“Fast acting. Her heart had stopped before the blood had finished pumping out of the wound. She was dead before the paramedics arrived.”
Alistair shivered. “No wonder we have never been able to catch him. If he can mod like that.” The Tamati Woden that Alistair had been chasing was at least ten to fifteen centimeters taller. “I thought you couldn’t mod height.” Not without major trauma, anyway.
“She left the knife,” Paola said. “With fingerprints all over it.”
“Deliberately careless? A copycat? Or maybe she’s just sloppy and doesn’t know how to hide her tracks.”
“Tell me you’d take out a contract on someone and then leave your fingerprints all over it. Or look at the camera like that. It was a deliberate taunt.”
“So maybe it wasn’t a contract. Maybe they were friends once. Or enemies.”
“With Tamati’s trademark leer? I’ve asked the experts. It matches perfectly.”
“Only if you had a scar. You can’t leer like he does without that scar.” Tamati Woden would never have given up his trademark scar.
“If you had once had a scar and had it removed, and you tried to leer like he does, that’s exactly what you’d get. It’s in your case files, Alistair. You ran that scenario with every expert you could.”
“Is it my advice you want, Paola? Or do you want my opinion on whether or not it really is Tamati Woden?”
“I know it was Woden, Alistair. I also know it wasn’t his body. He was just controlling it.”
“That’s not possible.”
“But what if it was, Alistair?”
“I think you’ll find it’s more likely he found a modder who could change his height, as well as his looks.” That was worrying enough in itself. A good modder could already change the voice and an iris pattern enough that biometric recognition didn’t work. Hell, bad modders could do it by accident.
Which was why the Justice Department used height as one of their primary search tools. Until now, you could disguise it—you could stoop or wear heels—but you couldn’t change it. If Woden could change his height, he could become anyone. Then they’d never catch him, because Woden didn’t leave evidence behind. Not normally, anyway, and especially not DNA. So why had he allowed the cameras to record the murder this time? What was different?
Not his problem anymore, Alistair reminded himself. He had more pressing ones of his own, like finding a body modder who had seemingly disappeared without a trace. He’d find that trace.
He just hoped he didn’t find her too late to save the colonists on Zell.
“Woden became more brazen after you left,” Paola said. “I think you kept him reined in.”
Woden had been getting that way anyway. Nothing annoyed an assassin more than not being recognized for his work. It was why he kept his trademark leer.
“Why are you looking for Nika Rik Terri, Alistair?” The subject change was so abrupt Alistair knew Paola had planned it.
“That’s my business.”
Cam stirred from his post, came into the room. “Because she’s my modder, and she’s disappeared.”
Both statements were true. She was Cam’s modder. She had disappeared. They were everything and nothing to do with the reason Alistair was looking for her.
Paola looked from Alistair to Cam, back to Alistair. “Are you two—?”
“No.” Alistair wasn’t in Cam’s class, wasn’t sure he wanted to be. “You’ve heard of these things called friends, Paola. Some people have them.”
Their reasons for hunting Rik Terri were their own. It wasn’t the Justice Department’s business, and time was short. Alistair frowned at the now-blank screen, steered the conversation back to safer questions. “Are you asking my opinion on if this murder is a copycat, or my opinion as to how likely your scenario of Woden taking over someone else’s mind is? Because I can tell you, it’s unlikely.”
“I want you to come back to the Justice Department and solve the case for me.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “I was kicked out, Paola.”
“You were placed on suspended leave.”
“I was escorted out of the building.”
“Your wife was up on a fraud charge.”
His ex-wife, even if they had still been going through the divorce. He still ground his teeth sometimes over how demanding she’d been about getting her half of their assets—including his savings, for she’d claimed she had none of her own—when she was sitting on a fortune of ill-gotten assets in anonymous bank accounts.
“Why did you walk out, Alistair? We all knew you wouldn’t be part of it. If you’d waited another month, you’d have been back in your old job. Hell, you could even have gotten Lisbet off. You’re a good talker, and she was a minor cog.”
She’d still been a cog, and Alistair should have known. He’d worked in the Justice Department for twenty years, been married to Lisbet for ten. He knew the signs of someone on the make, and Lisbet had exhibited every classic symptom.
“I’m not coming back to the Justice Department. I have a new life. Other responsibilities.” He wasn’t the dedicated agent he’d been two years earlier. He had people to protect. Different priorities. His old life was a long way past.
“Yes, you are,” Paola said. “I’ll expect you in at work tomorrow.”
“Not happening.”
Paola stood up. “In the office tomorrow, Alistair.”
He didn’t bother to say no again.
She paused at the door. “I told you the woman left prints on the knife.”
“You did.” Alistair waited. Paola’s pauses always preceded a dramatic announcement.
“When you’re looking for someone, Alistair, you should at least know what they look like.”
She couldn’t possibly mean what she was implying.
“The woman was Nika Rik Terri.”
* * *
• • •
When Alistair and Cam had started their search for Nika Rik Terri, they’d thought it would be easy. But Rik Terri had disappeared, leaving a bombed-out studio and seven dead bodies behind.
“It doesn’t have to be her,” Alistair had told Cam. “Any modder who works with transurides will do.”
“I don’t know.” Cam sounded doubtful. “It’s not common. Plus, it’s expensive. I paid a fortune for mine, and she told me it was because of the transurides.”
Modders always charged big money.
They discovered Cam was right. Most modders couldn’t work with transurides.
“Wouldn’t waste my time,” one of the lecturers at Landers, the best-known training college for modders, told them. “Fraught with danger. I mean, sure, we use trace transurides when we can, when we have to; it helps to stabilize a mod. But adding it for cosmetic purposes?” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine it would add any value.”
“Not to mention hugely expensive. The only modders who could afford to experiment with it would be the top-tier modders. Nika Rik Terri, Samson Sa, Jolie Sand, Esau Ye. And only on their wealthy clients.”
“How easy would it be to do, if it could be done?” Alistair asked.
The lecturer glanced pointedly at the time. “I have another lecture to present. Can’t afford to miss these classes, you know. We are training the new generation of skilled modders.” He paused, as if struck by a sudden idea. Alistair knew a fake pause when he saw one. “Why don’t I give you the name of one of our retired lecturers. He might be able to help you more. He loves to talk.”
* * *
• • •
Igor Chatsworth could certainly talk.
“Let me have a look at you,” he said to Cam, and dragged him over to a window to study him. “Modded, not natural?”
Cam nodded.
“Beautiful, beautiful. Done by a master.” He turned Cam around, studied him from e
very angle. “Amazing.”
“Let me know if you need rescuing,” Alistair said to Cam.
“It’s rather weird.”
Chatsworth didn’t hear. “Who did your mod?”
“Nika Rik Terri,” Alistair said. “Mr. Chatsworth, we’d like to talk to you about transurides and modding.”
“Of course she did. She was such a brilliant student. One of my own, you know. She was my special protégée.”
If Rik Terri was on the run, as seemed likely, would she go to her old mentor? Maybe this trip would be more fruitful than he thought it would.
“She’s turning out such beautiful work nowadays. Such a pity about that accident in her studio, and her body still not found.”
“Mr. Chatsworth—”
“Please call me Chatty. It’s what the students used to call me behind my back.” He sighed wistfully. “I miss teaching, you know.”
“I can imagine.” Alistair steered Chatsworth to a seat. Since he’d mentioned Rik Terri, maybe they should start with that. “We’re actually looking for Rik Terri. We don’t believe she was in the explosion. We’re trying to find her.”
“Such a terrible business. Such a terrible, terrible waste of talent. Some modders are followers, you know. They won’t experiment. Others experiment but they don’t know what they are doing. They’re the ones who kill people by accident. Nika, she was one of those rare people who understood the body. The kind of person who could change modding.” He sighed, looked defeated, and said again, “Such a terrible, terrible waste.”
Rik Terri had gone to a lot of trouble to make people think she was dead. Why?
“We heard that before the accident she was working with transurides.”
“Transurides are difficult. But Nika—maybe. She apprenticed to Hannah Tan after she graduated. Hannah learned from Gino Giwari. And Giwari—well, no one uses his techniques anymore. Too dangerous. He started mucking into DNA—a disaster. He was discredited. I tried to talk her out of it. The apprenticeship, I mean. I had ten modders lined up for her, but she insisted on choosing her own. And she chose Hannah Tan.”
It took two hours to extract themselves.
“All we learned from that,” Alistair said, “other than that your mod is remarkable”—which they already knew—“is that everyone works with transurides, but no one does either.” Which didn’t make sense. “Can we just send in a normal modder or not?”
“I don’t think another modder could do it,” Cam said. “I think we have to find her.”
Unfortunately, Alistair found he agreed with him.
Except they’d been looking a month now and they hadn’t found anything.
Maybe, with the resources of the Justice Department behind them, they would.
* * *
• • •
Alistair called Paola long after Cam had gone home. Long after he should have gone to bed. It was two in the morning, but she answered immediately. “You’ll take the job.”
“If you’ll do something for me.”
She’d say no, and then he’d have to beg for the job anyway, but finding Nika Rik Terri was only part of saving the colonists on Zell. They also had to get the colonists safely off-world afterward.
“You’re not exactly in a position to bargain, Alistair.”
“You’re the one who wants me to take the job. Come on, Paola.”
Maybe she heard the edge of begging in his voice. Maybe she really was worried about Tamati Woden. Maybe she was tired and just wanted to be rid of him.
“Spit it out.”
“If I take this job, then you organize a ship and have it ready to pick up a hundred people from an isolated world when I ask for it.” The Justice Department had a ship that could do it. Two ships, in fact.
There’d been silence at the other end of the link.
“I’ll do—” He bit off a promise he couldn’t keep.
If he could arrange transport, and if he could somehow get rid of the warship orbiting Zell, maybe he could buy the people on Zell extra time.
“A hundred people,” Paola said at last. “How many people contracted to that isolated place you went to, Alistair?”
“Fifty-one.”
Her silence spoke volumes; he just wasn’t talking the language.
“I’ll see you in the morning. My office, 8:00 A.M.”
5
NIKA RIK TERRI
Nika checked the settings on the Netanyu. “Eight minutes,” she told Jacques before he could ask. “You know that because nine minutes ago I told you it was seventeen.”
“That wasn’t me, that was Carlos.”
“On this ship, when one person hears, everyone does.”
The only one who hadn’t bothered her was Josune, who was sitting in the crew room drinking her third cup of coffee, watching the screens for signs of pursuit, listening to the public links for reports of a chase.
That’s what Roystan would have been doing if he’d been conscious.
Roystan’s body was producing too much of the protease enzymes that triggered natural cell death in the body, especially for someone who’d spent the last hour in a genemod machine. Nika circled the machine. “Switch inlet five over to the iron solution again,” she told Snow. The Netanyu was a solid machine, but it only had six inlets. How had the early modders ever managed to get results? Adding trace elements must have been a nightmare. If anyone added them.
“Will he be all right?”
“What do you think, Jacques?”
She’d paused too long.
“Jacques,” Josune said. “None of us have eaten in hours.” She’d thrown the congealing remains of the earlier dinner into the recycler. No one had wanted to eat that. “And Roystan is coming out of the tank in eight minutes.”
“Please,” Nika said, “don’t call it a tank, Josune.”
“Eight minutes.” Jacques looked around the genemod studio, as if realizing where he was. Or wasn’t.
Seven minutes now, but Nika didn’t tell him that. “And Jacques. Don’t give him coffee.”
Nika circled the Netanyu again. When Jacques was worried, he made for the kitchen. This time he hadn’t. She forced herself to breathe naturally.
Snow snapped the new module in. Switched inlet four over to mutrient half a minute later, without Nika needing to tell him to do it.
“You’re learning.”
“We’ve got one client,” Snow said. “I won’t know what to do for normal people soon.”
Even Snow was behaving strangely today. But then, that was to be expected.
“You escaped from the Boost,” Nika said.
Carlos entered with a clatter. Nika held up five fingers.
He nodded and stood away. “You can fix him, Nika. You have before.”
They’d better get this Songyan soon so she could at least feed multiple trace elements into Roystan’s body at the same time. Another problem with the Netanyu was that it didn’t allow complex add-ons. Otherwise she’d have built one that combined the trace elements for her.
In the kitchen Jacques started throwing pots around with unnecessary vigor. “We should have made her stop when she fixed him the first time.” Ostensibly talking to Josune, but talking to the modders as well. “We shouldn’t have let her play. We shouldn’t have tried to get his memory back.”
Josune said, “Roystan’s a grown man.”
Eighty years older than any of them.
This problem hadn’t come about as a result of Nika trying to restore Roystan’s memory. It was a direct result of what Giwari had done all those years ago interacting with the mods Nika had done back when Roystan had almost died while they’d been imprisoned on Benedict’s ship, interacting with the changes Nika had made earlier to fix those, and all of that interacting with the sudden spike of adrenaline Roystan’s body had produced.
“Let me tell you,” Nika said to Snow as they switched the feeds, all four of them this time. Two each, in quick succession. “Giwari could never have modded Roystan the way he did without the Songyan.”
Snow nodded, intent on what he was doing.
Timing was important here.
“He’s doing it for you, Josune. You tell him to stop. Tell him—”
Nika hardly noticed Josune interrupt Jacques. “Carlos. I need you here. A ship just appeared.”
Carlos left at a run.
“I don’t think even a Songyan could cope with this,” Snow said as they switched the feeds again.
“But you can build add-ons for the Songyan. Feed more through a single inlet.”
“You can build add-ons for a Dietel too.”
Another quick switch. Roystan’s body was now killing off cells too fast. She’d almost preferred it the way it had been. He’d been fine when he’d come out of the Netanyu two hours earlier.
“Ore carrier,” Carlos said. “A million kilometers away.”
One of the big, armored company ships, bringing in a load of ore from outside the legal zone, with enough firepower to blast them out of space.
“Let’s hope he’s checking us out as carefully as we are checking him,” Josune said. “The ship should move in an hour, when it’s stabilized.”
Meantime, it would be watching them. Nika had learned a lot about ship jumps in her time as a member of Roystan’s crew. The bigger the ship, the harder it was to calibrate, so the jumps were generally smaller, leaving less margin for error. Even automatic calibrators could give problems. When a ship came out of a jump, it was never a hundred percent stable; it always moved a little from opposing forces. A larger ship took longer to stabilize than a smaller one.
“Do you need Snow on the cannon, Josune?”
“Not yet.”
Good, because that was a bad idea.
The Netanyu chimed. Nika looked at the container she held in her hand, at the one Snow had in his. She didn’t like it when the machine and she didn’t agree on the definition of done.
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