Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1

by Lj Cohen

  Barre tapped the side of his head. "Here, listen."

  The music poured from his micro. Repetitive and hypnotic, it was oddly soothing. It did remind Ro of her habit of humming to herself as she worked. "What do you think would happen if we fed it back to the AI?"

  "Why?"

  "Kind of like 'We hear you and we want to get to work, too.'"

  "I can try, but it might not trust me anymore. The last time I played something, you did an end-run around it."

  Ro glanced around the remnants of the ruined bridge, wondering again what had happened there decades before. There was no sign of weapons fire anywhere else on the ship. "I think it's worth the risk, Barre. We have to find some way of getting it to trust us. At least now we know people are searching. It would be nice if we could help them find us."

  "We should probably brace ourselves." Barre glanced over at Micah and he nodded.

  Ro limped over to the nav station and wedged herself between it and the wall. Barre did the same over at comms. Micah set his back against a console and threw his feet over Jem's legs.

  "Okay," Barre said. "Three, two, one, now." The music faded from the small speaker in his micro and he looked up, unfocusing his eyes. Seconds ticked past in an uncomfortable silence. She wanted to ask Barre what he was doing and how the AI was responding, but she didn't dare break his concentration. It gave her a greater appreciation of Jem's patience when he worked with her.

  The bridge work lights remained steady as Ro stared up at them, half daring them to turn red and flash their warning. She gripped the edges of the console so hard her hands went numb and still nothing happened.

  "I think it understood. Look." Barre pointed behind her at the console she leaned against.

  Ro turned, shaking out her hands, and looked down, her breath catching in her throat. The few lights not melted in the nav station winked at her. Slowly, she reached for her micro.

  "Do you think that's a smart move?" Barre asked.

  She paused, giving his worry serious consideration. The old Ro wouldn't have done that. "I think I'd rather find out now if the AI freaks out then when our military friends come back."

  Barre's gaze flicking back to check on his brother before returning to her. "Okay. I'll keep the feedback going."

  Ro set the micro down on the console and wiped her sweaty palms on her pants. Three other lives depended on her making the right decisions. Four, if you counted the AI. It had a kind of personality, and certainly a degree of self-awareness and self-preservation, too, by the looks of things. She wondered what Dauber and May would have thought if they were here.

  If the AI saw any systems integration as a threat, maybe she could just get into the files and not try for any overrides. It would be a start, anyway. "Okay, baby. Here we go," she murmured, and paired her micro to the autonomics. "I'm not trying to hurt you. I just want to figure out where we are."

  She didn't care if Micah and Barre heard her talking to the computer. It was her version of humming and maybe the AI would understand her, at least on some level. The lights remained steady. Ro closed her eyes briefly before she triggered Jem's interface edits. "This is my music."

  Barre stepped closer to her. "No change in the song."

  Ro lifted her hands and triggered the commands for file access. The display blanked out.

  "Still no change," Barre said.

  The virtual screen filled with rapidly scrolling text and Ro had to stop herself from jumping up and down and shouting. They were in. Her heart pounded painfully as if she had been starved of oxygen. "Barre?"

  "Five by five."

  Ro winced, hearing the echo of Nomi's voice and her bright laugh. If she ever wanted to see the woman again, she had to focus. "I'm going to look for anything navigation related. Nav logs. Star charts, if I can find them, okay?"

  "Agreed," Micah said.

  "Good to go," Barre answered.

  She was tempted to look for an ansible map, but the ship was forty years out of date. Star charts didn't change all that much in a few decades, but the ansible network had.

  The files were a mess. It looked like something had eaten its way through the computer's memory, leaving random nonsense strings behind. More than half of the data were simply missing. Of the files she could find intact entries for, many registered as having zero size.

  No wonder the AI had problems.

  Zipping through the directory almost as fast as the display could scroll, Ro found little of any use. A few intact files, she toggled for copying to her micro, but didn't dare stop to examine anything for fear the AI would decide to shut her out. At the end of her scan, she had less than a dozen useful files. And nothing labeled with a helpful 'star chart' or 'you are here' designation. She backed out of the file system carefully and decoupled her micro before glancing back at Barre.

  "Good job."

  Ro snorted. He wouldn't have said that if he knew how little she recovered. Grabbing her micro, she sat back down. The pain in her leg was a distant thing — too easily ignored. Barre had warned her about that. She studied the recovered files. None of their names gave much of a clue to their contents. Some would be a challenge to open.

  She started with the basics. The format of plain old text files hadn't changed all that much in forty years. Glancing through them, she found antenna calibration logs, crew rotation schedules, and supplies lists. Ro closed the files and frowned, studying the list again. A few looked like they might be log entries, but playing the old recordings would take a bit of finesse. She glanced back at Barre and then frowned, looking away.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing." Ro opened a basic audio compiler and slid one of the recordings towards it. The expected file error message flickered in red. Just once, she'd like the easy way to work the first time.

  "You probably have to re-encode that to play it." Barre looked over her shoulder and shrugged when Ro stared back at him.

  "Give me your micro."

  He handed it over.

  "Here. Make it work." She bumped the audio logs to him and went searching through the database files from her own micro, discomfort twisting her stomach into knots. Everything she learned about dealing with other people, she'd learned from her father. She tinkered with the awkward databases, keeping part of her attention on Barre.

  Static-filled audio crackled through the bridge.

  " … fried the personality sub- …. Lieutenant Murray … every scan she … self-healing virus … damn thing … tates every time we … boot."

  The recording stopped.

  "I can try to clean it up a bit. But there's not a lot left. Sorry."

  "I remember studying about that in school." Micah's voice startled her.

  "About what?" Barre asked.

  "During the war. The anti-Commonwealth forces developed viruses that targeted AIs. Figured out a way to sneak them in ansible packets. They burned out a ton of computers before Commonwealth programmers figured out how to stop it."

  Well, that explained the damage to the computer. But it still didn't tell them what happened to the bridge. "Barre, go through every single log. See if there's anything in them we can use."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Make sure when the AI wakes all the way up, we don't also resurrect the virus."

  Chapter 27

  Nomi winced as her coffee overfilled, scalding her hand. Leaving the steaming cup at the coffee station, she grabbed a cup of ice water and submerged the burn in it. "Baka tare," she muttered, falling back on the old Japanese curse words she learned as a child from her great-grandmother. She wasn't sure if she were referring to herself or Alain Maldonado, though they both would qualify as utter idiots.

  Nomi frowned. The cold water numbed her fingers, dulling the pain. If it got any worse, she would have to find Medical and get some analgesic. She slammed a top on the coffee, and headed to comms, the throbbing in her hand a living reminder of Maldonado's presence.

  Silent crew members gave her cautious n
ods. The door to the communications room opened and it looked like a clone of the station's. Nomi exhaled. Thank the cosmos for small favors. As she walked into the softly lit workspace, the four staff there turned to look at her. She had to force herself not to retreat.

  "Ensign Konomi Nakamura, from Daedalus, reporting for duty." Not that they didn't know who she was or where she'd been assigned from.

  A tall, ebony-skinned woman pushed back from the main console, and stood. She had the stripes for lieutenant on her immaculately creased blue-and-black uniform. Everything about her was angular, from the line of her skull revealed beneath her shaved head to her sharp cheekbones and lanky limbs. "Welcome aboard. I'm Lieutenant Odoyo. Take position three and relieve Jenkins. I assume you're familiar with executing a search pattern?" She lifted a single eyebrow in a high arch and stared down at Nomi. This was a woman used to using her height to intimidate.

  Nomi stood at attention. "Yes, sir." Her voice echoed in the close room and she thought she sounded like some eager recruit. Odoyo's lips twitched into a brief smile.

  Jenkins, another ensign, vacated his station, giving her a curious glance. She sat down and slipped the headset over her ears as the still-warm seat quickly molded to her body. It took her a few minutes to orient to the display. Daedalus Station was a relatively fixed point in space. Messages came in from all directions, but converged on their array.

  In a moving ship, they had to anticipate and account for the variance. It was hard enough to hit a big stationary target when your transmitter shifted and much harder when both ends of the transmission were mobile.

  Nomi's world narrowed down to the pitch and volume of raw ansible signals — her own calibration shots, sent back to her, and relevant network traffic. It was a strange kind of music and she usually found the work soothing, especially during the late-night shift on Daedalus when traffic was sparse in their little pocket of the universe.

  Here, surrounded by strangers, Nomi tensed. No one knew for sure if Ro was in control of the ship or even if she was alive. She squeezed her eyes shut briefly, thinking of her. Ro's intensity softened when she slept, giving her face a vulnerability that she would probably hate. When her blond hair had spilled across the pillow, all Nomi had wanted was to let its soft silk slip through her fingers. Sighing, she focused her attention back on the display.

  A hand dropped on her shoulder and Nomi jolted upright in the chair. Jenkins stood beside her, grinning broadly.

  "You have to pace yourself out here," the thick-set man said, running his hand over his scalp. "Called your name three times."

  Nomi shrugged, suddenly aware of the tension in her shoulders and the back of her neck.

  "We just do two hour shifts on this kind of job. Two shifts of two on, two off. Otherwise you lose your edge and miss signals."

  She pushed the chair away from the console and stood, stretching. Jenkins plopped down in the chair and grabbed the headset.

  In search of some real food and more coffee, Nomi headed back to the mess. Filled tables and loud conversations made the room ring with noise. After the focused quiet of comms, Nomi wasn't in the mood for company, but there wasn't a place to sit in her cramped quarters. Sighing, she threaded her way through the room to an empty chair at a corner table. Two crew members leaned close to one another, deep in a very intense conversation.

  They waved her into the free seat and turned back to a discussion of some arcane point in fluid dynamics. Shaking her head, she set down her tray. Engineers. She ate quickly, suddenly nostalgic for her lonely night shifts and missing Ro.

  Ro had to be all right. The engineer was just too smart and too stubborn not to be. Flipping through her micro's display, Nomi checked for any messages from her family. Anything sent to Daedalus would follow her here as soon as they hit the range of the nearest ansible. Her brother had sent her his latest vid.

  She paused, her hand hovering over the waiting message.

  If the Hephaestus was searching for Ro in this sector, they must have some reasonable suspicion the ship hadn't traveled all that far. And Ro had hacked into Nomi's micro. She looked up at the two engineers still in intense discussion at the table and smiled, bending forward to compose a message. With any luck — though she was starting to think it was all planning with Ro — that message would find its way through a few ansible pings straight to her micro. Even the thought of Maldonado on board Hephaestus couldn't sour her mood.

  ***

  Ro sat cross-legged on the acceleration mat, staring down at her micro. Her lank hair swung forward and she tucked it behind her ears, trying not to think of how good a shower would feel. What could she possibly have that would detect and disinfect a forty-year-old virus? And if she were even able to string some program together, how would the AI react?

  "Here. You need this."

  Micah stood over her looking just as neat and as composed as if he were headed into a news conference with his father. Then she looked at his eyes and the dark circles that bruised the skin beneath them. They hadn't had more than a few hours of broken sleep and ration bars in too many hours.

  He handed her another bar and a drinking bulb full of water.

  "Thank you." Ro would never have thought to make sure they were all eating and drinking. So who really was the self-centered one?

  Nibbling on the ration bar was like chewing on lightly salted and sweetened insulation. She'd be ready to abandon ship even to the most crooked salver after a few more meals like this one. Focus, Ro, focus. She dug through her programming tool box again. Whatever she put together, it had to be old school and dead simple. Any complex code seemed to make the AI choke and then lock itself into threat mode.

  She set down her micro and pushed herself to standing. Walking around gave her a chance to stretch her spine and roll her shoulders.

  "If it helps," Micah said, "I remember the virus targeted the personality subroutines. It left the basic ship's functions intact, so the crews never knew what hit them until it was too late and the AI would basically go crazy. A lot of them just self-destructed, or crashed into other ships."

  Ro glared at him.

  "My mom and I were both history buffs. I think she always wanted me to follow in my dad's footsteps." He looked off into the distance, seeing something far beyond the ship or even the stars in the display. "At least until everything went to shit for him. For all of us."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I'm not." He met her gaze straight on, an unfamiliar anger burning in his eyes. "I need some air."

  She watched as he strode out of the bridge, his long legs moving quickly. Sighing, she returned to her makeshift base of operations, a half-eaten ration bar waiting beside her micro. So the virus spared the autonomic centers of the computer's brain. Well, Ro knew she could access the environmentals, no problem. And Dauber and May's SIREN code just curled around that basic machine language, much the same way a human cerebral cortex wound around the older reptilian brain structures and integrated with them.

  Introducing something through the environmentals could work, should work. Though that code was even older than the SIREN programming, it was still the building block of her micro and every other piece of machinery in use today, from the ansibles to the current generation of AIs.

  She opened her toolbox and snapped together a bunch of basic debugging and anti-virus tools into something that should be able to scan the computer for anything that didn't belong. "Barre?"

  The lanky musician glanced up at her from where he'd been sitting at Jem's side.

  "If I wrote a small auto-run command, could you translate it into your music?"

  He squeezed Jem's hand before joining her across the room. "Show me what you've got."

  She quickly coded the program and slid her micro over to him.

  "Hang on." He looked up and away, triggering the neural, and hummed quietly to himself as Ro drummed her fingers on her knee.

  Come on, come on, she urged him silently, annoyed because he just looked like he
was daydreaming. It was probably what she looked like when she was coding.

  "Got it," Barre said suddenly, startling her. "Here."

  The program spooled into her micro as a small sound file. She saw where he'd left a hook for her to attach her scan and her estimation of him went up a few more notches. "You're a lot better at this than I thought."

  Barre glanced at her sharply, then twisted his lips into a wry smile. "I get that a lot." He paused. "Or I would, if anyone cared about what I did."

  Her father's usual tact, right out of her mouth. "Sorry, that's not what I meant."

  "I know."

  "Time to get this going." She frowned, looking around the bridge. Micah still hadn't returned. He didn't need to be there, but she didn't want him wandering around the ship if it reacted with another wild burn. She buzzed his micro. "Micah — let me know when you're secure. We're ready to start the scan."

  "I'm fine. Go."

  Family shit wasn't anything she could help him with. "Barre?"

  "Ready."

  "Here we go," Ro said. She keyed the musical shell, her diagnostics wrapped within it. It was the best she could do. When she glanced at Barre, his intense brown eyes were filled with doubts. "Will you monitor the AI?"

  "Already on it."

  If anything changed, it might give them some advance warning. Unless the AI decided to act first and sing later. Either way, if the ship spooked and ran again, their chances of rescue diminished from remote to likely impossible. She risked a brief glance at Jem before returning to stare at the code scrolling on her micro. The minutes passed. Nothing happened. Ro squeezed her fists so tightly, her short fingernails left deep indents in both palms.

  What if she chose wrong? What if the scan itself triggered a defensive response? What if the AI was just too damaged to completely resurrect itself? "Barre?"

  He shook his head, the 'not now' message perfectly clear. It only increased the cold tide of nausea in her stomach. An alarm squawked through the micro's small speaker and Ro jerked her head. A sharp pain stabbed her lip where she bit it. "Shit."