Sunshine Read Online Free

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