No. He wouldn’t leave Alistair alive.
Her own body would shut down soon from the pain.
She was out of ideas.
Wickmore stepped forward to stand over Alistair’s prone body. He raised the needler this time. Fired down. “I owe you this, Laughton. If you had died at your apartment as you were supposed to, I wouldn’t have had to travel to this dead end of space. I wouldn’t have had to spend time placating my own company. I wouldn’t have had to dip into the chairman’s fund to be here now.”
Alistair’s body jerked with the pulses.
“But still, I got to hear about the Ort. Which I can use.”
He turned to Nika. “Did you really think the Justice Department would keep me prisoner, send me to trial? No. You and I both know that won’t happen in your lifetime.”
“You won’t get to trial, Wickmore. I am going to finish you once and for all.”
He fired the needler at Alistair again. “Justice Department. Never there when you need them, are they.”
Nika came out into the open, her hands up. “Stop torturing him.”
“That’s better. You and I have unfinished business, Nika. Deliver my exchanger, or Alejandro will be an angel compared to what I will do to you.”
She couldn’t stop her shudder.
“I’m glad we understand each other. And with your friends now space debris, there’s no one to rescue you this time.” Wickmore holstered the needler, aimed the blaster downward. “I must say, I’ll be happy to see the last of Agent Laughton.”
It was futile, but she jumped him anyway. Landed short.
Blue light silhouetted Wickmore. Lightning sparked out from his body. He danced inside it. Kept dancing. On and on, while his skin shriveled and his screams grew less and less, until they finally stopped.
“We’re not space debris yet, Executive.” Josune stepped over the charred body. “I’m glad your jump was short, Nika.”
Nika lay back, her smile wide, despite the pain. “I know what the good news is, anyway.” Laughton must have been about to tell her Another Road was here. He should have told her that first. “Roystan?”
“He’s good.”
Snow pushed past Josune. He dropped to his knees beside Nika. She knew the shape of him, even in the dark shed. “Snow. Don’t put me in the Dietel. Please.”
* * *
• • •
“I want to see Roystan,” Nika said as soon as she came out of the genemod machine.
“He’s still on board Another Road,” Josune said.
Snow crossed his arms. “I ran the mod you had programmed.” She’d left it coded, ready to go. “Pulling him out early doesn’t seem to have done major harm, but you can’t keep doing it, Nika.”
Nika laughed. “I missed you, Snow.” She had. She’d missed them all. Not just because she’d thought they were dead—she’d tried not to think about that—but she’d missed not having them around. “I need to see Roystan,” then belatedly remembered she wasn’t the only one who’d been injured. “How’s Alistair?”
He’d gone into the genemod machine before she had because he’d been more badly injured. “You didn’t touch his eyes.”
“Gramps told me.”
She’d forgotten Gramps was here.
“You told me too. Five times before the anesthetic took.”
She’d been in too much pain to think straight. At least she’d remembered the important things.
“We nearly put him in the Dietel, but it hasn’t been used for two years. We gave him nerveseal.”
“You should have brought Roystan and the Songyan down,” Nika told Snow as they went looking for Alistair. “We could have finished his mod, made sure he really was okay.”
Snow hesitated. “Nika, there’s something we haven’t—” He looked at Josune, shrugged helplessly.
Nika stopped. “You said they were all okay.” She’d never thought to ask about the others, just assumed they were all right. Neither Snow nor Josune looked upset. “Tell me.”
Snow stepped back and raised his arms helplessly.
“Everyone’s fine,” Josune said. “It’s not that. As soon as we’re done here, we’ll take you up, Nika.”
Nika looked at Josune. “It’s not bad,” Josune said. “Just something we need to tell you.”
They found Alistair talking to Paola.
“What am I going to tell Eaglehawk?” Paola asked.
“Tell them that they’d better not have had anything to do with trying to kill us or they’ll end up spending the rest of their life in jail.” He looked up. “That was fast.”
“It was a repair only,” Snow said. “I wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.”
Alistair looked as if he had no idea what Snow was talking about.
“How are your eyes?” Nika came over to check anyway.
“Good, thank you. I can still see.”
They reacted properly to light, at least. How did she know what was normal for Alistair? One day she would. “I’m going back to Another Road to check on Roystan.”
“But—”
“We’ll still help with the Ort,” Nika said. “And we’ll have expert engineers on hand to help, as well as two extra modders. We’ll make good progress converting the Dietel. But we’ll do that after I’ve checked Roystan.”
* * *
• • •
Nika, Gramps, Snow, and Josune went back to Another Road.
Carlos waited for them just outside the airlock. “Have you told her?”
“No one tell her until she checks Roystan.” Snow steered her toward the studio. “She won’t listen till then, anyway.”
“I’ll get Roystan,” Josune said.
“No need. I’m already here. And Jacques wants to know how long you’ll be, because he’s a celebration dinner planned.”
Nika looked around at the expectant faces. Carlos was openly beaming. Even Gramps had a smile.
Snow moved over to disinfect the Songyan—even though Nika could see it was sparkling.
“Let’s get you in there,” she told Roystan. “Before someone bursts.”
Roystan was fine.
“Nice job, Snow.”
“It was really hard.” Snow rolled his eyes. “Preprogrammed and all. My first chance at using a Songyan too. I may as well have been a doctor.”
“You’ll get other opportunities.”
Snow stood, his hands on his hips. “And I don’t even see why you needed the Songyan to start with. We could have done it in the Netanyu.”
That last stabilization, yes. “Later I’ll go through the repair with you. You can tell me what you’d have done. I’ll show you what I did.”
She rechecked Roystan’s vitals. Everything worked perfectly—albeit for a man whose natural body temperature was 40.2 degrees Celsius.
“Ready to come out,” she told Jacques. “Five minutes at most, then he’ll want a shower. Body modders only. The rest of you—” She shooed them out.
Gramps went, too, which surprised her.
Snow watched him go. “Melda offered to let Gramps stay on Zell. He’s thinking it over.”
“How do you feel about that?” Snow’s envisaged future had always had Gramps with him, Nika was sure.
He chewed his bottom lip. “He says he has to let me fly.”
“He’s welcome to come with us.” Wherever they went. Zell—with less than a hundred humans—wasn’t a place to train an apprentice. She looked around the ship. Neither was Another Road, not now they weren’t running.
Roystan came out, damp hair slicked down. Nika studied him critically. He hadn’t changed much from the day she’d first met him. More relaxed, and she was sure she’d find out why very soon, but otherwise the same. No longer starving, but certainly thinner than he’d been two weeks ago. She wa
lked around him, studying him.
“I think . . . this will be you forever, unless we mod you.” Or unless the transuride bonds broke down.
Roystan shuddered. “I’m never going into one of those machines again.”
“Roystan,” Josune said through the link, “don’t fight it. You may as well give up. This is Nika you’re talking to. You’ll be going in every month, at least. Probably more. Now take her down and show her, because we’re all waiting for dinner.”
They weren’t waiting for dinner. They were waiting at the entry to the cargo hold. Even Jacques.
Roystan opened the cargo door. “We collected this on the way through.”
Rocks. They’d collected rocks.
Nika picked out one small enough to fit into her palm. Studied it, saw the oily sheen. She looked closer, picked up another. The rocks she held had a heavy seam of the most precious transuride of all. Dellarine.
“So, do we have worthless rocks? Or do we have something else?” Roystan asked.
“You don’t know?”
Roystan’s neck heated slightly, and he gave his crooked smile. “No.”
“You are kidding me. You have all this, and you don’t know.” Nika shook her head. “Let’s go and have this celebratory dinner, and I will teach you all how to recognize dellarine.”
* * *
• • •
“What happens now?” Nika sat back and pushed away her empty plate.
“We have to decide how we’re going to sell this stuff,” Josune said. “We don’t want to mine it ourselves, and we certainly don’t want to let a single company have control of it. They’ll be ruling the galaxy in ten years.”
“A consortium,” Roystan suggested. “Although, I can imagine the power battles that will go on.”
Jacques laughed. “We know what happened to the last consortium the companies built. It’s as corrupt as anything.”
“Which consortium is this?”
“The Justice Department.”
They didn’t want to build another entity to rival that. The Justice Department was bad enough.
“So what do we do, then?” Josune asked. She put up her hands to cover her face. “In all this time I never thought about what we’d do when we found the treasure.”
Roy Goberling had known, though. Nika saw the realization in Roystan’s face. It was one of the reasons he’d run, tried to forget. If he’d remembered that six months ago, when he’d first met Nika, would he have been so willing to get his memory back, even for Josune?
Maybe. Maybe not. Eighty years was time enough to forget how bad it had been.
Josune dropped her hands. “Should we walk away?”
“No,” Roystan said. “Running doesn’t work. It just makes a different kind of pressure.”
He was right. They had to control it, or otherwise one of the companies would. Someone would find the transurides one day, especially with so many ships coming through the Funnel to see the Ort.
They couldn’t let that someone else be a single company.
They couldn’t do it themselves, because they’d be annihilated. Wickmore and the Boost would be minor problems compared, and they wouldn’t survive it.
Jacques was right. The Justice Department, monster that it was, represented all the companies, plus the non-company worlds like Lesser Sirius. It was the logical organization for a cross-company outfit. Not only that, Zell, and thus this part of the Vortex, was in the legal zone. The Justice Department would muscle in, whether they wanted them to or not.
The best they could do is control who did the muscling, and how.
“Who can we trust?” Nika asked.
“With something like this? No one.”
There were only two people she would even consider trusting in the Justice Department. Alistair Laughton, who was more naïve than they were, and Cam Santiago Le-Nguyen, whose company had been prepared to kill him because he was no use to them.
Alistair had a boss, Paola Teke, whom she thought he respected—or who respected him—who had brought the Honesty League with her.
“Hear me out,” Nika said slowly. Thinking aloud. “Let’s make a consortium. Ourselves. The citizens of Zell,” which included the Ort. “The companies. All overseen by the Justice Department, who in turn will be overseen by the Honesty League.”
“They’ve finally gone mad.” Jacques looked at Carlos and Snow and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Do they remember how many times the Justice Department has screwed us around?”
Even Roystan shook his head.
But Josune was nodding. “You want Laughton as the Justice Department representative.”
“Not just Laughton. His boss too.” Paola Teke was one step below the board; she wielded a lot of power, and Cam had said she listened to Alistair.
Teke was far more politically savvy than Laughton was. From what Nika had seen of Laughton, he wouldn’t follow a corrupt woman. Not knowingly. So Teke may not have been “good,” but she likely wasn’t on the make the way Brand and her team had been.
Roystan said, “It sounds great in theory, but if they’re any good, the Justice Department will kick them out and put someone else in their place. Someone more aligned with company goals.”
“Not if they were appointed permanently to those positions.” And not if the consortium had the power to appoint replacements, and those replacements didn’t have to come from the Justice Department.
“And that’s about as likely as—”
“It will happen if the Ort push for it.”
“And if they don’t?”
Josune said, “Laughton was already worried Santiago would—”
“No,” Snow breathed. “Don’t you see. We’ve got the genemod machines. We’re going to cure their plague for them.”
That little gem stretched into silence. It was broken by the gurgle of the coffeepot.
“Might work,” Roystan conceded, and even Josune nodded.
It would work, Nika knew it, and Alistair would even push for it, because he wanted to save his people on Zell. He might not appreciate it when he realized what he was in for, but that was his problem. He could deal with it. Nika thought he would cope with it too.
Jacques brought out freshly brewed coffee for them all. “Santiago will want part of it. Didn’t they start the settlement?”
And then decide to abandon them. “We’ll have a permanent Santiagan representative.”
“Barry?”
“Cam.” And she’d make sure whatever lawyer they got—and it wouldn’t be Cam—built in a clause to say that if Cam died, a representative from another company would sit in his place. “Maybe Jerome Brown as well.” Brown Combine was one of the most respected companies, reputed to be the most honest. He was a smart man. He’d cope with intercompany politics. “Once we explain, he won’t turn us down.”
Jerome Brown was also a long-term Goberlingophile. He’d bought the Hassim from them when Roystan and his crew had claimed it as salvage. He’d even been decent enough to try to save their life once, when Wickmore’s people were after them.
Roystan rubbed his hands together. “People might even think it was him who found the transurides, not us.”
“We could call in Feyodor’s lawyer,” Josune said. “We used him on the Hassim. He’s a good negotiator and for a percentage he’ll look after us.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Roystan said. He hesitated, then asked the question Nika had been dreading. “What are we going to do afterward?”
“We’re rich,” Carlos said. “We can do whatever we want.”
Nika knew what Carlos and Jacques would do. They’d follow Roystan. Roystan and Josune would most likely go exploring.
“I have an obligation to Snow, to my apprentice. I have to train him.” She didn’t want to leave, but they couldn’t continue to mod fo
ur people, three of whom didn’t like being modded.
Carlos waved it away. “You can do that on the ship.”
She couldn’t, not if she wanted to teach Snow properly. Although, they might learn a lot about transurides and longevity.
“There’s the Ort too. We can’t go anywhere until we’ve sorted out their plague.” She glanced over at Snow. Gramps wanted to remain on Zell. Could she train an apprentice properly there? There’d be a lot of people on Zell soon. All come to look at the Ort.
Snow might almost have been reading her thoughts. “I don’t think I’m going to be a normal modder. I’ll probably specialize in human-Ort relations, or how to work with transurides.” He looked toward his foster father, bit his bottom lip.
Nika wanted to go with Another Road. “We’ll stay on Zell awhile,” and tried not to brighten at the way Snow winced.
Once, all she had wanted was to be a good modder. She hadn’t realized she was lonely, or that she’d had no friends. And she was going to lose them, just after she’d found them.
“Face it,” Carlos said. “Zell is a horrible place.”
“Does it have to be Zell?” Josune asked.
Nika shivered. “Where else have they got?” Ort and settlers alike. Zell would never be anything but hostile to either race.
“We . . . the Hassim . . . found another world further in,” Josune said. “We called it Sassia. Earth-type, and no one has claimed it. Or not that I know of. Someone will discover it soon, so we may as well get the benefit from it. We could claim it, and combine it with the transuride agreement, Sassia-Zell rather than just Zell. It wouldn’t be company run, then.”
It was a generous offer.
From what Nika understood of what the Hassim had done, that was how they had made their money. They discovered worlds, but they didn’t work them. They sold the license and the location to the highest bidder, then took a percentage of everything.
Only this time it wouldn’t be the highest bidder. It would be their consortium. And this time a company wouldn’t rule the world—it would be governed independently. She hoped Laughton and his team would be up to it.
She’d be there, too, helping to make decisions. While her friends were off exploring the universe.
Stars Beyond Page 37