“Captain Keu’s orders, sir. He sees all the accident reports.”
“Is this your justification for issuing a travel voucher?”
“I didn’t issue the travel voucher. Mr. Pollard’s presence here isn’t at my request.”
“Lt. Graff, you’re a hair-splitting liar, you’re a trouble-t. maker and I resent your attitude.”
“On the record, sir, I hardly think I can be held ‘•r. accountable—“
“That’s what you think. You’re sabotaging us, you’re playing politics with my boys’ lives, and you have no authorization to bring in any outsider or to be passing unauthorized messages outside this facility to other commands.”
“That is my chain of command, sir. Dekker is my personnel, and Keu is my commanding officer. Sir. I notify him on all the casualties. What Captain Keu does is not in my control. And if the question arises, I will testify that in my opinion Dekker was not in that simulator by choice. Sir.”
Tanzer’s fist came down on the desk. “I’m in command of this facility, Lt. Graff. The fact that your commander saw fit to leave a junior lieutenant in command of the rider trainees and the carrier does not give you authority over any aspect of this operation, and it does not give you authority to issue passes or to take communications to anyone outside of BaseCom, do you understand me?”
“Where it regards your command, yes, colonel. But I’m responsible to Captain Keu for the communications he directly ordered me to make and which I will continue to make, on FleetCom. Lt, Pollard is here on humanitarian leave in connection with Fleet personnel. He’s Prioritied elsewhere. He’s here temporarily and he has adequate Security clearance to be here.”
“He’s also UDC personnel.”
“He’s under interservice assignment. On leave. And not available to R&D.”
“A friend of Dekker’s. Let me tell you, I’ve had a bellyful of your recruits, and I’m sick and tired of the miner riffraff and psychological misfits washing up on the shores of this program. Your own captain’s interference with design has given this program a piece of junk that can’t be flown—“
“Not true.”
“—a piece of junk that works in the sims and not in the field, lieutenant, because it doesn’t take into account human
realities. That firepower can’t be turned over to adrenaline-high games-playing freaks, Mr. Graff, and that machine can’t rely on the 50%’ers on the sims—how many ships are you going to lose on that 50%? Four billion dollars per ship and the time to train the crew and you’re going to gamble that on 50% of the time the pilot’s nerves hold out for the time required? We’re pushing human beings over their design limits, and they’re dying, Mr. Graff, they’re ending up in hospital wards.”
“Wilhelmsen didn’t the of fatigue, colonel, he died of communications failure, he died of not working with his own crew. He schitzed—for one nanosecond he schitzed and forgot where in hell he was in his sequence. There’s an interdict on mat move—it’s supposed to be in the pilot’s head, and it failed, colonel, he failed, that’s the bottom line. Dekker—“
“Dekker ran that same flight on sim and he’s lying delirious in hospital. Don’t let me hear you use that word schitz again, lieutenant, except you apply it to your boy. There’s the problem in that crew. There’s the troublemaker that had to prove his point, had to shoot his mouth off—“
“Dekker didn’t run that sim. And the word is concussion, colonel. From the impact of an unsecured body in that pod. He didn’t forget to belt in.”
“He was suited up.”
“The flightsuits keep your feet from swelling, coloneclass="underline" Dekker’s been exposed to prolonged zero g. The other crews say—“
“He was up there on drugs, lieutenant! Read the medical report! He was high on trank, he was in possession of a tape be had no business with, and he and his attitude got in that pod together, let’s admit what happened up there and quit trying to put Dekker’s smartass maneuver off on any outside agency. There wasn’t one.”
“I intend to find out what did happen.” ^ “Do you? Do you? Let me lay this word in your lap: U either you come up with proof that’ll stand up in court martial, or this investigation is closed. Dekker climbed into that pod on drugs, because he has an Attitude the same as all the other misfits this facility’s been loaded with, he believes he’s cornered the market on right, he’s a smartass who thinks his reflexes make up for his lack of discipline, and if you drop that chaff in the hearing you won’t like the result. If you want this program to fly, and I assume you do, then you’d better reflect very soberly what effect your appearance and your testimony this afternoon is going to have on your captain’s credibility—on the credibility of your service and the judgment of its personnel. Don’t speculate. Keep to the facts.”
“The facts are, Dekker saw what was happening, he called the right moves. It’s on the mission control tape.. ..”
“You’re so damned cocksure what your boys can do, mister, but it’s easy to call the right moves when you’re not the one in the pilot’s seat. You won’t sit those controls. You won’t fly those ships. Will you?”
Fair question, except they’d been over that track before. “That’s exactly the point. I’m not synched to a rider crew. Cross-training would risk both ships.”
“The truth is, lieutenant, your Fleet doesn’t want its precious essential personnel flying a suicide ship, your Fleet won’t let go of its hare-brained concept before it stinks. Your Conrad Mazian isn’t a ship designer, he isn’t an engineer, he’s a merchant captain in a ragtag militia trying to prove it’s qualified for strategic decisions. This ship needs interdicts on a pilot that’s stressing out.”
“That ship needs its combat edge, colonel. If Wilhelmsen had had an AI breathing down his neck he’d have had one more thing on his mind: Is the damned thing going to take my advice or not? At what mission-critical split second that I happen to be right is it going to cut me out of the loop? You can’t cripple a ship with a damned know-it-all robot snatching control away because the pilot pushed the £’s for a reason that, yes, might be knowingly suicidal, for a reason that wasn’t in the mission profile. Besides which, longscan’s after you, and what are you going to do, give a Union longscanner a hundred percent certainty an AI’s going to interdict certain moves? If he knows your cutoffs, he knows your blind spots. If he knows you can’t push it and he can, what’s he going to do, colonel?”
“When the physiological signs are there, you’re going to lose that ship, that’s a hundred percent certainty, and nobody else is going to be exceeding that limit.”
“Wilhelmsen was leaning hard on the Assists. He could have declined that one target, that’s inside the parameters, that’s a judgment a rider’s going to have to make. But he’d have looked bad for the senators. He wanted that target. That’s an Attitude. There’s a use for that in combat. Not for a damned exhibition.”
“Wilhelmsen was saving the program, lieutenant, saving your damned budget appropriation, in equipment that’s got six men in the hospital and seventeen dead. You don’t push machines or human beings past the destruct limit, and you don’t put equipment out there that self-destructs on a muscle-twitch. The pilot was showing symptoms. The AI should have kicked him out of the loop right then, but it can’t do that, you say he can’t have it breathing down his neck—a four-billion-dollar missile with a deadman’s switch, that’s what you’ve got—it needs an integrative AI in there—“
“Watch the pilots cut it off. Which you can’t do with that damned tetralogic system you’re talking about, it’s got to be in the loop talking to the interactives constantly, and no matter the input it got after, its logic systems are exactly the same as the next one’s, same as the ships are. The only wildcard you’ve got is the humans, the only thing that keeps the enemy longscanners guessing. The best machine you’ve got can’t outguess the human longscanner—why should you assume they’re going to outperform the pilot?”