Midshipman Henry Gallant in Space (The Henry Gallant Saga) (23 page)

"True, but this information is so important that it’s absolutely necessary to get everything in the right context; every nuance is vital," she said, fussing with her equipment.

She gave him a broad, disarming smile as she said, "Besides, we may still glean a few more details out of you yet."

He studied her surreptitiously. She was tall and slender with a warm, inviting face. He surmised that she was good at getting people to reveal secrets. He wanted to appear confident and imperturbable in front of her. Admittedly, he did not feel his best in his newly requisitioned but as-yet-untailored, service dress blue uniform.She instructed, "You need to tell your story openly, holding nothing back. Sometimes talking to a complete stranger is easiest. My people won’t be here for a while. While we wait for them, let me validate this data evidence and get your signature on your report and deposition. We can get into the narrative later."

He said, "The Jupiter battle, the asteroid-field events, and Midshipman Mitchel’s wounds—it’s nearly a continuous blur now." His mind flashed to how he had spent nearly every free minute in Kelsey’s hospital room. He shook the image off and concentrated on the issues before him.

"Let’s start with an inventory of these chips," she said. The validation of the chips and his report went quickly. Then he signed his report and deposition without reading either.

She said a few words quietly into her comm badge and pulled some material from her briefcase. She began asking a few general questions, followed by more pointed questions. They included details about the number of Titan ships and their characteristics. After about twenty minutes, she made a gesture toward one of the room’s view screens and Gallant suspected, for the first time, that their entire discourse was being monitored by others.

Gallant became aware of the steady stomping of approaching footsteps. As the senior officers began arriving, he rose and stood at attention.

"At ease," one officer said, but Gallant couldn’t identify the speaker.

Lifting his coffee mug, Gallant covered his mouth and watched them over the lip of the cup. He deliberately scanned the people filing into the room. None of them said anything to him as they took their places.

Gallant was conscious that his heart was beating more rapidly. Not for the first time, he wished he could get up and leave. But doing that made no sense, so he remained at the mercy of the debriefing officers. He lowered his cup as a senior captain approached him. The officer’s only comment was, "Interesting."

He pushed his coffee cup away and looked around the room at the several dozen men and women sitting attentively around the table.

All of them were fidgeting and staring back at him. He thought,
Too bad. You’ll have to wait.

Gallant turned his attention to the captain taking the seat next to him. Nearby, one technician ran video while another replicated the data chips and a third spoke into a recording device.

Several debriefing specialists from SIA sat directly across from Gallant. A collection of a dozen senior officers from the fleet’s ships, in nearby orbit, filled the remaining seats. An additional dozen officers filed in along the far wall of the conference room, apparently wanting to witness the proceedings. It seemed their curiosity couldn’t be contained to merely reviewing the reports.

It was clear that they had already been thoroughly briefed and had seen the Eagle’s video, and AI records. However, all this information was provided in bits and pieces. They wanted Gallant to stitch together the context from one image to the next. In addition, Gallant’s exceptional neural interface abilities during the encounter with the Titans gave him the best overall perspective of ships and fortresses. There was a myriad of details any intelligence officer would be dying to ask and only Gallant could create a comprehensive tapestry of events.At Lieutenant McCall’s prompting, Gallant told them what he had learned about the Titan fleet while hiding in the asteroid belt. The various officers’ questions, at first, seemed demanding and badgering, as if they were dealing with an enemy combatant rather than a fellow officer.

Gallant was pleased with himself for remaining calm as he presented the material. In his mind’s eye, he called up each of the relevant memories required to relate his story. He was now painfully aware that his report had appeared limited.

One intelligence officer, Captain George Ellison, a large, powerfully built man with gray streaks in his hair, sat across from Gallant. Another SIA captain sat next to him. Admiral Collingsworth, commander of the Mars Fleet, sat off to one side. Gallant assumed that other senior officers were monitoring the proceedings from their ships.

Captain Samuel Wilcox was the erudite-looking SIA officer who sat next to Gallant. He had laid out the parameters for the debriefing process. He asked Gallant questions about his childhood, his family, his background on Mars, and his life at the academy. These questions frustrated Gallant. He wanted to get to the important information about the aliens rather than spending a lot of time talking about himself. But Wilcox would not be persuaded. He moved on methodically to learn as much as he could about Gallant to gauge his credibility and reliability. When Wilcox seemed satisfied, he nodded to Captain Ellison.

Ellison seemed to be an imaginative, quick thinker who liked to talk, and his questions overflowed from his mouth. He wanted to learn about Henry Gallant’s neural-interface image of the Titan force. He explained that they were anxious to learn everything they could about the Titan ships’ missile capabilities and the fortresses whichGallant had experienced firsthand in combat. The intelligence officers expected they could use Gallant's knowledge to make a more complete profile of the enemy than they could with recent information from the Jupiter Fleet.

Gallant answered the officer’s specific questions cautiously, in terse, precise statements.

Finally, Ellison said, "OK, Mr. Gallant, I think it’s time for a change in the process. We would like you to give a narrative of everything that happened in the asteroid belt, just as it happened, as best as you can remember.”

Gallant hesitated, uncertain how to begin.

"Tell us about the action," prompted Wilcox.

"Well…," said Gallant, biting his lip.

Captain Bolder, one of the flag officers accompanying the admiral, said impatiently, "Speak up, man!"

Gallant began by explaining the battle conditions. Everyone listened breathlessly. From time to time, someone asked a leading question, and a bit more of the story unfolded. Gallant struggled to speak cautiously, without arrogance, but he was surprised by his own outpouring of words. He thought that he was only offering facts, but somehow the story revealed a simple elegance to his experience. He told of the long struggle and the difficult choices he made. Occasionally, Lieutenant McCall played a video from his digital evidence on the display console that corresponded with his story. The explicit images enriched Gallant’s story and excited the listeners’ imaginations.

He tried to explain the effort, tension, and anguish that overcame him as he struggled to navigate through the maze of asteroids and past the aliens. Then he detailed his actions and maneuvers as he fought the many Titan ships and evaded their missiles and plasma bursts. He described how he made the Titans believe that his ship had been destroyed. Finally, he spoke poignantly about how he had treated and cared for Kelsey as he repressed the concern that clutched at his throat.

At one point he stopped, feeling self-conscious as he looked at the many historic figures looking down at him from the decorated walls. He blushed, recalling his own words—fearful that he had been indiscreet or even boastful.

He looked around the table, expecting to see judgment or scorn on the officers’ faces. To his relief, he saw approval and possible admiration. Gallant realized they might even envy such an extraordinary adventure. Each officer at the table was his senior, with vast experience in warships that had traveled from Earth to the outer reaches of the Jupiter frontier. Yet here they sat, captivated by his tale of a man and woman carrying out a mission against desperate odds. Gallant’s humble heroism seemed to reach each of them.

Finally, as he stammered out the last of his exploit, he felt disconcerted that he may have won their approval under false pretenses since he never revealed his many fears during the horror of the battle. He hadn’t included his haunted memories of his lost comrades on the Jupiter frontier, the many questionable choices he had made, or the endless nights of suffering that Kelsey had endured. Gallant felt fresh anguish at the thought of Kelsey suffering, even now, but he checked himself. He knew that only misery lay in pursuing those thoughts.

The officers around the conference table began praising him for his single-handed attack on the alien vessel and for retrieving the critical AI CPU intelligence. They were excited and jubilant over his discovery of the hidden alien fleet. Gallant's fighter-pilot bravado had given them a spark of how to fight their opponent. They expressed lively pleasure at his safe return, but behind their fascination was a sense that they were still thirsty to know even more details. When it was finally clear that they had completely exhausted Gallant, they called a break. Gallant drank more coffee and used the time to rekindle his spirits.

When they resumed questioning, Wilcox finally got down to what he considered to be key elements. It was clear that the United Planets had a dangerous new adversary and that the solar system was a very different place than it had been. The intelligence officer looked over the Titan AI CPU, identifying the technological leap that gave the Titans a strategic advantage. He asked "Why did you pick this particular device among everything in the aliens’ control room?"

Gallant explained that it had seemed to resemble a central AI processor. Wilcox asked him to compare it with the neural interface he used in his Eagle.

Gallant said, “It is very different from our neural interface which taps into my conscious mind and acts as a conduit for me to give instructions to the controls on the ship. Ours allows me to draw information from the artificial intelligence, but the AI system never tries to control me.”

Gallant paused and looked around the table before continuing, “The Titan interface directs the impulses of multiple individuals simultaneously and coordinates with its AI central processing unit. I suspect that it also allows the AI to direct individual’s actions.”

“So you formed some opinions about this,” said Wilcox.

“Yes, I have,” said Gallant.

"OK, I'm willing to listen. What do you think you've learned from examining the CPU and from your experiences with the Titan forces?" asked Wilcox.

Gallant said, "The fact that their neural interface allows for coordinated multiple users to fly their larger ships makes it distinctly different from ours. To me, it emphasizes the different type of culture, and the command and control system they have. It must also influence their tactics for navigation and attack formations. They do not act as independent individuals. However, it’s not that they have a collective consciousness or one mind telepathically controlling everything. I don’t believe they are controlled by an artificial intelligence. Nor do they behave as cyborgs. My best guess from my experience is that they have a highly cooperative limited telepathy and limited AI capabilities."

An important aspect of the information Gallant provided, included the buildup of methane supplies in the asteroid cluster. Some of the intelligence officers were concerned that the Titans had the capability to conduct an extended campaign.

After the debriefing, Gallant was left alone in the conference room. He took the opportunity to call up the
Superb
’s GridScape computer. It was like every battle cruiser’s AI system, except that it integrated information from every AI system throughout the fleet. It even synced up with battle cruisers from Earth and Jupiter when opportunity and time permitted. The system had tried to make sense out of the data that Gallant had collected, but it still required him to fit together a number of details.

Gallant asked GridScape if it had reached any conclusions about the Titans. He asked it to evaluate the elaborate ruse of attacking Jupiter in order to draw out the Mars Fleet while, all the time, the Titans were stockpiling supplies and ships, ready to pounce on Mars. The AI could not provide any possibilities that had not already been considered in the debriefing.

Gallant used GridScape to get a briefing on the status of the war. It reported that the conflict between the Titans and the United Planets appeared to be suspended for the time being. The Mars Fleet had stopped its effort to relieve the Jupiter Fleet. Instead, it remained in orbit around Mars. Earth had sent part of its fleet to reinforce Mars. The Jupiter Fleet remained near Jupiter Station. The marines held their positions. Likewise, the Titan fleet near Jupiter maintained its position. It provided support for its ground forces, but those units hadn’t moved since Gallant had left the area. The Titan fleet in the asteroid belt remained under the misguided belief that they had destroyed Gallant and their position remained undetected. Their plan to attack Mars once the Mars Fleet went to Jupiter’s aid, likely remained unaltered. However, this state of affairs could not remain forever.

The next day, Gallant went to the fleet hospital to visit Kelsey. When he walked into her room, he did not see the old-time, sterile hospital setting with tubes and instruments. Instead, the space resembled her room from her Oregon home. There were numerous holographic representations of her personal items and many pictures of her home and family. Soothing music played quietly in the background. Under her bed were all the modern monitoring devices, hidden from view but able to maintain a complete medical picture of the patient. Her medical condition was being monitored remotely in a nursing station on the floor.

She sat up in bed wearing a comfortable dressing gown. She was still groggy from her recent surgery and medications, so she barely recognized him. He remained in her room for several hours, telling her about his debriefing and reassuring her as much as possible, even though he wasn’t sure how much she would remember afterwards. As Gallant began to get up, he noticed that an incoming video call was buzzing for attention. It was from Kelsey’s parents on Earth. He left quietly to give them some privacy.