There had been dead silence in the room. There was a small muttering now. Don’t blow, don’t blow, Graff wished Mitch and Jamil. We get our turn.
The gavel came down.
Tanzer went on: “A pilot with twenty years’ experience and no faults in the sims ran the course successfully for three hours, forty-six minutes and 17.4 seconds. The accident, which you’ve seen repeatedly, took place within seven tenths of a second. In the 17 thsecond Wilhelmsen missed one random ordnance target on the approach and reoriented to catch it on the retreat, which he did. At this point telemetry leaves us to guess what passed through his mind— perhaps the recollection he was entering the probability fan of a target in his path. Pulse and respiration has increased markedly over the previous ten minutes. The armscomper and the co-pilot simultaneously indicated alarm as the maneuver started. The armscomper fired off-profile as required and missed. In the next .7 of a second the pilot’s telemetry recorded three muscle twitches in conflicting directions causing the craft to undergo successive shocks, and one extreme reaction which caused the pilot and the crew to lose consciousness and sent the ship into a tumble.
“Possibly—Dr. Helmond Weiss will provide more specifics in his testimony—but possibly prolonged hyperception to a microfocused event like the double miss caused a spatial confusion....”
Pens on Translates took rapid notes. Graff kept his notes in his head. And said to himself, on the memory of his own system entries: Wilhelmsen panicked.
“Seven tenths of a second,” Tanzer said, “from first mistake to the ship entering a fatal motion. 4.8 seconds later it clipped a targeting buoy at .5 light. There is no recoverable wreckage. Our analysis of events rests entirely on telemetry—in which, ironically, the speed makes the microgaps significant data fallouts.”
“Meaning the instruments couldn’t send fast enough.”
“Meaning our data-gathering had two phases: an infosift rapid transmission and a more detailed concurrent total transmission that was running 28 minutes behind the condensed report. Machines can’t transmit that fast. More Important, human neurons don’t fire that fast. We’re using “” human brains to improve a missile’s kill rate at a sustained rate of decision that exceeds human limits. Meaning we can’t think that fast that long. We’ve tried an Assisted handoff to a human co-pilot and it’s not practical. The psychological stress is actually increased by the trade, and performance is critically reduced. Either we put an unexcepted AI override on the observed physical responses that preceded the incident, or we go back to design and put that ship Under a tetralogic AI with the pilot at the interface—as the heart, not the head, of the affair; or, unacceptably, we Outright admit that we don’t give a damn for human life, and we breed human beings to do that job and tape-train the fear and humanity out of them, the way they do in Union Space. There are no other choices.”
Down the corridor to the vending machines, a cheese sandwich and a soft drink. Cheese was edible. The fish wasn’t even to mention. It had something green scattered through it. Ben sat down, unwrapped the sandwich, tore the indestructible packaging on the chips and sipped his drink.
A guy came in, put chits in the machine. God, he didn’t want a couple of orderlies discussing kidney function during his sandwich....
But he caught the haircut and the uniform, took a second look, and found the shave-job staring back at him with sudden sharp attention.
“Pollard?”
The face almost rang bells, but he couldn’t place it. The haircut, pure rab, didn’t agree with the blue fatigues that said military. Civ docker, he thought. Then he thought; Dekker. Shepherd. And had a sudden notion in what packet of memory that face belonged.
“Mason?” he asked.
“Yeah!” the guy said, hands full. “Word is you’re here for Dekker, damn! How is he?”
“Like shit.” He indicated the place opposite him at the table and Mason brought his sandwich and his drink over and sat down. Ben asked, “What are you in for?”
“Therapy.” Mason wiggled the fingers of his right hand. “Gym floor jumped up and got me. —Dekker’s still bad, huh? He say anything?”
“Thinks he’s in the fuckin’ Belt most of the time.” Ben took a bite of cheese sandwich, thought about that shuttle leaving at mainday end, and how there wasn’t another til next week, wondered if there was a shortcut to the memory Graff wanted, and said, “Keeps asking for Bird and Cory Salazar. What in hell happened to him? Anybody know?”
Mason pulled a long face. “Just they pulled him out of a sim-pod bloody and beat all to hell. But we’d lay odds—” Mason looked at him about chest-high and stopped talking in mid-sentence. Mason filled his mouth with sandwich instead.
“—lay odds, what?”
Mason looked at him narrowly while he took time to chew the bite and wash it down with soft drink. “Nothing.”
“What, nothing? What’s that look mean?”
“You here as a friend of Dekker’s? Or officially?”
“Look, I’m a programmer, not a psych. I was minding my own business on Sol One. FSO hauled my ass out here because Dekker named me next-of-kin. Lt. Graff hands me his personals, doesn’t tell me shit else, asks me find out what happened to him, and that’s where I am, trying to find out why he’s lying there seeing ET’s and angels, so I can get back to Sol One before my posting’s gone. What’s that look mean?”
Mason said slowly, “You’re not here on Tanzer’s orders.”
“I don’t know Tanzer. The FSO jerked me over on a hush-up and hurry. Humanitarian leave, on account of Dekker wanted me. What’s the UDC got to do with it?”
“Uniform you’re wearing isn’t exactly popular in some quarters.”
“So what are we? Union spies? Not that I heard.”
“Say Dekker wouldn’t be lying in that bed except for the UDC CO here.”
Ben took a look at the door. Nobody around. Nobody listening, unless they routinely bugged the vending machines. “Mason. This is Ben Pollard. Ben who was Morrie Bird’s partner. Ben whose ass your ship saved once upon a while. You seriously mind to tell me what the hell’s going on and why Dekker rates all this shiz?”
Mason swallowed a bit of sandwich and sat there looking at him and thinking about it. “Say it’s a real pressured environment.”
“Yeah?”
“The UDC doesn’t like Belters. You must be the exception.”
Belters who might be old, exiled rab, Ben thought, Shepherds who looked like Mason—that haircut wouldn’t get a security clearance from the UDC, but he didn’t say so. He said, carefully, “There’s some feeling, yeah, but I never ran into it. Went into Tl, computer stuff—in no pain until they snatched me here. What’s this about Dekker and the CO?”
”Tanzer’s run the R&D for the UDC insystem stuff since Adam was an Earther, he’s got his System, and his friends in high places, til the Fleet signed us in to fly for them. The UDC wanted to do the test and documentation through their facility—all right, they had the set-up and the sims and the knowledge of the suppliers and the technical resources; which is how R&D’s got their hands on the ships and put their guys in the seats, because the U friggin’ DC is trying to get the Fleet demoted to a UDC command.”
“I’ve heard that. Mazian’s all over the news trying to get funds. The opposition wants it with strings.”
“You’ve seen the big ships. But the secondary stuff the Fleet’s building—top secret stuff, fast. UDC’s never flown anything this hot. Design screw-ups, spec screw-ups, materials failures. They cut the budget which means they go to the drawing-board again and make changes—no mind it costs another 150 million for a study and an 80 mil legislative session that could’ve made up the difference—no, that’s fine, that’s going in the damn senators’ pockets and feeding the contractors. We had one glitch-up with a pump that wasn’t up to specs, we got another because security’s so damn tight the company making a mate-up device can’t talk to the company writing the software, you figure that?”