Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “You could be making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill, Hana.”

  “That’d make my day, believe me. But think about it—suppose you hadn’t been in SecCom? Who’d know about the glitch?”

  “You suggesting there’s an Earth First cell on this ship? You saying Tom Pasqua’s part of it?”

  “I’m suggesting that any organization determined enough to mount a military operation in the high atmosphere, with what appears to be cutting-edge equipment, has to be taken seriously.

  “We’re totally isolated here, Nicole. Were’re a long way from home, and we’ve no access to independent—and secure—sources of data. Other than, perhaps, what we brought with us.”

  “Your PortaComp.”

  “At the moment,” Hana waved her hand over the little computer. “It’s scanning for ‘bugs’ and generating a ‘snow’ field to disrupt any tape recorders that might happen to have been left aboard. You’ll be happy to know we’re clean.”

  “I’m so pleased.”

  “You’re the one who said ‘be careful.’ ”

  Nicole slouched in her chair, chewing on a thumbnail while her focus gradually turned inward; she was staring straight at Hana, but had lost almost all awareness of her. Hana let her think like that for a couple of minutes.

  “Your hair looks awful,” forgetting herself and muttering aloud a comment she’d intended to keep to herself.

  “I beg your pardon?” Nicole blinked, centering once more on her friend.

  “You don’t take care of yourself.”

  “Last physical says different.” She still wasn’t wholly tracking, responding to the words while missing the subtext that held their true meaning.

  Hana threw up her hands, as if to say, why do I bother? “Fine,” she snapped. And then, “More precisely, you don’t seem to care much about yourself. Very neat, very presentable, totally regulation; the only thing about you that’s you anymore is that damn flight jacket. The rest is all camouflage.”

  “I haven’t your flair, but we’ve both known that from the beginning.”

  “No, Nicole. You don’t have the will anymore to try, unless someone puts a gun to your head. It’s like you’ve crafted an image of yourself, inside and out, that you’re determined to hold on to—like an icon or some talisman—for dear life.”

  “That’s way out of line, Hana.”

  “Probably. But where we’re concerned, I don’t figure I’ve got all that much to lose.”

  Nicole stood, turning away from the other woman to brace her hands against the curved ceiling overhead. Hana watched expectantly, and then her mouth opened in a silent gasp as she heard a subvocal growl that raised the atavistic hackles at the base of her skull and set her nerves to buzzing. She had goose bumps, she knew from fright, her back-brain sending a frantic series of primordial cues for her to run for the nearest tree. For her life.

  Nicole wasn’t even aware of what she’d done as she looked back over her shoulder, acting as though the previous exchange hadn’t taken place.

  “Have you told any of this to Ramsey?”

  “You’re the one and only.”

  Nicole nodded. “The software’s the key. Proof, one way or the other. If this glitch exists, can you find it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make it sooner rather than later, okay?”

  “Do my best. Course, you know who my prime suspect is.”

  “No offense, but that’s too damn convenient.”

  “Want to bet she had a hand in instigating Louie’s little stunt at our door? Most likely provided the means to disable the ScanCams.”

  “Let’s worry about suspects when we have some evidence.”

  “I merely mention it in light of the Lamplighter conference we’ve got scheduled.”

  “We’re stuck with that, Hana.”

  “Tell me about it.” Hana faced Nicole, started to reach out a hand and then thought better of it.

  “It’s just... ” she tried to say, and then thought better of that, too.

  Outside the hangar, they went their separate ways.

  To Nicole’s surprise, when the meeting convened, Ramsey Sheridan brought along Jenny Coy. Amy challenged her presence, citing security; the Colonel replied flatly that Jenny was part of the team on Judith Canfield’s direct orders—which prompted an exchange of intrigued looks between Nicole and Hana—and there was the end of it. The young woman backed off.

  There was a set of grim determination to Ramsey’s features Nicole had seen only in some wartime photos of him, one in particular, after three days of almost nonstop combat. The picture showed the face of a young man but the eyes of an ancient soul, with a haunting, hollow stare that Nicole had never forgotten. Ben Ciari had it as well, and she’d seen it in her own reflection, albeit to a much lesser extent, after the Wanderer mission.

  She knew then that whatever Lamplighter represented, it was bad.

  Amy, by stark and absolute contrast, was enthusiasm personified.

  “Lamplighter is a revolutionary C3 network,” the young woman said. She favored her corporate look again today, attempting to present a demeanor that belied her age. “Command, Control, and Communications. Our goal is to establish a full-spectrum biological interface between pilot and vehicle.”

  Nicole couldn’t help herself; she sat back in her chair, thunderstruck.

  “Are we talking about some kind of plug-linkage,” Jenny asked, to everyone’s surprise, “hardwiring the brain to the ship?”

  Amy shook her head, trying to gauge Nicole’s reaction.

  “Something completely different, along the lines of a software adaptation, using genetic engineering.”

  “On me?’ snapped Nicole, making Amy jump with the violence in that last single word.

  “I’m not exactly thrilled by this either, you know,” Amy protested, an unexpected blitzkrieg of nerves cranking her up to motormouth mode and stripping away a significant layer of her grown-up veneer. “I know what you’re thinking, I know what people will say, especially if something goes wrong. I also think we’re on the verge of something really important here. But Lamplighter’s subject specific. Without you, Nicole, we’ve got nothing. We’ll have nothing. All the work, all the hopes, all the possibilities, will have been wasted.”

  Then, kiddo, came the automatic response in Nicole’s thoughts, you are flat out of luck.

  Aloud, she said flatly, “Tell me,” and Amy obligingly rushed on.

  “We use a variation on the Hal genegineer virus to synchronize your nervous system with the C3 network of a spacecraft.” Her eyes—and Hana’s as well—flicked to Nicole’s hand on the table as the fingers arched and flexed in a slow, deliberate, totally unconscious movement, almost like a cat stretching its claws. “The idea is to have both sets of circuitry—biological and mechanical—resonate on the same frequency. You’ll have livetime, ongoing access to all ship systems. You’ll instinctively—consciously and unconsciously—know the status of the vehicle and its components. You can actuate them as well, literally control the spacecraft with your thoughts. In essence, you become the craft, the craft becomes you. A gestalt biotechnological organism.”

  “A wireless linkage, then?” asked Jenny.

  “In theory, it’d be more like the ship becoming an extension of the pilot’s body. Not so much asking specifically, ‘Tell me, ship, the status of the secondary lateral sensor array,’ but having an almost empathic awareness that your mind automatically interprets as the status of that particular system.”

  “Can you disconnect?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Shut it off, Amy,” interrupted Hana brusquely. “Disengage. Remove yourself from the network.”

  “Yes!” Amy snapped, responding to the acid in Hana’s tone.

  “And the effect?” Jenny again, as devoid of passion as Hana was brimful of it.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she replied, which nobody else at the table believed for a moment. Nicole set her te
eth and hid behind her best poker face.

  “If I understand correctly,” Jenny posited in the same casual manner, as though this were some abstract academic forum, “your interface in effect makes the pilot the organic CPU of this cybernetic system—let’s say, for the sake of argument, we’re speaking of the Constitution here. Nicole has total access to the Network, and total control over it. Everyone else in Primary and Secondary Command becomes her redundant system. That means she’s processing a tremendous volume of information.”

  “No,” Amy explained patiently, feeling herself on more secure ground, the surge of confidence reflected in a calming of both voice and manner. Nicole couldn’t help wondering if that was precisely what Jenny had intended. “The ship processes the information; Nicole taps into it as and when needed. There are enhancements built in to the genetic program to allow her to handle the additional capacity, plus buffers to prevent overload.”

  “But how does she—fuck this,” Hana almost snarled as she went entirely the opposite direction from Jenny, and tried to depersonalize the focus, “how does the pilot deal with the loss of that access, Amy? We’re not talking about a transient circumstance, like melding with a Virtual scenario. You’re making the person part of the ship, and the ship part of the person, as integral as any element of the organic physicality. How do you sever that? How do you deal with the emotional consequences? Does damage to the ship impact on the pilot? Or the reverse, if the pilot’s injured? Where the hell does one begin and the other end?”

  “Why me?”

  Nicole’s voice made some of the others jump; the conversation had gotten so heated, so quickly—and she had remained so supernally still—that they’d nearly forgotten she was present.

  Amy paused, and let her shoulders slump as she leaned a little forward onto the table.

  “You... ” another pause, as she struggled with the words, “are the primary component of the core data base. To a comprehensive degree we’ve been unable to match elsewhere. And believe me, we’ve tried.”

  “Where’d the information come from?” It was a pro forma question; Nicole had already intuited the answer, but that was a small horror compared to what she’d already heard.

  “My brother. The research project he ran on Virtual Reality. In going back over his notes, after he died, I suspect that this may’ve been where he was heading all along.”

  “Son of a bitch!” hissed Hana.

  Nicole thought much the same as she added: “And you just had to carry on the family tradition.”

  “You don’t know what’s at stake!” Amy cried with surprising passion.

  “Where you and your family are concerned, should I care? Alex is dead and buried, the same should go for his research.”

  “It isn’t about me, Nicole. It isn’t even about you. It’s about ships like this and how safely they get where they’re supposed to go. Columbus knew the principals of sailing and navigation when he headed west across the Atlantic, but he’d never seen a hurricane. Suppose, that first trip in 1492, he’d run into one, a rip-snorter of a Cat 5 storm, with winds in triple digits and wave tops higher than his mainmast. Want to lay odds on his survival? Or how eager the Spanish Court would be to bankroll the next sailor who wanted to follow in his wake—assuming you could even find such a guy.”

  “So?”

  “So. Here we are, jaunting helter-skelter across the stars—only we don’t have a clue what it’s like outside while we’re in warp. We don’t even know if that word applies. Think about it. We are traveling through an environment about which we know absolutely nothing! And none of our instrumentality can tell us. It’s designed and built to function in the ‘real’ Universe; it’s limited by its programming. It can’t tell us what actually is out there, only a marginally applicable Normal Space analog, because that’s the only language it knows.

  “We’re no better. The environment is so fundamentally alien to any of the concepts that our evolutionary biology is grounded in that we can’t comprehend what we’re looking at, even if we do something as seemingly obvious as looking out a damn window!

  “Think of us as autistic children. We function within a perfectly consistent solipsistic framework; the problem is, it bears no relation to the external reality we live in. We’re unable to comprehend the input or make our own actions or speech comprehensible to others.

  “We need a Rosetta Stone. A way to perceive the raw data of this alien environment in terms and a context that make sense. The capacity to adapt, to evolve, to apply inspiration and imagination. Not Artificial Intelligence, but true sentience, mated to the storage and processing capabilities of a CyberNet. The hope is that Lamplighter is it.”

  “Which was essentially the argument that was made to General Canfield and the President,” Ramsey added quietly, “when the project was initially proposed. Given the nature of your... history with the Cobris, Nicole, all concerned were predisposed to reject the submission out of hand. But it made too much sense.

  “Step outside and talk to Bill Hobby. Or better yet, assuming you get the chance, take a look at the Memorial Cenotaph in Challenger Plaza. Every year, on average, we lose a couple of starships. Still. We don’t know why. Accidents happen. A crash in Normal Space, more often than not there’s wreckage. We can analyze the debris, the flight telemetry, ultimately determine what went wrong. Aside from the logistics—which I grant you is no small difference—it’s very much like an accident investigation on Earth.

  “But a warp crash is by its very nature a catastrophic event. There’s nothing left, the vessel is wholly—we assume, instantly—vaporized. We don’t know whether it was a design or construction flaw, hostile action, or the poor bastards simply ran into something. We have to find a way to expand that data base.

  “One of the fundamental presumptions behind the Constitution’s design philosophy,” Ramsey said, “is that size begets survivability. Of course, much the same was said about the Titanic. If there are icebergs, we need to be able to see them.”

  “So does that make Nicole a guinea pig or a sacrificial lamb?”

  Ramsey faced her. “Your fundamental attitude is noted, Dr. Murai, there’s no need to press the point. If you’re unable—or unwilling—to make a positive contribution to these proceedings, I’m more than prepared, however reluctantly, to go on without you.”

  His expression softened, but you had to look really closely to tell. “That’s as formal as I want to get, Hana, and it’s the last time I want to have to mention this particular subject. Is that understood?” His gaze swept the table, to encompass them all in turn.

  “I’m still intrigued,” Jenny offered, “by this notion that Nicole’s the only viable test subject... ”

  “I told you, Alex established a unique data base for her.”

  “Aye, that I ken.” There was a shyly embarrassed little grin, and Jenny flushed ever so slightly. “Sorry. You’d think a proper university education would pummel the hometown dialect out of me long ago.” It was a deliberate attempt at humor and it didn’t work as well as she’d probably hoped; nobody even smiled. But there was a perceptible easing of the tension.

  “I’ve reviewed the data encompassing the entire run of the test program... ”

  “You had no right!” Amy snapped. “That’s proprietary information!”

  “I have proper clearance.” As earlier, Hana and Nicole exchanged intrigued looks, asking silently, Who the hell is she? “And the fact is, miss, your brother was implicated in an attempted presidential assassination. His work at Edwards was considered evidence in that investigation. My focus is more on the human side of the equation, rather than the electronic—that’s Dr. Murai’s domain—but”—she shook her head for emphasis—“I don’t think I saw anything that couldn’t be replicated with another subject.”

  “Learn to know what you’re looking at, then,” Amy responded nastily, “before you go around passing judgments.” She tossed her head in a scoffing motion that took a crucial five years off her a
ge and reminded Nicole of the girl she’d been at Edwards.

  “We ran Alex’s profile. On a score of subjects, all told. Duds, every one. The computer models wouldn’t even come close to matching. Nicole is it.”

  “As Jenny said,” from Hana, “tech is my domain. I want your specs, Amy. Everything Alex did, everything you learned. And, please, spare me the ‘proprietary information’ bullshit, okay? You hold back, we’re done. In that, I think I speak for us all.”

  Nicole nodded and said, “I have enough on my board with the test regime for Swiftstar. I assume that has priority during our visit to Faraway.” This last was directed to Ramsey Sheridan.

  “It’s one of the reasons you’re here, Major.”

  “We’ll use the Faraway stage of the mission to analyze the background data—myself, Hana”—she offered a pointed, questioning look at Jenny—“and Jenny. We’ll reconvene after departure for Nieuwhome and determine where we go from there.”

  “I have no problem with that,” said Ramsey. “Ms. Cobri?”

  “If you want any help... ” she offered haltingly.

  “Give us the data,” Nicole told her flatly. “Answer our questions. We’ll see.”

  The three women stayed in the facility after Sheridan and Amy left. Nicole arched back in her chair, tilting it all the way as she stretched her arms full length behind her head. Hana rummaged in a pocket, slid a packet across the polished surface of the table that plopped onto Nicole’s lap. Nicole peered past her chin, smiled, unwrapped the gum, and chewed contentedly.

  Then she blew a bubble.

  Jenny kept her distance and just watched, until Hana tossed her a piece of her own. The Scot’s reactions were better than her skill; she made a game try but hobbled the catch, and the gum fell to the floor.

  As she ducked underneath the table, Nicole asked casually, “So, Jenny, who the hell are you anyway?”

  “Little too old to be a Loot,” noted Hana.

  “My comparative rank’s the same as Nicole’s,” Jenny retorted. “At least, when she was a Captain. And we’re all pretty much of an age, thank you very much.”

  “I have six years active service,” Nicole said, after a bubble popped prematurely. “You’ve only just come through your astronaut’s qualification courses. What came before?”