by Lj Cohen
"Ensign Nakamura, report."
Nomi shivered at the unexpected harshness and at the use of her rank. Nominally, anyone placed through the Commonwealth of Planets belonged to the reserve force, but there hadn't been any active fighting since the war forty years ago and the commissions were just a formality.
She stood at attention about halfway down the long side of the large rectangular conference table, studying the assembly of senior staff, gathering her thoughts. Most of the hyper-alert station personnel sat upright around the table, most probably woken from their rest cycles and looking bleary-eyed and a little shell-shocked. Nomi's gaze was drawn to a formally dressed, distinguished looking blond man leaning back a little too casually in his chair.
What was Senator Rotherwood doing here?
"Ensign?"
Nomi cleared her throat. "Commander, I believe Rosalen Maldonado was aboard that ship when it broke free of Daedalus Station."
Rotherwood stirred, his bloodshot eyes suddenly laser focused on her. Mendez leaned forward, but otherwise gave no sign that this was or wasn't news. Nomi swallowed, deciding to ignore the senator for now.
"She informed me that she was tracking down some unusual power fluctuations coming from the derelict. I have been unable to raise her on comms, sir."
Mendez raised an eyebrow. "Was this before or after I ordered emergency communications only?"
Nomi forced herself to stand still. "Before, sir. We were speaking during my break." It wasn't exactly the full truth, but close enough for Mendez, she hoped.
"Daedalus — priority override. Locate Maldonado, Rosalen."
"Habitation Ring 21/Beta." Nomi jerked toward the speaker at the sound of Ro's impossible voice.
"Open a channel to the Maldonado residence."
The bland mechanized voice of the AI answered crisply. "Channel open."
"Maldonado, report!"
Silence rang in the room.
"Contact Maldonado, Alain."
A loud clang followed by a string of curses filled the room. "Whoever the hell you are, your problem isn't any more important than anyone else's. Get in line."
Several of the staff winced or shot curious glances at the commander. Her expression didn't change. "Chief Engineer," Mendez's voice rang out with easy authority. "When is the last time you saw your daughter?"
"Yesterday. Maldonado out."
Mendez tapped one finger on the desk. "Dispatch a security team to 21/Beta. Search the premises."
Nomi sighed. Mendez swiveled to stare at her. So did the rest of the senior staff and the senator. She stood up straighter. "I don't know why Daedalus pings her there. We were speaking …" Nomi glanced up at the time display, shocked at how slow the minutes had passed. "We were speaking just a quarter hour ago. She was on board at the time. Just before the incident, I heard the sound of engines."
The senator sat up and smoothed his already immaculate shirt front. "I suggest we dispense with these formalities and send one of these fine officers after that ship."
Mendez stared him down with a look that could have melted permafrost. "And how would you suggest we track it down without a working comm array?" She turned to Nomi. "How long until it's functional?"
That was a question she could answer. "Once the external repair is done, the diagnostics and calibration can take two to three hours."
"In two to three hours, the ship could be anywhere!" Rotherwood stood and glared at her, his face bright red.
Nomi took a startled step away from the table. Was he here because of Micah? She chewed her lower lip wondering if she should say anything about what she heard on the ship. Did he even know his son was growing bittergreen? Did it matter?
"Commander, I am holding you personally responsible for the return — for the safety of my son."
What? Micah was aboard too?
"Ensign."
She swiveled around, relieved to face the stern Mendez. "Commander?"
"You have thirty minutes. Take what staff you need. I want to know the instant we have long range capability."
The senator stormed from the room. Nomi let out her breath. "Yes, Commander." Her voice came out in a high squeak. How in the cosmos was she going to get the comms up and running in half an hour?
***
Ro leaned on the console, stared up at Micah, and tried not to wince at the pain shooting up her leg when she put weight down on her foot. "Maybe if you would shut up, I could figure out what happened." She pointed at the senator's pretty-boy son. "Hand me my micro."
"I got it," Jem said, leaning over to pick up the small computer. The color leeched out of his face as he handed it to her, the dark skin turning ashy gray. He blinked slowly and pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead.
"Get him on the floor before he passes out," Ro ordered, glancing over at both Micah and Barre.
"I'm okay." Jem squinted up at the view-screen. "Let me help you."
Barre glared at Ro before stepping over to his brother. It wasn't her fault Jem was here. She clenched her teeth. None of them were supposed to be here. And none of this was supposed to happen. Ro sat down on an intact chair and tried to ignore the sound of Jem and Barre arguing.
"Where in the Hub are we?" Micah asked. He stood just inside the bridge, staring at the display, his blue eyes wide and unblinking.
Well, that was the problem. They weren't in the Hub or anywhere she recognized. "Working on it." At least the burn had stopped. If she could pair her micro with the ship's AI, maybe she could figure out their flight path or find some point of congruity with the star charts. If the AI would even respond.
She set the micro down on the console, triggering its holo display.
"Wait. Stop," Barre said.
Ro looked over at him. He'd gotten Jem to lie down with his legs propped up on some wreckage. At least a little color had flooded back into his face. She leaned into the console, feeling for the slight vibration of the ship. It shouldn't have happened. Even fully flight worthy, the ship should have stayed dormant without a specific launch command. ""Look, we're still moving and every second we're getting further from Daedalus. I can't get us back until I know where we are. I can't even call for help until I can map us to the ansible network."
"I know that. I'm not stupid. But do you even know what the hell you're doing?"
"No," she whispered, closing her eyes briefly.
"Yes," Jem said, nearly simultaneously.
"So how'd you do it?" Micah asked.
"I didn't." Her diagnostics shouldn't have caused the ship to take off. Hell, without a fully functioning and responsive AI, the ship shouldn't have been able to take off. "I was working on the autonomic systems, tracking down a problem with the environmentals." She shrugged. "You know the rest."
Jem winced. "Would it have been something in my interface code?"
"No." Everything started to go to shit when she tried to use voice commands. But she'd been over every line of his code. Clean, elegant, it should have worked. That left her programming. But it checked out in every sim she ran and she'd been using her own diagnostics for years, so that couldn't have been it. None of what Ro did should have done anything but repair the damaged AI. And the AI shouldn't have torn the ship loose from Daedalus.
But here they were. She raised her hands again to the display.
"What if you're wrong?" Micah asked.
She looked around the broken bridge and at Jem, still pale and shaken. "It's not like we have much of a choice. The only way out of this is to figure out what happened to the AI. Unless you have a better idea."
"My brother needs help. We have to get him back to Daedalus."
"Well then, you can all just shut up and let me do my work." She turned her back on them and focused on her micro, holding her breath as it paired to the autonomics. The normal low hum of a ship skimming through interstitial space didn't change. The lights didn't so much as flicker. Ro exhaled in relief. Dying of acute depressurization and vacuum wouldn't be pleasant.
This is why she preferred working alone. "Just before the ship took off, I started a diagnostic on the AI repair in progress."
"And what, you just pushed the wrong button?"
Ro ignored Micah. "The compare routine encapsulates the program in safe mode. Even if something went wrong with my tool set, the AI was protected and so were we." If they hadn't skipped across a wormhole, they couldn't be all that far from Daedalus station. It would just be a matter of dimensional mapping.
"So why are we here?"
"If anyone can figure that out, it's Ro," Jem said. "How about you get out of her way?"
Ro flashed a grateful smile Jem's way, though she felt more than a little guilty about his support after their earlier fight. None of that mattered now. Focusing on her micro, she tuned out the three of them and got to work.
Programming had always been a game to Ro. Even when she hacked into Barre's medical records, it had been a challenge as much as anything, but this was different. They could die out here. She couldn't help a quick glance back at Jem. He could die out here.
Doing nothing wasn't an option. Ro raised her hands and started with the autonomic systems. Readouts popped up for life support and basic systems: Atmosphere and pressure checked out Earth normal. Hull integrity stable. Propulsion steady at twenty percent standard. Holding her breath, Ro waited to see if anything changed. So far, so good.
She looked up at the external display, studying the blur of unfamiliar starlight. Frowning, she glanced back at Micah, Barre, and Jem before triggering her diagnostic. She hoped none of them were close enough to see her shaking hands.
As she listened for any change in engine vibration, two familiar windows stretched up in front of her, data scrolling as fast as she could scan. The bridge lighting remained steady. The ship's vibration didn't change. She wished that made her feel better.
Minimizing the live windows, she called up the program's first-pass analysis. With all the time in the world, she would study the raw code line by line, but they didn't have time.
"So what's the bad news?"
Ro swiveled around in the seat. Barre stood behind her looking up at the display.
"How about the good news first?" she asked.
He shrugged.
"The AI is functioning."
"We knew that, genius," Micah said from across the bridge, his arms folded across his chest.
Ro ignored him and focused on Barre. "It didn't freak out when I accessed the diagnostic."
"What's the bad news?" Jem's voice echoed his brother's.
Ro glanced over at him, wincing at the bruise spreading over his forehead. "There's definitely damage. I'm not sure how much or how bad. If I can get the AI to respond to direct commands, I might be able to figure it out." If the damage was distributed widely across the AI, chances were good that redundant systems would fill in for the missing functions. If the dead sectors clumped together in one critical area, say navigation, they could be seriously screwed.
"Or you could blow us all up or send us into the gravity well of a planet," Micah said.
"Lay off her. This isn't Ro's fault," Jem said, struggling to sit up.
Barre crossed back to his brother and pressed his hand on his chest, pushing him back to the floor. "Don't be stupid, Jem."
"The hell it's not," Micah said, ignoring Jem and Barre, picking his way over neat piles of wreckage to stand between Ro and the console, staring down at her, his blue eyes cold. "I told you your father was manipulating you. I warned you, and you still had to hack in to what you didn't understand."
Ro's face flushed. She sent her display spinning towards Micah. He shifted back a few steps. "Since you apparently know everything, Rotherwood, how about you get us back home."
"Cut it out. Let me up. I can help." Jem pushed against Barre's hold.
"You have a concussion, dumb ass. You want to make things worse?"
"That's enough," Ro shouted, struggling to her feet. "You." She pointed at Jem. "Lie still." Using the console as a crutch, she limped up to Micah, her ankle screaming with every step. "Here." She pushed the transparent window right up against his face. "You want to give it a try? Go right ahead."
His face paled and he shook his head.
"Fine. Then we can all stand around and wait for the air to run out. Or the ship to skip across an unmapped wormhole. Or we could just starve. I don't know about you, but I'd like to keep living."
"Ro?" Jem's small voice pierced the silence that fell after she stopped talking.
"What?" she snapped, not taking her eyes off Micah.
"Do you feel that?"
She didn't feel anything. "Shit." The soft whine of the engines had fallen silent. The faint stir of air died away. As she stared up at the programming window, its glow seemed to brighten until it was the only source of light on the bridge. "Shit," she said again, a whisper against the eerie quiet.
A red light blinked through the room. "Intruder alert, bridge. Security protocol alpha." The computer had a pleasant female voice with the same brief hesitation between phonemes as Daedalus.
"Guess they haven't made a whole lot of progress in voice synth in the past forty years."
"Ro, I think we're in trouble," Jem said, his voice wavering.
"Intruder alert, bridge. Security protocol alpha," the bland artificial voice repeated.
"Congratulations," Micah said. "You brought the AI back from the dead and it wants to kill us."
Chapter 21
"Ro?" From his spot on the floor, Jem struggled to be heard over his brother's and Micah's raised voices.
Micah slammed his hand on the main console and Jem jerked in surprise. His head hit the floor sending a fresh wave of pain into his eyes. He squeezed them shut. He had to concentrate. The AI had fallen silent, though the red emergency lights continued to blink in an extremely annoying and totally random pattern that by design was impossible to shut out and ignore even through Jem's closed lids.
It didn't do good things to his headache.
Micah and Barre both turned on Ro like a pair of well synchronized drones and continued yelling. She crossed her arms and stood her ground, refusing to say a word. Jem fought to clear his foggy brain and think. They had to get access to the AI's core, somehow, and before they ran out of air.
He took a larger breath and tried again. "Ro!"
Micah paused, mid-rant and turned to Jem. "What?"
Barre shut his mouth with an audible click and scurried over to him. "You okay? What's wrong?"
"Other than the fact that you're giving me a headache, the ship is drifting in space, and we have no life-support?" Jem's head pounded louder in the silence. He'd lived in ships or stations practically his whole life and the soft whoosh of an air handler was a familiar and ignored sound. Now his ears rang in the strange stillness. Barre looked on the verge of another outburst. "Stop it. We don't have time for this. Help me up."
"Jem, you're still bleeding," Ro said, glaring at Barre and Micah as she hobbled past the two of them to sit next to him.
"And Ro's foot's still broken. None of which is going to matter …" Micah paused to glance at his micro. "In about an hour. More or less."
"Less," Ro said, wincing.
Barre glanced at Jem, his wordless question clear. Jem nodded. "Well that's just great," Barre said.
Jem ignored his brother and the seething Micah.
"I'm sorry." Ro laid her hand on his shoulder. "I should have been more up front with you. I just …" Her head drooped practically to her chest. Her hair slid forward to cover her face. "Micah's right. It doesn't matter now."
"Ro!"
She flinched, but didn't lift her head.
"Look, I have an idea, but I can't do it myself."
This time Ro did look up, her eyes red-rimmed, her gaze unfocused.
"We need to pair our micros." Jem wasn't sure how much the damaged AI could parse from their conversation, but the less it heard, the be
tter.
He pushed Ro's hand away and glared at his brother before sitting up against one of the consoles. His stomach flipped as if he were in free-fall, and the bridge spun wildly around him.
"Jem," Barre said, his tone eerily like his mother, "you have pretty bad nystagmus."
"Yeah, and I should be in the infirmary. Tell me something I don't know." Keeping his vision focused on anything was going to be hell. He pointed to his micro and held out his hand. Barre frowned and handed it to him. "Micah. Make yourself useful," Jem said, jutting his chin towards the console Ro had been working on.
Micah tossed him an ugly look, but threw Ro her micro.
She caught it and flipped it over and over between her hands, staring across the bridge.
"This is not a good time to decide your father was right," Jem said.
Ro whipped her head around to glare at him, her eyes narrow, her lips thin and bloodless, her hands clawed around her micro.
He held her gaze, refusing to back down, even through the nausea and the tendency of the room to spin. It hadn't been very long, but Jem could already taste the flatness in the air. If he thought about it, he could probably even calculate exactly how much time it would take before the O2 pressure dropped sufficiently to render them all unconscious. He went over the variables: four bodies, small, sealed compartment, fixed air volume. They wouldn't have long.
Work with me, Ro, he begged, wordlessly.
She broke eye contact first and Jem let his shoulders relax and his eyes close briefly. He still felt as if he were spinning, a planet of one, orbiting his own misery. Even if they did regain control over the environmentals, they still had to get back to Daedalus Station. The dizziness and the nystagmus were bad signs. But where a brain bleed might eventually kill him, lack of air would definitely kill them all.
"Okay," Ro said, her voice curiously flat in the dead air. "I'm ready."
Jem brought his micro up close to his face trying not to have to move his head. Tapping in commands one-handed would be slow, but using the holo interface would probably make him hurl. He turned off discoverability, set it to paranoid mode, and opened a private peer-to-peer link with Ro's micro, trusting that she'd figure out what he was doing without any explanation.
