Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 (7 page)

Ro stepped forward to pick up the drugs. "Do you have what you need to analyze this?"

Jem looked as if he had tasted something sour.

Micah should have thought of that. If he hadn't been so angry, he probably would have. "Will you believe me if I show you the spectroscopic assays for the different strains?" He'd have to dry some of his new-growth leaves, but he should be able to prove his bittergreen had nothing to do with Jem's brother.

At least that was something he could accomplish. Forcing his crop to accelerate its growth would probably result in stressed-out plants that wouldn't be able to set buds. He didn't know why he bothered.

The small, dark-haired boy nodded and turned away.

"Now get the hell out of my lab."

Ro placed her hand on Jem's shoulder and turned him away from Micah.
"Come on." The tension in his body practically vibrated through her arm. "We'll only be in the way."

He stared up at her, his eyes wide and unblinking, and let her lead him out of the bubble. "Can you find out anything about Barre?"

"Maybe." That would mean getting dangerously close to Daedalus's primary processors. Skulking around the edges of its domain didn't raise any alarms, but trying to break into the infirmary systems might. "But first I need to ghost you."

At least something went according to plan. She and Micah were already ghosting. If anyone asked Daedalus for them, her program made it appear as if they were somewhere else, at the opposite side of the station from the querent, and occupied. If there was a second request within a specific amount of time, or by the same person, it would ping their micros, depending on the importance of the one asking. She hand-coded the authority algorithm specifically for each of them. "Anyone get priority except your parents?"

Jem winced. "Barre," he said. "Just Barre."

"I have to weight your folks in there, too, Jem. If they're looking for you and can't find you, they could get command involved. Too many people get curious and they'll find my little tweaks."

"Do what you need to do," he said, staring past her.

Guiding him over to her corner of Micah's lab, Ro pushed Jem into the only open chair. Every other possible surface was covered with her equipment. He sat heavily, staring past her, the muscles along his jaw bunched.

"Can you set up my terminal and access? Just the hard wiring. I'll do the config after."

He shrugged and stood, turning to organize the desk.

Ro pulled out her micro and added Jem to her ghost protocol. It wouldn't hold up to a full-on decontamination, but the innocuous little program didn't look like much to the casual observer. That's what people got wrong. They wanted the big hacks, the monster hacks. Ro prided herself on writing subtle code, code that never called attention to itself, modest code. She smirked.

Maybe that's why she'd been able to throw so many tweaks into Daedalus's systems over the years she'd been trapped here. Even it didn't seem to notice.

"You're good to go," Jem said. "Can you pull up Barre's medical file now?"

Directly hacking in to private records was probably next to impossible and it would take her time away from the AI code mods she'd started playing with. The program lived in her head and she couldn't wait to get it locked down and tested. "I don't know, Jem." She raked her fingers through her hair considering the risk. Frowning, she twisted it into a braid and snatched a spare wire tie from the floor to secure it out of her face. "Couldn't you just ask your parents?"

"No."

"Why don't you just go and see him for yourself? It's not like the chart's going to tell you a whole lot anyway." She could start work on the repair drones. They had a lot to do before tackling the AI proper anyway.

Jem stared at her, his face set in hard lines.

"Unless you're already a doc, too," Ro said, trying to lighten the mood.

The muscles in his face rippled as he clenched and relaxed his jaw. "I need access. It's the tox screen. I know Barre was using. They know Barre was using. But if they have the proof, this time they'll send him off-system to mandated rehab."

"Seriously? For bittergreen? Isn't that a little overkill?" They said mandated just rebooted the addiction centers, resetting the brain's neurotransmitters back to pre-drug exposure levels, but Ro knew a few kids who'd undergone treatment and came home more broken than when they left.

"You don't know my parents."

"No, I guess I don't," Ro said, thinking of her father and the times she wished she didn't know him.

"Look, if you won't do it, I will."

Crap, that's just what she needed — an amateur mucking about. Cleaning up after him would take even more time away from what she needed to do. "You're talking more than a hack and a look-see. Do you have any idea the kind of checksums they have around medical records?"

"I won't let them do that to my brother. He may be an idiot, but he doesn't deserve having his brain turned inside out. Do you have any idea what happens in places like that?"

Ro frowned, her hands on her hips. He didn't know what he was asking. If she got caught, it would be more than the end of her dreams. Tampering with personnel and medical records carried big-time penalties.

"They'll burn the music right out of him. Ro, please, it's all he's got." Jem's eyes got shiny.

Ro turned away, uncomfortable with his naked emotion. If someone tried to take away her ability to program, to see code as a living, breathing entity, she wasn't sure what she'd do. Even her father — who'd pretty much taken everything else from her — understood that. "All right. I'll do what I can."

Jem's smile blazed through the small room like an artificial sun.

"No guarantees. I have a few ideas, but if they don't work, it's a no go. Understand?"

He nodded, the fear back in his eyes.

Ro swept a pile of permapaper from a desk chair and sat down at the terminal. Jem pulled a second chair close and scooted in next to her. She tried to glare him away, but he didn't get the hint. Ignoring him, she set up her micro. This was going to take a degree of subtlety that a keyboard or even ordinary gestures wouldn't be able to capture and besides, this way there was little-to-no chance that Jem could figure out the access codes she used.

Going head to head with Daedalus would be monumentally stupid and suicidal as far as her future was concerned. She'd almost have better luck trying to access Mendez's personal logs than breaking directly into the medical records system. Looking over at Jem, Ro pursed her lips, thinking. Like Jem, Barre was still a student. The ed algorithm spidered through the entire AI and made its own webbing to the medical data.

All Ro had to do was follow the threads.

"Ro?"

"Hmm?"

"It won't help if they access the tox results before you get to them."

She threw him a dirty look and pointed to the door. "Out."

"He's my brother. I want to help."

Ro folded her hands in her lap. "You can't. And I won't lift a finger until you get the hell out from underfoot." The sooner this got done, the sooner she could get back to the AI.

Jem sputtered as Ro glared at him.

"I get it. Really." Well, not really. She'd never had any family to care about. Her mother got fed up with her father years ago and split, leaving Ro trapped like a tiny moon orbiting her father's universe. She didn't have any conscious memories of the woman and her father kept no holos. "I do need your help, just not with this. How good are you at drones?"

"What do you need?" he said, his thin shoulders slumped.

Rummaging through a pile of spare parts, she pulled out a few small components. "Grab whatever tools you need. Then find two drones and replace the phone-home chipsets with these."

Jem pressed his lips together.

"You do know how to put them in sleep mode, right?"

"That's grunt work," he said, snatching the tiny interrupts from her hand.

"Get used to it, grunt."

That surprised a wry grin from him.

"Do you think you can handle a basic code mod?"

He raised a single eyebrow for an answer, and Ro suppressed her own smile. At least this would keep him from brooding too much.

"Then set them to do a wide search pattern of the whole ship and transmit the images back to me in real time."

His eyes brightened.

"Now get out of here and let me get to that tox report." She turned back to her monitor before Jem left the room. Getting into Barre's ed file was the easy part. She projected the data in the space around her and spent a few minutes studying the basic coursework the algorithm programmed for him. Concepts he struggled with in mathematics, both the theoretical and the practical, Ro had mastered when she was far younger even than Jem. She collapsed his test scores. Poor bastard — even with his parents' money and connections, he'd never get to Uni.

It was no wonder he spent his time drowning his sorrows in music and bittergreen.

She found one math class — advanced pattern mapping and recognition — where Barre scored way off the charts, his work significantly past even graduate level students. Classes branched off from that one into auditory recall, history of composition, theory of tonal and atonal scales, and harmonic deconstruction, whatever that meant. Jem wasn't kidding when he said Barre's music was his life. Half his server space was filled with original compositions. Ro kept digging, looking for the thread that would lead her to Barre's med files. It had to be here.

At least a basic medical needed to be part of every student's profile and Daedalus didn't like to waste space or run the risk of multiple versions of the same data. It wouldn't create a duped copy when it could simply mirror it or link to it. Either would serve Ro's purpose if she could find it.

Something blinked in the corner of her eye. She called up the file. Barre had started to fill out an application for a music scholarship program off Daedalus. "Gotcha," she said to the empty room and the bright display. Paging through the application, she searched for the required medical information. At the very least, they would require proof of inoculations and a basic psych profile.

He'd attached a musical score to the file, along with the old fashioned convention of notating the song. The black dots scattered across the lined paper made absolutely no sense to her. If she had the time, she would've had the terminal play it for her, but if she could pull this off, she figured Barre owed her a live show.

"There you are." The medical info had been tucked into an addendum to the application. Now all Ro had to do was figure out how to follow the breadcrumbs back to where the original lived without Daedalus noticing.

Ro cleared everything in Barre's files except for the relevant addendum pages. Those she enhanced and enlarged, hanging them at her eye level like a piece of art. But she needed to see past the surface display. The language AIs used to render data evolved from the original source code of the old web. There were still simple applications that ran happily on historically accurate versions of HTML, C++, and Java, and a whole network of home-brew hobbyists who preferred them to the more complex languages that emerged later.

They reminded Ro of re-enactors, not programmers.

She gestured with her left hand and pulled up her toolbox, a collection of small custom subroutines she could use like building blocks to do practically anything she needed. This time, she wanted something quiet and patient to tiptoe through Daedalus's convoluted data-paths, that if discovered, would dissolve into harmless bits of junk code.

This is what Ro loved. The process was as much architecture as programming. She linked segments together by feel, looking at the resulting shape with approval. Now to reveal the display code. She pulled one small, elegant program out of the toolbox and tossed it toward the application. It latched on to the lower left hand corner of the page and pushed. The page spun around and around, each revolution a little slower than the one before, until it stopped, and flipped face down.

Line after line of simple code wrote itself across the page as Ro waited. Even with the advances in AI self-programming, it didn't take much to display a basic visual. She scanned down the commands looking for one specific tag.

"Your turn, Rover. Go!" She flicked the tracker program she'd designed toward the plain codes. It went burrowing in, found an opening almost immediately, and disappeared.

Now she just had to wait.

She turned to the AI mods, unwritten code burning in her mind's eye.

***

Locating the drones would probably be harder than doing the actual reprogramming. After poking through all of the ship's compartments, Jem found one sweeping a corner in the aft corridor. The stupid thing got itself tangled in a recursive loop banging between two adjacent walls. Jem grabbed the little all-purpose robot and hit the kill switch. It powered down with a soft whine.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Jem hunched over it, frustrated that Ro set him to waste his time on something even Barre could have done. He thought of their morning in the computer lab and grimaced. So what if Barre didn't care about what Jem loved? It didn't make his brother stupid.

Taking bittergreen did.

He grabbed his micro-loupes and dialed up the magnification. He hated busy work. Jem had been playing with dumb drones like this one from the time he could crawl. He should be in there with Ro, digging out Barre's records or working on the interface design she wanted, or at least keeping an eye on Micah, not sitting here flicking tiny switches on a control module.

A few lines of simple code and it would do what Ro wanted. He pulled out his micro, waiting as it paired with the newly installed chip before writing the commands to transfer its query path to Ro's computer. But she hadn't said that was all he should do. Smiling, Jem added a quick peek-a-boo subroutine. That way he would know what she was looking at.

He patted the top of the robot's "head" and sent it on its way before jumping up and brushing off his pants. Now for drone number two. They swept the station in what seemed like random patterns and asking Daedalus for their location would be logged as an unusual command. He looked at his little rogue robot. "How's about you find a brother or sister for me?" He sent a simple query through its rudimentary processor. It beeped softly and spun around back to the station.