Source code, p.7
Source Code, page 7
“I am not your messaging service.”
“Thank you, Raijinn!” she yelled back over her shoulder, and headed up to the rooftop observation deck.
It wasn’t standard in these old hangars, but Dad had wedged it up here during the initial remodel. Daelia remembered asking him about it at the time, six years old and curious about everything.
“Need a clean line of sight for shooting zombies,” he’d told her. “When the apocalypse hits.”
Perched on the edge of the metal roof, snugged into a flat spot on the outbuilding’s northern edge, it was hot most of the time. Even when it was shaded by the hangar’s own bulk, like it was now, it was hot. Daelia turned on the mister system and was about to slide her monocle into her pocket to keep it from getting wet when she saw it again.
The flash.
The meteor.
Really strange, she thought, and made a note to check that code Raijinn had saved for her.
But the Storm Gryphons were warming up now, jet engines loud in the early afternoon heat, and Daelia settled back to watch.
No AR. No music. Just raw machine power.
Sometimes, that was nice too.
8
In retrospect, Argo supposed he should have listened to when the other pilots told him to get an apartment down in Clear Lake. But he’d been stationed out at fucking Creech for three years, in the dead center of some of the nastiest desert on the continent, and he’d wanted to do normal shit again. Go to bars. Meet girls. Have somewhere nice to go for a run.
So he’d bought a town house in the Rice Military area. Seemed decent enough. Some of the city’s only parks nearby, lots of nightlife, affordable on his salary.
The commute was bad, though. Really fucking bad, especially on Friday afternoons, and he was on shift this weekend.
Argo didn’t hold it against the squadron, giving the new guy the worst weekend of the entire year to fly caps, but it did present some logistical problems. Like that damn commute. To get in before the crowds, he would have had to leave his house around 0500.
Instead, he’d brought a sleeping bag in with him this morning and claimed one of the bunks in the crew rest room. The place smelled strongly of BO, more vaguely of beer, but he didn’t care. He’d slept in worse places over the years.
The afternoon had been pleasant enough, after the bullshit that was that first flight with Emily. Splatto had been far easier to handle—more like a predictive that hadn’t been rebooted in a while—and made Argo feel a bit better about how things were going with this new unit. At least he hadn’t fucked that up.
But Rover had been waiting for him outside the cockpit that afternoon. Ready to mow down any fuzzy feelings that might have been sprouting in his head.
“That was not the kind of flying I expect from a Weapons School grad,” his new commander told him.
After a full day in the cockpit, Argo wasn’t really in the mood. “When was the last time you flew her in the full virch?”
“Look, Irvington, I appreciate that you probably don’t have much experience with emergents, but they aren’t that much different from predictives. Once you make friends with them.”
“Sir—”
“I know nobody signs up for this job to be a goddamn cowboy,” Rover said, like he was spooling up for a huge speech, but stopped himself at Argo’s expression. “Like a rodeo?”
Argo shook his head.
Rover shrugged. “My oldest daughter loves that shit. Anyway, none of us sign up to wrangle cranky things that fucking think. Sure as shit wasn’t my first choice, but this is the world we’ve got now. You’ve got to get along with Emily.”
This was why Argo liked predictives. Easy. Did what they were told. Did what they were supposed to do. Easier to understand; they were all either sapient-class or at least knew how to form coherent sentences. No. They didn’t demand that a pilot trap himself in their own personal fantasies. He didn’t have to make friends with them.
“I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” Argo said.
Rover looked at him a moment more, and then the whine of jet engines distracted them both.
The first of the FQ-47s was heading out from their little ad hoc compound, out to the runway.
It was the Storm Gryphons’ turn at the sky.
“Damn air show,” Rover muttered. “You’re working this weekend, right?”
“Yeah. Bumper’s got me on the cap.”
“That’ll be a good warm-up for you,” Rover replied. “All the MQ-1s are equine-class. Much easier to handle.”
All six of the FQ-47s were headed out. Argo didn’t have his monocle on yet; he rarely bothered with one. He wondered what they looked like. Gryphons, probably. Emergents exercised a great deal of control over their AR form, but the appearance of predictives could be set by their human teammates.
“Why do they name them like that anyway?” he asked. Predictives didn’t have classes.
“Nobody knows how intelligent a dragon or a gryphon or a hawk with a forty-foot wingspan might be,” Rover replied, “but we all know what a killer whale or a horse or a dog is like.” The last FQ-47 was taking off. Rover watched it for a moment. “Besides, my opinion? The Domain Array uses animal analogs to remind us that these damn abiota are actually alive.”
“Are they?”
Rover snorted. “Don’t say that too loudly, or Emily might take offense.”
The squadron was empty now, all the families drifting out now that the Gryphons were done flying. The full-timers were eager to get home. Start the weekend or get some sleep for tomorrow. Argo could sympathize. He was pretty beat himself.
He had just enough time after his shift to shower, grab some leftovers from the heritage room fridge, and make his way out to the deserted deck before his nightly call with Aiden. Argo got his tablet set up and the video portal open and waited.
The Gravipause logo hung on the screen. Calls were expensive, and even then, limited to ten minutes a day, but Argo didn’t care. He’d offered to pay for it himself.
“Not to keep tabs on you or anything,” he’d told his little brother.
Which was a dirty lie. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his brother. He did, or at least, he trusted Gravipause to notify him if something happened. But old habits died hard.
Aiden had refused to let him pay for the time.
The logo blinked, then disappeared. A familiar sight replaced it: the tight, cylindrical interior of his brother’s room. And, of course, his brother.
Anyone who saw the two of them together could instantly see the relation. Aiden was younger, taller, and kept his dirty-blond hair longer than what Argo could. He’d thinned out over the past year, his skin losing some of its color. But that hadn’t dampened his characteristic enthusiasm. Aiden was grinning tonight and didn’t look as exhausted as he had for the past week or so.
“Bro! How’d your first flight go with the orcinus?”
Argo ignored the question. Aiden knew better than to expect answers to questions like that. As if Gravipause wasn’t monitoring every packet of data that came in and out of its training hub. “You know, it’s an orcinus,” he said. “How’s it going for you?”
The signal had a slight lag in it. “You know, same old same old up here,” his brother said, after a moment. “There’s this new chick working in the galley who I finally got to talk to today and—”
“I meant, how’s your zero-gee certification coming along?” Argo asked, resisting the urge to roll his eyes.
“That? That’s doing great. I’ve got my second qualifying EVA scheduled for tomorrow.”
“That soon?”
“They want to get it done before I head back down. I’m told—”
Argo frowned. “Signal’s cutting out,” he said.
“—ry about that,” his brother said, and the picture fuzz stopped. “We’ve been getting a lot of electrical interference up here like that recently. Some kind of solar weather event. Anyway, yeah, I do the walk and then pass the survival course, and I’m on my way out to a mining rig.”
“You know, when I said you needed to do something productive with your life, I was talking about, you know, something here on the planet.” Gravipause had a better track record than some of the other start-ups, but accident rates were still high, rescue almost impossible when something went wrong. All he’d wanted his brother to do was stop smoking so much pot. Get a job at Space Race Coffee or take on an apprenticeship program.
But the damn kid had gone up there instead.
Aiden always had thrown himself into things without thinking.
“Who needs college? If I can do this for a few years, I can get a planetside contract with one of the big extraction companies, work my way up to project manager, something like that. Do as well as you are.”
“This isn’t about me. You don’t have to be me, Aiden.”
“Who said anything about being you?” He pulled the camera a little closer. Pointed at himself. “Come on, bro. What’s better than this?”
Argo smiled, despite himself. “Let me know before you do that EVA, okay? And when you get back?”
“They’ll call you if I die.”
“Aiden…”
“It’s fine, Jason, fuck. I’ll call.” He glanced up. “Shit, my time’s almost up.”
“Go do your spaceman thing,” Argo replied.
“Sorry I’m missing the air show.”
“Eh, I’m working all weekend anyway.”
Ivan Garcia rubbed the bridge of his nose, tired already. He hated twelve-hour shifts.
Absolutely hated them.
But such was the price of working at NASA.
Things had been different back when Garcia had first started, when he’d walked in the door for the first time as an intern, as excited as his baby cousins on Christmas morning. Or maybe he’d been different; that was before he’d gone to Basic, after all.
Back then, six years ago, the only thing NASA really tracked were its own assets. The ISS. Hanwi Station in the Sea of Tranquility. Satellites. That stuff. Sure, they paid attention to the vast amount of junk up there—a problem that got worse every single time Tamm Aerospace put a Eurus up.
Now, however, both possibility and necessity had gotten civilian spaceflight well and truly off the ground, pushing more humans off the planet than ever before.
Most of NASA still dealt with the old mission sets—robotic exploration, R&D, astronaut training, that sort of thing. But a not-insignificant percentage of its budget now went to just making sure none of those idiot civilians up there killed themselves.
Orbital monitoring had taken on a whole new importance.
Garcia didn’t care about any of that. Everyone knew the dangers of spaceflight; if you wanted to take those risks, have at it. Considering the demand for copper alone, Earth needed Gravipause’s asteroid mining efforts to pay off. So it made sense.
And yet, he’d rather have been working for one of the exploration missions. That was what he’d wanted to be part of, not supporting a bunch of start-ups, trying to find a way to make access to space profitable. But even that was a manageable level of disappointment. If he continued to do well, maybe he could work his way onto the next Mars mission. That would be amazing.
No, what really pissed him off about the entire thing was that NASA still hadn’t gotten the money it needed to properly man Orbital Monitoring. They were capped, restricted, in how many people were allowed in the job. So to handle the increased workload, shifts had been stretched out to twelve hours.
Twelve-hour shifts were awful. No matter how many days off a guy got in between blocks.
“You going out to the air show on Sunday?” one of his coworkers asked as he unloaded his pockets into his locker. Miranda Watts, Telemetry. Of everybody he worked with, he considered her a friend. They were into all the same things. Computers, cars, Orpheus Watch, chicks. In the three years they’d worked together at NASA, she’d dated half the guys and a couple of the girls from the cop shop at Ellington. She was good at her job, the no-nonsense type. Ivan liked that.
“Yeah, sure.” He rolled a shoulder, stiff from yesterday. At least this was his last day for the week. “Are you going to make the meet-up on Sunday?”
“Of course,” she said. “The 993rd hasn’t been doing nearly enough this fall. Anything for the uniform. You?”
Ivan thought about what the guys at the squadron would think about that. Probably dismiss it as insanity, he decided. But that was one of the things he liked about the 993rd. It wasn’t real, so it didn’t come with the same load of bullshit. Orpheus Watch was old-school science fiction, a throwback. Roguish officers, dogfights, people in rubber suits playing the aliens. So much better than reality.
“I don’t know. Lara wants to go,” he said. “Rover tends to get pretty pissed off about cosplayers showing up and poking around his planes.”
“What does that matter?” she asked, shoving her messenger bag into her locker. The 991st patch was stenciled on the side of the black canvas in white paint. “You don’t like the guy anyway.”
“Yeah, but he signs my performance reports now.”
Watts laughed and punched him lightly in the shoulder. “Like you give a shit about that.”
Ivan slammed his locker shut. “Come on, we’re going to be late to shift changeover.”
They were late, almost two minutes behind. Ivan snuck in quietly, headed to his station in the back of the room. Out of sight, out of mind. NASA appreciated the importance of its cyber support functions—more than his unit at Ellington did, anyway—but even here, they were relegated to an unimportant corner of the operations floor.
His counterpart gave him a weary look, like she’d expected this, and handed him the station’s hardwired visor without a word.
Down below, at the front of the room, the floor lead was going through the normal changeover briefing.
“Did I miss anything?” he asked the other tech quietly, even as he brought up the ticket tracker with a few blinks. It was excessive, using AR for mundane shit like this, but Ivan preferred it over staring at a physical screen all day. The eye strain wasn’t nearly as bad.
“They haven’t gotten to us yet,” she told him, and went silent.
Nothing serious in his ticket queue, Ivan noticed with relief. And nothing all that serious happening up in orbit, either.
That was a good thing. Supposedly. Anything exciting usually meant somebody was in deep trouble up there.
Although Ivan would never give voice to it, he always kind of hoped something serious would hit the fan one of these days. There was always that little hope in the back of his brain.
Wouldn’t it be great if…
“Comm? Anything to add?”
The floor lead was staring right at him. Ivan stifled a yawn. “Huh?”
The other tech at the station stood. “There’s been intermittent signal loss from the ISS and Kheru Station for the past five hours. We’re still looking into the cause, but we believe it to be related to the coronal mass discharge we had earlier in the day.”
“Any concerns at this time?”
“We’ll just need to keep an eye on it, ma’am.”
The oncoming shift lead, in the main seat at the back of the room, a little way away, sipped his coffee. “Is it affecting commercial assets as well?”
Again, it was cyber support’s turn to answer. “I’ve been in contact with all our major industry partners. Numina is reporting the same phenomenon, as is Tsukoyomi and Aethera.”
“Lunar bases?”
“Kheru sustained some impact to their radio array but nothing enough to cause signal degradation.”
A nod and a grunt was all he got, and the briefing moved on.
Ivan turned to his counterpart. “How bad is it really?”
“Bad enough you’re going to have to make some calls, Garcia,” she said. “I know you like it quiet, but—”
“Just show me where you are in the checklist,” he grumbled.
Fucking twelve-hour shifts.
Still beat full-time work out at the 121st, though.
Hopefully something would happen today.
Shift was always more interesting when something happened. And solar flares didn’t fucking count.
9
By the time the Gryphons had finally returned to their temporary staging location, the sun was setting.
Daelia was also more than slightly buzzed.
Dad had never come by. Hadn’t even sent her a text. It worried her more than she cared to admit, even to herself. Was he pissed off that she hadn’t taken the offer right away? Had something else come up, something he didn’t want to share?
She was loath to go back inside. Just in case he’d finally…
“Dad’s not kicking you out of the Scrap House,” she muttered to herself, and grimaced as an alcohol-induced burning sensation ran down her brace, into her fingers.
Great.
Elevated BAC always screwed with the interface. It wasn’t like that on newer models, or so she was told, but the live ends of her nervous system were well and truly grown into her current implants. Undergoing a ridiculously painful surgery to replace those connection points, just so she could get drunk, seemed stupid.
She just hadn’t been paying attention today, dammit.
Making her way back inside, Daelia took the door onto the second floor, coming out into a wide, long space.
Upstairs was the personal section of the hangar’s outbuilding.
Go left and there was Dad’s office, used only grudgingly. Raijinn handled as much of the business minutiae as possible. A little way further was the movie room, along with storage and the gun safe.
Go right and it was open space. A kitchenette and bathroom jutted out from the interior wall, forming something of a barrier, turning the space into a long room. Various bits of furniture scattered about did little to define any purpose for the place.
It was the kind of place a bachelor would put together.
It was a place a bachelor had put together.
