She looked down at Roystan again. If he’d been Banjo she could have used his own muscle tone for some of the work. Would probably still have to do that anyway. How much did he weigh?
“He’ll come out of this weak. No energy reserves.” And thin. So very thin.
Roystan’s blood oxygen levels were becoming dangerously low. “We need to restart the healing process,” Nika told Snow. “Let’s turn on inflow three—the mutrient. It will force oxygen into his blood, but it will also stress his heart. Start with ten milliliters a minute.”
“Me?” Snow said. “Aren’t you—”
“If you’re going to be my apprentice, Snow, you have to learn. Ease it in.”
“I’m not . . . I have a shop, remember.” Then Snow turned to the Dietel and carefully set the feed. “Had a shop,” he muttered.
“I still don’t get why you can’t stick him in a box and let the machine do its job,” Pol said. “It works for everyone else.”
“That is why we are the modders, and you’re not.” Nika looked at her newly declared apprentice. Had she said that? Out loud. She never took apprentices.
“Run that for five minutes, Snow. I’ll get more mutrient.”
Fresh mutrient this time, not like the solution she’d left on the bench. They had to keep the food up to his body. If she did it properly she could feed him a little faster than he used his own cells, so at least he wouldn’t starve. Or not much, anyway.
“Hey,” the doctor said. “That stuff’s expensive, and you’ve already got some out.”
“That’s for emergencies.” They didn’t have to know what type of emergencies. “I need fresh mutrient, not something that’s getting close to its use-by date.” Now, all she had to do was convince Roystan’s body to take it. “I need to talk to Jacques,” she told Benedict. “A link is fine.”
“So I’m your personal aide now, am I?”
“You’re the one who has to agree to it.”
She thought he only agreed out of curiosity.
“Jacques,” Nika said when he’d joined the link. “I need to know every single ingredient you put in that spicy flatbread. Everything. How much of it, and what brand. No secrets this time, Jacques. Not if you want to help Roystan.”
She noted every item and brought up the chemical composition for each.
“And the porridge?” Which turned out not to be porridge at all. In fact, it was a mushroom slurry.
“Really?” No wonder it had looked so bad.
“Genuine shiitake mushrooms, from Earth,” Jacques confirmed.
And most useful when Roystan was badly run-down. If he was reasonably healthy—healthy for Roystan—then the mushrooms weren’t required. It was the spices in the flatbread that worked.
“I don’t suppose you have the ingredients here,” she said to Benedict. “So he could make some up.”
Benedict leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Earth foods. Imported here. Even if I did have, I wouldn’t. I’m not covering those costs.”
What had made Jacques try the mushrooms—and the spices, for they were also from Earth—in the first place? But Benedict was right, she’d never get them here. Therefore, she had to work out what it was that was helping Roystan’s body, and somehow manufacture them.
She watched as Snow added a minute amount of mutrient to the feed, just as she was about to tell him to do it. He learned well.
His movements were slow and heavy.
“Get some sleep after this, Snow. You need it. I’ll need you to take over from me later.”
Snow nodded, found a space on the floor, and fell asleep almost instantly.
Nika opened a link and worked through the ingredients in the foods Jacques had listed. She began with the porridge. The shiitake mushrooms provided two promising leads. Vitamin D2 and beta-glucans.
Weak bones were a symptom of a lack of vitamin D, and Roystan certainly had weak bones. She carefully added vitamin D2 to the mix going into Roystan’s body.
Every fifteen minutes she turned on the feed of mutrient on the Dietel and cleansed Roystan’s blood for three minutes. The vitamin didn’t seem to change anything.
Nika started to build beta-glucan molecules.
The doctor had no equipment for mixing molecules, but one of the Dietels wasn’t being used, so she borrowed it.
“What are you doing?” one of the guards said. “Sabotaging it?”
She looked up. Benedict had gone. So had Pol and the doctor. They must have been gone a while, for the second guard had been dozing, coming awake now with a start at his companion’s voice.
“Mixing molecules. This hospital doesn’t have anything that will let me create them. It’s primitive.”
Their talking had woken Snow. He yawned hugely and came over to check Roystan’s status.
“He’s still alive.”
Nika wished he hadn’t sounded so surprised. “Of course he is. That’s what we’re here for. To save his life.”
“I know, but—” He yawned again and scratched his head. “He shouldn’t be.”
Nika tapped the second Dietel. “What we’re doing here, Snow, is making our own polysaccharides.”
He blinked. At least he didn’t ask what a polysaccharide was.
“This is the one we’re making.” She brought up the formula. “I’m taking the results from inlets one to four and outputting them into five. You make sure that what comes out into inlet five is this, and only this.”
The guard said, “It’s not really an inlet, then, is it. It’s an outlet.” He sniggered at his own joke.
Nika ignored him. She went back to figuring out what the spices were. Jacques had called them chili peppers. Nika had never heard of them, but she dug through the historical records until she found something. Capsaicin, 8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide, which turned out to be a major irritant for mammals.
Why would Roystan’s body react well to that? If it did.
“Done,” Snow said, as the secondary Dietel beeped. “What do we do with it?”
“Now we see what the impact of giving this to Roystan is.” Nika disconnected the whole inlet tube and took it across to Roystan’s machine. “Disconnect inlet five for me, please.”
He did it swiftly. “We had Dietels in our first year at Landers. We all had to use them. Except Nika Rik Terri, who refused to. She was allowed to use the second year’s Netanyu instead.”
Nika connected the inlet lines she was holding. “I’m sure she didn’t refuse to use them. Just refused to use them on herself.”
She’d refused to be pink.
“You said you went to school with her. You must have known what she was like.”
“Unfortunately, yes.” Around third year, Nika decided she needed to learn all the modding machines. She couldn’t use something if she didn’t know how it worked, so she’d sneaked back on the weekends to run herself through the Dietel, observe the results, and then run herself through another machine to hide those results. By then, Chatty had given her a key to the labs.
“That was a long time ago, Snow.” Nika eased the gauge up on inlet five, half a milliliter at a time.
She stopped at six.
At first it didn’t seem to be doing anything. Until Nika went to do the next blood cleanse and found that Roystan didn’t need it.
An hour later they both agreed. Roystan’s body was taking oxygen again.
“But it doesn’t change anything,” Nika said. “As you pointed out earlier, his heart, lungs, and kidneys will fail if we can’t do it fast enough.”
* * *
• • •
It took four hours to mix up a compound from the base components. She added the capsaicin to outlet three. “Let’s see how this goes.” She slowly moved the inlet feed up, delicately and carefully.
They waited.
&
nbsp; “His temperature’s rising,” Snow said. “We should turn it off.”
“No. Wait.” By all accounts that was what capsaicin did. If that was so, then something would happen as the body got hotter. Rather like running a fever.
They watched as his temperature crept up. 37.5. 37.6. 37.7. 37.8. 37.9.
“How far?” Snow whispered.
Roystan’s temperature jumped to 40.2.
“Turn it off.” He reached over to turn off the feed.
Nika reached out to stop him. “No. Wait. Everything’s stabilized. Look.”
“At 40.2 degrees?”
“Turn on the mutrient feed, Snow.” It came out as a whisper.
“He’s running a fever.”
She turned on the feed herself. The alerts on the screen went green.
“That’s impossible. He’s 40.2 degrees.”
At least the temperature had stopped going up. Nika leaned back against the wall, suddenly aware of how exhausted she was.
She watched the screen, the tiny green dots spreading through Roystan’s body. Slowly, ever so slowly. Watched the other vitals. Heart, lungs, liver, kidney. Calculated the time the machine told her they had before the organs deteriorated too much to use.
They didn’t have enough time.
“Nika.”
Snow was experienced with death. He’d recognize what he was seeing.
“I know,” Nika said. “We have to speed up the process, or he’ll still die.”
34
NIKA RIK TERRI
Gino Giwari had used transurides in everything. Especially dellarine. He believed the body would accept that metal even when it rejected everything else. When Nika had worked at Hannah Tan’s she’d learned to use dellarine to quickly rip apart a bad gene mod and stitch it back together. Other transurides worked, too, but not as well.
If Nika could get hold of some, she was sure she could hasten the healing. Enough to do something about the organs that were failing.
She only needed a trace amount.
Which was fine, because trace amounts were all you ever got. Until Goberling had found his lode, transurides were found in small quantities in the soil on some worlds.
She’d have to take Benedict’s pin. It wouldn’t have dellarine, but the transurides it did contain might be enough.
Nika looked at the mutrient. At the naolic acid. There was only one way.
Snow looked uneasily in the same direction.
But first, she’d ask again.
Benedict arrived well rested and smelling of coffee. Her stomach gurgled at the scent of it. They’d need proper food soon.
“They spent all night making things in another machine,” the guard who’d stayed awake said. “They seemed happy with what they had. Until about an hour ago.”
“What happened an hour ago?”
“Not sure. She said”—he nodded at Nika—“they have to speed up the process or he’ll die.”
“Get the doctor here,” Benedict told the guard. He turned to Nika. “How long before he’s ready to talk?”
“We need transurides.”
Benedict sat down and crossed his ankle over his knee. “Even if I had some, I wouldn’t waste them on you. Or him.”
The doctor arrived, out of breath. “What’s happened?”
“You tell me,” Benedict said.
She checked Roystan’s monitor. “He’s still alive?” There might have been some respect there. She turned to Snow. “Nice job.”
Did she realize he was dying?
“It wasn’t me,” Snow said.
“It was teamwork,” Nika said.
“Teamwork. Hah. When you spent the night asleep, leaving him to do all the work.”
Benedict leaned forward. “Why do you say that?”
“Look at her. Skin glowing with life, refreshed. She’s had eight hours of healthy sleep.”
Snow looked at Nika. “You do look fresh. Don’t you need sleep?”
“Of course I do.” She’d crash soon. “That’s the sign of a good mod, Snow.” And the dellarine that added the translucency.
Dellarine.
She clutched his arm. “Snow. I’ve got del . . . It’s part of my mod.” She dragged him over to the Dietel they’d been using. “We can get it from me.”
“Hey,” the doctor said. “You can’t use that machine.”
Nika’s fingers flew over the panel, programming it. “Watch me, see what I do. You might need to do it one day.”
“You’re too fast.”
Next time, then. “Collect every single molecule in inlet five. We’ll need everything we can.”
“Don’t touch that machine.”
“Keep that woman away from the machine. Away from me.” If either of them understood what she was doing, would they let Snow keep the metal? No. She hoped they didn’t understand. “I’m not giving this stuff up for anyone except Roystan. Understand that?
“And Snow. Don’t touch the controls on Roystan’s machine. No matter how bad you think he is. Ready?”
She stripped and was in the tank before Snow had time to object. The last thing she saw before the machine took her under was Snow bumping the doctor out of the way. She hoped she’d come out of this alive.
* * *
• • •
Nika came out of the tank feeling better than she’d gone in. The Dietel had done some basic healing. The burn on her side was gone.
Pink skin. No! She shouldn’t have been in such a hurry. She should have thought first.
“Satisfied,” the doctor said to Benedict. “She planned this all along.”
“You look terrible,” Snow told her. He had a graze along his cheek and the makings of a black eye.
Nika grimaced. “You ever tell anyone I came out of a Dietel, Snow, and you’re dead.” She pulled on her coveralls as she moved over to Roystan’s tank. “Where’s our supply?”
He handed over the precious container from inlet five.
She checked the solution. It had the characteristic oiliness of suspended transurides. It wasn’t oily, it was the way the particles trapped and captured the light.
“Roystan?”
“Still at 40.2 degrees. Body repairs up 0.5 percent to 7.3. Deterioration of vital organs increasing.” He bit his lip. “We’re too late, Nika.”
“You’re never done until you’re done, Snow.” She connected the dellarine to input six on Roystan’s machine. “Now, watch carefully. This stuff is expensive and you can’t afford to get it wrong.”
She turned down the capsaicin feed. And the mutrient. “First, we stabilize his temperature, because this metal only spreads through the body at a temperature of 37 degrees.”
They waited as the temperature went down. While they did, Nika reprogrammed the Dietel. Old, familiar programs that she hadn’t used in years. Coding she’d learned from her time with Hannah Tan, back when fixing bad DNA mods had been part of her job, and transurides had been a necessary part of the process to tear the DNA apart, rather than now, when she used it mostly to add mods. Like the glow to her skin, now gone.
“I thought it was bad when you used Banjo’s body for modding Banjo,” Snow said. “Now you’re using the contents of someone else’s body.”
If Snow thought this was bad, wait until they really got started. Nika knew that only Roystan’s body could be used to repair his damaged organs.
“Is that really dellarine?” Benedict asked, making them jump.
Nika had forgotten anyone else was there. She looked around. The doctor had gone. “What’s it to you?”
“And it gave your skin that glow?”
“If you wanted cutting-edge mods you should have come to my studio. Instead, you went to SaStudio and got perfect teeth and a square jaw.”
Benedict stiffened. “H
ow do you know where I got my mods done?”
“Samson Sa,” Nika said to Snow. “He’s obsessed with teeth.” He’d probably had bad teeth as a child. “And he loves a square jaw. What you see there is classic SaStudio. It’s like a signature.”
Snow looked at Benedict. Benedict looked at Nika. Both were a little openmouthed.
“What you’re aiming for, Snow, are mods so unique no one knows who did them. And every season you come up with a different look. Go ahead, have a closer look. I’ll watch the temperature.”
Snow shrugged apologetically and declined to go closer. “She does it to everyone,” he told Benedict. “She did it to Roystan when she met him.”
“Thirty-seven,” Nika said, as Roystan’s temperature dropped to that. It kept dropping. She hand-fed the capsaicin flow until it settled at the required temperature. “Let’s get this stuff in, Snow. Very, very gently, now.”
She kept the temperature steady as Snow carefully fed the dellarine in.
“Good. Good. We’re done.” She waited half an hour to be sure it had dispersed. “Now, I’m taking his temperature back up again.” She’d never heard of transurides working at that temperature before, but Giwari’s mod seemed to require it.
At 40.2 degrees, they added mutrient again. This time the alarms stayed silent. One by one, the telltales went green.
“Look, it’s taking,” Snow said, as the dellarine kicked in, sped the process, the effect doubling, then doubling again. “He’s getting better. You’re a genius.”
Nika hated to dampen the sense of wonder. “No, Snow. That’s just the start. Now we get to work. We’ve repairs to do, and I can tell you now that we’ll have to use his own body to do it. There’s nothing in this studio, or out of it, that will work on him. Let’s get to it.”
35
NIKA RIK TERRI
Roystan came out of his tank six days after Tamati came out of his—if Nika had calculated Tamati’s times properly.
“Hello, old man,” she said.
Roystan blinked at her.
“Don’t mind her.” Snow helped Roystan sit up. “She has a terrible bedside manner. You’re just lucky she knows what she’s doing.”
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