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

by K. Gorman

  The clicking started again in the other hall. Closer now.

  “Eeeeeeeeeooohhsssssssss.”

  It couldn’t pronounce the ‘s’s properly. Or anything else, for that matter. Karin wasn’t even sure how it was speaking in the first place—did Shadows have mouths? With the way their black material melded into itself, whatever features they had weren’t visible, at least to human eyes. She’d always felt they’d had eyes, though. And they always turned their heads to ‘look’ at their prey.

  All of which helped her exactly not at all right now.

  The light fluctuated at the corner, the same way it would if a moth had decided to flap around the bulb—the Shadow getting closer?

  “Os. Os. Eos.”

  A cut of darkness across the off-white floor confirmed it. The Shadow’s shadow slid toward the wall, the movement smooth and unhurried. In another few seconds, it’d be on them.

  Shit. Karin stared hard at it. A glance back showed the next junction was more than eight meters away behind them, and none of the doors worked. They’d never make it.

  A supersonic whine sounded as Soo-jin tugged the safety off the blaster and it warmed up its energy pack.

  At the end of the hall, the Shadow stopped. A low, grumbling sound gurgled through the place, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  Then, the sound of running footsteps and a heavy, jerky breath.

  The Shadow’s shadow twitched, then roared, the sound going not just through the air, but across the frontal lobe of her mind, as well. A split-second later, both Nomiki and the Shadow sailed into view, her on top with one of her knives buried in its neck.

  She landed with a grunt and rolled, coming up with a skip and a jump before she hit the wall. Behind her, the Shadow was already disintegrating into wisps.

  Soo-jin stood. “God damn, girl.”

  Nomiki’s head turned their way with a jerk, a little too fast for an entirely human action—part of her ability at work—then she seemed to focus on something in the air, listening to the environment around them instead of giving them her direct attention.

  With a little shake of her head, she rolled her shoulders and turned toward them, her walk taking on a more casual, human appearance. “I’ve been looking for you guys forever. Where did you go?”

  “We were hiding in the closet like a couple of wusses. Did you see the unconscious guy?”

  “Yep. Program Ares.” Nomiki snorted. “Let’s not wake him up.”

  “Yeah. With a name like that, he sounds like a total douche.” Soo-jin pushed the blaster’s safety back on and dropped it into its holster. Then she sucked in a large breath and let it out slowly, arms crossing over her chest. “So. Are we going to talk about the talking Shadow, or pretend it never happened?”

  “That’s what, the third time this has happened?” Nomiki caught the confirmation on Karin’s face and nodded. “Yeah, we should probably talk about it.”

  “And about why it knows my project name.”

  “Has anyone heard them say anything else?” Soo-jin asked. “I mean, it may just be me, but it seems they have a kind of single-focus.”

  “Yeah, it’s weird. But let’s talk later. We need to find a way out.” Nomiki tipped her head back toward the other hall where she had come from. “I found more passages over this way. Might be a way out.”

  “There’s exit signs all over this bitch, but I ain’t seen any actual exit doors yet.”

  “Yeah, most of them lead back to the tunnels, or over here.”

  “Have you seen Marc?” Karin asked. “And what happened back at the tunnel? Did anyone else get out?”

  “Tunnel was a shit show,” Nomiki said, giving her right-hand knife a test swing at her side. “Most of Brindon’s brightest went down there. A couple managed to keep up when I cut my way out, but…” The muscles in her jaw tightened for a moment. “Well, we lost contact with each other a short while after. And I lost the last two when a bunch of Shadows dropped on us from the ceiling.”

  The… ceiling? Karin couldn’t help but glance up. Here, the ceiling was less than a meter above her head. She could touch it if she jumped high enough. But before, when it had just been her and Soo-jin and they were coming out of the AV closet…

  Had there been Shadows up there? And, if there had been, why hadn’t they attacked?

  Hell, why hadn’t this one attacked, either? With its creepy moans of Eos, Eos, it had clearly known they were there. So what was its gig?

  The last talking one, back on the bridge of the Nemina, hadn’t attacked, either. Neither had Christops’, for that matter. And hadn’t there been another one? During her stint as a prisoner on Caishen? Hard to say, considering she’d been so low on sleep as to be hallucinating.

  Karin gave herself a little shake. Whatever. She could get answers later. Right now, they had to get out and survive.

  “Any idea where Sasha is?”

  “No. And she hasn’t done that weird, bodiless-talking-to-me shit since the tunnel, either. But shh.” Nomiki tipped her head toward the upcoming junction. “Time to be quiet and kill things. By which I mean you be quiet and I’ll do the killing.”

  The section’s modernization took on another level as they passed into an area of what looked like labs and offices. On one side of the bright hallway, specialty labs housing containment units sat behind a triple-pane of clear glass. Either the facility had some excellent cleaning robots in its budget—odd, considering the mess they could make of weird lab equipment—or had managed to keep its janitorial staff un-Lost and content to work for the whole time, because there wasn’t a spot of dirt in the room. A brown-tiled floor, stained in a clouded pattern, covered the ground and made a quarter-meter backsplash up the walls, meeting drywall that, contrary to the off-white theme of the rest of the facility, had been tinted a light green color. A sign above the door read, ‘The Forest Lab.’

  Looking through the glass, the only trees Karin saw were painted on—two ubiquitous fir silhouettes standing in the corner—but the transport pods directly below them caught her attention. Five of them, all dormant except for the one at the end, which pulsed with a subtle light on its lid.

  All three women looked at each other.

  “Yep, going in.” Nomiki bypassed the lock with a wedge of her knife and pried it open. The door stuttered back as if surprised to see her.

  A shrill beep sounded when they entered, more warning than alarm. It stopped when Soo-jin slid the door back into place, and they heard the sigh of gas hissing through the air. For a second, they tensed, not daring to breathe. Then, when nothing more happened, they relaxed. A pull of static tickled her skin as the room got back up to pressure.

  They gathered around the pod and looked in the small window.

  “Huh. She’s kind of cute,” Soo-jin said after a bit, tilting her face up to catch Karin’s eyes. “Clone or daughter?”

  “Clone is my guess.” Nomiki snorted, glancing around at the other, dormant pods. “I’m also guessing they didn’t make another one of me.”

  Karin flashed her a grin. “They made Ares, didn’t they?”

  Nomiki’s expression soured. “Great. I got replaced by a muscle-head.”

  “Probably didn’t want another troublemaker. Or a repeat of what happened to the Earth compound,” she said. “They’d have to add an unhealthy dose of Xanax to the treatments to keep another one of you in line.”

  “It’d take more than a load of Xanax to keep me from sniffing through their bullshit. Besides—” she nodded back to the face in the window. “I notice they made another one of you.”

  “Probably thought I was safer,” Karin said.

  “Well, they’re wrong. You’re no dummy.”

  “No, but I was gullible. And afraid. And passive. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have gone right along with them. Let them feed me right through whatever brain-eating shit they had in quaternary stage. I saw through their bullshit, but went along with it, anyway.”

  �
��No, you didn’t.”

  “I did. Trust me. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this.”

  A small silence took the room. She continued to stare at the small face through the glass, feeling Nomiki’s eyes on her.

  After a while, her sister dropped her stare. The side of the pod gave a metallic thump as her knee bumped into it. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t a dumb, gullible kid person who got those scissors for me.”

  Karin hid the wince as the memory came back to her. Shortly before her tenth birthday, Nomiki had been banned from handling scissors outside of school projects. For very good reason. An afternoon of blade modification later, and she’d had her second set—the first set had been what had got her banned—of dual knives. Karin had a vivid image of her standing in the compound hallway, the body of a fallen guard in front of her, blood slicked up her arm and smeared across the nightgown she’d worn to keep suspicion down.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll save her. Or, well, Brindon will.” Nomiki gave her a lazy half-smile. “It’s nice having resources at your back.”

  “What if those resources turn on us?” Karin asked.

  “Then we turn on them,” Nomiki said, the response automatic. “Simple as that.” She glanced at Soo-jin. “And you didn’t hear anything.”

  Soo-jin raised her hands. “Hey, I’m the most anti-establishmentarianist person there probably is on this crew.”

  “Good.”

  “Plus, you could kick my ass.”

  “There is that. But, as a friend, you get a free pass for me to kick the ass of anyone you want. I enjoy doing that, so it’s a win-win for everyone.”

  “Everyone except the person whose ass is getting kicked.”

  “True. But we probably don’t like them, so it doesn’t matter. Now—” Nomiki tilted her head back. “Let’s go.”

  Another hallway took them past more labs and offices. No more active pods, and the computer they checked also did not have access. After that, the offices appeared to have been converted into makeshift, haphazard storage rooms. One held a load of stacked chairs and folding tables; another had heaped its shelves with older, cast-off lab equipment. Paper labels with notes like ‘broken’ or ‘missing part’ or ‘cord fried’ were tagged on their fronts, some of them with a thin layer of dust.

  They encountered a Shadow in one of these rooms. It didn’t try to talk, and Nomiki ended it with a stab to the face. The next two, encountered by surprise in the hallway, died in a similar fashion.

  Down the next hall, they spotted another two exit signs glowing in the wall beyond the next junction.

  Their arrows faced each other.

  Soo-jin spoke first. “Well, okay, then. What the fuck?”

  “Yep.”

  “Any chance they’ve been pumping hallucinogenics into the air here? This is a crazy science lab, right? With extra fucking emphasis on the crazy?”

  “It’s possible,” Nomiki said. “They did use some in our treatment programs.”

  Soo-jin shot her a disbelieving look. “Seriously?”

  “Yep.” Nomiki slid her knife back into its sheath, securing it with a small loop. “Don’t remember the hallucinations being quite so tame, though. Karin?”

  “I get flashbacks. Takahashi was there.” She fixed her sister with an even look. “We should ask him. He’s the brain guy.”

  Nomiki made a tsch sound with her tongue, then bent to adjust a strap on her leg. “You can ask him. I want nothing to do with him.”

  Which was why her sister had been coming down to his holding cell and glaring at him through the windows five times a day. And wasn’t allowed in. And wouldn’t answer direct questions about him.

  “Maybe I will,” Karin said. “After we get out of here.” She tilted her head. “And what is up with those? Just a coincidence? Are we even going the right way?”

  “I have no fucking idea. Everything is crazy train.”

  “I only ask because it feels like we keep going farther in rather than out.”

  Nomiki held up her arms in defensive, mock-harmlessness. “Hey man, don’t blame me for bad building design. It’s got fire code infractions written all over it.”

  “I’m not even sure we’re in the same building anymore,” Soo-jin said. “The place feels too big. Could be that we’ve been wandering across multiple levels, but I didn’t think the place was that big from the outside. Certainly didn’t look like it on the overhead drone.”

  “And where did everyone go? Apart from Mr. Sleepy and my twin, we haven’t seen anyone.” Karin shook her head. “I’m not crazy, right? Our squad was wandering around as Lost after the fight, right? Shouldn’t we have run into one of them by now?”

  “They all wandered in the same direction,” Nomiki said. “I tailed them for a bit before I decided to go find you. They were slow and unorganized, like normal Lost—kept closing doors on each other—but definitely heading in the same direction.”

  Karin waited a beat. “And… which direction would that be?”

  Nomiki pointed to the right. “Over that way.”

  Soo-jin lifted her eyebrows. “After turning down all these random hallways, you still know? Your sense of direction must be amazing.”

  Nomiki shot her a grin. “Just one of my natural talents.” Then, on a more sober note, she continued. “I’ve also noticed that the hallways are getting shorter. Tapering a bit on the long side. I’ve been moving us in a decent zig-zag, but it’s getting shorter and shorter.”

  Karin frowned. “That’s not what the overhead drone caught. It’s supposed to be a square.”

  “It’s more than ten meters out on the long side, by my estimate. So, either we’ve moved to a completely different building somehow, or…”

  Karin waited for her to finish her thought. When she didn’t, her frown deepened. “You think it’s part of her powers?”

  “Maybe. It would tie into what Takahashi told us about Eurynome—you know, that ‘genesis point’ shit? We don’t know what Sasha’s program was, but… genesis means beginning, or start. What kind of beings would you want to tap into if you wanted to know about genesis?”

  A leaden feeling settled in her gut as she realized what Nomiki was saying. Suddenly, she noticed the sweat on her palms. The wired, almost frantic wave of her brain as a part of the puzzle clicked into place. As the implications began to spin, a light, jittery sensation took to her bones.

  “Creation gods. I would tap into creation gods. Chaos, Shiva, Enki, Izanagi, that Celtic bull…” She shook. “Sol’s child.”

  “Well… not quite Sol’s child. But the others…” Nomiki had done her research, too, right along when Karin had been doing hers. “I don’t know what Sasha’s program was, but if she’s modeled off of one of the creator deities, then… well, it would make sense that she could create, right?”

  Karin frowned. “Create what? Shadows? We’ve already seen her do that.”

  “Well, yes, that, but she’s been alive for at least fifty years and the Shadows have not, so I have to assume that something changed recently—but this place is older than a few months. Think about the stuff we’ve found. That’s years, at least. So she has been up to something, not just the Shadows.”

  Karin scoffed. “Maybe all her up to somethings were just practice for making the Shadows. You don’t know what—”

  “Hey,” Soo-jin said. “You said the dimensions are off, right? Building dimensions?”

  “Yes. By ten meters, at the start. Conical design rather than rectangular.”

  “And the exit signs have been running us around. None have led to an exit yet, anyway.”

  “They’ve doubled back three times now.”

  “And our radios don’t work. Computers in here don’t have an outside network.” Soo-jin made a vague, frustrated gesture. “Even my netlink isn’t connecting, and it’s set to satellites.”

  “They cut right after that wall went into place.”

  “Which means that Sasha’s separated this place, somehow. In
a way that makes all signals disconnect. I mean, someone can do that with the right equipment, but given how freaky this building is turning out to be, and how freaky you people are—no offense—then I’d say it’s definitely some kind of weird power at work. Why go through the trouble, otherwise?”

  “There is no reason,” Nomiki agreed.

  Soo-jin narrowed her eyes. “You’ve already figured it out, haven’t you?”

  “I have a working hypothesis,” Nomiki said. “But I wanted to see if Karin came to the same conclusion.”

  Soo-jin snorted. “Spit it out.”

  “All right.” Nomiki shrugged. “I think Sasha created some sort of pocket dimension. We entered it through the tunnel, when we still had reception, then her wall went up and everything cut off. That’s when the dimensions went all… fwoopy.”

  A small silence passed through them. Karin lifted an eyebrow. “Fwoopy?”

  “That’s the technical term. Very technical. Snockered is also good.”

  Another small silence. Then, Soo-jin broke it in with her usual blunt, foul-mouthed flare.

  “Well, fuck us, then. Does that mean there’s no exit?”

  “Not unless she opens one.” Nomiki frowned. “Well, actually, I have no idea. It’s not like I run through pocket dimensions every day.”

  “Yeah, I hear they’re more a weekend sport,” Soo-jin said, tone rich with raw sarcasm. “Video games and movies usually make them have a puzzle to get through. A challenge to surpass. One exit. I expect that logic won’t hold up here, though.”

  “No. Sasha’s neither stupid enough, nor sadistic enough, to add that in. If this is a pocket dimension she controls, or something of the like, then we’ll probably have to go talk to her if we want out.”

  The third small silence ran the longest. Karin exchanged several looks with each of them.

  Then she laughed.

  “Well,” she said, echoing Soo-jin’s earlier words. “Fuck us.”

  Chapter Twenty

  As they went on, Karin kept careful track of their surroundings, suddenly hyper-aware of every sight, sound, and sensation. If this were a pocket dimension, did that mean the hallways weren’t real, or was she confusing the terms? With the exception of ERL gate mechanics, which still went well over her comprehension level, all her mythological research and obscure net browsing had not included information on other dimensions or dimensional boundaries.