Blood Ties Read online

  “First off, Alliance started the war, not Fallon.”

  Nomiki sat in the center of the broad side of the table, her nose crinkled as she worked an idle hand along its edge.

  The light tubes above them had an inadvertent, barely-noticeable flicker, as if their alternating frequency had slowed to the point where the human eye could detect it. It put a tired cast on the room which reflected off the worn, cramped counters and smudged walls. Karin hadn’t hired aboard for the Nemina’s aesthetics. As far as the kitchen went, the two-tier coffee grinder squatting in the corner had impressed her more than other ships’ fresh paint and clean shelving—that and the Nemina’s engine capabilities, discreet, circumspect route, and large amount of shipboard anti-socializing. With only two other crew members, both of whom were at least part-time introverts, she’d dreamed of a nice, isolated, manageable career of long, distant forays into the far ends of the system and quiet, modest, anonymous transactions made through the Chariday auctions.

  Reeve, Nomiki’s pilot and sole companion, had taken up position flanking her right. A muscled Caucasian man with broad shoulders and a navy-colored Fallon flight suit that fit just a little too tight, he leaned at an angle against the counter, providing a counterpart to Marc who flanked Karin’s right. Before, she’d thought their stances a natural occurrence. But, as time went on and neither man reached for their coffee on the table, she began to wonder if some Fallon protocol kept them from relaxing.

  Military paranoia. Fallon had it in spades. Of course, she could probably use a little more of it herself, considering how her last two self-directed missions had ended.

  “They blamed us from Day One,” Nomiki continued, her thumb pressing into the edge of the table as if to make an imprint into her skin. “Started jamming signals and blocking trade routes.”

  Us. That was new. Nomiki’s loyalties were as fickle as the system’s second sun. Either Fallon had passed her enough coin to buy her loyalty for a time, or she didn’t want to place herself as an outsider in front of a Fallon soldier.

  Karin’s jaw stiffened. They’d challenged their entire world together, fighting to escape the compound and the people who had created them, but that challenge had been mostly Nomiki’s. She’d been looking for Nomiki for over a month, and now that she’d seen her safe and sound, the sight of her taking charge, of moving into their old rhythm as if it were the most natural thing in the world, grated at her.

  She knew it was wrong, but that didn't stop the knot of hard, ugly emotion that pulled her stomach.

  Gods. What is wrong with me?

  Fortunately, no one seemed to be paying attention to her. Beside her, one of Soo-jin’s eyebrows had arched up into her forehead.

  “So, Fallon lighting up that cruiser was par for the course? After twenty years’ relative peace?”

  Nomiki’s shrug had a flippant, unworried ease to it. As if the topic weren’t too much her concern.

  “We sent them messages. The commander had been talking to the cruiser up until they fired the first laser. Told him the Nemina was under Fallon protection and was looking to find a peaceful resolution, but…” Collecting her hands back from the table’s edge, she lifted her gaze to meet theirs. “They may have skimmed the first shot across your nose, but that laser fired in our direction, too.”

  “And Fallon protocols dictate strict and full retaliation,” Marc finished for her.

  He cleared his throat and shifted his weight. The warmth of his arm brushed over her shoulder, and for the few seconds he leaned over her to grab his coffee, she experienced a certain kind of shelter comfort the emotions inside. She caught a hint of his scent, a mix of fabric softener, sweat, and dust from the boxes he’d moved earlier, then he retracted.

  Cookie cleared his throat. “That puts an… interesting spin on things.”

  “It simplifies them, anyway,” Marc said. “With them at official war, we can't go around trusting the usual sources.”

  “Fallon's offered you protection,” Nomiki said. “In case I didn't make that clear.”

  “I think the giant laser battle between Agni and Enmerkar solidified that,” Soo-jin said. “So what do they want? Protection doesn't come free.”

  “No shit, right?” Nomiki's gaze went to her, and a shock went through her as she held the gaze. Her sister’s eyes were sharp, dark, too-knowing. “You've been quiet, little sister.”

  A knot of emotion tightened her throat, but she swallowed past it, masking herself with a grimace. “Just tired. What do they want?”

  “To secure you as an asset, mostly. With the Alliance so hot after you, and the rumors flying around, well—you can heal them, right? The Lost?”

  Reeve was watching her now, she noticed. He'd been quiet, too, just like her, and now, his dark eyes held a distinct attention to them that belied his casual hunch against the counter.

  “Yes.”

  “And you've confirmed this? It's repeatable?”

  “I've healed nearly a thousand, now.” The one good thing that had come from working her ass off in the Ozark was that it had upped her numbers. “Alliance will have confirmation of that by now.”

  “Fallon will want its own confirmation.”

  “Yeah?” This time, she couldn’t hold in the bubble of laughter that escaped her. A spark of anger drove up inside her, making everything rise inside her. “And then, what will they do with it? Make me some sort of heal slave? Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Nomiki faltered. For the first time, Karin saw alarm flit across into her expression, along with a heavy dose of concern.

  “Well… probably not a slave, but…”

  “You'd be helping a lot of people,” Reeve said. “A lot of people. And we're fair. No slave-ness.”

  The statement stuck in the air for a few seconds, and the tension shifted. Her companions didn't bristle, precisely, but their stillness seemed less casual than before.

  Beside her, a stoniness had taken Soo-jin's expression. Her upper lip curled back, not quite revealing teeth. “She nearly killed herself for someone who described himself as 'fair.' Pardon us if we don't believe you.”

  Immediately, Nomiki's eyes narrowed on Karin. “You almost died?”

  She winced. “I'm not sure that's accurate. I mean, I threw up a couple of times and felt like shit, but—”

  “You stopped breathing, too.” Soo-jin's head turned in her direction. “You don't remember because you were unconscious, but we had to keep you monitored for the first few hours. You were dead unconscious. Not sleeping. Unconscious. Sleep came later.” Her head tilted, as if considering her. “I'm not enough of a medical officer to deduce the cause, but your levels were very low. Oxygen, potassium, a few others. You were kind of fucked up.”

  Karin opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Oh.”

  Okay, that might explain the emotions. And why her brain seemed to be spiraling back toward sleep. Maybe she wasn’t mad at her sister, just emotional due to a lack of… vitamins?

  Hah. No. She and Nomiki had plenty they needed to hash out between them—but what sisters didn’t? Other sisters probably didn’t have mad scientist origins or red-handed murder to talk about, but… No one would ever call her and Nomiki ‘normal.’

  “Are we going back to that ship? Agni?”

  “No. Too visible and too out of the way, given where your escape route took us. We’ll meet back up on Chamak. Easier for us little guys to circle around while everyone’s watching Agni lumber back to the border.” Nomiki paused. “They creamed that Alliance ship, by the way. About a hundred deaths, all across, but Alliance started talking a little while after you left, before we’d eaten through their second shield.”

  Karin winced. A hundred deaths. And pretty much all of them because of her. “Sol. Why didn’t they just talk in the first place?”

  “Because men are stubborn, and war is inevitable.” Nomiki rotated her mug of coffee on the table, then picked it up by the handle, giving them a look over its rim. “Is everyone cool with going to Chamak?”

  The crew of the Nemina looked at each other.

  “Well, our main goal was to find you, so…” Cookie shrugged. “Did anyone else have plans?”

  “No,” Marc said. “All my people are accounted for.”

  “And we've already fixed my people,” Soo-jin said. “Karin?”

  She raised an eyebrow at Nomiki. “Do we have a choice?”

  Her sister's jaw tightened. She met Karin's gaze, and a shot of fire dropped straight into her chest at her sister's look. When she spoke, her voice pitched low and soft. “Do you even have to ask that?”

  Karin's jaw, too, tightened. The fire diminished, leaving a trail that pulled at the pit of her diaphragm.

  Nomiki. Her sister. One who had killed for her. Who had protected her. Who had brought them across worlds to get away from what had been becoming a very bad situation in the compound. Who had destroyed everything familiar so that they could live.

  Yes, Nomiki would side with her.

  But her sister was also capricious and untrusting. More than once in her life, she'd been the dealer of hard lessons. Making Karin learn what she had to, not what she wanted to. Karin recognized her sister's intent now, but an edge still existed to their relationship. As if she couldn't quite trust her sister.

  If Nomiki thought it best, she would kidnap her and bring her to Chamak Udyaan herself. And there wasn't anything Marc, Soo-jin, or Cookie could do to stop her.

  Not if they wanted to live.

  “Chamak sounds fine,” she said. “Better than Alliance territory, anyway.”

  “Good.” Nomiki's face lit up in a broad smile. She rotated her coffee mug around again, her gaze directed into it. “What have you found about Seirlin?”

  She arched an eyebro
w. “Less than you, apparently. We’ve been going off your book.”

  “Ah. Yes. I can see how that would present a problem.” Nomiki rotated her mug again.

  Behind her, Reeve was frowning. “What’s Seirlin?”

  “The name of the corporation of mad scientists that created my sister and me.” Nomiki flashed him a considering, narrow-eyed look. “Actually, I'm not sure if you've got the right security clearance to hear this. We'll have to fix that when we get in. I mean—” she made a gesture to indicate the rest of the people in the room, “—it was kind of inevitable you'd find out, being my cabbie and all. It's not like we wouldn't discuss it.”

  Reeve snorted. “Right. Whatever. So long as I don't get jailed or quarantined.”

  “Fine.” Nomiki made to stand. “Maybe Karin and I better discuss things alone first, since you're so finicky.”

  Ah. Karin recognized the segue when she saw it. This was Nomiki’s way of getting her away from Marc, Cookie, and Soo-jin so they could talk privately.

  Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

  “No,” Karin said. “They need to hear.”

  The look her sister gave her—the trace of confusion that danced over her features—could almost satisfy the small part inside of her that still hurt from the childhood differences.

  Nomiki threw Soo-jin, Cookie, and Marc another assessing look, a deeper kind of realization clicking behind her eyes. She settled back down into the chair. “Oh.”

  The room sat quiet for a few seconds, then Karin shifted, sitting up in her chair and leaning her forearms against the table's edge. “What's Seirlin got to do with the Shadows? And what are they doing this side of the gate, anyway? I thought we left them all behind.”

  “Gate's been fixed,” Nomiki said. “About a month ago. And Seirlin's always been on this side of the gate. Huge corporation, different people. As far as I can tell, our compound was an odd branch-off, unrelated to most of Seirlin's activities.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “Yes, actually, I do. I've done a lot of research. They advertise themselves as a genetic and bio enhancement agency. Rich people body mod fodder.”

  “Have you… How deep have you gone?”

  “Not very,” she admitted. “I haven’t had a whole lot of time to poke around. You said you have the notebook I was using?”

  “Yes.”

  It was in her cabin, on the crate next to her bed.

  “Those pictures are from the public archives on Nova. Had a job there last year. Since I was near the gate, I took a few months to see what I could find. That’s all I found, then.”

  “Not much,” she commented.

  “No, not much at all. And I haven't had a whole lot of time to research since I hit Fallon. Too much… busy-ness.” She cleared her throat and lifted her eyes briefly. “How are your… memories?”

  “Spotty. Coming back, though. I think… Well, I thought it was trauma, but then I remembered about what they were doing.” She shook her head. “It’s still confusing.”

  “Wait,” Reeve said. “What’s wrong with her memories?”

  “I never did find out exactly,” Nomiki said. “It happened to both of us. Well, technically, all of us, since I know some of the other kids had it happen, too. They fed us some treatment program—no idea what—that fucked with our heads and bodies. Sometimes, we’d just wake up in our beds after, all bruised and feeling like shit. Real alien-invasion type crap.” She took a breath. “Anyway. Their ‘third phase’ ramped up that treatment bullshit, and they took us into some kind of isolation tank with sensors wrapped over our eyes and heads and pumped us full of chemicals.”

  A ripple of bile came to Karin, and she had a sudden image of the tank. Cream-colored, with rounded edges, and a sick, green light flashing from its waters. Under the table, her fists tightened.

  “Oh, Jesus. I remember it now.”

  “Right? Real fucked up shit. That’s when we started to lose our memories.”

  Soo-jin sat back with an audible thump. Her coffee sat untouched on the table. “Ah, child experimentation. Everyone’s favorite illegal kind of mad science.”

  “Technically legal,” Nomiki said. “Earth defined lab-raised test tube projects as subjects, not beings. Kind of a loophole meant for single-celled organisms and insects, but major parts of Earth neglected to update their laws.”

  “Wow. That’s… fucked up.”

  “And… why were they conducting these experiments?” Marc asked. “What was their end goal?”

  “Oh, you’re going to love this.” Nomiki sat up. “They had this whacked-out belief about human consciousness. Thought humanity was all connected or some shit and that, given the right circumstances, they could reach through the collective consciousness and… look for something, I guess.”

  “And instead, they got mutants?” Soo-jin raised an eyebrow. “I mean—no offense, Kar—but what the fuck? Did they get distracted?”

  “Who the fuck knows, right? I think in the beginning, they were using us as consciousness farms. A kind of microcosm using the so-called ‘pure’ form of beings created in the image and psyche of old god and goddess stereotypes to tap into higher pieces of our brain.”

  “High is one way to put it.” Soo-jin said. “Clio’s bounty.”

  A tone sounded through the Nemina’s internal comms. Karin stiffened as she recognized it.

  Ship alert.

  “Ten hells.” Soo-jin scowled at the doorway. “What now?”

  Karin rocked forward and leveraged herself up. “Let’s find out.”

  Chapter 3

  The ship sat on the Nemina’s scans looking only a little larger than some of the stars in its background. Impossible to classify from this far. Karin waved Cookie off from even trying when he made for his nest of computers perched on the free space of the navigation dashboard.

  As she sat in the pilot’s seat and brought up the scan data, Nomiki leaned over her shoulder, her gaze intent on the screen. “Reeve? Can you—?”

  “On it.” Reeve, the second-last into the room, ducked around Marc and disappeared back around the corner. His footsteps rang on the metal corridor floor, moving away.

  “He’ll tap into his equipment, see if he can find anything,” Nomiki said. “Nemina’s a bit…”

  “Old?” Marc suggested.

  “Vintage, yes.”

  The chair rocked a little as Nomiki leaned her elbow on the headrest. Her wrist ran alongside Karin’s head, fingers dangling just at the edge of her vision. For a second, she couldn’t take her attention off it.

  After so much time away from Nomiki, it felt odd to have her right next to her, as if nothing in the world had happened. A part of her wanted to lean her head against her wrist, but that would have been weird, especially among current company. They might have encouraged close family units among the members of the compound—especially those deemed siblings as she and Nomiki had been—but the real world was a little less touchy-feely. Besides, she and Nomiki never had been very close like that.

  “So…” Karin tapped a finger on the dashboard, then directed her gaze up to catch her sister’s face. “Fallon?”

  Nomiki made a partial shrug. “For now, anyway.”

  In the light of the dash, her normal tan had been washed out from her features, rendering them in a kind of blue that complicated the normal green of her irises. She had a more delicate face than Karin, with sharper features and narrower eyes. Some function of her genetic mix made her dark hair sit natural against her features rather than turn it into an incongruent juxtaposition like the one time Karin had dyed her hair to match.

  She watched her for several seconds, taking her in. “Money in the bank?”

  “Yep.”

  “And Reeve?”

  “Supervisor, of a sort. He’s higher-up than his rank indicates. Trusted to keep me on task.”

  Marc, standing to their side with his arms crossed over his chest, lifted an eyebrow. “He just left you to go back to his ship, alone.”

  A smile tugged at the corner of Nomiki’s lips.

  “He did just, didn’t he?” She turned her head to give Marc a direct look, and Karin felt the chair shift as she leaned her weight more against it. “Are you suggesting something, former-soldier Jones?”

  “Comms call.” Karin leaned forward to accept the notification. “Shush.”