Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 (20 page)

"My brother seems to trust you," Barre said.

Ro shrugged.

"For all of our sakes, I hope he's right."

Micah punched the bulkhead next to the bridge door and swore at the pain.
At least it cleared his head. And he'd be able to treat it if the medical bay was intact.

Ro's face burned in his mind. The arrogance reminded him far too easily of his father. He strode through the silent, empty corridor, past several rooms his map labeled barracks and a large mess hall, empty of everything except the tables and benches bolted to the floor, before reaching medical. A bare bones ship, everything had been stripped down for speed and efficiency. It was nothing like the elegant and lush vessels his family had traveled in during the years before his mother's death — and his father's disgrace.

At least while they had possession of this ship, his father couldn't deliver the crates full of weapons to whatever smoldering conflict had paid the most or for whomever owned him. Though he doubted that had been Ro's intent in triggering the cascade that woke the AI. Beware the unintended consequence was the story of his life.

Micah triggered the manual door release. Lights flickered on as he stepped over the threshold. For a craft abandoned for something over four decades, it was remarkably free of dust and dirt. Basic environmental tech had been pretty much perfected in the first interstellar wars, along with the artificial gravity that allowed soldiers to stay deployed long enough to reach the fight and still be able to return planet-side with enough bone stock and muscle mass to survive. That is if they survived the actual battles.

The med-tech had been designed with battlefield injuries in mind. Metal plinths with shock cradles lined the long wall, primitive scanner displays at the head of each. In the center of the room, a command chair with a clamp for a portable readout faced the row of patient beds. Along the right hand wall, a glassed in room had been carved out of the main medical bay. Micah peered through the window and the elaborate airlock entrance. A metal plinth sat in the middle of the room, retractable lighting over it. It could have been an isolation chamber or a morgue. Knowing the purpose of these ships, probably both.

Up along the ceiling of the entire bay, and lining the isolation room, high pressure nozzles faced down. He shivered from more than the cold, empty air. This was a place designed to be simple to disinfect, probably with an independent air supply and external overrides on the door. In the calculus of war, the lives of a half dozen or so soldiers and med staff meant little against the chance of some biological agent or alien virus getting loose. He glanced back, looking for the reassurance of the dimly lit hallway.

As long as they were drifting and the AI shut down, he knew he could get out, but knowing something and keeping his adrenals from reacting to the fear were different matters. He forced his shoulders to drop and his jaw to relax as he looked for supplies. The wall opposite the isolation room was lined with neatly labeled drawers. He opened a few at random.

Micah triggered Jem's micro and started typing.

Medical ?? operational. Scanners not powered. Likely tied into the AI. Place cleaned out except for what's bolted down.

He didn't wait for a reply before backing out of the sterile space, chills arcing between his shoulder blades.

Fuck. We need supplies. See what you can find.

Searching the ship gave Micah reason not to be in the same room as Ro, even if her giving him orders irked him.

He wandered along the central corridor. The barracks rooms all followed the same pattern: rows of metal bunk beds with an integrated storage bin bolted to the floor, handrails across the walls and ceiling, a small head, as bare and as utilitarian as the medical bay with nothing to salvage.

There was nothing useful here except what he'd brought on board for his plants. At least all his work would be good for something. Maybe they could salvage the cloth row cover for bandage material. They wouldn't die of thirst. His closed system contained nearly 200 liters of water. At the bare minimum of two liters per person, per day, it wasn't hard to do the math in his head. Worst case scenario, even if the recycling systems didn't work on the ship, raiding the water from his bittergreen plants would buy them a few weeks. Food was another matter.

How long would it take for Ro to get the AI working and get them back to Daedalus? No, that was the wrong question. The right question was how long it would take for his father to mobilize every resource he could to find the ship.

They needed to get back to the station before that happened. Some of those questionable resources would view them as complications. Micah would be safe. No matter how low his father sank, he protected his son. But Ro, Barre, and Jem?

Micah bypassed the mess hall. Even from the doorway he could see it had nothing they needed. According to the map, the compartments aft of the mess contained access to the engines. They would probably yield nothing of value. The only other supplies on this old boat were the ones his father stowed here. They couldn't eat weapons or ammunition, but maybe some of the other cartons had more useful contents.

He triggered the door release. The utility lights along the floor and ceiling provided a dim illumination. He poked around Jem's micro and set it to flashlight mode.

The mound of silent cartons threw oddly shaped shadows across the cavernous hold as he walked around. Micah didn't have a knife, but he figured they didn't have to worry about keeping the seals intact anymore. He set Jem's micro down on the top of a box and pulled several boxes down from neighboring stacks.

"Damn it, Dad," he said, staring down at the diplomatic seals, his hands curled into tight fists.

He tore open one box after another, shoving the ones full of weapons aside. What would his father do if they just tossed them all out of the airlock? He certainly couldn't complain to Commander Mendez. As satisfying as that would be, it would also destroy all the proof and any leverage he might have. He paused at a fresh box, waiting for the guilt that always came at the thought of abandoning his father. All he saw when he closed his eyes was his mother's face, lined with pain and regret.

"At least you didn't live to see this," Micah said to the empty room. He turned back to the box at his feet and tore open the cover. "Jackpot!"

***

Barre paced the small area between the command console and the forward display. He was as useless here as he was on Daedalus or Hadria. Or any of the other postings their parents had dragged them through. He glanced down at his brother's face, gray in the harsh light, and wanted to punch something.

Ro hadn't looked up from her micro since Micah had gone. It would be convenient if he could blame this all on her, but it wasn't Ro's fault he was on the ship. It wasn't even Jem's. Barre had let his brother talk him into this. He could have refused, stood his ground with his parents.

He looked up and studied the unfamiliar star pattern on the display. If they died out here, at least he'd still be himself, with a head full of music. He drummed his fingers lightly against the console, enjoying the hard resonance of the room. It reminded him of the piece he was working on and he triggered his neural link to the micro stowed in his pocket.

Tuning out the drifting ship, he let the song sweep though his body, controlling the micro with directed pulses of different rhythms. It was something he'd figured out on his own, even if he wasn't as brilliant as Jem. Back on Daedalus, he could even use his micro and the neural to tune the environmentals of his room.

The lighting here was all wrong. It burned into the song, introducing discordant notes. Lost in the music, he reached out to dial down the brightness, his shoulders dropping and his jaw relaxing as the whole room softened.

The demands of his body fell away, too. Barre knew they would need to find food and water, but for now, the music was all he needed. It was all he'd ever needed.

***

Ro stared at her micro, waiting for news from Micah, and tried to ignore the throbbing in her ankle. The makeshift splint Jem had made helped, but she could feel the swollen flesh pressing against the bandages. She watched the breath rise and fall in his chest. How could he be so brilliant and his brother so ordinary?

She glanced at Barre, his long dreads swaying in time to music only he could hear. At least he was out of the way. The micro beeped and she shifted her attention back to what she hoped would be good news from Micah. The lights in the bridge dimmed. Gripping the micro in one hand, she levered herself up to standing with the other, pulling on the command console and blinked up at the lights. That shouldn't happen. The AI had been disabled and only she had access to the autonomics through her micro.

Ro accessed her session of Jem's interface program. If the AI had woken up again, there was no predicting what it might do. She scanned the status. Environmental systems were all online, unchanged, with no sign of the SIREN code running. "This doesn't make any sense," she said, blinking up at the lights.

The door slid open. Micah wrestled a large box onto the bridge. "Nice of someone to come and help me."

"What?" Ro turned to him. "Sorry. What do you have?"

"Battlefield med-kits and rations. Enough for a small strike force. Should last us months." He shrugged. "My father never does things by half-measures."

Barre headed over to where Micah stood and took the box. "I've seen these before," he said. "Not fancy, but they'll do the job."

"You're welcome," Micah said.

"Yeah. Thanks." Barre had already set the box down next to his brother and was rifling through it. "Antibiotics and suture glue. You can fix almost anything with this stuff."

"What's our water situation?" Ro asked. The ration bars tasted like asteroid dust and had a texture to match, but they would keep them going. The battlefield ones even had a jolt of caffeine added.

"I don't know about the ship's recycling plant, but we have plenty of water in my lab." Micah shrugged before she could say anything. "We need it more than the plants do."

"I need some clean water to flush Jem's wound."

Maybe Barre wasn't as useless as Ro figured. "Anything in there to stabilize my ankle?"

"Cast tape. Here." He tossed a roll to her. She had to set her micro down to catch it.

"Great. Thanks," she said, glaring at him. "A little help here?"

Barre stared her down. "Water, Jem, and then you. It's called triage."

Her cheeks burned and she looked down at her hands.

"Water. I'm on it," Micah said as he slipped from the bridge.

Ro watched him leave, her eyebrows crinkling together. Micah was barely recognizable without a snarky comment, push back, or an argument. She slid back to the floor near Jem. "Anything I can do to help?" she asked. Like anyone on a space station, she'd done her basic emergency training, but it was nowhere near what the Durbins must have taught their sons.

Barre knelt by his brother, completely ignoring her. "This is probably going to hurt."

"You couldn't lie?" Jem said, his lips crooking into a small smile.

"Do Mom or Dad ever?"

"No."

Ro strained to hear Jem's soft voice and then looked away, feeling like she was eavesdropping on something she had no right to know.

Barre snapped on the sterile gloves from the med-kit and leaned over Jem's head. "Good thing you don't keep dreads like me."

Ro winced as Barre pressed down on Jem's skull. A small trickle of new blood traveled down his forehead.

"Hang on, I need more light."

"I'll see what I can do," Ro said, grabbing for her micro. Before she could access the environmental subroutines, Barre looked up and away, his eyes unfocused. The lights brightened so slowly, she initially thought she'd imagined it.

Barre turned back to Jem. "That's better."

"Wait." Ro frowned, looking from her quiet micro to the lights and back again. "Wait. You did that. How the hell did you do that?"

"What? The lights?"

"Yes! The lights!" If she could, she would have taken him by his shirt and shaken him. "How did you … if you'd triggered the AI …" Fear burned a cold wave through her chest. He could have gotten them all killed, just like she'd almost done. Ro swallowed hard.

"My neural." Barre turned back to Jem as if it was that simple.

All the warmth drained out of her face. "You can directly talk with the ship?" Maybe she needed both brothers, after all.

"Not talk. Not exactly. Not in words."

Now she definitely wanted to shake him.

"You can do that with your music?" Jem asked. "Wow. That's, that's seismic!"

"I guess." Barre busied himself lining up the supplies he needed to close up Jem's head wound. "How many fingers?"

Ro placed her hand on his arm. "I need you to tell me exactly what you did," she said, slowly, and carefully.

He shook her off. "Not part of the triage."

The door opened and Micah walked in with two containers of water and a roll of some thin, translucent fabric. Ro sat back and watched Barre take care of his brother. He carefully flushed the wound and patted it dry with sterile gauze. Antibiotics were next, then fresh gauze to protect it. He wound a strip of the fabric Micah brought around Jem's head to keep the bandages in place. Barre had precise hands — the hands of a surgeon or a musician.

And the mind that guided those hands — that mind could control the ship's computer without triggering the defense mechanisms that Ro had tripped. She would have time to be jealous of him and ashamed of her assumptions later.

"Is some of that water for drinking?" Barre asked.

"Yes," Micah said. "We won't have to ration for some time."

"Good. Give Jem small sips until he's finished about a half liter."

Micah raised one eyebrow at Ro and she shrugged. Barre knew more about medical than the two of them put together. If he wanted to give them orders, she figured he was entitled.

He turned back to his brother as Micah came over with the water. "Stick out your tongue."