Source code, p.14
Source Code, page 14
Old friends, many of them of them. But that was the nature of things. The Air Force RPA community was small anyway, and the Air Guard was even smaller. New people came in rarely here at Ellington, and old people left slowly, so they all got to know each other well. Very well.
Which was why Rover was stuck at the base’s damn concessions stand, selling wildly overpriced beer to already-drunk civilians at ten-thirty in the morning, instead of managing his issues back up at the main hangar.
The message app in his NULI kept pinging. Every ten minutes or so, he’d get a cluster-blast of new messages. State, sending directions. ACC, wanting a straight answer over rumors they were hearing about a missile landing near his base. Guard Bureau, headquartered up at Andrews AFB in DC, demanding to know why he’d taken three people off federal orders to put them on a state mission. And on and on.
“How you doing there, Rover?”
It was Malia Bryant, the no-nonsense major who served as the lead over at Base Contracting. She should have been the next in line for the Support Group commander billet. As far as Rover was concerned, she was the only field-grade officer in that whole damn Group who was competent enough for the job.
But Bryant was far too important to base operations to promote. Contracting would completely collapse. Lucky her, she was stuck in a shit position and would probably get a new shit commander to replace the current shit commander, who was retiring in the spring.
Rover liked her. But that didn’t mean he wanted to chat.
“Busy day,” he said, and dug the last beer out of the big tub for her. “Five cans, right?”
She smiled and picked up the pile of cans.
The base concessions booth was present at the sufferance of the firm that handled all the air show vending. The base had a deal with them: they sold the same type of stuff at the same price points, so nobody undercut anybody else, and everybody walked away with their money. A typical air show weekend brought in anywhere from twenty to forty thousand in profit, which was then split up between all the various squadron booster clubs.
In turn, those clubs paid for retirement gifts, for year-end Christmas parties, for special coins or patches, for diapers when somebody had a new baby, or for flags, when somebody died.
Rover didn’t really need the money. Not for the Ops Group.
They’d bought their flags themselves, after that disaster at Shiodome a few months back.
Beyond that, they just didn’t normally need this kind of money. At least half of his officers were commercial airline pilots, the sort who made damn good money and didn’t mind donating a few hundred bucks a year to the group fund.
But Ellington was a small base, one with a long memory and vast patience. An officer could easily see his career torpedoed over some slight, years in the past. Rover had seen it happen more than once. He worked the booth because he was expected to work the booth. Because it was good politics. Because he needed the rest of the base to know who he was and that he didn’t really consider himself better than them, even if his squadron was the goddamn reason for this place’s continued existence.
His predecessor had never worked it. But then, Raccoon had always just bulldozed his way through problems. It hadn’t made him popular with the other folks on base, and as the squadron DO, Rover had been the one to have to fix it. Good guy, if somewhat pigheaded.
But Raccoon was gone now, dead and buried, and it was Rover’s turn to run things.
Besides, when Rover needed something, it was usually the Support Group that had to get it for him.
He tried to get along with them. He really, really did.
“You are distracted today,” Bryant observed, coming back with another order. The list popped up in Rover’s monocle, and he started filling the tray.
“No shit, I’m distracted. You know how busy this weekend is for me?”
“Your people have it,” Bryant said. “Let them do their jobs, Rover.”
“You know how it is. Some things you have to do yourself.” Like call Guard Bureau back and tell them for the fourth fucking time that day that until the governor authorized him to release details on the Armand Bayou object, he wasn’t giving them shit.
Rover didn’t say that.
“This have anything to do with the space rock you boys have in the secondary hangar?”
Rover slammed an icy-cold lager down on the tray. “Shit, Malia.”
“Of course I know about it,” she said. “One of my tech sergeants is on the EMC team.”
“Then I need to have a talk with them again. State told us to keep our damn mouths shut.”
“Aren’t they worried it’s a missile? Or a bomb or something.”
“EOD’s on their way. Let them figure that out.”
“Shouldn’t we have figured it out before it was moved, you know, up here?”
That was Kemp. The lieutenant colonel from the communications squadron. The asshole who was likely going to take the vacant Support Group commander position, much to Rover’s dismay. He was one of those officers who thought his job was kingdom-building, not supporting the base’s flying mission.
Like anything beyond the flying mission fucking mattered.
Ellington had been on the federal Base Realignment and Closure list more than once. If anything, anything at all, happened to the flying mission, the entire Wing would cease to exist. Everybody’s jobs would evaporate like ice on a hot griddle. Gone, just like that.
Not even the governor’s office could save them if the federal mission was officially pulled.
Why he was the only commander around here who seemed to understand that, Rover had no idea.
Rover kept all that inside, though. Gave Kemp a smile. “Don’t worry. We’re outside the projected blast radius here.”
His messaging center beeped again. With a thought and a little concentration, Rover brought the number up. Florida area code. That would be the deputy A3 at ACC calling from his personal cell phone instead of his military-issued one. Rover thought about answering it, just to get out of this stupid booth, but let it go to voice mail instead.
Maybe it was a good thing he was helping with the concession stand, he thought. At least he had an excuse to ignore this crap. Not a great excuse, but an excuse nonetheless.
Rover spared a thought for Marathon, back at the unit, handling the EMC. No doubt ACC’s next call would be to him. Fortunately, Marathon was even better at being professionally rude than Rover was.
“You have an order for me to fill, Justin?” he asked. “Or are we going to just stare at each other all morning?”
Kemp rolled his eyes. “It’d be an awful shame if you killed us all.”
“I don’t know, my wife would probably enjoy the insurance money,” he replied. That got everybody around him laughing.
“Lieutenant Colonel Marsden?”
“Rover,” he grumbled, but looked over at the kid who had spoken. It was some staff sergeant from Finance. Poor bastard had found himself on this shift with six field-grade officers. “What?”
“Senior is asking for you over at the pickup window, sir.”
What the hell? Grabbing a wad of paper towel, Rover worked on drying his hands off as he walked around to the table where they laid out the finished orders.
On the other side of the folding table was, well, somebody whose presence made all kinds of sense.
Dammit.
“Navarro? What’s up?”
“Oh, I think you know. You look like you got about as much sleep as I did last night.”
Rover dropped the paper towel in the trash can under the counter. Paul Navarro. A senior master sergeant over in Force Support, he was heavyset, hair longer than regulations strictly permitted, the sort Rover expected over there. But unlike most of the other NCOs over in FSS, Navarro was a hard-charger, the sort who’d run any problem to ground just on principle, and Rover leaned on him heavily. There was no easier way to lose qualified pilots than fucking up their pay, something that the rest of FSS did with shocking regularity.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t full time.
His day job was over at NASA. Some position on their space watch floor.
“Your day job send you over to speak to me personally?” Rover asked, tired of the conversation already.
“I told ’em it was awkward as hell, but our director’s getting chewed up by DC right now.” As always, his voice carried the faint accent of Brazilian Portuguese.
“Let’s get this over with, then.” He dipped under the folding table at the edge of the booth, sliding out. “Malia, I’ve got to go take care of a problem!”
“You’re got two hours left on the shift, Ty!” Kemp yelled.
“Ain’t gonna do anybody any good if a plane falls out of the sky!” Rover shot back over his shoulder, already striding off.
Was he the only senior officer around here who understood there was an actual flying mission at this damn base?
“Hey, at least it’s me,” Navarro said as they walked out into the temporary aisles of the concession area.
“What, as opposed to Garcia?” Rover spared a thought for the cyber sergeant in the Group who worked under Norris. “Yeah, that would be a fuckin’ disaster.”
“That boy does not know when to shut his mouth. Count yourself lucky he’s drill status, Rover. I gotta deal with him daily.”
“Oh, believe me, I deal with him plenty.”
Rover was trying hard not to make eye contact with anyone. Will himself out of the crowd, as it was. Even though he was in OCPs for this today, there was always a chance somebody would recognize the patches on his shoulders and the badges on his chest and ask all kinds of questions. He hated that.
Not that he hated civilians themselves; protecting them was his job after all, a task that had become far less abstract after the Five Days War. Rover just preferred it when he could maintain some distance between them.
Navarro sighed. “They want me to make a case to you about handing over the space rock that fell out in Armand Bayou. Voluntarily, without all this red tape that we’re going through right now.”
“Armand Bayou is state land,” Rover replied. “It’s not subject to federal jurisdiction.”
“Dammit, Rover, we don’t know what it is—”
“Other than it came from space, right?” Rover asked. Navarro pursed his lips but didn’t answer right away. “Right?”
The other man sighed. “Data’s inconclusive. We’re still trying to figure it out ourselves.”
“Then I don’t see any reason why the military should be handing it over to a civilian agency.”
They passed the last concessions stand, some booth selling watermelon-juice pickles. Headed out into the static display area.
It was always interesting, seeing what displays people flocked to, what the civilians wanted to see. The vintage stuff was always popular. The World War II section was packed to the gills with bodies. But what most people had come to see today were the abiota. The younger planes, the newer planes.
His planes.
RPAs had been controversial when they’d first started taking a frontline role back in the early days of OEF. That controversy had only deepened once avionics packages started eclosing in earnest. The various remotely piloted airframes employed by the Air Force demonstrated this phenomenon at an insane rate, almost thirty-five percent by their fifth year in service. It had only polarized the public’s attitudes further. Some people wanted abiota removed from the military entirely, while others thought the whole DOD should be turned over to their control.
Everyone had an opinion on abiotic RPAs. Even the people who said they loved the military had an opinion. Almost everybody was wrong.
Abiota were addendums to an old argument, not the start of a new one. If anything, abiota were positively regressive. It took piloting out of the realm of the rational and landed them all squarely back in the Middle Ages. Riding horses into battle.
Or killer whales, in Emily’s case, but that didn’t have the same neat historical placeholder.
There were more people here, closer together and tighter. A sea of sweaty t-shirts and backpacks. Looked like half of Houston was here. Crowds carried a kind of anonymity, but Rover still pulled the unit patch off his shoulder as they waded deeper into the throng.
“You can’t have it both ways,” Navarro pressed. “You can’t cite state authority and then claim it’s a military matter.”
“The state’s military capacity is very robust.”
“We’re all on the same team here.”
Rover nodded at something up ahead, a huge pavilion erected in the middle of the planes. Memorial Plaza. “Are we?” he asked meaningfully.
Navarro looked over at it. Rubbed a hand over his face. “You’re on federal orders right now, aren’t you? Working that shit over in—”
“Civilians,” Rover warned.
Navarro dropped his voice. “Over in that little bathtub between Thailand, China, and the Philippines. So cut the crap. Give me a straight answer.”
Rover laughed, despite himself. “You enjoyed saying that, right?”
“Beats calling you ‘sir’ every other sentence. You know what a pain in the ass you are sometimes? Sir?”
“What do you want me to say? The governor’s ordered the Texas Military Department to retain custody of that damn rock for as long as possible. He wants to know what the hell it is, where it came from, and what it’s doing here.”
“NASA can give you those answers.”
“But will you? Come on, Paul,” Rover pressed. “We like to pretend like this is still a unified country, but the trust is well and truly gone.”
Navarro sighed but didn’t bother arguing the point. “I can back-door you the information,” he said quietly. “It’s my shop that would be analyzing it.”
Rover shook his head. “Let the brass and the politicians hash this out, Paul. You think I want that fucking thing in my hangar? This close to the munitions cache? Are you kidding me?”
“Then turn it over.”
“I’ve got a direct order from the Texas Air Staff.”
“The chain of command ends with the Pentagon.”
“Only in matters pertaining directly to combat ops,” Rover said quietly. “I am not pissing off General McMillan at State because somebody at NASA doesn’t want to file a couple of papers.” Navarro didn’t say anything. Rover pressed on. “We both know you guys are going to get it sooner or later. Let’s not get fucked in the process, okay? I’d like you to still be around to make Chief over at FSS someday, yeah?”
Navarro laughed at that, and started to say something, before his eyes narrowed behind his AR glasses. “Do you see this shit? Airfield overlay, not the show.”
Rover had shut down the AR field in his NULI for the booth. He was still getting used to it, and better not to deal with the headache when he didn’t need to. He brought it back up now, tuned to the military channel.
There, sure enough, clear as day at the Tamm Industries section of the displays, was the Eurus. Bellowing. And Emily was roaring right back.
“Oh, girl,” Rover sighed.
There was a long-standing Ops Group tradition of refusing to allow Emily do a demonstration flight for the show. They couldn’t keep her out of the static display—State Public Affairs insisted she be present—but at least there was some semblance of control there. There, they could jam her. Flying, they couldn’t. She was old for an abiota, and she was clever, and Rover was pretty sure that she could override the show overlay if she really felt like it.
And there was plenty there to worry about. Emily had a proper dragon’s hoard of animations. Chasing sheep, burning villages, fighting knights on horseback, she had enough reference material and preloaded images to conjure up all manner of problems for him.
It had happened a few times over the years. Visitors to base saw her form eating a half-roasted cow or merrily chasing a pack of virtual villagers with virtual pitchforks through the AR field, and they complained.
She thought it was funny, as did most of the interdiction squadron. And really, it wasn’t any worse than the meme printouts that littered the break room walls. But those were private.
Rover had learned that at the Academy: you didn’t share military humor with civilians.
“You’ve got to make her knock it off,” Navarro said. “This stupid circuit-measuring contest she has with every high-level abiota that comes through here is pointless. Especially when it comes to Tamm’s fleet. Like it or not, when that terminal across the way is complete, we’re going to be picking up a lot more traffic from Ozona Spaceport.”
“You think anybody can really tell Emily what to do?” he grumbled, and looked over at her again. “I need to get back to my shift.”
“Think about what I said.”
“Tell your director to have some fuckin’ patience,” he said, and left Navarro behind again.
Where did that Eurus’s personality, behavior, attitude come from, he wondered as he headed back to the burger booth. Conventional wisdom held that predictives developed on their own, in whatever way they would, once they were carved off from the main program. As individual and unique as emergents.
He’d never really believed it.
Rover spent enough time around his own weird little flock to have developed a good sense of things now.
There was more to most predictives than they admitted to. More, and less.
The AR form of that spaceplane might have lent an appearance of parity, of similarity, to an entity like Emily. But the human brain was the best pattern-recognition tool on the planet—even the deep machine learning algorithms of the best predictives couldn’t match it—and something in the back of Rover’s mind screamed at him every time he was around one of those things.
Not that he’d ever give voice to that.
Everyone was supposed to believe that there was no difference. No difference between predictives and emergents. Rover had never bought into that, though. There was something deeply, fundamentally incompatible there.
