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

by K. Gorman

  “I see you’ve made some friends,” Karin said, making a gesture to Ares and the woman she’d never met, who’d looked up from the opposite side of the room and fixed her with a stare that was a touch too intense to be anything normal. “And that you’re talking to people now.”

  “Yeah, I took your advice. That’s Lenora, by the way. Project Skogul. Picked her up along the way.” At her blank, uncomprehending look, Nomiki rolled her eyes. “She’s a Valkyrie, Karin.”

  Ah. That explained the spear, she supposed. Actually, no. That didn’t explain anything. In fact, there was a lot that needed explaining.

  She cleared her throat. “Do you have a plan for getting us out of here, or were you just hoping to turn a high commander into a shishkebab and run with it?”

  “I have twenty plans for getting us out of here.” Nomiki beamed her a smile. “Twenty seven, actually. None of which will be needed, however. Fallon’s got seventeen cruisers inbound to Nova, and the planet surrendered about five minutes ago.”

  “Er… Then why are you here?”

  “Bloodsport, mostly.” With a swift jerk and a pained yell from Baik, Nomiki pulled her blade from his arm and stepped back.

  Karin’s jaw slackened. Bloodsport? “You are psychotic.”

  “Whatever feeds the soul.” Nomiki tipped her sword up to her in mock salute. “We didn’t kill anyone, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “I…” Across the room, Marc caught her gaze. He had a similar expression on his face.

  Karin shook her head and threw her hands up. “You know what? Never mind. What the hell are you doing here, other than rescuing me and making sure I don’t end up as some sort of weird, hidden-away hostage?”

  Nomiki threw her a wide grin. “We’re going to Earth.”

  Considering they were already on Nova Earth, there was little doubt as to which Earth Nomiki was referring.

  “Old Earth?” she confirmed.

  “Yes,” Nomiki said. “Old Earth.”

  Amusement laced her eyes as she watched Karin understand this. Standing there, with Baik broken against the wall, Colahary broken on the floor, and Seras the only Alliance-aligned person to have made it out of the skirmish with less than a broken bone, with not one but three genetically altered Project Eurynome survivors around her, it seemed absurd to comprehend the extent the old planet’s name affected her.

  Old Earth. The compound.

  She fixed Nomiki with a look. “What the hell?”

  After another scrutinizing glance to Baik, Nomiki sheathed her weapons and strode forward. She patted Karin’s shoulder as she joined her, then steered her toward the door.

  “Come on. Reeve’s got the Nemina on the ground outside. I’ll explain everything on the way.”

  AWAKENING

  BOOK FIVE

  Chapter One

  Ker-clunk.

  The lock made a hard, clicking sound as Nomiki jiggled it, and Karin winced at the sharp, internal whine that followed. The panel beside it lit up, flashing a red that wasn’t hard to interpret.

  “I’m not sure you can brute-force that one, Nomiki,” she observed.

  “Brute-force? I don’t know what you are talking about. I am a creature of utmost finesse.”

  The end of the sentence devolved into a grunt as Nomiki put her shoulder to the door and gave it another shove, this time hard enough to make the entire surface rattle in its frame—her genetic enhancements gave her a strength more comparable to a small car than a person—before she stepped away, hands going to her hips and jaw moving from side to side as she sized up the door and the walls surrounding it.

  With her mid-range height and compact frame, Nomiki was a near-twin to Karin. Even their facial features were similar—enough that Karin had managed to get in the door of her sister’s apartment after a wary assessment by the property manager. But Karin had blond hair to her sister’s brunette, and a paler skin tone than the bronzed, Hispanic accent that colored Nomiki’s skin.

  And, of course, Nomiki had a lot more muscle than she did.

  Karin let out a breath, turning her attention to the view over the side of the left-hand railing. Although the mid-level light of Pomona had yet to reach its peak, there was more than enough to expand in the Novan disc material above and filter down to their level. Built in a tiered pattern that anchored deep into the side of an incredibly high and sheer series of cliffs, each of Pomona’s discs was made of a special substance that had been engineered to attract and expand light sources, shrinking any non-light entities above—the many roadways, gardens, parks, arcades, and buildings—into thin, wobbly caricatures of themselves. It made for a dizzying sight, but one got used to them.

  From here, the bottom of the disc looked a bit like glass, or like the surface of the water when seen from below, but with a couple more vague layers above it. They were on the fourth level. Far from the ninth at the top, but not terrible in terms of the city—between the second and the seventh was where the majority of the population lived and worked. At night, every single disc lit up as the sky’s light level shifted. In some areas, miniature disc-forms atop both public and private venues were programmed to cycle through special light patterns at night, depending on what day it was and how the moons were in the sky above.

  Currently, the light had a slight blue tinge to its normal gold, colored by the light of both Aschere, the main sun with a Sol-standard spectrum, and Lokabrenna, which tinted more toward electric blue. It gave an eerie edge to the vista offered at the railings of their outdoor walkway, and the slight haze in the air provided a depth to the city’s tall inter-disc buildings that rose up through the levels like massive, architectural tree trunks. Most of them were boxy and practical, but many of the new constructs were turning to less-conventional builds such as spirals, geodesic sphere links, and an hourglass figure whose mirrored sides looked like they belonged more in a science fiction drama than in real life—but then, to her, raised in an isolated compound on Old Earth, most things about this city, especially its levels, looked like science fiction.

  Gods, why are we even here? Weren’t we supposed to be going to Earth?

  Technically, they were on Earth—but Nova Earth, not Old Earth. They’d simply switched cities, following a lead Carlos ‘Cookie’ Jones, their resident techhead, had found in Seirlin Biocorp’s databank while searching for clues as to her and Nomiki’s genetically engineered origins. Karin wasn’t precisely unhappy about the delay, either. Gate travel was no picnic, and, brief as the sensations lasted, she was not in a rush to experience them again.

  Even one experience of transiting the gate had been enough for her. She’d been sick for hours afterwards, dry heaving in the storage unit they’d hid in, trying to figure out which way was up. And if her skin was on backwards or not.

  But the bald face of the prefab wall in front of her, and the security of the strong metal door, called to a different sort of memory.

  Numbness crept into her chest, chased by a rush of bile at the back of her throat. She clenched her fists as the green glow of her old compound’s basement came to her. Scuffed, dirty concrete. Gleaming metal beds whose mattresses smelled of must. The sound of rippling water. Dancing light. Heady, dizzying chemicals that put her in two minds at once.

  For a second, it was like she was standing there, frozen, coldness roping through her limbs like sea ice, not quite seeing around her but feeling the chill of the air, sensing movement, tracking half-heard voices. People in lab coats handling her, touching her, modifying her, pricking her full of drugs.

  The sound came up around her, roaring.

  Fuck.

  She shoved the memories back with gritted teeth, wincing at the raw strain of emotions underneath.

  No. It was a good thing that they’d found this lead. Anything they could grasp at to get an edge on Dr. Sasha and her Shadow army was a good thing. And they needed to know as much about Seirlin Biocorp’s Eurynome Project workings as they could if they wanted to survive.


  But the promise of the lab in front of her made her want to hike back to the Nemina, race out past Amosi, and never return.

  Nomiki made an impatient noise in her throat. But when she stepped forward and her hand lifted back up to engage the handle again, Cookie, a tall, scrawny man with brown skin and a scruffy overgrowth of stubble lining his head, neck, and jaw, gave a snort from his position two meters to the left.

  “Yeah, might not keep doing that. You’ll make it lock tighter.”

  “Or I might break it.” Nomiki paused, narrowing her eyes as she turned back to regard him. “Hey, thought you didn’t know shit about locks?”

  “I know some things. And I read up on the likely specs before we got here. It’s probably a Serpens Triple. That’s what Seirlin’s contracted for other places like this. Top of the line, like all their other stuff.” He inclined his head toward the door. “I can’t believe you thought I could get through it.”

  Nomiki grunted, then made a noncommittal gesture with her hand. “Eh, you’re a hacker. It’s electronic. Your skills could bend.”

  Taking a few steps, she tipped back toward the metal-framed railing and peered down the stairway they’d just climbed. “Hey, where’s my saw-lady?”

  “Oh, fuck off.” The top of Soo-jin’s dreadlocked head popped up above floor level, a middle finger quickly rising to flip off Nomiki’s grinning face as the engineer hoisted her bag and completed the last few steps to the level. “Next time, you can carry the equipment bag, Miss Muscles.”

  A lopsided grin flashed across Nomiki’s mouth, full of teeth—and, for the first time in a long time—Karin realized, real happiness. She directed that grin briefly to Jon Patrim, another genetically-enhanced super soldier who stood to one side, then to Karin, who had been genetically manipulated to different effects, before skimming past Cookie’s form and refocusing on the door.

  She, Nomiki, and Jon—and Lenora Pliska, a former super soldier that Nomiki had briefly dragged out of retirement to rescue Karin earlier. She’d been active on Tianjin Station when the Shadow Attacks first hit, and was now returning with her newly-healed son—had all been either created or genetically modified by the same company, Seirlin Biocorp, under the Eurynome Project, a gene-sequencing side project that had turned into a child murdering in-the-name-of-science genetic experiment. It had raised herself and Nomiki through a childhood of brain-washing and definitely-illegal chemical, nano, and genetic treatments meant to push their minds and bodies beyond the limits of normal human bounds.

  It had worked.

  Nomiki’s program, named Enyo after a goddess in the ancient Greek war pantheon, had turned her into something quite beyond the normal, run-of-the-mill super soldiers that had been developed by other companies and governments.

  Jon’s program, Ares, had been similar. The only difference being he’d been modified after birth and had somewhat volunteered himself for the task, though she doubted he’d submitted himself for precisely everything that had been done to him. Especially since they’d found him lying unconscious on a slab in an illegal, experimental lab facility, possibly being prepped for insertion into the hive mind end-game project that she kept hearing about.

  Yeah, that was a thing.

  Karin’s program, Eos, after a Greek dawn goddess, had made different changes. Instead of a super-soldier, she’d become what, essentially, amounted to a human flashlight.

  Well, up until recently, anyway. When the Shadow attack had begun four months ago, started by Dr. Evangeline Sasha—yet another alumnus of the Eurynome Project’s genetic testing, though one whose powers turned toward darkness and multi-layered dimensional planes through her Chaos program—they had found out that Karin’s light powers proved quite effective at opposing the Shadows—beings that attacked and took over people through some sort of possession technique. Not only did her light hurt them, but it could also drive them out of the Lost, people who had been taken over by the Shadows and turned into zombie-like puppets.

  And, even more recently, she’d gone multidimensional herself, existing on two planes at once—both the Shadow world and the real one—when her light powers had quadrupled and she’d pushed back against Dr. Sasha’s multi-dimensional attempt to replace Nova Earth with its Shadow variant.

  Or whatever the hell it was she had been trying to do. Karin hadn’t actually spoken to her to ask questions. And, with the Eurynome Project, they had plenty of questions and so very few answers.

  Today would hopefully change that. Cookie, proving to be much more selfless than his day to day attitude alluded to, had locked himself into a month-long file sort, combing through the files his backdoor spider had retrieved when he’d set it into Seirlin’s private servers.

  Last week, he’d stumbled upon a keyword—’cradle’—and, after plunking it into his search filters, had found a gold mine. Or, rather, a hive mind.

  The hive mind.

  She’d only learned about it from Dr. Takahashi all those months ago—was it only one? Two?—but apparently, the entire point of The Eurynome Project was to grow children along specific genetic frameworks, shape them into archetypal stereotypes modeled after old deities—for purity, though she suspected the powers that had manifested after that hadn’t hurt the project’s funding—and then stuff them all into a hive mind in order to chase a ‘genesis point’ for human consciousness.

  It was about as mad-science as it got. But…

  Well, this ‘cradle’ thing was the reason they were currently spending their off-hours breaking into abandoned Seirlin laboratories and not-quite-yet swanning off through the gate to Old Earth like Nomiki had promised they would.

  That and the fact that the warship they would be riding on through the gate was still in orbital negotiations with both the local Novan Alliance government and the federal cross-system Alliance government on how, precisely, they were going to proceed. Except for a few spotty one-off trips over the past seven years, the gate had only been reopened for about four months, and contact with the Sol system had ground to a halt of static since the Shadow attacks had begun.

  There was also Alpha Centauri to think of. Going through the gate would bring them into close distance with its gate and the Gliese gate, both of them other parts of an ambitious colonization plan that had not, as yet, come to fruition. Alpha Centauri had been the first successful colony, and its innovation had allowed for the success of the Sirius system.

  It had, for all intents and purposes, been a political isolate in its more recent history, which she doubted was a good thing given the militaristic, decentralized structure they were known for. Even Fallon and the Alliance had gone testy and hostile during the start of the Shadow attacks—she didn’t want to think about how those same attacks would cause an isolated, militarized government to react, especially since the closure of the Sirius-Sol gate would have cut them off from any communications with the Sirius system, too.

  As for the other, Gliese…

  Well, that gate sat dormant. Presumably, the colony ship—which had been sent shortly after Alpha Centauri’s success—had either encountered some unknown error and gone down, or everything was okay, they had landed successfully, and they were now settling and building the connection on the end point of where the ERL bridge would open.

  No way to know until it opened—not with the probe monitoring stations destroyed in the last major war.

  The quiet from the Sol side of the Sirius gate was disconcerting. But, as far as she’d heard, Fallon was still planning to make the trip, despite the risks.

  Earth had answers, and they desperately needed them.

  Fuck. If we don’t get them…

  She shook the thought aside, one hand tensing against the feeling.

  Sasha could attack at any time. They couldn’t afford to keep working in the dark.

  Soo-jin sidled up to the door. In one smooth move, she shrugged her bag off her shoulder, let it fall down to her elbow, then lowered it the rest of the way to the floor. It made a heavy thunk on
the metal plating.

  Marc, a former Fallon Empire soldier, owner of the Nemina, and Karin’s current boyfriend, followed a few steps behind her, breaking off to stand by Karin’s side. He and Cookie were cousins, sharing a similar skin coloring—though Marc’s ran darker and richer—and facial structure, but there, the similarity ended. Marc was much taller and more athletic, whereas Cookie had a too-skinny look about him.

  Judging by the possessive way Soo-jin had clung to the bag on her way past, and the patient, long-suffering look on Marc’s face, he must have offered to carry it up the stairs at one point and been heartily rejected, Soo-jin’s recent comments to Nomiki aside. They’d come up a good ten flights of stairs—a distance that had even made Karin pause for break, and she’d been working out.

  But Soo-jin didn’t seem to be the worse for wear.

  “We’re in luck, Ladies and Gentlemen,” she said, her loud tone carrying over the platform. “Cookie’s right, for once. It is an S-Triple.”

  Karin frowned, but decided not to ask just how Soo-jin could tell that. As far as she knew, the woman was an engineer with a background in vintage scrounging, not an organized gang thief breaking through modern security systems.

  “Aren’t we cutting the meeting time with your parents a little bit close?” she asked as Soo-jin bent to unzip her bag.

  Soo-jin grunted as she pulled out her saw—a weighty, hand-held block with a jagged-toothed circular blade and a hanging armguard that didn’t look too different from the ones Karin had seen on Old Earth—and dipped back down for her faceguard, fitting it around her head with an adept hand. “We’ve got forty minutes. I think we can manage.”

  She closed the visor over her face, hefted the saw, and shoved its blade into the slim divide between the door and the wall. A series of scratching sounds snickered like clicking insects as its clamps found positions on the metal, and a second later, the snarl and scream of rending metal blasted through the air, accompanied by the shower of sparks pouring off the back of the device’s armguard. Karin snapped her hands to her ears, trying to block the horrendous shriek out, and noticed belatedly that Soo-jin’s faceguard also extended over her ears, as well.