by Lj Cohen
***
Barre paced the small area between the command console and the forward display. He was as useless here as he was on Daedalus or Hadria. Or any of the other postings their parents had dragged them through. He glanced down at his brother's face, gray in the harsh light, and wanted to punch something.
Ro hadn't looked up from her micro since Micah had gone. It would be convenient if he could blame this all on her, but it wasn't Ro's fault he was on the ship. It wasn't even Jem's. Barre had let his brother talk him into this. He could have refused, stood his ground with his parents.
He looked up and studied the unfamiliar star pattern on the display. If they died out here, at least he'd still be himself, with a head full of music. He drummed his fingers lightly against the console, enjoying the hard resonance of the room. It reminded him of the piece he was working on and he triggered his neural link to the micro stowed in his pocket.
Tuning out the drifting ship, he let the song sweep though his body, controlling the micro with directed pulses of different rhythms. It was something he'd figured out on his own, even if he wasn't as brilliant as Jem. Back on Daedalus, he could even use his micro and the neural to tune the environmentals of his room.
The lighting here was all wrong. It burned into the song, introducing discordant notes. Lost in the music, he reached out to dial down the brightness, his shoulders dropping and his jaw relaxing as the whole room softened.
The demands of his body fell away, too. Barre knew they would need to find food and water, but for now, the music was all he needed. It was all he'd ever needed.
***
Ro stared at her micro, waiting for news from Micah, and tried to ignore the throbbing in her ankle. The makeshift splint Jem had made helped, but she could feel the swollen flesh pressing against the bandages. She watched the breath rise and fall in his chest. How could he be so brilliant and his brother so ordinary?
She glanced at Barre, his long dreads swaying in time to music only he could hear. At least he was out of the way. The micro beeped and she shifted her attention back to what she hoped would be good news from Micah. The lights in the bridge dimmed. Gripping the micro in one hand, she levered herself up to standing with the other, pulling on the command console and blinked up at the lights. That shouldn't happen. The AI had been disabled and only she had access to the autonomics through her micro.
Ro accessed her session of Jem's interface program. If the AI had woken up again, there was no predicting what it might do. She scanned the status. Environmental systems were all online, unchanged, with no sign of the SIREN code running. "This doesn't make any sense," she said, blinking up at the lights.
The door slid open. Micah wrestled a large box onto the bridge. "Nice of someone to come and help me."
"What?" Ro turned to him. "Sorry. What do you have?"
"Battlefield med-kits and rations. Enough for a small strike force. Should last us months." He shrugged. "My father never does things by half-measures."
Barre headed over to where Micah stood and took the box. "I've seen these before," he said. "Not fancy, but they'll do the job."
"You're welcome," Micah said.
"Yeah. Thanks." Barre had already set the box down next to his brother and was rifling through it. "Antibiotics and suture glue. You can fix almost anything with this stuff."
"What's our water situation?" Ro asked. The ration bars tasted like asteroid dust and had a texture to match, but they would keep them going. The battlefield ones even had a jolt of caffeine added.
"I don't know about the ship's recycling plant, but we have plenty of water in my lab." Micah shrugged before she could say anything. "We need it more than the plants do."
"I need some clean water to flush Jem's wound."
Maybe Barre wasn't as useless as Ro figured. "Anything in there to stabilize my ankle?"
"Cast tape. Here." He tossed a roll to her. She had to set her micro down to catch it.
"Great. Thanks," she said, glaring at him. "A little help here?"
Barre stared her down. "Water, Jem, and then you. It's called triage."
Her cheeks burned and she looked down at her hands.
"Water. I'm on it," Micah said as he slipped from the bridge.
Ro watched him leave, her eyebrows crinkling together. Micah was barely recognizable without a snarky comment, push back, or an argument. She slid back to the floor near Jem. "Anything I can do to help?" she asked. Like anyone on a space station, she'd done her basic emergency training, but it was nowhere near what the Durbins must have taught their sons.
Barre knelt by his brother, completely ignoring her. "This is probably going to hurt."
"You couldn't lie?" Jem said, his lips crooking into a small smile.
"Do Mom or Dad ever?"
"No."
Ro strained to hear Jem's soft voice and then looked away, feeling like she was eavesdropping on something she had no right to know.
Barre snapped on the sterile gloves from the med-kit and leaned over Jem's head. "Good thing you don't keep dreads like me."
Ro winced as Barre pressed down on Jem's skull. A small trickle of new blood traveled down his forehead.
"Hang on, I need more light."
"I'll see what I can do," Ro said, grabbing for her micro. Before she could access the environmental subroutines, Barre looked up and away, his eyes unfocused. The lights brightened so slowly, she initially thought she'd imagined it.
Barre turned back to Jem. "That's better."
"Wait." Ro frowned, looking from her quiet micro to the lights and back again. "Wait. You did that. How the hell did you do that?"
"What? The lights?"
"Yes! The lights!" If she could, she would have taken him by his shirt and shaken him. "How did you … if you'd triggered the AI …" Fear burned a cold wave through her chest. He could have gotten them all killed, just like she'd almost done. Ro swallowed hard.
"My neural." Barre turned back to Jem as if it was that simple.
All the warmth drained out of her face. "You can directly talk with the ship?" Maybe she needed both brothers, after all.
"Not talk. Not exactly. Not in words."
Now she definitely wanted to shake him.
"You can do that with your music?" Jem asked. "Wow. That's, that's seismic!"
"I guess." Barre busied himself lining up the supplies he needed to close up Jem's head wound. "How many fingers?"
Ro placed her hand on his arm. "I need you to tell me exactly what you did," she said, slowly, and carefully.
He shook her off. "Not part of the triage."
The door opened and Micah walked in with two containers of water and a roll of some thin, translucent fabric. Ro sat back and watched Barre take care of his brother. He carefully flushed the wound and patted it dry with sterile gauze. Antibiotics were next, then fresh gauze to protect it. He wound a strip of the fabric Micah brought around Jem's head to keep the bandages in place. Barre had precise hands — the hands of a surgeon or a musician.
And the mind that guided those hands — that mind could control the ship's computer without triggering the defense mechanisms that Ro had tripped. She would have time to be jealous of him and ashamed of her assumptions later.
"Is some of that water for drinking?" Barre asked.
"Yes," Micah said. "We won't have to ration for some time."
"Good. Give Jem small sips until he's finished about a half liter."
Micah raised one eyebrow at Ro and she shrugged. Barre knew more about medical than the two of them put together. If he wanted to give them orders, she figured he was entitled.
He turned back to his brother as Micah came over with the water. "Stick out your tongue."
"Barre, no. I need to stay awake. What if Ro needs my help?"
"What we need is a real scanner, a full sick bay, and a cold suit. What we have is me and the sedative I'm going to force into you if you don't open your mouth."
"You're just like her, you know. It's why
you two always fight."
"Shut up and stick out your tongue." When Jem had swallowed the tablet, Barre dragged over a med kit to Ro. "Your turn. Jem did a decent job with what he had, but this will be better."
"How long will he be out?"
"His brain needs to rest," Barre said, shrugging. "If he's lucky, it's only a concussion."
A chill walked up and down Ro's spine. "And if he's not?"
He held her gaze with his dark, intense eyes. "Can you get us back?"
Ro glanced back at Jem and Micah and then up at the unfamiliar star field. She swallowed the reassuring lie she knew he wanted, the answer even she wanted to believe and found, instead, the uncomfortable truth. "I don't know."
Nodding, he turned his steady hands to her broken ankle. Gone was the kid who would rather disappear in his own head than talk to you. Now, he had his mother's confidence and some of her arrogance, too.
He was gentle, at least, as he unwrapped Jem's temporary splint. Free from its constraint, her ankle throbbed in time with her pulse, each beat bringing a fresh wave of pain. Ro winced. The bottom third of her lower leg was mottled purple and swollen. "Without a scanner, I can't tell you anything specific about the break." He ran his hands up and down her leg. Ro bit her lip to keep from crying out. "I don't think it's displaced, but it's definitely broken."
"I already figured that part out, Doc."
He frowned at her. "Don't call me that."
"Can you stabilize it? Enough so I can walk?"
"It's better if you don't."
"Not one of the choices we have."
"You're risking permanent damage." Barre shrugged. "But it's your choice. The cast tape has time-release anesthetic woven in to the fabric. It's meant to keep soldiers going after battlefield injuries. Should work for your ankle."
"Good." The sooner she could get moving, the sooner she could troubleshoot the AI without the pain distracting her. The sooner she could figure out just what Barre could do that she couldn't.
"You think? Not if you want the bone to knit."
"Not at the top of my priority list. Just wrap me up."
"Aye, aye, Captain."
"Don't call me that," Ro whispered, as he unrolled the bandage and shook it in the air to activate it. If he heard her, he didn't react. The wrap went on her leg cool. She gasped and stiffened as Barre coiled it around her ankle in repeated figures of eight, but within moments, a warm numbness spread upward. Her tense muscles relaxed as the pain retreated.
"You need to give the cast wrap a few minutes to harden completely. Then you should be able to bear weight."
"Excellent."
"Pain is not your enemy, Ro. If you don't feel it, you're likely to add to the damage. And as far as the fracture is concerned, too much stress will just delay true healing."
All true and all irrelevant if she couldn't get them home. "I appreciate your concern."
"But you're going to do what you want anyway."
So they understood one another. "Pretty much."
"Jem's asleep. Now what?" Micah set the water container aside and stood up.
Ro exhaled as her ankle faded from her awareness. "The essentials. Food. Water. Assess the ship's systems so we know what we have to work with."
"And how does finding out where we are and calling for help fit in?" Barre asked.
"This is my version of triage. Can you leave Jem?"
He glanced over at his brother and chewed his lower lip before turning back and nodding.
"Good. I need you to find our other drone. It's somewhere on the ship and having both will make life easier. Micah — go figure out if we have working heads and water reclamation." If not, they would have to set up a field latrine.
"And you?" Micah asked.
"Me?" Ro pulled herself upright and set her foot down carefully before letting her weight settle. As Barre promised, there was no pain, only a distant sense of pressure and a kind of spongy emptiness that just felt wrong. "I'm going to see how much I can link to without waking our homicidal AI." She stared at Barre until he looked away. "And when you get back with that drone, you and I are having a talk, music-boy."
Micah and Barre left without another word and Ro wondered how long that would last. She hobbled over to the little utility robot in the far corner of the bridge and put it up on a console. At least this was something she knew she could fix. Its primitive programming capabilities meant it had serious limitations in autonomy, but it also meant very little could go wrong. She paired her micro with it and quickly turned off discoverability. Unfortunately, that meant she couldn't just use it to find its companion, but that was a small price to pay against the possibility of it pinging the ship's AI.
But maybe she could use the drones in another way. Back on Daedalus, they formed a network that functioned as the arms and legs of the station's AI. Each individual drone only had a small broadcasting signal, but linked, they were able to cover the whole station. She only had two. But she also had four micros and maybe, just maybe a way to get them all to play nicely with the ship's communications array. At least long enough to get a fix on the nearest ansible and send out a distress call.
Chapter 23
Barre wasn't sure what he expected when he handed Ro the drone, but her disinterested grunt as she set it aside wasn't it. Her long hair shading her face, she barely looked up from tapping on her micro with one hand and tweaking something on the first drone with her other. He watched her coordinate her two hands in different rhythms for a few minutes. She'd have made a hell of a drummer.
The door slid open and Micah stepped onto the bridge, mimicking his father's confident stride. This was the most time Barre had spent with him since he showed up on Daedalus. He wondered how else Micah was like the infamous senator.
"We have functioning heads. As far as the reclamation, it should work." Micah shrugged. "But these types of systems were notoriously inefficient, and the ship is close to forty years old."
Ro didn't respond, didn't even move when Micah walked up to her.
"So, what other busy work do you have for us?" he asked, his voice light, but his gaze locked on her with a laser's focus.
She glanced up at the two of them as if surprised to see them there. "You." She pointed at Barre. "Don't go anywhere."
He glanced down at his sleeping brother. "Yeah. No problem." Jem's color still wasn't great, but at least there was no fresh blood on the bandages. That had to be a good sign.
Ro reached for the second drone.
"Care to let us mere mortals know what you're doing?" Micah asked.
She blinked up at him, not seeming to register the sarcasm. "I need your micros. All of them. Even Jem's."
All Barre's music lived on the small device. Everything he'd collected across planets and systems and cultures and all the pieces he'd composed. "Why?"
Slapping the cover back on the second drone she sighed. "Setting up an ad hoc."
"Um, what?"
Ro pushed the hair back from her face. At this point, Jem would have been rolling his eyes.
"I'm using all the transmitting power in the drones and the micros to link up directly with the ship's comm array. With a strong enough signal, we can trigger the antenna's repeater function."
"That's assuming someone's listening for us," Barre said. A pang of unfamiliar guilt hit him. Their parents would be insane with worry and they would probably blame him. He curled his hands into fists.
She fixed him with a steely look. "A ship abandoned for forty years breaks free of a space station with four kids on board. You don't think they'll be listening for us?"
"And what if the wrong people hear us?" Micah asked, his gaze fixed on Ro.
"What choice do we have?" she answered.
Barre glanced from Ro to Micah, frowning. What were they talking about?
Micah handed over his micro and Jem's. Barre dragged his out of a deep pocket. Ro had no idea what she was asking. Barre gripped the small machine tightly. She held out her hand.<
br />
"Fine," he said. "Do you need me to unlock it?"
She blinked up at him. "Oh, sure, that'd be easier."
Easier than what? He drew his pass-code across the screen and toggled it open. "Will it work?" he asked, finally passing it to her.
"It should."
"Like the AI was supposed to work?" Micah said.
Ro winced. "Doing my best, here."
"Fine. If we're going to do this thing, is there anything I can do to help?"
"No. But he can." Again Ro pointed at Barre.
"I'm thinking you want the other Durbin kid." Jem still slept, but fitfully, his eyes shifting rapidly beneath his thin lids, as if he knew they were talking about him.
"You're the one who can sing to the ship, right?"
"Not quite," Barre said.
"You accessed the computer and it didn't freak out. Before I send out this pulse, I need you to do it again." Her green eyes didn't blink as she stared up at him. "Whatever I did triggered the ship's defenses. I don't know about you, but I like air and I like breathing it. If your music can keep the AI happy, we might just live through this."
"You've got to be kidding," Micah said.
Barre drew his eyebrows together. "No, it makes a kind of strange sense. You said the SIREN code was broken. It's like the AI has brain damage. And neuroscientists have known for a long time that alternative inputs can help organize motor outputs in brain diseases. Before the diaspora, on Earth they used to use music to get patients with Parkinson's moving."
The two of them stared at him and Barre fought the urge to turn away.
"Parents. Doctors. Remember?" After a burst of excitement, anger and resentment burned through him. Why were they so surprised? "I may not be a genius like Jem, but I'm not an idiot."
Ro hobbled over to him and placed her hands on his shoulders. "Hey, I never said that."
He shook her off. "You didn't have to."
She looked away.
"Sorry, I —" Micah started.
"Don't sweat it," Barre said. It wasn't like he didn't get the same shit from everyone, once they met his parents and his brother. He gathered his loose dreads in a tail and tied two of the outer lengths around them. "What do you need me to do?"
