Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1

by Lj Cohen

  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.

  Jem followed the drone through the familiar corridors of Daedalus. By the conventions of station time, it was afternoon and the second duty period would end in less than thirty minutes. He had the South nexus to himself, at least for a little while. The drone beeped again and bumped to a stop at the far airlock. When Jem didn't move, it backed up and hit the door again, beeping louder this time.

  "Keep your cover on," Jem said, triggering the airlock door. A second drone waited, powered down in a charging alcove. As he bent down to snatch it, two angry voices filled the corridor. Jem froze, glancing up.

  Ro's father strode toward him, the senator right at his heels. Jem shrunk back against the wall, curling up in the small niche.

  "You have less than two weeks," Rotherwood said. "And then, no matter what, we need to move the cargo."

  "And when will I get paid?" Maldonado asked, his voice low and cold.

  "You'll get yours. You just have to trust me."

  Maldonado snorted. "I'm not stupid, Senator."

  "You just do your part," Senator Rotherwood said, nearly spitting the words out. "And we'll both —"

  As Jem's heart beat triple time, they stepped past him, never even glancing down to see where he had hidden. He pulled out his micro and accessed the first drone's programming, sending it after them through the nexus. Nobody noticed work drones the same way nobody noticed him.

  Jem grabbed the second drone and quickly did the mod, wondering what the senator and the chief engineer were arguing about. Clearly, Jem wasn't the only one with secrets on this station. Maybe his little eavesdropper would have some answers. Eventually, it would dump the contents of its small memory to his micro. He ran his hands over his tight-clipped hair and watched the second drone head back to the ship to take the pictures Ro wanted.

  She'd better have been able to intercept that tox report. Otherwise Barre's little mistake was about to get a whole lot bigger. He shoved his micro back in a pocket and headed to the infirmary.

  Chapter 9

  The full assay would take a few hours. Micah looked up a
t the plants craning their way toward their artificial sun. It wasn't as if he had anything else better to do with his time now. He waited in the terraforming bubble as the immature leaves flash-dried in the small dehydrator. This process wasn't optimal for concentrating the psycho-active compounds in bittergreen, but he wasn't looking for high-grade product here.

  The scent of wet dirt and bruised herbs faded, replaced by a slight sharpness as the controlled heat drove all the moisture out of the green plant matter. That smell always brought back the dark room where his mother had spent her last days and the acrid sweat that overpowered the bittergreen tea he brewed for her.

  He stood up from the uncomfortable chair and stretched his spine. The machine beeped and turned its heating coil and fan off. At least he'd be able to get viable DNA from his sample. Micah reached for the packet Jem had thrown at him, the isolation gloves snug around his hands. If the plant had been dried too quickly, or if the supplier used some of the commercial chemical methods, he wouldn't have a comparison and this would turn out to be a colossal waste of time.

  Barre's bittergreen had a yellowish tinge to it. Micah opened the packet and an odd musty smell rose from the crumbly leaves.

  Micah quickly lost himself in the routine: Weigh out ten micrograms of the dried sample. Add it and the extraction buffer to the test tube. Shake, warm, extract, chill. The familiar prep for the assay distracted him, at least a little, from his father. The hell of it was he loved the lab work and studying botany on the cellular level. His mother had been so proud when Micah got his early acceptance to Uni. She'd already started to show signs of the neural degeneration that would kill her eight months later, but Micah had been so absorbed in his schooling and his father in himself, that neither of them noticed. If his mother knew, she also knew there wasn't anything they could do about it.

  The beep of a timer broke into his memories. He stripped off the gloves, grabbed the sample rack with two labeled test tubes, and headed through the rudimentary airlock back to what had been his office space before Ro had disrupted his only refuge. She, like his father, seemed to be able to wreck his life with as little thought to the consequences. What in the Hub was she doing here, anyway?

  The heat and humidity faded as cool air from outside the bubble mixed in the airlock. The sweat chilled on Micah's skin, pimpling his arms in gooseflesh. The outer seal opened, and he stepped into the chaos of Ro's half of the room. She stood in front of the surplus counter that served as her desk, the holographic interface sparkling all around her.

  Watching her manipulate the images and windows winking in and out of existence, he forgot his annoyance. She seemed more program than human, her whole body interacting with the display. Micah blinked, trying to keep her in focus. Her hair had slipped free of its usual tie back and whipped around her shoulders every time she moved her head. He couldn't look away.

  By the time he realized what he had done, Micah was halfway across the room, standing just outside the colorful sphere surrounding her. His hands tightened around the test tube rack and the glass encased samples clanked against one another, startling him out of his trance. Ro's gaze flicked toward his face. He stared into her sometimes-brown, sometimes-green eyes before she shifted her glance away from him and back to a part of the program that scrolled so quickly, Micah couldn't make out more than a blurred letter or two.

  He wasn't even sure she'd really seen him. Turning his back on her, he walked to his side of the room to load the centrifuge. Once the samples had been spun, he washed them gently in cold ethanol, shaking the test tube to collect as much of the material as he could. As long as he had to do this, he might as well do it right.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught occasional blurs of movement. Ro still stood at her desk, manipulating something on the heads-up holo. She didn't try to talk to him. Working alongside someone who showed the same insane focus as he had, made the lab less lonely.

  He turned back to the samples. The dried bittergreen had balled up nicely into tiny pellets he collected carefully and placed in a drying tray. He'd have to wait at least an hour until they could be loaded into the sequencer. For now, he could stretch the kinks out of his neck and shoulders.

  Looking across the room, he caught Ro in a rare still moment. She stared into the display, her arms upraised, motionless, a frown adding lines to her forehead. Micah crossed to her side of the lab. One virtual window showed code more complex than he'd ever seen before. He squinted at it, but couldn't keep up with its scroll rate. A second displayed a full ship's schematic of the original freighter. A third window flickered with a barrage of lo res images Micah recognized from the ruined ship.

  She pressed her lips together and swept her arm toward the third window. With fingers moving so fast, they practically blurred, Ro organized the images, overlapping some, discarding others, until she'd built a second ship to echo the schematic. She melded the images into a single fused picture and pulled it until it overlaid the middle one. Standing back, she stared through the photographic representation into the schematic beneath.

  "What are you doing?" Micah asked.

  She jerked, her hands jumping, the images spinning around the room. "Working," she said, before she swept her arm through the entire display and it folded in on itself, disappearing to a tiny point of light. "Did you finish the assay?"

  "Waiting for the next phase."

  "How about you wait somewhere else?"

  Micah didn't know what annoyed him more — that she seemed immune to his Rotherwood charm, or that she was even more closed than he was. "I got here first."

  "Tell you what, I won't snoop if you won't."

  "That's hardly fair. You already know what I'm working on."

  "And I don't care. Learn to cultivate a little disinterest, plant-boy."

  A half smile twitched across her face. Fine. So Ro had secrets. He excelled at uncovering secrets. Most people never looked past his surface. They saw the politician's son and little else. She wouldn't be the first to underestimate him.

  Shrugging, he was glancing at the waiting gene sequencer across the room when an alert sounded. Ro stiffened and turned back to the terminal, ignoring Micah completely. He knew an opportunity when he saw it.

  She pulled up what looked like a medical file. Micah added a few more degrees of difficulty to his self-appointed task. It was a good thing he liked a challenge. He leaned forward, squinting to make out Barre Durbin's blood tox results, the top right corner of the file flagged with a red virtual sticky note.

  "You."

  He jerked his head to face her, ready to retreat with an apology.

  "How much do you know about biology? The breathing kind, not the plant kind."

  Well, plants breathed too, but he knew that's not what she meant. "I'm good."

  She frowned at him, probably wondering how much of a liar he was.

  "What are we looking at?" He stepped beside her, and she moved over to give him room.

  "I was hoping you'd tell me," she said.

  "Well, it's a tox screen."

  "That much I got, moron."

  "Touchy, touchy," Micah said, smiling. He pointed to the information in the footnote. "That tells us they did a rapid assay with a limit of detection cutoff."

  "And that's important why?"

  "Because if the concentration of whatever they're digging for is below a certain threshold, it gets reported as negative, even if the drug is there. The absolute detection is more reliable, but it takes longer, and usually requires a bigger sample."

  "Good."

  Micah glanced over at her and raised an eyebrow before turning back to the report. "They tested for all the major metabolites. See?" The basic report was decent enough, but sloppy, scientifically. A real assay would have included the spectrophotometry curves and the absolutes.

  "So he tested positive for bittergreen." Ro bracketed the results and blew them up.

  "Yeah, but I still don't get how it's responsible for his symptoms." He gestured at th
e results, but nothing happened. "If you wouldn't mind?"

  Ro flicked a finger and zoomed out to the full results.

  "This doesn't make any sense." Part of him had hoped they'd find something other than the major metabolite for bittergreen. At least that might explain his collapse. "It's basically a borderline amount anyway." A few sips less or an hour later, and Barre's report would probably have shown up clean.

  "Good. Then you have no scientific objections to doctoring the report."

  "Look, there are things you don't screw with. This is probably one of them." What if it was something in the stuff? "I can't be responsible for this," he said, raising his hands and taking a step back.

  Her laugh echoed back at him from all the hard surfaces in the storage bay. "Oh, that's rich, coming from a drug lord in the making."

  Heat blazed to his face. "You don't play with someone's life."

  "I'm not. I'm saving it." Ro turned her back on him.

  "Fine. Do what you need to do." Micah strode back across the room to his corner. He would finish the comparative assay and be done. Done with this lab. Done with Daedalus. Done. He was smart. He was patient. He'd find another way to burn the cartel that destroyed his life.

  ***

  Yawning again, Nomi glared at the clock display. Its blinking numbers glowed 1530. She should still be asleep. Groaning, she dropped her head back on the pillow, waiting for the alarm blare she'd set this morning when she stumbled into bed after leaving the commissary. Loneliness hit her worse than the terrible hours, the foul coffee, or the distant staff. Maybe that's why she took the risk at breakfast with Ro.

  "Daedalus, ping Maldonado, Ro."

  Ro's voice answered and brought a brief smile to Nomi's face, until she realized it was a personalized away message. "Working. Urgent calls only."

  "And I got up early for that?" Maybe she could catch her at the end of her shift or something. "Okay then, locate Maldonado, Ro."

  This time the AI's generic voice responded. "Common space. Reading room."