Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 by Lj Cohen

Micah.
    She strode down the corridor, looking up for a change and smiling at everyone she passed. Most smiled back. Maybe this wouldn't be such a terrible posting after all. They couldn't keep her on the overnight shift forever.
    His attention glued to his micro, Micah Rotherwood brushed past her and ducked into the nexus. Nomi stared after him, frowning. She pulled out her micro and queried Daedalus in silent mode. The AI placed Micah in his quarters this time.
    Nomi decided she didn't need to head to dinner just yet.
    How well did she know either Ro or Micah, really? Were they working together? One of them had hacked the AI. She would lay odds on it being Ro. But why would she mess with the localizations? What did she have to hide? She squeezed through a knot of people chatting in front of the nexus, apologized, and hurried after Micah, her curiosity even more powerful than her loneliness.

Chapter 10
    Ro took a deep breath and copied the negative result for a narcotic metabolite and pasted it to the bittergreen, obliterating the flagged finding . Setting the report as unread, she saved and closed it. The file blinked red for official and unreported. She stepped away from the display, shaking out her fingers and getting ready for the next part of the hack.
    Backing out of the medical file took Ro as much time and care as getting inside had, but no one would be able to trace her path through the system. She'd done as much as she could. What happened between Barre and his parents wouldn't be her concern anymore. Jem would owe her.
    Ro erased the display, calling up the ship's data from her micro and the two drones' completed map. Someone had deliberately disguised recent structural repairs and Ro knew that someone had to be her father. That meant he was connected to the stolen cargo somehow. But how? She pulled her arms in close to her body, letting the holographic display collapse in on itself.
    Now what?
    Could this wreck even fly? Judging by his notes, her father seemed to think so, but she'd have to check every system aboard to see what he'd finished and what did and didn't work.
    She folded her arms around herself, considered her options, and paced the room. Why wouldn't he let her leave? It would have cost him nothing to authorize her scholarship application. Now it was down to this: No AI, no scholarship, no escape. She couldn't do that, not and live with herself. She certainly couldn't continue living with him.
    Ro stopped and called up the original AI core code. Letting it spiral around her in a wash of color and motion, she whistled in appreciation. No wonder her father left this for last. Even if the ship could take off, without a functioning AI, it couldn't do much more than orbit Daedalus or limp through interstitial space. No one would offer Ro a scholarship for that, unless she could troubleshoot its higher brain.
    The original programming bootstrapped Dauber and May's self-learning, interactive, recursive, enhanced networks and the first gen AIs took it from there. The SIREN interface had revolutionized interstellar travel, simultaneously making the millions of tiny calculations needed to navigate in real time through interstitial space and mathematically mapping the unstable probability wells that let the next generation of crewed ships hopscotch through wormholes.
    Without the AI, the ship was one very expensive, very stranded storage locker.
    She squinted at the core code, wondering what the hell her father was planning. If the cargo was his, then he needed the ship to smuggle it off base. But if it could fly, blasting free of Daedalus station wouldn't exactly be subtle.
    Right now it couldn't fly and he had left the AI for her. She was sure of it. For all his secrecy and the little confrontation they had this morning, it had been almost too easy to get into his workroom for the schematics.
    What else had he done here? Frowning, Ro paced her corner of the storage room again. She had assumed the