Stars Beyond

by S. K. Dunstall

  “They’re agents. They did their training here. Of course they’ll know people.”

  “They’re agents, yet you arrested them?” They hadn’t arrested Alistair. They’d put him on suspended leave.

  “I had to. I had the Honesty League on my back. Otherwise we could have sacked them quietly. Instead it’s a media circus and we need to give them a trial.”

  Cam followed them out. Hopped. “This tarmac’s rough.”

  He’d forgotten Cam had no shoes.

  Cam waved him away when he would have helped. “Let me mince,” and he did, across the roof. Alistair matched his pace.

  Paola looked out across the roofs, looked back quickly. “Can’t he go any faster?”

  “I’m doing my best,” Cam said.

  Paola always had set a fast pace to the lift. How much courage did it take her just to arrive at and leave work every day? Alistair gave her a gentle push toward the lifts. “Go press the button for us.”

  “That’s some phobia,” Cam said once she was out of hearing.

  “Yes.”

  They reached the lift, where Paola waited with one palm against the wall. “Ground floor’s locked down. They have to authorize us, can you believe.”

  They were trying to catch intruders down there.

  “We’ll go down to second,” Alistair said, because it had to be better for Paola than standing out here in the open, waiting for access.

  “Thank God,” Paola muttered, and punched the floor number.

  They stepped out onto the second floor.

  “They were brought in this afternoon. Which is what I came to see you about earlier tonight. Before I interviewed them, I reviewed the case file. They’d contracted to deliver some young man to a merc ship. But they underestimated the crew young Bertram Snowshoe was with. Finally,” as she must have gotten clearance for the ground floor, for she punched the lift button.

  “Bertram Snowshoe?”

  “Get in the lift, Alistair. Stop gawking.” The other two were already inside. He followed. “Yes. Snowshoe. I looked him up and found two people had inquired about Snowshoe recently. Leonard Wickmore and yourself.”

  This case was getting more tangled every second. “Why does Wickmore want Bertram?”

  “That’s something you can answer tomorrow, when you interview him. I hear he’s on Kitimat.”

  “The other day when we interviewed him, he was at his office on Eaglehawk Prime,” Cam said. “Not liking the coincidence.”

  “Executives travel all the time. They do most of their work on their way to and from places.” They stepped out of the lift and Paola stopped to talk to the agent in charge. “What’s happening?”

  They were outside the storeroom. The room number was familiar.

  “We cornered them in the storeroom,” the agent in charge said. “They’ve locked themselves in. The engineer is about to open the door.” He hesitated. “They know we won’t harm them. They’re using that to their advantage.”

  It was clear what he was asking.

  “You have my permission to use force,” Paola said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He opened a link.

  “Wait.” Alistair frantically searched records. Where had they stored the Songyan machine? Storeroom 313. How unsurprising. “You didn’t corner them at all. They’re here to steal the genemod machine.” And Paola had just given the order to use deadly force. “Rescind your order, Paola. We need these people alive.”

  He was too late. The guards had already stormed the door.

  16

  NIKA RIK TERRI

  Nika glanced toward Snow.

  “Oh, don’t worry about Snowshoe,” Wickmore said. “I won’t kill him unless he gives me problems. Captain Norris may even give me a full complement of mercs for a little war I’m about to start, he’ll be so grateful to have his lost lamb back in the fold.”

  “We’ll be going nowhere if the Justice Department agents get in.” Nika looked around the storeroom. This must be where they stored larger items, for there was a loading-bay door at the back. It was flush with the wall; thin lines of pale blue power crisscrossed in front of it.

  The noise over at the other door intensified.

  There was a fire door in the wall beside the loading bay, but the Songyan wouldn’t get out of that.

  Plus, there was still Wickmore. She turned back to him. “What now?”

  “If you’d arrived quietly, we could have gotten out without any fuss. Could have had time for a little chat even, to see how cooperative you plan on being. We no longer have that luxury. I won’t forget this.”

  “We did arrive quietly,” Snow said. “And we didn’t ask you to come. Don’t take it out on us.”

  Nika shrugged. She put her hand to her face to turn on the link. She had to let Josune know what was going on.

  Wickmore fired.

  Thousands of hot needles ripped through Nika’s body. It was only seconds, but she dropped to her knees, concentrating so hard on not screaming, and not throwing up, that it took a moment to realize the high keening she could hear was her. When she could, she gulped in air. Wickmore was dead. He was so dead. She was going to kill him.

  But first they had to escape.

  Otherwise Roystan would die.

  Snow knelt down beside her. He put his hand on her face, turned her to look at him. All she could think about was how much it hurt.

  “Nika.” He used the tone that said she really needed to listen to him.

  She forced herself to concentrate.

  “Needlers cause pain, but they don’t disable you.”

  “Isn’t that touching.” Wickmore’s voice was a distant sound. “The apprentice telling his master how it works. But it’s time to go. Pay attention, Nika.”

  Nika swallowed her pain and turned to Wickmore. He indicated a large panel to the left of the fire door. “The code to open the loading bay is nine, eight, seven, six, five. So unimaginative, don’t you think.” He waved the needler in Snow’s direction. “You can do the honors.”

  Snow punched in the numbers quickly. The bay door slid open.

  At the same time, the door at the other end of the storeroom disintegrated.

  Could they wait for the Justice Department, who at least weren’t trying to kill them?

  Blaster fire caught the edge of Snow’s arm, the one he couldn’t use properly yet.

  Damn. That order had changed. Now they were trying to kill them.

  Wickmore was already out of the loading bay, his needler still aimed at her.

  Coward.

  Nika hauled herself to her feet using the Songyan to pull herself up. Thank the stars it was still on the trolley it had arrived on. She blinked away the sweat stinging her eyes and swung the genemod machine around. She pushed it between them and the oncoming agents.

  She was seconds too late. Snow grunted, spun, as blaster fire raked down his right side. The rest of the fire—from at least three agents, at Nika’s guess—raked the Songyan crate, setting it alight.

  Snow fell. Nika dropped too. Under the cover of the fire, she rolled Snow through the exit. Next body she’d build for strength.

  “Hold your fire,” someone roared from the passage outside.

  Wickmore turned, snarled. “Laughton! What are you . . . Can’t you die like you’re supposed to?”

  Four Justice Department agents waited outside the loading bay.

  “Going somewhere, Brand?” one of them asked. It was the agent they’d met in the foyer coming in. “I will enjoy bringing you in.” He straightened, almost to attention, as he recognized Wickmore. “Executive. What is going on?”

  The whine of a stunner came over the top of the voice. The four agents, and Wickmore, dropped.

  Josune ran over to help with Snow. “I didn’t want to take them out earlier because tha
t would bring others.”

  She’d brought the aircar down to the loading bay. They ran for it. “The Songyan?”

  Nika shook her head. “Burning.” Even if it was only the crate that burned, they would be captured if they went back for it. “Let’s get Snow to a modder.”

  “Drake’s?”

  “Perfect.” And it was. The Justice Department would go to the hospitals first. They’d eventually try the modding studios, but Nika would have enough time to keep Snow alive.

  Josune lifted off as more agents spilled out of the loading-bay door.

  * * *

  • • •

  Drake’s studio was dark. Nika rang the bell. Rang it again. And again. If he was like Snow, he’d live on the premises. She rang a fourth time.

  Inside, a light came on, and Drake peered up blearily over the counter.

  Nika leaned on the bell.

  He finally came over and opened the door. “A modder’s got to sleep, you know. How am I to do . . . Oh, it’s you again.”

  “A thousand credits to use your machine again.”

  “Two.”

  “Fifteen hundred,” Josune said before Nika could agree.

  Nika let them negotiate while she helped Snow across to the machine. Snow was bad, because he climbed into the machine without even checking it.

  She knew Snow’s body almost as well as her own now, set up the machine automatically.

  “You might want to slow down,” Drake suggested. “You’re liable to make a mistake.”

  She didn’t make mistakes. “Where’s that leftover mutrient we gave you?”

  “That’ll cost—”

  “Don’t charge us for our own products,” Josune said.

  “But you gave it to me.”

  “I’ll pay him,” Nika said, which told Josune how bad Snow was. “But don’t try and pass off inferior product, or I might kill you myself.”

  Drake looked at her, looked at Josune. “That’ll be—”

  “Get it now, or I will kill you. We’ll pay cost price,” Josune said. “And remember that Nika knows cost price better than you do, for she bought it to start with.”

  Nika pulled down the first program she had for Snow. The original, when she’d taken a read of his hair. It wasn’t optimal, but she didn’t need to code it in. Not only that, it was Snow’s design, so it wasn’t as if she were overriding his mods.

  Afterward she sat back and watched. How many times had she sat by a client, watching the genemod machine? It all seemed so far away from her life of spaceships and blasters and deadly enemies.

  She looked at Josune, who looked as exhausted as she was. “Wickmore was waiting.”

  He was never going to get out of her life. Not unless she killed him. Or ran, like Goberling had. Changed his name, changed his identity, removed his memory. She didn’t want to do that.

  “We should have killed him.” She glanced at Drake, listening avidly. “Laughton’s people were waiting for us too. We set off alarms as soon as we arrived, or just after.”

  “The ID didn’t work?”

  It should have worked. “Unless they were after Brand and Bouwmeester.” They might even have been, for one of the agents had said, “Back to their prison cell.”

  “Unlikely,” Josune said. “Scum like that seem to get away all the time.”

  “I mucked up badly.”

  “And the Songyan?”

  “On fire, last we saw.”

  “You trying to steal a Songyan?” Drake’s eyes opened wide. “You people have balls, I’ll say that. But you should know I don’t do illegal here, and I don’t want to get caught in your backlash.”

  As Snow said, how could you steal something that you’d bought and paid for?

  “The Songyan is ours,” Nika said. “They stole it from us. We’re not thieves.”

  Drake flexed a scaled muscle. Admired it. “And I can fly too. If you really owned a Songyan, no one would steal it from you. It would be snug in a studio, and you wouldn’t be here illegally using my machine.”

  “Excuse me. There is nothing illegal about hiring a genemod machine for a few hours, provided you have certification. I should make you apologize for that.”

  “How?”

  “She’d put you in your own machine and pour orange crystals in until you did so.” Josune’s hand was close to her stomach. She always reached for the sparker first. Nika would prefer she went for her blaster this close to a genemod machine. But then, Drake didn’t realize how close he was to someone pulling a weapon on him.

  Drake checked his hairline on the screen. “She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.”

  “You’d turn orange.”

  Idle threats didn’t help their predicament. “I have to get a Songyan.” Nika needed the extra inlets, and the fineness it provided. In time maybe she and Josune could build something that would approximate what Conrad Songyan had done, using the base of one of the other machines—like the Netanyu—to do it, but that would take months, and Roystan didn’t have months.

  It was time to share their resources with someone else. “Who do we know has a Songyan?”

  SaStudio. Jolie Sand. Esau Ye.

  What would she have done if a desperate modder had come into her studio and demanded to use the Songyan? Said no, to start with, but if she knew them, and they persisted, she might eventually agree. But she’d make sure that she controlled the reads. And the mods. And their machines were customized for them.

  “How many of them are on Kitimat?” Josune asked.

  Exactly none. And Josune had a point. How long could they run to get this machine and keep Roystan alive? Even now, back on ship, he’d be feeling the effects.

  “We don’t have time to go somewhere else.” They’d make the time.

  “Think,” Josune said. “What about Songyan themselves? Was yours the only machine they had waiting to be sent?”

  “They’re custom built.” Every connection soldered by hand, every fastening hand-fixed, the box hand-molded. “They do them one at a time.” All of it customized to the purchaser’s requirements.

  “What about a demo model? Most showrooms have a demo model, at least, especially if you have to order it.”

  “Are you kidding?” Drake said. “This is Songyan we’re talking about. They don’t need demo models. The results speak for themselves.”

  “A damaged one, in for repair.”

  “The engineer goes on site.” Not that Nika’s had ever needed repair. Sinead had serviced it once a year, but she’d never had to repair it. “The only machine they have on the premises is a museum piece. The very first—” Nika’s voice trailed away. Giwari’s machine, and Dagar had said they serviced it regularly, so it would be in working order. She looked up. “It’s too old and doesn’t have my add-ons. But I’m desperate, Josune.”

  “So am I.” Josune glanced at the genemod machine, where Snow’s mod was half-done. “How long?”

  “Another hour.”

  “I’ll make plans.”

  17

  ALISTAIR LAUGHTON

  Leonard Wickmore looked as if he was about to have an apoplexy. “What are you doing here? Are all my staff imbeciles?”

  Alistair was glad he wasn’t in Wickmore’s office right then. “Funnily enough, I work here. What’s your excuse?”

  Alistair had better things to do than question executives. He wanted to follow the aircar. It was being pursued, but he knew it would be gone. Luck? Planning? Or both?

  Agents had stopped the fire spreading and finally managed to put out the genemod machine itself—whatever it had been packed in, it generated a lot of heat as it burned.

  “What were you doing in the store, Executive?”

  “Your people nearly killed Nika Rik Terri. If I hadn’t been there to save her, they would have done so.”

/>   “You still haven’t said what you were doing there.”

  “And you destroyed the genemod machine. Purpose built to Rik Terri’s specifications. I had plans for that machine.”

  “I’m sure you did. I ask again. What were you doing in the Justice Department store?” He could hear his voice getting louder, consciously quietened it.

  Paola caught Alistair’s eye. “Upstairs.”

  Her office, she meant. Alistair took hold of Wickmore’s arm as they moved across to the lift.

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all. You had no right to be in there. You’re lucky you’re not under arrest.”

  “Yet,” Cam murmured quietly from behind.

  Alistair saw the heat surge through Wickmore’s body, stepped in instinctively to block. Wickmore’s blow would have knocked the smaller man off his feet.

  “And you’re about to be charged with assaulting an officer of the Justice Department.”

  “You stepped into it. When my lawyer is finished, you will never work in the Justice Department again.”

  “This is Alistair Laughton you’re talking to,” Cam said. “Has he ever worried about things like that?”

  Paola gave a grim nod.

  “You keep out of this,” Wickmore said.

  “He works with me,” Alistair said. “You’ll answer him as civilly as you would answer any other Justice Department agent working on a case you’re a suspect in.”

  “How am I a suspect?”

  “Executive Wickmore,” Paola said as she ushered him into her office, “the Justice Department is a combined-companies initiative and can reasonably expect no interference from individual companies. We have a job to do. We are expected to do it. Especially right now, when we are under such heavy media scrutiny. Twenty agents saw you in the storeroom. You need a good reason for being there, else you will be charged.”

  “I don’t like being threatened.”

  Paola raised herself to her full height. “Perhaps we should call the Eaglehawk board representative. Have him explain things to you.”

  He was going to love that at four o’clock in the morning.