by K. Gorman
“There was a breakthrough in nanotechnology about fifteen years ago that rendered this machine obsolete.” Takahashi bulldozed on, gesturing to the rest of its length, as if in explanation, and she tried to do some quick math in her head to figure out if the Nemina’s onboard nano was older than that. The outstretched wings of a painted blue Seirlin logo sat on its side, muted by the shadow that folded over them. “But it is still capable of scans, and there are a… sufficient number of nanos still loaded.”
He paused, hesitating as he glanced back at her. “If you were to have another episode…”
Ah. So that’s what he was getting at.
“If I start hearing voices again, you’ll be the first to know,” she said, unable to keep the dry sarcasm from her tone.
“Good, good.” He nodded, almost to himself. “I’ll make sure it’s ready for you.”
Then, he seemed to forget about her, or dismiss her, picking up a rag from a nearby bed and working on cleaning the dust off of the machine.
She waited a beat, to see if he’d add anything, but apparently, he was finished with her. She and Marc exchanged a look.
Oookay, not much for picking up on social cues, is he?
Marc folded his hands around hers, rubbing the ridge of her wrist with the pad of his thumb. She gave him a partial smile—her first since entering the building, she realized.
For a moment, her attention went back to the logo painted onto the side. It had looked fresh and new when she’d first seen it—and absolutely, intimidatingly cutting edge in her flashbacks. The ones with Dr. Takahashi were always the worst—but, seeing it now, it had an outdated feel. As if everything that had been done to her was past history, dusty and abandoned.
“Wow, there’s some pretty fucked up stuff in here.” Soo-jin’s face wrinkled into a grimace as she dangled a pair of metal restraints from her fingers.
Child-sized restraints.
Cookie stood close to her, his own expression curling in uncomfortable disgust.
“Yep. Welcome to our nightmare.” Nomiki strode into the room with nary a sound, making Tasuhada jump from where he’d bent over to examine a different machine by the door. “Hey, Muscles, give me a hand.”
Jon, who had been examining the super-cleaned patch of floor near the middle of the room, along with the bed that sat next to it, fell into line behind her without even glancing up.
Karin’s eyebrow twitched.
Muscles? Nomiki could shove a train off its track. What was—
Her sister headed for the back, where a series of shelves and cupboards lined the wall. She grabbed the closest one, braced herself, and hauled.
The violent noise of ripping wood tore through the room. Glass slid down and crashed to the floor as she tossed a square-sized chunk of counter to the side. By the time it thunked to the floor, she was already grabbing for a second piece, boots grinding in the broken glass. “There’s a second passage back here. Help break this away.”
Ah. So that’s how we get to the sub-basement.
“Wait!” Takahashi jumped forward. “You’re looking for the secret room, right? There’s a keypad. I remember seeing it somewhere.”
Nomiki halted and did that thing she did where she went absolutely still. Her head twitched toward Takahashi.
“Where?”
“I don’t quite remember. It was on the wall somewhere. “
Her head lifted to the rest of them, and she jerked it toward the wall in invitation. “Okay. Everyone, find the keypad. It might be on a different wall. How big, Doctor?”
Takahashi grunted, already turning for a closet to his right. “Normal-sized. About the same as the ones on the ship.”
A jolt of adrenaline hit her system as everyone surged to action. She slid her hand from Marc’s, jumping for the nearest section of counter. Her fingers traced over dusty surfaces, pushing glassware and old machinery aside to inspect the surfaces behind them. She poked into the corners of the counter, frenetic, looking for even the smallest gap that would indicate the gap of a holoprojection.
“Here!” Soo-jin waved from the corner of the room, close to where Jon and Nomiki had been looking on the back wall. A blue holopoint had lit up behind her. “Do you have a code?”
Nomiki’s eyes narrowed. “No.”
Soo-jin twisted, did a quick survey of the room, and turned her waving flail into a pointing gesture toward Cookie. “Nerd! Bring me my bag!”
“Yes, Queen.” He grabbed the equipment bag, probably intending to sweep it over in an effortless fashion, but instead staggered on his first step. “Sol, woman, what do you keep in here?”
“The hearts of men, sucked dry for all eternity. There’s also a codebreaker key in the inner side pocket.”
A codebreaker? Karin’s eyebrow twitched, and her gaze wandered over to where Baik stood in the other corner.
Weren’t those illegal in every corner of Sirius, excluding only pockets of Independent-run territory?
Her expression stiffened into a grim seriousness.
We aren’t in Sirius.
The group wandered closer, slowly filtering to the wall as Cookie handed the bag to her. Soo-jin fished out a small, slender device, gave its top a careful twist to situate the holopoint, then bent into the wall, her face a sharp mask of concentration as she lined up the connection.
A codebreaker was a simple, if rather expensive, design. The first part of it consisted of several ports that could be refitted and modified to fit most of the system’s standard passcode scanners—depending on when it was acquired, of course. One couldn’t use a ten-year-old device on a newly-designed, fresh off the board lock, nor could it be well used on unique, custom-built creations, unless one got extra crafty and found a workaround. Once connected, it overrode the base screen—where one would input a passcode, eye scan, fingerprint mark, vocal transcript, or other security key—disabled input limits, determined its encryption algorithm, and flooded the checker with a random combination of relevant entries until it found the correct one.
It took three minutes.
A beep sounded, followed be a suction noise in the wall. Glass rattled as the cupboard next to where Nomiki had mauled the counter popped out a couple of inches. A rumble came from behind it, inside the wall.
Karin shivered, staring at the line of black that made the door. A jangle of nerves rose in her mind.
This is it.
Tasuhada gave the cupboard a low whistle, pulling it out the rest of the way just in time to catch the two steel doors of a bare, industrial elevator.
She let out a hiss of breath as a memory jarred through her—herself, in someone’s arms, medication doused through her mind. The slight rock of the car as they carried her on and turned around. A smell of breath mint coming to her as the door closed and the elevator started down.
Her reaction must have been obvious, because Marc found her hand again and wrapped it in his.
She gave a hard swallow, staring at the open doors.
That must be where they did tertiary phase with us.
A shiver of anticipation ran through her skin as she realized that they might soon find the Cradle.
“Damn,” Soo-jin said. “That’s…”
“Let’s go.” Nomiki caught the door as it made to close. “Jon, stay up here. In case of…”
She trailed off with a frown.
“Incident?” Soo-jin suggested.
“Yes. Incident.” She unsheathed her blade with an electric hiss and stepped in, holding the door for the rest. The elevator was more than big enough, though she saw it shift when everyone embarked.
Nomiki lifted her gaze to her. “Sis?”
Abruptly, Karin realized she hadn’t moved. A sliver of unease worked its way up her spine—she did not want to go in there.
Marc’s hands smoothed over her tense wrist. He brought his head low, one arm retracting to encase her opposing shoulder in a half hug as he spoke close to her ear.
“You don’t have to go if you don�
��t want to. We can go back to the ship if you want to.”
But that wouldn’t solve anything, would it? If she wanted all of this—the conflict with Dr. Sasha, the Shadows, Tia, the Cradle, the weird world shift thing that she seemed to be doing—to come to an end, she’d have to face what Seirlin had done to her. And now was as good a time as any.
Ignoring the slither in her gut and the tension that kept her back and chest straight and stiff, she let out a breath, ducked away from Marc’s hug, and forced her stiff legs toward the elevator.
Chapter Fourteen
Karin caught a brief glimpse of a rough, underlit concrete ceiling and old, dirty pipes before a thick, dank smell assaulted her nose and eyes. She squinted, putting the sleeve of her shirt to her face in an attempt to block it as Marc’s steady hand guided her out of the open elevator doors.
She wasn’t the only one who was affected.
“Ho-ly shit,” Soo-jin said between coughs, her voice uncharacteristically small and weak. A light flicked on overhead, revealing her to the side, her back hunched and her eyes narrowed into slits as she surveyed the room. Like Karin, she’d positioned the sleeve of her hoodie to her mouth. “Did the cleaning team just miss this?” Another cough, suppressed by her forearm. “Takahashi, did you know about this place?”
“I knew nothing about this.” The doctor’s voice, normally calm and even, had taken on an incredulous tone. She spotted him on her right, his mouth not dropped, but his expression definitely slackened. “To my memory, this room didn’t exist. I only saw the holopad. Thought it was for secure storage, initially.”
“So, basically, this is a secret lab inside a secret lab, for the secret experiments inside a broader range of secret experiments—like one of those Russian dolls? The ones that eat each other?”
Er…
“Nesting dolls, you mean?” Karin shook her head as the image of the dolls eating each other popped into it. “And I have no clue. It certainly looks like it. And the cleaning team might have missed it. It was behind a fake wall.”
“Yeah, but it’s a pretty fucking obvious space. They’d have to be morons not to notice it.” Soo-jin shook her head. “Any kind of depth-penetrating scan could have revealed it. Hells, the Nemina could have revealed it on her deep scans.”
“The Nemina is equipped with Fallon-grade military sensors and software,” Marc reminded her. “She can scan a lot of things.”
“Yeah, yeah, your boat is pretty.”
Frustrated by Tasuhada’s unmoving back blocking the view in front of her, Karin bumped past him, pushing into the room.
It was smaller than she’d thought, a simple hallway with room for two people abreast. The walls on each side appeared to crowd in, though that might be an effect created by its cupboards and counters. It was also even more dust-covered and neglected than the last one, and, from the smell in the air, had not been opened for a very long time. Unlike the upstairs, which hadn’t covered its concrete, an old white tile covered the counters and backsplash, its grout black with dirt. A sink to her left held a small amount of milky water, the simple plug and chain visible in the drain at the bottom. Someone’s old coffee mug sat upside down next to a soap dispenser at the back of the counter, an older variant of the Seirlin brand printed on its side.
Now that the initial shock of the air had worn off, she found it easier to breathe—even though it was still thick and heavy.
Hells, can weird gases build up in a place like this? I swear I’ve heard of people getting killed this way.
Of course, if that had been the case, either Nomiki, Baik, Marc, or one of the two scientists in the room would have brought it up.
“Suns,” Soo-jin said, her tone almost reverent. “I think they did miss this on the clean-up.” She twisted. “Takahada—ah, sorry—Tasuhada, isn’t this a nanometer?”
“Yes.” He sidled up next to her, squinting in the gloom. “It is. And to pre-empt your next question—yes, any cleaning team would have taken this with them. The machines upstairs can have their hard drives cleaned, but this can’t. It’d store all the records on it.”
“Hmm. I bet that, between us four smart people, we can get those records off.”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “And—ah—you can call me Shinji. It might be easier.”
“I’ve actually been thinking of calling you both Drs. T-Squared.” Soo-jin flashed him a grin. “But Shinji would work.”
Surprisingly, it was Dr. Takahashi who laughed.
“Drs. T-Squared. I like that.”
“Hey, guys, come here.” Cookie’s voice came to them from past the next door. “You’re gonna want to see this.”
Both Cookie and Nomiki had vanished around the next corner—the room made a sort of entrance segue into a second hallway, framed by a naked concrete threshold. Baik, toward the end of the room, gave the rest of them a brief glance before disappearing through, as well.
Karin eyed Dr. Tasuhada—Shinji. He’d managed to get in front of her once more, and now blocked the passageway. Again.
Fortunately, Cookie’s call had piqued his interest. She shuffled forward as both he and Soo-jin dropped what they were doing—Soo-jin pocketing the nanometer for later—to file down to the next section.
The next hallway led to a large, square room several meters down. It looked like a near twin to the surgery theater above, albeit somewhat rearranged. Curtained partitions hid many of the beds from sight, and their blue-green color wore at Karin’s eyes in the stark light of the tubes overhead.
At the very center of the room, with a wide, human-sized tank next to it on the floor, sat the Cradle.
It was mounted on a moderate-sized table, with wires and cables running between it, the tank, the wall, and a bank of computers on the far side of the room. Its pre-fab sides made a dull, dusty gleam under the light, and a series of empty slots on the side facing her did not give her a lot of confidence, but there were several lights glowing in its front, and Cookie had an expression of careful excitement as he bent down to look at it.
“It must have a backup power supply,” he said. “Or maybe—hells.” He bit his tongue between his lips as he squinted at a few slots on the side. “Tasuhada, do you think…?”
As both Shinji and Takahashi strode over to look at the Cradle, Karin followed its cords and cables to a familiar-looking nano-injector crown that sat on the table next to it.
Revulsion corded through her throat, but she shoved it back, steeled herself, and made her legs move. The crown’s metal gleamed as she approached. Someone had taken the time to put small plastic caps on the ends of the injectors. She stared at them, her fist clenching beside her.
Memories pushed through her. She shoved them back, but a sharp pain nagged at her head like a ghost. She tilted her head to the side, felt up her skull to where one of the points originated, and found a small bump in the skin under her hair.
Sol’s fucking child.
She retracted the hand and found Nomiki staring at her from the other side of the room.
“Is this it, then?” she called. Her voice was soft, but she had no doubt her sister would hear her. “Is this what spurred you to leave?”
Nomiki didn’t answer, but a fresh hit of nausea rolled through her stomach. She shuddered with it, but staved it off.
As her gaze slid back to the Cradle, Tia’s words cycled back into her brain.
“Come find me, little light.”
She stared at its form. It had a horse-shoe shape at its top, leading into a flat back, and the smooth prefab surface dipped down into several tiers that fanned out until it hit a midpoint, giving it a strange, clam-like appearance. Its pre-fab had a fine texture, but it looked unfinished—like a prototype rather than anything commercially manufactured and marketed.
A chill sank into her skin.
She doubted the Cradle had ever been meant for the shelves.
Gods. Layla, Brennan, the other Nomiki… are they all in here?
Her stomach did a slow, gn
awing flip as she drew closer, a shudder running through her.
Is this it?
The chill sank deeper. Ahead, the water of the tank had a milky skim across its surface, some of it riding up the glass in older patches that had obviously evaporated away. She took in a slow breath, lifted a hesitating hand, then reached out to feel along the Cradle’s surface.
Kneeling below her, Cookie twisted where he was trying to look under the Cradle’s chassis. His voice was softer than normal, with a distracted quality to it, but it came to her as if a hall of water stood between them. She tensed, noticing the way it felt off.
When the hissing sound rose, like a great wave drawing itself up in the distance, she knew her touch on the Cradle had been a mistake.
She sucked in a breath, eyes widening, already backpedaling, hearing it come crashing down on her.
“Karin?” Nomiki’s brow furrowed in concern. She strode forward. “Karin, wait—”
The memory pierced her mind like a lance. Light erupted around her, along with the caustic bubble of that second energy. She let out a yelp, felt the energy rise up, snap into place. The world bent, shivered—
Then, she was alone.
Breath rasped through her throat. She halted it, tense and still, eyes wide and looking around. The room was the same as she’d left it—at least on first glance.
Then, she noticed that the skim was gone from the water, and the tank glowed with a quiet, healthy luster. Under her hand, the Cradle hummed with energy.
Sounds came to her, at first blurred and faint, like a radio receiver adjusting its wavelength, then bursting with clarity and volume.
She jerked as a man walked through the door to her right, and sucked in a breath as she recognized the hunched figure he carried in his arms.
Her younger self’s blond hair was easy to recognize, as was the familiar curve of her legs and feet. She was older here than she had ever been in her memories of treatment, and her nakedness made the rest of the room’s stained concrete, shadowy walls, and industrial equipment feel obscene. Her skin appeared to glow from its paleness, even against the whiteness of the lab coat he wore, as if the light touched her better, and in higher quality. It looked like a simple trick of the eye—a result of so much exposed skin and likely a psychic effect from the fact that she was looking at herself—but a small part of her wondered if it wasn’t some latent power of her light ability that made her appear so.
