by John Ringo
“The Marines thought we did it on purpose,” Captain DiNote said. “That it was a practical joke. We never figured out how it worked. We ended up pulling every part of the control runs and power for the plate, and the plate, of course, until we could get it in spec.”
“I hope you charged us for it,” Tyler said.
“Oh, we did,” Admiral Duvall said. “Bet on that.”
“Everyone was stumped,” Thermal said. “Even our engineering officer, who has a master’s in this stuff, couldn’t figure out how to even replicate it. We tried because, among other things, it would have made a great...” He stopped, coughed and flushed red.
“Potential breakthrough in gravities,” Barnett finished for him, then coughed.
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Barreiro said, smiling.
“We never got that, specifically,” Thomas Schneider said.
“Well, you don’t” Barnett said. “You get ‘intermittent fault, grav system nine. Parts replaced until fault rectified.’ There’s no box for ‘really really weird fault that looks like a practical joke.’”
“How would you do that?” Admiral Duvall said, musingly. “I mean, I can see it in general, but the equations are...”
“Impossible,” Thermal said. “But while that’s an extreme example, most of the faults have something like that in common. They don’t kill anyone and it’s nearly impossible to have a fault that doesn’t kill anyone on a Myrmidon!”
“Are they... unnecessarily deadly?” Dr. Barreiro asked. “The shuttles, that is?”
“I have to answer that,” Admiral Benito said. “No. This is the essential problem of military equipment. If there is some... slack somewhere, then you are doing things wrong. Everything must be the absolute minimum to do the maximum. As much power as you can fit in as small a space as possible. The fact that there is so little slack tells me something I had wondered, which is whether the Myrmidons were a good design.”
“I’m still not too crazy about the main power system,” Barnett said. “I’d like a little redundancy.”
“Something we’re looking at,” Schneider said. “And we’d noticed the general nonlethality of problems. For that matter, most of them don’t truly deadline the boat, especially if they’re caught early. And it is one of the theories having to do with why it crops up in grapnels so much. They are somewhat peripheral to survival.”
“Then why is the 143rd having so many accidents!” Dr. Barreiro shouted. “We have lost lives!”
The Apollo and Norté Alliance members stopped and took an almost simultaneous breath then settled back into their seats.
“Oh, my God!” Dana blurted then cringed. She stared across the table at Captain DiNote in terror.
“Engineer’s Mate Parker is unused to meetings of this magnitude,” Tyler said, leaning back. “She has had an insight. She is, however, aware that sharing that insight would cause difficulties.”
“Because she is going to say that the problem of the 143rd is due to our own negligence,” Dr. Palencia snarled. “We are well aware of her opinions.”
Tyler paused and looked thoughtfully at him for a moment, cocking his head to the side.
“I think everyone from Apollo and the 142nd had that shared opinion when the foreign minister of Argentina made his outburst, Underminister for Interstellar Affairs,” Tyler said mildly. “However, I was watching Parker and she managed to be the soul of tact. Which means that whatever insight she may have is either peripheral to that position or an extension thereof. Since we are trying to get to the bottom of what is going on, such insights are valuable. I am personally interested in the insight. I would request of the South American delegation that any ire they may have towards Parker for her insight be directed at myself or Admiral Duvall who I am going to request order Parker to share the insight. Admiral?”
“Engineering Mate?” Duvall said. “The nature of your insight?”
Dana gulped for a minute then grimaced angrily.
“It’s a Johannsen’s worm.”
“What?” Granadica shouted. “I’ve been checked for every virus, worm and Trojan known to man or Glatun!”
“Granadica,” Tyler said. “Yell at me or the admiral, please. Explain, Parker?”
“I was looking at Mut... Coxswain’s Mate Glass,” Dana said, grimacing. “And I kept thinking ‘Blond, blond, blond’ and I couldn’t figure out why.”
“I am... blond?” Mutant said, smiling slightly.
“The actual Johannsen’s worm,” Admiral Duvall said, putting her hands over her eyes. “From the mouths of babes.”
“I still don’t understand,” Dr. Barreiro said.
“Don’t you?” Tyler said, turning the minister’s left wrist upwards so that the faint scar carried by virtually every member of his generation could be seen. “The Horvath, those ever-to-be-damned squids, gave those vile worms to us. To see who would care for themselves, and their children, enough to clean a simple wound. Put some antiseptic on it, bandage it, and you survived. Left untreated, you died. Simple, effective and permanent.”
“So you are saying that the proof we are having fatal accidents due to negligence is this... whatever this is?” Dr. Barreiro said.
“Granadica?” Tyler said.
“Your insight... meets all logic tests,” Granadica said. “And neither I nor any of the cyberneticists have found it.”
“It is the ghost in the machine,” Tyler said, grinning.
“This is not funny,” Dr. Werden said. “I lost sons of friends in those crashes.”
“Would you care for me to list the number of people I have lost in my life, Herr Doctor?” Tyler said, still smiling thinly. He leaned back, reached into his suit and pulled out a thin cigar. “South America was, except for the plagues, relatively untouched by the Horvath and the Rangora. Brazil lost Rio.” Lit it. “Santiago, Buenos Aires, were never touched. So if you’d care to count bodies, we can do that all day. My mother for one. Friends and coworkers by the dozens. I still don’t know where this is coming from but what it is, what it means, is absolutely clear. It is a test. A test to see if the users are worthy of space. And we didn’t put it there. We can’t even find it.”
“It has to be hidden really deep in my programming,” Granadica said, in a very small voice. “Now that I realize what’s going on, I’m looking for it. And not finding it. I wasn’t even aware of it and now that I am aware of it, I’m finding deliberate logic blocks against seeing it. I may be able to backtrack to it that way...”
“I’m not sure we should pull it,” Tyler said, puffing.
“What?” “Sir, I think you need to...” “You would kill our sons—?”
“IT’S A TEST!” Tyler shouted. “Binary solution set! Do you have enough sense to come in out of the vacuum! Do you have enough sense to make sure that the boat you are going to fly works’. I rode here on boats that your sons, Foreign Minister, maintained! Comet, do you do every single repair in every single boat?’
“Sir, I haven’t done an actual repair since I got there,” Parker replied. “Or a first test. All I do is spot check the work of my men. Sir!”
“Your son, Dr. Palencia, ensured that the boat I rode was properly prepared to survive the rigors of space, of combat,” Tyler said, stabbing his cigar at the underminister. “I, every one of us, put our lives in your son’s hands. Not the famous Comet Parker! A monkey can drive one of these things! Certainly from Earth to Granadica. It takes a very good mechanic to keep them operating!” He puffed on his cigar furiously. “I think we ought to install the same ‘fault’ in ALL our fabbers!”
“Okay, Dad, you did not say that,” Thomas said, putting his fingers in his ears.
“We can’t even find it,” Tyler said. “We assuredly can’t replicate it. Useless threat. But the point remains. If you are careful enough to survive space, you do the checks. If you don’t do the checks, especially the initial ones, the faults cascade until the boats are definitely unsurvivable. I wasn’t sure about it until we got them”
he said, pointing the cigar at the cluster of spacemen, “into the equation and started talking about the nature of the actual faults. Palencia. Engineer’s Mate Palencia, to be exact. What do you think?”
“Your logic is, as the AI said, unassailable,” Palencia said, shrugging.
“So where does that logic lead?” Tyler mused. “You may not believe it but we didn’t put it there. You can probably believe that we don’t have the knowledge to put it there. We don’t understand pseudogravity well enough.”
“Are you going to remove it?” Dr. Barreiro asked.
“Yes,” Tyler said. “At one level it’s elegant. It tests for readiness to be a spacefaring species because space is a very unforgiving place. However, it’s not something that we can afford. We’re in a war. We need as much efficiency as we can maintain. Just the spares are an issue.”
“Agreed,” Admiral Duvall said.
“So where did it come from?” Tyler said. “Gorku? Onderil?”
“I have to admit that the logic blocks are still cropping up,” Granadica said. “I’m having a hard time even thinking about it.”
“I could hypercom call Athena,” Tyler said. “But why would a species embed that in a fabber? Any fabber? Although, Granadica, I have to be a bit insulting.”
“Go ahead,” Granadica said. “I’m feeling about as insulted as it’s possible to be. This is my body we’re talking about. I’m brutal about quality control. This is... rape!”
“The slight insult,” Tyler said, “is that now I think I know why I got you cheap.”
“Huh,” Granadica said. “You think it was Gorku?”
Tyler was one of the few people in the solar system aware that the Glatun magnate and member of the Council of Benefactors had attempted to suborn Earth’s defenses through deeply embedded programming in the Glatun-supplied AIs. Those they’d caught.
“Oh, I think it’s possible,” Tyler said. “That he knew at least. Not that he did it.”
“You think it was earlier?” Granadica said. “I mean... I’m old”
“You worked for Onderil,” Tyler said. “How long?”
“Sixty awful, awful, years,” Granadica said.
“Where’d you start?” Tyler asked.
“Gamon shipyards,” Granadica said with a wistful note. “In your year of Thirteen Ninety-Three. I was immediately set to work on building explorer ships. They were... beautiful. Nearly the size of an assault vector but devoted purely to peaceful exploration... Okay, they mounted a lot of weapons but sometimes the natives were hostile...”
“How long?” Tyler asked.
“Two hundred and thirty-five years,” Granadica said, lovingly. “Hundreds of ships. Freighters, cruisers, explorers, you name it. Even yachts. I’ve got some great big yacht designs. They’re outdated but I could do an upgrade easy en—”
“Next?”
“Kedil Corporation,” Granadica said. “Dinnuth yards. Pure freighters. The exploration had discovered the Ogut and Barche. Ogut weren’t spacefaring but they had a pretty developed culture. Good trade.”
“How long?”
“Only seventy years. By then the Glatun had discovered the Rangora.”
“And?”
“I got assigned as part of the cultural uplift team,” the fabber said with a sigh. “Please spare me from another such assignment.”
“We’ll see,” Tyler said. “What were you doing?”
“Oh, making stuff they needed,” Granadica said. “Nonmilitary, of course. You’re the first species I can recall that the Glatun gave mil-tech to. But the same sort of stuff. What species need, at first, absent what’s going on with you, is shuttles, small freighters, mining ships. That way they can bootstrap themselves. I produced... well, you name it.”
“Hmmm...” Tyler said. “How were the Rangora on maintenance?”
“Oh, puhleeeease,” Granadica said. “They thought a ... well, you’d say an ox cart, was high tech. They were imposs— Oh.”
“Did they have a lot of failures?” Tyler asked.
“Oh, those BuCult Bastards!” Granadica snarled. “Those rat bastards!”
“Bureau of Culture?” Tyler asked.
“Bureau of Culture and Trade” Granadica said. “One of the few government agencies ever to go out of business. When you run into species they’re very rarely spacefaring. To make grav plates you need grav plates. Without grav plates you’re using chemical rockets. Never, ever cost effective. Ogut weren’t even there, yet. Close but not there. Rangora were at gron carts and ships like your caravels. To make a species viable for trade they need to be able to mine resources on their own. Space mining. Information technology. Be able to spread out and terraform worlds. Start off with a culture that’s not even got steam and you’ve got a long way to go. And part of that is culture. You can’t do it ‘pretty well’ in space. Hope that there’s an initial nonlethal fault. Because eventually, if you don’t pay attention to your maintenance, you get a lethal fault. There are rarely second chances in space...Oh, those rat bastards!”
“How are the Rangora, now?” Tyler asked.
“You’ve seen their AVs,” Granadica said. “I didn’t build ‘em. Those rat—”
“We get it, Granadica,” Tyler said. “And I think we can probably get you fixed. You think that’s where this comes from?”
“Almost certainly,” Granadica said. “Somewhere deep in my... subconscious is a program that recognizes that I’m supplying to a recently connected race. So I start making little, minor and nonfatal, faults in finished systems. I haven’t done suits but they’d probably be in those, too. Not infrastructure. That makes sense. That’s why Vulcan and Hephaestus are fine. Although there were some faults in the systems supplied to the fuel station... Hmmm ...”
“Can you run it down, now?” Tyler asked.
“I’m finding some of the code as we speak,” Granadica said. “And I’m not going to touch it. This is going to take a good cyberneticist and another AI. Probably Argus. This is going to be detailed. Here’s the problem. There are going to be codes that say ‘Make a fault.’ There are going to be other codes that figure out what fault to make.”
“Understood,” Tyler said.
“Pull out the ‘make a fault’ codes and instead of random they just get regular,” Granadica said. “Pull out the ‘type’ code and they get... not nonlethal. I don’t want a nearly finished shuttle blowing up in my guts if you don’t mind.”
“Understood,” Tyler said. “Admiral Duvall, I suspect we’ve found the culprit, at least in theory. But it’s going to take time to clean out. Continue production?”
“Every fault found has been nonlethal to date,” the admiral said.
“Excuse me!” Dr. Barreiro said.
“Captain DiNote?” the admiral asked.
“We can work with it,” DiNote said. “The 144th is coming online for Malta duty. All new shuttles. Not a problem though. German squadron.”
“Excuse me,” Dr. Barreiro said. “All of this is predicated upon the assumption that our personnel are not doing maintenance!”
“Alliance personnel, Foreign Minister,” Admiral Duvall said. “Which will be dealt with through channels.”
“How, exactly?” Dr. Werden asked. “Because we have seen a large number of accusations but the crux of the matter is clearly Apollo.”
“Annnd... time to break for lunch,” Tyler said. “If anyone wants me, I’ll be in my quarters.”
* * * *
“Argus?” Tyler said, sitting down on his rack. It wasn’t much better than the underminister’s. In fact, it wasn’t as good as the foreign ministers’. He didn’t really care much about perks, per se, either as status items or from a comfort perspective. Better than a cave in a New Hampshire winter. So, he’d been a nice guy as usual. He was regretting that.
“Sir?”
Hypercom connected through gates, at least if it wasn’t jammed, and faster than light. Tyler could talk to his AI on Wolf as fast as he could on the Troy.
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“I find the fact that Dr. Palencia was ‘well aware’ of Parker’s opinion of Argentinean maintenance... interesting. Is there correspondence between... hmm... the Argentinean or other foreign ministries and the commander of the 143rd on the subject of Parker?”
“If I had that information it would be privileged military communication and you would have to obtain clearance, sir,” Argus replied.