Providence - Max Barry Page 0,74
but rather tucked away in an appendix designed for technical use. There it said: UNDETERMINED: SYSTEM UNABLE TO PERFORM ANALYSIS DUE TO TECHNICAL FAULT. “I reviewed the drone reports in an attempt to figure this out.”
“So you continued to read,” the general said. “What did you see?”
“I opened the detailed drone commentary and reviewed the results of individual scans.” The screen scrolled, replaying the text. “Spectrum analysis. Materials composition. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. Until . . .” The screen stopped. She didn’t look at it. She didn’t want to see this part ever again. “There was an object the drones had tagged as ‘inert body.’ It was huge. Bigger than all four carriers combined. Everything about it was wrong. Mass. Spin. Structure.”
“This was the hive.”
“Yes.”
“Did you recognize it as such?”
“At that point, all human encounters dating back to Coral Beach had been with hostiles housed in relatively small structures. We didn’t know they built on this scale.”
“Then what did you think it was?”
“I thought it was a hive,” she said.
“And what did you do?”
“I ordered a closer inspection.”
“By the drones.”
“Yes.”
“Did you move the gunships?”
“No.”
“The carriers?”
“No.”
“Did you sound a general alert?”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because the system hadn’t flagged it.”
“It was a ten-kiloton unknown object within your safety zone.”
“We’d had false alarms before, and it didn’t seem possible that the computers could miss something like that.”
The Surplex man, Bogart, shuffled in his seat. “If I can make a note,” he said, leaning forward. “It’s not correct to say the system ‘missed’ it. It was identified and categorized as ‘undetermined’ because that’s actually what it was. As you said yourself just now, we’d never encountered an object like this before.”
She liked his we. As if this man had been there. As if he would ever contemplate putting himself in the kind of personal danger that he expected of her, and everyone who had been with her, and everyone who would follow. “Not ‘enemy,’” she said. “Not ‘threat.’ We had your AI system that was supposed to be able to detect enemies and mobilize a response before we even saw them. Except when a gigantic ball of ‘undetermined’ rolled up to our starboard, nothing happened.”
“Which is incredibly regrettable, I’m sure everyone here would agree,” Bogart said. “But I must make the point that the system was acting as designed. It wasn’t asked to speculate. That’s the domain of human officers. The system—”
“I saw it unfold.” No one was asking her to continue, but she couldn’t listen to another word from Bogart. She could keep herself in check for the media, arguably, but she couldn’t hear him talk about acting as designed without laying it out for him what that meant. “I had visuals, so I saw everything. Salamanders peeling off it, thousands, in seconds. We were facing the wrong way. The gunships were guarding against an enemy in the distance, and it was already inside. My screen overloaded. There were too many hostiles to display. We weren’t set up for an engagement at that scale. But I saw that we lost Spirit of Phoenix first. I know that was seven hundred and forty-nine lives. Then Balance of Chicago. Four hundred and seventy-one. Hrovat took command as Retribution of Calgary went down. Eight hundred and two.” The screen was updating in response to her words, playing out the battle. “The gunships began to engage at this time. Hrovat’s own ship, Joy of New Orleans, reported that she was breached, with hostiles on deck. We theorized that this would signal a shift in their pattern of attack, from exchanging fire at a distance to boarding and capture. But the enemy pursued both strategies at once and did not cease firing at any point. New Orleans was lost. Two hundred and eleven. At this stage, I became the highest-ranking surviving officer, although this was not communicated to me for several minutes, at which time I was leading a strafing run on the undetermined inert body. I observed that it continued to issue salamanders. By which I mean,