Stars Uncharted Read online

  She repeated the process on herself, and didn’t warn him about the dizziness or the disorientation he would experience. Or how strange a tall man like him would find it in a shorter body like hers.

  She’d get her body back bruised. The first time she’d swapped with Alejandro he’d bumped into a lot of things because he hadn’t taken into account her curves. After a while he’d gotten used to them, come to like them rather too much. So much so that she’d offered to give him his own, which had led to their second-last major fight.

  This time her curves were smaller, but it didn’t take much to misjudge.

  She set the connections. “Ready?” And she flipped the switch before Tamati could get out the “Wait” he’d started to say.

  A flash of blue, white, then gold. There was the usual moment of disorientation where her brain interpreted things at a different height and in a different color than what she was used to. The room smelled strongly of blood. His body’s blood. Her blood now. Then the pain centers kicked in and she dropped the weapon Tamati had been holding to clutch at her stomach as she realized how much she hurt.

  Her thoughts were fuzzy.

  “How many painkillers have you had?” It was a wonder he could walk, let alone talk.

  Tamati dived for the weapon, misjudged the distance, and planted himself nose-first into the floor.

  He stood up, weapon in hand, stepped back, and waved the weapon in her face.

  Nika ignored him. She concentrated instead on the slow, steady movements she needed to make until this body became familiar to her. Everything was obscured by the haze of painkillers Tamati had taken. How had he gripped her arm like he had? She felt leaden and heavy.

  Tamati waved the weapon under her nose, unsteady, but enough in control that it could kill her. “Fix my injury while I am away. I’ll be back in two hours.”

  “It will take four hours to fix the knife wound. You’ve lost a lot of blood.” A genemod machine was fast on the basics, like repairing damaged bodies. It was only when you tried to change a body that it took time.

  “Don’t try killing my body in the interim.” He leaned close. “I know that when one of us dies, the other returns to his own body. That’s how it works, isn’t it?”

  Nika nodded mutely. That was the theory, although she’d never tested it. Otherwise, the bodies automatically swapped back after twenty-four hours.

  A bigger worry was that Tamati would consider her body dispensable, and let her be killed on his job.

  He’d get a nasty shock if he did, for she’d take a long time to die. Long enough for him to think the bodies weren’t going to change back.

  Nika was paranoid Alejandro might almost-kill her one day. Just for fun. That he’d do something to her body while he was in it—like maybe put a noose around her neck and jump off somewhere high. He’d be fine, because once she was dead, he’d return to his own body. He’d then cut her down and put her into the genemod machine. If he didn’t time it right, she’d be brain-dead.

  Hence her own last modification but one. To push extra oxygen to her brain when her body started to shut down. It gave her fifteen minutes before any brain damage started, and another fifteen before she was irreparable.

  She hadn’t tested that, either.

  “I have taken precautions,” Tamati said. “If I don’t get out of here alive, you won’t either.”

  “You can be sure I’ll do my utmost to keep you alive.” The comment was heartfelt.

  He smiled the twisted-leer smile with Nika’s face. Even when he didn’t have a scar he twisted his mouth the same way. “I am glad we understand each other.” He brought his weapon down on her home link, smashing it. “No calling anyone.”

  “You didn’t have to do that. Who am I going to call with your voice and your face?”

  “The police, maybe.”

  Who, if they knew Eaglehawk was involved, would run fast the other way.

  “Remember, our bodies switch back after twenty-four hours.”

  “Won’t be a problem. I’ll be back long before.” Tamati waited for her to connect herself into the regen unit. “I want to be sure you’re under before I go.”

  She set the timer for four minutes instead of four hours, and prayed he wouldn’t notice the difference. Any longer and it would be too dangerous to come out of it before full repairs had been done.

  The last thing she remembered before the machine knocked her out was her own face looming over her, saying in her own voice, “Don’t think you can double-cross me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When Nika regained consciousness the room was quiet. For a moment, she lay in the haze of the painkillers Tamati had taken and wanted to go back to sleep.

  She forced herself off the machine.

  She hurt in every single place she could hurt, and her brain kept going hurry, hurry, reminding her she hadn’t stopped the internal bleeding. He would die if she didn’t stay on the machine.

  She felt dirty in this body she hadn’t asked for, and the sight of Tamati’s longer fingers touching the controls on her machine, mimicking the moves her hands normally made, turned her stomach.

  Four minutes had drained enough liquid out of her lungs so she was no longer in danger of imminent drowning, although she imagined she could feel new blood pooling in, even now. She was also weak from loss of blood. She hooked herself up to a portable plasma supply and waited precious minutes until the feed had finished. She didn’t have long, but there was no point dying before she was done.

  Tamati hadn’t wasted any time leaving for his job, but he’d still stopped to lock every door that was coded to her own DNA—iris and fingerprint. There was no way she’d get out before he came back.

  That was fine. She didn’t want out. She wanted to stay alive. Tamati would keep her body alive until they switched back, at least.

  She hoped.

  All she had to do was keep this one alive for that long.

  Someone like Alejandro, or Alejandro’s boss, would have kept her alive and come back to use the exchanger, again, and again. Not Tamati. Not with his reputation. He’d tidy up after the job.

  What could she do to increase her chances of living through the next day?

  She swallowed the bile—or was it blood—that rose at the thought of Tamati, in her body, waiting to kill her.

  If she could keep him in the genemod machine for more than a day, and his—her—body outside for twenty-four hours, she’d be back in her own body before he came out of the machine.

  Nika laughed, although it hurt. One advantage of having had an abusive boyfriend was that you were paranoid about him getting back in to hurt you. She had locks—double, triple, quadruple—on everything. Cleverly hidden from her clients, but still there. Manual locks that would take time and effort to break through.

  She’d be gone before he got out.

  Maybe she could get a little revenge at the same time. Redesign his body. Make him unrecognizable as Tamati Woden. That might scuttle future job prospects. Yes. She’d do that. A full-body redesign would take days in the machine, give her more time to escape.

  She didn’t have time to create a new look from scratch, so she picked through her old designs, heavy-headed from the painkillers.

  Sex change? No. Tamati was the sort who’d adapt. He’d probably find it useful in his profession.

  The scar was a given. She programmed that in. Consider it gone.

  Iris and fingerprint change as well. When she had finished, he wouldn’t be able to touch anything he’d secured with biometrics. If he was as paranoid as she expected him to be, he wouldn’t have another way in to his own personal system, because he’d expect someone to hack it.

  She kept the data, carefully ensuring that her off-site backups recorded every detail of his DNA, his irises, his fingerprints, toeprints, and eve
rything else about him. A blood sample. Hair and skin.

  She had to stop. She was getting weaker. She’d have to put him under soon.

  What else could she do?

  What would an assassin hate the most?

  To be noticed.

  She laughed again, and foul-smelling drops of brownish-red liquid sprayed onto the screen. If you were an assassin, you didn’t want to be seen. Although how Tamati managed that with his scar she had no idea. Probably covered it with a nuplas face when he went out on jobs.

  She’d had a client once who’d been allergic to nuplas. It had taken weeks to work out what had caused the allergy. A tiny marker on the end of the MC1R gene. She programmed the marker in. If Tamati tried to disguise his face with nuplas he’d break out in a painful rash that would take weeks to clear and itch like mad all the time he had it. Standard painkillers—even nerveseal—made the rash worse.

  She flicked through her templates, looking for the one she’d designed for Alejandro. Back when she’d first been smitten by him. She’d worked on it ever since, perfecting it over time. Yes. That one. It was fitting, really. Passing Alejandro’s new body over to someone else signaled the end of this period of her life.

  She hesitated. This truly was the end. The end of Alejandro. The end of Alejandro’s boss. The end of Nika Rik Terri.

  She’d thought she was ready. She wasn’t.

  She turned back to the design, Tamati’s strong fingers shaking. She couldn’t stop the shake.

  It was a simple design, deceptively natural except for the deep cobalt green of the eyes and the thick, luxurious hair that picked up the metallic sheen of polished copper, along with a touch of the tarnished green patina of hydrated copper chloride, which would become more noticeable as his hair became damp. Wet, it would be totally green.

  The patina had taken her years to perfect.

  Deep-set green eyes, copper hair. Delicate, unblemished skin that carried a hint of the copper. Square jaw. Strong mouth, soft lips. Aquiline nose that looked as if it would be too large but wasn’t. Noses continued to grow over the years. If he wanted to continue to look his best he’d need to come back in two to three years and have some shaved off.

  He wouldn’t, of course.

  A pity she didn’t have time to build something in so that he couldn’t leer as he smiled. He’d still do that. It was an ingrained habit.

  This man was going to turn heads wherever he went.

  What else?

  Nika’s first and only boss, Hannah Tan, had specialized in DNA changes. She’d been passionate about them. “No one knows how to do them anymore,” she had said. “Not like the golden days when artists like Gino Giwari were at their peak.”

  Hannah had lived and breathed DNA changes, and for five years Nika had too.

  “I am the best,” Hannah had told Nika often. “But Gino Giwari, he was . . . he was God. He could do anything.”

  Nika had learned everything she could about Gino Giwari. There was plenty to learn. He hadn’t been a modest man. He’d published extensively and documented many of the changes he had made.

  Over time she had come to believe that while Giwari had been more than capable of successfully changing someone’s DNA, he hadn’t been an artist, he’d been a technician. His changes were always in the same places. It got so that all Nika had to do was read a sequence of DNA and she could recognize Giwari’s work.

  In fact, the thing he should have been famous for, which had been buried under years of posturing about DNA changes, was his pioneering use of transurides in body modding. Nika was using it now, to give her skin its ethereal glow.

  Giwari’s DNA techniques had never taken off. Nika had reproduced some of them, but always with problems. And DNA modified that deeply didn’t take well to future mods.

  Drops of blood spattered onto the screen. A little tweak of the DNA, Giwari-style, and Tamati would always have trouble with genemod machines.

  A perfect design for an assassin who liked to go unnoticed except when he did his kills, and a nasty surprise next time he was injured.

  She set up the life support. Her calculations told her it would take twelve days.

  She set the safeties.

  Alejandro’s meddling had taught her early that she had to build in safeties. Especially after they had started using the exchanger and she’d come back to her own body once to find that while he’d been in her body he’d redesigned it to add twenty millimeters to her bust and to remove the same from her waist. After that she’d made good and sure he couldn’t touch what she’d set up. The controls were memory-based. Nothing Alejandro could use by forcing her body to the scanner. No biometrics, no prints, no DNA. Pure memory.

  Once Tamati’s body went into the box, nothing would let him out until the process was complete.

  It was done. She triggered the locks, including the manual locks—old-fashioned bolts that you had to pull back, and chains—that stopped anyone coming into the shop but could be opened from inside. And you didn’t need DNA to do it.

  The exchanger had been their final fight. After she’d dumped him, he’d come back again, and again. It had terrified her that he might get into her shop while she was in the machine. He knew just enough to do major damage.

  When Tamati came around he’d get out.

  He just wouldn’t get in beforehand.

  She tubed up, and immersed herself in the mutrient bath.

  2

  JOSUNE ARRIOLA

  The Hassim was three days late. At first, Josune had only been worried because every day’s delay increased the chances of discovery. If she had known how paranoid Captain Hammond Roystan was about trackers on his precious ship, The Road to the Goberlings, she’d have found another way to keep in touch with the Hassim. Would even have risked a coded message.

  Now she was just worried.

  Captain Feyodor had been waiting for her signal. She should be here by now.

  “You going to do some work around here?” Carlos demanded, and Josune dragged her attention back to the gear she was curing. She spared a wistful thought for the Hassim’s workshop, whose molder cured as it built. The gear she had just built would have been harder than tempered steel when it came out of the molder, instead of her having to cure it for an hour afterward.

  “Both ends, Josune. Do it evenly. I don’t want a gear breaking in nullspace.”

  “Teach your grandmother, Carlos.” But Josune obediently switched the gear around so the heat lamp could work on the other end. Carlos might be unqualified, but he was a natural engineer, and he certainly knew his way around a molder. So did Josune, but she had spent years studying ship engineering. Those qualifications didn’t show on the certificate she’d handed Roystan when she’d applied for this job. That certificate said she was a junior technician who’d gained all her experience on an old cargo runner named the Breadbasket, which had worked out on the rim.

  Carlos watched her. “For a newbie, you’re good at this.”

  “I had a lot of practice. The Breadbasket kept breaking down.”

  “Thought you claimed it had the best engine in the sector.”

  She had to be careful, remember what she’d said. “That’s because I was on it.”

  Roystan hadn’t been able to check her credentials with her supposed former captain. The Breadbasket had fallen afoul of a cattle ship. The reason Josune hadn’t been with her crew? She’d been in jail, drunk and disorderly, when they’d shipped out. She was supposed to meet them at their next port. At least, that was what she’d told Roystan.

  Roystan had taken her on because he needed an extra general hand. Josune being an engineer was a bonus. But he’d given her a stern warning. “Get drunk here and we won’t bail you out. Don’t expect to join us at the next port, either.”

  “You young people,” Carlos said. “Always think you know everything.” />
  She’d lied about her age too; said she was twenty-five. She’d spent time in a machine to make herself look ten years younger than she was. The hardest part was trying to act like a twenty-five-year-old.

  She shouldn’t have to lie much longer. But the Hassim was late.

  * * *

  • • •

  They gathered as a group for the evening meal. Roystan switched the boards from the bridge to the display in the crew room so they could eat together. Over time, the crew room on The Road had been modified so much that it had become a secondary bridge. If they’d been able to connect the pilot controls and the calibrator to the crew room, Josune was convinced no one would ever step onto the main bridge except for maintenance.

  There were seven crew. Josune and Roystan. General hand and de facto engineer Carlos. Chef and cargo master Jacques, who’d spent the six weeks Josune had been on board cooking and talking to his kitchen appliances. The longest time he spent in cargo was when choosing what to cook for dinner. There was plenty of cargo space set aside for food.

  Cargo assistant Pol did most of the cargo work, with the help of two other general hands, Guardian and Qiang. Guardian doubled as the second pilot. Josune didn’t know what Qiang’s second role was, but as she was the only one allowed to carry a blaster, she assumed Qiang was the ship heavy.

  She touched her hand to the welcoming hardness of the sparker strapped to her stomach. It made her uneasy to walk around on a ship unarmed. Roystan and his crew might think they were safe here so deep in the legal zone, but Josune knew from experience that when a company wanted something, the legal zone was no barrier. The Justice Department—paid by the companies to maintain the legal zone—turned a blind eye to what the companies did, and sometimes actively helped them. Weapons were occasionally necessary.

  Eating together was a ritual Roystan insisted on. At first Josune had thought it strange, but she had to admit, they solved a lot of problems over the dinner table.