by K. Gorman
Her eyes bugged out as they led her through the corridors. For ship design, Centauri had doubled down on the military’s protocol of cramming as much as possible inside. Storage lockers, both holo and touch screens, medical access, and engineering panels lined the walls like fish stuffed into a can, labeled in both System and Centauri. Soldiers were everywhere. They dodged them on the ramp, in the corridor, up the small set of stairs that led to the top portion. The metal type, she noticed, were not as common as they had been outside. Perhaps the drone ship was their home?
At the top of the stairs, they took a hard right and, after a pause to consult with the panel of a heavy-looking door, walked through into a clean, concise bridge.
A hulk of a man stood near the center, with features so blocky and rigid, they looked cut from a cliff face rather than something human. Unlike the other cyborgs she’d seen, his cybernetics had a bulky, industrial look, as though he’d come out of an autobody shop rather than the pristine bodymod lab space she’d seen in both Seirlin Genomics and Ajin Pharmaceuticals. His gray hair stuck up from his head in a practical buzz that linked back to some old, adrenaline-fueled military shows she’d watched.
A female cyborg stood by his side, arms folded placidly in front of her, wearing an expression of focused boredom. She looked small and lithe by his side, but a second glance told Karin that she was actually quite tall and possessed a similar style of bulky cybernetics that turned her frame more robotic under the loose, baggy clothes she wore.
Karin was dragged in just in time for the man to backhand Baik across the face.
Baik’s head whipped to the side. Two guards held him from the back, his arms twisted up between them. A bandage, similar to the one she’d been given, was stuck to his neck, not quite covering the angry red gash of flesh where the knife had gone in.
Either his quicksave and medical patches had made good work, or the Centauri had intervened. Given that her wrist was still broken, she was going to bet it was a mix of the two. The Centauri didn’t seem all that ambitious in how they healed prisoners.
The man barked an order—in Centauri, not System—and the two guards hauled Baik to his feet.
When they came around, Baik’s eyes slid up to meet hers.
In that moment, she regretted everything bad she had ever thought about him.
He looked like death. Blood stained his uniform from when he’d almost bled out on the ship, and three separate bruises had swollen around his right eye and cheek, producing a bloom of discordant red and purple that blotched into the too-pale tone of his skin. Bags lined his eyes, as if he’d been kept up too late. Suns, how long had she been out? Not that long, considering it was still night.
His eyebrows lifted slightly as he drew closer to her—well, one side of them did. The other was too swollen to do much—asking a silent question.
Probably wondering the whereabouts of her sister.
She gave her head a little shake, then hissed as the guard on her right tightened his grip, fingers digging into her flesh painfully.
He pulled her forward to the center dais, where the two in charge waited.
The older man watched her approach, his face as still and serious as an eagle.
He was even larger up close—chunky, and only in part due to the cybernetics. His entire left arm had been replaced, looking less like a product of cybernetics than of the hydraulic machinery that lifted the Nemina’s ramp. Though the shoulder of the piece had a smooth, contoured shape that narrowed to a point where a human elbow might sit, the joint there was a swivel rather than a hinge, with a forearm that packed a large blade and a gun barrel between its ‘bones.’ At the end, a normal-looking robotic hand hung loosely closed. It attached to his body with a smoother metal that looked more like the ‘skin’ of the other cyborgs she’d seen. A lump of new machinery started on his chest, just visible before his modified uniform cut off the view.
He let her look. When she came to his face, steely-gray eyes caught her attention like knife points. The wavy trace of a scar pulled across his cheek, mixing with the weather-beaten lines and the heavy tanning on his skin. He was older than she’d thought—pushing into his late fifties, by appearance, though she suspected he was even older.
The woman beside him looked older, too. Not as old as him, but there was a definite sprinkling of gray in the rich brown of her hair. Though she didn’t wear a proper uniform—perhaps that was not a strict requirement, given that the other cyborgs she’d seen had been wearing only metal—she carried a confident, practical stance that implied she was very comfortable on the bridge. Though she lacked the specific arm modification the man had on his one side, which furthered Karin’s theory that it was a replacement, she shared the bulkier quality of his other enhancements. She gave Karin a cool assessment as she was led up to them, her brown eyes dark and cold.
Karin grimaced as her two guards forced her onto her knees. When the one on her left tried to force her arm to twist back, she yelled at the sudden wave of agony that rode up from her wrist, collapsing to her left.
The older man barked an order in Centauri, his tone harsh and guttural. The guard stopped.
After a second, they righted her.
Breathing hard, she clenched her right fist against the pain and forced herself to straighten, blinking back the tears that came to her eyes.
“What is your name?” the man asked. His voice had a deep accent that curved around the edges of words.
“Karin Makos.”
“Job?”
“Pilot.”
Her answer caused a murmur from the woman. They exchanged a quick few sentences.
“Why are you here?”
Ah. And that was the question that had got her in trouble before—sort of. She’d made the mistake of telling Prell that she was from here.
She considered lying, but something told her he’d know if she did.
“We were looking for something in the facility.”
“How did you know to look here?”
She hesitated. “We found it in our research.”
He didn’t say anything, but his eyes narrowed. He exchanged a look with the woman next to him.
“What did you do to Lieutenant Colonel Tyrell?”
She frowned in confusion. The first soldier had identified himself as Scaro Prell, so she assumed he meant the second guy.
What hadn’t she done to him? What hadn’t they, as a group, attempted to do to him to take him down?
“I, uh, hit him with a gravball bat? I tried to shoot him, but I don’t think any hit.”
A vivid memory of the dent on his head came to her mind. In the next second, her fingers caught a flood of warmth as she remembered his blood dousing her hand, the way she’d managed—somehow—to peel the front part of his suit up.
Gods. Did I really do that?
Fortunately, feats of extraordinary strength were either so common as to be negligible, or he simply didn’t care about it, because he gestured to his face. “No, I mean the event that occurred with his eyes.”
Ah. Her use of the light.
“That’s an augment,” she lied, trying to keep her voice steady.
The woman’s jaw tensed. “False.”
“Thank you, Tillerman.” The man shifted. His eyes slid to the guard on her left side who held her broken wrist. “Thebes, can you—”
“Genetic augment,” Karin interrupted hastily, anticipating his next order as the guard’s grip shifted on her arm. “Or as close as one can get. Took a lot of years and a lot of tests to get.”
The man’s gaze slid back to hers. He studied her for a few moments, then broke the stare to have a muttered conversation with the woman in Centauri.
Karin waited, tense.
After a minute, he made a dismissive gesture.
The guards hauled her back up—more carefully this time, she noticed, so perhaps her cooperation was being noticed—and she let go of the breath she’d been holding.
They took her back to he
r cell.
Chapter Twenty-One
Tia was back. This time, the dream squirmed between the two images—her in a dark office, the only thing visible apart from the holodisplay of her desk, and the narrative scene that unfolded in the lab between her and Elliot Corringham. Perhaps her brain wasn’t as undamaged as she’d thought.
After a dizzying, raveling squabble, and with a noise not unlike an elongated scratching sound of an old vinyl record—a warbling pitch that made all her metaphorical neck hairs stand up straight—it settled on the lab.
“Tia, did you send the E-Twenty reports over to CC yet?”
“No. We’re still waiting on your brother. When is he going to finish with the subject twenty-three exam cloud?”
Karin’s eyes fluttered open, the sterile beep clicking her into the scene like an arrow thunking into a target, and their voices took on a background drone. She’d memorized their cadence now, could even begin predicting their movements.
She focused, grounding herself, widening her eyes. She was in the girl’s point of view again, on the bed, her brown skin covered with bandages and blankets. Black, spiky hair poked out from the sides of her vision. The lab’s lukewarm air touched her face as she glanced down, viewing the lumps her body made in the blankets. She gave her fingers an experimental flex.
Though she could feel a pain response from her real body, very little of that carried over into this one. Whether that was due to the act of coming here or due to the painkillers the girl likely had pumping through her system—with this many bandages, she imagined she had a pretty strong dosage—she wasn’t sure. But she could almost believe the bandages now. If the skin beneath them hadn’t been so much darker than hers, the arm itself so much skinnier—hells, what were they feeding this girl, a diet of straight cinnamon and lettuce?—and the body so much smaller, she could have believed it to be herself in this bed.
She groaned, the sound turning into a rattle through the girl’s dried lips, and attempted to pull herself up.
The room immediately froze.
Reality shivered. She caught an image of the other Tia, the one behind the holodesk, and the way she’d seemed to snap her head up as if she’d noticed Karin’s presence.
Slowly, this Tia let her netlink fall to her side. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
She wasn’t speaking to Elliot Corringham anymore. He had gone into an absolute stillness, frozen like someone had hit pause on a netdrama.
Karin let her breath go. “I’m getting that a lot lately.”
First with Layla, Program Athena, in one of her dimension-crossing dreams, then with Tylanus.
Tia turned. Her face was careful, half a mask of emotions, half filled with the kind of sharp, calculating cold that Karin would have expected from Nomiki. Her gaze slid through her, then up to a holodisplay above Karin’s head.
“Amazing. It finally worked.”
The way Tia said it made it sound as if this were the first time it had happened.
Gods, I can’t deal with this right now. I need to get out.
But she was here, and Tia would have no idea what she was talking about.
Karin grunted as she pushed herself up. “Well, this is my second time here—maybe third—so you may want to re-assess that.”
Tia went still, like she had a few times before. Her eyes moved, as if she were reading something in the air.
At the end of it, they narrowed, brow furrowing as if something were coming to her. “Eos?”
“Yes.” Karin gave herself a small shake, closing her eyes. “Is this a dream, or did I cross dimensions again?”
Tia’s eyebrow twitched up, seeming to snap out of whatever reverie she’d been in this time to flick her gaze back to Karin’s eyes. “Do you cross dimensions often?”
She hesitated. “Well, there’s one confirmed instance, but that might have been someone else. And the second time, my body stayed in one dimension while I went into another.”
Which, technically, she was doing right now—if her broken body was still alive back in the compound.
She clenched her jaw. Still, she could feel twinges of pain throughout her arm and chest.
“Your being here certainly means that you’re able to,” Tia said. “You’re connecting to a different plane, you know. This is my realm. Which, in turn, makes it your realm. You’re one of my children, after all. Theoretically speaking.”
“That’s kind of what you said before. My program used your program as a base, correct? I suppose that makes me your child, in a way.” Karin let out a long, slow breath. “Well, this just got a whole lot more weird and awkward.”
Hadn’t Tylanus told her that Sasha was close to being her mother?
Of the two, she’d prefer Tia.
“This is not a dream,” Tia informed her after another half-minute of that strange mid-space freezing she did. “It means you’re evolving, getting stronger.”
“Must be from the treatment,” she muttered, wincing as she sat up.
Gods, it felt like she’d just been on the Manila a few hours ago. How had things gone so wrong?
Tia made a face. “Nasty stuff, those. Necessary for neural and biological shift, though.”
Karin frowned, then realized that she must be talking about the treatments.
“Did you invent them?”
“No. That would be the Corringham’s. Both of them. I did help with the coding, but the treatment serum itself was theirs.”
Karin blew out a slow breath. That figures. Even Takahashi had alluded to their control of the project—and the way they’d so drastically changed it from its harmless, sequencing origins.
Gods, I’m having this as a fever dream. I’m not really here. In real life, I’m lying unconscious in a cell, in the fucking compound, of all places.
Unless, of course, she actually was here.
She glanced down at the bandages, lifting a hand to examine them, then the length of crow-black hair that fell down the side of her face—definitely not her usual blond.
“Who is this?”
Tia gave a little nod.
“She is Maya Richmond. Program Delphi.” She hesitated. “Are you familiar with the story?”
“The oracle?” Karin guessed. The oracle of Delphi was hardly an obscure myth, though not one she’d focused on. The details escaped her. “Does she predict the future?”
“No. This particular program was designed to channel other programs. In that, her manifestation is getting a gold star.” Tia pursed her lips. “She’s a bit like a human radio transceiver.”
“Ah. That’s why you combined her program with yours in your sneaky ‘seed’ thing—so we could connect.” Karin paused, her brain catching up with her. It was like trying to think with fire. “So, I’m not actually here?”
“Do you feel like you’re here?”
A slow, choking grip slid through her throat. She fought it back. “Yes, but—”
“Then what does it matter? Whoa, easy there.” Tia snapped to her feet, gaze tilting upward as the holodisplay above the bed gave several beeps. “Calm down.”
Karin struggled to rein in the emotions that tore through her chest. It felt like she’d been stabbed with a thick, blunt knife, and its dull tip was poking straight into her heart. Marc’s face came to her again, bloody and unconscious, his eyes unseeing.
Gods, Marc.
Tears came. She leaned her head back on the pillow, eyes closing the room out as they overwhelmed her. A sob wracked through her chest. Her breath wheezed slowly through her throat.
A hand slid over hers, warm and smooth. When she opened her eyes, Tia’s blurry face looked down at her.
“What’s wrong?”
She blinked up at her. A hot trail slid down the side of her face and neck, soaking into her hair and pillow. She forced herself to stare past Tia’s head, focusing on the smooth white surface of the ceiling above her. From there, she worked on getting her vision to widen again.
When her breaths had
calmed down, and she could see the underglow of the room’s cabinets in her peripheral vision, she allowed her shoulders to relax back down.
She drew in a deep breath, swallowed, then turned her gaze back to Tia.
“I need to get out.”
The doctor’s frown was sharp and immediate. Wary. “Get out of where? Here?”
“No.”
The emotions welled up again—Marc’s face, the limp way he’d rocked when the soldier had hit him, the smell of blood and hurt in the air, crushed into her chest. She gripped her fist into the bedding with her right hand and swallowed them back. When her breathing evened out, she didn’t look back to Tia. Instead, she focused on an empty test tube stand on the counter past the foot of her bed.
It seemed easier.
“I’m currently held prisoner in the Macedonian compound by the forces of the Alpha Centauri system. My wrist is broken, my chest hurts pretty bad, and my boyfriend may or may not be dead. I need to get out.” She flicked her gaze to Tia’s, meeting her dark brown eyes. “Can you help me?”
Tia’s face went still again, the way it had before. This time, it only happened for a moment. Her expression sharpened a second later, features taking on a more angular, serious tone.
“Me, specifically? No. I am useless here.” The muscles of her jaw tightened. She was so emaciated, Karin could see them in hard, delicate detail. Tia’s lips thinned as she swallowed, her brows furrowing. After a few moments, the bed dipped as she swiveled, her focus turning to a spot on the wall as she worked at the problem. “You say you have been across dimensions?”
“Yes. I—” Karin wrestled with her tongue. “I mean, I have, but it’s spotty. Mostly done with Tyl—Program Tartarus—so at first, I thought it was his fault, but I think I’ve gone through on my own.”
She had, hadn’t she? Or had those been actual dreams?
No. That last one, with Tylanus… yes, he had been there, but she doubted he had helped her cross over. He’d seemed surprised to see her, after all. Though not too surprised. And there’d been a few other times like that.
