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

by K. Gorman

  But something about this seemed off.

  If they were after her, why attack Soo-jin and Marc? And fail?

  The people she’d grown up with would not have been so sloppy.

  No, if they’d one after her, they would have come prepared to fight her sister.

  Cold fear struck her as her mind spun through that thought.

  Suns, is Nomiki dead?

  Was that what she’d meant in the dream when she’d talked about surviving?

  After a few seconds, she realized that she had stopped breathing. She gave herself a small shake and forced the panic back.

  Focus, she told herself. You don’t know anything yet. Nomiki is probably just fine.

  Few things could trouble her sister. If Karin had managed to beat the Shadow off, Nomiki had likely done the same with just her little finger.

  Soo-jin glanced to the corner of the room where her knife still lay on the floor. Combined with what she assumed would be two blast-marks in Marc’s cabin, that was all the physical evidence they had that the attack had ever taken place. The Shadow things, whatever they were, left no trace of themselves behind.

  She shivered.

  “Did they... go into you guys’ heads?” Soo-jin said. “Like, with their fingers?”

  Karin nodded, but Marc shook his head. “Mine didn’t get close enough. What do you mean? What did it do?”

  “It pinned me down.” Soo-jin’s jaw muscles worked for a few seconds. She gave a hard swallow before she spoke again. “I thought it was—you know—but then its hand came up. It went through my fucking face.”

  “Me, too,” Karin said. “I think it was going for the brain, if that makes sense.”

  Soo-jin’s expression twisted. “I wish it didn’t.”

  “How did they get on, anyway?” Marc said. “We’re in space. No one saw anything earlier?”

  “I didn’t. I suppose it’s possible they hid somewhere, though.”

  Karin’s stomach did a little flip. Was it possible this whole incident was due to something more normal? Something not connected to her screwed up past? She didn’t think the Shadows had been on board before, but it was possible. Their ship was not the most secure thing in the galaxy, and they largely ignored it when they were out scrounging. Not unthinkable that someone could by-pass the lock and sneak on board.

  But it wasn’t a large ship. And—well, they were Shadow people.

  Things that, by all known science, did not exist.

  Marc nodded. “We should check the logs, see if the cameras caught anything. We did all see the same thing, right? Shadow people?”

  “Yeah. Shadow people.” Soo-jin shivered. “At least, that’s what I saw. Karin?”

  “Same,” she said. “But mine didn’t disappear.”

  Two heads snapped her way. “What?”

  “It went out of the room. I was chasing it when...” She looked to Soo-jin. “Well, I heard you.”

  “Shit.” Marc brought his gun up. “What happened to it?”

  She swallowed hard, tightening her grip on the helmet. “It went toward Cargo One.”

  The first thing they did was turn on every single light on the ship. Every one, including the flood bulbs embedded into the hull and the safety globes inside the waste management tank.

  Then they checked the feeds.

  “Sol’s child,” Soo-jin said. “I can’t believe we got it on camera.”

  Karin shivered. The Shadow appeared in the frames taken ten minutes ago—about a minute before her fight in Soo-jin’s room. So far, it was the only footage they had of the creatures. Earlier recordings showed nothing on how the things had managed to get into their rooms, nor how they’d even gotten on the ship. They’d need to review the day’s footage more carefully, of course, rather than the brief skim they’d just finished—but she had a feeling they would come up empty on that front.

  “Cargo’s the darkest place on the ship,” Marc mused aloud. “Maybe it’s looking for more even ground? Given its… properties.”

  “It’s also the creepiest place on the ship,” Soo-jin said. “Can we add that into its properties?”

  Karin frowned, ignoring Soo-jin to add to Marc’s speculation.

  “It didn’t look like it was trying to hide when I saw it. Some of the light did seem to hurt it, though.” Careful, she thought, keeping her gaze steady on the screen. Don’t give away too much about the light. “Can we go in with extra light sources? Cave flares, perhaps?”

  Unlike on some other ships she’d been on, they kept their gear in their rooms rather than near the exit. And she happened to know that the cave flares were stored in a box next to the refrigerator.

  “Hell yes, we can,” Marc said. “I’ve got a diving lamp in my room, too.”

  “I have fifty grams of raw magnesium,” Soo-jin said.

  They both swung their heads to look at her, their eyebrows arched.

  She shrugged. “I was drunk, and SellNet was up.”

  Although they seemed to have fallen back into their normal spirits, Karin could feel the unease beneath it all. Soo-jin’s hands still trembled—as did her bottom lip when she spoke—and she fretted with the bottom edge of her tank top. Marc was a rigid, tense presence behind her. Her own muscles felt weak and shaky, and slow to respond. She found herself double-tapping commands into the computer. Mundane tasks were taking almost twice as long to complete.

  Her jaw tensed as her gaze returned to the Shadow on the screen.

  Everything about it jarred at her senses. Nothing about it felt possible.

  “I think we should take a camera with us,” she said. “If we can get a better picture...” She indicated the still shot with a vague wave of her fingers.

  “Agreed. I want to know more about this. Someone must have seen something like this.” Marc’s fingers dug into the top of her chair, gripping it hard. “We can’t be alone in this.”

  But that is exactly what we are. Alone was what space was.

  “I have an old vlogger set-up in my room. It records decently,” Soo-jin said.

  “We’ll use that, plus my night scope, then. Just in case.” Marc huffed, then took a big breath and pushed himself back from the chair. “Right. We stay as a group—no one goes off alone. I’ll bring my blaster just in case, but... Let’s try the climbing axes first, shall we?”

  Five minutes later, suited up and hefting a climbing ax instead of her helmet, Karin followed Marc and Soo-jin to the back of the ship.

  Her breath fogged up the visor in front of her, quickly dissipating into the suit’s enviro controls. Both she and Soo-jin lumbered forward on the metal floor, with Marc tip-toeing ahead of them, ice pick in one hand and blaster in the other. His lack of suit made her uncomfortable, but he had insisted, giving her some strategic military explanation about flexibility, speed, and small spaces.

  To be fair, he did look formidable, the way he stalked down the corridor with nary a sound. She hadn’t really noticed just how muscular and proficient the man was until now.

  When they reached Cargo One, its lights were mysteriously dark. The muscles in Marc’s jaw worked, eyes narrowing as he assessed it. Neither she nor Soo-jin had his military experience, and it was his ship, which made him the default leader of the team. Judging by his no-nonsense expression and practical movements, this wasn’t his first time leading.

  He jerked his head. “Soo-jin, you take left. Karin, right. There’s nothing alive back there except that thing, so attack anything that moves. I don’t care if you damage the crates.”

  They glanced at each other, their features lit by their helmets’ under lighting, then fell into step. Karin hefted her climbing ax as they moved toward the door.

  It hissed as it opened.

  Cargo bays were not known for their aesthetics. Their practicality relied on them being as sparse and empty as possible, with the exception of the holds and ties that kept the cargo snug in case of zero gravity. In this, the Nemina’s cargo compartments excelled. Made to detach
in a supply drop, the compartment’s metal sides rose up in a long, brutish rectangle only a shade smaller than system-standard shipping crates—so about twice her height and five times as long. Straps and netting attached to the walls with clips and metal jaws that could be levered tighter with one of the tools they kept close to the bay’s inner door. Black scuffs and skid marks marred the walls and floor, evidence of a lifetime of use.

  At least, that’s how it had looked when Karin had loaded it earlier.

  Now, stuffed to the gills with containment crates and with the lights off?

  It was a cramped, pitch-black maze.

  Soo-jin’s light bounced off the nearest container, gleaming harshly back to them and sending shadows skittering back across the crates and walls. Karin’s heart jumped at the movement, the image of the Shadow person flashing across her mind. She lifted Soo-jin’s camera in her left hand, using its low-light abilities to scan the rest of the room.

  A heavy click sounded behind her as Marc tried the manual switch.

  “Power’s on, but the lights are dead,” he said. “I’m guessing it’s in here.”

  Even if their camera feeds had confirmed that the thing hadn’t left cargo, there had still been a chance that it had moved elsewhere. It did seem like a supernatural thing, after all—and who knew how it had gotten onto the ship in the first place? The cameras certainly hadn’t caught any of the things going into their rooms.

  A chilling thought hit her.

  What if they’d been attracted to them, somehow?

  She was starting to reconsider all the ghost stories she’d ever heard.

  If this wasn’t connected to her fucked up past and mutant powers, then what was it?

  The path was so narrow that they had to move in single file. She took the lead with the camera, and Soo-jin came second with their main light. As Marc moved in last, they heard him swear.

  “Sol this, I’m using my blaster.”

  A rustle and a click sounded as he exchanged weapons. Despite their proximity to the hull, a small sense of relief whispered through her. Blasters were, for all their hull-breaking capabilities, very effective weapons. All he needed was one shot, and the creature would be done. If the thing attacked her anything like it had earlier, Marc would have ample opportunity to shoot it before it did whatever it wanted to do to her.

  A shape moved in the corner of her eye, and she snapped her head around.

  She stopped dead.

  The Shadow stood beyond the next crate, half-hidden by the darkness between the stacks—but its outline was obvious, unaffected by the shifts of shade as Soo-jin swung the flashlight’s beam over in its direction.

  Like watching light skip over oil, but with none of the shine. A piece of space, cut out from reality and given form.

  Two sharp intakes of breath sounded behind her. The others had seen it, too.

  Her heart hammered. As she stared, the creature seemed to bring its head up. Its not-eyes opened, their gaze pricking an anxious trail up her skin as it studied her.

  Then it lifted its long, slender arm toward her. Its claw-like fingers extended like jagged, whispery cuts of black cloth, reaching across the space between them.

  In her mind, she heard, as if a thought:

  Eos.

  The blaster cracked. Marc shot it in the head.

  And the camera caught it all perfectly.

  “So, definitely not a mass hallucination,” Marc said with a dry tone.

  They huddled on the bridge, once again staring at the computer feed. Unlike the grainy image from the security monitor, Soo-jin’s camera had caught the encounter in high definition, shooting simultaneously in both low-light and night-vision modes.

  Which meant that the thing had been caught in all its black, shadowy glory.

  It looked like a demon—like the Death Man that had haunted folklore in the settlements, or the Night Terror supposedly made from the darkness between the stars. Both had been discounted now, with alleged evidence and sightings attributed to the faulty equipment of the previous century.

  But Soo-jin’s camera wasn’t faulty, and neither were they.

  “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping for a while,” Soo-jin remarked. “Not without a nightlight, at least.”

  Marc snorted. “I don’t think any of us will be sleeping anytime soon. It’d be a better idea to go in rotation, anyway, at least for a while. Monitor the situation. We still don’t know how they got on here.”

  “Let’s record our sleep, too,” Soo-jin said. “If they do come back, we can get them on camera.”

  “Twenty-four hours in a cycle, three of us—eight hours each?” Marc lifted his head. “That works out just about perfect, doesn’t it?”

  “We can still get our beauty sleep.”

  The two of them fell into silence, attention pulled back to the screen. It was like a black hole, that way, its unnaturalness screaming to some instinctual subset in their brain. Even though it was a still image, she got the feeling it was looking at her.

  Her skin prickled with a sudden cold.

  “Did anyone else have a weird dream before this happened?” Soo-jin said.

  Karin gave her a sharp look, her earlier unease stiffening her spine. “Like what?”

  “I dunno. There were some kind of stone ruins there. Real old.”

  “Were they in a field?” Marc asked. “Lots of flowers? Stars?”

  Her stomach did a slow flip. Despite herself, her jaw slackened.

  Soo-jin caught the look on her face. “You, too?”

  “Yes. Flowers, stars, ruins.” She shut her mouth, then looked down, her brow furrowing as she thought hard.

  They saw the ruins, too? The same ruins?

  That meant it was all connected—and definitely connected to her past.

  She knew exactly where those ruins were. She’d left them behind on Old Earth seven years ago, on the other side of the Gate.

  Was this whole thing one elaborate trap?

  She let out a slow breath, trying to act normal.

  I’ll have to be careful.

  Fortunately, she didn’t need to say anything. Marc voiced her thought for her.

  “What does it mean?”

  His brow had also furrowed. She had a feeling it would be a common trait for them over the next few days.

  “Right now, all it means is that we had the same dream, and then we all got attacked.” Soo-jin shrugged, then leaned back to catch Karin’s eye. “How long ‘til the next relay?”

  “Two and a half cycles. It may not have news yet.”

  “Well, I’m hoping it will.” Soo-jin yawned, then stretched her arms over her head, her knuckles cracking. “So, shall we figure out these shifts?”

  Chapter Five

  Back in her room, Karin breathed a sigh of relief. Soo-jin had pulled first sleep, and Marc was sitting in on watch now, giving her the perfect opportunity to slip away and deal with the giant mess she’d made of her cabin.

  The droplets of light hadn’t gone away, only dulled in their luminosity where they’d splashed the walls. They looked almost like milk, with a slight moon-edged, silver tint that made them gleam like quicksilver when she activated them.

  Her sister used to make fun of her, say she was worse than a teenage boy.

  When Karin called to it, the light sparked back to life. Motes of it reappeared in the air, suspended like dust and party glitter—or like crystals of ice on days of extreme cold. They pulsed, shimmering in and out of sight.

  She lifted her fingers and pulled the light back into herself. It gave a warm sensation as it returned, flitting through and vanishing within her skin. She’d never understood how it worked—only that the lights were, somehow, a part of her. The scientists back in the compound had never given her an explanation for it, nor for what her sister could do.

  Instead, they had called them nymphs, or fairies. Sprites.

  Now those were terms Nomiki had bucked with haste.

  Karin’s jaw tightened.
Nomiki. What had she been doing in her dream? As far as she remembered, dream manipulation of any sort had not been one of her powers. She rubbed the spot on her arm that Nomiki had cut. Then, grabbing the netlink from her shelf, she turned and walked back to the hall, slapping the door panel to make it open.

  Marc glanced up from across the hall. They’d programmed Soo-jin’s door to remain open, partly for safety, but mostly so that she wouldn’t be constantly woken from it opening and closing. He sat just inside, his back to the corner, with a netlink propped up in his hands. He’d eschewed the blaster for a crowbar, which lay at an angle across the crate next to him.

  Karin peeked in, looking toward Soo-jin’s bed.

  “She’s asleep,” he said softly. “Do you need something?”

  “Company, mostly.” She shivered. “Not sure I want to be alone for a while.”

  He nodded. “I’ve got the same feeling.”

  Looking around, she spotted another stool already sitting next to the door. She stepped around the threshold and eased herself down onto it, glancing around the room. The lights had been turned down—given the most obvious property of the Shadow people, they hadn’t wanted to turn them completely off—which gave the area a subdued ambiance. Pictures and posters decorated the metal walls, a mix of indie bands and advertisements for the net-fiction stories Soo-jin followed. Other paraphernalia filled the gaps between them, along with odd things she had found on her scrounges. The frame of an old computer was stuck to the wall by her bedside, its circuits visible in the empty indent where the screen would have sat, some of it modified with neogel and glitter that caught the light in a softly-glowing, splatter-punk motif. Across the room hung the framed parts of an old watch, each carefully positioned against a rough cream matte, Soo-jin’s telltale signature visible in an archaic name chop in the bottom right corner.

  Karin’s gaze lingered on a series of pictures taped to the side of Soo-jin’s locker. These seemed more personal. The semi-gloss paper looked like it had come from one of the photo booths that still occupied a few spaceports in the system, and, though she couldn’t make out the subject matter, she could tell that the pictures lacked the professionalism of the others in the room.