Providence - Max Barry Page 0,73
and turned to the screen. There it was. The deployment map, right before the end.
She took a breath. “We came out ten tees off course. We were supposed to be in empty space, but there was a high amount of debris. I had no information on how we got off course.” But she knew now: The navigation software messed up. Everyone in this room knew that. “Commodore Hrovat ordered the gunships to establish a standard defensive zone. We dispatched drones. There was a lot of rock to check through, but nothing tripped any alarms. Two hours later—”
“What did you do in the meantime?”
“Me, personally?”
“Yes.”
“I communicated with Commodore Hrovat over comms. He expressed concern for the proximity of the troop carriers to the debris. There was a lot of rock floating about and it was difficult to track it all at once.”
“That’s all you spoke about?”
“We also spoke about our families. His kid shares a birthday with my husband. We were both hoping for a moment to send a message home.”
The general nodded. “Carry on.”
She would step through the Fornina Sirius engagement. She would tell them again which officer was where, who did what. But she didn’t want to describe personal conversations, which forced her to remember them as people. “When Commodore Hrovat retired to rest, I assumed command. My priority was to establish where we were and how we’d ended up there. Until that was resolved, we couldn’t reliably perform a hard skip. I was also called on to resolve some ship-to-ship logistics.”
“What were they?”
“The Graham wanted to perform a personnel transfer to Hancock. They had a sick midcaptain.”
“At what point did you review the drone report?”
“The drones were reporting continuously,” she said. “There wasn’t a single point in time where they finished.”
“But your system automatically aggregated their data. Compiling a report for you, essentially.”
“I reviewed those at regular intervals.”
“How often, exactly?”
“I would say approximately every ten or fifteen minutes.”
“And what did they say?”
She glanced at the screen. It was there, the same as she remembered. A lot of text, but the critical line was up top. It was even boxed.
THREAT LEVEL: UNDETERMINED
“They said that,” she said.
“What was your reaction?”
“I understood it to mean that the drones hadn’t finished their scans.”
“I’m not asking what you thought they meant,” the general said. “I’m asking what you did.”
There it was. “Nothing,” she said. “We were already on alert and there was no evidence of a specific threat. It wasn’t uncommon for the system to take a little time before determining a threat level. So I continued with my duties. Every so often, I checked back on it to see if there had been any progress.”
“By ‘every so often,’ you mean every ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Approximately, yes. More frequently later.”
“Why more frequently later?”
“Because it seemed like a long time,” she said. “It shouldn’t have taken that long.”
“So, eventually, you realized something must be wrong.”
“Yes.”
“That the system should have returned a specific threat analysis, but hadn’t.”
“That’s correct.”
“What caused this realization?”
“It occurred to me that on previous occasions, when the system hadn’t collected enough data to produce a threat level summary, it would leave that section blank. It would not say ‘Undetermined.’” She did not describe how this felt: the crawling sensation that she’d missed something terrible.
There was silence. She took a sip of water.
“At this time, how long had you held command?”
“Two hours and eleven minutes.”
“What did you do then?”
“I reopened the most recent report.”
“You didn’t issue any order.”
“No.”
“You didn’t communicate your concern to anyone.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t understand what ‘Undetermined’ meant. I hadn’t seen a threat level coded that way before. Not even in the manual.” She had looked it up afterward. It wasn’t in the regular section,