, wary gaze. Glassware and equipment gleamed from the counters around them, obviously part of some laboratory somewhere, and she got a sense of space at her back, but not too much.
What is with these scientists and their aversion to light?
After Takahashi and Tasuhada on the Manila, she was beginning to think the people in the science community—or at least a subset that included them—were related to moles. Only one corner of the space was lit, overlooking a desk sprawled with file folders, paperwork, two netlinks, an embedded older-model holoscreen projector, and several cold-store test tube cases, their contents labeled with a glowing holopoint and dark against the glass. A large storage locker sat beneath a long, room-length window, its square siding and warped metal reminding her of a shorter version of the locker on the Nemina that held her wardrobe and personal effects. The hallway beyond was dark, further cementing her idea of mole scientists, but the light from the corner provided enough radiance to give the rest of the room adequate illumination so that, while she wouldn’t be reading a book very far from the desk, she wouldn’t bump into anything if she chose to wander around.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “So, have you always been able to talk through Shadows, or are you branching out?”
Studying him now, he didn’t look nearly as desperate as he’d sounded through the Shadow yesterday, but something about his manner kept her cautious and tense.
Hah. As if being in his very presence wasn’t enough to make her cautious. He was the enemy, for saints’ sakes. Sasha’s son. The guy who’d been helping her fuck over Nova Earth and increase her bid for system domination.
He grunted, dropping her gaze. A shrug rolled off his shoulders. “Extension. Similar to what we’re doing now.”
She cocked an eyebrow when he didn’t elaborate, slid her weight onto one hip, and waited.
“I felt your power on Nova. The way you broke our hold.”
The breath puffed out of her in a laugh. She threw her hands up, eyes rolling to the ceiling. “Is that what this is about? Are you angry about that? Because I’m not going to apologize.”
“No,” he said, his eyes calm and watchful.
Oh. Well, then.
“Then what?” Her hand lifted, fingers already moving to pinch the bridge of her nose, but she cut off the movement and squared to him instead, looking him straight in the eye. “Why did you want to talk?”
His gaze flicke
d down her body, assessing. “You’re getting stronger.”
Somehow, she didn’t think the last sentence was about what had happened on Nova. He was talking about what she was doing now. She stiffened, the second energy running through her like an electric current.
Yes. Any betterment in her ability to cross dimensions and communicate with him would be due to her recent treatment and her program’s theoretical genetic reversion to the Eurynome base structure—if her vision with Tia was legit—which would put her on more even ground for taking down his mother and screwing up their plans.
Not precisely what she wanted to talk to him about.
“We pretty much told each other to go fuck ourselves the last time we spoke,” she said, ignoring his words and allowing a sliver of ice to creep into her voice. “What’s changed?”
“Nothing. Everything.” His gaze dropped to the counter, then darted across the lab to the side, where an old, refrigerator-like machine sat against the wall, bathed a pale yellow by the lights. He licked his lips, and she frowned as the movement caught her attention.
Was he nervous?
She cocked an eyebrow. “Think you might be able to narrow down that answer a bit, buddy? You seemed pretty desperate earlier.” She snorted. “I’m still not convinced it wasn’t an acid flashback, by the way.”
“You wouldn’t be, no,” he sneered, his words turning smooth and clipped. He made a disgusted sound in his throat. “You’ve been denying your powers at every turn.”
“I’m a human flashlight,” she said, knowing it was a lie from the moment she started saying it, but not caring. No way was she telling him about Eurynome. “Magical dimension-crossing dreams were not supposed to be part of that package.”
