The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time)

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  Sitting at her desk, flipping through the holos that showed the Unity’s daily improving readiness, Melissa knew that Vance was not wrong. She had doubts: they would not outweigh Vance’s certainty.

  When her phone went off the caller ID showed that it was a Peaceforcer on the Halfway security detail – not the Unity, and not properly in her chain of command. “Yes?”

  “Chief,” he said without preamble, “we have a hostage situation.”

  THEY’D CALLED HER because Ops had shown she was the Elite closest to the problem. Any Elite would have done – but she was at least twenty minutes closer, responding from the Chief’s house, than any of the Elite aboard the Unity, or aboard the hotels that serviced the Unity. And she spoke Chinese.

  In theory, she was not required to respond. In practice –

  “WHAT IS YOUR name?” she called out in Mandarin to the man on the other side of the dance floor.

  “Go away!” he yelled back.

  They were in a night club not too far from the Earthside Edge, in the middle of a little cluster of restaurants and clubs. It was a tumbling bolo, with a restaurant at one end of the cable and a dance club at the other. A small car ran the length of the cable, shuttling people between the two destinations. The man holding the hostages had camped out in the dance club; he’d released most of his hostages already, letting them exit via the cable car, half a dozen at a time. They were down to only the hostage taker and his three hostages – two women and another man – by the time Melissa arrived.

  She got floating cameras up in the air – the size of dust motes, invisible in the dance club’s low lighting – as soon as she arrived. The hostage taker – Melissa dubbed him “Chrome” for his long, mirrored hairstyle – was probably in his early twenties, possibly even his late teens. His hostages were also Asians, no older than he was, and in the video feed looked too terrified to be of use.

  Chrome was armed with a weapon Melissa found depressingly familiar – an Elite killer, a pumped laser, with the flared bell-shaped opening that meant it had been detuned to be fired upon PKF Elite. The weapon alone complicated the situation – weapons were difficult to come by at Halfway; the average Halfway structure was a thin shell that held up to pressurization well enough, but handled any sort of weapons fire badly. Nobody wanted to breathe death pressure, and almost no Halfers carried weapons capable of producing a breach.

  Even the few who did, didn’t carry Elite killers. The PKF had Views on such weapons; possession was an automatic death penalty and the PKF wasn’t slow about applying it. The heat exchange in post-Rebellion model Elite made them less useful than they’d been – but you could still kill an Elite with one, though usually not with just one shot.

  Melissa hadn’t been retrofitted with the heat exchanges yet. One shot would probably be enough, at this distance. She’d been shot with an Elite killer once before, during her second tour of duty in Los Angeles, during the rebellion – but it had been from a sufficient distance that she’d survived it with bad but not fatal internal burns, where the superconducting network beneath her skin had distributed the heat.

  Her floating cameras got a good front view of Chrome’s face; Melissa’s tactical engagement program immediately began searching facial recognition databases for a match.

  The dance floor was about 40 meters in diameter; the cable car came down in the center of it. Melissa came down in the car and stepped out on the side facing away from Chrome and his hostages. They were holed up to one side of the dance floor, on a small rise designed for live music – to Melissa’s surprise there was what looked like an actual piano on the riser, a wooden upright that looked very like the piano in her parent’s living room. Who had paid to ship that to Halfway?

  Chrome had his hostages on their knees in front of him, and was crouched down behind them with his pumped laser pointed at the back of a sobbing girl’s head.

  “I appreciate you sending everyone else out,” Melissa called out from the other side of the cable car. “Perhaps we can send out the three who are left? I will be happy to stay behind with you.”

  “I can’t send out anyone else!” – she thought Chrome yelled back at her. His accent was worse than hers and she had a hard time understanding him. Chinese, yes, but no more a native Mandarin speaker than Melissa. She fed the rest of what he had to say through her battle computer – she thought he was complaining that the women had fooled him, that the man he’d taken hostage was trying to make a fool of him, they were liars and he would show them what was done with liars –

  It sounded like romance gone very, very bad.

  But there was the Elite killer.

  Melissa knew she might not get a chance to ask him the question afterward. She knew that asking it now was probably a mistake – but she wanted to know. “Where did you get the rifle?”

  “Ha!” Chrome yelled. “You like it! You like my rifle, you like my big gun?”

  “It is a very big gun,” Melissa agreed. “Where did you get it?”

  “Hu Jinping,” a voice whispered across her earphone. “Twenty-two. Shipping clerk. No revolutionary background on record, not a likely candidate for recruitment. One of the hostages is Pamela Qinghong, his ex-girlfriend.”

  “Where did he get the gun?” she subvocalized.

  “We don’t know.”

  Jinping yelled at her. “Not telling! Do you want to see me use it, huh?”

  “No, don’t,” Melissa said, lowering her voice enough that he would have to quiet down to hear her. “This doesn’t need to end badly for anyone.” Any moment backup would arrive onsite with enough knockout gas to flood the room – should have had it to hand to begin with, flickered across Melissa’s mind, it was interesting how many things could go wrong in one not-very-unusual hostage situation. “If we –”

  Jinping yelled something Melissa didn’t understand about freedom and pride and shot the girl he’d been pointing the laser at. The corona of the discharge bloomed around her head in a fireball and she was dead before she had time to know what was happening. Melissa came around the cable car with the lasers in both fingers lit, and got them centered on Hu Jinping’s face as he swung the laser around, not on her, but to shoot another of his hostages.

  The pumped laser took time to charge, and Melissa’s lasers sliced down and took Jinping in the throat before he could pull the trigger again.

  Jinping died before a stasis bubble reached him.

  It turned out that the girl he’d actually killed wasn’t even his ex-girlfriend, just someone who’d managed to be in the wrong place at very much the wrong time.

  TRENT SPENT MOST of Friday working his way through Chief Thorvald’s progress reports. He had an idea what was going on, and Monitor thought it might be correct – but Trent didn’t trust Thorvald to address it. Reading the remarkable series of excuses Thorvald had produced across the last year to explain slowness in mounting and test firing the torches, Trent decided that he didn’t even trust Thorvald to honestly evaluate and fix the problem, even if he had the solution handed to him.

  At 3:00 P.M. he took Ken and Keith Daniels and Jean-Paul Troileac with him and went down to see the torches in the “B” stack.

  IVAN THORVALD KEPT them waiting for most of half an hour before showing his face. Thorvald was a short, olive skinned, black-haired man in his mid-fifties – not obese, exactly, but round and red-faced. Like many people these days, he didn’t particularly resemble his name. Even in free fall he had difficulty catching his breath, when he spoke too much or too passionately – Trent got to see both before the afternoon was over.

  Thorvald, when he finally arrived at the rocket scaffolding for the “B” stack, brought nearly half his senior staff with him. That suited Trent – the more witnesses the better, for his purposes.

  “Chief,” Thorvald said shortly to Trent. “Come to fix our problems, have you?”

  “Well, we’ve fixed ours,” Trent said mildly. “We thought we might be of service.”

  “We knew y
ou’d appreciate it,” Ken volunteered.

  The Unity had sixteen torches, each one of sufficient size to power any other vehicle humans had ever built. They were aligned in four rows of four torches each, four stacks, with each stack heavily shielded from the others. In the event one stack met with damage, the shielding would, ideally, prevent the damage from spilling over into the other three stacks. Within each stack, there was shielding between each individual torch, though it was substantially lighter than the shielding between stacks.

  With all sixteen torches lit, the Unity would accelerate at two gravities – an amazing accomplishment, for a structure the size of two spacescrapers laid end to end.

  At least that was the theory.

  “I’ve been walking the diagrams,” Trent said. “It looks like what’s happening is that when the torches pass fifty percent utilization on the flow of hydrogen, you start getting sputtering. Fifty percent flow gives you less than thirty percent of the thrust you’re supposed to develop, because the fusion reaction doesn’t operate at peak efficiency until they’re at full flow. Good so far?”

  “Yes,” Thorvald said grudgingly.

  ly

  “Great,” Trent said. “And you think that the problem is the focal length of the fusion reaction, that it’s been misdesigned and is too short, or too long, or both –”

  Thorvald flared up immediately. “I don’t need any fucking sarcasm from you, we’re doing our best here with gear that’s out of spec and –”

  “It may be,” Trent agreed, “but let’s go look at B1.”

  THE B1 TORCH was an oval structure approximately twice as wide as it was tall – 80 meters by 40, and nearly 40 deep. The fusion chamber tapered at the left and right edges so that, when fusion was occurring, it looked eerily like a human eye – a darker circle in the center where the hydrogen entered the torch, a brighter ring surrounding it where the fusion reaction took place.

  Trent brought them back to the point in the scaffolding where the hydrogen fuel was injected into the fusion chamber, and then walked them backward along the main fuel line. “Do you know why the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded?” Trent asked. “Not you, Kenny. Not you, Daniels. And particularly not you, Lieutenant Troileac of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force DataWatch.”

  “I’ll just float here with my mouth shut,” said Lieutenant Troileac.

  Trent waited patiently. Finally one of Thorvald’s sub-Chiefs said, “Blow-by with the O-rings.”

  “Righto. Bad design work, that. But the thing is, everyone knew about the problem. I mean, bloody well everyone, right? People at NASA knew about it. People at Morton Thiokol knew about it. The solid rocket boosters built by Morton Thiokol had a problem with the O-rings getting cold and not flexing sufficiently to seal off the hot gases. One very cold morning they launch, and blammo, the O-rings are frozen stiff and they don’t seal, and it goes badly from there.

  “Here’s the thing: everyone knew about it. The day before launch, the engineers – hate to be them, wouldn’t you? Living with that disaster on your conscience for the rest of your lives? – the engineers had a conference call where they discussed the probability that the O-rings wouldn’t hold up in the cold. Fantastic, isn’t it? That people could put the lives of those astronauts at risk like that, knowing the problem, just for fear of their own shoddy work being found out?

  “Of course, that was the old United States, wasn’t it. They didn’t execute people for failing to do their duty. One of the reasons they lost the Unification War, isn’t that what they teach these days? Mind you, the Unification does execute people who fail to do their duty. Cover up something that you know is wrong and get caught at it, it’s the firing squad for you, isn’t it.”

  While Trent was talking, Thorvald’s features had gone from deep scarlet to nearly purple. “Are you suggesting we’ve done that? Are you saying that?”

  Trent pointed at the sub-Chief who’d answered his question about the O-rings. “You.” He gestured at the main pump assembly they’d ended up floating nearby. “Take that assembly off, would you? We’d like to look at the joints on the flow tube sleeves.”

  The sub-Chief looked back and forth between Trent and Thorvald. “It’ll take about ten minutes.”

  Trent stared at Thorvald, and said, “Do it.”

  IT TOOK THEM more like twenty to get the hydrogen pumps shut down and the casing removed.

  “Now,” said Trent, “serious brownie points to the person who can tell me what’s wrong with this assembly. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m talking keep your job caliber brownie points.”

  Jean-Paul Troileac moved his head closer to Trent’s and whispered to him.

  “Ah. I’m told that brownie points are not an obvious concept to non-native English speakers. I can see that. Let’s try it this way,” Trent said cheerfully, “the first person to come up with a reasonable suggestion almost certainly won’t be prosecuted for dereliction of duty.”

  A voice from the back of the crowd said, “The constricting sleeves are on backwards.”

  “They bloody well are not,” Thorvald all but screamed. “They’re bi-directional and you can’t fucking mount them backwards.”

  “Ah,” said Trent softly, “but they are. The sleeves themselves don’t have a front or a back, but the direction in which you fit them into one another matters. The sleeves joints should run in the direction of the hydrogen flow, not against it. Which brings us back once again to –”

  “Challenger,” said Ken. “The sleeve joints surrounding the o-rings were upside down. It rained the night before, and water leaked in and froze.”

  “As they are here,” said Trent softly. “Not upside down, but backwards. Leave this assembly casing off and fire this engine. And we’ll all wait here and we will measure the hydrogen that leaks from that joint. Chief Thorvald, would you like to perform the measurement?”

  “I’ve had enough of this shit,” Thorvald snarled at him. “I’m not being hung out to dry over this crap gear and this crap job. You bastards try and hang this on me, you, you, dirty liars, I’ve got records and test results and … and … and ...”

  Thorvald gasped for air and then died of a massive stroke.

  “I KILLED A man,” Melissa said.

  Me too, Trent started to say, when he saw that she was serious.

  He’d found her on one of the fore observation decks. She hovered a dozen centimeters over the chairs that ringed the view window, the deck’s lights down, the blast shielding raised up out of the way, watching the traffic swarming through Halfway. There was nothing visible except Halfway – not the sun, the Earth, or Luna; just structures and ships, flickering through a starry black sky.

  “Monitor,” said Trent. “Please shut down recording in this room.”

  “Yes, Chief. I will respond again to the phrase ‘Command, Monitor.’”

  “Thank you, Monitor.”

  Melissa glanced at him. “It will record that you requested privacy. Tomorrow when I report, Commander Vance will want to know what we talked about.”

  Trent shrugged. He came closer to her. “And you’ll tell him.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Is there anything you wouldn’t tell him?”

  Amusement crossed her features. “Nothing likely to come up between us, I think.”

  “Who did you kill?”

  “A bad man.” She paused. “A man, anyway, doing a bad thing. He killed a girl and I killed him before he could kill anyone else.”

  “Reb? Erisian Claw?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so, except that he had a pumped laser, an Elite killer. We don’t know where he got it yet, but there are officers tracking his known contacts. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

  Trent blurted, “Chief Thorvald is dead.”

  Melissa stared at him. “What?”

  “It’s my fault. I wanted to make sure he was removed from his position, we can’t afford any more screwups, so I went down there with
witnesses and demonstrated what was wrong with the torches, and now we know and they’ll get fixed. But he –” Trent hesitated. “Medical says he had a stroke. A really bad one. By the time they got him stabilized the damage was too great.”

  Melissa blinked. “Dead? Really dead?”

  “Really dead.”

  “Oh, God.” She stared out at the glittering dark sky. “Aren’t we just the pair.”

  “We’re fixing the torches. There are three fuel lines per torch, and they’re all wrong in exactly the same way. We fix them, all forty-eight assemblies, and the ship can boost.”

  Melissa nodded. “I saved two of the three hostages, and I killed the hostage taker. Of course, the PKF onsite before I got there got the other eighty hostages out of the building without anyone dying. Even if they did everything else wrong you can imagine. No knockout gas, no slowtime bubble for removing casualties. Who the hell trained these people?”

  “The rocket scientists,” Trent said, “mounted the joints on the fuel lines backwards. The rocket scientists … weren’t.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked him where he got the rifle. You don’t, you know. You don’t talk about their weapons. You talk about their friends, their mothers, pets, food, sleep, you don’t remind them they’re standing there with a, with a goddamn gun in their hands.” She shook her head. “I was in Los Angeles during the TriCentennial. My second posting there – I should be used to this. I asked him about that rifle, Gene.”

  “Don’t break my hand, OK?”

  “What?”

  Trent reached forward, not too fast, and put his left hand in her right.

  She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. “Chief, are you crazy?”

  “I don’t think so.” Trent thought about it. “Well, maybe.” He held her hand a little tighter. “You’re one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. I’ve loved you since almost the first moment I met you.”

  “Ah,” she said wisely, “you are crazy. And not used to death,” she added. “It hits people like this, when the adrenaline stops.”

  “Is it hitting you that way?”