Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 (3 page)

Barre scowled over the steaming mug. How could Jem be so freaky cheerful this early? He added it to the mental list of things that were unfair and not likely to change any time soon.

"Since when are you so eager for school?" Jem always hated the work anyone assigned him. Usually he tried to figure out ways to twist it to suit what he wanted to do. Maybe they weren't so different, after all.

"Doing a collab with Ro."

"I know, you only love her for her brain."

"Barre, it's not like that," Jem said, the skin on his cheeks brightening.

It was always so easy to fluster his little brother. At least some things in life were fair. "Do Mom and Dad know?"

Jem stared up at him, his eyes intense. "No. And they don't need to. I get my work done. I get good grades. What I do and who I do it with on my own time is none of their business."

"Whoa, kid." He swallowed the last of the coffee and set the cup down on the counter. "I'm not here to criticize." Barre had enough of his own secrets, including the packet of bittergreen in his back pocket. "Where are they, anyway?" he asked. Their quarters were utterly silent except for the two of them.

"Station staff meeting. I waited until they left before coming to wake you."

"Thanks." And he meant it. The last thing Barre wanted was to spend another meal being picked apart by his disapproving parents.

"Can we go, yet?" Jem asked, just the barest hint of the whine in his voice that used to drive Barre crazy.

"Fine. Good. Whatever." Barre put his hands on Jem's shoulders and pressed down. "But we do the calc work first. Payback for waking me up."

"Deal," Jem said, slipping out from under his grip.

Other than a few night-shift staff heading to their quarters, the corridors were empty this early in the morning. The computer lab was empty, too, except for the AI's blinking red oculars. Barre logged into his syllabus, swallowing the resentment he always felt when he asked his little brother for help.

He remembered a time when Jem turned to him with questions. It hadn't lasted very long. Once Jem mastered the computer interface, he quickly pulled past him and never looked back.

Barre called up the module he struggled with and turned down the music. Conceptual math didn't get any easier with a soundtrack and Jem would be ticked if he thought Barre wasn't paying attention. He could compose complex pieces in his head for a fully tricked-out band even without the neural. If you needed it rewritten for an old-school orchestra, he could do that, no problem. Transposing was as simple for him as theoretical physics seemed to be for Jem.

But his parents only had room for Jem's talents in their lives. The first time Barre had played something he wrote just for them, they nodded politely and couldn't be bothered to listen to the entire song.

"Focus, Barre."

He sighed. "Sorry."

Jem tapped the monitor. "Is this what you're having trouble with?"

For the moment, he couldn't find a sarcastic reply.

"Okay. Watch." Jem pushed away the ancient keyboard in favor of the holo display. Watching him use the heads-up module was like watching Judicious Monkey play the multi-synth. His hands moved in a blur and the equation danced in front of them. "Look here," Jem said, and exploded the view, showing the problem in three dimensions.

Barre stared, his mouth falling open as Jem built a representative construct, each piece linking to a part of the problem. Then he simplified the building, collapsing multiple layers of structure into a simple cube.

"You've got to be kidding me," Barre said.

"What do you mean? If you do it this way, you'll always get the right answer in the fewest steps."

There was no way he could ever replicate what Jem had just done. "I swear Mom and Dad bought you from Dynamic Machines and had you programmed by an evil genius."

"But Barre, it's simple. Just look —"

He cut his brother off before he could wipe the display clean and start again. "Wait. Listen." He linked his neural to the computer and played a few bars of the piece he'd been working on last night. "Now score it for twelve voices. And use a microtonal scale."

Jem stared at him open mouthed as the simple melody line played over and over. Part of Barre's mind had already started to create a counterpoint and a rhythm track.

"I can't. You know I can't."

Barre thrust his arm in the middle of Jem's display and sent fragments of equations flying around the room before the computer extinguished them. "But it's easy. Simple even. Since I can do it." He pulled up a reproduction of old-fashioned staff paper and with a few economical gestures, wrote the melody line out. "There, easier now?"

Jem glared at him, the anger in his expression a smaller reproduction of their mother's face.

"Never mind." Barre wiped his music away with an open-handed gesture and flicked off the playback. The room fell silent. "I need some space." He left Jem to the work he'd rather be doing anyway and stormed off into the corridors of Daedalus Station, trying to look like he had some specific destination in mind.

***

"Jerk," Jem said as the door slid shut, and turned back to the monitor. It wasn't his fault he was smart. Besides, he worked hard for his grades and opportunities. He shouldn't have to apologize for that. It wasn't fair. Every time he tried to help Barre, it ended badly, but Jem was the stupid one who kept trying.

He was done. He could be just as selfish as his older brother.

"Okay, Ro, what have you got for me?" he said, linking his micro to the AI and waiting for the revised syllabus to download. His anger drained away as his new curriculum scrolled across the display: Cyber-neurolinguistics. AI interface design. A 3-d schema for the first-gen Dyn/Mac processor. Where the hell did she find that?

With shaking hands, he pulled up the schema and displayed it around him. "Wow," he whispered, blinking up at the AI source code. It was the most beautiful and terrifying thing he'd ever seen. Even the most basic of its subroutines had more complexity than any program he'd ever dared pull apart and rebuild. What did Ro think he could do with this?

"So, what do you think?"

He jumped, hearing Ro's voice behind him. She must have slipped in the room while he was drooling over the code.

"It's …" He waved his hands at the holographic representation and fell silent, his gaze shifting from parts to the whole and back again as he tried to concentrate on the logic strings and numbers whirling through his mind. Dizzy, he grabbed the edge of the counter and looked up at Ro, trying to keep from losing his breakfast.

"Yeah. Me too," she said, a rare smile lighting up her face. "I was up all night playing. Here, this'll make it better." She turned to his interface and wriggled her fingers at it. Jem could have sworn she was tickling the computer, rather than sending it commands. Layers of code collapsed in on itself until what was left looked like a normal program. A massive program, yes, but something he could take in with one gulp.

How in the universe had she done that? He looked up at Ro, his mouth hanging open.

"Better?"

All Jem could do was nod, thinking of Barre and the massive apology he owed his brother. "So what's the plan?" he asked, the squeak in his voice completely blowing the casual vibe he wanted. Now, he was glad he never got the chance to send Ro the code modifications he'd been working on.

"Don't worry. We don't have to deal with most of this." She waved her hand and more than half the program dimmed. "It's the interface I'm interested in, for now."

"Oh, that's all?" He grinned back at her. "What a relief."

She rubbed her hand along his head, brushing the short hair backwards. "You can handle it, small fry. I saw what you did with your interface mods."

His eyes widened.

"Yes, I peeked. Sorry."

But she wasn't sorry. He could see it in her smirk. Jem shrugged. He wasn't all that mad, even if she treated him like a kid brother instead of a colleague — even if she broke into his personal files. There probably wasn't another person on the station who could have. Jem looked back at her simplified schematic and swallowed hard. She thought he could handle it. "You want me to graft my interface onto this?"

"Hell, yeah," Ro said, waving her hands again and setting the program spinning like an old fashioned globe. She studied the dancing lines of code and stopped it with the gentlest press of her fingertip. "Isn't this just crying out for a little tweak?"

Jem pulled out his micro and called up his program. The massive AI code dwarfed it, even with Ro's simplification. "Do you really think so?"

She looked down at him, her changeable eyes squinting in concentration. Jem didn't know if she was scrutinizing him or his code. "Make it work. Then we can talk."

Make it work. He stared at the bewildering code. Make it work. The scale of what he thought she wanted was enough to make him feel slow and thick. "And if I can't?" Silence answered him. When he looked up, she was gone.

Barre's anger and frustration drummed a pounding counterpoint to the music streaming through his head as he paced the circular corridors of Daedalus station.
He owed Jem an apology, but he couldn't face going back to the computer lab.

He shook his head, the unruly dreads his mother and father both hated sweeping across his back. What he really needed was an acoustically perfect, sound-proofed room stocked with a multi-synth and the computer to augment it. Where his parents supplied Jem with the latest and greatest, along with access to research experts across the galaxy, Barre's consolation prize included a fast micro and a neural synaptic interface. They weren't the best tools for the job, but the neural was better than nothing, given how little they tolerated what they considered his hobby.

His hobby. He clenched his hands into tight fists and kept walking. The blood throbbing in his ears drowned out the music. He stopped short and someone barreled into him from behind.

"Watch it!"

Barre drew a breath to yell back when the officer glared at him and swept past. The silver stripes in his gray uniform matched the shine of the weapon holstered at his right hip. Barre swallowed his snippy response and watched the man's back until the curving corridor hid him. Plasma rifles were nasty. His parents insisted both Barre and Jem complete grueling advanced medic training, and the Doctors Durbin version of a first-aid class involved critically ill patients and gruesome injuries, including fatal ones. The mingled stench of flesh and plastic from treating plasma burns had clung to him for days.

A group of cadets jogged past him wearing full recon gear. They looked pretty stupid, their brown-and-tan patterned camo conspicuous against the shiny steel reflective walls. It was 0900 already. The station had a small fixed crew and an even smaller military presence, but anyone in the corridors was too many for Barre.

He tapped his back pocket, feeling for the reassuring shape of the small bag of bittergreen and headed back to the residence ring. Their family quarters were still empty. He grabbed a large mug, hit the dispenser for simmering water, and retreated into his room. The water needed to cool to just the right temperature before he shook the leaves over it: Too hot, and the trace elements that made the drug so effective would break down; too cold, and it would just be nasty. Either way would leave the tea useless, bitter, and undrinkable, without any of the high.

Barre eyed the small amount left, the last of his old supply from Hadria, and wondered if it still had enough of a kick to work its magic on his mood. He sprinkled a pinch over the mug and watched the leaves slowly uncurl and sink to the bottom. Five minutes and a few swallows later would let him cope with this bleak and silent place, at least for a little while.

With his parents and Jem out, Barre could crank up the music and turn his whole room into a surround-sound system. His headphones were the best commercially available, but he was old school. Hearing sound as it vibrated through the air and through his bones felt better. More than better, it felt right, almost as soothing as how his body felt after the bittergreen — alive, alert, and smooth.

Barre's shoulders dropped as the waves of sound washed over him. He reached for the tea, his nose wrinkling at the unexpected sour smell. Fresh bittergreen tea was sharp enough, but this tasted like dirty socks. It must be the old leaves starting to oxidize, but it was all he had, so he sipped it slowly and waited for his brain to settle. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the melody he'd played for Jem in the lab. Even without a computer or a heads-up interface, he could represent each musical line as a sensory impulse in his oh-so-ordinary mind. Some sounds pulsed in colors, other burst through him as flavors or scents, some had details he couldn't even name, but felt in some dark recess of his consciousness. He tried to explain it once to his parents, and they were briefly interested in his expression of synesthesia until something more novel about Jem or some new disease or surgical technique snagged their attention.

It didn't matter. The music was more important.

A combination of sounds blasting through the speakers and the textures rolling through his mind played a counterpoint to all the harsh, reflective surfaces of Daedalus — the burnished walls, the uniforms, and the plasma guns. When Barre finished, he knew the composition would be like an auditory expression of his restlessness, the sound equivalent of one of the long-extinct hunting cats, something warm and alive and very dangerous.

***

Ro stood in front of her father's workshop door, her hands damp. After one last check on his location, she ran a service override on the door lock. It opened, silently retracting into the compartment's walls.

She hesitated at the threshold. If she turned around right now and sealed the door, he might never find out. But she'd never get her chance to escape. She swept the room with all the security subroutines she had. They all reported clean.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, she stepped inside. She paused, waiting for his angry voice or for an arm to grab her in the darkness. There were no sounds except for her heartbeat and harsh breathing.