Sunshine (2 page)

“Movement detected, Miss Kyung, possibly local fauna, a small rat-like creature.”

She pointed at the corpses. “Did they do this?” she asked. “
Kill
these people?”

“Negative. It’s highly unlikely due to the creature’s size when compared to bite marks still visible on the bones. But this is odd.”

“What?” Kyung asked.

“Several of these corpses have barely operating microtransponders, the old variety which the corporation embedded into their skulls. Although most of their records have been wiped, they still contain some data—personal information. According to my readings, these are the first Koryo colonists.”

“What are you talking about?” Kyung asked. “The original Koryo colonists are buried in Pak City. I met their children yesterday during a memorial ceremony. One of them is planetary governor for Christ’s sake!”

The computer sounded condescending now, but Kyung ignored the tone. “Not according to these transponders, Miss Kyung. These ones predate any registered colonists by fifteen years and clearly state they were first to settle the planet.”

“
All
of them?” asked Kyung. “How did they die?”

“There is no record of the manner in which they died, but their master roster indicates all of them are here except one. Hold please…” The speakers clicked off, silent for a moment, before her computer spoke again. “Miss Kyung, several of the small creatures are approaching you from the other side of the bodies.”

Kyung ripped the fléchette pistol from her holster and backed against the door. She waited. Her helmet speakers amplified the sounds around her, and again she heard the gentle clicking of tiny claws, the noise getting louder until a large rat-thing scurried onto the pile. Its belly was round like a grapefruit. The thing raised itself on hind legs to sniff the air, exposing multiple rows of sharp teeth, and then ran toward her with a growl.

Kyung squeezed off a series of shots, downing it on her third try. Two more leaped at her. She killed one with a quick shot, the other when she slammed a gauntleted fist on its back.

“Where are they coming from?” asked Kyung.

“From the other side of the pile,” her computer answered. “My sensors show a man-sized opening in the wall beyond.”

She slid the pistol back into her holster and moved out.

“And Miss Kyung, my motion trackers also picked up something else similar to what you described outside.”

“A dog?” Kyung asked.

“Affirmative. More massive than an average Earth canine. I lost it a microsecond after it showed up on sensors but will continue to scan.”

She cursed silently. “Yeah.
Do
that.”

“Miss Kyung, given your food, drug, and power constraints, shouldn’t you continue searching for an escape route?”

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 unfortunately 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.