She’d be glad when they collected the Songyan.
She put the new feed down and helped Roystan out of the machine. “They’re watching some ore freighter.”
“Thanks.” Roystan made for the door, raising his voice as he went. “What’s the status, Josune?”
“Ore freighter, a million kilometers. Identifies as a Santiago ship. So far it looks legitimate. How do you feel?”
“I’m fine.”
He had no idea how he was, and Nika didn’t either. She hoped it was legitimate. She wanted to watch Roystan for a few days, to see the effects of today’s two mods without them having to run from something.
She cleaned out the Netanyu while Snow put the inlet containers into the sterilizer. “So the Boost? Why does he want you so badly?”
She thought Snow wasn’t going to answer. Eventually, he did.
“I told you about Gramps?”
The modder who’d taken him in. “Yes.”
“He signed onto the Boost. To save me.”
Snow had told her that before. How Gramps had taken the contract because they were both starving. But that was all he ever said about it. Nika still wasn’t sure how that had come about. Few experienced modders were paupers, and if Gramps had taught Snow the trade, he was no newcomer.
“The Boost—” Snow ran his hands through his hair. “How much do you know about mercenaries?”
“Cattle ships?” A lot more than she had six months ago. She’d heard a lot of horror stories.
“Nika.” Snow pulled at his hair. “This is not . . . a mercenary is not a cattle ship. A merc is a fighting ship. It’s full of armed people who go to war.”
She knew there were wars. When two or more companies claimed the same world, or when one company tried to take over a world belonging to another company, they hired ships full of mercenaries to fight that war for them. It was the cattle ships she hadn’t heard about until she’d met Roystan’s crew. She’d thought they were different names for the same thing. Snow hated them equally.
“Cattle ships go around in space finding people who are vulnerable.” Snow looked a lot older suddenly. “In space, if you don’t have money to buy air, or fuel for your ship, or food, you don’t survive. They pick on small ships—like Another Road—and attack them, take them over.”
“But we can afford food and air.”
“It doesn’t matter, if you’re caught by a cattle ship. They work outside the legal zone, so there’s no law but salvage law. They take your ship and sell it for salvage. And you either pay them to go free or they sell you to a merc ship.”
“Sell you?”
“Technically, it’s not selling. You sign a contract to work for the merc ship. The cattle ship takes a down payment up front, then a percentage of your wage until you’ve paid your way out of the contract.” Snow looked at his hands. “I’ve never heard of anyone paying off their contracts. The money’s poor. The interest increases.”
“Interest?” They’d just been sold.
“They charge for food and board. Add that to the end of the contract, and start charging interest from day one.”
She’d bet the interest compounded too. “So don’t sign the contract. Don’t join the mercs.”
“You’re on a cattle ship,” Snow said. “There’s only two ways off. Sunward, or by signing a contract.”
Nika suspected sunward wasn’t anything good. “So the cattle ships supply soldiers for the companies. By kidnapping people and selling them to ships that do the fighting.” She had been so sheltered on Lesser Sirius.
“They don’t always go to the merc ships. Sometimes they are sent to work on asteroids. They do the dangerous jobs humans have to do or that no one else will work on.”
It got worse. “So Gramps signed on to a merc ship, and you went with him. You didn’t sign on, did you?”
“I ate food. Used water and air. I have a debt. Captain Norris can’t afford to let anyone get away. Otherwise other people will try to escape too.”
“I see.” If Nika ever came across Captain Norris and the Boost again, she might make a little reckoning of her own.
Big thoughts, for according to Snow, the Boost had four hundred armed soldiers on it.
“I hope Gramps is all right,” Snow said. “It was dangerous what he did. Helping me get away. But Gramps said Captain Norris was too stingy to take on a doctor when he had him for cheap. Said he wouldn’t do anything. Once I’d made enough money, I planned to go back and buy out Gramps’s contract.”
Gramps might have been right. Or he might have been saying that so Snow would go. Nika silently packed away the last cleaning rag. “Come on, let’s go up and see what’s happening.”
* * *
• • •
The ore ship nullspaced out half an hour later.
“One less thing we have to worry about,” Roystan said. “I presume we do have to worry about the Boost in the future, Snow.”
Snow nodded.
They also had Wickmore to worry about, and Nika hadn’t told them that yet.
“So where do we go next?” Roystan reached out as if to grab something, closed his hands on air. “I admit I’m not used to not having something to do.”
They couldn’t randomly wander through space either, hoping to find Goberling’s lode. Plus, Nika had an apprentice; she had a responsibility to train him. He needed clients to work with. Unless Snow wanted to work on longevity, in which case he was in exactly the right place. But first they had to collect the Songyan she’d ordered.
Roystan said, “Josune, where did Feyodor think Goberling was most likely to be? Maybe if we go there, I might remember something.”
Josune wrinkled her nose. “For the last two years Feyodor was convinced you’d spent time near the Vortex.”
Roystan shuddered. “Never. I’m sure I’d remember if I’d been there.”
“What’s the Vortex?” Nika asked.
Everyone turned to look at her.
Snow pulled at his hair. “She doesn’t know anything outside of modding.” It was almost apologetic.
Nika didn’t laugh, although she wanted to.
“The Vortex is a massive electromagnetic area in space.” Roystan tapped the tabletop as he thought. “It’s twenty light-years across, closer than most of us ever want to go toward the galactic center. You have to travel slowly, and carefully, because a careless—or plain unlucky—ship can get caught by the force of the field. There’s only one way to get to the Vortex. That’s an area called the Funnel, which is like a hole through one edge of the Vortex. Don’t ask me how it works.”
Even Carlos was rubbing his arms, as if he was cold, and nodding vigorously.
Roystan shuddered. “The Funnel’s almost worse than the Vortex itself. A kilometer wide, like a pipeline through the middle, and you have to go right down the middle. Any deviation gets you caught up against the sides, and the forces pull the ship apart. Then, once you’re out of the Funnel, there’s less than a million kilometers between you and the Vortex itself. No. Goberling would never have been stupid enough to go there. Never.”
Nika looked from his face, to Josune’s, to Carlos’s. If it were that dangerous, “Why would anyone go there?”
“Transurides.”
Of course.
“It was a popular theory when I was young,” Roystan said. “Scientists believe transurides take massive energy to create, to push the atoms out past an unstable configuration into a stable one, and the Vortex certainly has that energy. And there’s a planetary system, just where you come out of the Funnel, with a barely human-habitable world, but every twenty years or so someone tries to set up mining there, because it has a higher-than-average level of transurides in the water.”
“No one has made money from it yet,” Josune said. “We stopped at Zell on our first trip in. It’s a bleak place, abandoned. And p
ast the Zell system—” She shuddered. “It’s terrifying, so most people turn right around and go back up the Funnel.”
“Those that don’t get sucked in by the Vortex,” Roystan said.
Josune shivered. “The funny thing is, not far past that dangerous part, you can nullspace out. It’s just nobody ever goes far enough to find out. Except Feyodor.”
Feyodor had been obsessed.
“Out past the Zell system there are patches of wider, safer space with star systems. We found one with an Earth-type planet. We called it Sassia.” She looked at Roystan. “Back when I had to prove to you who I was, I showed you specs of a bracelet made of a mineral that came from there.”
“I remember that bracelet.” Roystan’s mouth curved in a smile. “The one Pol took.”
“Let’s not go there,” Carlos said.
Nika wasn’t sure if he meant don’t talk about Pol or not go to Zell. “Before we go anywhere, we collect the Songyan.”
“Yes, the Songyan.” Josune looked at Roystan. “Which you already ordered.”
“I didn’t order it.”
“Nika did, which means she thinks there’s something wrong.”
Roystan looked around as if looking for an escape, thought better of it, and sat back.
“And there is, or she wouldn’t have ordered a Songyan, as well as put you into a genemod machine as soon as we left that last space station.”
“There was something wrong with him after he came out of the box,” Carlos said.
“Machine, please. It’s not a tank. It’s not a box. It’s a machine.” Training them to use correct terminology was a slow job.
“Can’t trust these modders. Not even the great Nika Rik Terri.”
“There was something wrong with him before that.” Josune fixed her gaze on Roystan. “She told you to stay calm.”
If Roystan had hoped to keep quiet about his problem, this wasn’t the way to do it. But it was better out in the open so everyone knew. “Initially his cells weren’t dying off fast enough.” Nika had learned to tailor her explanations to this crew. “Which led to cells multiplying when they shouldn’t.” The rampant, unchecked cell growth would eventually have killed him. “So I sped up the die-off.” The transurides in Roystan’s body meant you couldn’t just put him into a machine and have it repair him. You needed a machine—like a Songyan—that would allow you to tweak the mod as it went. “Over the next two days his body would have settled. Unfortunately, excess adrenaline sped up the die-off and now we have the opposite effect, and while it’s great that Roystan’s body is full of dellarine, it is binding with the proteins that speed the process up, making it difficult to stop.”
In the body, dellarine was the most powerful of the transuride elements. Nika didn’t know of any modder besides herself who used that element exclusively. Other modders used a cocktail of any of the transurides they could get, and as few as they absolutely had to use.
Most modders couldn’t afford to use them at all.
“So you botched it,” Carlos said. “And you can’t fix it.”
“She’s doing better than you,” Snow said. “You didn’t even notice anything was wrong.”
“She did fine, Carlos,” Roystan said. “I’d been feeling unwell for days. She tested me, said she could do something, and warned me I wasn’t to excite myself for two days. None of us planned on being attacked by the Justice Department.”
“She shouldn’t have done something so dangerous, then.”
Roystan held up his hands. “No more, Carlos. Let’s not argue about this. You either,” to Snow, who’d opened his mouth to say something. “Let’s talk about more-pressing problems, like what we do after we get the Songyan. Where do we go?”
“Where is the Songyan?” Josune asked.
“Kitimat.”
Josune thought for a moment. “Sagittarius arm. Old and established.”
“Justice Department headquarters,” Carlos said, voice laden with doom.
That hadn’t been a problem when Nika had ordered the Songyan. “I can ask for it to be sent somewhere else.”
“No,” Roystan said. “Kitimat is the last place the Justice Department will think to look for us. It’s the perfect place to go.” He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s set a course for Kitimat.”
6
ALISTAIR LAUGHTON
The Justice Department hadn’t changed. Same offices, same soaring interior, designed to impress the tourists. Same full-body scan.
The door remained closed.
Paola had better have cleared this.
Alistair went over to the desk, where a young man and a young woman—who might almost have been twins, with their short purple hair and green suits—looked up with the same inquiring expressions. Purple and green to him, at least.
“Can we help you?”
He gestured vaguely toward the door. “I’m supposed to have clearance.” He didn’t bother explaining who he was. He didn’t know them—hopefully they didn’t know him.
Both looked at the screen in front of them.
“You only passed two of the three points of reference for ID,” the woman said.
His eyes. Which were never going to pass a scan. Alistair wasn’t even sure they were organic anymore.
“Terribly sorry, Agent Laughton. But you should have completed the Intention to Mod Form before you were modded. We’ll require a certificate from your modder and proof of identity from three independent sources before we can let you through.”
He hoped Paola was in her office today. “Then can you call Agent . . . Wait.” Three points of reference. There were four options. Iris, fingerprint, image, and voice. “Let me try again.”
He went back to the entry, waited out the body scan, then said, “My name is Alistair Laughton. I am an agent of the Justice Department.”
The door opened to let him through.
Cam waited for him inside the security doors.
“I’m not going to ask,” for Cam didn’t talk about his past, and the Justice Department didn’t let anyone in who wasn’t supposed to be there.
Cam followed, looking around with interest. “I came here when I was a kid,” he said. “Back when—” He cut off what he was going to say. “We got the grand tour. Twenty of us.”
Families of company executives or members of the board got the grand tour. Nobody else.
There were twenty-eight people on the Justice Department board. Twenty-seven company representatives, and the combined-worlds rep, who represented the combined, non-company worlds.
They made their way up to Paola’s office. Cam didn’t set off any alarms.
“What’s he doing here?” Paola asked.
Cam smiled the smile that made everyone smile back. “I’m working with Alistair.”
Paola did smile, but afterward she scowled. “You can’t afford to bend the rules right now, Alistair. You need to be squeaky clean for the next few months. People will be watching, waiting for you to do something wrong. You already had a lot of enemies.”
“Not my doing,” Alistair said. “Cam, you sort out your security so that Paola is satisfied. Meantime, I want to see the file. Is there somewhere we can work?”
“Your old office.”
His old office smelled musty and unused. There was no dust, of course, because the bots cleaned the office daily, but the biscuits he’d kept in the drawer were still there, along with his special brand of coffee. Both two years stale.
The room looked different to how he remembered it. Not only because of two years’ diminished memory, but because of his changed eyesight.
The battens in the wall were crisscrossed, the design he’d come to recognize as being supplied by one of the subsidiaries of Santiago. The fabricated walls might hold up well on a building on Kitimat, but in the harsh world of Zell, they’d fallen apart
quickly.
A lot of things had fallen apart on Zell.
The wall was full of cabling and pipes. Most of them seemingly active. The wires were warm, the pipes cool—except for one, which looked to run hot water. It was flimsy, for he could see the faint shape of someone in the next office.
He settled down to look at the files.
Cam came back half an hour later. He looked tireder than usual, and his ready smile was gone.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just want out of here. I didn’t go to Zell for two years just to come back and sit in an office and play politics.”
“Don’t play with Paola. She’ll always win.” Alistair sat back. “Why did you go to Zell, Cam?” He waved a hand. “No. You don’t have to answer that.”
You didn’t go to a world like Zell because you wanted to see it. You went because you wanted to escape. It wasn’t his business to pry into Cam’s secrets. He sent Cam the list of names he had ready and stood up. “Let’s go and talk to Samson Sa.”
* * *
• • •
SaStudio was on Lesser Sirius. One of the few worlds to have an independent government rather than a company, which meant they used their own police force rather than call in the Justice Department. Consequently, Alistair didn’t know much about the world. It was, he found out from Cam on the trip there, the place to go if you wanted a top-of-the-range mod. Half the elite modders in the galaxy lived there.
Nika Rik Terri’s studio had been on Lesser Sirius, on the same street as SaStudio.
Sa’s assistant told Alistair to make an appointment. The waiting list was three months.
“We’re from the Justice Department.” Alistair had called ahead, so the assistant was just being difficult. “We’re not trying to make an appointment for a body mod.”
The assistant’s gaze flickered over Alistair’s body. It was clear he thought Alistair should be here for that. Alistair gritted his teeth. He hadn’t been to a modder since Zell and was unlikely to ever go to one again. They wouldn’t understand about his eyes.
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