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

by K. Gorman

  It was only partially finished. The many Shadow attacks, military abductions, and frantic flights that had interrupted their normally-relaxed scrounging schedule had put the project on hold. But there was seating—one fully-upholstered lounge chair, another half-upholstered lounge chair, and a half-upholstered cloth couch frame that Marc had built and riveted to the floor. There was also a table to set her mug on, and windows to watch the world fly by in.

  Outside, the shadow of one of their two military escorts, one a Fallon Imperial Dart, and the other an Alliance H-Class Viper, zipped alongside, shaking and shivering on the fast-moving ground. Although Nova Earth had given its unconditional surrender to the Fallon military fleet a few days before, the two governments had come to a peaceful resolution—Fallon hadn’t, after all, come here to conquer—and they’d assumed joint custody of Karin while in Alliance territory.

  They hadn’t, of course, been around when the crew had played break and enter with Seirlin Biocorp’s secret lab. At that time, Reeve had taken the Nemina on a small tour through the fourth level’s buildings, set the ship down on some lot in the northern quarter, then come back for them when Nomiki had radioed.

  Karin watched the ship’s shadow move and dash for a few minutes, then turned her attention up to the slow turn of the horizon. A set of low-lying mountains rose up in the far distance, looking like dark stamps of slate against the bottle-blue horizon. Both Aschere and Lokabrenna were nearing their zenith now, with the smaller blue sun about thirty minutes ahead of his brother and tinting the sky a more turquoise shade than normal—they were just coming out of a section of orbit where Lokabrenna was closer than its sibling star, but now, both planet and star were orbiting to the other side of their barycenters.

  As they had inevitably done for the past few months, her thoughts returned to the Eurynome Project. And, more specifically, to the hive mind aspect.

  Disgust flavored her throat almost immediately.

  Sol and Clio, I can’t believe they’re still doing that. I hope Nomiki eviscerates someone before this is all over.

  On the tail end of that thought, she remembered that her sister, on multiple occasions, had eviscerated people under the employ of Seirlin Biocorp, and that she had borne witness to most of them.

  Okay, a lawsuit, then. Seirlin clearly doesn’t care about the death of its employees—not unless it’s happening to its higher-ups rather than the grunts—but they do care about money.

  There was a lot of things she could do with money. A lot of good, even if she didn’t want to use it for herself.

  Money, however, wouldn’t give her the answer to whatever the hell had happened to her in the lab back there. If she wanted that answer, she was going to have to reach out and find it for herself.

  She narrowed her eyes on the horizon.

  And what in the ten unholy hells is going on with Tylanus?

  The last time she’d seen him, he’d been all high and mighty, warning her off of interfering with his mother’s reality replacement project.

  But this time, he’d seemed… desperate.

  Beside her, Marc shifted.

  “You all right?”

  His voice rumbled as he spoke, the vibration running through his ribs where she’d snuggled closer—she may not be so great at hugs, but she’d definitely taken to cuddling like a snake to a basking rock.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Just thinking.”

  “About Seirlin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything else?”

  She tilted her head back, cocking it to the side until it lolled back onto his shoulder and she got an awkward angle on his face, one of her eyebrows rising—sometimes, she forgot just how observant he was. And how accurately he could read people.

  After a moment, she lolled it back. “Yeah. About Tylanus.”

  It struck her as a little weird to be admitting to her boyfriend that she was thinking about another man, but she’d told everyone about it afterward, relating both the Shadow’s appearance, how she’d appeared to have broken the world into a kaleidoscope with her power, and Tylanus’ desperate plea that she ‘come find him’—all of which had, much to her displeasure, gotten her a quickly-radioed schedule to visit a doctor once she’d finished healing Soo-jin’s family.

  “I’m trying to decide which likelihood is better: that I’m tripping out of my mind on some treatment flashback, or that I’m actually fucking with dimensional physicality and hearing Tylanus through Shadows.”

  And, apart from Soo-jin and Nomiki, Marc would be the only one she admitted that gem to. Even speaking it aloud, in here, in this safe space, sounded idiotic.

  He thought for a moment. “Well, you’ve manipulated dimensions before, right? And heard Tylanus through Shadows?”

  He was referring to three incidents. The biggest one had happened about a week ago, when she’d been strapped to some Alliance machine in a bid to boost her powers and fight against the dark power threatening to take over the entire planet, and had ended up existing in both planes at once—even thinking it made it sound like something out of a fantasy drama rather than anything grounded in real-world physics. But then, they had all been breaking the laws of the physical world during their childhood at the compound. Brennan perhaps most of all with his ability to reanimate dead things, including dead things that were taxidermic, though a few others came to mind.

  Another, which had happened before that, had involved disappearing into a different reality right in front of his eyes—literally vanishing—as she met with Tylanus. It might seem small compared to the bigger, world-saving one, but it was definitely more… definite.

  The last had happened during their stint in Sasha’s pocket dimension, when Tylanus had led them out of it using a Shadow.

  “I’d thought that was his doing, though,” she said. “He’s the dimension-shifting guy.”

  Project Tartarus. They’d gotten his program paperwork about a month ago, after he’d dropped it in a conversation with her, and she’d been making the connections ever since. In mythology, Tartarus was both a being and a place. Born from Chaos, along with Gaia, Erebus, Nyx, and a few others, he formed and controlled a shadowy underworld below Earth—and below Hades—where, conventionally, only the most-fearsome things were locked. A Hell below the Greek’s conventional Hell.

  The original Eurynome had ended up in there. She and her husband Ophion had been part of the early Titans and had ruled Heaven from Mount Olympus until Cronus and Rhea had come up and challenged them both to an arm wrestling match, which they had then lost.

  Actually, most of the Titans had ended up in there.

  And, of course, there was the much-later Robert Graves version, which held Eurynome as a creation goddess. Based on the snake and egg symbolism of the Project, and the creation-like context behind it, Karin suspected that the original inventor of the Project had been going off of his version as opposed to the pre-Christian myths.

  “He might be the dimension-shifting guy, but you beat him at his own game. Maybe some of the power bled through.”

  She snorted. “I don’t think it works that way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we live in the real world. My magic is science—they even fucking replicated it—” She made a quick, snappy gesture, the hand equivalent of an eyeroll. “I am not magic, and I run on a different program than him.”

  Yet, even as she said that, she wasn’t sure she believed it anymore herself. Her thoughts kept returning to Brennan and his reanimated hawk. She’d seen its glass eyes come alive and blink, watched as it struggled against the wire tether holding it up. She wondered if it still had the hook in its back from its pre-existence as a taxidermic animal.

  And, of course, there were Dr. Sasha and Tylanus. Together, they had brought an entire system to its knees and thrown a mad-science party within a pocket dimension.

  “Uh huh,” Marc said. “You keep telling yourself that.”

  “It’s not working anymore, is it?�
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  “It stopped working about two months ago when we walked into an extra-sized pocket dimension and were led out of a labyrinth by a Shadow person.” He tilted his head. “I mean, before that, pushing the Shadows out of the Lost was quasi-possible. Chemicals and light and weird diseases and possibly an entire section of humanity tripping their asses off, but…”

  He looked over, his mouth turning flat, and she felt the shrug roll through his shoulders.

  “Yeah, it’s not working anymore,” she said.

  “It’s not working anymore.”

  She paused. “Well, how are you doing?”

  He’d been quiet today, which wasn’t unusual for him. Even in normal crew situations, he wasn’t the most chatty—that honor went to Soo-jin and Cookie who traded snipes and insults like they were going out of style—but she also knew that quietness was an instinct of his. If something were wrong, if anything serious were going on, he shuttered down, becoming silent and watchful.

  “I’m fine.” He paused. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  “But, better than yesterday?”

  Yesterday, they had been near bored out of their wits and still in technical custody of the Alliance government, even if that custody had become rather comfortable and catered in the past week.

  “Oh, light years better.” He made a gesture of the view of desert scrub currently whipping past the windows. “Never knew I could miss even desert so much until I was cooped up in a single room with no option to leave.”

  “You’re cooped up in the Nemina all the time,” she pointed out. “And often without the option to leave.”

  “Yeah, but I own this ship. And I can fly it to places.”

  “So long as those places don’t have trees,” she commented.

  He grunted and threw his head back. “Suns, I’m never going to live that down, am I? You know that I fixed the paint scratches from that, right?”

  “And pulled the leaves out of the landing gear? Yeah, I know.” She shot him a grin. “You’re still not going to live that down.”

  With Nomiki and Reeve up front on the bridge, and Cookie and Soo-jin messing about somewhere down the hall, Marc and Karin had the middle part of the ship to themselves. Under normal circumstances, planet-side, hearing the clunks and murmurs coming from farther down the hall might have felt like an infringement on their privacy, but the crew of the Nemina had long ago learned how to keep to themselves. And the noise, intrusive though it might be, felt to her more like a companionable backdrop.

  When he didn’t immediately answer, and a quick glance up showed that his attention had wandered, she closed her eyes and lay her head against his shoulder, for the moment enjoying the bump and jiggle of the craft and the warmth of his arm, listening to the high-pitched sound of the Nemina’s engines screaming over the ground.

  After a few minutes, a netlink rang up the hall where Cookie and Soo-jin were mucking around, and the space went unconventionally quiet as Soo-jin answered it with a curt and professional reply. The call ended, and a quiet exchange happened up there—Cookie asking a question, and Soo-jin deflecting with a swear Karin recognized more by the tone she used than for actually hearing its consonants.

  Footsteps sounded, coming toward them.

  She opened her eyes just as Soo-jin appeared at the door. Her nose wrinkled as she poked her head inside.

  “Two minutes out,” she said.

  Marc gave her a careful study. “That bad, huh?”

  “I moved to the opposite end of the system for a reason,” Soo-jin replied. “Do me a favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “If I go missing suddenly, or if they attempt to kidnap me during this, a C-Class laser cannon to their homestead reactor—or at least the threat of one—would not go amiss.”

  Marc’s eyebrows rose. “You know, you might want to talk to Nomiki and Jon about that sort of thing. They’re a bit more specialized for groundwork than us.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m all over that.” Soo-jin flashed him a grin that seemed to belie the seriousness of her request. “You’re my Plan B.”

  She vanished around the corner, her long dreadlocks swinging after her.

  “Plan C,” Marc called after her as her footsteps retreated down the hall toward the bridge. “Plan A is for you not to go missing and everything to be hunky-dory.”

  To that, Soo-jin gave some sort of response. The exact wording was lost in the hallway’s acoustics, but it sounded a little too bright and cheery to be sincere.

  Karin grimaced. “Sol, this can’t be fun for her.”

  “Nope. Not one iota.” He shook his head. “Do you know how many times she has discussed her family with me?” He paused, waiting a beat as he met her gaze. “Twice. Twice in the three years I’ve known her. In all the time we’ve been space-borne together, with nothing better to do on the ship but talk.”

  Her lips peeled back from her teeth again. Scroungers, like any type of long-distance traveling job, spent a lot of time in space, and there was only so much feed drama one could consume. Travel between planets could get so boring that many had acquired multiple PhD’s during the travel — the record being fifty-three, held by some eighty-year-old transport driver who traversed the long Nova to Belenus route that cut across the entire territory of Fallon’s two orbiting planets, often only stopping at either Tianjin or Midgard station before cutting over to wherever the hell Belenus had gone in its orbital path.

  Soo-jin had made it clear that she didn’t get along with her family, and Karin had known it to be an extreme feeling—as she’d said, there was a reason she’d moved clear across the system from them—which made her all the more grateful and appreciative that Soo-jin had taken the knife for the team and contacted her family in order to come to Karin’s rescue, but…

  “Do you think they’d actually kidnap her?” she asked.

  Marc shrugged. “Hells if I know. Never met them. Ethno-purists are fucking crazy, though.”

  Soo-jin’s family home looked… nothing like she’d expected. Where she’d pictured a cultist haven of slap-dash farm homes and scrounger rigs, peppered with the same sort of East Asian building design she’d seen at Songbird Sanctuary on Enlil, the compound—if she could call it that, considering it was the size of a small city—rose on surprisingly modern legs, with a main building that twisted up like a strand of DNA, trees and gardens bristling from nearly every level, and many other shorter, equally new age building blocks spread out below it in a U-shape around a massive central courtyard.

  No vehicles were parked in the courtyard. And Reeve must have received some instruction from either Soo-jin or someone down below, because he eased the Nemina up short of the smooth, massive flagstones, setting her down beside several other craft.

  Her eyebrows lifted as she got a good look at them through the window.

  Altima NSX, Clarned T40 or 41, and… is that a custom-crafted-Fint?

  She squinted closer as the Nemina landed, bending to crane her neck at the logo on the side—Fint was the Novan-based space and hovercraft garage that had become a luxury chain across the system, building only the most high-end models, and this one, though older, had the aristocratic look she’d expect from that company.

  Nomiki, standing next to her, gave her a sisterly smack on the butt. “Karin, for the gods’ sakes, stand up. People are watching.”

  Given what Soo-jin had told her about her family, she wasn’t sure she gave a shit if these people were watching her, but she straightened. The Nemina’s ramp was lowering outside, and Soo-jin had already smacked the door panel, so it was a moot point, anyway.

  As she stepped outside, the heat of the two suns soaked into her jacket but was almost immediately sapped away by the rough chill of the wind that whipped up between vehicles. On the side of the Fint’s cherry-red paint job, she could see that a thin veneer of chalky dust coated it like a sheen of baby powder.

  A bus-sized shadow slipped across the blinding flagstones of the courtyard. K
arin looked up to see both fighters, the Fallon Dart and the Alliance Viper, doing broad, lazy circles of the space, their engines as slow as they could make them without engaging hover mode.

  “Guess that makes me your Plan D,” Marc commented, his eyes also on the sky.

  “Nah, I trust you more.” Soo-jin patted him on the shoulder. “If my family tried to kidnap Karin, I’d trust those guys to spring into action, but my little butt is, sadly, less valuable in the current market.”

  “I’m invested in your butt,” Cookie commented.

  “It’s a pretty nice butt,” Nomiki agreed. “Wouldn’t you say so, Jon?”

  Jon said nothing, but the slight rise in his eyebrow as he regarded Nomiki spoke volumes.

  I’m not sure I’ve actually heard him speak.

  She frowned, thinking back. Maybe once, but… it had been such an insignificant moment that he could have said something like ‘please pass the coffee.’ Nothing terribly intriguing.

  He must talk to Nomiki. Or have talked to her. They’d spent an entire voyage from Chamak to Nova together, and they had so much in common. Plus he’d been in a prison cell before, and Nomiki had been hankering to ask him a million questions.

  Before she could speculate much more on just how Jon managed to communicate anything, a crunch of gravel sounded from nearby, and a small vehicle rolled up, its electric motors whirring. The driver, an older man with thick, weather-tanned skin and age spots creeping up under the brim of his cap, gestured to Soo-jin with a broad, toothy grin.

  Soo-jin jumped forward. “Uncle Chul!”

  Karin gaped as the man nearly fell out of his seat in his attempt to hug her.

  “Oh, sweetie, I have missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too, Uncle.”

  When tears began to form in the old man’s eyes, and Soo-jin’s voice also began to break, a rough pang tightened in Karin’s chest.

  Gods, this must be so hard for her. She clearly still cares about them.