Stars Beyond

by S. K. Dunstall

  She’d never before had friends who’d put their own lives above someone else’s.

  Nika sighed. There was no choice, really. “Snow, it’s time I showed you how to order a custom-built Songyan.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Nika left Snow to wipe down the Netanyu and joined Roystan in the crew room to work through the gene read.

  Their ship, Another Road, was twice as large as The Road to the Goberlings—which it had replaced—and fifty years more modern. It had five levels, and when they’d bought it, four of them had been given over to cargo. Three of those levels were still closed off with no life support. The fourth was now divided into three roughly equal parts. One-third for cargo, one-third for engineering, and one-third a modding studio.

  When they’d bought it—two months ago now—the top level had contained more cargo space, a cramped set of cabins off to one side for crew quarters, and a small bridge. In the intervening weeks, Roystan, Carlos, and Josune had stripped it down, separating the area into more spacious living quarters, adding emergency bulkhead doors around and across the ship, and building an entirely new, larger crew common room, with a full commercial kitchen opening off it. Jacques refused to let them call it a galley—he was a chef, after all.

  Josune was adding weapons. The ship now bristled with them. The weapons themselves were on the outside of the ship with an access corridor all around. The corridor served as another protective layer that could be sectioned off and sealed in case the ship got hit. She wanted to add panels that could control the weapons from their shared common room, but that, she said, was a long-term project.

  So far no one had fired at them.

  Nika wanted to believe no one would.

  The whole ship was a work in progress. Even now, there were half-assembled weapons on the smaller counters at the back of the crew room.

  Nika looked away from the read, frowned at the weapons. It was unlike either Josune or Carlos to leave them out, but they’d been there for three days now.

  Roystan looked to where she was looking. “They’re planning something.” He smiled for the crew who weren’t there.

  “Do you know what it is?”

  He shook his head. “We’ll find out soon.”

  It was a funny way to run a ship, but it worked for Roystan.

  Nika tapped the schematic in front of her. “I’ve ordered a Songyan, but that will take weeks.” She watched his expression fall. “I can prevent some of the symptoms in the meantime.” His face brightened. “But I can’t fine-tune it. Your body will take time to adjust when you come out of the machine.” She’d taken her Songyans for granted. Now she knew just how good they were. “There’ll be things you can’t do for two days.” He’d be fine after thirty hours, but it was better to play safe, especially with Roystan’s fragile body. “You can’t exercise strenuously. Can’t get too excited.” She paused again. “No sex.”

  “Okay. No sex. No exercise. No excitement.”

  “Two days of absolute calm.”

  If his body started producing adrenaline, it would trigger a cell reaction that wouldn’t stop.

  “Got it.”

  “Have you? Really?” She held his gaze with hers. “This is important, Roystan. You think you’re bad now, but do the wrong thing and it’ll get worse.”

  It wouldn’t just be worse. It would be dire.

  “It’s getting worse now, isn’t it?”

  She couldn’t argue with that.

  “Does it matter either way?”

  “If you don’t follow my instructions exactly—” Nika paused. “You could die.” She nearly said “will die,” but until it happened, she was not going to say it.

  “And if I’m sensible, I’ll feel better.” Roystan’s smile was crooked. “There’s no question, really.”

  There wasn’t.

  “We’ll do it after dinner.” After the crew got back, she meant, because although Roystan might go into a genemod machine for ten minutes without the rest of the crew here, he wouldn’t do it for longer. No one felt truly safe, but this part of space was quiet. They were in the legal zone. Wickmore would take days to track them, if he even tried and didn’t just wait at the Songyan factory.

  “Thank you, Nika.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Josune and Carlos arrived back from their shopping in high spirits, dragging an antigrav trolley behind them. The engine on it was twice as big as the one they’d installed two weeks ago. At least Nika thought it was an engine. It was like none she’d seen before.

  They shooed Snow—who was researching body modder Giwari at one of the three secondary screens near the disassembled weapons—over to the main table.

  Giwari was eighty years dead, but Nika had told Snow that she expected him to know everything about the man and his work. He had, after all, been the genius who had modded Roystan.

  So far as Nika could tell, Roystan’s body hadn’t aged since his late thirties, and that was more than eighty years ago.

  Jacques arrived back not long later, with another antigrav trolley. His was laden with fresh food.

  “The hydro farms on this station are amazing,” Jacques said. “Look. Melons, grapes, greens.” He rubbed his palms together. “Everyone out of the kitchen. I’m cooking dinner.”

  Nika’s mouth watered at the thought. “How long to dinner, Jacques?”

  Roystan would enjoy his dinner better after being modded.

  “An hour.”

  They had time. “Then I’d like to fine-tune some of Roystan’s chemical pathways.” The crew were used to her working on Roystan, with her trying to help him regain his memory.

  “Let me move away from the station first,” Roystan said. “Overstay fees are heavy here.”

  Six months earlier Nika wouldn’t have known that if a shuttle stayed longer than its booked time, it incurred overstay fees, let alone known how high those overstay fees were. “Sure,” and she waited until they’d moved before she took him down to the genemod machine.

  “We’re going to force the destruction of some of those excess cells,” she told Snow. “Make our own initiator caspases to trigger the destruction of the cells.”

  Snow chewed his bottom lip. “How are you going to target the cells?”

  “Turn it off and turn it on.” It was like throwing red paint at a wall and hosing it off immediately after. Do it often enough, and you ended up with a slightly pink wall, which was all they wanted.

  Stopping the reaction was the bigger problem. “We need to slow the cell destruction immediately after.” She tapped the screen. “These ions will speed up that process. Get me the rate of blood circulation. I want you to calculate how much we need to give him to stop the cell breakdown within thirty hours of us starting the repair.”

  “Sometimes I think I’d have been smarter to stay home and be beaten up by Banjo,” Snow muttered.

  “You can always go back, Snow. Banjo loves you now. And he did say he’d look after your studio until you got back.”

  Snow didn’t even hear her; he was already immersed in his calculation. “And I tell you what I’m not doing,” he said. “I’m not going to cannibalize his body to get the proteins.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The mod took half an hour. “Now remember,” she warned as she helped Roystan out of the Netanyu, “nothing strenuous. For how long?”

  “Two days. Thank you, Nika.”

  Back in the crew room, the smell of their forthcoming dinner wafted. Nika breathed in. This was her home now.

  Snow went back to studying Giwari.

  “You know,” he said as he followed another link of data. “Gino Giwari thought a lot of himself.” He reached over for a piece of the flatbread that was keeping them all out of Jacques’s way. He chewed reflectively. “Rather
like other body modders I know.”

  “There’s no point hiding what you are,” Nika said. “When you’re good, you know you’re good.”

  “Some people think they’re better than they are,” Snow said.

  Josune and Carlos were packing up. They’d cleaned up whatever they’d been installing, and Josune reassembled the disassembled blasters. They didn’t take long to put together. She locked them into a weapons drawer. Every public room on ship had weapons drawers, coded to the crew. Josune had made it her mission to fill those drawers with weapons.

  “Are we talking about the great Nika Rik Terri, Snow?”

  Snow didn’t answer.

  Instead he scrolled through the data he was looking at. “Did you know that Giwari was the first modder to purchase a Songyan genemod machine? When it was still a start-up company.” He tapped the screen. “There’s a picture of him here with Conrad Songyan himself.”

  Nika came over to look. The flaxen-haired man standing in front of the big black box looked to be around Snow’s age. He radiated confidence.

  “He’s young.”

  Had she looked as confident at that age? Probably. Although she’d never admit it to Snow, she’d been rather full of herself for a while.

  “He’s a body modder,” Snow said. “He was probably sixty.”

  “Songyan machines have been around a hundred and fifty years.” Nika did quick calculations in her head. “Giwari was eighty when he modded Roystan’s memory. Ninety when he died. That makes him in his early twenties when he bought the Songyan.”

  Songyan himself didn’t look much older. But then, Nika knew Songyan’s story. How the young engineering genius’s mother had died being modded. How he’d been driven to build his own machine to prevent that happening again.

  “So Giwari got it cheap,” Snow said. “New engineer, brand new machine he’s trying to convince people to buy. It’s untested. Conrad would sell it at cost to anyone who’d buy it.”

  The machine of choice for professional modders back then had been the Maestro. Even the Netanyu was unheard of. And as for the Dietel, that would take another seventy years to come onto the market.

  After which it would spread like the parasite it was, because it was cheap and easy to use. They even had one in the studio here on the ship.

  “You’d have taken it too,” Snow said.

  He was right. Even now she checked out all the new modding machines. Just in case. But then, people used to send them to her. “I wonder if Giwari used anything except a Songyan.”

  Snow rubbed his hands together. “And soon we get our own.” He beamed at the others. “You’re not the only ones who went shopping today, you know.”

  Carlos slapped his palm against Josune’s. “You owe me fifty credits.”

  “I thought she’d take longer.” Josune glanced over at Roystan, opened her mouth to speak, closed it before she did.

  Nika would have to tell them soon that Wickmore would be after them again.

  “Five minutes to food,” Jacques said from the kitchen. “If you people are doing something, do it now.”

  Josune and Carlos scrambled in a last-minute flurry of activity.

  “Right,” Josune said. “Switch her over.”

  The big wall-screen came on.

  “You’re on.” Josune and Carlos slapped palms again. “Come on over, Roystan.”

  Josune wiped down the smaller table, which had earlier held disassembled weapons, dusted the seat behind it, and pointed. “Try it out.”

  “The seat?” Roystan asked.

  “Sit down.”

  Roystan sat. The webbing around the seat—which had looked like simple emergency webbing—snapped into place around him. A full flight seat.

  Roystan’s eyes widened.

  Carlos cackled gleefully.

  The table came up, tilted to look like one of the boards on the bridge.

  “Oh.” Roystan put his hands on the board. “You built a pilot’s console.” Familiar screens came up. “We can fly the ship from here, Nika,” for the table next to Roystan’s had come up as well, and there, on-screen, were the calibrator controls. And no doubt that innocuous-looking seat behind it would turn out to be a full flight-deck seat as well.

  Not that they needed Nika to calibrate any longer. They had a fully functioning ship calibrator that Carlos and Josune kept spot on. Even so, Nika liked to keep her hand in. It improved hand-eye coordination and gave the modders something to practice with. As Snow had pointed out, there weren’t many people to mod on this ship.

  She’d have to do something about that eventually, if she were to train her apprentice properly.

  “Ahem,” Jacques said. “Play later. Dinner is served.”

  Roystan ran his hands across the console, then reluctantly stood. “Later,” he agreed.

  Carlos’s grin was wide.

  “Bet you didn’t see that coming.” Carlos made way for Roystan to sit down.

  “No.” Roystan’s smile was almost as wide. “We can run the whole ship from here.”

  Only Roystan would think that doing everything from the one room was a good thing. But whoever had thought of it—it had to be Josune—was a genius. Roystan lived in the crew room.

  “You didn’t build that in a day,” Snow said. “You couldn’t.”

  They hadn’t. Nika looked at the weapons drawer, containing the blasters Josune had put together in under a minute. The blasters had littered the table for three days.

  “We would have finished days ago,” Josune said. “But we needed—” She broke off as a communications link sounded.

  Roystan opened the link.

  A woman’s face appeared on-screen. Her face was modded in a style Nika had made famous five years earlier. She wore a burgundy suit and dark eye-covers. “Another Road. This is the Justice Department. Prepare to be boarded.”

  3

  JOSUNE ARRIOLA

  Josune’s hand automatically went to her stomach, to her sparker tucked under her shirt. Back when Roystan had claimed salvage on the explorer ship the Hassim, the Justice Department had sent out a fake arrest claim for him. The crew of Another Road now believed the claim had been instigated by Eaglehawk Company, headed by Executive Leonard Wickmore and his elite team of assassins. After Benedict, Alejandro, and Tamati Woden had died, the crew had checked to see if Roystan was still a wanted man. Josune had paid an investigative service to make doubly sure. According to the investigative search, and their own lesser searches, Roystan had never been wanted by the Justice Department at all. None of them had been. She’d checked them all.

  So what did they want now, and how had they snuck up on them without any warning alarms?

  Roystan was already answering, his voice relaxed as he said, “Please identify your ship.” He muted the link and brought up coordinates for a space jump. “We might get to test out our new boards sooner than we planned.” He moved over to the pilot’s seat. “Nika, I need you on the calibrator. The part of space I plan to nullspace to has anomalies that interfere with communications links.”

  Nika moved over to the calibrator board. “Remember to stay calm.” Low. A murmur. Josune only caught it because she’d moved to a nearby screen to check the weapons. She glanced at Nika, then to Roystan.

  Roystan avoided meeting her gaze. He unmuted the link as the Justice Department details came through and the ship matched their speed and came alongside. “Thank you. We have received the Justice Department seal. Please hold while we confirm the details.” He sounded almost apologetic as he added, “After all, we need to prove you aren’t pirates who’ve stolen a Justice Department seal.”

  The woman on the link snorted. “Pirates. We’re in the legal zone, mister.”

  “It’s captain, not mister, and as you point out, we are in the legal zone. Confirmation of identity is a standard requirement
for an official wishing to board a ship.”

  Another standard requirement was that the agents would ID themselves as they came on board. Josune was looking forward to that. She and Nika had built the scanner together, to the same design as the scanner Nika had built in her studio. It recorded more personal details than anyone might reasonably expect it to. As Nika had said, sometimes it came in useful.

  “Ooh. A man who knows his rights. Very well, Captain. I am Agent Brand. Agent Bouwmeester and I wish to board your ship to investigate the report of the illegal use of a genemod machine.”

  A genemod machine. The Justice Department had boarded the Hassim three times. The usual excuse was a stolen engine. Once it had been a stolen calibrator. It had never been a genemod machine.

  These people knew who they were.

  Josune pulled up the schema for the other ship onto the big screen built into the table. “A standard ten-man carrier.” They’d be armed. If they tried to run, the Justice Department had every right to shoot them.

  “We have to let them board,” Roystan said.

  An impatient sigh came through the speakers. For a moment Josune thought Roystan had accidentally unmuted. Brand said, “Of course, you’re going to deny you have a genemod machine. I’ll bet you’re packing it away right now.”

  “Is she for real?” Nika demanded. “Let me.” She opened the link without waiting for Roystan to agree. “Do you know how long it would take to hide a genemod machine that is set up? We’re not packing anything away, and if you break anything, we’ll sue you from here to the other side of the galaxy.”

  They were lucky the crew had only had Another Road two months. Josune was sure that within twelve months there’d be a whole room of genemod machines waiting to be inspected, instead of just the Netanyu and the Dietel that they had now.

  “It’s a trap,” Josune said.

  “Unfortunately, we have to spring the trap before we can do anything.” Roystan unmuted again to say, “As captain, I welcome you both to Another Road. We have nothing to hide. I will meet you at the docking station.” He hesitated. “Also, for the record, we are recording this.”