Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (55 page)

“No, but it has other flaws.”

“Specifically?”

“Even a tetralogic is recognizable, to similar systems. Machine can counter machine. Human beings can make decisions these systems don’t expect. Longscan works entirely on that principle.”

“Are you a computer tech?”

“I know the systems. I personally would not go into combat with a computer totally in charge.”

The senator leaned back, frowning. “Thank you, lieutenant.”

“May I make an observation?” Tanzer asked, and got an indulgence and a nod from Bonner.

Tanzer said: “Let me say this is an example of the kind of mystical nonsense I’ve heard all too much of from this service. Whatever your religious preferences, divine intervention didn’t happen here, Wilhelmsen didn’t stay conscious long enough to apply the human advantage. Human beings can’t defy physics; and the lieutenant sitting behind his carrier’s effect shields can maintain that spacers are somehow evolved beyond earthly limitations and make their decisions by mysterious instincts that let them outperform a tetralogic, but in my studied and not unexpert opinion, there’s been altogether too much emphasis in recruitment based on entry-level skills and certain kinds of experience— meaning a practical exclusion of anyone but Belters. The lieutenant talks about some mysterious unquantifiable mentality that can work at these velocities. But I’d like to say, and Dr. Weiss will back me on this, that there’s more than button-pushing ability and reflexes that make a reliable military. There is, very importantly, attitude. There’s been no background check into volunteers on this project...”

Dammit, he’s going to do it—

“...in spite of the well-known unrest and the recent violence in the Belt. We have a service completely outside the authority of the UDC trying to exclude the majority of Sol System natives from holding a post on weapons platforms of enormous destructive potential, insisting we take their word—” Tanzer’s knuckles rapped the table. “—that the policies and decisions of the UN, the world governments, and even Company policy will be respected and observed outside this system. It’s imperative that these ships not remain under the control of a cadre selected by one man’s opinion of their fitness for command, a man not in any way native to Earth or educated to Earth’s values. The Fleet is pushing qualifications arbitrarily selected to exclude our own military in command positions, for what motive leaves me entirely uneasy, sirs.”

Some things a man couldn’t hear and keep his mouth shut. “General,” Graff said. “I’d like to make my own statement in answer to that.”

“This isn’t a court of law, lieutenant. But you’ll have your say. In the meantime, the colonel has his. —Go on, colonel.”

Graff let go a breath and thought, I could walk out, now. But to what good? To what living good? I’m in it. The Captains can disavow what I say. They can still do that. But Tanzer wanted to cut a deal. Tanzer wanted me to agree on the redesign and what good is my agreement to them, what could it possibly influence if this committee’s already in their pocket?

Tanzer said, “There are two reasons why I favor a tetralogic system. This ship is too important and too hazardous to civilian targets to turn over to personnel in whose selection our values have never been a criterion. I’ve been asked privately the reason for the substitution—”

My God, here it goes.

“In the recess I’ve also been asked the reason for the morale difficulties in this old and time-tried institution. Gentlemen, it lies in the assumption that these machines are flyable only by super-humans personally selected by Conrad Mazian and his hand-picked officers. Earth is being sold a complete bill of goods. Conrad Mazian wants absolute control of an armada Earth is sacrificing considerably to build. What’s the difference—control of the human race by a remote group of dissidents—or by a merchanter cartel with a powerful lobby in the halls of the Earth Company administration? These ships and the carriers should be under UDC command and responsible to the citizens of the governments that fund them, not to a self-appointed committee of merchantmen with their own interests and their own priorities.”

Bang went the gavel. The growing murmur from the committee and the aides and witnesses ebbed down, and Tanzer went on:

“You’ve seen an unfortunate incident in this hearing room, resultant from what the Fleet calls discipline, beginning with the concept of command by committee and ending with the uniform variances that permit Belter enlistees to dress and act like miners on holiday. The carrier that is allegedly on operational alert at this moment for the protection of Earth itself doesn’t even have its senior pilot at this facility, while Captain Keu is on an indefinite leave to Sol One. Junior lieutenant Graff insists he’s qualified in an emergency—but his heads of station outrank him, a prime example of merchanter command order, and if he says decisions have to come at light speed, and he can’t have an AI breathing down his neck, what does he say about a committee of senior officers calling the shots for him on the flight deck?”

He stood up. “I object, general.”

“Sit down, lieutenant.” The gavel banged. “Before I find you in contempt of this committee and have you arrested.”

He sat. He was no good in the brig. The captain and the Number Ones needed to hear the rest of it. Accurately.

Tanzer said: “We need a disciplined system that can let us substitute a pilot, a tech, a scan operator, anybody in any crew, because this isn’t the merchant trade we’re running, ladies and gentlemen, it’s war, in which there are bound to be casualties, and no single man is indispensable. There has to be a chain of command responsible to legitimate policies of the Defense Department, and in which there is absolutely no leeway for personalities too talented and too important to follow orders and do their job.”

He couldn’t stay quiet. “You mean downgrade the ship until cargo pushers can fly it!”

Bang went the gavel. “Lieutenant!”

Echoes in the core. High up in the mast sounds came faint as ghosts; not like R2 where half-refined ore shot through zero-cold, and thundered and rumbled like doom against the chamber walls. In this vast chamber sims whirled around the chamber on mag-levs and came like tame, dreadful flowers to the platforms, giving up or taking in their human cargoes—

You carded in before you launched. The pod’s Adaptive Assists recognized you, input your values, and you input your tape for the sim you were running. You fastened (he one belt that locked the others. But something was wrong. The pod started to move and he couldn’t remember carding in, couldn’t think through the mounting pain in his head and the force pinning him to the seat—

“Cory!” he yelled. Tried to yell. “Cory, hold on!”

But he couldn’t reach the Abort. Couldn’t see it, couldn’t reach it, and the damn sim thought the belts were locked. “Mayday,” he called over com, but it didn’t answer. Someone had said he’d earned it. Maybe Ben. Ben would have. But he didn’t think Ben would have done this to him...

“You’re a damn screw-up!” someone yelled at him. “You screwed up my whole damn life, you son of a bitch! What’d I ever do to deserve you?”

Sounded like his mother. But his mother never grabbed him by the collar and hit him. That was Ben. Ben was the way out and he tried to listen to Ben, it was the only chart he had that made any sense now...

Ben said, “What day is it, damn you?” And he honestly tried to remember. Ben had told him he had to remember.

“I object vehemently,” Graff said, calmly as he could, “to the colonel’s characterization of myself, my captain, my crew and my service. I challenge the colonel’s qualifications to manage this program, when he has had no deepspace experience, no flight time at those speeds, no experience of system transit at those speeds; and neither have any of the medics who’ve testified. This—” He clicked a datacard onto the table, and remembered with a cold chill the one Tanzer was carrying. “This is my personal medical record. I call that in evidence, on reaction times and general qualifications.”

The gavel came down. “I’ll thank you to reserve the theatrics, lieutenant. This committee is not impressed. You’ve asked to make a statement. Make it. I remind you you’re under oath.”

“Yes, general. I call the general’s attention to the fact that he did not so admonish the colonel. Can we assume it was an oversight?”

He expected the gavel. Instead Bonner leaned forward and said very quietly, “The colonel knows he’s under oath. Make your statement.”

“It’s very brief. The colonel ordered me not to tell the truth to this committee.”

There was a moment of silence. Bonner hadn’t expected that shot. He should have. Bonner said, then, “Are you through, lieutenant?”

“No, sir.” He thought of Dekker. And the bloodied sim-pod. And wondered if he would see another day in this place. “I intend to answer the committee’s questions. If it has any.”

A long silence, subjective time. Then a senator asked, “You think you could have flown the rider?”

“If I were trained to do that, yes, ma’am.”

“You couldn’t, say, step from the carrier into the ridership. Given the familiarity with the interfaces.”

“I’ve had years of training for the mass and the characteristics of a large ship. Cross-training could confuse me. Jump makes you quite muzzy. You’re riding your gut reactions quite heavily in those first moments of entry. Certainly so in combat.”

Another “You think a training program can produce that kind of skill, here, in a matter of months.”

“No, sir. Not without background experience, I don’t. That’s why the Fleet didn’t recruit from the local military. Test pilots like Wilhelmsen—he could have done it. I’ve no wish to downplay his ability. He was good. We’d have taken him in a moment if the UDC had wanted to release him. Or if he had wanted to go.”

“Are you doing the recruiting, now?” Bonner asked. “Or speaking for Captain Mazian?”

“I’m agreeing with the colonel, sir, based on ray knowledge of Wilhelmsen’s ability. But that ability can’t be trained in the time we need; we need prior experience. We particularly need crews that can feel insystem space. The Shepherds and the miners and insystem haulers aren’t trainees as the term implies; and they’re not eighteen-year-old recruits who think a mass proximity situation is an exam problem.”

“What is a mass proximity situation, lieutenant?”

God.

“A collision alert, sir.” It was the least vivid description that leapt to his mind. He had no wish to offend the senator. The senator laughed, like a good politician, and leaned back.

Another asked, “Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“To what government do you hold loyalty?”

A handful of days ago he would have said something about historical ties, a center for the human species. But he didn’t want to get into abstracts. Or create any apprehension of an outsider viewpoint. He looked the senator in the eyes and said quietly, “To Earth, sir.”

But the answer appeared to take the man aback; and it struck him then for the first time that he was looking at Earth, at this table: a row of incomprehensible special interests. None of them could see Earth from the outside— the techs from subsidiaries of the Earth Company; the senators from the Pan-Asian Union and Europe. Bonner, from the Western Hemisphere. (Who first defined east and west? he wondered, hyperfocusing, momentarily as bereft of referents as they were, taking in everything. Politics of dividing oceans? And why not north and south—except the ice?)

The same senator asked, “And these recruits from the Belt? To whom are they loyal?”

Touchy question. A good many Belters were political exiles from Earth. He said, “I’m sure they’d tell you, individually, whatever their concept is. The human race, certainly. The one that nature evolved on this planet, not UK one from labs on Cyteen.”

“Loyalty to themselves, would you say?”

He quoted Bonner. “Isn’t that the issue of the war, senator? Freedom of conscience?”

Silence from Bonner. Deathly silence.

“If this design goes AI,” Graff continued quickly, wishing for Saito’s eloquence, “so the enemy can predict it; or if some legislative compromise replaces our command with officers who don’t know jumpspace tactics—we’ll the, ship by ship. Then let the UDC hold the line with no carriers, no deepspace crews. Lose us and you won’t have the merchanters. You won’t have the far space stations. We’re the ones that have risked everything carrying out your orders, trying to hold the human race together. What’s on Cyteen isn’t like us.”

Bonner said, “Lieutenant, tell me, what do you care if Earth ceases to exist?”

He said, halfway into it before he remembered whose quote it was, “ ‘If Earth didn’t exist, we’d have to create one.’ “

Emory of Cyteen had said, a now-famous remark: “We all need to be from somewhere. We need a context for the genome. Lose that and we lose all common reference as a species.”

But the committee didn’t seem to recognize the source. Likely they couldn’t recall the name of Cyteen’s Councilor of Science—or conceive of the immense arrogance in that statement. Cyteen was terraforming, hand over fist. Ripping a world apart. Killing a native ecology, replacing it—and humanity—with its own chosen design. He’d seen the classified reports. And he wasn’t sure Bonner had. Mazian was taking those records to the highest levels of the Company and the UN.

A senator said, “We’re here to discuss technology. The fitness of a machine.”

“The fitness of the men who fly it,” Bonner said, “is also at issue.”

The pod reoriented. Flesh met plastics. Dekker tried to defend himself, but something grabbed his collar, held him. Someone shook him, and said, “Straighten up, you damned fool, or I’ll hit you again.”

“Trying to,” he told Ben’s hazy image, and tasted blood in his mouth.

“Why in hell?” Ben asked him. “Why in hell did you have to ask for me?”

“Dunno, dunno, Ben.” Blood tasted awful. He tried to get his breath and Ben shoved him back against the pillows. Ben looked like hell.

Ben still had his fist wrapped in his collar. Ben gave him another shove. “I can’t blame whoever shoved you in that simulator. You’re a pain in the ass, you know that? You’re a damned recurring pain in the ass!”