But how, Parkowski wondered, how would knowing about a SAP attached to the ILIAD mission impact the country’s security?
This guy wasn’t going to give her the answer to that, though.
And it was just a piece of paper, right?
“Fine,” she said. “Give me a pen.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Are you ready, Grace?” Dr. Pham asked.
She nodded. “I guess so.”
“Cheer up.” He smiled weakly. “This time, everything is going to go smoothly!”
If you say so, she thought.
It was Friday, the day of her third mission on Venus. Parkowski had gotten a good night of sleep and was ready to put the stress of the last few days behind her. It had been a trying week, and she wanted to end it on a good note.
The skies were clear, the communications pathway to and from Venus was working at near-peak efficiency, and there was a crowd in the high bay.
Dr. Rosen, the mission’s lead program manager, Anna Khoudry, and a few lower-level Aering executives were present. There were over twenty technicians, double the normal ten, and Parkowski had two backups compared to the normal one.
Her mentor seemed particularly nervous when he had rolled into the office about five minutes after Parkowski’s arrival, and his anxiety had increased with every step of the pre-mission walkthrough. Dr. Pham was worried about something specific, but Parkowski hadn’t the foggiest idea what it was.
She put her helmet on and waited for one of the technicians to plug it into the VR environment.
Moments later, she returned to the surface of Venus.
Parkowski made some small movements to check the responsiveness of the integrated system and was pleased to see that the ACHILLES unit she was operating, ACHILLES 1, tracked her movement fluidly.
She was pleasantly surprised to see that the graphics settings for the VR environment were turned up to the max, a pleasant side benefit of the clear communications pathway. She could see every nook and cranny on the cracked surface, the detailed starfield overhead, and even the robot’s now damaged and dirty exterior. Whatever they were paying the texture artists at Panspermia, it was worth it.
The first leg of the trip was short. ACHILLES 1 was only a few kilometers from its final waypoint. Parkowski covered that distance in about twenty minutes without breaking a sweat.
There were some alarms on the UI so she pulled them up. The ACHILLES unit was getting a strange magnetometer reading, which made sense with the context of the mission.
Parkowski had gotten an earful on the relevant science history from Pham and Khoudry before she had suited up. The Russians had never realized the importance of their probe’s discovery; the data from Verana had been relegated to the dustbins of history with the fall of the Soviet Union before a young researcher had digitized them in the mid-2000s and posted them on an internet repository with little fanfare. A few years later, a CalTech postdoc had discovered the treasure trove of Venusian data and published a prize-winning paper on the planet’s magnetic field and its many anomalies. The two Aering senior engineers had compared it to the invention of stealth aircraft, also based on a Soviet researcher’s forgotten work, a story that Parkowski had heard too many times from DePresti.
The readings made no sense to her, she was an engineer, not a geologist or planetary scientist. There was a lot of excited chatter on the net from the experts.
Parkowski shrugged — would the ACHILLES unit do the same millions of miles away? So far, everything was going according to plan.
She had just switched to the second unit when a new voice broke in on the mission net. “Miss Parkowski, how is everything going?”
It was Dr. Rosen.
“Hey, sir,” Parkowski replied. This was odd. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing,” the Aering Ph.D. told her. “I’ve been reading your after-action reports, Grace, and you have had some interesting experiences in the Venus environment.”
She didn’t say anything. Where was he going with this?
“Dr. Khoudry and I are here to see if anything… exciting happens on your mission today,” Rosen continued.
Were they expecting something, Parkowski wondered? She wasn’t sure how to respond.
The senior engineer kept talking. “Great job so far. Keep doing what you’re doing.”
“Thanks,” she replied.
Rosen didn’t say anything else. That whole conversation was weird.
She switched to the second ACHILLES unit, making sure that the sensors on the first one were still active so that the scientists could get all of their readings.
ACHILLES 2 was inside of a network of slot canyons to the far east of its final destination. Parkowski had calculated the distance to be over a dozen kilometers from the current location of ACHILLES 1, but she knew now that number was too low. The canyons were dense, similar to the dry riverbeds of the American West, but they had been created by planetary tectonics rather than running water.
Some of the twisting routes that she had created in her planning software were already not possible. One of the passageways between two canyons that she had hoped to use was blocked with boulders.
Parkowski sighed and pulled up her map within the VR interface. The mapping of this area wasn’t as detailed as she would have liked, but it was enough. She manually changed some of the waypoints, adding an extra fifteen minutes to her mission, and started on her route.
While she walked, she called over the net to Pham. “Jake, I’ve made some slight changes to the mission route. Adding fifteen minutes and four seconds, but still within the time margin.”
“Copy, Grace, thank you, let me know if anything else changes,” Pham replied.
The path she had chosen was a roundabout one. She went away from the final waypoint before crossing back and taking a parallel, unblocked canyon in the correct direction.
When she was four kilometers away, she started to get an error message. Pulling up the logs, Parkowski saw what the problem was.
One of the robot’s leg actuators was malfunctioning. The control system that told the right leg’s joints to bend and push forward in a walking motion was throwing up all kinds of error codes, some of which Parkowski had never seen before.
It was the moment when Aering management’s decision to use engineers as the ACHILLES unit’s operators paid off. Parkowski opened up the code for the leg’s control system and scanned it while pulling up a display of the ACHILLES 2’s sensor feeds. She called out on the net that she had an issue, but everything was under control.
Comparing a time-series data plot with the expected output from the system’s block diagram, she found the culprit. One of the sensors in the robot’s leg gave an incorrect output. Parkowski tried to change the gain, but it had no effect. Instead, she told the control system to just ignore the sensor and use the other ones embedded in the leg for feedback.
It worked. She was on her way again, the entire episode having taken just four minutes, which she could easily make up.
As Parkowski came out of the canyon, she increased her speed slightly.
The system didn’t handle it well. For the first time in the entire mission, she started to experience some lag.
“What’s my total lag?” she asked over the radio.
“One minute, forty seconds,” Pham replied. “You should be fine.”
“I’m seeing a lot more than that.”
“Copy, continue and see if it smoothes out.”
It did. As she reached the edge of the crater, the sluggishness of the system and the associated graphical bugs disappeared.