Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1

by Lj Cohen

  "Well, you'd better figure it out. You may be the only one who can," Micah said. "I'd like to live past the next six minutes."

  Had he only been lost in the symphony for a minute? "I think — I think the AI just figured out a whole language based on my musical interface."

  Ro looked down at her micro. "I can't access anything, now."

  "So, what's it saying?" Micah asked. He appeared as calm as ever, his expression giving little away. But Barre could see past the polished look at the tension rippling in Micah's jaw and in the tightness of his shoulders.

  "It was too much." Even the memory of the music sent waves of vertigo through him. He leaned onto a console, waiting for his head to clear.

  "The clock is ticking and we're sitting ducks out here."

  "Barre, you have to try," Ro said.

  His heart started to pound again, a metronome set to too high a speed. "You don't understand. It's too much. All in my head. I can't. I can't."

  "Time to engagement, T minus five minutes."

  "Please." Ro looked up at him, her eyes a too-bright green, before glancing down at Jem.

  What would his genius little brother do? He certainly wouldn't curl up in the corner and whine. Barre looked around the bridge, avoiding eye contact with Ro or Micah. What would Jem do? Ro's weird pile of electronics lay on the floor, his micro part of the circle.

  With a simple thought, he paired his neural with the tiny computer and set it to external speaker. Triggering playback mode, he pushed the ship's music through it, blasting the bridge.

  Outside the resonance of his own skull, the music was still as strange and as alien, but not as overwhelming. Barre could listen without being swept away in a tide of incomprehensible emotion. The AI had taken elements from every sound the ship could make and created scales that didn't exist in any musical idiom Barre had ever studied. It had its own odd beauty.

  "What the hell does it mean?" Micah said, wincing, his hands clasped over his ears.

  Even Ro looked vaguely ill, her face taking on a greenish cast in the red lights. Barre turned the volume down, but kept his focus on the music. Even though it had seemed to last forever in his head, it was just a few lines, repeated over and over with just slight variations. If the ship learned everything it knew about music from him, then there had to be some kind of meaning in it.

  "Engagement in T minus four minutes."

  "I know, I know," he said. "Tell me something useful, damn it."

  Ro placed her hand on his arm. The warmth startled him, as did the concern in her normally icy gaze. "You said the AI took your musical commands and created its own language."

  Barre nodded.

  "Then listen and tell us if you recognize anything."

  "It's not that easy."

  "I know. But you have to try."

  Barre set the music to loop slowly. It distorted the sound, making it even less melodic and more eerie. How was he going to make sense of this? Something was coming at them. Given his luck, it wouldn't be a convenient rescue ship. He didn't much care about what happened to him. It wasn't like he had a whole lot waiting for him back on Daedalus, but he owed it to Jem.

  He sunk to the floor, sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, focusing not on the individual noises the AI co-opted for notes, but on the phrases, the pauses, the way the music made him feel. That's how he always interacted with new music and this was the newest of the new.

  The distractions of the emergency lights and Ro and Micah's fear kept pulling him away. Barre took a deep breath and shut off the external speaker. The only way to do this would be to let the music fill him up again, hoping he could ride the wave this time instead of drown.

  The concerns of the derelict ship and their possibly unwelcome company faded. But before he could trigger the recording, new melodies spilled into him. He held his breath, straining to listen with his whole body. Woven into the barrage of sound, something seemed familiar. He traced the line of a descant, high, wordless, yet filled with defiance and despair. Barre recognized the emotions he had poured into his last composition. "Yes, yes." He smiled and played the refrain back to the AI.

  It echoed back to him, distorted, but unmistakable, with a new refrain added. This one made his arms break out in goose bumps. He understood the sound of fear and composed a flute solo in his head, a thin wail. The computer added the line to its composition. Anger. Desperation. Fear.

  A melody that he always thought of as the sound of Daedalus Station flitted through his mind. He played it for the AI, hoping it meant "home." The music fell silent. His heart beat a wild rhythm.

  Barre was no programming genius like Jem or Ro. It wasn't like he could wrest control of the ship from its damaged computer. All he could do was play. He played his fear for his brother and Ro's reckless competence. He didn't know Micah well enough to add him to the mix, but he figured that wouldn't matter. It would have to be enough.

  For himself, he repeated the main melody from his own score. I'm like you. I'm broken, but I want to survive.

  "Please."

  ***

  "I'm in!" Ro shouted, as her micro displayed a schematic of the ship's ansible controls.

  "Engagement in T minus three minutes."

  "Yeah, yeah, I know," she muttered to herself, frantically accessing the unfamiliar interface. "Who the hell are you?" Every ansible had a unique designation. If it tried to hail them, there should be some sort of electronic fingerprint. No fingerprint meant no registration, which meant nothing good for them. A drifting craft would be fair salvage, with or without people on board. Unless they could get it under control, they would be at the mercy of anyone who stumbled across them.

  A legitimate salver might consider them crew instead of cargo, but a legitimate salver would have hailed them and identified themselves. She scrolled through the comm logs, frantically looking for anything that would look like a signal. The tiny blip was so small, she nearly missed it against the background cosmic noise. She isolated it, blew it up, and ran it through an interpreter.

  "Come on, come on, tell us who the hell you are."

  A small speaker crackled to life, startling a squeak out of Ro.

  "Transport three two seven, this is the Commonwealth vessel Hephaestus. Acknowledge."

  This was military, not a salver, or worse a marauding chop shop. With any luck, they would be back on Daedalus inside of a few hours. She wrote a quick program to send an auto-reply with their identification, but before she could transmit, a packet of music drowned out the recorded comm message and nearly burst Ro's eardrums.

  "Warning: Emergency burn in ten seconds."

  Her micro screen blanked out. "What? Barre? What the hell is it doing?"

  "Ten"

  "I have no idea, but I'd hold on if I were you!"

  "Nine."

  "Can you stop it?"

  "Eight."

  "I don't know."

  "Seven."

  "Shit," Micah said, and stretched out flat on the bunk padding.

  "Six."

  "It's not listening to me," Barre said, looking over at Jem.

  "Five."

  "Shit. Get low," Ro warned, scrambling for her own cushion.

  "Four."

  "Three."

  The AIs voice continued its implacable countdown.

  "Two."

  "One."

  The giant hand that pressed down on Ro was no gentler than when the ship first blasted free of Daedalus. But at least now, she was ready for it. The massively increased weight of her body seemed to crush her spine into the bridge floor as if the old, worn cushions were only a molecule thick. All the air squeezed out of her lungs and Ro struggled to breathe, wondering where they would end up or if any of them would survive.

  Chapter 26

  Nomi dressed quickly and left her too-empty quarters in search of coffee. Was it yesterday she and Ro were supposed to meet for breakfast? At least it was well before shift change and, other than the mess hall chef, the room was empty. He hande
d her a hot cup. Nomi took it, grateful she didn't have to speak to anyone. She slumped into the chair nearest the door and took a sip, grimacing at the bitterness. Micah never did get her that coffee he promised.

  Did he know that his father and Ro's had their own interest in the ship?

  Her micro buzzed. "Nakamura, report to the commander." It was a relief to have something to do with the worry that spun through her odd, restless dreams last night. Leaving the still steaming coffee, Nomi sprinted across the quiet station to command.

  Silent guards let her into Mendez's office. An unfamiliar man sat in the chair the senator had occupied yesterday. She looked up at Mendez, trying not to let her confusion show. The commander had clearly not slept well either, given her rumpled uniform and the dark smudges beneath her eyes.

  "Sir!" she said, standing at attention, deliberately not looking at the visitor.

  "Ensign Nakamura, you are being reassigned to the Commonwealth ship Hephaestus."

  Nomi's head jerked upwards. "Sir?"

  "You will join their search and retrieval mission as the representative of Daedalus Station."

  She swallowed the lump in her throat. Reassigned? Retrieval? What about rescue? "Sir, have we heard from the ship?"

  "Our sensors detected the transport last night." The man's voice rumbled through the office.

  Nomi forced herself to stand still, her attention fixed on her commander, even as the blood surged painfully through her chest. She wanted to interrogate the man. Why were they calling this a retrieval? Her throat tightened. What about Ro and the others?

  "But she fled before we could salvage her."

  What did he mean by fled? Was Ro actually flying the ship?

  "Commander Targill, our priority is with her passengers," Mendez said.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Nomi watched the man lean forward and stand.

  "Of course, we will make every effort to secure your people." He towered over both her and Mendez, making the room feel significantly smaller. "But that ship is a danger to shipping lanes. As is your little homing beacon."

  Mendez's eyes narrowed slightly. She turned to Nomi. "Ensign, kill the transmission."

  Her mouth fell open. If they were alone, she might have dared to argue, but Targill was the real deal — a Commonwealth Military lifer with the posture and the stripes to prove it. He kept his silver hair in a severe brush cut and an ugly burn scar puckered the skin along his right temple. Nomi turned away from the cold appraisal in his blue eyes and back to Mendez. "Yes, sir."

  She pulled out her micro and, offering up a silent apology to Ro, stopped the signal. Even with the crew working around the clock, it would still take time for the resumption of anything resembling normal communications. She should be there with them and helping to contact Ro.

  "We leave in fifteen minutes." Targill turned on his heel, a motion as precise and economical as the rest of him, and strode out of Mendez's office.

  "Ensign," Mendez said.

  Nomi blinked and turned back to the commander.

  "This is a temporary posting. You are being attached to the Hephaestus at my request."

  Mendez had already made that clear. Nomi stared at her, wondering what she wasn't saying.

  "Dismissed."

  "Yes, sir."

  She walked back to her quarters in a daze, packed spare clothes and her toiletries, and headed to where Hephaestus docked. A bored crewman escorted her aboard the sleek cruiser and to an excruciatingly small cabin along the ship's port side. "Mess hall directly opposite to starboard. Report to comms when you're settled. Pair your micro to the ship's AI for a map."

  Barely wide enough for Nomi to walk through with her bag, the cabin had sleeping berths for two. She hoped her roommate had a sense of humor. Her stomach rumbled and she remembered she hadn't eaten yet today. After shoehorning her bag into the square storage locker set into the wall beside the foot of the empty top bunk, Nomi went to find the mess hall.

  Immaculately uniformed crew walked the narrow corridor with purpose. None of them even glanced her way. Alarm bells sounded. Targill wasn't kidding when he said fifteen minutes.

  "Liftoff in five minutes. Stations." The AI's voice was clipped, efficient, like everything else she'd seen on board so far. In the mess hall, Nomi experienced a sense of deja vu. Just like on Daedalus, it stood nearly empty. One man, his tall frame stooping slightly, thrust a spill-proof mug under a spigot. If that was coffee, she'd almost forgive Mendez for placing her here.

  Grabbing one of the lightweight mugs, she joined the man by the dispensers. "I'm Ensign Nakam …" She trailed off as the man turned, his hazel-green eyes the one piece of familiar she would have happily lived without.

  Alain Maldonado.

  How did he get here? And did Commander Mendez know?

  "Hello Konomi," he said.

  "Ensign Nakamura," she snapped in return.

  He held her gaze for several uncomfortable seconds before leaving the mess. Hephaestus's engines roared to life.

  ***

  As suddenly as the burn began, it ended, leaving Barre lightheaded and a little nauseated. He sat up, waiting for his head and stomach to settle. At least the ship hadn't put them in free-fall. That would have been messy.

  "Everyone still in one piece?" Ro asked, climbing to her feet.

  "A few microns thinner, I think," Micah said, as he stood and stretched out his back. Barre cringed at the multiple pops he could hear halfway across the room.

  "How's Jem?" Ro asked.

  Barre scooted over to check his brother's pulse. Slow, but regular, the same as his breathing. "No change." It wasn't a good sign. He was going to have to wake him soon and get him to drink some more, or he'd have to rummage through the medi-kit for an IV setup.

  "Any ideas as to why we just ran away from potential help?" Ro put the question to the room, but Barre knew she was mainly asking him.

  "I didn't do anything," Barre said. They had to believe he wanted to be rescued, at least for his brother's sake.

  Micah stared him down. "Maybe it's time you did," he said.

  Barre's shoulders tightened. "What do you mean by that?"

  "You spend your life trying not to take up any space. Well, you're the only one who seems to be able to talk to this crazy ship. Figure something out."

  "I'm not the one who got us here," he snapped back. "That would be my brilliant brother and Ro." A faint music played through his head. "Not now," he muttered.

  "And if you don't stop whining and get to work, we're going to be stuck here." Jem's voice barely registered over the odd melody, but it got them all to shut up.

  "Hey," Barre said, leaning over and checking his brother's vital signs again.

  "Can you open your eyes?"

  "Not unless you want me to vomit."

  "Oh." The dizziness didn't bode well for the state of Jem's brain.

  "So, if you're the genius, what do you think we should do?" Micah asked, ignoring Ro. She glared at him but kept silent. Barre shook his head. They were quite the team.

  "Figure it out. But do it fast." Jem's voice trailed off and Barre thought he'd lost consciousness again. "I can't help you. I can't make my eyes work right."

  "Fuck," Barre swore. Kneeling over his injured brother, he carefully peeled back one eyelid and then the other. Without a penlight, he had no way of checking how his pupils reacted, but his right eye was dilated nearly all the way. The left side looked pretty normal.

  He swallowed hard and sat back on his heels. "Jem's right," he said, staring at his brother. He knew Ro and Micah were watching him. "We don't have a lot of time. I think he has a bleed in his head." He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. "I've done everything I can for him."

  "Not everything." Ro stood behind him and squeezed his shoulder. "Come on. Let's see if we can get through to the ship again."

  "What about me?" Micah said.

  Barre stood up and bit back his sarcastic reply.

  "Once we get control over th
e ship, we're going to have to figure out how to crew it with just the three of us. Don't worry. You'll be plenty busy then. For now, keep an eye on Jem."

  Barre reluctantly shifted away from his brother's side as Micah sat down beside him.

  He looked up at Barre and gave a half-smile. "Hey, it's okay. I got this."

  ***

  Ro turned to Barre and tapped the side of her head. "What do you hear in there?"

  They were adrift again, and again, nothing in the star field looked familiar. Maybe if they could access navigation, they might be able to at least figure out where they were. Though if the ship went off on another random burn, it wouldn't much help to know where they'd been.

  He shifted his attention between her and his brother.

  "Barre?"

  He moved closer to her. "I know. I'm sorry."

  "So, anything?" Ro kept her voice casual. Maybe Jem would have understood how much it hurt to admit she needed help.

  "Just a kind of background noise. Like someone humming to themselves."

  Pulling her eyebrows together, she studied Barre. He was so completely different from his brother. When she worked with Jem, she could almost hear the thoughts whirring in his head. His brain always raced ahead of his ability to explain himself. And he was always thinking. Barre seemed causal to the point of disinterest or disdain.

  "Background noise? What do you think it's doing?" She'd figured the AI was pretty heavily damaged and about as conscious as Jem was. But what if she was wrong?

  "How the hell should I know?" Barre glanced around the bridge, his gaze lingering on the damaged forward screen and the unfamiliar stars. "It could be doing anything."

  "Well, we know it doesn't want me sending any signals. What about getting into the informational archives? Navigation? Star charts?"

  "And how do you expect me to do that?"

  "I don't know. Ask it? Sing it to sleep?" Ro couldn't help laughing at the absurdity of this. All her hacking skills and she needed a musician to access the AI.

  "Nursery rhymes are not my specialty," Barre said, his mouth turning up into a reluctant smile.

  "What's the music like? I mean, do you think the AI is out of fight-or-flight mode?" It seemed odd to describe a computer in those terms, but that's literally what it was doing before.