Chapter 2
Micah glanced around the generic space that had been their quarters for the past half year. It looked no different from any number of assigned living spaces scattered across dozens of sectors. A modular sofa with easily reconfigurable seating and a colorless nano-polymer cover took up most of the living area. Water rings overlapped the surface of the low table in interlocking circles. An empty glass sat at the table's edge exactly where it had been for the last three days.
He slipped into the corridor and headed to his lab in the cargo hold of the abandoned ship. It had taken him weeks of work, even with repair drones, and Mendez's tacit approval, but Micah had managed to clear out and power the forward storage bay, rig up full spectrum solars, and automate a weather loop for irrigation.
When he reached his green haven, Micah emerged into the full light of an artificial day, blinking until his vision adjusted to the brightness. The plants didn't care if their cycle matched the station, and he liked working at night better anyway. He looked up at the vaulting ceiling overhead. Enough moisture had condensed around the ceiling plates that it would probably rain later.
His seedlings looked healthy--long green leaves fanned out on each plant on five sides from a central stalk--but he'd gotten this far too many times before. This was make or break time. If none of his new crosses panned out, he'd be out of luck and out of business. The lovely deep green foliage growing in neat rows up toward his artificial sun represented the last of his stolen seed cache.
"Botany for fun and profit," he said, as he logged the results of this trial. It was painstaking to manage so many variables, from hybrid pairs, to light levels, to water, to the trace elements in the soil. His work was a cross between old-fashioned Mendelian genetics and cutting-edge gene modification, except he didn't use pea plants and no lab in the Hub would risk crossing the drug cartels to support him.
He just needed to figure out what would give him plants that produced fertile seeds. Growing bittergreen itself was easy enough. It was a weed. Anyone could do it. That's what Micah counted on, if he could solve the seed problem. If. When. From behind the clear terraforming bubble wall, he watched the rain and massaged the back of his neck trying to ease the stiffness.
"Nice set up."
Micah's legs tangled with the chair and he hit the floor hard. He looked up into the face of the chief engineer's kid and exhaled. At least it wasn't one of Mendez's security officers.
The girl leaned against the polished wall, her arms folded across her chest. She tapped one booted foot silently on the metallic floor. He scrambled to his feet and gave her a smile. "You startled me." What was her name? Robyn? Raelin? His father could always remember names, drunk or sober.
"Really? Never would have guessed." Her muddy green eyes stared into his and the only thing he could read was curiosity. She had the most open closed face he'd ever seen.
"Micah Rotherwood," he said, offering her his hand.
"I know who you are." She pushed off the wall, leaned down, and righted the chair. "The question is, why are you here?"
Micah lowered his hand, studying her reactions. "Commander Mendez let me have the space for my research." Her eyes, large and wide set in an oval face gave her a childlike look. The restless intelligence behind those eyes was anything but childlike. Her lean body didn't have many curves and she dressed in plain, utilitarian pants and short tunic. Her hair--blonde and long--was tied back into a tail that reached halfway down her spine. It was an interesting contradiction.
She nodded but didn't say anything.
He gave her his most charming smile. "I was just heading out for the night. Care to join me for some coffee?"
Her eyes brightened and he felt his own expression shift to something more genuine.
"How quaint. Coffee. Especially when you have such a lovely supply of bittergreen."
Fuck. He wondered how long it would take him to erase any sign he'd been growing the drug here. "How did you find me?" Maybe she was bribe-able. He shook his head, the irony not lost on him, given his father's sorry history.
"You're not much of an engineer, are you?" she asked.
Damn but her face was hard to read.
"Increased power draw on the station grid. You're lucky no one came to investigate sooner."
"I really am studying to be a botanist."
"I really don't care."
Micah slumped against the desk. "You mean you're not going to shut me down?"
"Too much bother," she said, moving over to his computer. "But I do need to balance the power loading and mask your draw or someone will stumble in here to investigate."
"Someone like you?"
She gave him an odd look, pulled out her micro, and flung several rapid-fire gestures at it. "Yes. Exactly like me."
Micah's eyes widened as her micro's readout scrolled across the display on his computer screen. Damn. She'd just blown through all his security. How the hell had she done that? She set the micro on his desk. Bringing both hands up as if she was the conductor and the computer her orchestra, she controlled his machine using gestures faster than anyone he had ever seen. He recognized the signs for save and execute, but all the rest blurred in one continuous, graceful motion.
"Done," she said, slipping the micro back in her pocket. The computer returned to the Daedalus Station logo. "But I'd use a much better password in the future. Or maybe even some biometrics. Though even those aren't infallible." She turned to go, leaving Micah sputtering.
"Wait. I don't understand. Why are you helping me?"
"There's plenty of room on this hulk. I might want to set up shop. And it's always good to get along with your neighbors." At the airlock, she paused to turn around. "And by the way, my name's Ro."
He didn't need to look at his reflection in the burnished metal to know his face blazed red.
***
Ro clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle the laughter. What an idiot. It wasn't surprising, given his father. She couldn't give an empty airlock's worth of oxygen about the drugs. But the ship? The ship presented all kinds of possibilities.
Earning a journeyman's engineering rating was definitely better than being trapped in this dead-end place, but she wanted more than a series of lateral hops from job to job and subsistence living like her father. For that, she needed access to a solid Uni in the Hub. She looked down at herself and frowned at the grease stain on her shirt. An engineer's kid had about the same chance at one of the top schools as this wreck had to fly.
She stared at the scavenged ship. If her father had bothered to investigate the problem, he had to have discovered the bittergreen lab. But instead of reporting it to the commander or balancing the power draw, all he had done was bury the problem. Either he was working with Micah or he had some other reason for keeping prying eyes away from the ship.
That alone was reason enough for Ro to dig a little deeper.
The ship was essentially useless. They hadn't even made this kind of freighter in decades and even if the thing could be made to fly, the first gen models had been unstable buggers. AIs had come a long way since then.
An idea so crazy it might work danced through her mind. Accessing the ship would be simple given her new official status and she had a program of AI enhancements she'd been dying to field test. If she could wow the admissions board--really wow them with something--she wouldn't need to apply for any scholarship.
Excitement bubbled through her like an oxygen high. She patted the hull. "You and me, baby, we could be something special." There was plenty of room to set up a little workshop. "Oh, yeah. This could totally work."
Ro pushed away from the corridor and paced as she schemed. Micah wouldn't risk making a fuss and besides, Ro's work wouldn't get in the way of his little greenhouse. Power might be an issue, but her mind was already churning on ways to hide the additional resources she would need and the places she could borrow them from. She stopped at the door seal that connected the ship with the now-permanent temporary umbilical to Daedalus and tapped against the tarnished metal.
She needed an assistant--someone clever enough to follow her directions, be discreet, and keep the project moving while she knocked down Mendez's work list, but not so clever as to hijack her idea.
Micah wasn't smart enough to follow her lead in the programming and too clever and too sneaky by half to control. Besides, if he was working with her father in some way, he presented a security risk. No, she needed someone quite different. Smiling, she pulled out her micro. It was late, but he'd probably still be awake. "Message Durbin, Jem." Most likely he was still tinkering with the code he wanted her to look through.
"Ro! Did you get my message? I've been looking all over Daedalus for you."
She winced and dialed down the volume. If his incessant babbling didn't drive her mad, his unrelenting cheerfulness would.
"When you get a chance, patch that program directly through to my micro. I'll run it in protected mode and take a look."
"That's super! Thanks. It's not as elegant as your stuff, but it's still pretty cool. Look, I have this other idea--"
"Jem. Stop." She projected as much cold authority in her voice as she could.
"Oh. Sorry. I--"
"Shut up. Listen. No apologies. Just listen." She'd throttle him if he wasn't so damned smart and eager to please. "I have a job for you." That got his attention. "It's complex and probably doomed from the start. But, I need your help--and you can't tell anyone about it. That includes the commander, my father, and your parents." She paused, enjoying the momentary silence.
"When do we start?"
First she needed to do some investigating. "Check your syllabus in the morning. You've had a change in course requirements."
Jem's low whistle pierced her ear. "Outstanding! You so need to give me those access codes."
"I think not," she said, laughing. There was no telling what Jem would do with that amount of unholy power. "Go to sleep. You'll need to be at your best tomorrow."
"Aren't I always?"
Ro snorted. "Go. Dream of perfect code."
"Oh, man, oh, man this is gonna be great--"
She terminated the call mid-gush, not quite regretting her choice but wondering how the hell she was going to keep Jem from making her crazy. "I guess it's time to head back to school," she said, tunneling into the ed database. Going directly against Daedalus would have been risky, but the teaching algorithm was a quasi-independent program only loosely connected to the station's AI, not too different from her own autonomic nervous system. Ro accessed Jem's coursework, replacing his syllabus with a new one, tailored to her needs.
Now she just needed to find out what her father knew.