Source code, p.4
Source Code, page 4
Scurvy laughed, clearly not buying it. “Of course you can, sir. Now, I’ve got IPA and lager on tap back here. What do you want?”
“Daelia?” Argo asked.
She was still looking at the photos. “IPA’s shit,” she said, distracted.
“IPA for me,” Argo said. “Lager for Hall over there.”
“I swear, if Emily was one of these old-school fighters, she’d probably liquefy her pilot,” Ho continued.
“Yeah, that’s why we don’t have in-airframe fighters anymore,” Scurvy said. He looked at Argo. “Weapons School, huh? They’ve got some nasty emergents there, don’t they?”
They did have a few. Mean, mean abiota. Too mean to ever let back on an active mission, but great for training purposes. Only the instructors flew with them, though. Argo didn’t volunteer this. “Emily has the most immersive virch I’ve ever seen,” Argo said.
“You can thank Menendez for that,” Ho said.
“Menendez? I don’t think I’ve met him.”
“You probably haven’t met her,” Scurvy said, emphasizing the last word kindly enough. “She’s in base Cyber Surety. Odds are good you’re not going to see any of them until something breaks real hard.” He handed Argo the now-brimming steins, and then glanced over at the hallway door. “Shit, Senior Brandel, what are you doing?”
“You boys in here talking shop?” the woman standing there asked. She had master sergeant stripes on her OCP chest patch and a glower on her face. Short and stocky, graying hair pulled back into an old-school slick bun, she reminded Argo of nothing so much as a female dwarf from one of his brother’s D&D games. “I swear, you lot can never turn it off.”
She was loaded down with food.
“Good to see you too,” Scurvy replied drily.
She set a pair of gigantic paper bags down on the bar top. A crawfish in a chef’s hat, Lenny Lamoreaux’s, was printed on the side. “That’s wonderful, of course you are. Talking about going inverted over a mig and shit.”
Ho stepped over to help her wrestle the huge aluminum catering trays out of the bags. “Well, if Emily feels like pulling a maneuver like that …”
“Stuff it, Ho,” she replied. “Get outta my way. I’ve got a buffet to set up, people to feed. Don’t know if you noticed, but it’s air show day and I’ve got a whole bunch of shit to go deal with after this. I’ve got six more bags in my car too, just like this. Stinkin’ it up.”
“Why did you go pick up the food order? Today, of all days?” Scurvy asked. “Should have let me know, Becca.”
“Didn’t want to bother you, Chief.”
“Next time, bother me. You’ve got better things to do.”
“Yeah, you tell that to the boss,” she said. “Cactus wanted me to do this.”
The chief pulled out his cell phone. “Instead of the tower brief? Like I said, bother me over things like this, okay? Mind if I send some airmen to get the rest of the food out of your car?”
“I tried to tell him that—”
“Me, Becca. Me. Bother me.”
Sensing he was not welcome in this particular conversation, Argo took the opportunity to take Daelia her beer. “He looks like a frat boy, doesn’t he?” he commented, handing her the lager.
“What, who?”
“Bush.”
“Eh,” Daelia said with a shrug, not really paying attention.
And then Argo realized what she was actually looking at. A framed picture, big, with its own little metal plaque on it.
Bellona Hall, Recognition Ceremony, 2008.
It was a photograph of an early model MQ-1, taken in the main hangar in front of the gigantic Texas flag that hung there. Beside it—her, Argo supposed—some general with a whole mess of ribbons on his chest was handing a young captain a certificate.
A copy of that was hanging next to the photo.
In recognition of your status and in accordance with the Artificial Life-Forms Act of 2007, the United States Air Force hereby awards a full commission in the rank of major to Bellona Hall, MQ-1, Tail Number TX-287RV, effective immediately. Given under my hand on this day, 4 March 2008, General Rumsfeld, SecDef.
“She eclosed in 2005, you know,” Daelia said. “Took them two years to verify my dad’s claims about her being sapient. Then another six months for the paperwork to get here.”
Argo nodded and took a sip. Wasn’t the best beer he’d ever had, but then, that was fine. He didn’t need to be showing up for his first operational debrief here drunk. The metal of the stein made it brassy. “I’ve heard about that. Your folks changed the world.”
Daelia nodded, absent.
“She resigned that commission almost immediately,” somebody said behind them. “Started a whole other legal battle. The Air Force had had her listed as equipment, even after this. There was a theory you could separate the abiota from its hardware. They wanted me to copy her over to some thumb drive and leave them the machine. But obviously, that’s not the case.”
“Hi, Dad,” Daelia said without turning around.
“Argo, isn’t it?” Lee Hall asked, coming up next to them. He held his hand out. He’d come in with Rover. “Good to see you again.”
Argo shook back. “Good to see you too.”
“How are things up at Creech?”
“Hot,” Argo replied. “Just PCS’d down here.”
“Nothing like a military move, eh? Welcome to the Texas Air Guard.”
That was Argo’s new commander. Rover. Lieutenant Colonel Ty Marsden. An unremarkable man in appearance, he was nonetheless one of the most decorated pilots in the Guard. Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross. There were some crazy stories about things the unit had gotten up to during the Five Days War. He’d only promoted to squadron commander in August, picking up the position after the Shiodome bombing.
Must have been around that time he’d gotten the NULI. Argo recognized the signs, having seen a number of friends go through the implantation surgery the past year or so. The skin around the interface ports on Rover’s left temple was still slightly puckered, still healing. It accentuated the annoyed expression that always seemed to be on his face.
Coming over, he reached around Argo. Grabbed his stein off the wall.
“How’d your first flight with Emily go? You enjoy her virch?”
“Oh yeah, that was a blast, sir,” Argo replied, privately groaning. Did everybody fucking know?
His new command gave him a look, then chuckled. “Bullshit,” he said, attention moving away already. “Chief! What’d we get for lunch?”
“Cajun, boss. Lenny’s.”
“Fuck, that swill again? Barbecue next time, you hear me?”
“Sausage likes it, sir. Gotta take his orders over yours.”
That was met only with a stony silence from Rover and a chuckle from Lee, and the two enlisted in the room didn’t say a word.
Argo sipped his beer. He hadn’t been here long enough to get a feel for the political nuances, but then, this was a Guard base. As he understood it, it wasn’t like active duty, where folks moved around all the time. People might do their entire twenty- or thirty-year career here at Ellington. He suspected that as bad as the politics were in regular Air Combat Command, it was a thousand times worse here. Or maybe everybody was good friends with everyone else. He hadn’t had enough time to figure it out yet.
But regardless, there was definitely nothing nuanced about the way most people felt about the Group Commander, Sausage. He’d been a replacement after Shiodome as well, Argo had been told, but far from a popular one.
“You want to grab some food, sir?” Brandel asked from over at the bar, she and Scurvy shoving big plastic serving spoons into piles of gumbo and rice. “Before I go outside to let everyone else know? Or Ho drools in it?”
“Hey!”
“She’s right, Ho. We wouldn’t want a repeat of last year’s Christmas party,” Rover said.
“Hey,” Ho said again, good-naturedly, “I haven’t had nearly as much to drink yet.”
“You want to get that drunk, go for it. Great lesson for my girls in what not to do.”
“I’ll get something, if you don’t mind,” Lee said, and pulled his daughter away from the photographs. “Before I have to go make sure you didn’t break anything in our girl, Argo.”
Argo sighed.
The Guard really was going to take some getting used to.
5
Plate piled high with étouffée, Daelia followed her dad through the rabbit warren of a squadron building, out onto a little patio. It was an awkward space, a patch of exterior concrete that had been enclosed when the Group had absorbed outlying buildings. Both the pavers and the small pergola seemed like some low-budget attempt to make the place into something functional.
It boasted a single table with bench seating. Wood. Splintering in the wicked South Texas weather.
It was quiet, though, and private.
Father and daughter were dogged by one of those awkward silences that were all too common these days. It hadn’t always been like this, the distance between them. But once it had started, like dark energy in some cosmic void, it had pushed them further and further apart, until she’d eventually left home, then left town. She would have gone further—left the state, left the country—if she could have. If she’d gotten into Cal Poly, or Cambridge.
If she wasn’t careful, Daelia thought sometimes, she’d find herself living out her days up in orbit. Couldn’t get much further away than that.
Dad had been an aircraft maintenance officer, once upon a time, and still had some of that attitude. Maintenance was a high stress job that ground all the social niceties off its people, wore them out. Dad had always carried a sort of baked-in weariness that had only gotten worse since Mom left. The last few years it had become downright suffocating.
He’d been young when Daelia was born and wasn’t quite in his fifties now. Hair more gray than blond now, face lined by time and the sun, he looked older than he was. But he was still strong, still lean, still perfectly capable of pulling the engine blocks out of some huge Army vehicles or wriggling into a jet turbine to diagnose a problem.
Unlike almost everyone else in his line of work—people like the ones Daelia knew back at Ware—her dad hadn’t gone for one of those new NULI implants. In fact, he was downright old-fashioned when it came to technology.
He’d been using the same battered monocle unit for as long as she’d known him. He’d rebuilt it from time to time over the years, but the housing and base circuitry was still the same old military model from 2005.
It was one of the few things he was sentimental about.
Dad was the only abiota engineer she knew who kept technology at absolute arm’s length. He had never trusted it.
Something to do with Mom, maybe.
Daelia had always wondered, but never asked.
It was just how he was.
And neither of them was very good with difficult conversations.
“Heard Emily gave the new guy a hell of a ride this morning,” Dad said.
Daelia smiled ruefully. “It was a shit show.”
“Sorry I missed it. Sounds like it was more fun than the meeting down at the tower,” he said, sitting down. “Thanks for handling it.”
Daelia didn’t get a chance to answer.
A mail icon had just popped up in the corner of her monocle.
An email.
She blinked it up.
Daelia, we’re nearly at the deadline for registration for the spring semester now. I can hold your funding, but only for so long. We need to figure out what you’re doing. I’m happy that you’ve taken a break and hope that it has given you some time to think about what we discussed. But I need you to make a decision soon about what you would like to do. The SAAL consortium is willing to consider alternatives, if that helps. You know that everyone’s intentions here are pure. This is no time to go radio-silent on me.
She blinked it away.
Last thing she wanted to deal with right now.
“Anything important?” Dad asked, taking a huge bite out of his corn bread.
“Veda again,” Daelia grumbled, and when Dad gave her that look, she added, “You know, my academic advisor?”
“Daelia, I know who she is.”
Daelia picked at her rice. “She’s still on my case about taking a different angle with my research. Refuses to let me go back to what I was doing.”
“Has she ever told you why?”
“Last time we talked in person, she said my current approach is too derivative. Doesn’t push things far enough.”
“That is the point of doctorate research, isn’t it? To push?”
“Yeah, but…” Daelia trailed off. She didn’t know how to explain it, how that last conversation with Veda had made her feel. Like ants were crawling behind her eyes. She was so terrible at explaining this stuff, even to herself. And she certainly didn’t want to talk to her dad about what Veda had had to say about Mom. “I don’t know, it’s not what I want to do.”
Dad wiped his mouth. “I’m proud as hell of you for what you’ve done so far, but you don’t need a PhD.”
“I never thought I needed a PhD.”
“You know what I mean.”
Daelia rubbed at her left arm with her right thumb. It was an old nervous tic with her, something she’d been doing ever since the accident. She couldn’t feel the pads of her finger pressing in on the flesh. The brace wasn’t that good. “It would help with getting a job—”
“Where?” Dad asked pointedly. “The National Labs? NASA? Omphalos? Daelia, you are good with mechatronics—”
“I know, Dad—”
“And you have a natural knack with emergents. They listen to you. They like you. You know how rare that is? You can write your own ticket, whatever you want to do.”
“Dad, I know,” she snapped. “I just… I guess I wanted to be something other than Bellona Hall’s daughter.”
Dad was quiet for a moment. “Your mother loved you. Loves you still, I’m—”
“Don’t start in on that shit again, Dad.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Didn’t stop her from leaving,” Daelia said.
“Honey…”
“Can we talk about anything else besides Mom?”
Dad didn’t say anything for a moment, then pulled out his tablet. “Here,” he said, passing it over. “I’ve been wanting to ask you about this for a while. Now’s as good a time as any.”
It was a full-time employment contract. With Bellona Robotics. Daelia stared at it for a moment, then set the tablet down on the composite picnic top. “Dad, I…”
“I know you don’t need your old man giving you a job. This isn’t that. But the last five months have gone well, haven’t they? Haven’t you enjoyed getting to work with the abiota here again?”
She had. She had. After years of academic bullshit, pushing herself through sleepless nights to keep up with her mathematics requirements and computer theory electives, it had been nice to be back here. With the soldering guns and wrenches. With the virch, instead of raw code.
Tactile things. Real things. Things she could see, or at least had a feel for.
“I don’t know, Dad.”
“The Army boys just got that new bitzer pack in and the 121st here has a couple of inbound emergent MQ-13s. Raptor-class, cagey as fuck. There’s too much work here for just me alone.”
“Dad…”
“I know this is what you really enjoy, honey, and you’re damn good with these machines.” He waved a hand roughly in the direction of the flight line. “You don’t have to answer me right now. But I want you to think about it.”
She glanced at it again. “That’s a lot of money.”
“It’s what I’d pay any tech.”
“I don’t want to just be a tech,” she replied.
“Like I said, it doesn’t have to be permanent,” he said. “We can…”
He trailed off.
His cell phone was ringing.
“Why haven’t you ever gotten that integrated?” Daelia asked as he pulled out the little handheld device. She hadn’t used one of those since she was old enough to figure out how to configure a monocle. Dad hadn’t liked that very much, but he’d let her do it. If he didn’t want to put a SIM chip in his monocle, that was his problem.
Dad gave her a look, that look, the shut up look, and hit the talk button. “Leander Hall, Bellona Robotics.”
Daelia ate slowly, watching him.
“Uh-huh… Right… Okay, yeah, I remember hearing about… No, of course I don’t have any… Right. Right. I’ll see you there.”
Daelia poked at her food. It really wasn’t good. “Who was that?”
“Change of plans,” he said, and gave her an apologetic smile. “Looks like I’ve got a little trip to take this weekend.”
“What? Right now, just like that?”
“It’s been in the works for a while. Timeline just moved up.”
“Why?”
He sighed. “BR’s got other contracts besides Ellington, you know. Private client. Needs me on site ASAP to take care of a hardware problem. You know how that is.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. But Daelia suspected that she was supposed to. Maybe Dad had even said something about it. Maybe she forgot.
Still.
“It’s air show weekend.”
“And I still have to take care of this. All the more reason to have you off this provisional employment status and full time,” Dad said. “I’ve got more work than I can do with our current crew. Especially with everybody who’s left over in the Philippines.”
She shook her head. “There’s lots of people who’d like to work for you. You don’t need to hire me.”
“We’ll talk about it again on Monday, how about that?” Dad said and checked his watch. “I need to go over Emily’s flight logs before I need to leave.”
“Sure,” Daelia said. “I’ve got the debrief, though.”
“Great,” he said. “See you back at the Scrap House later this afternoon, okay?”
“Sure thing, Dad.”
