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

by K. Gorman

  She giggled. Elliot had already complained about it.

  But he was hers, and she was so happy.

  As a creation Program, she needed something to devote herself to. And her work on the Project had been driving her mental.

  She’d transferred to the Project’s new headquarters in Macedonia two years ago. University hadn’t been hard, not when she’d already studied most of the subjects. She completed her first degree in medicine, then a second in genetic engineering. Neurology was a passing hobby she never quite got the hang of, but knew more than most about.

  They’d applauded her, given her a job, let her find her feet in Seirlin’s Novan labs.

  Then, she’d transferred back to Eurynome.

  It had been a strange twist, and one she didn’t altogether enjoy. Now that she’d grown up and studied, she knew precisely how preposterous the Project sounded. She also knew what an asshole Bernard Corringham tended to be. He kept the Project in an iron grip, which she both approved of and disapproved of, and, now that she worked ‘behind the curtain,’ it was as if the Project’s rose-colored tint had faded into a scummy brown.

  They weren’t out to save the world. The things they did here, though they were great and they worked, were not typical for a lab.

  She hadn’t touched her powers in years.

  And now, she was supposed to pretend she was not part of that anymore. That she was simply a doctor trying to help the new Eurynome subjects manifest their powers and complete their Programs.

  It felt like she was dressing in the skin of a snake.

  It was worth it―she knew that. When they succeeded, their research would change the world.

  But they were still hurting people. Children. And they had to make a lot of sacrifices to get there.

  Tylanus made it better. Though he was, technically, part of the Project, he was hers.

  Her baby.

  She could help him where no one else could.

  And she loved him more than she loved the rest of the world.

  God, I didn’t know so much love until you came along.

  Smiling, she rocked his bassinet, memorizing the tiny, sleeping look on his face.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  A breath escaped her, then another, and a cool breeze lifted against her cheek and neck. Karin stared, rotating slowly to take it all in.

  It looked like it had come from an old, whimsical painting. The party stood on a stone road in the shade of a forested mountain slope. Beside them, the edge of the road dipped into a steep, grassy slope and ran into a loose collection of lush green fields over rolling hilltops, segmented by sections of mountain that stepped in like forested feet, the thick growth of wild riparians, and a slow moving snake of a river that gleamed in the distance.

  A sharp, pained gasp hissed through Tylanus’ mouth, and his grip tightened on hers.

  He sank to the ground, clutching his abdomen.

  “Tylanus?” She bent down next to him, still holding his hand. “Are you okay?”

  His other hand was clenched so hard, the knuckles had turned white with small splotches of red. The skin on his face had paled, and his black eyes stared straight ahead, narrowed with pain.

  One of the Centauri team parted from the group to come over, slinging her rifle over her shoulder and pulling on the Med bag she wore.

  But, before she could make it, the pain seemed to pass―or at least lessen. With a heavy grip on her hand, he leveraged himself back up, only wobbling a bit when he stood.

  “I’m fine. It’s just…” He winced and closed his eyes again. “When I come here, I feel it more. She’s already changed so much.”

  Ah. She understood. They were in Tartarus, his world. One he was connected to intrinsically. The world that Sasha was using to create her own new one.

  Because, of course, she couldn’t use her own world. She, as its new base, would need to survive the process.

  Her lip curled.

  Well, she already sacrificed one child for herself. And is willingly about to murder several hundred more.

  Gods, this was fucked up.

  She let go of his hand and stepped back, tilting her head toward the peak. Though she’d never explored Mount Olympus personally, she’d seen pictures of it. So far, the forested slope, and the height, matched what she’d seen in the pictures, but she had her doubts about the peak. Though she only caught a glimpse of it past the trees, she was willing to bet that Sasha had taken some artistic license in its design―though it looked high, with a faint slip of clouds ringing its outward edge, she could already see the beginnings of the temple complex, and the rock itself had a far lusher tint than its bare-faced, scree-filled counterpart on Earth.

  But then, this was Sasha’s creation. And she was making a literal ‘realm of the gods.’

  Fucking hell.

  “You mentioned she had defenses,” she said. “What are they? Can we fly up there?”

  He hesitated. “Yes. Provided we don’t use any of our powers, we should be able to get within a kilometer of the temple entrance without triggering her defense.”

  “What if we did trigger her temple defense?” Tillerman asked. “What does she have? Shadows and Sentinels?”

  Karin had explained the name she’d given to the creatures with the scythe blades to him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Among other things.”

  “She also has powers. I saw her create walls of darkness before. My light can get through them, but not without effort.”

  “Can she manipulate the dimension itself?” Nomiki, dressed in her Fallon klemptas and followed by Jon’s similarly-dressed hulk, joined her side, also squinting up at the mountain. “Like when she almost closed us off in that other pocket dimension of hers?”

  “That was in Chaos,” he told her. “But, yes. She can. However, as long as Karin or I remain conscious and capable of our powers, and everyone stays around us, she can’t shut us out.” He gave her a small, grim smile. “As the ‘god’ of this place, I can also find anyone in it.”

  Which was how he’d known she was in the temple. And likely how he’d managed to find Karin whenever she wandered into his dimension.

  “If this is Tartarus, don’t you also have creations in here?”

  “Yes. They are in different parts. I…only have a pocket of myself left. The rest, I have given to my mother.”

  ‘Given.’ She registered the word, processed it, and let it go.

  Tylanus was older now than when she’d last seen him, and she had very little idea of what had transpired in that time, nor how Sasha had raised him. He called her ‘mother,’ and Sasha considered him her son, but when she’d first met him, he’d been in a life pod, undergoing what, in hindsight, had looked like a more intensive, fucked up version of the ‘treatment’ the rest of them had received, and later on, he’d been just as strapped to hospital machines as the rest of them and kept isolated on a ward.

  Some childhood.

  But Sasha must have taken him with her when she’d moved from the Earth facility. And she must have done it before Karin and Nomiki had smashed their way through the gate.

  She let out a breath, took one last look at the top of the mountain, then turned her head to Tillerman. “What do you think? Fly up there and face the fray?”

  The commander grunted. “Better than getting ambushed in the forest. We’ll have the ship ammo, too.”

  She gave her a nod. “Good. Let’s do it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  They lifted off, the Nemina’s bulk shaking and groaning as it buffeted through a crosswind. Karin hung onto a handrail. The strap of the harness pressed into her shoulder as they tilted and turned.

  Through the windows, the rush of dark green trees turned to meadow, a fall of scree around a creek, and back again. The camera feeds caught sight of the rest of the mountain as they rose up, overlaying the window view.

  Her doubts were wrong. Sasha had modeled it after the real-life Mount Olympus. It had the same gener
al shape that she remembered from studying the photos, with a top that wasn’t so much a peak as a ridge that curved around in a partial circle and veered downward, like the collar of a cardigan made of bare rock and scree. The elevation also put them around two-thousand-five-hundred meters as they climbed, which lined up roughly with where they would have been at this point on the real mountain was with its peak at around two-thousand-nine-hundred meters.

  But, instead of a naked slope of bare rock, scree, and a few scraggly plants, a large temple complex molded across the mountain like a small, impeccable, ancient city.

  It looked like a piece out of a video game. The buildings were done in an ancient, Greco-Roman style, with columns and balustrades everywhere. Marble gleamed under the sun, some of it almost blinding out parts of the screen. It was a rich display of imagination―what someone might imagine Heaven to be like, if they were really into Greek mythology. Small ponds and pools gathered in and around the buildings, along with water features like rivers and waterfalls, all impeccable and beautiful, the water seeming to come out of nowhere―it shouldn’t be there, not without pumps to get it from the base of the mountain, and no artesian well would reach that high, not without some imaginative ‘help’ from Sasha’s creation powers. Lawns and gardens marked the area. As the camera zoomed in on one of them, she noticed a number of marble statues in and around them.

  She had to say—Sasha threw a decent party, in an architectural sense.

  And, at the very top, nestled close into the peak of the mountain, sat the main temple.

  She could tell because it was the biggest. Roughly the size of the Manila in orbit, which could hold over twenty thousand people, the temple was a glorious complex of high columns and a peaked roofline, with several stories that circled a courtyard below.

  She looked to Tylanus. “Any landing suggestions?”

  “The courtyard. Easiest place to get to, with multiple entry points.”

  “Sounds like a good place for an ambush,” she commented. “Tillerman, thoughts?”

  “The roof would be better, or somewhere on the outside. It depends on her surveillance.”

  “She’ll know we’re here the second we touch down,” Tylanus said.

  Great. She stared at the screen, chewing her tongue. There were a dozen places Reeve could land the Nemina, but all she had in her brain was a pilot’s assessment of them, not a military one.

  “Movement.” Marc reached forward on the sensor station and expanded the front camera feed on the main screen.

  A second later, it had zoomed onto a spot near the base of one of the courtyard buildings. A dark-haired woman stood in the shadows of the roofline, partially hidden by a column, staring up at the approaching spacecraft.

  Karin’s teeth ground as she recognized her.

  Genevieve Kapinos, the Program Artemis they’d rescued from Sasha’s pocket dimension.

  If she were here, the others were, as well.

  “Set us down and tell Freccia to do the same. If anyone knows what’s going on and how to deal with it, it’s her and her sister.”

  “Yes, Regent.”

  Her lips tightened into a thin line as the Nemina put her nose up and began to descend.

  Genevieve vanished as soon as the ships came down. She shouldn’t have been surprised―as Program Artemis, she’d have that instinct.

  But, the second Karin stepped off the Nemina’s ramp and into sight, she poked her head back out.

  “Karin?”

  She re-appeared from behind a pillar farther down, and this time, she wasn’t alone.

  When they’d first met, Genevieve had been coming down from a shower, her black hair in a thick frizz around her face, and Karin had mistaken her for Layla, the old Program Athena who had died many years ago, and whose consciousness still occasionally showed up when Karin wandered into Tartarus or the Cradle. With a similar genetic blueprint to the original, both Genevieve and her sister, Toriana, the new Program Athena, looked almost like twins caught at different ages. They had a similar build and facial structure, with sharp, expressive eyes, and thin, lanky bodies, though she suspected the thinness had a bit to do with the Eurynome Project’s gamut of medication.

  During her childhood in Macedonia, they had all been sick every month from their ‘treatments.’

  The new Eurynome victims from Chamak still wore the clothes Fallon had given them―a basic combo of gray pants and shirts that Nova Kolkata’s base had on hand.

  Against the backdrop of the temple and the stone courtyard, it made them look like escapees from a psych ward dropped into an odd, abandoned resort.

  She started forward. “Genevieve! Are you okay?”

  “Yeah…Sasha grabbed us. Where are we?” Her gaze slid behind her as Tylanus exited the Nemina, and her eyes grew wide. “Oh, holy shit―”

  “No, no, it’s okay.” Karin held up her hands, palms out. “He’s with us.”

  “Uh huh.” Genevieve chewed on that. “Right. Well. Can you get us out of here? Sasha’s chasing us down, one by one, and hooking us up to some machine. It’s not very fun.”

  “Is she, now?” Karin resisted the urge to bare her teeth, the need for violence rising inside her. She tamped it down and turned. She caught Jon’s eye and found a similar urge bottled up inside his expression. “Jon, do you think you can stay behind and guard the kids?”

  He would be a good guardian. The kids already knew him. He was one of them.

  He nodded once, and she ushered Genevieve and Toriana toward the Nemina’s ramp. “Go. I’ll deal with Sasha.”

  Tylanus caught her arm as she was about to go forward.

  “I’ll stay behind, too. If she comes, I can warp them back over.” His muscles worked in his cheek. “Besides, I don’t need to see you hunt down and kill my mom. And I’m not sure what I’d do if I did.”

  Fair enough. She could understand that. If she had someone she considered a mother, she probably wouldn’t want to see anyone kill her, either.

  “Stay behind, then,” she said. “It’s probably a good idea.”

  She moved forward, gesturing to the squad of Centauri.

  “New plan. Head out, and round up as many children you can. They may be dangerous, so be careful and don’t startle them. Tell them that you’re here to get them out.” She winced, imagining the group running into a few of the Titan programs she’d seen in cryo. Hopefully, they weren’t too far advanced in their treatments. “Captain, how many can you fit on your ship?”

  “Depends on how big they are and how long life support has to run.” She couldn’t see his face through the tinted visor of the helmet, but she could imagine his look of calculation. “We brought a full squad, but the Freccia class can fit more. Twenty, perhaps twenty-five, depending on their sizes. There won’t be enough harnesses, though.”

  Which meant, if they needed to fly out at any amount of acceleration or G-force, it would be a problem.

  “Let me warp them,” Tylanus said. “I can get them to Earth and come back for more.”

  She hesitated.

  What choice do we have? Tia pointed out. If he’s lying and ends up hiding them elsewhere―well, he could do that anyway, right?

  She had a point.

  Then, in a voice that chilled her right to her spine, someone spoke at her side.

  “Trust him. He helped us, didn’t he?”

  Layla, the original Program Athena, stood next to her, squinting in the sun and looking a near-twin to Toriana, who had paused partway up the ramp.

  Karin let out a shaking breath. Dead children…

  Of course. They were in Tartarus, and Tylanus had allowed them in.

  She’s not really here. She can’t be.

  But she was. This wasn’t Earth; this was Tartarus. And Tylanus had linked it with her Cradle.

  That’s amazing, Tia said into her mind. How did he manage to do that? The Cradles are supposed to be isolated.

  Maybe Sasha’s code isn’t the only thing that is breaking, she r
emarked back.

  She gave a quick nod to Layla. “All right.”

  The two girls rushed the rest of the way into the ship, both of them gaping at Layla who watched them go, her eyes serene but sad.

  “I’m glad I got to save some people, at least,” she said.

  Then, more movement slipped in from the shadows of the courtyard. The Centauri soldiers flinched, some of them lifting their rifles before hastily lowering them.

  She didn’t blame them. She had a feeling that the two figures walking from the side of the courtyard hadn’t actually existed a second ago―not on their camera feeds nor their thermographic sensors.

  Nomiki sucked in a sharp breath as a teenaged version of herself strode over, trailed by a tall, stocky boy with a mop of brown hair and light-colored eyes.

  “Brennan,” her sister breathed, his name like a whisper on the wind.

  Brennan had been the catalyst that had spurred their escape. He and Nomiki had grown close in the few years leading up to it, one hardly leaving the side of the other.

  When he’d been killed, Nomiki had taken to the forest for months.

  Brennan had died during the quaternary stage of his treatment, when the Corringham brothers had stripped parts of his psyche and put it in the Cradle to join the hive mind. Same with Layla.

  They were completed Programs, uploaded to the system.

  But the Nomiki that followed them, who looked a lot younger and more aggressive than her sister, was not.

  No, she was an incomplete Program. Fragments of her sister they had managed to extract before she murdered her way out.

  Incomplete, but complete enough to form an actual person.

  Looking at her, one could notice the difference. She was sharper, less hesitant, more prone to violence and aggression.

  Where her sister could play at being normal, had integrated her behavior and meshed it with society, had grown past her programming and adapted to live with it, this Nomiki was as sharp and fresh as when she’d come out of the box, so to speak―an example of how the Eurynome Project and the Cradle stripped parts of their personality down to an unfiltered version of their programming, without all those pesky hormones and chemicals and body-brain adaptations mixing in and ‘polluting’ the process.