Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 (11 page)

Sound burst through her headset. Wincing, she turned down the volume. Standard traffic reports and worm-hole status updates chased away the awkward, nearly one-sided conversation.

"How's that sound?"

"Fine. Better." Nomi wondered where Ro's smile had gone. "Thank you."

Ro collapsed the display and slipped her micro in a pocket before pushing back from the console and staring at Nomi, her eyes cold. "You kept looking for me and Micah this afternoon. Why?"

Crap. Ro must have captured all her queries somehow. "I — I left you a message. I wanted to talk to you," she said, her lips suddenly dry.

Ro took a step forward, her dark brows angry slashes across her forehead. Nomi shrunk back against her console.

"About what?"

The anger in Ro's eyes sent a chill down Nomi's spine.

"Did Mendez send you to spy on me? Did my father?"

"Ro — I — no," she stammered. "I just wanted — I thought we could be friends." She should have reported them when she had the chance.

A tense silence flooded the room. Nomi's hand stretched out toward the emergency call beacon on her console.

"You're scaring me, Ro."

Silence locked them both in place, Ro studying Nomi's face with a fierce intensity, Nomi's hand trembling over the alarm.

Ro squeezed her eyes shut, and let her shoulders slump. "What am I doing? I'm turning into my father. Shit." She spun on her heel and the door opened again. "I'm sorry."

Nomi stood alone in the empty room, her heart pounding, the ansible network's imitation starlight twinkling all around her.

***

Ro stormed through her room, gathering a change of clothes, not even bothering to mask the noise. She couldn't live with her father any longer. It didn't matter what happened next. An image of Nomi, her hands shaking, her face pale, and her dark eyes dilated, rose in her mind. She didn't deserve Ro's anger.

If the crew head on the ship worked, she'd move in there for the duration. If not, she could use the fitness room's facilities. Ro shoved her clothes and toiletries into a bag before pausing to look around the room she'd slept in for the past three years. There was little to show that a person actually lived there. Personalizing her quarters only made the inevitable packing and moving more difficult. Other than the quilt she inherited from her mother and had restored, there was nothing she couldn't walk away from. She folded the patchwork blanket carefully and slipped it inside her bag. Her micro had everything else she needed.

With one last glance at the closed door to her father's room, she quickly enabled the ghost subroutine. If someone was looking for her while she was officially off duty, Daedalus would place her in her quarters. No one would risk having to deal with her father in order to find her.

She didn't look back as she strode through the quiet station to her corner of Micah's workshop and the sleeping AI.

***

Jem couldn't block out the shouting. His parents argued late into the night, their raised voices penetrating two sets of doors in their quarters. He curled around a pillow and tried to sleep.

He didn't need to make out the words to know they were furious with Barre. But it wasn't really even about him. It was about them — about the Doctors Durbin and their selfless, dedicated, brilliant, perfect image.

A drug-addicted son marred their little fiction and now they were going to send him away.

Jem threw his useless pillow across the room and rolled out of bed. He pulled on pants and a shirt, grabbed his micro, and slipped out of their quarters.

Well, Barre had wanted their attention. He certainly got it this time.

Jem walked through the silent station towards the ship. If he couldn't sleep, he might as well work.

The soft whirring of the two reprogrammed drones greeted him as he stepped onto the bridge. He was going to have to see if the one he sent after the senator and Maldonado captured anything interesting, but for now, he really just wanted to lose himself in the code. As he slid into the pilot's command chair, his black mood evaporated. If only Ro could get the ship working again, then they could go anywhere.

Sighing, he pulled out his micro and configured it for wide angle heads-up display. He wasn't as skilled as Ro in managing the interface, but he could get the job done. He had to. Ro counted on him.

The AI code rose up all around him in its dazzling complexity. It would be easy to get lost, staring at it for hours and getting absolutely nothing done. He forced himself to focus. Jem found the small segment of the code that he needed to work on and expanded it until everything around it blurred away.

At right angles, he pulled up his mods. Until today, they'd just been theoretical models he'd played with for years, never dreaming he'd have a chance to actually test them. Jem licked dry lips, shut out the scurrying of the drones and the heap of scrap metal in the center of the bridge, and started to work.

"What are you doing awake?"

Jem whirled around to see Ro leaning against the ruined navigator's console. He shook out his hands and rubbed his eyes. "What time is it?"

"0-400."

"Wow." He'd been working for hours without a break. No wonder his eyes felt so gritty.

"Show me what you've got."

"Look, I have no way of knowing if this will work. Not until you get the AI back up." Now that Ro was here, his doubts returned about a thousand-fold.

She stepped over a drone to get a closer look at his display. "It's a solid idea. What's the worst that can happen? The AI's upper brain is already fried. Besides, there's no reason it shouldn't work."

Her confidence in him chased off the exhaustion. "Okay. See here?" He gestured at the corner where the two programs touched. "I needed a bridge. Something with enough of the AI's core code that it wouldn't reject the additions." It helped to think of this kind of work like an organ transplant. The body had to be tricked into accepting even the best artificial organs completely. "Sort of a shunt." He gestured to the left at a scrolling page of code.

She traced the lines of code while Jem fidgeted. What if he'd screwed up? What if she didn't think it would work now that she'd seen the full program? He was sure he must have overlooked something. A sour taste flooded his mouth and his stomach roiled.

"Oh, clever, clever boy," Ro said, smiling. "You
have
been busy."

Relief flooded through Jem. He sagged against the console, feeling the soreness in his neck and back for the first time since he sneaked in here. "I was just about to graft it on. If it works in the sandbox, then maybe we can try it for real."

Ro leaned forward, her eyes bright. "Nice!"

Jem stepped away from the display. "Do you want to do the honors?"

She raised her arms and zoomed through the code so quickly, Jem's vision blurred. He sighed and backed further away. Her project, her choice. At least he had the chance to work on it with her, even for this small piece.

The display flickered briefly. "Oh, no, this is your baby," she said, tucking her hands behind her back. "All yours."

"You sure?" His voice squeaked and Jem cleared his throat.

She nodded.

"This is outstanding!"

"Yes, yes it is," Ro said, staring at him hard. Jem shook out his hands. He could do this. He had to do this. It was just a trial run. It didn't have to be perfect.

"Okay," he said. "Here goes." First he had to prepare the AI program for the graft. Moving his hands carefully, he created a rough edge in the code representation. Then he did the same to his shunt. Theoretically, when he drew them together, the two programs should meld to each other and create a seamless whole. If it worked, then they should be able to use the holographic interface to pass commands to the AI. It would be much faster and more efficient than the original and very primitive voice command structure or console input as long as you were skilled in using it.

"What are you waiting for?" Ro asked, nudging him in the ribs.

Jem put his arms down for a minute and rolled his shoulders before sending the final command to execute.

The display winked out as the new program compiled. The seconds ticked by. Jem waited, barely daring to breathe. Yes, this was only proof of concept, but unless it worked right out of the gate, he doubted Ro would trust him to continue with her.

Ro's breathing sounded harsh and ragged beside him. She clutched her micro so hard her knuckles had whitened. Jem smiled, glad she was just as nervous and excited as he was.

Red lights flared all over marred consoles, making the ruined polymers appear to be melting again. Jem sucked in his breath and turned to Ro, his eyes wide. "What the hell?"

"Oh, you brilliant boy," she said, her voice a husky whisper. "You did it."

Ro gave a very startled Jem a bear hug and twirled him around in a circle before springing away and pairing her micro to the brilliant interface graft he'd just enabled.

"Ro, what did you do?" Jem said, a quaver in his voice.

She couldn't look away from her display. In one virtual window, she had the original program specs with her mods running. In another, one of her system tools coaxed the crippled AI to spool out its damaged code. "I knew it would work, so I yanked you out of the sandbox."

"Jesus, Ro, you could've told me!" Jem's voice cracked.

"Your code scanned five by five." It was a race between her and her father now and she needed Jem's interface if this was going to work.

"But I didn't get a chance to work out the bugs. What if —"

"Time to put on your big boy pants," Ro interrupted. You could 'what if' until the singularity. It was what she'd been doing, until now. "I aim to get this AI working. Help me or leave. What will it be?"

He didn't move and Ro smiled. "Good. Now watch and learn, my young assistant," she said, sounding a hell of a lot more confident than she felt.

The strobing red lights cast distorted shadows across the bridge. Ro kept her gaze locked on her displays to keep from getting queasy. With Jem's code grafted on, she readied her modded program for full forced upload. The AI had too much damage to patch which was probably why her father gave up after getting the autonomic systems running. If this worked, it would have to build its personality subroutines from factory specs. It would take time, but it was better than the brain-dead mind that barely functioned.

"Ready?" She turned toward Jem. He stood just behind her, his arms hugged around his ribs, his gaze darting around the bridge before finally settling on her virtual display.

His interface hack had been brilliant. She wished she'd thought of it, but she didn't have the gene-mod background he did and if his genius was anything, it was his ability to create a code interpreter for a biological metaphor and make it work.

"No," he answered, softly. "But that's not going to change anything, is it?"

"No."

Jem's new holographic interface simplified the work of hand-feeding thousands of lines of code allowing her to build a virtual structure instead, something Ro was very, very good at. As she reviewed her schematics, she once again felt a familiar awe for Douber and May and what they might accomplish now, with something like this. She wondered what the two legendary programmers would make of her.

She quickly threw open another window and tossed it toward Jem. "Monitor the environmentals, okay? This could get a little messy."

"Messy?" Jem squeaked. "How?"

"Just keep us quiet, okay? I don't want Daedalus to get curious."

"Okay." He didn't sound comfortable, but Ro knew he'd have her back.

"Here we go," she said, and focused all of herself on the code. Jem would just have to cope without any hand-holding. If he couldn't, then she'd picked the wrong assistant.

With careful fingers, she pinched her program into a neat cube that lay sparkling in one palm. Her free hand pulled up one of her favorite subroutines. The auto-run sequencer was one of the first tools she'd built and she knew it so well she didn't even need to look at it.

"Okay, baby, she's all yours," Ro said, sending it spinning in the air towards the window where the ravaged code limped along. She regretted that she'd never get to meet the original AI. There was no hope for it, really, given how the code looked. Once the sequencer worked its magic, she should be able to force her program to override the damage and the AI would be able to create a new personality out of the ashes of the old.

Come on, Ro, you can do this
, she thought, biting her lip. She had to. Her stomach cramped as she waited. Garish light washed through the bridge. "Who programmed these lights, anyway?"

"Sorry?" Jem said.

"Can't you do anything about it?" Red was a stupid color for emergencies.

"I'm on it."

She glanced up. The scrolling code stuttered to a stop. Ro held her breath, pulse pounding in her ears as the symbols slowly flashed, white lettering glowing in a smoky background. The background winked out, taking the letters with it. All her virtual windows crashed. The red wash of light abruptly cut out, leaving them blinking in near darkness.

"Fuck," she said, stiffening her arms so she wouldn't inadvertently send any commands.

A klaxon blared, the sound rising and falling in a painful wail that reverberated through the small space. Anyone even near the ship would hear them. "Jem!" she shouted over the cacophony.

"I'm on it!"

"Come on, come on," she urged. "Hurry." She needed to be able to see to send commands to the computer. Even the nauseating red light would be welcome. Her outstretched hands trembled, her prepared code waiting. She didn't dare move blind. And if the auto-run sequencer completely broke down the old program while she was immobilized, her new code wouldn't have anything to grab on to.

The damned siren made it impossible to concentrate. What the hell was taking Jem so long? Even if she could turn, she wouldn't be able to see him. "Now would be a good time," she said.

The sound cut out so suddenly, Ro nearly fell back. She risked turning her head. Jem stood hunched over his micro furiously inputting commands in its small display. Dim white lights rose up from the two drones in cone-shaped columns. "How's that?"