Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 (25 page)

Nomi's world narrowed down to the pitch and volume of raw ansible signals — her own calibration shots, sent back to her, and relevant network traffic. It was a strange kind of music and she usually found the work soothing, especially during the late-night shift on Daedalus when traffic was sparse in their little pocket of the universe.

Here, surrounded by strangers, Nomi tensed. No one knew for sure if Ro was in control of the ship or even if she was alive. She squeezed her eyes shut briefly, thinking of her. Ro's intensity softened when she slept, giving her face a vulnerability that she would probably hate. When her blond hair had spilled across the pillow, all Nomi had wanted was to let its soft silk slip through her fingers. Sighing, she focused her attention back on the display.

A hand dropped on her shoulder and Nomi jolted upright in the chair. Jenkins stood beside her, grinning broadly.

"You have to pace yourself out here," the thick-set man said, running his hand over his scalp. "Called your name three times."

Nomi shrugged, suddenly aware of the tension in her shoulders and the back of her neck.

"We just do two hour shifts on this kind of job. Two shifts of two on, two off. Otherwise you lose your edge and miss signals."

She pushed the chair away from the console and stood, stretching. Jenkins plopped down in the chair and grabbed the headset.

In search of some real food and more coffee, Nomi headed back to the mess. Filled tables and loud conversations made the room ring with noise. After the focused quiet of comms, Nomi wasn't in the mood for company, but there wasn't a place to sit in her cramped quarters. Sighing, she threaded her way through the room to an empty chair at a corner table. Two crew members leaned close to one another, deep in a very intense conversation.

They waved her into the free seat and turned back to a discussion of some arcane point in fluid dynamics. Shaking her head, she set down her tray. Engineers. She ate quickly, suddenly nostalgic for her lonely night shifts and missing Ro.

Ro had to be all right. The engineer was just too smart and too stubborn not to be. Flipping through her micro's display, Nomi checked for any messages from her family. Anything sent to Daedalus would follow her here as soon as they hit the range of the nearest ansible. Her brother had sent her his latest vid.

She paused, her hand hovering over the waiting message.

If the Hephaestus was searching for Ro in this sector, they must have some reasonable suspicion the ship hadn't traveled all that far. And Ro had hacked into Nomi's micro. She looked up at the two engineers still in intense discussion at the table and smiled, bending forward to compose a message. With any luck — though she was starting to think it was all planning with Ro — that message would find its way through a few ansible pings straight to her micro. Even the thought of Maldonado on board Hephaestus couldn't sour her mood.

***

Ro sat cross-legged on the acceleration mat, staring down at her micro. Her lank hair swung forward and she tucked it behind her ears, trying not to think of how good a shower would feel. What could she possibly have that would detect and disinfect a forty-year-old virus? And if she were even able to string some program together, how would the AI react?

"Here. You need this."

Micah stood over her looking just as neat and as composed as if he were headed into a news conference with his father. Then she looked at his eyes and the dark circles that bruised the skin beneath them. They hadn't had more than a few hours of broken sleep and ration bars in too many hours.

He handed her another bar and a drinking bulb full of water.

"Thank you." Ro would never have thought to make sure they were all eating and drinking. So who really was the self-centered one?

Nibbling on the ration bar was like chewing on lightly salted and sweetened insulation. She'd be ready to abandon ship even to the most crooked salver after a few more meals like this one.
Focus, Ro, focus.
She dug through her programming tool box again. Whatever she put together, it had to be old school and dead simple. Any complex code seemed to make the AI choke and then lock itself into threat mode.

She set down her micro and pushed herself to standing. Walking around gave her a chance to stretch her spine and roll her shoulders.

"If it helps," Micah said, "I remember the virus targeted the personality subroutines. It left the basic ship's functions intact, so the crews never knew what hit them until it was too late and the AI would basically go crazy. A lot of them just self-destructed, or crashed into other ships."

Ro glared at him.

"My mom and I were both history buffs. I think she always wanted me to follow in my dad's footsteps." He looked off into the distance, seeing something far beyond the ship or even the stars in the display. "At least until everything went to shit for him. For all of us."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not." He met her gaze straight on, an unfamiliar anger burning in his eyes. "I need some air."

She watched as he strode out of the bridge, his long legs moving quickly. Sighing, she returned to her makeshift base of operations, a half-eaten ration bar waiting beside her micro. So the virus spared the autonomic centers of the computer's brain. Well, Ro knew she could access the environmentals, no problem. And Dauber and May's SIREN code just curled around that basic machine language, much the same way a human cerebral cortex wound around the older reptilian brain structures and integrated with them.

Introducing something through the environmentals could work, should work. Though that code was even older than the SIREN programming, it was still the building block of her micro and every other piece of machinery in use today, from the ansibles to the current generation of AIs.

She opened her toolbox and snapped together a bunch of basic debugging and anti-virus tools into something that should be able to scan the computer for anything that didn't belong. "Barre?"

The lanky musician glanced up at her from where he'd been sitting at Jem's side.

"If I wrote a small auto-run command, could you translate it into your music?"

He squeezed Jem's hand before joining her across the room. "Show me what you've got."

She quickly coded the program and slid her micro over to him.

"Hang on." He looked up and away, triggering the neural, and hummed quietly to himself as Ro drummed her fingers on her knee.

Come on, come on, she urged him silently, annoyed because he just looked like he was daydreaming. It was probably what she looked like when she was coding.

"Got it," Barre said suddenly, startling her. "Here."

The program spooled into her micro as a small sound file. She saw where he'd left a hook for her to attach her scan and her estimation of him went up a few more notches. "You're a lot better at this than I thought."

Barre glanced at her sharply, then twisted his lips into a wry smile. "I get that a lot." He paused. "Or I would, if anyone cared about what I did."

Her father's usual tact, right out of her mouth. "Sorry, that's not what I meant."

"I know."

"Time to get this going." She frowned, looking around the bridge. Micah still hadn't returned. He didn't need to be there, but she didn't want him wandering around the ship if it reacted with another wild burn. She buzzed his micro. "Micah — let me know when you're secure. We're ready to start the scan."

"I'm fine. Go."

Family shit wasn't anything she could help him with. "Barre?"

"Ready."

"Here we go," Ro said. She keyed the musical shell, her diagnostics wrapped within it. It was the best she could do. When she glanced at Barre, his intense brown eyes were filled with doubts. "Will you monitor the AI?"

"Already on it."

If anything changed, it might give them some advance warning. Unless the AI decided to act first and sing later. Either way, if the ship spooked and ran again, their chances of rescue diminished from remote to likely impossible. She risked a brief glance at Jem before returning to stare at the code scrolling on her micro. The minutes passed. Nothing happened. Ro squeezed her fists so tightly, her short fingernails left deep indents in both palms.

What if she chose wrong? What if the scan itself triggered a defensive response? What if the AI was just too damaged to completely resurrect itself? "Barre?"

He shook his head, the 'not now' message perfectly clear. It only increased the cold tide of nausea in her stomach. An alarm squawked through the micro's small speaker and Ro jerked her head. A sharp pain stabbed her lip where she bit it. "Shit."

"What's wrong?" Barre asked, his voice tight, breathless.

She studied the error messages piling up in a separate window from the scrolling diagnostic code. Closing her eyes briefly, she offered up a prayer to the programming gods in general and to Dauber and May in particular.

When she opened her eyes again to look at the error messages, she decided there had to be a special place in hell for whoever had constructed the virus that downed the AI. Much of the virus had attacked one specific part of the personality subroutine — the decision making algorithms. The code in the error-checking and hierarchical-reasoning centers looked like Swiss cheese.

"Huh." That didn't make a lot of sense. Everything should have been clean after she ran the patches and overrode the damage with fresh source code. Unless her tinkering had reactivated the virus as well. That made things more interesting in ways she didn't need right now. "Keep listening to our friend, here. If the song changes, tell me right away." She didn't even wait for Barre's acknowledgment, but hunched over her micro, her hair falling forward, shutting out the rest of the bridge.

"Where are you hiding?" Ro slowed down the seemingly endless stream of error messages, looking for patterns. She could spend hours disinfecting each sector, one by one, but she suspected that way would trap her in an endless recursive loop.

If Micah was right and the virus had been originally deployed in ansible packets, Ro would have to pick her way through the comms architecture for clues and hope that the AI wouldn't have another freak out.

"Okay, baby, hold still, I'm just taking a look."

Carefully picking her way through the computer's basic architecture, she identified the communications subroutines. Ro wiped her sweaty hands on her pant legs before tweaking the display again, this time looking for the corresponding errors for this part of the code. A self-resurrecting virus had to set its hooks in the registry but it also had to hide somewhere so it would reinitialize after every boot. The blasted thing covered its tracks well. She couldn't believe she hadn't noticed any sign of it.

A slow process, but Ro would have to track each error back to its source for clues. If only Jem could help. It would take too long to train Micah or Barre on what to look for.

She paused and looked up from her micro, her hair swinging away from her face, and blinked in the suddenly bright room. Could it be that simple?

"All quiet," Barre said. "Anything?"

"Maybe," Ro answered and returned to the blinking display. She went back into the file system, searching for the hidden caches of old ansible messages that had to be there. It was the only thing that made sense. "All I have to do is find the virus, figure out how to extract it, run a fresh set of scans, and then convince the system to reboot. All without trying to kill us all or self-destruct."

Barre barked out a strangled laugh.

"Easy, right?" She set her search parameters to look through all the hidden, temp, and system files. "I know you're in there," she muttered. The micro beeped once and a list of suspect ansible files blinked on the display. "Ha! Knew it." The system kept a hidden backup for ansible traffic. The poor bastards. Every time they thought they cleared the system and rebooted, the message would trigger as new and reinfect the AI.

She paused, frowning at the file list.

"What are you waiting for?" Barre asked.

The question was, how sophisticated was the virus? If she were coding something like this, Ro would have added a fail-safe against direct extraction. Her stomach knotted up, a combination of the ration bars, fatigue, and paranoia.

"Ro?"

"I'm on it," she said, her hands trembling as she manually purged the suspect files. A minute crawled by and then another without any kind of response from the AI. It didn't calm her stomach down one bit. "Rescanning now," she said. This time, she set the diagnostics to obliterate any questionable files and to quarantine the damaged sectors.

The micro beeped again, and Ro jumped, nearly fumbling the device. She clutched it tightly as her pulse slowed down to something approaching normal. She did it. No, she corrected herself, looking up at Barre, they'd done it.

"Now, can you convince our patient to reboot?" She forced a light tone in her voice as a cold sweat chilled her arms.

"I think so." Barre had that faraway look in his gaze again.

She shivered.

The seconds crawled by as she sat, unable to do anything but imagine scenario after scenario that ended with the damaged ship crashing them into an asteroid or flying them into a star or through an unstable wormhole.

There was nothing more Ro could do now, except wait and trust in Barre to work his musical magic.

"Done," he said.

Her hands shook as she set the SIREN source code to deploy once more. While the patches ran, she stood and stretched, her whole body stiff from hunching over her micro for far too long. Her eyes felt gritty and dry and she'd probably trade the ship and her accidental crew mates for a hot shower and a real meal.

"She's coming back on line," Barre said.

"She?"

He shrugged. "The voice feels feminine."

"Incoming ansible transmission. Text only. Stand by."

Ro turned quickly toward the sound and slammed her hip into the comms console.

"Holy shit, it worked!" Barre shouted.

The door to the bridge slid open and Micah raced inside, breathing quickly, his face red.

The AI's voice did have a definitely feminine timbre to it. Still a synthesized voice, but it had a lot less hesitation and clipping than before. Ro exhaled, letting her shoulders relax. They did it. They really did it.