Devil to the Belt (v1.1)

by C. J. Cherryh

  Demas’ advice, Saito’s, Armsmaster Thieu’s, for that matter, who might be called, was unanimous, and that it agreed with his only confirmed that if he was wrong and if he screwed this, the Fleet had to push him out the lock as a peace offering. That was one thing. He understood that kind of assignment.

  But the thought that he could screw things beyond recall, offend the wrong senator, say something the media could get hold of and kill the riderships or bring the Fleet under UDC control—either of which would kill any hope of preventing the whole Beyond being sucked into Union’s widening influence—that was the possibility that had his bands sweating and his mind chasing random imaginations throughout Tanzer’s performance: he kept thinking, I’ve got to counter that; and, I’ve got to get that across to the committee, and, God, they’re not going to ask me the right questions.

  No way Bonner’s going to let me answer those questions.

  The general’s no fool. There’s something he’s got planned, some grenade planted and ticking, only where is it? With Tanzer?

  Tanzer was saying: “It’s the task of this facility to evaluate prototype systems and to take them to the design limits. The essential step before we risk human life is advanced, exacting interactive assist simulation. The second step is automated performance testing. And again, the simulations are revised and refined, and procedures and checklists developed in hours of Control Integration Trials, a process with which many of our distinguished panel are intimately familiar. They are also aware that in the world of high-velocity craft we are exceeding human capacities to cope with the infostream. We’ve overrun human reaction time. We’ve long since overrun conventional radar. Hence the neural net AA, which adapts and shapes itself threefold, for the pilot’s past performance, enemy’s past, pilot’s current behaviors—and the longscan technique that extrapolates and displays an object’s probability. We’ve developed dopplered communications and communications techniques to receive information faster than human senses can sort it, computer assemblies to second-guess the pilot on multiple tasks. The faster we go, the more the pilot becomes an integral component of the systems that filter information via his senses and the Adaptive Assists into the ship’s controls. Right now the human is the highest vote in the Hellburner’s neural network; but we’ve long been asking the question at what point the sophistication of the computers to provide the information and the speed and power of the ship to react may finally exceed the engineering limits of the creator— that is, at what point of demand on human capacity to react to data, do we conceive a technically perfect and humanly unflyable machine?”

  The questioner, Bonner, said, “Have we done that, in your opinion?”

  Tanzer said, “Yes. In my opinion, yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “The EC militia came here with a design within the capabilities of the shipbuilding industry, and within the skills of its own pilots to operate. And the design for a companion ship they claimed could use off-the-shelf hardware and software—”

  Damn him, Graff thought.

  “—and serve as a high-velocity weapons platform. It was not, of course, operable as designed. The fleet insists that the unpredictability of human decisions without a tetralogic AI dominating the pilot-neural net interlink is essential to high-v combat. And we have six men in hospital and seventeen dead in the realworld discovery process.”

  Hell.

  “We’re putting crews into a ship that is in effect a high-v multilogic missile, with the sole advantage that the equipment is theoretically recoverable.”

  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 17th second 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?”

  “Must be the programmer that did the EC security system.”

  “Listen.” Mason’s finger stabbed the water-ringed table-top. “Right now they’re six months behind schedule and talking about one damn more redesign on the controls. The UDC bitched and bitched about sim time, said Tanzer’s ‘boys’ were the ones to do the test runs because they had the hours and the experience—you want to talk to me about hours? Shit, I’m twenty-seven, that’s twenty fuckin’ years I’ve lived on the Hamilton, and they give me 200 hours at nav? 200 fuckin’ hours, you believe that? They won’t log anything you ran up before you were licensable at your post. I was nav monkey when I was seven, I was running calc when I was ten, I was sitting relief on the edge of the Well when I was twelve, and then they say they’re counting only a quarter of the time our ships logged us—as a compromise because it was civilian hours? Ninety days a tun, thirty heavy, and on call 24 fuckin’ hours a day in Jupiter’s lap for longer than these sim-jockeys would hold up, and they give me 200 hours? I was 2000 plus on my last run out from R2!”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yeah, but that’s UDC rules. You only get hours for the time you’re logged on. Who logs on? Who ever logs on? You do your fuckin’ job, you’re too busy to log on, with a load coming and the watch rousting you out of your bunk at 2100 to check you’re where you think you are, because somebody thinks we got a positional problem, shit if I’m going to log on as officer of record and get my fuckin’ hours for the UDC. Same shit they’re pulling on the merchanters. You know why they don’t count real hours on us? Because the UDC’s got four pilots can claim real hours on a par with us, and last week they had five.”

  “The guy with Dekker’s crew?”

  “Wilhelmsen.” Mason leaned closer, said, “Listen, —”

  And stopped as a nurse came in and carded a soft drink. The nurse left. Mason said, “We’ve got a lot of pressure. You got maybe four, five hours at a run. Virtual space display. Neural net Assist. Real sensory overload. Hyperfbcus, non-Stop. And you don’t sub in some stranger in the last twelve hours before a run, you don’t have bad feeling between the pilot and the techs, you don’t plug in a guy with a whole different visualization system. You want to figure how much pressure Wilhelmsen was under to perform? Shit, he missed a target. He could’ve let it go. But he was too hot for that. He flipped back to get it, schitzed on where he was, and took three good guys with him. You know why Dekker’s in here? Dekker—Dekker told Wilhelmsen’s crew to their faces that he could have done it.”

  “Shit.”

  “No kidding. Wilhelmsen’s navigator took severe exception, there were words—”

  “Before or after they sent Dekker to hospital?”

  “Let me tell you about that, too. Yeah, Dekker was in shock. He was watching it in mission control. But he didn’t need any hospital. They wanted him quiet. They wanted him not to say a thing in front of the senators and the VIPs they had swarming around the observation area.”

  “They.”

  “The UDC. Tanzer. They doped him down and let him out after they got the last of the VIPs on the shuttle out of here. And twelve hours later they haul Dekker out of the sim that’s been running for six—”

  Evans walked in. Stood there a moment, then said, “Lt. Pollard. Getting the local news?”

  Ben remembered to breathe. And shoved back from the table. “We knew each other, back when. Old news. —Nice seeing you, Mason.”

  “Nice seeing you,” Mason muttered, and got up himself, Ben didn’t wait to see for what. He chucked his plastics in the bin and walked out, with a touch of the pulse rate and the cold sweats he’d used to feel in the Belt, when the Company cops were breathing damned close to them.

  Infighting with the UDC? A major Reel project going down the chute and the blue-sky UDC fighting to get its boys in the pilot seat and the Earth Company militia under its command?

  He wished he were in Stockholm.

  “Lt. Graff?” Bonner said, and Graff got up from beside Demas, walked quietly to the table and swore to tell the truth.

  “State your name, rank, citizenship, service and age,” the clerk said.

  “Jurgen Albrecht Graff, Fleet Lieutenant, EC Territories, ship merchanter Polly d’Or, assigned militia ship Victoria, under Captain Keu, currently Helm Two on the ECS8, uncommissioned, age thirty-eight.” Heads perusing documents, drowsing on hands, came up and looked at him with dawning close attention.

/>   Gen. Bonner said, “Will you state your approximate actual age, for the record, lieutenant?”

  Son of a bitch, Graff thought. “Actually, sir, I haven’t calculated it since I was fifteen. But I was born in 2286, Common Reckoning, and the first EC president in my memory was Padriac Melton.”

  “Would you agree you’re approximately early twenties, lieutenant, in terms of actual years?”

  “I’ve no access to those records, sir. And it’s not relevant to my experience.”

  “What is your logged experience?”

  “Since I was posted to Helm—ten years, six hours a Shift....”

  “Logged hours, lieutenant.”

  “—conservatively, 18000 hours, since posting. Not counting apprenticeship. Not counting working during dock, which is never logged.”

  Bonner’s face was a study in red. “Logged records, lieutenant. Answer the question as asked or be held in contempt.”

  “As far as I know, there are documents behind those hours, sir. The Polly d’Or is likely somewhere between Viking and Pell at the moment, and she maintains meticulous log records. Victoria’s whereabouts the Fleet commander could provide, if you’d care to query—”

  “I doubt this committee has the patience, lieutenant. And let’s state for the committee that your logged hours on Sol Two records are substantially less. Can we at least agree that you’re not a senior officer, and you were in physical control of the carrier during the test run?”

  “General.” Salto’s quiet voice from behind him, mild registered on the faces of the panel. “Una Saito, Com One, protocol officer on Victoria. —Lieutenant, as a matter of perspective, where were you born?”

  Bonner said, “Ms. Saito, whatever your rank may be, you’re in contempt of this committee. Be seated before I have you ejected.”

  Graff said, looking at all those frowning blue-sky faces, “Actually, sir, if it’s relevant, I was born on the sublighter Gloriana, on its last deep-space run.”