Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 (24 page)

"Any ideas as to why we just ran away from potential help?" Ro put the question to the room, but Barre knew she was mainly asking him.

"I didn't do anything," Barre said. They had to believe he wanted to be rescued, at least for his brother's sake.

Micah stared him down. "Maybe it's time you did," he said.

Barre's shoulders tightened. "What do you mean by that?"

"You spend your life trying not to take up any space. Well, you're the only one who seems to be able to talk to this crazy ship. Figure something out."

"I'm not the one who got us here," he snapped back. "That would be my brilliant brother and Ro." A faint music played through his head. "Not now," he muttered.

"And if you don't stop whining and get to work, we're going to be stuck here." Jem's voice barely registered over the odd melody, but it got them all to shut up.

"Hey," Barre said, leaning over and checking his brother's vital signs again.

"Can you open your eyes?"

"Not unless you want me to vomit."

"Oh." The dizziness didn't bode well for the state of Jem's brain.

"So, if you're the genius, what do you think we should do?" Micah asked, ignoring Ro. She glared at him but kept silent. Barre shook his head. They were quite the team.

"Figure it out. But do it fast." Jem's voice trailed off and Barre thought he'd lost consciousness again. "I can't help you. I can't make my eyes work right."

"Fuck," Barre swore. Kneeling over his injured brother, he carefully peeled back one eyelid and then the other. Without a penlight, he had no way of checking how his pupils reacted, but his right eye was dilated nearly all the way. The left side looked pretty normal.

He swallowed hard and sat back on his heels. "Jem's right," he said, staring at his brother. He knew Ro and Micah were watching him. "We don't have a lot of time. I think he has a bleed in his head." He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. "I've done everything I can for him."

"Not everything." Ro stood behind him and squeezed his shoulder. "Come on. Let's see if we can get through to the ship again."

"What about me?" Micah said.

Barre stood up and bit back his sarcastic reply.

"Once we get control over the ship, we're going to have to figure out how to crew it with just the three of us. Don't worry. You'll be plenty busy then. For now, keep an eye on Jem."

Barre reluctantly shifted away from his brother's side as Micah sat down beside him.

He looked up at Barre and gave a half-smile. "Hey, it's okay. I got this."

***

Ro turned to Barre and tapped the side of her head. "What do you hear in there?"

They were adrift again, and again, nothing in the star field looked familiar. Maybe if they could access navigation, they might be able to at least figure out where they were. Though if the ship went off on another random burn, it wouldn't much help to know where they'd been.

He shifted his attention between her and his brother.

"Barre?"

He moved closer to her. "I know. I'm sorry."

"So, anything?" Ro kept her voice casual. Maybe Jem would have understood how much it hurt to admit she needed help.

"Just a kind of background noise. Like someone humming to themselves."

Pulling her eyebrows together, she studied Barre. He was so completely different from his brother. When she worked with Jem, she could almost hear the thoughts whirring in his head. His brain always raced ahead of his ability to explain himself. And he was always thinking. Barre seemed causal to the point of disinterest or disdain.

"Background noise? What do you think it's doing?" She'd figured the AI was pretty heavily damaged and about as conscious as Jem was. But what if she was wrong?

"How the hell should I know?" Barre glanced around the bridge, his gaze lingering on the damaged forward screen and the unfamiliar stars. "It could be doing anything."

"Well, we know it doesn't want me sending any signals. What about getting into the informational archives? Navigation? Star charts?"

"And how do you expect me to do that?"

"I don't know. Ask it? Sing it to sleep?" Ro couldn't help laughing at the absurdity of this. All her hacking skills and she needed a musician to access the AI.

"Nursery rhymes are not my specialty," Barre said, his mouth turning up into a reluctant smile.

"What's the music like? I mean, do you think the AI is out of fight-or-flight mode?" It seemed odd to describe a computer in those terms, but that's literally what it was doing before.

Barre tapped the side of his head. "Here, listen."

The music poured from his micro. Repetitive and hypnotic, it was oddly soothing. It did remind Ro of her habit of humming to herself as she worked. "What do you think would happen if we fed it back to the AI?"

"Why?"

"Kind of like 'We hear you and we want to get to work, too.'"

"I can try, but it might not trust me anymore. The last time I played something, you did an end-run around it."

Ro glanced around the remnants of the ruined bridge, wondering again what had happened there decades before. There was no sign of weapons fire anywhere else on the ship. "I think it's worth the risk, Barre. We have to find some way of getting it to trust us. At least now we know people are searching. It would be nice if we could help them find us."

"We should probably brace ourselves." Barre glanced over at Micah and he nodded.

Ro limped over to the nav station and wedged herself between it and the wall. Barre did the same over at comms. Micah set his back against a console and threw his feet over Jem's legs.

"Okay," Barre said. "Three, two, one, now." The music faded from the small speaker in his micro and he looked up, unfocusing his eyes. Seconds ticked past in an uncomfortable silence. She wanted to ask Barre what he was doing and how the AI was responding, but she didn't dare break his concentration. It gave her a greater appreciation of Jem's patience when he worked with her.

The bridge work lights remained steady as Ro stared up at them, half daring them to turn red and flash their warning. She gripped the edges of the console so hard her hands went numb and still nothing happened.

"I think it understood. Look." Barre pointed behind her at the console she leaned against.

Ro turned, shaking out her hands, and looked down, her breath catching in her throat. The few lights not melted in the nav station winked at her. Slowly, she reached for her micro.

"Do you think that's a smart move?" Barre asked.

She paused, giving his worry serious consideration. The old Ro wouldn't have done that. "I think I'd rather find out now if the AI freaks out then when our military friends come back."

Barre's gaze flicking back to check on his brother before returning to her. "Okay. I'll keep the feedback going."

Ro set the micro down on the console and wiped her sweaty palms on her pants. Three other lives depended on her making the right decisions. Four, if you counted the AI. It had a kind of personality, and certainly a degree of self-awareness and self-preservation, too, by the looks of things. She wondered what Dauber and May would have thought if they were here.

If the AI saw any systems integration as a threat, maybe she could just get into the files and not try for any overrides. It would be a start, anyway. "Okay, baby. Here we go," she murmured, and paired her micro to the autonomics. "I'm not trying to hurt you. I just want to figure out where we are."

She didn't care if Micah and Barre heard her talking to the computer. It was her version of humming and maybe the AI would understand her, at least on some level. The lights remained steady. Ro closed her eyes briefly before she triggered Jem's interface edits. "This is my music."

Barre stepped closer to her. "No change in the song."

Ro lifted her hands and triggered the commands for file access. The display blanked out.

"Still no change," Barre said.

The virtual screen filled with rapidly scrolling text and Ro had to stop herself from jumping up and down and shouting. They were in. Her heart pounded painfully as if she had been starved of oxygen. "Barre?"

"Five by five."

Ro winced, hearing the echo of Nomi's voice and her bright laugh. If she ever wanted to see the woman again, she had to focus. "I'm going to look for anything navigation related. Nav logs. Star charts, if I can find them, okay?"

"Agreed," Micah said.

"Good to go," Barre answered.

She was tempted to look for an ansible map, but the ship was forty years out of date. Star charts didn't change all that much in a few decades, but the ansible network had.

The files were a mess. It looked like something had eaten its way through the computer's memory, leaving random nonsense strings behind. More than half of the data were simply missing. Of the files she could find intact entries for, many registered as having zero size.

No wonder the AI had problems.

Zipping through the directory almost as fast as the display could scroll, Ro found little of any use. A few intact files, she toggled for copying to her micro, but didn't dare stop to examine anything for fear the AI would decide to shut her out. At the end of her scan, she had less than a dozen useful files. And nothing labeled with a helpful 'star chart' or 'you are here' designation. She backed out of the file system carefully and decoupled her micro before glancing back at Barre.

"Good job."

Ro snorted. He wouldn't have said that if he knew how little she recovered. Grabbing her micro, she sat back down. The pain in her leg was a distant thing — too easily ignored. Barre had warned her about that. She studied the recovered files. None of their names gave much of a clue to their contents. Some would be a challenge to open.

She started with the basics. The format of plain old text files hadn't changed all that much in forty years. Glancing through them, she found antenna calibration logs, crew rotation schedules, and supplies lists. Ro closed the files and frowned, studying the list again. A few looked like they might be log entries, but playing the old recordings would take a bit of finesse. She glanced back at Barre and then frowned, looking away.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing." Ro opened a basic audio compiler and slid one of the recordings towards it. The expected file error message flickered in red. Just once, she'd like the easy way to work the first time.

"You probably have to re-encode that to play it." Barre looked over her shoulder and shrugged when Ro stared back at him.

"Give me your micro."

He handed it over.

"Here. Make it work." She bumped the audio logs to him and went searching through the database files from her own micro, discomfort twisting her stomach into knots. Everything she learned about dealing with other people, she'd learned from her father. She tinkered with the awkward databases, keeping part of her attention on Barre.

Static-filled audio crackled through the bridge.

" … fried the personality sub- …. Lieutenant Murray … every scan she … self-healing virus … damn thing … tates every time we … boot."

The recording stopped.

"I can try to clean it up a bit. But there's not a lot left. Sorry."

"I remember studying about that in school." Micah's voice startled her.

"About what?" Barre asked.

"During the war. The anti-Commonwealth forces developed viruses that targeted AIs. Figured out a way to sneak them in ansible packets. They burned out a ton of computers before Commonwealth programmers figured out how to stop it."

Well, that explained the damage to the computer. But it still didn't tell them what happened to the bridge. "Barre, go through every single log. See if there's anything in them we can use."

"What are you going to do?"

"Make sure when the AI wakes all the way up, we don't also resurrect the virus."

Nomi winced as her coffee overfilled, scalding her hand.
Leaving the steaming cup at the coffee station, she grabbed a cup of ice water and submerged the burn in it. "Baka tare," she muttered, falling back on the old Japanese curse words she learned as a child from her great-grandmother. She wasn't sure if she were referring to herself or Alain Maldonado, though they both would qualify as utter idiots.

Nomi frowned. The cold water numbed her fingers, dulling the pain. If it got any worse, she would have to find Medical and get some analgesic. She slammed a top on the coffee, and headed to comms, the throbbing in her hand a living reminder of Maldonado's presence.

Silent crew members gave her cautious nods. The door to the communications room opened and it looked like a clone of the station's. Nomi exhaled. Thank the cosmos for small favors. As she walked into the softly lit workspace, the four staff there turned to look at her. She had to force herself not to retreat.

"Ensign Konomi Nakamura, from Daedalus, reporting for duty." Not that they didn't know who she was or where she'd been assigned from.

A tall, ebony-skinned woman pushed back from the main console, and stood. She had the stripes for lieutenant on her immaculately creased blue-and-black uniform. Everything about her was angular, from the line of her skull revealed beneath her shaved head to her sharp cheekbones and lanky limbs. "Welcome aboard. I'm Lieutenant Odoyo. Take position three and relieve Jenkins. I assume you're familiar with executing a search pattern?" She lifted a single eyebrow in a high arch and stared down at Nomi. This was a woman used to using her height to intimidate.

Nomi stood at attention. "Yes, sir." Her voice echoed in the close room and she thought she sounded like some eager recruit. Odoyo's lips twitched into a brief smile.

Jenkins, another ensign, vacated his station, giving her a curious glance. She sat down and slipped the headset over her ears as the still-warm seat quickly molded to her body. It took her a few minutes to orient to the display. Daedalus Station was a relatively fixed point in space. Messages came in from all directions, but converged on their array.

In a moving ship, they had to anticipate and account for the variance. It was hard enough to hit a big stationary target when your transmitter shifted and much harder when both ends of the transmission were mobile.