Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (54 page)

“The effect will be training your pilots to pull it short—to worry when they’re taking a necessary chance. Combat pilots can’t have that mindset; and you can’t train with that thing breathing down your neck.”

“You’re not a psychiatrist, lieutenant.”

“I’m not an engineer, either, but I know the AI you’ve got won’t accommodate it, you’re talking about a very complicated software, a bigger black box, and that panel’s already crowding armscomp, besides the psychological factors—”

“Cut one seat. One fewer tech. The tetralogic’s worth it.”

“That’s ten fewer objects longscan can track, and that’s one damned more contractor with an unproved software and another unproved interface to train to.”

“That’s nothing getting tracked if the ship doesn’t get built, lieutenant, come down to the point. You’re not going to get everything you want.”

“If you want to cut a deal, you need to talk to the captain, I’m under his orders.”

“What are his orders?”

“To keep that ship as is.”

“Or lose it? You listen to me. You don’t have to agree. Just don’t raise objections.”

“Talk to my captain. I can’t change his orders.”

Tanzer was red in the face. Keeping his voice very quiet. “We can’t reach your captain.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know why. We think he’s in committee meetings.”

“Go to Mazian’s office, colonel, I can’t authorize a thing.”

“We’ve been trying to reach him, lieutenant, and we’ve got your whole damned program about to destruct on us, out there—you’d better believe you’re in a hot spot, and I wouldn’t take you into confidence, you or your recruits, but we can’t afford another shouting match for the committee. We’re trying to save this program, we’re not arguing the value of human hands-on at the controls: you know and I know there’s no way Union’s tape-trained clones are any match for real human beings—”

“They’re not that easy a mark. Azi still aren’t an AI with an interdict.”

“They’ll crack. They’ll crack the same as anybody else. Their program’s going to have the same limitations.”

“They won’t crack, colonel, they’re completely dedicated to what they’re doing, that’s what they’re created for, for God’s sake—”

“You listen to me, lieutenant. I was in charge of the program that put your Victoria out there and I don’t need to be told by any wet-behind-the-ears what a human pilot is worth, but, dammit! you automate when you have to. You don’t hold on to an idea til it kills you—which this is going to do if you screw up in there. You can lose the whole damned war in that hearing room, does that get through to you?”

“Colonel, in all respect to your experience—”

“You go on listening. Yes, we had to have a show, yes, I subbed Wilhelmsen. Your boy Dekker’s got problems. Serious problems.” Tanzer pulled a datacard from his breast pocket.

“What’s that?”

“A copy of Dekker’s personnel file. It’s damned interesting reading.”

Damn, he thought. And hoped he kept anxiety off his face. It couldn’t be Reel records—unless mere was a two-legged leak in the records system.

“Reckless proceeding and wrongful death.” Tanzer pocketed the card again. “You want the reason I subbed him? There’s a grieving mother out there that’s been trying to get justice out of that boy of yours. Rape and murder—”

“Neither of which is true.”

“I had, if you want to know, lieutenant, specific orders to pull Dekker off that demo, because Dekker’s legal troubles were going to surface again the minute his name hit the downworld media—and it would have.”

“On a classified test. He lost a partner out in the Belt. The incident isn’t a secret in the Company. Far from it. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that, if you’ve got that record.”

“The name was going to surface, take my word for it. He’s politically hot, too damned hot to represent this program— that’s why I pulled him from that demo, lieutenant, and you had to ignore my warning. Stick to issues you’re prepared to answer and leave Dekker the hell out of this. Cory Salazar. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“ASTEX politics murdered Salazar.”

“Tell that to the mother. Tell that to the mama of the underage kid Dekker seduced out there.”

“That wasn’t the way it happened, colonel.”

“You want to tell Salazar’s mother that, —lieutenant? You want to tell that to a woman who’s on the MarsCorp board? I couldn’t put him in front of the media. I had to pull him off that team. You understand me? I’m trusting you right now, lieutenant, with a critical confidence, because, dammit, you’ve raised the issue in there and you’d better have the good sense to back off that point, waffle your way out of it and come into line if you want to keep your boy , inside these walls. If he gets to be a media issue, he’s dead. You understand that?”

“I understand Wilhelmsen died, I understand a whole ciew died for a damned politicking decision—”

“You mink I don’t care, Lieutenant? Your boy Dekker’s got a political problem and a mouth. And we’ve got a ship that kills crews and somebody’s mother breathing down our necks, wanting your boy’s head on a platter. You hear me? I didn’t screw Dekker. Your captain put him in that position, I didn’t. Damned right I pulled him from what was scheduled to go public, and damned right I shut him up before he got to the VIPs we had onstation.”

“By shoving him into a pod unconscious?”

“No, damn you. I didn’t.”

Not lying, if he could rely on anything Tanzer said. Which he was far from sure of. “You told him why you pulled him?”

“Trust that mouth? No. And don’t you. Hear me? He got into that pod on his own. Leave it at that. Attempted suicide. Who knows? I won’t contest that finding. But you shut it down with that. I know he’s popular with your emits. I know you’ve got a problem. But let’s use our heads on this and you quieten matters down and get off that issue.”

Damn and damn. Call the captain, was what he needed to do. But they weren’t sure the UDC wasn’t eavesdropping. And if Keu was currently caught up in committee at Sol—

Ask Tanzer if FleetCom was secure? Hell if.

“We’d better get in there,” Tanzer said and opened the door and walked out.

Son of a bitch, Graff thought, what do I do? Demas is on board, Saito’s on her way up there....

He walked out, shut the door. Tanzer was down at the corner of the hall with Bonner, the two of them talking. He looked at his watch. One minute from late, the committee was about to convene. He could no-show, he could send Bonner word he was going to be late.

They could say any damned thing without hindrance then, finish the meeting without him in the time it would take to get FleetCom, let alone confer with the captain.

He’d faced fire with steadier nerves. He’d made jumpspeed decisions easier with a ship at stake. There was no assurance Tanzer had told him the truth, or even half of it. There was no assurance they had ever tried to get Keu, or Mazian, mere was no assurance it was anything but a maneuver to silence him and ram something through, and there was not even absolute assurance they’d told the truth about political influence stalking Dekker, but if it was, God, somebody had found a damned sensitive button to push. If the Fleet didn’t back Dekker, if the Fleet let Dekker take a grenade—the likes of Mitch and Jamil wouldn’t stand still for it, there’d be bloodshed, no exaggeration at all, the Belters would take the UDC facilities apart first and work their way over to Fleet HQ. Betray them—and there was no trusting them, no relying on them, no guarantee the metal and the materials were going to go on arriving out of the Belt, and damned sure no crews to handle the ships.

Now he didn’t know what Bonner was going to do in that hearing room. Or Tanzer. And he wasn’t in a position to object—he felt he was heading into a trap, going in there at all, but he followed them in and sat down in a decimated ;ring.

Not a friendly face in the room. Not a one.

Bonner called the session to order, Bonner talked about high feelings over the tragic accident, Bonner talked about the stress of a job that called on men to risk their lives, talked about God and country.

Blue-sky language. Blue-sky thinking. Up to an Earther didn’t refer to phase fields, war was two districts on a plane surface in a dispute over territory, and the United Nations was a faction-ridden single-star-system organization trying to tell merchanter Families what their borders were: explain borders to them, first.

You had to see a planet through optics and think flat surface to imagine how ground looked. He hadn’t laid eyes on a planet til he was half-grown. He never had figured out the emotional context, except to compare it to ship or station, but there was something about being fixed hi place next to permanent neighbors that sounded desperately unnatural. Which he supposed was prejudice on his side. Bonner talked about a righteous war. And he thought about ports and ships run by Cyteen’s tape-trained humanity, with mindsets more alien than Earth’s.

Bonner talked about human stress and interactive systems, while he thought about the Cluster off Cyteen, where startides warped space, and a ghosty malfunction on the boards you hoped to God was an artifact of that space, while a Union spotter was close to picking up your presence.

Bonner got Helmond Weiss on the mike to read the medical report. Telemetry again. More thorough than the post-mortem on the ship. Less printout. Four human beings hadn’t output as much in their last minutes as that struggling AI had. Depressing thought.

Then the psych lads took the mike. “Were Wilhelmsen’s last decisions rational?” the committee asked point-blank. And the psychs said, hauling up more charts and graphs, “Increasing indecision,” and talked about hyped senses, maintained that Wilhelmsen had gone on hyperfocus overload and lost track of actual time-flow—

... making decisions at such speed in such duration, it was pure misapprehension of the rate at which filings were happening. No, you couldn’t characterize it as panic....

“... evidence of physiological distress, shortness of breath, increase in REM and pulse rate activated a medical crisis warning with the AI—”

“The carrier’s AI didn’t have time to reach the rider?” a senator asked.

“And get the override query engaged and answered, no, there wasn’t time.”

Playback of the final moments on the tape. The co-pilot, Pete Fowler, the last words on the tape Fowler’s, saying, “Hold it, hold it~”

That overlay the whole reorientation and firing incident, at those speeds. The panel had trouble grasping that. They spent five minutes arguing it, and maybe, Graff thought, still didn’t realize the sequence of events, or that it was Fowler protesting the original reorientation.

You didn’t have time to talk. Couldn’t get a word out in some sequences, and not this one. Fowler shouldn’t have spoken. Part of it was his fault. Shouldn’t have spoken to a strange pilot, who didn’t know his contexts, who very well knew they didn’t altogether trust him.

The mike went to Tanzer. A few final questions, the committee said. And a senator asked the question:

“What was the name of the original pilot?”

“Dekker. Paul Dekker. TVainee.”

“What was the reason for removing him from the mission?”

“Seniority. He was showing a little stress. Wilhelmsen was the more experienced.”

Like hell.

“And the crew?”

“Senator, a crew should be capable of working with any officer. It was capable. There were no medical grounds there. The flaw is in the subordination of the neural net interface. It should be constant override with concurrent input from the pilot. The craft’s small cross-section, its minimum profile, the enormous power it has to carry in its engines to achieve docking at highest v—all add up to sensitive controls and a very powerful response....”

More minutiae. Keep my mouth shut or not? Graff asked himself. Trust Tanzer? Or follow orders?

Another senator: “Did the sims run the same duration as the actual mission?”

Not lately, Graff thought darkly, while Tanzer said, blithely, “Yes.”

Then a senator said: “May I interject a question to Lt. Graff.”

Bonner didn’t like that. Bonner frowned, and said, “Lt. Graff, I remind you you’re still under oath.”

“Yes, sir.”

The senator said, “Lt. Graff. You were at the controls of the carrier at the time of the accident. You were getting telemetry from the rider.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The medical officer on your bridge was recorded as saying Query out.”

“That’s correct.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’d just asked the co-pilot to assess the pilot’s condition and act. But the accident was already inevitable. Just not enough time.”

Blinks from the senator, attempt to think through the math, maybe. “Was the carrier too far back for safety?”

“It was in a correct position for operations. No, sir.”

“Was the target interval set too close? Was it an impossible shot?”

“No. It was a judgment shot. The armscomper doesn’t physically fire all the ordnance, understand. He sets the priorities at the start of the run and adjusts them as the situation changes. A computer does the firing, with the pilot following the sequence provided by his co-pilot and the longscanner and armscomper. The pilot can violate the aimscomper’s priorities. He might have to. There are unplotteds out there, rocks, for instance. Or mines.”

“Did Wilhelmsen violate the priorities?”

“Technically, yes. But he had that choice.”

“Choice. At those speeds.”

“Yes, sir. He was in control until that point. He knew it was wrong, he glitched, and he was out. Cold.”

“Are you a psychiatrist, lieutenant?”

“No, sir, but I suggest you ask the medical officer. There was no panic until he heard his crew’s alarm. That spooked him. Their telemetry reads alarm—first, sir. His move startled them and he dropped out of hype.”

“The lieutenant is speculating,” Bonner said. “Lt. Graff, kindly keep to observed fact.”

“As a pilot, sir, I observed these plain facts in the medical testimony.”

“You’re out of order, lieutenant.”

“One more question,” the senator said. “You’re saying, lieutenant, that the tetralogic has faults. Would it have made this mistake?”