Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 (16 page)

Sitting down on the thin bunk pad, the metal frame pressing into his spine, Barre wondered when Jem would return. He wished he could believe this little stunt of his would change anything. As smart as Jem was, he was pretty stupid about their parents. Barre closed his eyes and picked his favorite play-list. He stretched out on the rigid bed letting the music flood his brain.

***

Micah strode through the ship's corridor toward Daedalus, trying to sort out who he was more furious at — his father or Ro. Right now, they were pretty even in the polling. If Ro wasn't going to help him, he had to figure out how to stop his father on his own.

The real question remained — what was he willing to risk? How much would the commander believe? He frowned, wondering how his father even got those fake diplomatic seals. He didn't have the skills to counterfeit them. The penalties for that were probably more severe than even smuggling the weapons.

At the ship's airlock, he froze. 
The seals.
He needed Mendez to find one of those seals — preferably in his father's possession. Micah smiled and headed back to the storage bay.

***

"Good riddance," Ro said, to Micah's rigid spine. She wasn't surprised when he didn't turn back. First Jem and now Micah. Relying on anyone other than herself had been a mistake. Her father was right.

An image of Nomi's sleek, dark hair and her expressive almond-shaped eyes flitted through her mind and she pushed it away. Friends meant liabilities and compromises that led to disappointment and loss.

Ro grabbed her micro. Her program had terminated several hours ago and if the AI hadn't been utterly fried, it should be starting to re-integrate itself by now. With one last look at Micah's lab, she headed to the bridge.

The door slid open at her touch. Soft red down-lights glowed from the walls to illuminate the smashed displays. The rest of the space lay in shadow. A drone's small white light blinked from the floor across the room.

She accessed Jem's interface, hating the fact he was so good at this. With a few casual waves of her hand, her micro paired easily with the autonomics and she manually shifted the illumination from night vision to daylight mode. The room brightened steadily until the entire bridge was bathed in an even, white light.

It looked like all the environmentals worked fine.

As Ro scanned Jem's code again, something in his programming snagged her eye. "Huh," she said, her voice loud in the empty room. He had side-loaded a sophisticated voice module.

The environmentals were controlled by the autonomic subroutines, but just like in humans, the cortex could override them, at least to some degree. If the AI could parse a voice command and send it on to be processed, she would know the sensory input modules functioned.

"Illumination — night vision."

The brightness wavered. Ro held her breath, waiting. Nearly imperceptibly, the lights began to dim. Ro blinked and the shadows deepened. Shivering with anticipation, she stared, grinning as a red glow replaced the harsh white.

She opened her mouth to start another voice-command sequence when her micro beeped.

"Ro?" Nomi's voice warmed the harsh room, bringing an unexpected smile to Ro's face.

"I'm here," Ro said. The red lights deepened as she tried to figure out what else to say.

"I found your hack. Well, that's pretty obvious, right?"

"I'm sorry. I probably shouldn't have broken into your micro."

Nomi laughed. "Serves me right for not locking out the defaults."

Ro could imagine her shrugging one slender shoulder. If someone had hacked her stuff, she would have been supremely pissed. "No static?"

"Five by five," Nomi said. "You free for breakfast?"

She glanced at the time on her micro. "You just got on shift. It's hours until breakfast."

"Yeah, but I don't want you making other plans."

The lights started shifting between night-vision red and daylight white. That wasn't supposed to happen.

"Ro? You still there?"

"Hang on a minute. Tracking down a glitch." Maybe it was the voice integration. Ro shifted back to her micro's heads-up display and found the manual illumination settings. "Let's try this again." She set the light levels back to daylight mode. Harsh white light dazzled her vision, as bright as a lightening flash. "Shit." It washed out her display.

"Ro?"

"Working on something." Nomi would have to wait. "Illumination — night vision," she said again, trying to override the stutter and get the environmentals to reset. The room glowed red. Ro's sight cleared and her displays returned to focus. Setting two additional windows, she called up her program in one and the live code in another. They should have been identical. The AI should have reverted to a factory reset with Jem's interface and Ro's tweaks enabled.

She opened her toolbox and pulled out a compare and contrast module. Given the complexity of the code involved, it would likely take hours to run.

"Yeah, breakfast sounds great, Nomi," Ro said, surprising even herself, as she superimposed the two windows and flicked the assessment module over. Maybe she could even get a few hours of real sleep first.

The program tumbled end over end, a complex cube shape of glowing colors. It struck both windows and winked out, like a flame extinguished in a flood of water. "Huh," Ro said. That wasn't supposed to happen. "Nomi, can I catch you later?"

The bridge vibrated beneath Ro's feet, long dead engines growling like recently uncaged and hungry animals. Red lights pulsed. The wail of emergency sirens deafened her. The ship leaped up and Ro fell to the floor, her hands clasped over her ears. A giant's fist pressed her to the ground, her leg twisted at an awkward angle nature never intended. She screamed as her ankle broke beneath her, the sound swallowed by the klaxon and the angry engines.

The communications array seemed a lot less lonely and boring knowing Ro was on the other end of Nomi's micro, even if she was busy tinkering with something.
The sound of a rumbling engine filled the array, even through the micro's tinny speaker.

"Ro, what are you working on?"

The whining increased until Nomi could practically feel the vibration through her bones.

"What the …" The whole communications room shook. Her micro trembled on the edge of the console before tumbling to the ground. An alarm Nomi had never heard outside of her orientation training dopplered through the station. She could hear it from the corridor, slightly out of pitch and out of phase from the array's own alarm.

Commander Mendez's voice boomed through the communication system. "Alert level alpha. Emergency crew to stations. All non-essential personnel to quarters. This is not a drill."

"Ro!"

Even if she did answer, Nomi couldn't have heard it over the wailing siren. Lights flashed red all over her console. Her chair, bolted down for the vanishingly small chance of a station-level impact, shivered beneath her. She pressed her knees against where the armrests molded into the seat and leaned her torso against the console to keep from being dumped to the floor.

Red lights strobed through the room, dazzling Nomi's eyes. The room lurched beneath her and a new alarm added to the cacophony. That sound she knew. It was the warning of an airlock breach.

Her chair gave one more violent shake and then the motion stopped. All Nomi could feel was the wild pounding of her heart. She checked the air pressure. Wherever the breach happened, this room was tight. Closing her eyes, she struggled to think, alarms still ringing in her ears. What the hell just happened? She scrambled for her fallen micro. "Ro? Are you okay? Ro!"

The klaxons quieted to an irritating alert. "Bridge to communications, report!" Commander Mendez's voice cut through Nomi's confusion like a bucket of ice water down her spine. She dropped the micro into her lap.

Snapping upright in her chair, Nomi she studied the ansible display. "No indications of any large scale communications disruption, Commander."

"Damage assessment?"

Nomi scanned her console, running a manual check on the array. All the indicator lights extinguished before the system rebooted. One by one, green lights winked on all over her panel. She held her breath, waiting as several of them flashed amber before holding on steady red. Still, most of the panel glowed green.

"Short range communications intact. Unknown damage to the long range antenna and receiving array." The familiar routine of monitoring her equipment quieted her pulse and pushed her fear for Ro aside. "External sensors off line. Visual inspection needed for full assessment and repair options."

"Continue monitoring all frequencies. Report any unusual communications. Mendez out."

Red lights continued to wash across the room. Nomi leaned back in the chair and stared into the display. What the hell just happened?

The adrenaline washed out of Nomi's body, leaving her trembling and dry-mouthed. She looked down at her micro, triggering the private communications tunnel Ro had programmed, her hands shaking.

***

The ship surged beneath him and Jem struggled to keep his balance. He slammed into the corridor. Bright pain burst in his shoulder and slid down to his fingers. The blankets slipped from his stinging hands. He didn't even have enough time to curse before something flattened him to the floor, squeezing his chest so tight, he couldn't breathe.

Darkness swarmed his vision, dulling the shiny metal surfaces. A high-pitched whine sounded from a long distance away. Jem's pulse thudded in his throat.

The ship.

Ro got the ship to fly.

What the hell was she doing?

She was going to rip the station to pieces. Jem struggled to stand against the shuddering and the press of the acceleration, managing to push up onto his hands and knees. He felt like he massed about a hundred kilos of dead weight. Gritting his teeth, he reached his left arm up, grabbed onto one of the small handles set into the corridor for low-gee navigation, and dragged himself to standing. His right arm hung useless at his side, the pain a strange combination of sharp tingling and numbness.

The engines continued to growl, gravity fighting his every step as he struggled toward the bridge. He growled back, an angry sound, deep in his throat. She could have killed him. She could have killed them all. Jem glanced toward the crew quarters. There were no acceleration couches, no tethers, and no way to check on Barre.

The scant few meters between the main corridor and the bridge felt more like a hard uphill climb of ten klicks. The ship lurched sideways and surged upward. The violent shift ripped his hand from the grab bar and bounced him around the corridor. His head smashed against the wall before he fell again, his shoulder collapsing under his weight.

He had to reach the bridge. Why wasn't Ro doing anything? Why was the ship still accelerating?

A warm wetness slid down his forehead. Jem blinked the blood out of his eyes and reached his left hand up to his scalp. He winced, finding the cut and pressed his hand to it until the blood slowed down to a thin trickle.

His vision refused to come into focus. Dizziness made standing utterly impossible so Jem crawled, wincing whenever he had to take weight on his right shoulder. He ignored it. He also ignored the throbbing in his head.

Muttering to himself and leaving a trail of bloody hand-prints, he half-dragged himself toward the bridge. The door stretched above him, distorted by double vision. Jem tried to blink it away and struggled to stand, reaching his hand toward the manual release. The door slid open and he fell across the threshold onto the bridge, panting with the effort.

Jem's body felt like one big bruise, but he pulled himself further inside. Garish red lights washed across the damaged consoles.

"Ro?"

A string of curses answered him.

"Ro?" Jem called again.

"My ankle is broken." Her voice, low and husky with pain, came from the far side of the room.

"You have to stop the ship!"

"You think?" Ro laughed, a harsh sound.

Jem grabbed the edge of the nav station and levered himself up against the acceleration. The ship shuddered again. The impossible weight lifted. He overbalanced and slammed into a console, the impact jarring his head. Bile flooded his mouth as the room spun around him.

He leaned against the console waiting until the urge to retch passed. Glancing up, Jem sucked in a shocked breath. The main display flickered and jumped and he blinked several times again in a useless effort to clear his eyes. Stars streaked across the screen, interrupted by the crack that split it into two slightly misaligned halves. Daedalus station was nowhere in sight.

Now what? How far had they gone?

Steadying himself on the ruined consoles, he lurched over to where Ro lay curled on the floor, her face nearly colorless. Jem's mouth dried. He shook his head and nearly threw up from a fresh wave of dizziness. "What have you done?"

"Fucked up," she said. "Monumentally."

"You have to get us back," Jem said, unable to tear his gaze from the unfamiliar constellations.

"Right now, I'd settle for some painkillers and help standing."

He blinked and looked down. If her ankle was broken, she would need far more than that. Jem choked back a laugh. She needed the infirmary on Daedalus and his parents. He pressed the knuckles of his left hand to his mouth.

"You shouldn't be here, Jem," Ro said, as he picked his way closer to her. She shut her eyes briefly. "But I'm glad you are."

He sat down heavily beside her, cradling his right arm in his lap and waiting for the room to stop spinning. "Do you want the good news first or the bad?"

Ro winced. "Good."

"I can probably splint your ankle," he said, looking around the bridge. The drones had stacked piles of scrap in the corner.

"And the bad?"

"I'm not the only one you didn't count on." He took a deep breath. There was nothing he could do about it now. "Barre's here, too."

"Great. Just great." Ro squeezed her eyes shut. "I can't deal with that now. Help me with my ankle. I have to get control of the ship, first."