Hellburner (13 page)

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?”

“No, but it has other flaws.”

“Specifically?”

“Even a tetralogic is recognizable, to similar systems. Machine can counter machine. Human beings can make decisions these systems don’t expect. Longscan works entirely on that principle.”

“Are you a computer tech?”

“I know the systems. I personally would not go into combat with a computer totally in charge.”

The senator leaned back, frowning. “Thank you, lieutenant.”

“May I make an observation?” Tanzer asked, and got an indulgence and a nod from Bonner.

Tanzer said: “Let me say this is an example of the kind of mystical nonsense I’ve heard all too much of from this service. Whatever your religious preferences, divine intervention didn’t happen here, Wilhelmsen didn’t stay conscious long enough to apply the human advantage. Human beings can’t defy physics; and the lieutenant sitting behind his carrier’s effect shields can maintain mat spacers are somehow evolved beyond earthly limitations and make their decisions by mysterious instincts that let them outperform a tetralogic, but in my studied and not unexpert opinion, there’s been altogether too much emphasis in recruitment based on entry-level skills and certain kinds of experience— meaning a practical exclusion of anyone but Belters. The lieutenant talks about some mysterious unquantifiable mentality that can work at these velocities. But I’d like to say, and Dr. Weiss will back me on this, that there’s more than button-pushing ability and reflexes that make a reliable military. There is, very importantly, attitude. There’s been no background check into volunteers on this project...”

Dammit, he’s going to do it—

“...in spite of the well-known unrest and the recent violence in the Belt. We have a service completely outside the authority of the UDC trying to exclude the majority of Sol System natives from holding a post on weapons platforms of enormous destructive potential, insisting we take their word—“ Tanzer’s knuckles rapped the table. “—mat the policies and decisions of the UN, the world governments, and even Company policy will be respected and observed outside this system. It’s imperative that these ships not remain under the control of a cadre selected by one man’s opinion of their fitness for command, a man not in any way native to Earth or educated to Earth’s values. The Fleet is pushing qualifications arbitrarily selected to exclude our own military in command positions, for what motive leaves me entirely uneasy, sirs.”

Some things a man couldn’t hear and keep his mouth shut. “General,” Graff said. “I’d like to make my own statement in answer to that.”

“This isn’t a court of law, lieutenant. But you’ll have your say. In the meantime, the colonel has his. —Go on, colonel.”

Graff let go a breath and thought, I could walk out, now. But to what good? To what living good? I’m in it. The Captains can disavow what I say. They can still do that. But Tanzer wanted to cut a deal. Tanzer wanted me to agree on the redesign and what good is my agreement to them, what could it possibly influence if this committee’s already in their pocket?

Tanzer said, “There are two reasons why I favor a tetralogic system. This ship is too important and too hazardous to civilian targets to turn over to personnel in whose selection our values have never been a criterion. I’ve been asked privately the reason for the substitution—“

My God, here it goes.

“In the recess I’ve also been asked the reason for the morale difficulties in this old and time-tried institution. Gentlemen, it lies in the assumption that these machines are flyable only by super-humans personally selected by Conrad Mazian and his hand-picked officers. Earth is being sold a complete bill of goods. Conrad Mazian wants absolute control of an armada Earth is sacrificing considerably to build. What’s the difference—control of the human race by a remote group of dissidents—or by a merchanter cartel with a powerful lobby in the halls of the Earth Company administration? These ships and the carriers should be under UDC command and responsible to the citizens of the governments that fund them, not to a self-appointed committee of merchantmen with their own interests and their own priorities.”

Bang went the gavel. The growing murmur from the committee and the aides and witnesses ebbed down, and Tanzer went on:

“You’ve seen an unfortunate incident in this hearing room, resultant from what the Fleet calls discipline, beginning with the concept of command by committee and ending with the uniform variances that permit Belter enlistees to dress and act like miners on holiday. The carrier that is allegedly on operational alert at this moment for the protection of Earth itself doesn’t even have its senior pilot at this facility, while Captain Keu is on an indefinite leave to Sol One. Junior lieutenant Graff insists he’s qualified in an emergency—but his heads of station outrank him, a prime example of merchanter command order, and if he says decisions have to come at light speed, and he can’t have an AI breathing down his neck, what does he say about a committee of senior officers calling the shots for him on the flight deck?”

He stood up. “I object, general.”

“Sit down, lieutenant.” The gavel banged. “Before I find you in contempt of this committee and have you arrested.”

He sat. He was no good in the brig. The captain and the Number Ones needed to hear the rest of it. Accurately.

Tanzer said: “We need a disciplined system that can let us substitute a pilot, a tech, a scan operator, anybody in any crew, because this isn’t the merchant trade we’re running, ladies and gentlemen, it’s war, in which there are bound to be casualties, and no single man is indispensable. There has to be a chain of command responsible to legitimate policies of the Defense Department, and in which there is absolutely no leeway for personalities too talented and too important to follow orders and do their job.”

He couldn’t stay quiet. “You mean downgrade the ship until cargo pushers can fly it!”

Bang went the gavel. “Lieutenant!”

Echoes in the core. High up in the mast sounds came faint as ghosts; not like R2 where half-refined ore shot through zero-cold, and thundered and rumbled like doom against the chamber walls. In this vast chamber sims whirled around the chamber on mag-levs and came like tame, dreadful flowers to the platforms, giving up or taking in their human cargoes—

You carded in before you launched. The pod’s Adaptive Assists recognized you, input your values, and you input your tape for the sim you were running. You fastened (he one belt that locked the others. But something was wrong. The pod started to move and he couldn’t remember carding in, couldn’t think through the mounting pain in his head and the force pinning him to the seat—