“Just a little something that says you accept responsibility for my saving your life. And it gives you a job at the same time.”
Cattle ship. “You know, it’s illegal not to warn the signee what they’re getting into.”
“You don’t get the cure if you don’t sign. You must be hurting.” The doctor glanced sideways. “And starving.”
If this doctor was in the way when they finally started fighting, Josune wasn’t going to point her weapon away to spare her. Her returning look was cool. “I’ll survive,” she said. “But I admit I’d like to stop the pain.”
“Good. You’ll sign, then.”
“I’ll sign,” Josune agreed. “But I want to read it first.” She was stalling for time. She needed to get rid of her weapons. She didn’t want to leave them unattended on a bench while she went into a modding machine. Except, how?
“It won’t make any difference.”
“I know that, but I like to read my contracts.”
“More fool you. I don’t care. Just don’t take long about it.”
They came into the hospital. A smallish room, crowded with four emerald Dietels, the machines Nika despised so much. Three of them were occupied.
Snow sat by the one nearest the door. He looked haggard. Roystan was in the machine in front of him. Josune could see his outline against the green glass. He was so still.
But then, wasn’t everybody once you got them into a genemod machine?
She stopped beside Snow. “How’s it going?”
Snow’s eyes were rimmed with red. His face was gaunt. He indicated the displays. Everything was red.
He shook his head.
“We turned the alarms off,” the doctor said. “The noise annoyed me. You don’t get time to chat to your friend. You get time to read the contract.”
Josune sat down. “Pull it up.”
“What, you can’t pull it up on your own?”
“I had a hand link,” Josune said. It was easier than explaining. She didn’t want to explain, anyway. Not to this doctor who sold bodies for half the profit.
“I didn’t think they made them anymore.” The doctor looked at her consideringly. “No ship wants someone who can’t communicate.”
Josune shrugged and waited for the doctor to think it over. The loudest noise was the swish of the inlet valves on the machine on the man farthest from Roystan.
“Josune,” Snow said, suddenly, urgently. “I’ve done everything I can for Roystan.”
She looked at him.
“I’ve stabilized him as much as I can. The machine’s keeping him alive, but only just. I can’t do any more.” His eyes glistened with unshed tears. “It’s not going to keep him alive forever.”
“Not much longer, I’d say,” the doctor said.
Josune could see that Snow agreed with the diagnosis by the way he rubbed his palms together. How did she point out that Nika was a body modder too? Without him closing down on the idea completely?
He said, “I know Nika does some dangerous things. Like when she pulled you out of the machine early.”
Maybe she didn’t have to.
Snow closed his eyes. “I know she’s been deregistered, but she’s still a modder.”
If Rik Terri—one of the best-known modders around—had been deregistered, it would have been all over the media.
“I know she’s crazy. I know she’s never done any medical work. And I’m still not sure if she lied or not about going to Landers.”
He took a deep breath. “But Roystan’s dying, Josune. And sometimes Nika thinks differently than other modders. She might—”
Josune’s own eyes were watering. “She might.”
“I can’t think of anything else to do, and he’ll die soon.”
“Snow.” Josune hugged him. Almost too late she remembered the weapons, and swiftly transferred Nika’s laser from her coveralls to his, pulled the sparker out of her hair, and dropped it down there too.
She pressed a palm to his chest, so that he wouldn’t touch the weapons. This might have been a bad idea. “I hear you, Snow. I was thinking of what Nika used to say. Two reasons for everything.”
“Two reasons?” Snow sounded out the words, as if the syllables didn’t make sense. They probably didn’t, but at least she’d stopped him drawing attention to the weapons she’d transferred to him.
“I come here to be cured. You needed me here to reassure you that it’s all right to call Nika in, no matter what the consequences. Two reasons.”
She’d said her private good-byes to Roystan earlier, in that stuffy little cell where she thought they’d all die. She’d hardly dared believe they’d put him into a tank. Snow had been convinced Roystan was dying, and so had Nika. Josune hadn’t hoped. Now, Snow was giving Nika a chance, and she knew she shouldn’t believe it would make a difference, but it did.
Snow blinked and put his own hand to his chest.
She thought he was going to give them away, but he was only settling the load. “Right. Two reasons.” He turned to the doctor. “I need the other modder to look at him.”
“Not sure I like having a deregistered modder in my hospital.”
Josune hoped the conversation was all that she’d followed.
“You can’t do anything. Snow says he can’t. Why not let Nika try? Can she do any worse?”
The doctor looked around. “Deregistered. She’ll probably waste expensive product. I can’t afford that.” She waited expectantly.
Josune was used to bargaining, but this was blatant extortion. “How much?”
“Three thousand credits.”
When the average wage for a crew hand was three hundred credits a week. If she promised twice as much as she supposedly earned, they would suspect something. Or not believe her. “Eighteen hundred. I’ve got six weeks’ wages in my bank. That’s it.”
“My cut’s ten percent,” the company man told the doctor. “For not letting it go any further than this room.”
“It’s all I have,” Josune said. “I can’t give you any more.” They didn’t have time to bargain.
Snow twitched. He glanced at the silent machine.
“If you don’t take it,” Josune said, “it will be too late.” She should have kept her weapons.
She looked around for something else to use. “Maolic acid?” she asked Snow hopefully.
“It’s naolic acid.”
“Deal.” The doctor handed the scanner to Josune for her payment.
Josune paid, praying Benedict hadn’t told this doctor he was looking for Josune Arriola.
He hadn’t, it seemed, for the doctor only glanced at the receipt, nodded, and looked at the company man. “You get the deregistered one while this lady here signs her other contract.”
33
NIKA RIK TERRI
Nika was half dragged, half helped across to the end Dietel. She glanced over to where Josune was installed. The machine would destroy Josune’s lovely detail. It had been good work.
She flashed Snow a quick smile before turning to Roystan. She was nearly too late. Why had Snow left it until so late to call her?
Benedict walked silently into the room and settled in a chair. Pol was with him. By the look on Pol’s face, it wasn’t her choice to be here. The doctor glanced at them, glanced at Nika, then turned back to her work.
It was eerily silent, although every light on Roystan’s machine was flashing red. Nika turned up the volume. Sometimes you could hear the problem before you saw it.
“Oh, please,” said the doctor, as the hospital filled with the cacophony of alarms.
Nika ignored her. The first thing she did was switch off the rejuv, inflow by inflow, until there was nothing left except life support.
“You can’t do that,” the doctor protested. “He’s liable to die from his injuries.�
�
“Nika,” Snow said. “It’s what’s keeping him alive.”
Nika hardly heard them. She was counting under her breath. Six, seven, eight.
The alarm on the first inflow cut out. Then the second, then the third, until at last there was blissful silence again.
She leaned against the side of the Dietel, her legs shaking, and watched Roystan’s vital signs. His heartbeat was settling from the erratic pulsing induced by the forced mods. Brain activity was normal for a man in an induced coma. He wasn’t going to die immediately. Good.
The rest of him was a mess.
“I don’t think you should have done that,” Snow said.
The doctor came to stand beside her. “What do you expect him to do? Get better by himself? It’ll take months.”
It was always an option when nothing else worked, although Nika thought that in this case his body would probably break down first. “Do you have any hu-skin?” Roystan had needed hu-skin to fix his blaster burn.
The doctor laughed. “You’re joking, right?”
Nika wished she were. She scanned the monitors. The lack of food and liquid didn’t help. She had no balance, and everything had a double image.
“I need food,” she said. “Water.”
“It’s in the drip.”
“For me. For Snow too.” He looked as if he was ready to drop. “They haven’t fed us. They haven’t given us anything to drink. We’re weak enough to make stupid mistakes.” She looked at Benedict.
“Get them something,” Benedict ordered one of his company people. “Water. Rations. Nothing fancy.”
The machine was set up for heavy burns. Nika had used similar settings on her own Songyan for blaster burns on Alejandro’s friends. There was nothing wrong with that. It would have worked on a normal body.
No, the damage was more integral than that.
Old Base had used hu-skin. To Nika, that was another signifier of a DNA problem. She pulled up the DNA read. It took three tries.
Another Dietel sounded completion. It made Nika jump. The doctor shook her head and she moved over to open it. “I want you to know,” she said to Benedict, “if he dies, it’s nothing to do with me.”
Nika thought she didn’t care, either.
“You’re the doctor,” Pol said. “He’s your responsibility. The man’s been in a fight. You say you can’t fix it. You’re lying.”
Pol had better hope she never had reason to come to this doctor for mods. Not the way the doctor looked at her. “We’ve a body modder here, and he can’t fix him either.”
Neither Pol nor the doctor would come out of it well if Roystan died. They were already laying the blame elsewhere. Snow wouldn’t come out any better, but his situation was settled. Cattle ship. Snow would hate that.
“Body modding is not basic medicine,” Snow said. “Few modders make good doctors. They don’t have the experience.”
Snow might be welcome at the hospital—he was saying things the doctor liked to hear—but Benedict was listening, and he didn’t need to hear things like that.
“This is not basic medicine,” Nika said. “His DNA has been modified.”
“Liar,” Pol said. “Roystan wouldn’t even go to a modder when he broke his nose.”
Nika checked. She hadn’t been looking for tiny cosmetics like that. Sure enough, there was the hairline crack and the mend that pushed the nose out of true. She should have seen that when she’d first observed his nose on ship.
“It took months to set and he still refused to see a modder about it. There’s no way he’d go for anything larger.”
He’d gone to Tilda, who’d studied with Hannah Tan, who knew how to fix botched DNA mods.
“If either of you wants to take over, you can,” Nika said. She knew neither of them would. She tuned them out and concentrated on the details scrolling up the screen.
“You hear me?” Pol demanded.
Nika hardly noticed.
She recognized DNA changes. She recognized it now, as Roystan’s DNA scrolled up.
The changes—always in the same places. Coding that Nika hadn’t looked at since she’d left Hannah Tan’s studio to start her own.
Pure Giwari. Except for the telomere at the end.
The only problem was, Giwari had been dead eighty years.
* * *
• • •
Nika clung dizzily to the edge of the Dietel while she tried to think, gulped the water Snow handed her. “Thanks.”
Roystan looked to be in his late thirties. Maybe he was older. Even so, he’d have been a child when Giwari got hold of him. Why would anyone change the DNA of a growing child?
The alternative—that one of Giwari’s changed subjects had bred—was less likely, but what else could it be? Nika revised her opinion of Giwari. Maybe Hannah had been right. Maybe he had been a genius. Changing one’s DNA normally made you sterile. Had Roystan’s parents—or grandparents—bred true? Had Giwari had an apprentice? She’d never heard of one.
Or was Roystan older than he looked?
The lack of food didn’t help her think. She scrolled back through the DNA, blinking, trying to focus.
The numbers ran together.
“She’s stalling.” Pol reached for a weapon she didn’t have at her hip anymore. “It’s an excuse.”
Nika tuned her out again.
Roystan’s DNA was a Giwari design. No question. The only question was whether it was first-generation or second-generation Giwari. But while it was classic Giwari, the mods on the telomeres at the end weren’t. Either Roystan had been modded twice, or that was the change that had allowed the first generation to breed.
Nika touched her finger to her jaw, linked in, and copied the results to her own personal memory. She’d study it in detail later.
Roystan’s heart and lungs were both strong, but he was struggling to breathe—the Dietel had to continuously drain his lungs and help the heart keep pumping. He’d be dead without the machine.
His skin was supple, although his bones were brittle and fragile. He had the body of a man in his thirties, and the bones of someone three times that.
A goodly portion of that body was covered in hu-skin. More of it was covered in a synthetic that took half an hour’s analysis to identify. Nuagahide. She hadn’t been born when they last used nuagahide. Regeneration had improved so much since then. Nowadays they used the person’s own skin to repair damage, and if they couldn’t, they used hu-skin.
Nika sat back and stared at the screen as she considered the results.
Roystan looked to be around her own age, but the machines didn’t lie. Here, in front of her, was the body of a man whose skin had first been repaired before Nika was born.
With a DNA change done by a man dead eighty years.
Hammond Roystan was an old man.
* * *
• • •
Nika came back to the present to find everyone watching her. The only sound she could hear was the low music piped through the speakers, and the soft hum of the other mod machines working. Roystan’s machine missed every third revolution. It needed servicing.
“Discovered a problem you can’t fix.” There was a hint of smugness about the doctor.
“There’s never a problem I can’t fix, provided I have the time to do it in.” And the tools. But what did she have?
She turned to Snow. “See how I’ve stabilized the body by turning off any mods?”
He nodded. “But the doctor’s right. It will take months for him to recover this way. He won’t make it. His kidneys, heart, and lungs will give out beforehand.”
They wouldn’t be the first to give out. “You forgot his blood. In a couple of hours his blood won’t be able to carry any more oxygen. If we can’t keep the oxygen to his brain, it won’t matter if he does live. He’ll be bra
in-dead.”
It wasn’t as if the Dietel wasn’t trying to force the oxygen through. That was the problem with nuagahide, one of the reasons they’d stopped using it.
“In fifteen minutes we’ll have to push more oxygen through to him. Watch him in the meantime. Let me know if anything—anything at all—changes.”
Snow nodded.
Now to see what raw materials were available. She looked around the room.
The doctor stood, arms crossed, smiling faintly. Benedict sat in the only chair—presumably the doctor’s work chair—elegant and watchful.
He reminded her of Alejandro, back when she had thought she was in love with him.
She looked around further. Supply cupboards would be . . . over there.
“What are you doing?” the doctor demanded, as she made her way across.
“Seeing what you have.”
“I didn’t say you could use anything.”
The supply cupboard was locked. Nika looked at Benedict, rather than the doctor. “I need raw materials.”
Benedict glanced over at the Dietel. At the doctor. “Open it.”
She opened it, with a backward glance that might have been sullen or might have been scared.
Nika went through the cupboard. They had large vats of mutrient, some basic salts, naolic acid, and some of the more basic acids. Not a lot here she could use on a man whose DNA wouldn’t replicate outside his own body.
“Do you have transurides?” Giwari always used transurides in his work.
The doctor laughed. “You’re joking, right.”
“No. I’m not.” If Roystan truly had been modded by Giwari, she’d have to get transurides from somewhere, and the only place she knew of any was the tiny bird of prey on Benedict’s lapel. He wouldn’t hand that over.
Maybe if she told him about it being a marker? She’d think about that later. She took some mutrient and naolic acid and placed them on the bench behind the Dietel, with as much distance between the two as she could. “Just in case,” she told a wide-eyed Snow. “You know what it’s for.”
He moved as far away from them as he could.
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