Part 6 (1/2)
Bren's glitch was rare. It usually came up with high-bandwidth link users. Someone with source bias could be hard to distract from one source to another. Bren had a link source bias that could prevent him from noticing data on other channels or from his own eyes and ears. Polite people just called him distracted. He knew that Nicole didn't like it. She had said that it would hold him back in the s.p.a.ce force. He'd done well enough, though. This job was suited to him. It had a lot more technical involvement and less politics than an Earthside a.s.signment. He wondered if Nicole would keep her distance this time.
Bren called in his handlers to help sanitize the a.s.sAILs and transfer their logs over for a.n.a.lysis. He spent the evening in the Guts going over the video from the raid. He stepped through the images slavishly, concentrating on the mysterious robot whenever it appeared in the footage.
Glimpses of the enemy machine revealed a foe that maneuvered with deadly prescience. Bren learned nothing of the weapon system that had destroyed much of his a.s.sAIL team. As he watched a clip of the thing retreating, he realized that its movement disturbed him.
”Something is wrong with the way it moves,” he said aloud.
Hoffman snapped out of a virtual interface over by his station and joined Bren.
”Yes, it moves too fast,” he said.
”More than that. Here in the pool area, watch it swirl away after the exchange of fire. When I saw it had spider legs and a spherical body, I a.s.sumed it walked like a spider or an insect. But it doesn't walk ... it spins. I can see a line of its footprints in a couple of these images, and I really do mean a line: it spins and places the next counterclockwise foot on the ground. It only has one or two feet on the ground at any given time.”
”That makes no sense,” Hoffman said. ”No animal walks like that, and with good reason. There's no way it could be that fast without using all those legs to push off the ground in various directions.”
”It is spinning and even though it's moving fast here, it isn't pus.h.i.+ng off with all those legs. The legs aren't moving it, I think it has some other mechanism, it's more like a hovercraft, or ... I don't know.”
”Then why would it need legs at all?”
Bren shook his head. ”Maybe it takes too much energy to fly all the time. The legs could hold it up, and then it only has to expend energy to balance itself, or to move somewhere. But it wouldn't have to fight gravity, or whatever force is pulling it downward.”
Hoffman thought about that for a moment. ”That would make it quite mobile in a zero g environment as well. But if I designed it that way, then I'd forget about the legs entirely in combat. This is obviously a high-energy expenditure time, why bother with the legs?”
Bren and Hoffman watched the footage several more times but didn't have any further insights. The machine with the red dot had an unorthodox method of motion, which they couldn't explain. Eventually, Hoffman resumed other tasks. The hours eroded his workforce until only Bren remained in the Guts. It wasn't an unusual situation. Everyone else had taken off to catch some sleep or use up some of their fantasy VR allotment.
At some point he must have fallen asleep since he woke up with a sore neck in the a.s.sAIL nexus. He looked up, ma.s.saging his neck, and saw Jackson entering the room.
”There you are. Hey. Vendrati released a report on the a.n.a.lysis of the a.s.sAIL remains,” he said.
Bren opened Vendrati's report through his link. The executive summary said that the UNSF scientists currently had no idea how the a.s.sAIL armor had been compromised. Vendrati's team worked closely with several Earthside labs, putting a lot of smart people on the problem. They looked at every sc.r.a.p from a thousand angles, steadily churning the chaos of ideas into conclusions like angry ants shuffling food toward their nest.
”They did find a puncture point in the armor of each dead a.s.sAIL,” Bren repeated aloud. ”Less than seven millimeters in diameter. Very little damage to the surrounding surface. They believe there was a projectile, and they found foreign chips of t.i.tanium.” Bren shook his head. ”t.i.tanium is too light to punch a hole through that armor, though. Especially with a round of that caliber.”
”What about the video?” asked Jackson.
”I went through as much as I could last night,” Bren said. ”Fell asleep looking at it. I couldn't find any clues about how they penetrated the armor. There is a projectile of some sort; the audio has evidence of supersonic launches that aren't any of ours. I a.s.sume the Earthside labs will find us a few frames with a projectile in them. The main thing I noticed is that the machine moves in an unintuitive way. Of course, I sent it all along to Vendrati's people back home.”
”Let me ask you something. In your opinion, was that thing running an AI core?”
Bren considered the question for a moment.
”I'm almost certain it was. It's too good, too fast. I think it was a core, and I think it was started before ours were.”
”They knew we were coming?”
”No idea. Maybe they had a rotating schedule set up where there was always a core up at any given time while others were being sterilized. We have to find some clues on that d.a.m.n station. How can petabytes of data be so useless to us?”
”Ask Devin. If it was an AI, it knew what to erase. But I've never heard of an AI erasing itself.”
”Me neither.”
”So what can we do differently at the next base?”
”We start the a.s.sAILs earlier, give them more background information.”
”That's dangerous. If they're awake too long ... but I agree.”
”Their power plants will only last about fifty hours. Plus, it'll shut off in hardware before the power plant is exhausted, forty-seven hours after we start them up. And there's no override. Not even any mention of it in the software or our schematics package. There's no feedback sensor or even a self-check circuit on it, so there's no way an a.s.sAIL can learn about it.”
”Unless they get so smart inside of forty-seven hours they can deduce that we'd have put something like that on them and get power somewhere else.”
”Right. That's why our police cruiser is sitting on a nuke.” Bren watched Jackson carefully. Had he already known?
Jackson rubbed his brow. ”Sitting on a nuke. Wonderful.”
Bren figured Jackson's move to rub his head served only to give him time to think. That meant Jackson knew about it and might even have the activation codes. Bren hoped that knowledge would never prove useful.
After two more days, Bren's focus s.h.i.+fted away from processing the old information. Now he had to concentrate on modifying the a.s.sAIL background information to antic.i.p.ate more resistance like the one they had encountered at Thermopylae. He always worked through his PV, so he wandered about the Vigilant, thirsty for new scenery that never materialized. The intricate confines of the Guts got to everyone after a time. Bren had fantasy time acc.u.mulated but he didn't use it; once he was hooked on a challenge, he tolerated no distraction.
He stripped the targeting priority on the Circle Fours. Bren wanted the freshly started units to pay rapid attention to any kind of unknown robot. They'd made the mistake of thinking Circle Fours were the greatest danger. He supposed that the penalty would be that an a.s.sAIL unit might target something like the medical scanner early on, ignoring even a Circle Four for vital seconds, but what choice did he have? By the time the units had been mission green for a few minutes, they would be able to react to what they had experienced. They would have the power to change their own priorities, which they would do with superhuman intelligence.
Nicole Devin caught up with him in the galley after he had finished a meal. s.h.i.+pboard time was late in the evening.
”h.e.l.lo, Bren,” she said. He took her use of his first name as a good sign.
”It's great to see you again after all this time,” he said, smiling at her. ”Are you catching a late snack?”
”No, I'm after a person, not a meal.”
Bren raised an eyebrow. ”Oh.”
She laughed. ”Well, I meant a person from the station. I'm interested in learning more about a particular individual who was on Thermopylae. We need to search through the a.s.sAIL data and see if there are any clues in there.”
She sent a pointer for two face models through her link to Bren. The first identified the face of a beautiful woman with straight black hair and dark eyes. Bren found her Asian features mesmerizing. He tore his attention away to look at the second model. It was a representation of the mask from one of the plastic suits the Bentrans had worn. Bren's first reaction was to say he couldn't help much, citing his schedule. But he liked Nicole and wanted to work with her again.
”I have a tight schedule, as I'm sure you're aware. Why is this particular person such a high priority? I take it she's not talking, whoever she is.”
”This individual was definitely up to something interesting. Probably espionage, or at the very least some unusual kind of security,” Nicole said.
”Well, as you know, the a.s.sAILs are going in at the next base. I need to know if those people are a threat, and if they have anything to do with that robot we engaged, some kind of red spider-”
”Red. That's what they called it.”
”What?”
”They had a nickname for it, the company people who weren't privy to its secrets, which was about everyone. They called it Red, because of the spot on its side.”
Bren realized that Nicole wasn't demanding a one-way transfer of information. He wanted to know more about what had been happening on Thermopylae, and she could tell him.