Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 (9 page)

The same bland voice answered her. "Common space, reading room."

"Huh." She swept her gaze around the empty library, wondering. "Ping Maldonado, Ro."

"Working, urgent calls only," the message repeated.

"Message Maldonado, Ro."

"Recording."

"Ro, this is Nomi Nakamura. I'd like to ask you a question when you're free. Please ping me at your convenience."

Maybe the senator's pretty-boy son would know where she was. "Daedalus, locate Rotherwood, Micah."

"Main cafeteria."

Maybe he'd have a line on that coffee he'd promised. She left the cluttered reading room behind and returned to the spartan station, happier than she'd been in a long while. It would be good to talk to someone — even Micah.

She strode down the corridor, looking up for a change and smiling at everyone she passed. Most smiled back. Maybe this wouldn't be such a terrible posting after all. They couldn't keep her on the overnight shift forever.

His attention glued to his micro, Micah Rotherwood brushed past her and ducked into the nexus. Nomi stared after him, frowning. She pulled out her micro and queried Daedalus in silent mode. The AI placed Micah in his quarters this time.

Nomi decided she didn't need to head to dinner just yet.

How well did she know either Ro or Micah, really? Were they working together? One of them had hacked the AI. She would lay odds on it being Ro. But why would she mess with the localizations? What did she have to hide? She squeezed through a knot of people chatting in front of the nexus, apologized, and hurried after Micah, her curiosity even more powerful than her loneliness.

Ro took a deep breath and copied the negative result for a narcotic metabolite and pasted it to the bittergreen, obliterating the flagged finding
. Setting the report as unread, she saved and closed it. The file blinked red for official and unreported. She stepped away from the display, shaking out her fingers and getting ready for the next part of the hack.

Backing out of the medical file took Ro as much time and care as getting inside had, but no one would be able to trace her path through the system. She'd done as much as she could. What happened between Barre and his parents wouldn't be her concern anymore. Jem would owe her.

Ro erased the display, calling up the ship's data from her micro and the two drones' completed map. Someone had deliberately disguised recent structural repairs and Ro knew that someone had to be her father. That meant he was connected to the stolen cargo somehow. But how? She pulled her arms in close to her body, letting the holographic display collapse in on itself.

Now what?

Could this wreck even fly? Judging by his notes, her father seemed to think so, but she'd have to check every system aboard to see what he'd finished and what did and didn't work.

She folded her arms around herself, considered her options, and paced the room. Why wouldn't he let her leave? It would have cost him nothing to authorize her scholarship application. Now it was down to this: No AI, no scholarship, no escape. She couldn't do that, not and live with herself. She certainly couldn't continue living with him.

Ro stopped and called up the original AI core code. Letting it spiral around her in a wash of color and motion, she whistled in appreciation. No wonder her father left this for last. Even if the ship could take off, without a functioning AI, it couldn't do much more than orbit Daedalus or limp through interstitial space. No one would offer Ro a scholarship for that, unless she could troubleshoot its higher brain.

The original programming bootstrapped Dauber and May's self-learning, interactive, recursive, enhanced networks and the first gen AIs took it from there. The SIREN interface had revolutionized interstellar travel, simultaneously making the millions of tiny calculations needed to navigate in real time through interstitial space and mathematically mapping the unstable probability wells that let the next generation of crewed ships hopscotch through wormholes.

Without the AI, the ship was one very expensive, very stranded storage locker.

She squinted at the core code, wondering what the hell her father was planning. If the cargo was his, then he needed the ship to smuggle it off base. But if it could fly, blasting free of Daedalus station wouldn't exactly be subtle.

Right now it couldn't fly and he had left the AI for her. She was sure of it. For all his secrecy and the little confrontation they had this morning, it had been almost too easy to get into his workroom for the schematics.

What else had he done here? Frowning, Ro paced her corner of the storage room again. She had assumed the environmentals were running through Daedalus. Ro didn't like to make any assumptions where her father was concerned. At best they would be wrong. At worst, they could turn dangerous.

Turning back to her micro, Ro pulled up her toolbox again. She wasn't doing anything fancy this time, just basic system diagnostics, and if her search somehow did register with Daedalus, she would claim she was following up on the power drain. It disturbed her that she only spared a small twinge of guilt for throwing Micah under the afterburners. "Like father, like daughter."

Pairing her micro to the old standards took her a few minutes. The old computers didn't have the capability to access the holographic display, so she had to squint to make out the scrolling code on the micro's small screen.

"Son of a bitch." The underlying systems worked perfectly. Full autonomic functions were intact. While the environmentals still ran through the station, the ship could take over without a problem. Her father was a piece of work. Now all she had to do was heal the AI itself. Simple, right? She started to laugh, the sound harsh and mocking against the hard surfaces of the storage bay.

She opened a new virtual window, studying her code mods again. Every sim she ran came up five by five, which made her a little nervous. "Come on, Ro, get a grip." Slowing down the run-time, she started another test and watched it complete, matching the ideas in her head with the code she'd written.

Just like her hacking toolbox, her code mods stacked together like children's toys, small, stable modules, each individually tested to destruction, built into something elegant and robust. A tiny beep and a winking blue light pulled her attention back to the run window.

It passed every test she could think of.

She pulled her hands through her tangled hair. It was the tests she couldn't think of that drove her crazy. Nothing else remained but to try it live.

She shut the simulation down. Now what? Walk away because she could fail? Or because her father had manipulated her again? The code pulled at her and not just because of the challenge or the stakes. She wanted this. She needed to prove she could best him, even if it didn't lead anywhere. Whatever the hell he did with the ship afterward didn't matter. Maybe if she was lucky, he'd take off in it and never look back.

***

For someone with something to hide, Micah was surprisingly easy to follow. He kept his gaze glued to his micro, muttering to himself as he wound through Daedalus's corridors. Nomi kept him in her sight, partly amused, partly concerned when the AI kept listing him in different, random places in the habitation ring. When he branched off a service corridor, she paused, frowning. From here, he could get outside to the barely terraformed asteroid or into the wreck of the old ship.

Nomi could call in now and report what? A glitch in the localization subroutine and a wandering resident? If she ever wanted to get assigned to a better shift, she'd better bring something more useful than that to Mendez. Besides, how did Ro figure into all of this? There had to be a logical explanation that wouldn't end up getting the engineer arrested.

At the next branch point, Nomi stopped again and listened. All was silent except for the slight whistle of the air handling system. She frowned, studying the external airlock. He could have gone outside here, but he would've needed an EVA suit. Besides, Daedalus monitored the airlocks closely. Air loss cost the station precious resources. Nomi bet Micah had gone to the ship.

If she was wrong, she could always request permission to leave the station and search after her shift. Of course, she'd need a decent reason. She'd worry about that after checking out the ship.

She snaked her way through the temporary corridors to the wreck, surprised by how intact it appeared. Neither the airlock nor the part of the hull she could see through the umbilicals showed evidence of any damage. The starboard side wings jutted out over the dusty rock of the asteroid.

Creeping forward, Nomi felt a prickle at the back of her neck, but she knew no one could be behind her. Micah was somewhere ahead, most likely in the ship, doing something.

This would be about the time her younger brother would leap out of an alcove and scare the crap out of her, but this was no horror vid and Daisuke and home were at least a dozen jumps away. She tapped out a distress call on her micro just in case, ready to trigger with either a touch or a voice command, shaking her head at the paranoia.

The airlock stood open in maintenance mode. She slipped inside and stopped again, one hand near her micro, ready to bolt. Her distorted reflection looked back at her in the metal walls. There wasn't any sign of damage on this side of the airlock, either.

She stepped through to the ship. An empty, silent corridor branched out on either side of her. Looking back and forth, Nomi had decided to head aft and work her way forward when raised voices from the front of the ship echoed harshly against the metal.

There were two distinct voices. One had to be Micah's. She didn't want the other to be Ro's. Her stomach roiled. Shifting her micro into recording mode, she crept forward, hoping they wouldn't be able to hear her above their own shouting.

Jem hesitated outside the infirmary.
If Ro messed up, he'd just made things much, much worse for Barre. But what the hell else was he supposed to do?

The infirmary gleamed in stainless steel efficiency. All the activity centered around one bay. "A slow day at the office," his father would joke, if it weren't Barre lying in a medi-bed. His mother stood, frowning at the complex display.

"This makes no sense," she said.

Jem jerked his head up to meet her gaze, but she wasn't talking to him. His father came up behind her to study the screen.

She slapped her hand against the wall. "Toxicology is negative. There's nothing in his blood work and unless he picked up some strange parasite or exotic infection between Hadria and Daedalus, he shouldn't be unconscious."

The lab techs looked away and avoided Barre's treatment bay. Jem's father placed his hands on his mother's shoulders. She closed her eyes and leaned back against him. Jem turned away from their unexpected intimacy.

"Jem."

He looked up into his mother's perfectly composed face.

"There's nothing you can do here. Barre is stable."

There was nothing in her expression or her piercing gaze that would have betrayed any frustration or concern. At least he knew how to deal with the cold, distant version of his mother.

"I know. I just wanted …" Jem trailed off, gesturing at his quiet brother.

"Let him stay, Leta. It's his brother."

Jem nodded at his father, grateful for his intervention.

His mother walked away. Jem swallowed a lump in his throat and pulled a stool to Barre's cubicle, struggling with his conscience. Tampering with medical records was illegal, but what his parents would do to Barre if they found out he was using again was worse.

Jem leaned close to his silent brother and took his hand. "You can be such a jerk sometimes, you know?"

The soft beeping of monitors answered him. He watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Barre's breathing, wondering what kind of music his brother would write for it.

"If you can't find your way back from wherever you've wandered off to, I'll be alone with them."

The wail of an alarm made him twitch and he almost missed the gentle answering pressure against his fingers. A swarm of white-coated staff, led by his parents, displaced Jem from the bedside. He shrank back into a corner of the room, struggling to see what was happening.

Someone pushed an ampule of something clear and viscous through Barre's IV. His body arched away from the bed.

"Keep him still!" his mother shouted.

One brown arm shot up and yanked on a fistful of tubes and wires.

"Shit. He's extubated himself!"

"Hold him!"

More alarms joined the jangle of the first. Jem couldn't see through the crush of bodies around Barre's bed. His mouth dried. What if he'd made the wrong choice? What if the drug had made his brother seriously sick? He'd have to tell his parents not only about Barre, but what he'd done to the records. He chewed on the side of his thumb until the cuticle bled.

"Get the fuck off me," Barre rasped, barely loud enough to be heard over the machinery.

"And he's back," his father said. Jem could hear the relief in his voice. "All right, team, give the boy some room."

Technicians scurried around, clearing machines and pulling all the tubes away from Barre's body. Jem took a few hesitant steps forward. His parents stood looking down at Barre, identical expressions of relief on their faces. That wouldn't last long.

"What am I doing here?" Barre asked.

Jem watched his mother's lips thin and her eyes narrow, the anger that was never far below the surface bubbling up. "I don't know what you took this time, but I know it was something and as soon as I prove it —"

"Mom, I don't —"

She leaned forward. "Don't you dare," she said, the deadly quiet in her voice sending chills down Jem's spine. He had definitely done the right thing. His mother whirled away from Barre, bright spots flushing her dark cheeks. His father shook his head and followed her. So everything was back to normal then and right on schedule.

Barre looked up into Jem's eyes and shrugged.

"Yeah, some things never change," Jem said.