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

by K. Gorman

  Well, most people just used floaters. They could be installed on pretty much any surface, and most buildings, this one included, were already kitted out for them. With their careful movements and enclosed gravity generators, they were a solid, predictable, reliable way of moving things, following predetermined track sensors up and down the sides of buildings that were usually stuck onto the surface by someone either using a hoverbike or rappelling down, or by an AI drone. It made a funny sight—like seeing a series of elevators, or monorail cars, sluggish and slowly crawling their way up and down—but they were predictable. Reliable.

  But slow. And, as Soo-jin went up to the wall to examine the dent further, sliding one hand along its edge, Karin pushed her own light farther out. The floor, a shinier, more linoleum-like version of pre-fab than the matte wall, gleamed back at her, a number of scratches shining like lain spiders’ silk in its surface. Others scuffed deep in black smudges.

  Okay, so they were in a hurry when they left.

  She frowned. That, in itself, was not unusual. If the latest statement Seirlin had fed them was true, any branch of the Eurynome Project had been forced to close when she and her sister had made their escape seven years ago—a logical path, given that Nomiki had quite literally killed their way out with the two separated and sharpened halves of a pair of stolen scissors and was, given her program, prone to deep-seated vengeance.

  But something about that didn’t sit well with her.

  For a company that had literally funded trillions of credits into a project—billions of Earth dollars—and had clearly profited on the research that had come out of it and planned to continue profiting on people like Lenora, who had been raised on the Sirius-side of the program and indentured into a private militia before her contract was up, and body modists like Jon and all of the clients Takahashi had served during his tenure at Seirlin Genomics, she doubted an Old Earth facility breach would have shut down operations that quickly, even if it had been Nomiki doing the breaking.

  She and Nomiki had gone underground after. As had the others who had escaped, she suspected. Not on vengeance sprees. And they had actively avoided Seirlin clinics and hospitals until Nomiki had re-activated her vengeance side this year and gone off looking for them.

  Still—seven years of distance. And more than seventy years’ worth of lucrative project data on how to induce super humans through gene mutation.

  A company like Seirlin wouldn’t just throw that away.

  Other bits and pieces of the rushed move came to them as they moved on—a half-pair of broken Eisei grabbers left next to a doorway, the long smear of black on the wall that she guessed came from one of the moving rigs, the cut-off ends of moving straps lying on the floor like flat plastic fingers. The office windows flashed the glare of their light back at them, their panes dust-streaked, but surprisingly clear. Some of the doors were ajar, and the darkness around their edges felt like it was crawling under her skin. Her shoulders gave a small tremor, and the tendons in the back of her hand clenched as she fought the urge to run.

  It felt like she’d taken a dive into another world. She didn’t belong there. The darkness stuck to her like oil, slick and clammy against her skin, each finger of it a reminder of the touch of a Shadow—the way they got under a person’s skin and seemed to reach inside the flesh. Each step she took was stiff, stilted. Back rigid and throat closed. Fighting the urge to turn and walk away. Hells, if it weren’t for Marc standing next to her, she would have—consequences be damned.

  She wanted nothing other than to walk straight back through the broken door and never look back.

  But Marc stuck close to her. His reflection in the windows, next to hers, was a calming presence. He was quiet, but attentive, his face concentrated, protective. Looking out for her.

  Seeing that made it better.

  He made it better.

  Soo-jin’s light lingered on one room’s window. When Karin peered in with her, she only saw the glint of the plastic wrapper on a set of disposable cups and the dead black of a holoscreen terminal—broken, she assumed—inlaid into the desk surface at first.

  But then, a larger machine at the back caught her eye, along with the hospital bed next to it. A metal cart was parked by its side, as well as what appeared to be a small, empty metal bookshelf.

  “You know, I don’t think it’s been seven years since they moved house,” Soo-jin said, her voice quiet and low so that the others, farther ahead, would not hear.

  “No?” Marc asked, pressing himself closer to squint through the glass.

  Karin gave the room beyond a flat stare. Wouldn’t surprise me.

  “No.” Soo-jin nodded to the machine in the corner. “I’m guessing that one’s broken—why else would they leave it here?—but I was at the hospital three years ago for some radiometry tests, and the technician there was gushing about the new machine and how it basically made all other radiometry detectors obsolete because of its extra layer of detection or whatnot. And being the good little happy tech nerds that we were, she and I went right through its workings while we were waiting for the test to complete. And even from here, I can tell that’s the same machine.”

  Karin snorted. “You mean Seirlin, the company that’s been torturing and gene-splicing and murdering children, lied to us? Color me shocked.”

  “No shit, right?” Soo-jin shook her head, disgust curling her upper lip away from her teeth as she made to step around Karin and head for the door to the room.

  She paused halfway, though, a frown stopping her in her tracks. She caught Karin’s gaze with hers, a hard-to-read expression on her face.

  In the next second, Karin found herself engulfed in a sudden, one-armed hug, with Soo-jin pulling her in tight and the equipment bag making them both list toward the wall.

  Soo-jin’s hand patted her on the back. “They’re gonna pay for what they did. All of them. And after all this shit is over, you’ll get a front-row seat as they go down in flames.”

  Karin wasn’t quite sure what to make of the gesture—hugs hadn’t factored into her childhood past the age of five, what with the compound’s arm’s length treatment of them, and Nomiki had never been the hugging type. Even she and Marc, despite all the cuddling, didn’t full-on hug a whole lot.

  For a second, she just stood there, stiff as a board, unsure what to do. Then, slowly, she reached her hands up and slipped them around Soo-jin’s back, relaxing into the gesture.

  “And a shitload of money,” Soo-jin added. “Make sure you get a shitload of money from them.”

  At that, she laughed. “What?”

  Soo-jin pulled away, the glow of Karin’s light casting up to catch her face at an awkward angle, eyes dark, earnest, and gleaming as she took hold of Karin’s shoulders and squeezed. “I’m serious. Once word of this spreads, there ain’t gonna be a lawyer team in the system who isn’t lining up to represent you against Seirlin.”

  Karin gave her a weak smile. “Thanks, Soo-jin.”

  “No problem. Just looking out for my numero uno.”

  A series of muffled shouts, one of them definitely including all three of their names, came from around the corner where the others had disappeared, sounding distant.

  “Ah, looks like they found something.” Soo-jin paused, her expression changing into a squint as the shouts turned into a distinct set of swears. “Or maybe they didn’t find something.” She gave Karin a pat, then broke away, heading back toward the door of the room. “You go on. I’ll get this serial number.”

  She found several dormant life pods tucked to the side of the next corridor, an apparent overflow from the room full of them just beyond the next doorway. The shadows behind them gradually softened and swung around as the soft ball of light that hovered by her shoulder passed by. The rounded glass on the pods gleamed with a hardened, more-industrial quality than that of the windows along the wall, and the liquid inside reflected back a dank green color. Like in the water machine in the reception, a dusting of green-brown algae
lined their fronts, likely from the set of high windows along the top of the hallway. They were dirty, almost completely covered in grime, but a smattering of light came through.

  Marc kept pace with her. As she headed for a room close to the facility’s midpoint where Nomiki, Cookie, and Jon had clustered with their flashlights, the curved silhouette of an arched framework came into view. It gleamed a dull brown when Cookie caught its corner with his flashlight. The glow slipped down, revealing the start of a half-filled transference tank attached to it.

  Memories crashed through her, made her lose her step. Dim, dingy concrete. A thick-sided tank full of a liquid that was not quite water. Limbs paralyzed by sedative. Drugs flowing into her arms through two intravenous set-ups. Flashing lights. Voices around her, faces looking down from above. A crown of wires and nodes that magnetized to her brain and pinched through her skull. The quiet, frenetic, in-actionable panic that crawled through her guts and froze her chest as they closed the lid over her.

  The Eurynome Project’s so-called Tertiary stage of treatment.

  She stopped dead, sucking in a breath—so sudden, Marc almost crashed into her.

  No. No, no, no. I’m not going in there.

  She swayed as the world tipped. The smell of wet must flooded her senses, matching the cold touch of the dream. Clammy sweat formed along her back and shoulders as it lingered, touching her skin like old, damp cotton.

  After a moment, she realized the smell came from the tank.

  Nausea churned through her gut. The world shuttered like a blind around her, memories creeping through the back of her consciousness like flickering strobes.

  No. No, no, no.

  She almost took a step back—either on reflex or instinct. By the curl of Nomiki’s lip and the cool, disdained expression on her face, she was also remembering the tank. Where Karin had only completed a part of the phase, Nomiki had gone quite a ways into it. Which explained why Karin remembered things that she didn’t.

  But Nomiki didn’t feel things like she did. Fear didn’t affect her on the same level, nor did she experience the utterly cold-cocked revulsion that twisted through Karin’s gut like a tunnel of worms. Nomiki was like a computer that way, able to partition herself and examine the fear for what it could tell her in a roundabout, disconnected way—noting its attributes but feeling none of its concerns.

  After a few seconds of careful breathing, Karin managed to shove the memories down. With effort, and more than one dry heave, she forced herself to come back into the moment, step up to the room, and let herself through the door.

  A week had already gone by since she’d thwarted the Novan Shift Event, and Dr. Sasha wouldn’t rest long. If they wanted to defeat her, they had to learn everything they could about their pasts.

  “There was definitely something here.” Cookie knelt near the front of the device, examining a series of dangling wires and empty ports that reminded her more of the back of an old audiovisual system than anything related to the tank itself. “Something big, too, with more than one backup power source.”

  Revulsion wriggled through her gut, but she forced her gaze away from the tank’s surface and to its back, where the Cradle had plausibly been hooked. She spotted the first power source near the bottom of the structure, an obvious cord mingling with a snarl of thick wires that came from the base. She didn’t see a second, but her brain was skating on thin ice right then.

  “There’s a few weird connections that I don’t recognize, too,” Cookie continued. “I’m guessing they built some of their own tech for it? Must have sucked for them if one of the cables broke, but hey, this is Seirlin we’re talking about.”

  “They may have used Sol-based tech for it. Or even Centauri,” Nomiki said. Since Alpha Centauri had been colonized first, they were large steps ahead of Sirius in many major tech areas. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s not here.”

  Gods, how could they talk about it so normally? This was the thing that stole their memories. Tertiary phase.

  The sick feeling in her stomach doubled—whatever the fuck this was, whatever the fuck it had done, she wanted nothing to do with it—but she hunched her shoulders and forced herself to look the thing over, jaw clenching, arms crossed over her chest, a mix of disgust and fear bubbling in her gut.

  A greasy, green-tinged liquid filled the human-sized basin partway, its color like a diluted version of the serum Seirlin used to feed into her I.V.s during treatment. The tank’s sharp bowl shape didn’t look like the aquarium she’d seen in her memories, but she didn’t doubt its purpose. This one was made of a coarse, pre-fab mock-up and rough enough around the edges that she doubted it had gone beyond a prototype phase for Seirlin—which counted as good in her books, since that meant that, although they may have been able to create Lenora and others like her through the research done on Karin and the rest of the Eurynome subjects, they’d completely fucking failed to succeed with the hive mind concept that Dr. Takahashi had been talking about.

  Or so she hoped, anyway.

  But then, why build one if they hadn’t already succeeded in the Earth trials?

  When she shifted, a glint of metal half-submerged in the thick water caught her eye, the rest of it a vague, circular shadow amid the algae and the water’s green tinge. She frowned, trying to figure it out. It looked like some sort of strange, thorny insect, or a plant with a specifically circular design.

  Then, she got a closer look at the spikes.

  Nano-injectors. Four centimeters thick. Skull-penetrating.

  And an entire kit of brain-scanning electrodes lined the arms of its frame like suckers on an octopus.

  Sol’s fucking child.

  She struggled to keep breathing, the air sounding like a rasp in her rapidly closing throat. A tremor hit her hands, and her eyes went watery, but she wrestled the emotions back, steering them away from full impact, strong-arming her focus back in.

  She managed it. Barely. And not before a vivid image of an injector posed above her head gave her a keen reminder of the nanotechnology Takahashi had used to operate on her brain.

  Were these nano injectors different from others?

  They seemed different. And the device certainly had more prongs. An entire three-piece crown of them, as opposed to the single tri-injector she remembered him using. Just how did it work, anyway? Did it just use its many prongs to inject some highly-specialized nano directly into the brain and have it work from there? If that was the case, then how was that any different than the procedures Takahashi had done to her—and why not involve him? Though he’d known of the existence of the hive mind and had a vague idea of the Corringhams’ end goal, he hadn’t heard of the Cradle—an odd thing considering he was a neurospecialist.

  A thick set of cables twined from it to the front of the tank where the Cradle had likely been mounted. She stared at them, wondering.

  One or two cables, she could understand. Nano-delivery and power.

  But this had at least five.

  Just what the hell were they doing with this?

  “We should get that to Takahashi,” Marc commented. “See what he can do with it.”

  Karin stiffened, fingers digging into her bicep. She had a very good idea of what Takahashi could do with the device, thanks to the various nightmares currently pushing at the back of her head. And the sharp gleam of the skull-penetrating nano injectors was doing a fine job of filling in any gaps in her memory.

  Another roll of nausea flipped through her stomach like an oiled snake, the sensation oddly linked to the skim of dirty grease that collected in thin lines over the surface of the liquid. Something dark lurked underneath, as if the tank had grown a soft bed of algae since its abandonment. The smell rose to her senses again, old and musty, but sweet, pressing into her nose and mouth like a rotting piece of wood. When her gaze returned to the needles of the laser-injector again, a prickle of awareness rolled across her head—as if one was positioned and ready to spike into her skull.

  Gods. Fuck
this noise. A clammy feeling settled under her skin like a damp, dirty cloth. She shuddered as another twinge of nausea crawled through her body, followed by the tremble of old, concentrated fear. The room and its light seemed to spin and expand around her.

  Why was she here? It had been a stupid idea to come. Marc was right—Takahashi knew more about this than they did.

  Being here was only opening old wounds. She should have stayed on the ship.

  With a thought, she re-absorbed the light into her skin and backed up. Energy snapped into her like a rubber band, at least temporarily dissuading her growing urge to throw up. She squinted her eyes into narrow slits as she navigated to the door, giving Marc a small shake of her head when he made to follow, his eyes dark with concern. Nomiki, too, watched her leave, arms crossed over her chest and a serious expression on her face. Their eyes met briefly.

  Then, the dimness of the hallway outside closed over her like a cloak.

  This time, though, it was a comfort.

  Karin tensed her shoulders, halting several paces from the door as an old emotion pulled at her chest and unfolded quickly to include her eyes, as well. Her surroundings blurred, melding together before reappearing again, and she took a shuddering, stabilizing breath as she turned back into the dark part of the room.

  Soo-jin, coming over from where she’d been checking out the other machine, glanced over, a concerned expression drawing her brows down, the netlink in her hand casting a blue glow on her face that mingled with the flashlight in her hand and the light from the room.

  Karin shook her head and gave her a weak smile, a dismissive gesture rising from her hand.

  The concern changed to knowing in Soo-jin’s eyes. The woman gave a small nod, the fingers lifting on one hand to give an acknowledging wave, and she kept on to the room to join the rest.