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

by K. Gorman

  As she watched, the woman glanced up at a notification and went ramrod straight. “Shit. Shit!”

  Karin stiffened. “What?”

  But, as a notification bleeped on her navigation window, she knew.

  Centauri were on the radar.

  It was just a single dot, small and far away. Not even close enough for the Nemina to decide what type of ship it was.

  But far too close for her comfort.

  She stared at it, her grip on the yoke tightening.

  Fuck you.

  “It could be happenstance,” Soo-jin suggested. “Their European party bled into the Atlantic several hours ago. It could be spilling over here, now. They’re barely on the continent.”

  Karin snorted. “You’re unusually optimistic.”

  “Hey, after the shit we just went through, I feel we’re owed a bit of good luck.”

  “I thought you said Karma accumulates for the next life, not this one?”

  “Yes, but luck and Karma aren’t inextricably intertwined, and I feel like the luck itself should balance itself faster.” Soo-jin raised an eyebrow in her direction. “Because it’s either that, or they’re on their way here.”

  “Or have decided to follow-up on the Brazilian address they saw glued to the Cradle’s back.” Karin blew out a slow breath. “Suns, why couldn’t they just take their party to North America?”

  “Or better yet, Mars.” Soo-jin met her gaze. “We could call it off. We don’t have to be here. You don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes, I do. If I don’t, the entire universe as we know it will not exist.”

  “What if we could come to some sort of deal with the Centauri? Go away, come back when we’re friends and united in saving the universe?”

  “I don’t think that would work,” Karin said. “The Centauri don’t seem very open to the whole ‘friendship is caring’ thing.” She swallowed. “Plus, I think—”

  She sucked in a sharp breath as a bubble of energy rolled up through her mind. The ringing from before burst across her skull with a shrill, all-encompassing scream, drowning out all else. A vivid, static-y image of the lab blared across her mind, ringing with the tone of Tia’s voice. She gritted her teeth as the whole ship slid to the side. The Nemina’s dashboard bleeped a warning.

  She steadied them out, but not before a few shouts came from the back.

  Across the room, Soo-jin stared at her with wide eyes. “Uhhh, you okay?”

  “Yes,” she grunted out, fighting the sensation. “She’s here.”

  “Who? Sasha?” Soo-jin frowned, then got it. “Tia.”

  Karin nodded. The ringing, and the energy, had settled down to a background noise. As she shifted the Nemina, the pulse in her mind also shifted, moving like a block of ice in water.

  It felt like she had some weird, cold awareness of where the Cradle was.

  Which answered her questions about how she would know Tia was in the Cradle, at least, but damn—could it have waited until she wasn’t actively flying the ship?

  Suns, if she keeps it up like this, we won’t even need the laser-injector.

  She focused on keeping the Nemina steady as she directed them over the building’s slanted metal roof and into the battered, overgrown parking lot beyond it. Lampposts stuck up from the concrete like skinned tree poles. As she was settling the Nemina down between a few of them, a set of familiar footsteps hurried up the hall.

  “I did not hit a tree,” she said as Marc poked his head in.

  After a quick glance—and likely an exchange of expression with Soo-jin behind her back—he grunted.

  “Day’s still young,” he said, before vanishing back behind the manual control wall again.

  “No, it isn’t,” she grumbled after him. It was mid-afternoon, by the Nemina’s local clock translation.

  Soo-jin flashed her a grin. “Day’s still young somewhere.”

  Karin grunted, focused on the landing. The Nemina touched down with a gentle bump. Within seconds, she was getting a notification for a ramp-down request—this close to landing, they had to go through her. She approved it, then brought up a route calculation she’d made during the flight and plugged in the last few angles and coordinates. Nomiki and Jon flashed by on the camera feeds, dressed up in their partly-broken combat suits and heading for the building.

  Scouting for trouble.

  After mirroring the Nemina’s Centauri-tracking feed onto her netlink and checking her camouflage settings, she scooped up the spare blaster from the chair beside her and followed Soo-jin down the corridor.

  Time to get this show on the road.

  The Brazilian air hit her like a hot, wet sponge. It felt like it was forcing itself inside her nose and mouth for the first few steps, and she could already feel her hair start to frizz. She pulled her ponytail tighter, feeling only a small twinge in the hyper-localized spot of numbness that was the blaster wound in her shoulder and the bulge of the sticky CoolSkin bandage that sat under the strap of her tank top, and started across the cracked parking lot to the squat, three story building that waited on its other side.

  Well, more like one-and-a-half-story-building on this side. The building dug into the hill, spilling its full three stories down the slope-side, but showing only as a low, flat structure from where the parking lot met it at the front. She didn’t recognize this side. All of her dreams had happened either at its back or inside it—unless, of course, Tylanus had completely fabricated those bits, but she didn’t think so. Not when she’d recognized the back so clearly.

  Like the back, the front was unimpressive. Covered in many years of tropical grime, it had a squat, flat façade that sagged in one spot near the end and dull, uninspired architecture that didn’t so much say brutalist as boring—it was just one big concrete block. Grime-covered windows overlooked the parking lot, and most of the paint was flecking off the concrete front. Near the end, a tree had fallen through part of the rooftop, dislodging the gutter and a piece of machinery that looked like it was connected with the ventilation. Another tree was already growing out of it, its branches bushy and short, indicating that it had been there for some time.

  Nomiki jogged up to one of the two front entrances and tried the door. When it didn’t budge, she smashed her elbow through the glass part, unlocked it from within, and disappeared inside.

  A few seconds later, Karin saw movement in the next window.

  “Jon and I will do a sweep,” Nomiki said over the comms. “You guys start looking.”

  “Roger that,” she replied, knowing it would annoy her sister. Cookie had used the same lingo about a month ago and received a stern lecture about the differences between actual military comms language and the stereotypes perpetrated on netdramas—neither of which anyone but her sister cared about.

  Sure enough, Nomiki’s comm picked up a passel of half-muttered swearing.

  “For fuck’s sakes, Karin.”

  She grinned. But the levity was short-lived. The day’s bleary sun vanished past the building’s overhang, and a quiet hush fell over her group. A broken piece of glass crunched under her shoe as she eased the front door open. Marc caught it behind her. A quick check back found the rest of the group—Soo-jin, Baik, Cookie, and the two doctors—trailing in a loose line.

  She took a breath in, paused, let it out again, and set to exploring.

  Like the Macedonian compound, the main level was comprised of things that would not be out of place in a regular school—classrooms, a few offices, both janitorial and equipment storage, a normal-looking nurse’s office, still stocked with bandages and basic medical equipment. There was even a small theater room, complete with chairs, cushions, holoscreens, a Playspace Armada, and an old Nintendo G-6 console with two dozen game chips.

  Clearly, Brazil had received better funding.

  The hallways, likewise, were a juxtaposition of new and old. Corkboard bulletin boards tacked full with artwork, school projects, award ribbons, and pictures of children in school uniforms sat
next to dormant holoscreen projection lenses on blank wall spaces, and wooden benches and other furniture clashed with the cutting-edge wireless security sensors they saw in nearly every corner of the building.

  Though Jon and Nomiki had cleared out the top level, the memory of her run-in with the sentinel on Nova made her stick close to Marc.

  On the second level down, they found the labs.

  Her light power hummed when she activated it, forming a soft, rippling orb above their heads. She sucked in a breath as Marc, Soo-jin, and Cookie followed her out, taking in the windowed laboratories and the myriad of shadows that extended beyond them.

  “I recognize this.”

  She didn’t recognize it fully—not yet, anyway—but the make of the walls and corridors, the thick wooden frame on every window, the way the long glass windows stretched down every hall triggered an impulse of memory.

  The corridor ahead of her was long and straight, lined by three lab rooms—two on the left and a long one to the right. Shelves and equipment made gloomy shapes amid the shadows that cloaked the rest of the floor.

  But not for long. Soo-jin, Cookie, and both doctors stepped around her, flashlight beams roving across every corner and inch.

  Soo-jin gave a low whistle when hers found a large piece of expensive-looking lab equipment through the window of the closest lab. “I’m guessing Seirlin missed this place in their clean-sweep purge.”

  “You know what that is?” Karin asked.

  “No, but I bet it’d make a down payment on my future Beleni beach home.”

  Karin laughed. “You planning a scrounge?”

  “Maybe.” The woman flashed her a grin. “Would you mind?”

  She clapped her on the shoulder with her good arm. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see you pillage my childhood trauma for your own personal gain.”

  Soo-jin gave her head an affectionate tilt that she recognized, the grin slipping to a loose, easy smile, squeezed Karin’s arm, careful to avoid the hole in her shoulder, and disengaged herself. Her boots made light taps on the hall as she walked away, flashlight beam moving with a professional efficiency through the rooms. Cookie, Baik, and the doctors had already gone ahead, the front-most person—Baik, by the way the netdrama-level perfection drew her attention to his visage and the fatigues he was dressed in—was in the process of looking around the next corner, his smooth face lit in the glow that reflected off the wall beside him.

  She stopped when she got to the second lab, the feeling of déjà vu doubling as she came in line with its windows.

  One look inside was all it took to steal her breath.

  After a moment, she regained control, forcing her lungs to work again. She squared herself with the window and jabbed a finger at the glass. “This is where my last meeting with Tylanus took place.”

  Well, sort of. His Tartarus-mirrored version of it, anyway. She’d never actually been here, but as she slid her gaze from the back of the metal cabinet on the other side of the window to the room beyond, taking in the broad desk with its single light in the nearest corner to the large island counter that followed the center of the room, she realized that his copy had been very good.

  Only the papers on the desk, and the mismatched pairings of science equipment on the counters, both of which were lacking in the real-world variant, were different.

  Perhaps because he actually used the lab? She had trouble picturing Tylanus as a scientist, but considering who his mother was… Plus, there’d been all those Eurynome hive mind children wandering in.

  She could definitely see some of them helping themselves to the equipment and setting up serious experiment factories.

  Marc drew closer, perhaps taking a cue from the quaver in her voice. He laced one set of fingers around her waist, his arm protective across her abdomen, and soothed the others over her bicep, careful of the bandage that stuck to her skin only a few centimeters above. “Does it scare you?”

  She shook her head. “No. No, it’s not that. It’s just—it’s just fucking unnatural, you know? I’ve been here before, but not really. And I…”

  She blew out a breath. She didn’t really need to say anything.

  It was just fucked up. And he understood that.

  Up ahead, Soo-jin had turned her head, Shinji behind her. They’d likely overheard everything. It was a quiet space, and Karin hadn’t cared to keep it a secret. She opened her mouth to speak, but before that, Takahashi’s soft voice came from around the corner.

  “Karin, you should see this.”

  It sounded strained. Almost regretful, which was rare for him, as if his analytical side had dropped and he’d allowed the emotion to leak out.

  She wasn’t going to like this.

  Taking a breath, she steeled herself. And walked forward. Marc followed, his hand dropping to hers. She laced their fingers together, taking his comfort while she still could.

  In the next hall, about half-way down, was a hermetically sealed chamber. Her gaze landed first on its viewing window, and she made to pass it, giving its contents only a small glance-over, but her steps faltered as she caught sight of what lay beyond its curved glass.

  Ten clear incubation crates, all laid out in sterile plastic casings, with matching artificial wombs hanging from the back wall.

  The breath whooshed out of her.

  They’d never had mothers. Not real mothers, not in the traditional sense. Her entire existence was owed to about seventy different genetic donors and an entire panel of scientists who had built her, nurtured her genetic code into a chimera of an egg, and coaxed her to life through the sterile care of lab charts, temperature controls, and nanotechnology.

  Perhaps they’d loved her, but she seriously doubted it.

  No one who loved someone could have subjected them to the life she’d lived in Seirlin’s care.

  But Takahashi wasn’t at the incubator window. He and Baik stood farther along the hallway, their gazes fixed firmly through the window of a second hermetically sealed chamber.

  As her gaze drifted from him, to the door that connected the two rooms—a double door, meant to equalize pressure—the pit dropped from the bottom of her stomach.

  She had a sneaking suspicion that she knew what she was going to find.

  Sure enough, when she joined him at the window and shoved her light through into the room, rows of genetic engineering equipment shone back at her.

  They looked innocuous enough. Quaint, even. If she hadn’t done so much research on the topic, she could have easily overlooked it, confused the place for any other science or medical lab.

  But she had, and she didn’t.

  Her fingers spread lightly over the surface of the glass. She didn’t remember lifting her hand. Her gaze slipped from one thing to another. A fridge sat in the corner, looking like a more-science-y version of the glass-fronted variety she’d seen in Novan convenience shops, except for the pack of test tubes and dabbers it held within. On the counter, more dabbers and needles, these ones empty, color-coded caps waiting in clean lines in a blue plastic carrier. A glass-enclosed case took up the majority of the space, with two plastic gloves reaching in from two holes in the side to allow access to the tools. Farther along the hallway, the environment suits that hung from the wall seemed a bit overkill.

  “This is where we were made?”

  She wasn’t sure why she was asking Takahashi. He wouldn’t have any idea—he’d only been responsible for her brain after she was already walking and talking.

  But he was nodding, agreeing with her. “None of this equipment was ever present in Macedonia, at least to my knowledge. This is likely where you were built.”

  Built. Somehow, the world felt better than ‘created.’ As if she were a house and someone had been simply hammering nails and plugging electrics until she was whole.

  Creation had a whole other set of connotations.

  Then, her gaze slipped past Takahashi, and she sucked in a sharp breath.

  Seeing th
e change in her expression, he ducked to the side as she lunged forward, her shoes slapping heavily on the floor. Her light flared ahead of her, brightening the next corridor in a spotty, inconsistent luminescence. Her hands found and pushed the glass door, ears twitching at the creak its neglected hinges gave.

  She stopped, taking in the computer workstation to her left, a massive bank of holoscreens combined with an archaic piece of old computer hardware. A bed sat farther in, tilted just so. Around the far side, a series of cabinets and counters wrapped the rest of the walls.

  Tia’s lab.

  Exactly as she remembered it. Right down to the clunky, outdated equipment and the tilt and make of the medical bed on the opposite side.

  Someone had preserved it.

  Slowly, Tia’s words came back to her.

  “I’m here because two narcissistic brothers thought to pluck my memory and lock it in a cage because one could not bear to get over it and find another girlfriend, and the other so desperately needed a structure for their little world.”

  It had seemed flippant at the time, with a touch of venom.

  But now, she thought she understood.

  One of the brothers had been obsessed with her. Perhaps both.

  She could hardly breathe.

  At her hip, Nomiki’s voice came over the comms link.

  “We found the Cradle. Third floor down.”

  An unearthly calm threaded through her shoulders. She took a breath, let it out, and, eyes staring at the bed, lifted the netlink to her face.

  “We’ll be right down.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  It wasn’t hard to find the Cradle. All she had to do was follow the swearing. Rooms and tables full of glassware and equipment glittered in her light as she passed, shuffled aside once for a crowded office with drawn blinds and again for what looked to be the dumping ground for a series of pipes and vents. Life pods, an older, milky-colored variety as opposed to the clear ones they’d found in the Novan lab, took the room on the left, clustered together past the windows like some organized forest.