Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1

by Lj Cohen

  "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.

  "Lights up twenty percent," she whispered.

  His work table was an explosion of computer components. Some were functional, some in various stages of repair, some clearly beyond even his help. Half-cleared notes on loose sheets of permapaper littered the floor.

  She didn't even know what she was looking for, but she knew she didn't have a lot of time.

  A large roll of archival perm took up most of the space across the desk. She unrolled the free edge, anchoring it down with a broken impeller. It was a schematic for an old class of freighter. The perm was marked up with her father's cramped writing and sketches. She peered closer, bringing her micro to illuminate the faint marks. The familiar connected block-and-tube outline of Daedalus station emerged, with the ship jutting out from one end.

  Ro's heart raced. This was the wreck. Where had her father gotten its original engineering diagrams? And what was he doing with them?

  "Daedalus, locate Maldonado, Alain," she whispered.

  "Corridor delta seven."

  Ro winced at the AI's loud voice. She turned back to her father's desk. The archival perm didn't have a standard interface, so she couldn't clone the data. But she could take screen captures and stitch the pieces together later. Unrolling sections of the schematic with trembling fingers, Ro snapped a picture of each one.

  She re-rolled the perm and moved the impeller back to its spot on the desk. After a last quick glance around the room, she turned off the lights and shut the door behind her. Slipping her micro into a pocket, she headed for the galley. The door to their quarters opened. Ro tightened her hand on the mug she'd taken from the rack beside the sink full of dirty dishes.

  "Rosalen."

  Her father's gravelly voice made the hair on the back of her neck tingle.

  "What are you doing?"

  She turned, pressing her spine against the galley's edge. His eyes glittered in the low light. The galley's counter separated them, but there was no way for her to escape their quarters without passing within arm's reach of him.

  "I was making coffee," she said, careful to keep her voice neutral. "Here," she said, sliding the mug across the counter to him.

  Ro walked to the end of the galley and tried to slip past him, but he grabbed her upper arm and squeezed just hard enough to trap her. Keeping her body completely still, Ro fought to steady her breathing.

  "Don't you have work to do?"

  Mendez must have notified him. She lowered her gaze from his hard, green eyes, but carefully kept him in her peripheral vision.

  Her father shook her softly and her gaze snapped to his face. Ro kept her tone bored, flat. "It's just an internship assignment. It won't interfere with my responsibilities here."

  He let go of her arm. Ro stumbled back, resisting the impulse to rub where his fingers had been.

  "I'll be in my workshop for several hours. I expect not to be disturbed."

  Ro nodded.

  Her father leaned over her to drop the mug into the nearly filled sink before returning to his workshop. He paused at the door.

  Ro's heart hammered against her ribs.

  "Just so you are aware, I'll be programming extra security measures. For your own protection."

  The warning didn't have to be stated any more clearly. Well, he wasn't the only one here with a secret. "I have work to do."

  "Best you get to it, then."

  Ro frowned down at the mess of food archeology, her nose wrinkling at the smell. From now on, he could deal with his own meals. She would dine at the commissary with the other station staff. After all, she was one of them now. At least one of the Maldenados could start acting like it.

  Striding down the corridors to the North nexus, Ro forced her mind away from her father and back to the complex AI programming. It was one thing to identify a tiny piece of code and figure out how to tweak it, but to really understand the entirety of it? To figure out how badly dam
aged the ship's brain had been in the crash? Ro's doubts nearly sent her back to Mendez with her resignation in hand.

  But that would leave Ro worse off than before. She squeezed into the crowded nexus, keeping her head down, waiting in line for the airlock.

  "Good morning, Ro. Can I buy you that coffee, now?"

  She glanced up into the smiling face of Micah Rotherwood, botanist, charmer, and aspiring drug distributor. He didn't seem the least bit flustered, nor did he look like she did after a late night of running code. His smooth face tanned from the time he spent under full spectrum plant lights, he reminded her of a younger, blonder, and less seedy version of his father. Even Ro knew enough of Senator Rotherwood's story to steer clear of him. She frowned, wondering if Micah had inherited more than just his good looks. "The coffee's free, and now that I officially work for Daedalus, so are my meals."

  "Trust me, that's less of a bargain than you might think." The woman in line ahead of her turned and smiled. Elegant and slim, she had straight black hair that ended in a razor edge at her chin and warm brown eyes with more than a hint of some Asian ancestry.

  "You're new," Ro said, trying not to think of the number of station personnel she had seen come and go in just the three years she'd been stuck on Daedalus.

  "Konomi Nakamura. Call me Nomi. I'm communications. Night shift." She swallowed a yawn. "Sorry!"

  The woman hardly looked like she'd been working all night, either. Ro glanced down at her usual rumpled clothes. That had to change.

  "I'm heading for dinner. Can I join you?"

  Instead of the polite excuse Ro expected, Micah smiled at Nomi, faint lines crinkling at the sides of his light blue eyes. "Oh, please do," he said. "Micah Rotherwood. Pleasure to meet you."

  Ro had a sudden urge to warn Nomi about him, but didn't know what she would be warning her about. Neither of them were her business, but she stuck out her hand, getting between the two of them anyway. "Ro. Ro Maldonado."

  Nomi turned, her expression thoughtful. "As in Chief Engineer Maldonado?"

  Ro stared her down. "Yes, he's my father, and I got this job because I'm really good at what I do. If you have any questions, ask Mendez." This would get old quickly if she had to justify herself to every station employee.

  "Hey, damp down the signal, Ro," Nomi said, shaking her head. "I wasn't implying anything. Do you think you could get him to look at the sound balance in comms? We're getting an intermittent cut-out at the high frequencies."

  "I'll see what I can do," Ro said, adding it to her own personal list, partly out of guilt, but partly because Nomi's straightforward style was refreshing compared to Micah's manipulative charm.

  "All channels clear, then? Excellent." Nomi's eyes lit up in unfeigned delight as she took Ro's arm. "Come on, I'm starving!"

  She stiffened at the unexpected touch.

  "It's nice to finally find some people to talk to," Nomi said. "It's hell being on nights. I hardly know anyone."

  Ro knew everyone on the station, and it didn't make her any less lonely. "I've been stuck here nearly three years." Three years down, two more to go for her father's contract if she couldn't make good on Mendez's offer. At least this would be the last move she'd ever have to make for him.

  "So why are you here?" Micah asked, slipping between them. "I figure you must know my family's history."

  There weren't too many people in the Hub or beyond who didn't know the scandal involving the former Senator Rotherwood. He'd been indicted for money laundering, embezzlement, fraud, and bribery. While they never proved any of it, Rotherwood was probably responsible for propping up the biggest pyramid scheme in a century. Rumor said the cartel was still pulling his strings. The only reason the senator didn't see the inside of a dark cell was because he used his glib tongue to implicate a bunch of even more important men.

  "You're surprisingly cheerful for the son of a man with death threats chasing him." Ro wondered why he stayed. Surely he could have sued for full citizenship and let his father fend for himself. She would have done so if she could. Better that than find yourself at the wrong end of an assassination attempt.

  Micah shrugged. "It makes life interesting."

  He was impossible to read.

  Nomi laughed. "Much more interesting than my story, I'm afraid."

  They moved through the commissary quickly as the line built up behind them. Nomi had been right about the morning offerings. Not a huge amount of variety, but the food was filling and nutritious enough. She selected some nondescript hot grain equivalent and black coffee. Ro chose the same and smirked, watching Micah purse his lips, shake his head, and dispense just a cup of coffee.

  "Trust me, this isn't what the commander eats," he said.

  Ro raised an eyebrow.

  "It'll do," Nomi said, navigating easily through the now crowded room to an empty table in the corner. "So, Daedalus is my payback."

  "What did you do to deserve us?" Micah asked, laughing.

  Nomi took a sip of coffee and grimaced. "I can put up with almost anything except this." Sighing, she set the cup down and slid it away from her. "Just fulfilling my end of a bargain. My family didn't have the capital to send me to a Hub Uni, so I took a scholarship and signed on to give back one for one in an under-served posting."

  "You agreed to come here for three years?" Ro asked.

  Nomi's lips turned down into a pout. It made her face seem very young. "Four. Advanced degree."

  Micah cocked his head. "Seriously? When did you start at Uni?"

  "Before I turned fifteen."

  "You have full citizenship?" Micah asked.

  Nomi nodded.

  Ro balled her hands into tight fists under the table as Micah whistled. She would have just about killed to get early admission somewhere, but her father had refused to sign her release papers during their last posting. Unless she figured out some way to attend Uni, Ro wouldn't even be eligible to take placement tests until she turned eighteen. And then she needed another two years of work experience to apply for citizenship. All to prove she wouldn't be a drain on society. She relaxed her hands and focused on Mendez's promise.

  "But they didn't warn me about the coffee," Nomi said.

  "I think I can help with that," Micah said.

  "Oh, really?" Nomi's smile lit up her whole face.

  "My father loves his coffee. Has it shuttled in special, direct from the Hub."

  "I suspect your prices are above our pay grades," Ro said, looking at Nomi, trying to convey some kind of warning. What could Micah want from her?

  "You have no idea," he said, laughing. "But not in this case. Besides, I think I owe you, Ro."

  "All in an evening's work," she said. If he only knew what she planned for the ship, he'd figure a way to make her pay him. "Besides, how does giving Nomi coffee help me?"

  "Well, it does if I share it with you," Nomi said, smiling, the light glinting in her eyes.

  Ro felt her face get warm.

  "See? You never know," Micah said, winking. "Just jumping it ahead."

  "Look, I need to get going," Ro said, sliding her chair out. She leaned forward to pile all the dirty dishes onto her tray. When she reached for the half full cup in the center of the table, Nomi touched her lightly this time, just the press of her fingers on the back of Ro's hand. She wanted to curl her blocky fingers with their squared off nails and hide them behind her back.

  "Hey, Ro, no static, yeah?"

  Ro took a deep breath and let her hand relax. "Yeah."

  "Time for bed." Nomi stifled a huge yawn. "See you around, Ro." She turned to Micah. "Nice meeting you."

  "Right back at you," he said. After she left, Micah turned to Ro and took the tray out of her hands. "Communications. Hmm. That could be useful."

  She grabbed the tray back and banged it down by the recycler.

  "What?" he asked, his expression the very pose of innocence.

  "Go back to your little botany project," Ro said, through a tight jaw. And leave me alone, she
thought.

  "Hey, I only meant that it's good to have friends. And now I have one in engineering and one in communications."

  "So I guess your father taught you everything he knows."

  Anger flashed across his face. In a heartbeat, his power charm was back on full display. "No, not everything," he said, his voice light. The smile never reached his eyes.

  Chapter 5

  While she sat in the commissary waiting for the diagnostics to finish running on the medical bay temperature controls, Ro sneaked glances at the stolen schematics. Most of the tables stood empty, and the few station staff that stopped in for a late-afternoon snack ignored her.

  Unwilling to risk using the holographic display, she squinted at the micro, coffee cooling at her side. The ship's design was simple enough that she memorized the basic configuration in a single glance. Its stubby body tapered down to a slim nose at one end and a blunt tail at the other. Two sets of wings, one larger and one smaller, jutted out from the sides in what was supposed to look like a dragonfly, but had been nicknamed the bumblebee almost from the beginning.

  Her father's handwritten notes interested her even more than the design of the old transport ship. Tapping the engine compartment to enlarge it, she pondered his design mods, wondering if these were plans or completed work. There was only one way to find out.

  The diagnostic finished running with a satisfied beep. At least the Durbins wouldn't be able to complain about being too cold or too hot or too whatever in medical. She logged herself as working/unavailable/emergencies only and headed to the ship, a utility cart loaded with tools and supplies following behind her.

  She tapped her micro. "Locate Rotherwood, Micah."

  Daedalus's slightly nasal, bored voice responded. She guessed he figured he wouldn't be here long enough for him to personalize his message. "Habitation ring, 37/Beta."

  That left her free to explore without his interference. She wound her way through the station proper, into the older, temporary corridors, and through the airlock into the ship.