Sunshine Read online

  Kyung glanced once more around the room, her unease notching up. White ceramic. Clean. The structure had been covered on the outside with some kind of facade, she realized, designed to defeat a casual onlooker and convince people that there was nothing special about the place. But she recognized a laboratory when she saw one. This is exactly how Samsung did it, and even the desk screamed that she was now inside one of their sensitive outposts, so that if Kyung squinted, she could almost see the smiling secretary.

  “This is no mine,” Kyung said. “This is a company site, and if the SSD was involved, I guarantee you those bastards had a second way out, a secret one. In case of emergency.”

  * * *

  Kyung had moved through an open laboratory air lock, its glass doors shattered. Beyond was a workshop. Most of the lights still functioned, and the room stretched into the distance at least a hundred meters long and as many wide, and tables covered with equipment and computers filled the area with only narrow spaces between them, forcing her to pull herself down a tight channel; it wasn’t long until the effort aggravated her injuries.

  The room spun; pain screamed up both legs and into her abdomen before Kyung’s suit sent its next bolus of drugs into her veins. Her arms slipped against the slick ceramic floor panels, but she pushed on, pausing every few seconds to listen for movement until eventually her eyes started to flutter shut and Kyung hoped that she wouldn’t fall asleep, didn’t want to think of those rat-things crawling into her armor. But the drugs finally slammed home; her fear disappeared in a haze of thoughts and scenes of her family in Korea, which floated through her mind until Kyung grinned with the realization that nothing really mattered anymore and that the temperature had jumped to a more comfortable level, one which made her so sleepy…

  “Miss Kyung!”

  Kyung felt a vague sense of urgency, but the computer’s voice barely broke through a veil of sleep until finally Kyung’s eyes snapped open, the blaring suit alarm yanking her back into consciousness.

  “Miss Kyung!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Miss Kyung, look in front of you.”

  Kyung raised her head. In front of her lay a Chinese soldier, who writhed on the floor—his chest ripped open from sternum to waist and armor shattered in several places. He was mumbling something and pulled off his helmet.

  “Where did he come from?” Kyung asked.

  “From the northeast while you were unconscious, and he collapsed about one minute ago. You’ve been out of touch for one-point-three hours.”

  The man stared at her, several drops of blood falling from his mouth to splash on the floor. He whispered one last phrase before his eyes went blank.

  “Did you catch what he said?” asked Kyung.

  The computer flashed a message on her screen. “He said, ‘Huli jing,’ a Chinese word, but there is an equivalent in Japanese, kitsune. I’ve checked the meaning, and it doesn’t make sense, Miss Kyung. A fox creature?”

  Kyung felt a chill as she recalled her grandmother’s story, the one she had tried to remember on the ridge. “Kitsune is a folktale—every kid knows it, and it’s not just Japanese. The Chinese and Koreans have stories too. My grandmother told us that kitsune are shape-shifters, fox spirits who kill a person, eat him, and assume his form so friends and family can’t tell the difference. It’s a bunch of crap. The guy was probably hallucinating when he died.”

  Then again, Kyung thought, that thing on the ridge looked like a dog. The urge to figure it out overpowered everything, and Kyung gritted her teeth so she could sit up to get a better view, looking for something, anything that might help. She saw a computer terminal nearby and pulled herself closer. Kyung snapped a panel from her forearm and unwound a tiny cable, jacking it into a port on the terminal’s side.

  “Can you access these systems?” she asked. “And hack through any security codes?”

  “They’re over thirty years old, Miss Kyung. I don’t know. But I shall try.”

  “Well,” said Kyung, “someone’s keeping the power going in this place, so maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Kyung tensed while she waited; it wasn’t only that this place wasn’t right, it was that everything had a look as though people had been here yesterday working, even though the bones proved they’d been gone for some time. Computer terminals flashed their holo symbols, showing they were dormant but ready. There were even coffee cups and bowls with chopsticks, their contents long ago transformed into something else, and blinking meeting reminders on the desk closest to her so it appeared as though someone would be back at any minute. Kyung slipped the pistol from its holster and tried to raise herself a few more inches to get a look over the desk. It was no use. She slumped back to the floor with a wince when something crashed in the distance.

  “Do you sense any movement?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” the computer said, “but your power levels are so low that I had to deactivate multiple systems, including motion tracking, in order to interface with the laboratory computer. Would you like me to stop and check for movement?”

  Kyung shook her head. “Negative. Keep looking. I want to know what they were doing here.”

  She heard footsteps splashing in shallow water at the far end of the chamber and flicked the pistol’s safety off.

  “System accessed. My apologies for the delay; it took some time to access relevant information. There were older security codes that took more time to break than I anticipated.”

  Kyung whispered, “Just give me a summary.”

  “Project Sunshine. Genetic research intended to create the next generation of enhanced security forces, a collaborative effort between Unified Korea and People’s Republic scientists exiled from their home system. It appears that the project enjoyed some initial success but was then shut down due to an unforeseen event.”

  The Chinese and North Koreans.Here.On Koryo. “That’s not possible,” said Kyung. “Unified Korea would never collaborate with the old North. Are you sure we’re talking about North Koreans?”

  “Affirmative. Twenty from Paegam system itself transferred here two days after a team from Pusan finished construction.”

  “Define genetic engineering,” Kyung said. She had trouble wrapping her thoughts around the possibility that Samsung had worked with their enemies, under the auspices of the SSD, and decided to ignore it for now. “The stuff we’re doing today—enhanced strength, pain reduction?”

  The computer’s voice was slower now—almost tired, she thought. “Negative. It looks like these were to be organisms never conceived of before, nonhuman troops with chimeric DNA compositions that coded for extremely elastic and elongated proteins, enabling them to assume the form of anything. Human or animal.”

  Kyung nearly dropped her pistol. Koryo was nothing. Well, maybe not nothing, but certainly not worthy of Chinese attention since it was just a chunk of rock coated by a thick layer of ice and had an atmosphere barely capable of supporting human life. There were minerals here, sure. Cobalt. Some copper. But other than that there was nothing that the Chinese wouldn’t have been able to find on some other planet or asteroid, no reason for them to have cared enough to invade on the ground. Stephens-Eight, a thousand light-years away, had been an obvious choice since it held more platinum and oil reserves than anyone on old Earth could have imagined. But this place? It had been the greatest mystery of the whole war: why Koryo? Kyung held her breath with the realization that her company may have had a role in starting it. The only reason the Chinese would have wanted this place was because of Project Sunshine: Why waste time and money on research and development when you could just steal Samsung’s work? And they had been here too. The North Koreans must have told their new Chinese allies everything, sold it to them for a few freighters or a thousand tons of rice.

  “What happened?” Kyung asked. “Why did they shut down the program?”

  “According to the records, two test subjects escaped, initiating automated quarantine safeguards, which u
nfortunately locked the entire colony inside the site, killing them all. After that the corporation abandoned the post but kept a power and remote maintenance connection from Pak Chong Hui City—to maintain isolation protocols. It looks like the war, however, may have damaged some systems so that automated production resumed. Hold please…

  “Movement,” the computer said. “Ten meters in front of you, Miss Kyung, and to the right. Coming this way. I completed a download of the Sunshine records and reactivated defensive systems.”

  “Damn it, I didn’t ask you to download those!” Now the fingerprint would be all over her—that she had found the place, that she knew. Then again it was the least of her problems, and Kyung rolled over to sit up, pushing her back against one of the desks. She raised the pistol and waited.

  “Where is it?”

  The computer stuttered, and Kyung glanced at her power indicator. Her heart sank.

  “S-sorry, Miss Kyung. I have to shut down in order to maintain power levels for your medical and environmental systems. Good luck!”

  Power. Without fuel cells she’d be dead from the cold, not to mention the pain once her drugs ran out. Kyung looked at the body of the Chinese soldier. She didn’t know if converting the man’s fuel cell was even possible, but it was her only option, and she was about to move closer to him when someone giggled. Kyung listened. In the distance she heard a soft dripping noise and a loud rattle when the air-handling system kicked on, pushing warm air from an overhead vent, so that she almost failed to hear their footsteps. More than one set. Kyung aimed, and her hand started shaking when from around the corner came a pair of children—little girls in Korean school uniforms whose hands clenched a thick jump rope, swinging lazily between them.

  Kyung fired. The first fléchette barely nicked one of the girls’ shoulders, and their jump rope went instantly taut, drawing the two together so that Kyung thought they had melted into each other. She screamed. The girls fused, and their uniforms turned translucent for a second before transforming into the fur of a monstrous dog-thing whose muscles tensed as it leaped. Kyung emptied her pistol. At the top of the creature’s arc, her final fléchettes ripped through, explosive tips snapping like firecrackers and sending sprays of blood so the thing slammed into the desk next to her and lay there, taking one final breath before rolling onto its side.

  Kyung threw her pistol to the floor. She could smell it now—a kind of musk that somehow seemed right for Koryo, and she scooted closer, curious. Kyung finally managed to pull the gauntlet from its locking ring and gently lowered her hand to the thing’s back, the coarseness of its hair surprising her. But there was something else. Kyung pushed her palm against its abdomen and felt the animal’s skin shift in reaction, and when she pulled away, she saw an exact duplicate of her hand as it reached out. Kyung screamed again, regaining control when the hand went limp. Dead.

  She pulled herself over to the Chinese soldier, rolled him over, and snapped the man’s fuel cell from its socket, then grabbed his carbine. Kyung hadn’t seen it at first. The weapon was like her pistol, only much bigger, with a shoulder-mounted hopper that fed fléchettes through a flexi-belt so that a complete load provided ten thousand shots, and his hopper looked almost full. An hour later, she finished rigging the Chinese battery.

  “Hello, Miss Kyung,” the computer said, “I’m happy to see you alive.”

  “Shut up and get me out of here. The Chinese guy had a Maxwell carbine. Can I mount their hoppers to this suit?”

  “Affirmative,” it answered. “The suit was designed to handle all foreign offensive systems, including Chinese ones, in case its occupant was forced to use captured weaponry. You can even get a heads-up interface via the carbine’s camera sight. But you should know all this, Miss Kyung; you designed me.”

  Kyung struggled to contain her anger. “I’m not talking about that!” she shouted. “I’m talking about the damage from my fall; were the shoulder mounts or targeting electronics damaged?”

  “Oh.” A second later it answered, “No, Miss Kyung. All offensive systems operational. As an aside, the capture of a Maxwell carbine increased your chance of survival by a small but significant percentage. Well done.”

  “Shut up. Walk me through this.” A moment later, the computer had helped Kyung mount the hopper, and a red targeting reticle appeared on her faceplate.

  “Listen to me,” said Kyung. “This thing, whatever I just killed. The little rat creatures I saw when we first entered, the ones I killed near the bones, they looked like their young. Maybe there were baby dog-things. Were Project Sunshine creatures designed to reproduce?” Did Samsung actually hire bioengineers that stupid? she wondered. And why do this in the first place; the government of the UK had signed the treaty for Christ’s sake, and above all, why cooperate with a North Korean government in exile—one that only knew how to lie and steal?

  “Miss Kyung, I advise you to prepare for combat while I look for that data.”

  Kyung’s stomach turned. She heard a howl from one side of the chamber answered a few seconds later from somewhere behind her. “I’m ready,” she said. “Where are they?”

  “Two moving in circles around you, Miss. And no, it doesn’t look like they were intended to have offspring. The creatures were all male—sterile males at that. But with human speech skills and intelligence. This was a highly ambitious project, Miss, and fast-tracked, but it looks like they had that aspect of safety in hand since there was no way for them to reproduce.”

  The first creature didn’t bother with subterfuge and leaped over the desk she had leaned on, not realizing that Kyung had been there all along. She fired into its back, killing it instantly. The area went silent then, and Kyung began trembling, not sure where the second one was and wondering if she would make it out after all. The recent movement had irritated her legs, and the drugs failed to curb all the pain so she bit her lip, doing everything she could to will it away, if even for just a few seconds so she wouldn’t pass out again. Not now. Maybe in a little while, after she had found someplace to hide, to hole up and think about the next move. Kyung heard something and raised her carbine when another soldier crawled from around the corner, his armor shattered and helmet gone.

  “Help me,” he said.

  “How did you know I spoke English?” she asked

  This time when Kyung fired, the shock had worn off. She didn’t even flinch when the thing thrashed on the floor before dying, its transformation less spectacular now that it was expected.

  “Perfect marksmanship,” said the computer.

  Kyung pulled the carbine’s sling over her shoulder and moved onto her stomach. “Any sign of doors?” she asked.

  “Keep heading on the course you were originally on, Miss Kyung; there are several air locks in that direction. Would you like me to tell you what I found?”

  “Sure,” she grunted, pulling herself along. “Tell me.”

  “I’ve been scanning the downloaded records and found a map of the facility. According to this, at the rear of the site is a maintenance and storage area. It also looks like there is a tunnel from there to Pak Chong Hui, a power conduit. It makes sense, Miss, since we saw no indications of aboveground towers; power must have been routed underground, and they would have needed tunnel access for routine maintenance.”

  “How long a tunnel?” she asked.

  “Ten-point-eight kilometers, Miss Kyung. But there’s one issue that concerns me.”

  “What?”

  The suit computer cleared its throat, and she almost laughed. It actually cleared its throat! “Our only route to the maintenance area passes an entrance to the main production hall, the place where these creatures are most likely manufactured.”

  * * *

  “How were they to be controlled?” Kyung whispered. She hid under a desk, a rotting carpet pulled over her so she could watch, undetected, from a hundred meters away. Three of the dog-things sat outside the production hall, the thick glass of its entryway smashed and metal fittings
shredded from what looked like claw and teeth marks. All three creatures were asleep. But Kyung didn’t want to open fire yet; she couldn’t see inside the production area, and there could have been anywhere from zero to a hundred more, and the noise of fléchettes might have brought them, a whole army for all she knew. At least the door to the maintenance area looked unharmed, which brought a feeling of hope when she saw it, until Kyung realized that it was closed—and probably locked—so she might need even more time to allow her computer to open it once things started moving.

  “According to the files, it was to be done using coded voice commands.” The computer was on whisper mode so Kyung had to concentrate to hear. “I have the files containing those codes, but they’re encrypted with algorithms I’ve never encountered, probably layered, and I speculate it would take time to break. It’s unlikely that any new or old standard corporate codes would work.”

  “But could you do it?” she asked.

  “I could try, Miss Kyung. It will require power resources and an increased drain on the fuel cell, which is already at sixty percent.”

  Kyung nodded. “Do it. Cut off all unnecessary suit systems, including climate control; it’s not too cold now that we’re in this place.” She thought for a moment and then realized something. “Wait. I want you to do one more thing.”

  “Yes, Miss Kyung?”

  “Since you’re a prototype, we gave you a self-destruct charge. I want you to activate it in the event that I die.”

  The computer sounded indignant. “That has already been taken care of, Miss Kyung. Dr. Leonard uploaded specific instructions for conditions under which self-destruction should occur.”

  John Leonard already did? Kyung was about to ask more when she stopped; the dog-things had woken up. They shrieked, and she thought their sound was like a human scream that shifted into a dog’s howl, so loud that her helmet pickups snapped off and shielded her from the brunt of it. Even then the echoes locked her in place. A kind of numbing paralysis ran from her head to her legs and froze every muscle, her mind speeding through the day’s events in a way that suggested none of this was real, none of it could be happening. And why her? Why would John Leonard upload instructions for self-destruction without telling her and what were his orders, and even if Kyung made it out, made it back to Pak, what would he have waiting for her there? The fear became a thing alive, a squirming mass in her chest that threatened to force a scream in answer to those that now surrounded her, only Kyung’s would be the howl of surrender, one to signal that she had finally given up because it had all become too frightening. But she tried to convince herself there had to be answers somewhere, and if anyone had a way to figure it out…