by Max Barry
She hadn’t been to Arlington since she was a cadet. In the meantime, it had doubled in size, sprouting offices and testing fields and blocky beige buildings. All thanks to war funding, she guessed. Her escort, a young CDO with soft blond hair and no facial expressions, reeled off building names as they sped by, two of which she recognized as belonging to officers from Fornina Sirius. If she’d died out there, maybe there would’ve been a Jolene Jackson wing. Or an annex. Maybe a squash court.
The car stopped. Her escort bounced out to be on hand as she exited. She was in full dress and a passing pair of privates stopped to salute, which she returned. The lobby was very corporate, very glass. Among an ocean of black tile rose a titanium sculpture of a Surplex mining drone. The staff sergeant on desk knew who she was before she could open her mouth. “Sir, the admiral will be with you a few moments. I can take you to a room where you can wait.”
She felt eyes on her as she crossed to the elevator. She felt different on base. Outside, in the real world, voyaging into the unknown and facing an unimaginable horror and surviving, that made her a hero. Not here. On base, people knew, even if they didn’t. They sensed something a little funky about a person who crawled back home, alive, leaving thousands of bodies behind. If she was feeling charitable, she would call it superstition, the belief of the military mind that when death brushed by a person, it left something behind, something contagious. More realistically, she would say they were smart enough to realize that the only way that many people died was if there had been a monumental screwup, and there was a good chance it was hers.
The Colossus room was eight floors up. She accepted a steaming coffee from the staff sergeant, who had taken over from her escort as silently and seamlessly as if one had morphed into the other, and lurked near a window that offered a view over bunkhouse roofs and wet fields. She could see cadets rolling around the track, running drills or looking for their car keys or whatever the hell they were doing.
She heard a door but didn’t realize it was Admiral Nettle until he was standing beside her, gazing out at the cadets. He had a thick white mustache. That was new. “Think you could take them?” he said. “You set a track record here, as I recall.”
She said, “That was a long time ago.” She had once believed she could save the world by running track.
“Yes. When things were simpler. How’s David?”
“Good.”
“Did he come to Arlington with you?”
“No. He has work. And it’s not really his thing.” It wasn’t really her thing anymore, either. She’d once thought places like this were Service: saluting in corridors, drills, meetings. That was what the military was all about. Now it all felt slightly junior high, like watching people play dress-up, worrying about things that didn’t matter. Lately she had trouble believing that even a small portion of what happened here was helping.
“I visited him,” Nettle said, “when it wasn’t clear who had survived.”
“I know you did. Thank you.” There was a pause. “I know why I’m here.”
Nettle’s eyebrows rose.
“I know the press is important,” she said. “The talks. The shows and clips. But I’m not good at it. I can’t . . .” She searched for the word. “I don’t know how to talk to those people. I can’t give them sound bites and slogans.”
“Jolene,” Nettle said, “you’re doing an excellent job because you find it difficult. People see you struggling and they empathize. You’re not hiding any of that. You have an authenticity that can’t be manufactured.”
She was taken aback. “Then I don’t know why I’m here.”
“Well, it’s not because we want to critique your media performance.” Nettle gestured toward the door. “If you’re ready?”
For what? She hadn’t even known there was a we in his meeting. She’d assumed she was coming in for a one-on-one with Nettle. But when she entered the Colossus room, she saw no fewer than half a dozen uniforms clumped around a mahogany table, including a general, a chief of staff, and two majors. More stars in one place than since they’d awarded her the Medal of Valor on live broadcast. At one end of the room was a wall-sized screen, reading: INCIDENT REPORT / XID FS-000-013 / FORNINA SIRIUS.
She thought: Ah, crap.
Nettle guided her to a chair and took the seat beside her. She took a sip of water.
“That’s one of my favorite pieces,” Nettle said. He was gazing at a painting that occupied most of the opposite wall: a wide, featureless plain with a hint of far-off mountains. Near a corner was a dark figure with a stick or a spear. “Do you see the gazelle?”
She hadn’t, until he mentioned it. In one corner was a tiny brown smudge.
“Persistence hunting,” Nettle said. “Practiced by ancient tribes across Africa a million or so years ago. They were slower than their prey, but figured out that they could exploit their basic human advantage in stamina. We can endure, you see. Keep going for hours, days, until the prey ran itself to death. That’s how we survived.”
He was trying to put her at ease, because they were going to make her talk about Fornina Sirius, and she would be expected to do so calmly and rationally, as if reviewing a restaurant meal. One of the men with the general was a civilian in a light gray suit with a Surplex ID tag. She’d never interacted with him directly, but knew his name, Bogart, and his reports, which, when she untangled the words, said that she had killed everyone.
“Perhaps that’s how we win the war,” Nettle said. “By exploiting our innate advantage over the salamanders.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know.” He smiled. “Maybe it’s still endurance.”
The brass huddle across the table broke up. Officers and staff found their seats. She didn’t know if they’d planned to sit on one side of the table, with her and Nettle on the other, but that was how it wound up. The general asked how her flight had been and how long she’d been in town and she did not allow her gaze to shift to the screen, where someone was dialing through Fornina Sirius layouts. “Now, why don’t you take me through this?” he said finally, and turned to the screen. There it was. The deployment map, right before the end.
She took a breath. “We came out ten tees off course. We were supposed to be in empty space, but there was a high amount of debris. I had no information on how we got off course.” But she knew now: The navigation software messed up. Everyone in this room knew that. “Commodore Hrovat ordered the gunships to establish a standard defensive zone. We dispatched drones. There was a lot of rock to check through, but nothing tripped any alarms. Two hours later—”
“What did you do in the meantime?”
“Me, personally?”
“Yes.”
“I communicated with Commodore Hrovat over comms. He expressed concern for the proximity of the troop carriers to the debris. There was a lot of rock floating about and it was difficult to track it all at once.”
“That’s all you spoke about?”
“We also spoke about our families. His kid shares a birthday with my husband. We were both hoping for a moment to send a message home.”
The general nodded. “Carry on.”
She would step through the Fornina Sirius engagement. She would tell them again which officer was where, who did what. But she didn’t want to describe personal conversations, which forced her to remember them as people. “When Commodore Hrovat retired to rest, I assumed command. My priority was to establish where we were and how we’d ended up there. Until that was resolved, we couldn’t reliably perform a hard skip. I was also called on to resolve some ship-to-ship logistics.”
“What were they?”
“The Graham wanted to perform a personnel transfer to Hancock. They had a sick midcaptain.”
“At what point did you review the drone report?”
“The drones were reporting continuously,” she said. “There wasn’t a single poin
t in time where they finished.”
“But your system automatically aggregated their data. Compiling a report for you, essentially.”
“I reviewed those at regular intervals.”
“How often, exactly?”
“I would say approximately every ten or fifteen minutes.”
“And what did they say?”
She glanced at the screen. It was there, the same as she remembered. A lot of text, but the critical line was up top. It was even boxed.
THREAT LEVEL: UNDETERMINED
“They said that,” she said.
“What was your reaction?”
“I understood it to mean that the drones hadn’t finished their scans.”
“I’m not asking what you thought they meant,” the general said. “I’m asking what you did.”
There it was. “Nothing,” she said. “We were already on alert and there was no evidence of a specific threat. It wasn’t uncommon for the system to take a little time before determining a threat level. So I continued with my duties. Every so often, I checked back on it to see if there had been any progress.”
“By ‘every so often,’ you mean every ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Approximately, yes. More frequently later.”
“Why more frequently later?”
“Because it seemed like a long time,” she said. “It shouldn’t have taken that long.”
“So, eventually, you realized something must be wrong.”
“Yes.”
“That the system should have returned a specific threat analysis, but hadn’t.”
“That’s correct.”
“What caused this realization?”
“It occurred to me that on previous occasions, when the system hadn’t collected enough data to produce a threat level summary, it would leave that section blank. It would not say ‘Undetermined.’” She did not describe how this felt: the crawling sensation that she’d missed something terrible.
There was silence. She took a sip of water.
“At this time, how long had you held command?”
“Two hours and eleven minutes.”
“What did you do then?”
“I reopened the most recent report.”
“You didn’t issue any order.”
“No.”
“You didn’t communicate your concern to anyone.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t understand what ‘Undetermined’ meant. I hadn’t seen a threat level coded that way before. Not even in the manual.” She had looked it up afterward. It wasn’t in the regular section, but rather tucked away in an appendix designed for technical use. There it said: UNDETERMINED: SYSTEM UNABLE TO PERFORM ANALYSIS DUE TO TECHNICAL FAULT. “I reviewed the drone reports in an attempt to figure this out.”
“So you continued to read,” the general said. “What did you see?”
“I opened the detailed drone commentary and reviewed the results of individual scans.” The screen scrolled, replaying the text. “Spectrum analysis. Materials composition. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. Until . . .” The screen stopped. She didn’t look at it. She didn’t want to see this part ever again. “There was an object the drones had tagged as ‘inert body.’ It was huge. Bigger than all four carriers combined. Everything about it was wrong. Mass. Spin. Structure.”
“This was the hive.”
“Yes.”
“Did you recognize it as such?”
“At that point, all human encounters dating back to Coral Beach had been with hostiles housed in relatively small structures. We didn’t know they built on this scale.”
“Then what did you think it was?”
“I thought it was a hive,” she said.
“And what did you do?”
“I ordered a closer inspection.”
“By the drones.”
“Yes.”
“Did you move the gunships?”
“No.”
“The carriers?”
“No.”
“Did you sound a general alert?”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because the system hadn’t flagged it.”
“It was a ten-kiloton unknown object within your safety zone.”
“We’d had false alarms before, and it didn’t seem possible that the computers could miss something like that.”
The Surplex man, Bogart, shuffled in his seat. “If I can make a note,” he said, leaning forward. “It’s not correct to say the system ‘missed’ it. It was identified and categorized as ‘undetermined’ because that’s actually what it was. As you said yourself just now, we’d never encountered an object like this before.”
She liked his we. As if this man had been there. As if he would ever contemplate putting himself in the kind of personal danger that he expected of her, and everyone who had been with her, and everyone who would follow. “Not ‘enemy,’” she said. “Not ‘threat.’ We had your AI system that was supposed to be able to detect enemies and mobilize a response before we even saw them. Except when a gigantic ball of ‘undetermined’ rolled up to our starboard, nothing happened.”
“Which is incredibly regrettable, I’m sure everyone here would agree,” Bogart said. “But I must make the point that the system was acting as designed. It wasn’t asked to speculate. That’s the domain of human officers. The system—”
“I saw it unfold.” No one was asking her to continue, but she couldn’t listen to another word from Bogart. She could keep herself in check for the media, arguably, but she couldn’t hear him talk about acting as designed without laying it out for him what that meant. “I had visuals, so I saw everything. Salamanders peeling off it, thousands, in seconds. We were facing the wrong way. The gunships were guarding against an enemy in the distance, and it was already inside. My screen overloaded. There were too many hostiles to display. We weren’t set up for an engagement at that scale. But I saw that we lost Spirit of Phoenix first. I know that was seven hundred and forty-nine lives. Then Balance of Chicago. Four hundred and seventy-one. Hrovat took command as Retribution of Calgary went down. Eight hundred and two.” The screen was updating in response to her words, playing out the battle. “The gunships began to engage at this time. Hrovat’s own ship, Joy of New Orleans, reported that she was breached, with hostiles on deck. We theorized that this would signal a shift in their pattern of attack, from exchanging fire at a distance to boarding and capture. But the enemy pursued both strategies at once and did not cease firing at any point. New Orleans was lost. Two hundred and eleven. At this stage, I became the highest-ranking surviving officer, although this was not communicated to me for several minutes, at which time I was leading a strafing run on the undetermined inert body. I observed that it continued to issue salamanders. By which I mean, it was spraying them like mist with no sign of stopping. We had lost all of the carriers and a third of the escort. I gave the order to retreat.”
She forced herself to stop. The room was silent. The screen paused its replay. It was awash with red, four small white markers arrowing toward the left corner. She took a sip of water, her hand trembling.
“This kind of engagement must never happen again,” Nettle said. “We can’t allow them to get close. You’ve heard of the Providence program?”
She took a shaky breath. “It’s a new class of battleship.”
He nodded. “If we can get funding approval, it will win the war.”
“The public was united before Fornina Sirius,” said the general. “Afterward, they were burning flags. Now there’s a pacifist leading the polls. We’re smarter than our enemy and better resourced, but we will lose if we can’t convince people they need to fight. The real war isn’t out there. It’s down here.”
“The design is truly remark
able,” Nettle said. “If they work like they’re supposed to, a handful of Providences may enable us to achieve total military victory with zero casualties. What do you think?”
She said, “I think our plan was zero casualties, too.”
“Indeed,” said Nettle. “But, to speak bluntly, your fleet was constructed in peacetime. This is a new generation of war machine designed specifically to destroy this enemy.” He turned to Bogart. “Would you like to present the software?”
Bogart cleared his throat. The main screen flipped to a diagram. “I work in Surplex Machine Intelligence, liaising with Service Strategic Command for—”
“I know who you are,” she said.
He nodded. “There were, obviously, serious performance shortfalls at Fornina Sirius, not only during the encounter itself but also at various stages leading up to it. Immediately afterward, Service and Surplex launched a number of inquiries into, one, establishing how these defects were able to occur, and two, recommending strategies for avoiding a repeat in the next generation of military hardware.”
“Take it out.”
Bogart’s eyebrows rose. “Ah . . .”
“It doesn’t work,” she said. “Remove it. That’s my recommendation.”
“With respect,” Bogart said, “it’s not practical to, as you say, ‘take it out.’ Software is integral to the military. It’s in every vehicle, vessel, and practically every piece of equipment. There’s no question that it will be present. The question is how much executive authority it should wield.”
She turned to Nettle. “Is this why I’m here? You know my opinion. Keep software out of command. I’d rather have nothing than have a computer I can’t trust.”
“That’s not why you’re here,” Nettle said.
“Now, we actually agree on this,” said Bogart, shuffling forward. “Because, and perhaps this will surprise you, we at Surplex find your actions at Fornina Sirius to be fairly reasonable, under the circumstances. But we also think our software was reasonable. In our opinion, what created a catastrophic failure was not software, or human command—”
“Not software?”