Read Online Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 by Lj Cohen - Free Book Online

an artificial sun.
    "No guarantees. I have a few ideas, but if they don't work, it's a no go. Understand?"
    He nodded, the fear back in his eyes.
    Ro swept a pile of permapaper from a desk chair and sat down at the terminal. Jem pulled a second chair close and scooted in next to her. She tried to glare him away, but he didn't get the hint. Ignoring him, she set up her micro. This was going to take a degree of subtlety that a keyboard or even ordinary gestures wouldn't be able to capture and besides, this way there was little-to-no chance that Jem could figure out the access codes she used.
    Going head to head with Daedalus would be monumentally stupid and suicidal as far as her future was concerned. She'd almost have better luck trying to access Mendez's personal logs than breaking directly into the medical records system. Looking over at Jem, Ro pursed her lips, thinking. Like Jem, Barre was still a student. The ed algorithm spidered through the entire AI and made its own webbing to the medical data.
    All Ro had to do was follow the threads.
    "Ro?"
    "Hmm?"
    "It won't help if they access the tox results before you get to them."
    She threw him a dirty look and pointed to the door. "Out."
    "He's my brother. I want to help."
    Ro folded her hands in her lap. "You can't. And I won't lift a finger until you get the hell out from underfoot." The sooner this got done, the sooner she could get back to the AI.
    Jem sputtered as Ro glared at him.
    "I get it. Really." Well, not really. She'd never had any family to care about. Her mother got fed up with her father years ago and split, leaving Ro trapped like a tiny moon orbiting her father's universe. She didn't have any conscious memories of the woman and her father kept no holos. "I do need your help, just not with this. How good are you at drones?"
    "What do you need?" he said, his thin shoulders slumped.
    Rummaging through a pile of spare parts, she pulled out a few small components. "Grab whatever tools you need. Then find two drones and replace the phone-home chipsets with these."
    Jem pressed his lips together.
    "You do know how to put them in sleep mode, right?"
    "That's grunt work," he said, snatching the tiny interrupts from her hand.
    "Get used to it, grunt."
    That surprised a wry grin from him.
    "Do you think you can handle a basic code mod?"
    He raised a single eyebrow for an answer, and Ro suppressed her own smile. At least this would keep him from brooding too much.
    "Then set them to do a wide search pattern of the whole ship and transmit the images back to me in real time."
    His eyes brightened.
    "Now get out of here and let me get to that tox report." She turned back to her monitor before Jem left the room. Getting into Barre's ed file was the easy part. She projected the data in the space around her and spent a few minutes studying the basic coursework the algorithm programmed for him. Concepts he struggled with in mathematics, both the theoretical and the practical, Ro had mastered when she was far younger even than Jem. She collapsed his test scores. Poor bastard — even with his parents' money and connections, he'd never get to Uni.
    It was no wonder he spent his time drowning his sorrows in music and bittergreen.
    She found one math class — advanced pattern mapping and recognition — where Barre scored way off the charts, his work significantly past even graduate level students. Classes branched off from that one into auditory recall, history of composition, theory of tonal and atonal scales, and harmonic deconstruction, whatever that meant. Jem wasn't kidding when he said Barre's music was his life. Half his server space was filled with original compositions. Ro kept digging, looking for the thread that would lead her to Barre's med files. It had to be here.
    At least a basic medical needed to be part of every student's profile and Daedalus didn't like to waste space or run the risk of multiple versions of the same data. It wouldn't create a duped copy when it