Stars Uncharted

by S. K. Dunstall

  “What do I look for?” Nika asked.

  “Heat traces,” Carlos said.

  Which was no help. “What does a heat trace look like?”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Color,” Roystan said. “Red or yellow, mostly.” He fired the jets, a gentle movement.

  Something large hurtled by, close.

  Behind it, Nika caught a glimpse of yellow.

  Carlos’s eyes crossed. “Maybe I should go to bed. Seeing everything double made that look huge.”

  It had been huge.

  “There,” Nika said. “Something warm.”

  Carlos zoomed in. A body, dead, from the way the neck twisted. The yellow fading as the body cooled. Rotating lazily in free space, the body rolled to face them.

  Carlos gasped, cutting off a gurgle that might have been a choke. “Qiang.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The ship had imploded from the inside. It had a massive hole through the middle, but parts of the hull remained undamaged. Nika counted twenty-one yellow blips before the last heat trace faded to nothing. It didn’t seem possible that one bomb could do so much damage. There were no survivors. There were bodies.

  Qiang was the only one not wearing a business suit.

  Roystan was white around the mouth, the red blotch of his healed skin a stark, pink patch against the alabaster of the rest of his neck and down into the collar as far as Nika could see. She thought for a moment that he would clap his hand over his face and reach for a zipped bag, but he didn’t.

  “I don’t care that she’s dead.” But Jacques’s voice broke.

  The only time Nika had heard him mention his former crewmates, he’d sounded ready to kill them himself.

  Roystan got himself a coffee, and almost gagged at the taste. “It looks like Qiang and Pol sold out to the company.”

  They hadn’t found Pol’s body. Or Guardian’s.

  “Part of the ship looks intact.” Roystan hesitated. “Josune, how are your ribs?”

  “Fine.”

  It was a lie, but Nika thought Josune was sore enough to take care with her own body.

  Roystan hesitated, then said, “Take Jacques and Snow. See if you can find their nullspacer, and if we can salvage it. I’ll send the bodies sunward.”

  The nearest sun was a light-year away.

  Snow leaned close to Nika. “No one wants to carry dead bodies. You send them into the nearest sun.”

  She must have looked bewildered, for Snow sighed. “There’s no room on a spaceship for dead weight.”

  Dead being the operative word, obviously.

  “It keeps space tidy. Gets rid of unwelcome objects floating around in space, waiting to hit an unsuspecting ship.”

  “You really don’t know anything,” Carlos said.

  Nika raised her hands in defense. “Airy-fairy modder, remember.”

  Jacques thrust a bowl under Roystan’s nose. “Eat. You know how useless you’ll be if you don’t keep up your energy.”

  Roystan pushed it away.

  “You’ve a crew, remember. They’re your responsibility.”

  For a moment Nika thought Jacques would spoon-feed him. Maybe Roystan thought so too, for he took the bowl and raised it to his lips. His hands were shaking. With nerves? Or fatigue?

  Maybe his body produced too much adrenaline.

  Carlos said, “Remember that time they discovered those bodies circulating New France? Hundreds of them. Must have been a whole ship destroyed. They sent them sunward and the planet gravity caught them.”

  Nika shuddered.

  Roystan put down the bowl abruptly. “Let’s get suited up and get this grisly business over with.”

  “What if the second ship arrives before we’re done?” Josune asked.

  They all knew there would be a second ship.

  “They won’t jump close to their own ship. We’ll have time to get away, and if we can get their nullspacer, it might be faster than repairing our own, which has been hit twice now.”

  “Grisly as it sounds,” Josune said, “we should keep Qiang’s body. For her ID. She does, after all, owe you ten million credits. Well, Pol does, but I can’t see Qiang leaving all the credits with Pol. If we can get someone to hack it, we might be able to get some of it back for you.”

  Fingerprint and iris identification were basic work to Nika. If she had a machine like the Songyan, she could probably do it.

  Roystan clamped his teeth together, as if the food he hadn’t yet eaten wanted to come up again. He nodded. When he finally spoke, it was to say, “Do what you can with the nullspacer while we clean up the bodies.”

  Josune nodded.

  * * *

  • • •

  Alone on the bridge with Carlos, Nika watched the screens and spent the time planning Roystan’s new stomach.

  There were three reasons someone had such a poor gag reflex.

  Reason one. The stomach rejected foreign matter. That was easy to fix. Find out the cause of the rejection and fix it. This often had an added advantage that the person enjoyed exotic food more.

  Reason two. The body had trained itself to gag based on an event or events that had happened in the past. That was harder to fix. You had to know what the memory was and change the association. Changing memories was bordering on illegal, and had to be done delicately so that you didn’t change anything else at the same time. She didn’t know Roystan well enough to fix a bad earlier association.

  Although she might have been able to do it with the exchanger. Back when she’d first built it, not after she’d used dellarine in it.

  Neither of those was likely to be the problem. No. Nika was becoming increasingly convinced it was botched DNA.

  Change on a molecular scale had to be done carefully, and properly. It took a gifted modder to do it.

  Nika’s first job, before she’d bought herself the Dekker and branched out on her own, had been with Hannah Tan. Because Hannah was the leading expert on DNA changes, many botched-DNA jobs came her way. Young modders, straight out of Landers, convinced they could do anything. Not-so-young modders, who should have known better. Nika had learned to recognize the symptoms. Roystan was exhibiting many of them. The only reason she wasn’t certain it was a botched mod was that he didn’t exhibit the most common symptom—rapid aging.

  Josune’s voice broke into her assessment. “Promising piece of debris at five hundred points to the center. I’ll check it out.”

  Through the link, Roystan instructed Snow and Jacques. “Work with Josune. Follow her orders. I’ll finish the bodies. Snow. Jacques. Keep your links open, to both Josune and me. I need to know everything that goes on out here.”

  Nika heard the assent. She shivered. She wouldn’t like to be out in space on her own, hunting up dead bodies. Especially not when they were expecting an enemy ship any moment.

  * * *

  • • •

  Roystan arrived back before the others did. He dropped wearily into the captain’s chair. Nika studied him carefully, one eye on the calibrator. Sometimes food intolerances showed up around the eyes. Like the black ring that indicated signs of a liver problem, maybe leaky gut syndrome.

  “What?” Roystan asked, at Nika’s scrutiny.

  “Just thinking about mods.” His eyes didn’t have any black rings.

  “And you’re looking at me?” He looked wary.

  “She’s an artist,” Carlos said. “No doubt she wants to change your body to suit her artistic ideal. Next thing you know you’ll be three meters tall with green hair and a fish tail.”

  “A true artist doesn’t take away the essence of the person. Their aim is to enhance what’s already there, not to disguise it.” Nika turned back to Roystan. “Who did your last mod?”

 
“Do you ever think of anything other than modding?”

  Her whole life had revolved around her work. And Alejandro. She shook her head.

  “Why am I not surprised. Tilda, of course.”

  Tilda, the previous owner of Snow’s studio. “And she botched your mod?”

  “Botched?” Josune asked. “How?”

  Nika had forgotten the link was open, everyone on the same public channel. You didn’t talk to a patient about their mods publicly. She shouldn’t even have done it with Carlos there. Sometimes her obsession took over, and she wasn’t safe in her studio right now and free to discuss it.

  But Roystan didn’t seem to mind. “I went to Tilda all the time. She never botched a job.”

  Nika would believe that when she got Roystan under a machine.

  “I know what you’re thinking. She wasn’t in your class, but she was a good modder.”

  Snow’s disembodied voice came through the link. “Tilda apprenticed to Hannah Tan, you know. I found some old letters on the shop link. They parted on bad terms.”

  Nika bit her tongue to stop herself from saying she’d also apprenticed to Hannah Tan, and was glad she hadn’t spoken when Snow added, “Nika Rik Terri apprenticed to Hannah Tan, too. She was the first apprentice Hannah took on in twenty years.”

  Nika said, “Hannah hated apprentices. Thought they were worthless.” It had taken a lot of work, hanging around Hannah’s studio, talking mods every time she got the chance, before Hannah finally gave in and even let her inside.

  “Tilda stole money from her,” Snow said. “That’s also why Hannah never acknowledged her as an apprentice, and why Tilda came to Lesser Sirius rather than Pisces III.”

  “Pisces III?” Josune sounded suddenly breathless.

  Should they pull her in?

  “Hannah’s studio was on Pisces III,” Nika said. “Back then it was the hub of all things modding.” All the big modders of the golden age had come from there. Giwari, Stephenson, Jens, Patel, McLannard, diGiovambattista. Nika herself had come to Lesser Sirius to get away from the influence of all those masters. She’d found the modders on Pisces III steeped in tradition, set in their ways, always looking to the past, not the future. Lesser Sirius was the modding hub now. In a hundred years, Lesser Sirius would go the same way as Pisces III.

  “I found court papers,” Snow said. “Justice Department. Tilda nearly went broke paying the fines.”

  If Tilda had studied with Hannah Tan, then she’d know how to fix a botched genemod, for that had been Hannah’s bread and butter. No wonder Roystan had gone to her.

  “Hannah Tan refused to have another apprentice, until along came Nika Rik Terri.”

  Who’d been an arrogant little piece, and refused to take no for an answer. She wanted to learn from the best modders around.

  Josune cut in. “We’ve just picked up some salvage.”

  Nika was almost glad for the interruption.

  “You are not going to like it, Roystan.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Snow and Jacques dragged a net between them when the salvage party arrived back. The contents looked like junk.

  As soon as they were all in, Roystan set The Road on a new course. “We’re lucky the other ship hasn’t arrived yet, but it will. Start thinking. We need to know what we brought on board that they could be tracking.”

  They all adjourned to the crew room.

  “Bodies headed sunward?” Josune asked.

  Roystan nodded. “Except Qiang.” He looked momentarily green. “I’ve stashed her in the outermost cargo hold. Did you get the nullspacer from the ship?”

  “Most of it. We can fix the rest.”

  “Good.”

  Jacques helped Snow lift the net onto the table. “Look what we found.” He pressed the release. Strands dropped away. “Snow says they’re weapons.”

  They didn’t look like weapons. Nika picked up one of the smaller pieces. “How do they work?”

  “That one’s a Mark 27 Skol hand weapon,” Snow said. “Military grade. It can burn half your body off if you’re within twenty-seven meters.”

  Nika dropped the weapon hurriedly.

  “Twenty-seven to eighty meters,” Snow said. “We might be able to save you, but you’ll spend weeks in the regen machine.”

  “Outside eighty meters?”

  “No range.”

  Nika touched it cautiously with the tip of her middle finger. “So if you see someone with one of these you run like mad and hope you’re out of range before they fire.”

  Snow had a great repertoire of withering looks. Nika would have to cultivate some of them.

  “Hmm.” Roystan picked carefully through the weapons. “Military grade, you say.”

  Snow nodded.

  Roystan tapped the table thoughtfully. “Salvage is salvage. But I’ve never sold weapons before. I wouldn’t know how to.”

  “Qiang would have known,” Jacques said.

  Roystan gave him a sharp glance. “None of us are Qiang, are we? Does anyone know how to get rid of them without getting ripped off?”

  Alejandro’s boss would have known.

  Roystan sighed. “We’ll work something out.”

  Nika picked carefully through the weapons. They didn’t look dangerous. In fact, only two of them looked like traditional weapons.

  “Don’t,” Snow said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Nika knew how to handle an iron bar. Or a hefty plasma jar. But the first time she’d held a real weapon had been on Atalante Station. She held her hands away in surrender.

  Roystan grinned sympathetically. “You’re the expert on this,” he told Snow.

  “They’re all old.” Snow picked through the bundle. “This one”—he pointed to one that looked like something Nika might have used for jimmying the lid off a can of mutrient, back when they came in cans rather than screw-top jars—“can slice a man in half at the waist as neat as you please. Cauterize the wound, too.”

  Roystan looked gray around the mouth. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “To this?” Josune brought out something else. At first glance Nika thought it was a giant femur, for it was roughly the same shape. Then she looked closer and saw it was a ceramic-metal alloy, that peculiar gray-purple of alloys designed to withstand extreme temperatures. It was still crackling as it warmed up now that it was no longer in the near absolute zero of space.

  The word on the side was Hassim.

  Roystan rubbed his eyes. “I suppose destroying it isn’t an option.”

  “No.” Josune put another one beside it. This one had Pierre down the side. “You know what it means, Roystan. They didn’t need us at all. They had the Hassim memory. But they came back for us.”

  Roystan moved his hands away from his face. He looked at her.

  “They came back. They’re looking for the same thing Captain Feyodor was.”

  “Something on the Hassim’s or the Pierre’s memory will tell us why,” Jacques said.

  Josune opened her mouth to speak, then closed it.

  Roystan rubbed his eyes again. “Let’s put these back into the safe. You might reprogram it, Josune. Add Nika and Snow, and have any four of us open it.”

  “This conversation isn’t finished.” But Josune picked up the ships’ memories and took them out.

  28

  NIKA RIK TERRI

  After that, things slowed down.

  As Roystan pointed out, you couldn’t go anywhere in space fast. Not when you couldn’t nullspace. Josune and Carlos worked on the nullspacer. They’d taken the one from The Road, and the one from the Pierre, and were trying to patch something workable out of both of them.

  Jacques and Roystan searched the supplies they’d brought over from the Hassim to see if they could discover how the c
ompany was tracking them.

  Since Nika and Snow had no idea what they were looking for—Jacques didn’t either, Nika was fairly sure—Josune set them to curing the nullspace parts as they came out of the molds. Nika was glad to do something. Anything.

  They had one curing machine and a dozen gears on the table in front of them.

  Carlos hovered, watching the curing while he worked at his own tasks. “Do it properly. I don’t want something breaking because it wasn’t cured properly.”

  Neither did Nika. “They teach us how to cure at Landers, Carlos.” Or they had when she’d been there. “Two hours a week for a whole term.”

  “Two hours a week.”

  “They don’t do that anymore,” Snow said. “They expect the molding machine to cure it for you.” He glanced at Nika. “Of course, most modders don’t make their own equipment. They buy add-ons.”

  He was winding them up. Nika didn’t mind. His curing technique was far superior to hers. She’d bet that on the Boost, the medical team had repaired a lot of their own equipment. Now all she had to do was to convince him that making your own add-ons, rather than purchasing them, was a step up, not down.

  Roystan came by engineering when they’d finished searching the cargo. “Nothing. And no ships, either. Maybe we’ve lost them.”

  An alarm sounded.

  Roystan opened a link. “A ship just arrived.”

  Nika’s heart raced. Reaction, even though a ship couldn’t possibly get to them for hours. After all, they’d waited hours for the Pierre.

  “Normally, I’d hail them, say hello,” Roystan said. “But we don’t want anyone to know we’re here. Let’s wait for them to hail us.”

  Nika calculated the vectors. The ship was turning to intercept The Road. She hoped she was wrong, but Roystan confirmed it.

  “Right in our way,” Roystan said, as the path of the other ship stabilized. “We’ll meet them head-on in three hours. They haven’t called us.”

  “It’s a standard safety measure,” Snow told Nika. “Even before you can see a ship, you know by the transmissions that another ship is in the area.”