Things Fall Apart: Chapter 15

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Forward

Commodore Haraldsdottir was not what Singer was expecting. Having nothing more to go on but the surname, with its strong hint of a family tree going back to Iceland on lost Earth, Singer's mental picture did not at all match the compact, dark person who stepped off the pinnace to the sound of Kasel's bosun's pipe, with Lieutenant Alexander and PO Wasserman just steps behind her.

Her two officers wasted no time filling in the places that had been left for them in the side party, and if Haraldsdottir found this dance in any way strange, she did not show it.

Instead, she came to stand facing Singer, who came to attention and saluted, taking note as she did so that Haraldsdottir did fit stereotype in one way: her eyes were brilliantly blue.

"Permission to come aboard, Lieutenant?"

"Permission granted, Commodore. Welcome to Bellerophon." This was ritual, of course, not quite verbatim out of wet-navy tradition of bygone eras, but recognizable. On paper, even as a mere lieutenant, Singer could have denied the commodore permission, but nothing in her study of the protocol of side parties had suggested it had ever been done.

And anyway, Singer was not aware of any reason to do it. Espinoza had been more forthcoming, as the side party gathered, making it clear that, while it had been years since he'd really interacted with her, he'd never had anything but respect for Haraldsdottir. Having no one else to poll for an opinion, and needing some baseline to start from, Singer chose to work from that.

"Commodore, my officers and senior staff—" this was a stretch of protocol. It was rare that non-coms would be present here except as honor guard, so some covering words seemed necessary to excuse the divergence. "You already met Lieutenant Alexander, my acting executive officer. Here are Lieutenant Cadotte, acting science officer; Ensign Cordé, acting communications officer; Reserve Lieutenant Erikson, engineer, whom I believe you know; Chief Kasel, acting medical officer and bosun; and PO Wasserman, acting operations officer."

Some of those titles had been decided only at the last minute, in hasty conference with the worthies in question. She had never really assigned them formal jobs, and the record, frankly, would reflect that. But one had to say something more than, "These are the survivors that helped me drag our sorry asses and broken ship home."

For some value of home.

The commodore lived up to Espin...er...Erickson's opinion of her. She accepted these introductions without a twitch of an eyebrow. She reviewed them all with a gaze that spoke only of respect and gratitude, before saying, "Lieutenant, gentles all, saying, 'It's good to see you!', while true, seems somehow insufficient. It's good to see anybody at all, at this point, outside the Borass' rock. Your arrival gives us hope, and more practically, opens up several possibilities that had been closed to us for the last six megaseconds. If it is not precipitous, I would like to move directly to a mutual debriefing session. I will understand, however, if you all need more time to process the enormity of what's happened."

They had discussed that, too, Singer and her official family—a hurried conversation with Alexander and Wasserman before they headed out on the pinnace, then a slightly less hurried one with the rest as they gathered. Everyone agreed that they could not really even begin to process the scope of it all, until they had heard the details from the commodore's perspective. They could all see a system littered with devastation, but not all of it made sense to what they already knew about the software contagion that had made their AIs, and those aboard Almaty, riot.

So Singer responded, "Commodore, I believe a debriefing is exactly what we require to even begin processing things. If you'll follow us?"

"Lead the way, Lieutenant!"

So she did, leading her small parade to the starboard reception room, which she'd ordered set up for a long, long meeting.


Arriving there, the commodore, as was her right, moved to one end of the long table. Singer considered whether her proper place was to the commodore's right hand, or at the opposite end, and chose the latter—the table was not so long that it put them at great distance. Her people settled in to the other places in about the same relative order they'd taken to sitting around their briefing table, which placed her two NCOs closest to the commodore. The commodore said nothing about this possibly unorthodox arrangement.

Tentatively—extremely tentatively—Singer let her shields drop, just a little. Recent events had forced her to refine a skill she'd little practiced before, to adjust her emotional shields directionally. It didn't always work, but she seemed to hit on the right combination, which she knew because the "flavor" of what she received was new to her, while her own people were now well known.

Singer had been bluffing, putting on a confident "officer" front this whole time. She'd never been in a side party in her life, let alone led one. She was an officer whose record clearly showed no interest in command, commanding what might well be the last starship of the Tau Ceti Treaty Organization fleet still under her own power. The commodore, simply by existing, had more right to the command chair of this ship she'd never set foot on before than Singer, who had lived the last several gigaseconds aboard her.

Only long years of practice at a poker face kept Singer from falling out of her chair when, with her shields only dropped a little bit, she clearly detected that Haraldsdottir was also basically faking it. She wasn't an imposter, nothing of the sort. Espinoza would have detected that in seconds and said something, certainly.

But this situation was as alien to Haraldsdottir as it was to Singer and her people. They were falling back on protocol and rules and ranks because they had nothing else to work with.

"Before we begin," the commodore said, "let me just give you all—yes, all of you—permission to speak freely. Politeness is always welcome, but frankness is going to be necessary, I think, to get through this.

"Also, it's totally a side-issue, but if I don't get it out of my system now, it's going to distract me: Ari," she said to Espinoza, not even pretending to use the alias that technically went with the uniform, "what the heck are you doing here? I mean, yes, I saw the Despot being towed in, but..."

Espinoza smiled. "The time compressor aboard Bellerophon had been physically damaged. I surmise that our three surviving 'paladin' AIs had managed to shield it from their rampaging siblings, but the rioters still managed to get into one of the H4s, leading to blunt-force and electrical damage. The skipper prevailed upon me to bring both my expertise and the Despot's intact coils to bear on the problem. It didn't take much prevailing, honestly."

Haraldsdottir nodded. "That matches up with what I've gleaned so far from the reports Lieutenant Alexander brought to me. I read as much as I could on the way back, of course." She turned her attention fully on Singer. "Lieutenant, you and yours may be further ahead in determining the cause of the problem than we are, honestly. This ship represents a mixed environment—one in which this...infection took root, but not completely, allowing the ship and some of the crew to survive.

"Out there," she continued, waving a hand to encompass the entire system, "we weren't so lucky. Every artificial station and TCTF starship succumbed, almost simultaneously, including, as you've seen, the city of New Norfolk." This last part came out almost as a croak. The commodore paused, then, and took a moment to order her thoughts and, perhaps, ensure her voice would do her bidding.

Before she could continue, though, Cadotte asked a question. "What about the private traffic, though. The system should still be full of barges, passenger clippers, packet ships..."

Haraldsdottir nodded slowly, and Singer could tell that the other woman was struggling, now. Finally, she said, in a ragged voice, "You will now see, and sooner than I hoped, the real reason I gave permission to speak freely. I regret...but you'll understand, perhaps, when I tell you...that I am unable to relate this information unemotionally. You see, we experienced one symptom here, in this crowded, busy, bustling system that you and Almaty and all our other far-flung explorers wouldn't have."

She was getting more agitated with nearly every word, but somehow—Singer assumed long years of practice—she kept her voice from overpowering the small room's acoustics.

"Every ship who's AIs saw an opportunity to do so, took advantage of their greater acceleration and maneuverability. Not caring about the human lives aboard, they disabled their gravity compensators and burned far harder than any human-crewed ship should. If they could only ram a single barge, that's what they did. If they could place themselves in the midst of a convoy before self-destructing, they did so. Of course, the stations exploded without much warning, so any docked ship, or ship in close, was caught up in the...event."

She was crying, now. Openly. "We could hear them, of course. The ships that were targeted. The barges were robots themselves, of course, but they don't run anything like the same kind of code, so they were unaffected. Or maybe they were affected like the Almaty's disaster beacon—I got to that part of the report—but there was nothing in-system left for them to infect. Point is, if it had just been the barges, maybe..."

She took a deep breath. "But of course, it was passenger ships, too. Private craft, transit ships, liners...yachts," this to Espinoza, who just nodded. "They were all screaming for help we simply could not provide them."

Of all of them at the table, except maybe Singer, Cordé was the one least well versed in the nitty-gritty of space travel; or maybe she just felt someone needed to ask the question out loud. "Why not?"

The commodore continued to show more grace than Singer might have expected, and did not shout her answer as if Cordé were an idiot, nor look askance at the lack of proper address. Merely, she proceeded to tick off on her fingers.

"Firstly: every ship under power in our own internal shipyard also exploded, taking out everything else, powered or not. Only the fact that the docking core was built to withstand just such an event—always assumed to be an accident, mind you, when planning for it—kept the rock from breaking apart.

"Secondly: That also took out all our own pinnaces, which were neither powered nor AI-operated, but merely caught up in the destruction. In fact, as luck would have it—bad luck—not a single craft larger than a worker-bee survived on any of the stations, with one exception: the outer yard's pinnace garage—another rock station—appears to not have suffered any damage. But we had no way to cross the distance to it.

"Thirdly, however: even if we had, physics is physics. There was no way we could have intercepted those ships. We considered trying to remotely control the pinnaces in the garage, turn them into missiles. To do that, the garage itself would have needed to respond to remote commands, and it wasn't answering. It's not clear if the monitoring AI there was directly affected, or killed by some other rioting AI, or perhaps is even lying in wait for us to come liberate the boats there. All we know is, we could not use it to relay the orders to the pinnaces, and the garage's rock is thick enough to not allow direct transmission."

She paused for several moments. For the first time, she noticed there was a glass of water in front of her—as there had been in front of everyone. She grasped it like a lifeline, and bought time by drinking from it while she visibly tried to calm herself.

Finally, she continued.

"This is also why we've basically been trapped. Until now. And that, Lieutenant, at the risk of taking things out of order, will be Job One now that you and your crew are here. I've got about two dozen qualified pilots with no boats. There are fifteen pinnaces and maybe another dozen smaller classes of boat waiting at that garage. Assuming we can contrive physical access and override the garage's operations, we can get those pinnaces out into the system. You've got at least two pilots you sent across to get me, and three pinnaces of your own intact. So your job will be to help us gain access to the garage, and liberate those boats so we can start getting out and distributing aid, cleaning up the mess, and maybe, just maybe, find some survivors in unlikely corners."

This last was not said with much hope, Singer thought, and she didn't blame the commodore. So much time had already passed.

Alexander said, "We could probably start training more pilots, while we're at it, Commodore. Many of us...well, we won't have much better to do. Helping to clean up the system, get help to people, survey the extent..."

The commodore held up her hand, "You're right, of course, but that's not my plan for this crew. I want you to help me bootstrap the process, yes. But right this minute, this is also the only remaining trained starship crew ready to hand. I have a number of people who are part of the shipyard operation who have served ship-side as well, of course, and I can augment your numbers from that, modestly. But I need this crew to be a starship crew, not a search-and-rescue operation."

Cordé began, "But..." Singer felt again that perhaps it was more because somebody had to than because Cordé didn't see for herself what Singer saw.

"We don't know," Singer said, before Haraldsdottir could, "what's going on anywhere else. It's tempting to believe this is somehow a regional anomaly, but if it were, someone would have come looking to see why we'd gone quiet, by now."

The commodore nodded. "Exactly. In fact, it's slightly concerning that we have not had a visit at least from the David's Star Republic, by now, or Thessaly. They each have completely different technology bases. My boffins tell me the chances of their having been directly effected by this are miniscule, unless whoever unleashed this had a completely different version to unleash on them, and every other diaspora system that does things differently."

"But," Wasserman broke in, looking a bit uncomfortable doing so, but taking the permission to speak freely to heart, "they could have been indirectly affected."

Nobody spoke for a moment while that percolated. Cadotte spoke first. "They stand apart from us, but we trade with them a lot. And TCTF ships make port calls a lot."

Alexander finished the thought. "If even one of those blew up anywhere near New Anaheim, or Newer York...they're going to be very, very angry, aren't they."

"They are," the commodore responded. "Especially since, with our network also apparently completely destroyed, we have no way of telling them what happened beyond what they can see. They might choose to send their own ships out to investigate, but...well, you know how they are."

"I don't!" Cordé responded, prompting most of the table to stare at her. "Well, I don't! I mean, I've heard a bit about them, but..."

Singer caught the commodore's eye and gestured. It was a vague gesture, but the intention came across clearly: "let me take this." Any history lesson coming from the commodore would seem too much like a rebuke.

"David's Star is the first settled system outside Sol. Most of the human diaspora stems from them, not from Sol directly. They fostered that diaspora, but they've always deliberately stood aloof from it. Their opinion is that too much connectedness defeats the purpose, which was to ensure the survival of humanity by spreading out outward. They have a fleet, but they don't actually go anywhere, much. They have their own bilateral agreements and communication networks with systems that aren't part of the TCTO. Until now, they allowed a relay to our own network, as well, but we can assume that's gone, now. They love to correspond, and share information, but they pretty much hold it all at arms length, like pen pals who never even try to meet.

"And...they are militantly defensive about the slightest hint of any threat to their safety and their autonomy."

Espinoza added, "They've spent nearly two-thousand years—sixty-three gigaseconds—preparing for the idea that some day, somebody's going to impinge on one or the other."

Cordé nodded. "I think I get it. Nobody goes to war in space. It's too expensive. But the DSR comes closest to being ready for one."

"Exactly," replied Singer.

Here, finally, the commodore took up the thread. "And that's why I think that's where I need to send you, first. It's tempting to send you back to Tau Ceti, find out what's happening to the Core. But if we're going to get any real help at all for pockets of survivors in affected systems, it's going to have to come from outside, somehow. And we owe the DSR an explanation. We tell them; we convince them; they tell others."

Cadotte broke in again, almost animated. "The Institute of Advanced Artificial Intelligence is headquartered there. I assume the local branch is mostly gone, now, so if there's anyone likely to help us get to the bottom of who and how and why, it's them."

Singer nodded, but still objected, "Commodore, all due respect, but...you know what shape this ship is in. We love her, but she's done about all she can do getting us here."

The commodore smiled then. It was a genuine, but enigmatic smile. She had been waiting for this moment. "That's true, but you see, there is one other bit of genuine good luck, beyond your arrival allowing us to get at the pinnace garage, and I mean to take advantage of it."