Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 (8 page)

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.

The full assay would take a few hours.
Micah looked up at 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 the 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."

She hummed as she dressed, layering her crisp gray uniform over a deep red tank top. The rich color highlighted her eyes and her space-pale skin. She stopped to check herself in the mirror, making a face at her own reflection. Chances were whatever she felt for Ro wouldn't be reciprocated.

It didn't matter. If she didn't start meeting people, she'd end up going insane. Just six weeks apart from her family and friends and she already understood the depth of her mistake, but she had a debt to pay.

"Well, then," Nomi said to the empty room and utilitarian furniture. Even her old dorm room had more personality. "Let's go see what Ro's doing."

Striding through the station, Nomi forced herself to nod at the other personnel. At least the hallways showed some sign of life at this hour. By the time Nomi's shift started, she'd be lucky to interact with even a handful of people.

She kept walking until she stood outside the reading room, where she paused to tug her uniform top smooth. The door slid open and Mendez stepped out. "Commander," she said, startled.

Mendez frowned, reading her ident badge. "How are you settling in, Nakamura?"

"Well, thank you."

"Excellent." The commander's dark gaze took her in and dismissed her just as quickly. Nomi watched as she disappeared into the station before entering the reading room. "Ro?"

The small space had an old-fashioned holo-set vibe, as if someone researched historical libraries and recreated an ancient Victorian sitting room, complete with gloomy lighting, antique chairs, and shelves lined with reproduction paper books. The lights brightened as she stepped deeper inside. "Ro?"

Silence rang in the empty room.

"Daedalus, locate Maldonado, Ro."

The AI's voice echoed. "Engineering sub-level three."

That had to be wrong. There was no way Ro could have made it from the reading room all the way across the station and down to engineering. Besides, they would have passed each other in the nexus. Was there some glitch in the AI's localization subroutine? "Locate Nakamura, Konomi."