by Lj Cohen
Maldonado turned toward the door.
"Now what?" Micah asked.
"Now I get paid for my troubles and I figure out if I have a use for you." He slipped Micah's micro in his pocket.
Micah stared across the room and then down at his restraints. The doors might as well have been on the other side of a wormhole.
***
The lights burned through Jem's closed lids. He hated when Barre screwed around with the environmentals, especially when he wanted to sleep in. He tried to put his arm across his face, but it wouldn't budge. "Hey, cut it out." All he heard was a muffled cry.
"Welcome back, Jeremy."
The deep and unfamiliar voice came from his right side. He couldn't turn his head to see. Jeremy? No one called him Jeremy — not even his parents. Jem squinted and the brightness seared his vision. "Can you turn down the damned lights?" His voice emerged as a hoarse croak. The lights dialed back. The scrape of a chair moving against the floor hurt his ears. He focused on the white coated figure beside his bed just as he noticed the familiar beeping of monitoring equipment. Sick bay? How did he get here?
A gentle hand peeled back his eyelids one at a time. Jem steeled himself for the light pen that followed. "What's the last thing you remember, Jeremy?"
"Jem."
"Excuse me?"
"It's Jem. And the last thing I remember?" He frowned. Images fell through his mind in a tumble: Finding Barre sprawled unconscious across his bed. Sick bay on Daedalus. The ship. The ship! Ro! "Where's Ro?" He struggled to lift his head but nothing moved. A distant thrum of pain beat against his eyes.
"Easy, there. You're on Hephaestus. And you've just come out of surgery."
"What?" He shifted his gaze back and forth trying to see as much of the room as he could. Smaller and more compact than sick bay on Daedalus, it had the spartan feel of a ship. He didn't see Ro, Micah, or his brother. "Where is everyone? Are they okay?" Ro's ankle probably didn't need a whole lot of attention. That was good.
"It will take a day or so before your brain unscrambles, I'm afraid. Until then, we can push something through your line to help you rest."
More sleeping was the last thing he wanted. "Can you just tell my brother I'm awake?"
"Your brother?"
"Yeah. Barre. Barre Durbin."
"I'm afraid you're the only one we evacuated before the ship disappeared."
Jem heard the whine of his own cardiac alarm as his pulse raced.
"Get him sedated!"
"No!" he shouted, trying to free himself from the restraints.
"I need his pressure down. Now!"
A stream of warmth slithered through his arm, spreading an enforced calm that took away the fear and the pain, but not a terrible sense of loss. "Please. I need … talk to … Barre." As he floated away on the chemically induced quiet, something kept irritating him. Like the remembered space from a lost tooth, he kept poking at what was missing. Ro. Something about Ro and Hephaestus. And a message.
The medic leaned forward, checking his vital signs, as if they'd be any different by the monitor. Jem smirked. His folks did that, too.
"Easy there, Jem. You need to rest your brain. Head trauma is serious stuff."
The sounds of the medical bay blended together into a kind of distant music. He wondered if he could capture it on his micro for Barre. No, that wouldn't work. His micro was probably still on Halcyone's bridge with Ro.
The melody incorporated a soft voice, speaking with punctuated urgency. "Is he awake? Can I talk to him?"
"Ensign, I've already told you, we need to keep him sedated. When he's out of the immediate post-surgical phase, we'll re-evaluate."
"Please, he's our only link to Halcyone! I need to —"
"Nakamura, if you don't leave my sick bay, I'll call security to escort you out."
Jem blinked slowly, trying to sort out why that name seemed important. The floating feeling make it hard to pull it together. "Wait," he said, his voice a ghost of a whisper. "Nomi."
The voices by the door got louder and more agitated. "Wait! Nomi!" The words were only distinct in his own head. But after a lifetime in and around medical wards, he knew how to get their attention. Jem smirked, took as deep a breath as he could, and held it.
Pressure built up in his chest and against his throat. He wanted to cough. His body struggled between thinking he was drowning and wanting to wrap itself in the soft, muzzy blanket of the drugs. His pulse pounded in his ears. Why weren't the alarms going off? His lungs burned. This wasn't going to work. He should just let go and breathe.
He had to breathe.
His head throbbed in time to his pulse — a slow thud, thud, thud. A distant, uncaring part of him wondered how high his carbon dioxide levels would have to rise before the monitors started screaming. Would they trigger before his body relented and reached for the cool bliss of air?
The whine of a siren pierced his foggy brain.
"Damn it, the kid's crashing!"
In the instant before Jem was sure his lungs would burst, he huffed out the breath he'd been holding and drew in fresh oxygen, sweeter than anything he'd ever tasted. He panted for a minute, then smiled up at the circle of concerned faces watching him. "Hey, it worked."
The doc who'd been caring for him frowned, his eyebrows drawing together as he studied Jem.
He held the man's gaze with a direct stare. "I need to talk to Nomi." It would have been a lot better if his voice hadn't cracked, but he figured he got his point across.
"Well, I guess this means you're going to live."
Jem would have shrugged if he could have moved anything but his eyes.
"I wouldn't have wanted to be the one to tell your parents otherwise."
"Please. If you arrest Nomi, I'm just going to have to hold my breath again." He smiled again. "Let me talk to her. It's not like I can do a whole lot else. And I promise I'll rest after."
The doctor studied Jem for what felt like a long time before he nodded and turned to the door. "Let her go."
"Thank you," Nomi said.
"You have five minutes."
She sat in the stool the doctor vacated, shifting closer to the bed.
"Hey. You going to be okay?" she asked, her gaze shifting between his face and the bandages on his head he couldn't see.
"So they tell me." Not being able to turn his head or shrug was worse than having an itch in the center of his back he couldn't scratch. "Do you think you can get them to turn off the restraint field?"
"Given that you saved me from being tossed in the brig? Doubtful."
The sedative smoothed over all his earlier urgency now that she was sitting with him.
"Jem?"
"Huh?" It would feel so good to sleep again.
"They're going to drag me away from here in about three minutes." She leaned forward, her dark eyes shining. "I'm worried about Ro. Can you help me find her?"
Adrenaline washed through him and his drooping eyelids snapped open fully. "Halcyone. Where's the ship? Where are they?"
"I don't know. And Ro's father is on board." Her dark eyebrows drew together. "Jem, we know he's after something on that ship. Do you know what it is?"
"The weapons." Jem coughed, wincing as his head throbbed.
"That's it, Nakamura." The doctor leaned over him and pushed another dose of warm fluffies into his line.
"You've got to stop him," Jem mumbled. His thoughts spun off into softness, but he had to tell her. Had to. They were together. Maldonado and the senator. "… Rother … Rotherwood." A welcome darkness folded around him like the cushion of an acceleration pad.
***
"Anything yet?"
"No." Two blips represented Micah and her father on the schematic of the ship. Only one was moving. She bit her lip trying not to worry about Micah. Halcyone wouldn't be monitoring him if he weren't alive, but she didn't trust the decades-old internal sensors to report much beyond basic life-signs. They had to get out of here. "How's our signal?"
That couldn't be helped. Unless her father physically damaged the transmitter, he couldn't prevent their SOS either, or the private message she sent to Nomi. No, he would keep the transmitter working, not willing to risk his ability to contact potential buyers. "Let's hope Hephaestus gets our message before anyone else does." Her stealth program traveled through the same ansible channels as the distress call, but it used so much less bandwidth, there was a decent chance it would reach Nomi before Barre's signal got picked up.
A movement across her micro's display caught her attention. "He's on the move!"
Barre scrambled over to where she sat, her micro perched on her knee. He split his attention between the screen and the bridge doors.
Ro watched the small blip of light pulse along the ship's corridor moving toward its nose and the bridge. She reached over and grasped Barre's hand. He squeezed hers back, gently. His hands had thick calluses but his long, large fingers were surprisingly delicate.
"Well, it's not like he can sneak up on us," Barre said quietly.
"Then why are we whispering?" she asked, the corner of her mouth curving upwards. "He already knows we're in here."
He smiled back at her.
The bobbing light came closer. Ro gave Barre's hand another squeeze, grabbed her micro, and stood. "Not going down without a fight. You with me?"
"Hell, yeah," Barre said, and jumped up beside her, his dreadlocks swaying around his head. "How about we welcome him back with this?" He picked up a piece of twisted metal the length of his arm and hefted it at shoulder height.
Brute force against state of the art energy weapons. Shit. Well, it was better than huddling on the floor waiting to watch her father shoot her friend. Looking into his grim face, she smiled, feeling the cut on her cheek split open.
"What?" He lowered his improvised weapon.
She laughed. This was crazy. She'd made every mistake in the cosmos, put all these people at risk for her damned ego, and the image of Barre standing there, all fierce and heroic reduced her to helpless giggles. "I'm sorry," she gasped, struggling to get herself back under control. "It's not funny. It's not."
Barre set the metal down on the floor and cupped her shoulders. "It's going to be all right. We'll get out of this."
"Jem is lucky to have you," Ro said, the wild energy slipping away, leaving her terribly tired and spent. "Okay, Daddy dear, where the fuck are you?" She glanced down at her micro. "Barre," she said, disbelieving both the AI's tracking and her own eyes.
"What?"
She blinked several times, staring at the map. "He's gone to engineering."
"What?" he repeated, frowning at her.
"Look." She handed him her micro.
"Halcyone," he said, his gaze frozen on the display. "Locate Maldonado, Alain."
"Engineering bay."
Barre picked her up and swung her in a complete circle, laughing, his dreads flying around his head.
"Hey, watch the shoulder!"
He set her down and sobered. "You know it's just a reprieve, right?"
"Yes. We have to get out of here."
"Got any ideas?"
Micah was sitting in a room full of ways to blast through that door. Ro paced the bridge. They could see him there, but that was about it. If Halcyone had been a modern ship, she'd be able to get a full audio/video feed to and from practically anywhere, but there wasn't much of anything to hack into. Outside of some museum, the communications devices they'd used back when this ship was built didn't even exist. Her damned micro had more sheer computing power than the machine that ran Halcyone's autonomic subsystems.
Ro tapped her finger across the ubiquitous little device. It should still be paired to Micah's through her ad hoc program. "Yeah, I guess I do have an idea." It only took her a few minutes to initiate a direct connection to his micro. She paused before she said anything and checked on her father's location. Still moving through engineering.
"What are you waiting for?" Barre asked.
But what if he wasn't? "What if my father's ghosting and he's still in the storage bay with Micah?" He had to know she'd be trying to track him.
"Why would he do that?"
"I don't know." Ro wanted to scream, but that wasn't going to help. Underestimating her father was a bad idea, especially when he seemed to have all the advantages. "Wait. Give me a minute." She reconfigured the link to stream its audio and video feed through to her micro. "Huh."
"What?"
"Nothing. Look." She set it to display in holo mode and the two of them stared at a dark rectangle. It didn't make any sense.
"Can you clean it up?" Barre asked, squinting at the display.
"There's no image. Nothing."
"Malfunction?"
She double checked her program parameters and sent a silent ping to the device. It returned the ping-back almost instantly. "Nothing wrong with the micro or the signal." But something was wrong. She could feel it in the pit of her stomach.
A loud thump echoed through the bridge from the micro's small speaker. It was followed by a string of curses in her father's voice.
Chapter 36
"Shit! Shut it down, Ro!" Barre shouted, leaping to his feet.
"But Halcyone pings him in engineering. I don't understand."
"It doesn't matter where he's supposed to be. Shut it down." Barre couldn't understand how someone as smart as Ro could be so slow and stupid when it came to her father. "What if he does what you did in reverse?"
"So what. So he knows we're listening to him. It's not like he doesn't know where we are."
True enough, but he didn't want to give Maldonado any reason to head back here anytime soon. He sat beside her and watched the empty video feed. "So now what?"
"We listen."
Well, he could do that. Barre threw part of his attention to Halcyone, listening for her music. That, more than anything, told him about the state of the ship. Ro could study her sensors and diagnostics.
A crackle of static burst through Ro's micro as a discordant blare of sound blasted Barre's mind. Clasping his hands over his ears didn't do anything to quiet the internal music. Ro would have to deal with whatever came through the micro. He focused on settling his breath to a hypnotic and regular rhythm, feeding it back to the AI. Ro was right — it was a lullaby of sorts. In a lot of ways, the AI reacted like a frightened child.
He had no idea how long he spent working to soothe Halcyone, but the music finally softened. Barre let out a long, whistling breath.
Crouching in front of him, Ro stared into his eyes, her own narrowed, her eyebrows pulled together. "What is it?"
"I'm not sure. But Halcyone doesn't like it. What have you got?"
Ro leaned over her micro and moved her hands too rapidly over its surface for him to follow. "He is in engineering."
"How do you know?"
"Because he's hacking directly into the antenna array." She swore methodically in the quiet of the bridge.
"But who is he sending a signal to?"
"How the hell should I know?" Twin bright spots of red burned in the middle of her cheeks.
Barre only got the slightest of warnings, a bugling fanfare that repeated in his ears, before the rumble of engines shook the bridge.
***
Micah fumed long after Maldonado strode out of the cargo bay. The damned restraints were effective, he had to give him that. After getting shocked a few times, Micah didn't even breathe too deeply, for fear he would trigger them again. The hard surface of the packing crate pressed into his backside, but trying to shift would only bring new punishment from the cuffs around both his wrists and his ankles.
Whoever invented them should be slowly roasted in a skimmer's afterburners.
If Ro didn't kill her father, Micah would.
He pressed his lips together in a frown. She could be dead, along with Barre. And if Micah couldn't find a way out of here, Maldonado would kill him as
soon as he was no longer useful.
A vibration shook the hold. Micah grabbed for the crate beneath him and was rewarded with a lance of fresh pain through his hands. "What the hell?" The rumble of engines shook the crate. "Oh, no. Oh, shit."
The floor lurched beneath him, throwing Micah down, agony curling him into the fetal position.
"No, no, no!" he muttered, struggling to relax his arms and legs.
***
"Shut it down, Barre! You have to shut it down!" Ro's heart beat wildly as she dove for the meager protection of the worn down acceleration mats.
Barre glanced around the bridge with wide eyes before following her example. "I can't. I don't know how!"
"We can't let the damned ship do another burn or they'll never find us."
Barre tilted his head to the side and frowned. "It's not Halcyone this time. It's something your father is doing."
"How the hell do you know that?"
"Here, listen." Barre patched the AIs song through Ro's micro. The alien music, high pitched and frantic, pounded through the bridge. "She's terrified."
"Damn it!" He couldn't have her ship. "We have to stop him. Can you get the AI to help us?"
"Right now, I'm doing all I can to keep her from shaking us to pieces."
The ship shuddered beneath them as if the AI and Ro's father were playing a giant game of tug of war. Ro sat up and wedged herself in the corner where the navigation and comms consoles butted up against one another.
"What are you doing?"
"Don't know yet," she said. "Keep singing to the ship. I'll see what I can do from my end." The vibration set up a painful resonance of sound across the bridge. Barre winced and she could only imagine what it must be like hearing it from the inside, too.
Ro cleared all the running programs from her micro and concentrated on finding a way in again. A violent jolt banged the back of her head against the console and she swore. If her father managed to wrest control of the engines, she wouldn't have time to get flat, and the gee forces would twist her into a knot. "Come on, girl, we're a team. You know me. I'm not going to hurt you."
The bridge shook too much for her to use the more efficient 3-d interface and she struggled to input the commands she wanted. A shudder tipped her sideways and nearly set her micro flying from her hands. "Barre, you've got to calm the ship down!"
