Stars Beyond Read online

  He was lying, but Wickmore didn’t call him on it. “As you wish.”

  “I’m not sure where you’re going with this.” Norris glanced up and down the empty street again. “The Hassim was sold to Brown, the backup memory supposedly destroyed, and the crew of the Hassim are dead.”

  “Not all of them,” Pol said.

  Norris frowned and glanced at Wickmore.

  “One of the crew survived.” Norris would be wondering why he let Pol take part in the conversation. Yes, Pol was annoying. She never knew when to keep quiet, but for the moment, he didn’t want her quiet. It made it easier for Norris to believe. “The engineer, Josune Arriola. She has her own records of their trip.”

  He had no idea if Arriola did or didn’t; all that mattered was to make Norris believe that they believed it.

  “Benedict, one of my men, was convinced of it. Therefore, I am sure there is substance to the tale. When I bring this to the Eaglehawk board, though, I want irrefutable evidence.” It sounded credible. Wickmore’s team had followed up some crazy ideas in the past that had made money for Eaglehawk. “Hence it’s a side project at this time.”

  “I don’t chase dreams, Executive. No matter how lucrative you make them. Finding some woman who may or may not have access to records from the Hassim is hardly my style. We’re a fighting ship. We fight other people’s wars for them.”

  Wickmore didn’t even have to consider his answer.

  “We’re in a period of stability right now, with companies working together instead of going to war. Not to mention the Honesty League keeping the Justice Department honest, relatively speaking. Your mercenaries are becoming . . . redundant. You’re spending money feeding a lot of deadweight.”

  Norris’s eyes narrowed.

  Wickmore didn’t push. He had the reaction he wanted.

  “I am sure you are looking for something new. We can come to an agreement on terms. Or we can split the profit.”

  Norris started to shake his head.

  “Before you refuse, Captain Norris, hear me out. I have one more item of interest that might change your mind.” Wickmore glanced at the eight bodyguards. “Indentured?”

  Only half of them would be. No matter how well protected Norris was, he would have loyal bodyguards alongside the not so loyal, to keep them in line.

  “The term is contracted. Once they have paid off their contract, they are free to leave.”

  They never worked off their debt, but Wickmore didn’t mention that. He wanted these people listening. And they were. Avidly. Norris might not give credence to the Hassim’s treasure, but his crew certainly would. Not that the crew’s interest would influence their captain, but if they knew about it, they’d work that much harder to find Roystan’s crew.

  “Don’t they try to escape?”

  “Nobody, but nobody, escapes the Boost.”

  As predictable as ever. Wickmore damped his spark of triumph.

  “Not even Snowshoe Bertram?”

  Norris could kill him with a single lunge. He wouldn’t. The loss of control would cause him to lose face in front of eight soldiers—two of whom were looking at each other with small, knowing sniggers; silent sniggers to be sure, but it was enough.

  Norris, after a few seconds, regained his speech and made a pretense of looking puzzled. “Who? Oh, Bertram Snowshoe. He didn’t escape, Executive. I let him go temporarily. He dreamed of becoming a body modder. Who am I to stand in the way of a boy who wants to become qualified? Especially when he’s prepared to pay for the tuition himself.”

  “But you intended to collect him again afterward, Captain.”

  “I intend to,” Norris corrected him.

  “Snowshoe graduated months ago, Captain. He should be back on board by now.”

  A tic started to pulse in Norris’s right cheek.

  “But he’s not, is he. He disappeared not long after graduating.” Wickmore leaned close. “How many deserters have you had since?” For no one deserted the Boost and lived to boast about it. Captain Norris tracked them down and killed them or forced them to sign a worse contract than before.

  Snowshoe’s disappearance would have given the crew hope. If one man could do it, so could others.

  Norris bared his teeth. The tic had grown into a full-grown twitch. “There had better be a point to this.”

  “I can get you Bertram Snowshoe. Or Snowshoe Bertram, as he calls himself now.”

  “Where?”

  “Let’s talk about what I want in return.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “You didn’t tell him which ship,” Pol said.

  “Of course not.” He wasn’t a fool. “You can give him the name once you are on your way. But not before.” Pol Bager was no match for Captain Oliver Norris. Wickmore was sure she would discover that the hard way. It wasn’t his concern. “Call me as soon as Norris disables Another Road.”

  Captain Roystan and his crew—including the long-missing Nika Rik Terri—had evaded capture before, and until Keenan’s unexpected offer of funds, Leonard Wickmore hadn’t had enough manpower to be sure of finding them, let alone be certain to capture them when he did. But even Roystan and his crew would find it impossible to evade a warship filled with four hundred trained, armed mercenaries.

  “Arriola is mine,” Pol said.

  “Of course.” Norris didn’t care about Arriola, except maybe as a bonus. Wickmore didn’t care about her either, no matter what Pol thought, no matter what he’d told Norris. Even if information from the Hassim database would be useful in cementing his place in the Eaglehawk hierarchy.

  No, he wanted Nika Rik Terri. He hoped Norris hadn’t realized that.

  Norris would do his job if he wanted to get Snowshoe. Pol had better do hers as well.

  “I got you onto the Boost,” Wickmore told Pol now. “Just do your job when you get there.”

  2

  NIKA RIK TERRI

  The Netanyu 3501 was a serviceable machine, good for its time, but up against a Songyan, it didn’t rate. “Only six inlet tubes,” Nika said. “How are we supposed to fine-tune a body with six inlets?”

  The human body was a complex factory that responded to minute chemical changes, and she was used to being able to control them right down to the DNA. The Netanyu worked for basic repairs, but it only worked down to the cellular level. She missed the fine-tuning she could do with the fourteen inlets and tenfold increase in accuracy in the feeds that came with the superior machine.

  She had an apprentice now too. How could she train Snow properly if she couldn’t teach him how to modify any lower than cellular level?

  Snow, who had taken the Netanyu apart to clean to Nika’s exacting standards and was now putting it together again, snapped the last coupling together. “We could always get a Songyan.”

  She wanted one as much as Snow did, maybe more so because she knew what they could do. A Songyan had fourteen inlets, and those extra inputs made a difference when you wanted a perfect mix. She had a new name, Nika James, and a new look. She’d removed all her hair and added diamanté in a line of faceted jewels that trailed over her forehead and down the side of her face and neck. It wouldn’t make any difference, for as soon as she put the order in, Leonard Wickmore would find her. One day they’d have to get a Songyan, but not yet. Not until she could work out a way to order it without Wickmore using it to find her.

  The chatter of the crew through the internal links was comforting. At first it had been strange to see and hear what was happening in the crew room, down in engineering, or on the bridge, while she worked in her studio. She was used to working in quiet areas with nothing but ambient music to soothe her clients. Here on the ship the only thing that soothed was the chatter of daily life, the knowing that everyone was safe. The only private conversations were the ones you had in your cabin or when most people were of
f ship.

  “Ready?” Josune asked. Nika could see her at the shuttle bay, waiting with Roystan while Carlos and Jacques made their way down. “The merchant closes shop at 20:00.”

  They had plenty of time, but today Nika was as impatient for them to go as Josune was.

  Josune and Carlos left first—they had to get to the other side of the station where Josune had a part on order.

  “Come on,” Nika said under her breath as Jacques hesitated for some quiet words with Roystan. Snow looked at her.

  “Set up for an examination,” Nika said.

  “I can’t keep setting up the machine and pulling it apart again. I eventually need someone to practice on.”

  It was a problem, and one she’d have to address, but they had a bigger problem right now. “I’ll give you someone to practice on soon.”

  He set it up, one eye on her. “I don’t know how we lucked onto a ship where no one wants to be modded. What are the odds?”

  Four months ago she’d have asked the same question. “High.”

  At long last Jacques left.

  “About time.” Nika made her way up to the crew room, which was where Roystan would go.

  She got there before he did.

  Roystan stopped in the doorway. He knew.

  “When were you going to tell us?”

  “I . . . it’s probably nothing. Something I ate, maybe.”

  “Roystan. You know the symptoms. You’ve had this problem before.”

  He moved over to make himself some coffee. He made her a mug too. “I was hoping it was temporary. I’ve got used to feeling so well lately. I wanted it to be—”

  There was nothing but silence through the speakers, not even the sound of Snow setting up the Netanyu.

  “Come on down,” Nika said. “We need to see the damage.”

  “I have to watch the ship while the others are out.”

  “It’ll take ten minutes. Don’t you trust us to hold the doors for that long?” Nika ushered him out. “I’ve got an apprentice. We’ll be talking things over. If we wait until the others get back, everyone will hear the discussion.” She paused. “Unless you want us to turn off the feed to the studio.”

  That would bring everyone down, sure something was wrong.

  Roystan brought his coffee with him. “It might be a virus.”

  She didn’t honor that with an answer. If he’d thought it was something others might catch, he’d have been down at the first symptom.

  “Are you ready?” she asked Snow.

  He nodded.

  “Are you sure it will only be ten minutes?” Roystan asked.

  “Your coffee will still be hot.” She looked from the mug to his face. “Lukewarm, anyway.”

  “There’s no point arguing with her,” Snow said. “She always wins.”

  Nika should find that in the ship record and play it back the next time Snow disagreed with her.

  Roystan didn’t argue anymore. The other crew members would be back on board in less than an hour. He knew as well as she did what would happen then. They would have him in the machine as soon as they knew there was a problem. He ran the ship mostly on consensus, which meant he wouldn’t pull rank to ignore her, probably didn’t even want to. He just didn’t want to face the truth.

  His body was deteriorating.

  Hammond Roystan—formerly Roy Goberling—had spent the last eighty years just surviving while his body rejected the modifications Gino Giwari had made, at Goberling’s request, to take away his memory. He wouldn’t want to know he was going back to that.

  But if he didn’t tell them he had a problem, they couldn’t fix it, could they.

  “Good,” Nika said. “Into the machine.”

  “Clothes on or off?”

  It was always better with clothes off, but the machine could take a reading either way, and Nika was good at gauging moods. “On,” she said.

  “That’s okay, then.” Roystan put his mug down, crawled into the machine.

  “They should make these things easier to get into.”

  Snow looked pointedly at Nika. “If we had a Songyan, all you’d have to do is lie down on a bench.”

  Yes, if they had a Songyan, they could do lots of things. But Songyans had to be custom built. She didn’t remind Snow about Wickmore. Snow would only tell her again that she was paranoid. She was paranoid, but Snow didn’t know Leonard Wickmore the way she did. He didn’t like to lose, especially not when he could see benefit in it.

  Like being able to swap bodies and use the swapped body to commit a murder.

  She wished she’d never invented the exchanger.

  “Run the diagnostics.” She watched Snow’s sure fingers on the controls. He was better with a Netanyu than she was, despite his oft-repeated claim that fixing genemod machines was for technicians, not body modders.

  She turned to the results that had started scrolling up.

  “What can you see?” she asked Snow.

  He frowned down at the screen. “It looks normal.”

  Nika knew this body down to the DNA. She zoomed in on the cells around Roystan’s kidneys. It wasn’t just the kidneys, anywhere would do, but it gave her something to target. “Compare it to the read we took thirty days ago.”

  Snow studied the two reads carefully. “Some of those cells should have died off. But it’s nowhere near Giwari’s changes.”

  Gino Giwari had modded Roystan’s body nearly eighty years earlier, wrapping the end of each gene tightly in what Nika hoped was a code to how to restore Roystan’s memories. The issue might have been related to that. It might have been related to the changes Nika was making to restore his memory. Or it might be something else altogether.

  “The human body is complex.” It would take days to work out what the underlying cause was, but they could do something to alleviate the problem while they worked on it.

  “Maybe it’s the start of a tumor.”

  She didn’t think he believed that any more than she did.

  “All over his body?” That much was a fact. She could see it in the stats scrolling up.

  “It isn’t bad at the moment. Sometimes you see problems where there aren’t any, Nika.”

  And sometimes she saw problems while they were small. Before they became large ones. She fixed her gaze on Snow.

  He sighed heavily. “How do we fix it?”

  Nika turned back to the scrolling data. Body mods had a flow-on effect. One tiny change, like fixing a chemical imbalance in one part of the body, could end up affecting other parts. The challenge was keeping the body balanced long enough to make the changes permanent—before it started its own repairs. Like Roystan’s was doing now.

  Extra growth in cells like this was normally easy to fix. Put the person in a genemod machine, and let the machine set the body back to its norms. Except Nika’s ongoing adjustments had forced Roystan’s body to accept Giwari’s changes as if they belonged. His body was healthier, the cells stronger, but it wasn’t normal, by any measure.

  All they had to work with was a Netanyu. It was like trying to use a freighter to maneuver into a shuttle bay when you needed a little one-man shuttle. Still, it could be worse. It could be a Dietel. Or a Dekker.

  The Netanyu pinged to show it was finished. Nika helped Roystan out of the machine. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

  She watched his face, trying to gauge what he really thought—Roystan was an intensely private man, although in Josune’s presence he was relaxing that shield—while he took a sip of his no-longer-hot coffee and grimaced.

  “What’s the damage?”

  How could she describe it without getting technical?

  “Cells in your body die every day. When they do, they break down into smaller components so your body can get rid of them. Unfortunately, your body isn’t doing the
breakdown properly, and it’s not doing it fast enough.”

  “My body is finally starting to fall apart?”

  She wasn’t sure. Roystan had lived eighty years with Giwari’s mod without his cells starting to multiply this way. He’d had other problems—like his body starving itself because it couldn’t get enough food—but the cells behaving this way wasn’t one of them. “It’s just as likely to be what I’m doing to try to restore your memory.”

  “It’s still close to acceptable bounds,” Snow said.

  Not for Roystan, it wasn’t.

  “Look at Nika’s face. She doesn’t agree with you.” There was a glint in Roystan’s eyes that hadn’t been there before, the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth that showed no matter what he said, he was relieved they were looking at the problem.

  “Nika doesn’t agree with anyone who doesn’t agree with her. You should account for all the factors that make up the body. Including environmental factors, emotions of the person, even the food they ate the night before.”

  Roystan tipped the rest of his coffee down the studio sink. “That sounds familiar. Almost like a lecture I heard Nika giving the other day.” His eyes lightened as he smiled.

  Yes. He was happier.

  “Give me time to look at the read,” Nika said. “We’ll do something.” It wouldn’t be the fine work she could do with her old machine, and Roystan’s body wasn’t exactly standard anymore. Sometimes the more basic genemod machines could tip the balance trying to restore things to human normal. She could do something temporary and fine-tune it later, but to really fix it, she needed more control, and that meant a Songyan.

  She might save Roystan’s life, only to have Wickmore turn up and kill them all. Everyone but her, because he’d want her to turn the Songyan into an exchanger.

  She could put it to the crew to vote on what they wanted to do. She knew what they’d say. Get the Songyan. All except Roystan, who would pull rare captain’s rank to prevent them going. But they’d go anyway, and it would be more dangerous and more divisive because they were doing it behind Roystan’s back.