Sunshine (3 page)

“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…

Despite her proximity to the now-awake creatures, she risked another question. “When are you to self-destruct?”

It took the computer a moment to answer. “It was supposed to occur when your chances of falling into Chinese or North Korean hands exceeded ninety percent or if you found this facility. I should have destructed when you fell.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“The fall disrupted the charge so that it is no longer functional.”

Kyung didn’t know what to think, the reality of what she had just learned creating more questions than it answered. “I thought you said that you didn’t know about this place or what it was.”

“That’s not accurate, Miss Kyung. I indicated that my data on the facility had been removed and that such an occurrence was unusual. But general data existed. And Dr. Leonard was quite clear in his instructions.”

The news shocked Kyung.
He tried to kill me?
She was about to follow up with another question when the creatures moved.

All three dog-things rose from the floor and loped toward the production hall, one of them nipping at the other two to hurry them through. A few seconds later Kyung was alone. She had almost died—been blown up after surviving a fall that could have killed her but didn’t—and part of her was furious with Leonard for having tried to murder her, but mostly she was furious with herself for ever trusting him, for having let her guard down to the point where she hadn’t bothered to interrogate the computer fully before landing on Koryo. Kyung should have known better. John didn’t make director by being an idiot, and in his business covering one’s tracks on the wrong moves was almost as important as making the right decisions on new product lines, maybe
more
important, but neither was as important as the golden rule of weapons sales: watch your own back. It would have been easy for her to run a simple check just by asking as many questions as she could have on any topic related to systems that could have killed her. When she saw the stupidity of it, Kyung had to stop herself from pounding the floor, enraged by her own carelessness. But anger helped. Slowly she inched her way from under the carpet, moving through the wide hallway to where the dog-things had slept, until ten minutes later she had drawn even with the production hall entrance where she peered in using the carbine’s sight.

“Movement, Miss Kyung,” the computer warned.

Kyung hissed her response. “No shit, movement. I can see them myself. How many are there?”

“I count three hundred of the largest size, four hundred of what could be juveniles, and another four hundred of the small ones; these last are identical to the ones we first encountered at the bone pile. I assess that these small ones are newly manufactured
huli jing
.”

Kyung didn’t see how she could make it. The entryway was at least three meters across, having been designed to allow the movement of heavy equipment, and it would take her a minute to traverse if she went all out, ignoring what was sure to be excruciating pain—the kind that could make her pass out. But for now, none of them looked her way. Kyung watched as the things sat on their haunches, even the young ones, each of them staring at row after row of vats. Kyung had only seen them in pictures but knew that the metallic cylinders contained a nutrient solution, kept at exactly the right temperature, in which organisms grew to the point where they could be safely released. Beside each vat, two medical robots swayed on their trunks, their spidery arms moving to maintain production.
How long would this continue
, she wondered,
without humans in the loop? How many would be manufactured?

“John Leonard created this,” Kyung whispered. “It was him. He was the one colonist who got away.”

She hadn’t been talking to it, but the computer responded. “Correct. According to the Sunshine files, this was his first project and was conceived of during a period when relations between North Koreans on Paegam-737 and the Chinese hit a low point, when the Unified Korean government convinced the North to conduct joint military exercises, thereby pressuring New Beijing to halt mining in an area claimed by Pusan.”

“But why break with the convention?” Kyung asked. “With Korea’s treaty obligations?”

“I’m afraid that’s not in the files, Miss Kyung. But I did learn the main reason for working with the North Koreans.”

Kyung figured she’d regret knowing the answer, but at the same time wanted it more than anything—like passing an accident and having to look. “Why?”

“Human test subjects. Two of the North Koreans were scientists; the rest were used in live tests for the creatures’ combat abilities. All North Korean test subjects died long before the accidental release of creatures, but tests involving them were deemed successful.”

Kyung felt sick again. Leonard knew.
And now the Chinese were here on Koryo.
Kyung wasn’t worried about what would happen to the planet’s inhabitants if the creatures got loose because that was a short-term problem, the longer term one a question of what would happen once the Chinese took this place and added Sunshine to their repertoire of horror. She imagined armies of creatures moving undetected into UK territory because to everyone they’d look and act like UK soldiers, citizens, or even its politicians. Kyung also admired it. She had to give credit to John for having conceived of something so brilliant, and for a second lost herself in thought, imagining what would have happened had the project succeeded, created a new kind of weapon that didn’t reveal itself as a weapon until it was too late. These things would be ruthless; Kyung had seen the evidence of that already.

Another howl brought her back to the present. The vats hissed, and their lower section lifted on hydraulic pistons to drain a viscous orange fluid, along with which came one of the small rat-like creatures. At first she thought the other ones fed on the young. All of them converged on the newly emerged to surround them in a sea of growling dog-things, their teeth bared and growls audible even from that distance, but then Kyung saw they were cleaning the newborns, licking the remnants of fluid from pink bodies that squirmed on what must have been a cold floor.

Kyung had seen enough; it wouldn’t be long before the things turned their attention back to the entryway. “I’m trying for the door. How are you coming with those command codes?”

“Still not cracked, Miss Kyung. But I
have
made progress.”

“Keep working on it but get ready. In a few minutes, you may have to open the maintenance area door for me.”

Kyung scooted forward, doing her best not to make noise as she passed the production hall. Her suit slid along reluctantly. Each sound, the scrapes of ceramic armor against the floor, magnified in her mind until it was a gunshot, the creatures sure to hear her sooner or later, until finally the stress made her cry in silence so tears streamed down her nose and fogged her faceplate. She was open. Exposed. Nothing now could prevent them from seeing her, although ironically, she thought, her slow movements most likely prevented them from noticing the human who had emerged from the darkness of the outside corridor. Three quarters of the way there, Kyung started to think she’d make it. Then once she’d passed to the other side, she couldn’t believe she’d made it and cried harder, the pressure release palpable when breath came back along with a pounding heartbeat she hadn’t noticed a minute before. Kyung reached the door and found it unlocked.
It was open!
She swung the door wide, looking for any creatures that might be waiting on the other side, and then pulled herself through before slowly working her legs out of the way so she could shut it behind her. Kyung was almost home free when it came. A lone creature. The thing had walked silently out of the production hall and stopped, its head turned directly toward her and yellow eyes trained on what felt like an invisible spot on her forehead. Neither of them moved at first. But then, at the same time she flung the door shut, the creature leaped and screamed, its shriek echoing throughout the underground chambers.