by K. Gorman
“It’s beautiful,” he said again. “Thank you.”
His gaze didn’t drop from her—she could still feel it, see him watching her in her peripheral vision—but some of the awkwardness did. As if a wall had fallen from between them. She allowed her gaze to turn back, meet his again, drop to examine the signs of exhaustion that lined his face, as if he were an example out of a textbook.
“You know…” She cocked her head to the side, indicating the mess of light and activity that marked the main part of the military operations. “I bet they wouldn’t miss you if you went back to the Nemina and conked out for a few hours.”
He followed her indication, squinting as the light slipped over his face. “No, they probably wouldn’t.”
He didn’t make a move to stand up, though.
“Right. Well, uh.” She shifted, her hand coming up in the midspace. She really wanted to reach out, put it on his shoulder or something. Comfort him. But she thought better of it, instead turning the gesture into a wave and angling her body back to the Nemina. “I’ll leave you alone, then. Work to do, arcane medical loot to pillage, more knives to sharpen, et cetera.”
Gods, just stop talking, and you might get through this conversation without further embarrassment.
He nodded, lifting the frame a few inches in reply. “See you around.”
Cookie’s head spun.
Light and fluffy, like a cloud. If the cloud had been laced with Lu-Yang chemical exhaust, threshed through a Sophic mower, and shunted into a room for three years.
He reached for the small can on his left, registering the crinkle as its thin aluminum dented under his thumb. This was his third Hyperspace Mouse in as many hours. Normally, he stopped at two—one downed like a shot to jump start the caffeine flow with a frightening mix of awareness, stimulation, and high heart rate, and the second sipped slowly to keep the energy above a certain level—but tonight, after all the bullshit, he’d found himself reaching further into his prized cache.
It went down awful on his tongue, but smoothed into a sugary tartness in the aftertaste.
Gods, what was he doing? Here he was, sleep-deprived beyond all recognition of time, both his body and his brain dragged through the rungs and washboards of stress—even beaten—and what was he doing instead of rolling over and conking out right there on the floor?
Listening to the opening bars of Essence Three as it booted up.
Technically, he had both Essence and Essence Two, as well, but he’d always liked Three. Felt some sort of connection with it, whereas the others were more background fodder.
It was the music, he thought. Though all three Essence games used the same composer, Three was also directed by the man, and it felt like there had been so much more attention paid to the background and setting audio. Hells, it felt like the scenes had been made for the sound, rather than the other way around. And that simple fact made the game so much more captivating.
Still, he probably should be sleeping. He cringed, glancing over his surroundings. The past several cycles had not seen much in the way of cleanliness come to his side of the lab. Hells, even Takahashi had gone slack over that during their pell-mell run from Macedonia to Brazil. A mix of tech and food wrappers littered the space around him, most within arm’s reach, though he spied a few pieces that had made it farther afield. He’d brought a few blankets from his bunk, along with the pillow, which he’d propped against the skeleton of the couch Marc eventually hoped to finish. One of the blankets, a nice dusty shade of evergreen, draped over his shoulders. It didn’t make him feel particularly warm, but he didn’t feel cold, either, so it must be doing its job.
After a minute, Essence Three switched from its opening credits into its first area of gameplay, and he was staring at the rendered image of the game’s main character, an off-duty line cook from one of Nova’s lowest levels, facing the disc-lit nighttime streets on his way home from work.
In the background, the soundtrack was absolutely silent. Still.
He blew out a slow, quiet breath.
He really should be sleeping.
A noise made him glance over. Shinji stepped into the doorway of the makeshift lab, the dimness of the space casting a pallor over his skin. The hallway behind him was dark, even the night cycle off tonight. He was surprised he hadn’t heard the man approach, considering, but maybe he’d grown used to the Nemina’s hallways and corridors by now. She wasn’t exactly a large ship.
Their eyes met across the room. Cookie gave him a nod. Shinji’s gaze slid sideways, taking in the screen.
“Essence?” he asked.
“Number Three,” Cookie confirmed. He glanced around, shifted. Cleared a spot next to himself and patted it.
Shinji took the invitation, rubbing his shoulder as he slipped into the room. He stopped just next to him, still standing, the toes of his shoes a few bare centimeters from his leg, and glanced down, giving an assessment of the screen.
“I never finished this one.”
“I know. You said. Never past the frog demon, right?”
He nodded.
“Could always boot up One. Start from scratch.”
Shinji shook his head. “No. I’d rather watch you play.”
Cookie patted the spot next to him again. “Then you should sit down. I prepped a nice spot of floor for you.”
Shinji didn’t move. Slowly, Cookie realized that his gaze had moved from the game to him.
“Er…” He turned his head back up, squinting as he met Shinji’s eyes. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” A swallow flowed through Shinji’s throat. In the next second, Cookie knew why. “Heard you were gay. That true?”
Suddenly, he was paying a lot more attention to the man.
“Sometimes,” he said cautiously. He didn’t know how things rolled on Chamak—Fallon seemed pretty straight-laced liberal—but there were always fuckwads who thought gay relations were unnatural.
He wondered who’d let that cat out of the bag. Soo-jin or Marc?
Soo-jin, probably.
“I like everyone,” he finished, by way of explanation.
“Ah.” A muscle worked in Shinji’s jaw. His fingers fiddled at his side. “I’m gay.”
Cookie watched him for a few moments, waiting. On the screen, the first chords and mutterings of atmosphere built, sending a low, nostalgic resonance throughout the room.
Still, Shinji made no move.
“Well,” Cookie said slowly, reaching over to pat the piece of floor next to him again. “Then you should definitely sit down. Come, we can both get the crap scared out of us, then go take it out on the Mess’ chocolate supply.”
“There’s chocolate?” Shinji looked hopeful.
“Yep. My dear cousin keeps a supply of it in one of the high cupboards where he thinks us short people can’t get to.”
Shinji glanced down at him. “You’re not short.”
“No, but he’s tall.” Cookie flashed a smile, then patted the floor again. “Come on, sit.”
Shinji gave another glance, then turned, lowering himself down. Cookie adjusted himself, making more room. The scent of soap and chemicals came to him, and he glanced sideways. Shinji must have come from sani. His skin was clean, but dry—not holding the moisture that a true shower would leave—and his hair had separated into little segments, spiking up toward the front.
After a moment, he threaded his arm through Shinji’s, leaned in, and took hold of the controller. He felt warm, his shoulder strong next to his, and, as if Shinji had clicked some invisible switch, the day’s tension loosened within him.
He relaxed.
Stared straight ahead at the screen, a long-unfelt flutter brushing the underside of his diaphragm, a smile twitched his lips. He tried, but didn’t wholly succeed, to keep it off his face.
He shifted, the scent of soap coming to him again, and leaned forward toward the screen.
“All right. Let’s get the crap scared out of us.”
As he started the
character forward, Shinji leaned into him. He smiled, studying him in his peripheral vision, watching how the light from the game played off the smooth planes of Shinji’s face. He had a strong nose, with high cheekbones. A narrow jawline that swung into his neck.
He ended up dying more times than he’d thought possible in that game, but he wasn’t unhappy about that.
Epilogue 2
Awakening
Karin woke. She didn’t wake slowly, either. It was quick, like a snap. A single blink of her eyes, and she had an immediate awareness of the room, her eyes adjusted to dimness perfectly—more than perfectly, in fact, and she didn’t have to think about it before she knew that the improved night vision was a direct result of her new genetic programming.
Most of Marc’s cabin was lit up by the dim red cast of the digital clock on the wall. In the past, that had made the place ungodly dark to her—she’d stumbled more than once, even with Marc’s tendency to keep a clean space—but now, the room came to her in absolute clarity. She could see the red cast over the two lockers at the end, over the lines of the floor’s pre-fab, the two picture frames Marc kept on the opposite wall, a family portrait with him and his mother and another of him with his former combat group. Below, the rumpled sheets of the second bed reflected in a lighter color. They were normally occupied by Cookie, but he’d stripped the pillow and blanket and had been holing up in the lab lately.
What it didn’t reflect off was the depthless, pure black silhouette of the Shadow in front of her.
She remained relaxed, giving it a quick scan. Beside her, Marc didn’t stir, though his arm slung over her waist.
What did it want? She didn’t think it would attack.
“Hello,” she said, as quietly as she could, not wanting to wake Marc.
The Shadow stirred. The edges rippled as if a draft had curved around its form.
“Eos.”
And, as the name shivered into her mind, she felt something inside her click into place.
DEUS
BOOK SIX
Chapter One
“Ten contacts, all hot.” Reeve’s voice buzzed over the comms line. “Karin, do you see them?”
“I see them,” she confirmed as her HUD updated, painting the targets on the map image in the top corner of her visor. She hunched down next to the front tire of an old, worn-out pickup, the specialized Fallon blaster in her hand pointed at the ground.
Like her suit, it ran in stealth mode, its normal running lights off. Only its slight, barely-audible supersonic whine and the notification in the bottom corner of her HUD indicated its active status.
She glanced around. The small farm was located near the southeastern outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, and according to UN reports, disguised an underground missile operation. A paramilitary group had taken residence and had been moving equipment into the site over the past few months.
On flyover, it wasn’t much to look at―a basic barn, farmhouse, and outbuilding setup with several old agricultural drones rusting in the fields. But a deep, secondary scan from one of the orbiting Alliance ships had picked up a large gravitational anomaly in the building.
Either a piece of old terraforming equipment, a ship with a substantial engine and weapons drive, or a very large bomb.
Given that Melbourne was on Old Earth and the planet, by definition, did not need any terraforming, she didn’t think it was the former. Which left either a gunship or a bomb in the possession of a dodgy group of militarized individuals.
“Time ’til go?” she asked.
“Two minutes,” Reeve answered. “Recon drone incoming.”
A soft whir sounded in the air, and a new tag appeared on her HUD. The drone, about the size of a Novan gravball disc, flew overhead, rotors humming like a small fan, and banked to go around the back of the barn.
She settled in, lifting her gaze to the rest of the scenery. The farm was peaceful. November meant early summer to this part of the globe. Semi-dry fields rolled away at her back, cut through with swaying lines of wooden fencing and a thick riparian where the hills uniformly dipped for a stream. A quarter moon hung above the foothills, waxing gibbous, and a blanket of stars filled the dark blue expanse above.
From where she knelt, she made out the movements of several satellites. A chorus of sound undulated in the fields and forest around her―frogs by the stream and irrigation pond, along with the occasional caws and chirps of nocturnal birds. Bats winged past the barn, attracted to the insects gathered by the light in the windows.
With her new, upgraded senses, the night came to her with a clarity she’d never before received. She had little trouble seeing through the dark, especially with the quarter moon in the sky and the vast scattering of stars above her. Where before, the dimness would turn the shadows into blurry, indistinct shapes, her vision could now compensate for the low light conditions. Her hearing, too, had improved―to the point where she could hear the occasional mutter of conversation from the barn just over a hundred meters away.
One of the men, a tall, thickly-muscled, black haired brute with at least one firearm on him, kept walking by the windows.
She glanced down at where his shadow fluctuated the light reflected off the grass in front of her. Either this group was overconfident in their security, or they had a few surprises up their sleeve.
Granted, they probably didn’t expect three genetically modified superhumans to come raining on their parade.
She and Nomiki weren’t normal. As former subjects of an experimental genetic engineering project, they were chimeric mixes of over thirty different genetic sources that had been pieced together, artificially born, and shipped off for a childhood of brainwashing, surgery, chemical treatments, and medical tests.
Nomiki had been developed under Program Enyo, which turned her into a bioengineered supersoldier in both brain and body, with a surplus of athleticism, a mind for strategy and combat, and a curious brand of selective psychopathy that didn’t so much ‘turn off’ emotion as partition it behind a glass wall for analysis.
Jon had been developed as Program Ares, another member of the war pantheon―though he, notably, had been re-engineered after birth, and well after having grown up into maturity.
Karin…
Well, she was different than both of them. Initially developed as Program Eos after a Grecian Titaness who brought the dawn, she’d recently had her bioengineering changed to reflect Program Eurynome instead. Though originally the Eurynome Project’s first creation, the Eurynome Program had gone on to become the base structure of every single program thereafter.
Which meant that, in addition to being a powerful creation Program with the ability to manipulate dimensional boundaries, she also had the basis for every single god and goddess Program that the Eurynome Project had ever created, which included the combat specs reserved for the war pantheon sets.
A little over a week ago, Karin had all the combat ability of a wet noodle.
Now, she had over fifty confirmed kills on her record and the ability to gut someone in a second flat.
Of course you do, said a voice in her head. I wouldn’t be riding around in a body that couldn’t defend itself. I just emphasized Eurynome’s base combat coding a little more for our purposes. Ares, in particular, has a vengeance streak that I’m particularly fond of.
That came from Dr. Tia Sarayu, former lead geneticist of the Eurynome Project―and its first human trial.
Part of her psyche had been uploaded into Karin’s head a week ago, and she’d been making herself at home ever since.
You keep saying ‘base mold,’ Karin thought back, and all I can think of is the stuff that grows on bread after I’ve left it too long.
That’s funny, Tia replied. Normally, I get people thinking back to renovating the crown and base molding of a room.
Normally. Technically, Karin was her only normal. Except for a handful of typed commands across a computer interface, Tia hadn’t spoken to another human being, thought-speak or oth
erwise, in over seventy years. All that remained of her was a brain and brain stem in a tank, wired through with cybernetics and connected to a computer whose hardware was slowly corrupting.
Just one of the weird, fucked up discoveries they’d all made when investigating the Eurynome Project.
The comms beeped once, warning them of the minute marker, and a countdown flashed up in the right corner of her HUD. Another notification informed her that both Reeve and the war room on the FSS Courant, the Fallon ship in charge of the op, had linked into her suit’s feed.
She glanced over to where her sister crouched beside a tractor, still as a stone, the moonlight reflecting off the armored slope of her back. Behind Nomiki, Jon’s hunched form appeared twice as large. Although they all wore Fallon’s state-of-the-art klemptas armored suits, Jon’s musculature made him a size of his own. He looked like a chunk of metal parts, or one of those bulky, heavily-armored paladin class characters Karin occasionally saw in netgame advertisements―too large and unwieldy to be anything but a fantasy.
He made it work, though, and not just in the hulking smash that those characters were stereotyped into. He proved fast, quick-thinking, and lethal.
He just also happened to be able to use a wall as a door with that armor.
At the side of the screen, the countdown reached ten.
A slip of energy shivered in her gut, and within the span of a few moments, everything focused. The heart rate monitor on the left slid up a few numbers as her body prepared for combat, and the clarity of the scene around her sharpened, attention darting to the slightest movement. The area slipped into her mind’s eye as her brain pieced every pertinent bit of information into a map. It was like feeling a computer amp up its frame rate and processing speed, or an engine shift gears on an uphill.
Nomiki had once described to her how it felt―how her brain and body slid fluidly into combat readiness. It was almost exactly what Karin experienced now.
