The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) (11 page)

My, my,
thought Trent.
The girl has no social life at all.

She was thirty-three years old, Melissa du Bois, and had spent the last decade struggling to rebuild a semblance of a career out of the wreckage left by her last encounter with Trent. The struggle had marked her, visibly enough: she was harder than Trent remembered, and more cynical –

And
much
more dangerous.

TRENT HAD BEEN assigned a two-room suite in forty-one percent gee, the bottom or outermost ring, at what had once been the Halfway Hilton, before the imposition of martial law at Halfway. Early in ’77 Space Force had requisitioned the hotel, a double wheel design with counter-rotating wheels, and towed it to its current position a quarter klick out from the
Unity
.

They were good quarters, for a civilian. The bathing facilities were complete; an enclosed shower, an open tub with high sides, tile floors that would tolerate the inevitable low-gee splashing. The mirrors in the bathroom were a ridiculous extravagance; rather than using reflective paint that could be turned on and off, the Hilton had used actual mirrors, bolted to the walls.

Trent wondered if the mirrors were breakable, and hoped he would not have occasion to find out. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen a real mirror since leaving Earth, and could not recall an instance.

Trent assumed that his actions and conversations would be spied on at all times while in his quarters, and while aboard the
Unity
, and most of the rest of the time as well. He vaguely recalled that, decades ago, cameras – not even holocams, flat cameras – had been mounted behind mirrors. “One-way mirrors,” they’d been called. He thought that it had required a darkened room on the other side of the mirror, but wasn’t sure –

Not that it mattered. The PKF had not grown so incompetent that they couldn’t mount molecular cameras in a commercial hotel wherever they pleased.

He took Eugene Yovia’s suit coat off, kicked Yovia’s shoes off, and laid down on the bed, and fell asleep still wearing his shirt and slacks, and had nightmares all night.

11

THE SIGN THAT hung over Eugene Yovia’s workstation appeared to be hand-lettered – calligraphy, done with a slightly shaky hand:
“Only success will be tolerated, and it must be good, too.”

“Well there, young fellow. Been a while, hasn’t it?” Sub-Chief Lendyl Kenneth Wilson, Ken or Kenny to those he worked with, sat at the keyboard in front of the systerm in Trent’s office; he spoke without looking up.

“Four, five years,” Trent said. “A while.”

Ken was that rarity, a man who was actually as old as he looked. He was in great shape – he had beaten Yovia at dropball with some regularity, back in ’75 – but he was casual about the cosmetic side of his geriatrics. At ninety-five he was rail-thin, with a shock of sparse white hair that tended to go in every possible direction by the end of a long day, with heavy laugh wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. He hummed with energy. Trent couldn’t imagine where he got it from, as that day wore on; as far as he could tell the man didn’t actually eat.

“Have a seat, have a seat,” Ken said. His speech patterns were odd. Trent had watched a recording of a conversation between Yovia and Wilson, when Yovia accepted the job upstairs. Yovia had called Wilson to let him know he was coming back; they’d been friends, Yovia’s last tour. Wilson had a tendency to place heavy emphasis on odd words for no apparent reason – he was the sort who, in sensables, was called a “character.”

It was 08:05, Saturday morning. Trent had gone to the quarters assigned to Yovia, in the huge quarter-gee donut nearest the
Unity
, the night prior, and slept until 07:00, when his inskin had awakened him. He’d taken the first available shuttle over to the
Unity
, 07:30.

After over a decade living with the ten-hour clock used by the SpaceFarers’ Collective, and for that matter the rest of the Solar System except Earth and Unification Luna, it required a conscious effort to shift back into a twenty-four hour day. Trent let his inskin handle it; his biological component kept trying to convert times into the ten-hour clock it had grown used to. It surprised Trent to realize how deeply ingrained the habit was; he’d spent the first eighteen years of his life with a twenty-four hour clock, and he’d expected no difficulty in living under such a clock again.

Making just one reference to a ten hour clock would be a disaster. Now why did he do
that
, people would say –

– and Melissa would make a quick guess.

Ken gestured at the seat facing his, and Trent pulled himself into the chair. He left the seat ties untouched. The fact that the office had chairs was a sign that it had been designed for downsiders, with the psychological comfort of downsiders in mind; Halfers, and SpaceFarers too for that matter, see no point in chairs in a free fall environment. They just take up cubic.

“Been brushing up on your chess, have you? Good, good, maybe you can finally give me a game.”

“I’ve gotten a little better,” Trent admitted. “Enough to put a hurting on you
...
not that it was ever all that hard.”

Ken Wilson was the best pure programmer Yovia had ever met, and at chess he had beaten Yovia – not really a bad player – five times out of six. Ken grinned at Trent, and said, “And dropball, too, you’ve been practicing your dropball.”

Trent nodded. “You bet. Downside, I’ve been practicing my free fall basketball. Every day.”

“Lousy excuse,
lousy
excuse, I won’t accept it. You’ve been lazy is what it is, fat and lazy.” Ken gestured at Trent’s gut with one thin, wiry hand. “Lookit that. You go downside, fight the heavy gee all day, still got fat.”

“Fat but not slow,” Trent countered. “You get in the chamber with me, I’ll dunk around you all day long.”

Ken had beaten Yovia at dropball nine games out of ten. The man was known to have beaten homebrews at dropball, young Halfers born in drop.

“Fat but not slow? Hah! Hah! I don’t think so, you wretch.”

Trent clasped his hands over his fat. “Chief Wretch, to you.”

“They offered me the job, you know.”

Trent laughed at him. “They did not.”

“They would have offered me the job if I’d wanted it,” Ken said quickly.

“Hah!” Trent shot back. “They’d have been afraid you’d file handwritten, calligraphic reports.”

“I did that once,” Ken admitted. “It upset them a little bit. Could be why they had to drag a two-time loser like you up the well to oversee things.”

“You’re a character, Ken.”

“So they tell me,” Ken said. “Want to go play tourist?”

THEY STARTED AT the torches, aft.

“Hear you divorced that bitch Janice,” Ken said as he showed Trent the cracker leading from the water tanks to the fusion engines.

“Don’t call her that,” said Trent flatly. “And she divorced me.”

“Girl never did have any taste,” Ken commented. “Only sensible thing she ever did was marry you.” He glanced back at Trent. “’Spect that was an accident. I imagine you’re going to wipe that silly face off your face now?”

“I intend to.”

“Good. I can’t see playing chess with Bad Jack.” It was the name of a murderous, amoral character in
Death Valley
, a wildly popular Unification War sensable Selstrom had starred in. “I’ll keep expecting you to whip out a maser and fry me if I beat you.”

“Never would.”

“That’s what they all say,” Ken muttered. “Right up until they
toast
you.” They stopped in front of a panel with the cover off, exposing several dozen optical switches, a jungle of spliced optic fiber. “Recognize this?”

Trent searched his inskin for schematics. “Bundled high bandwidth lasercable junction for the One-C line. Leads to the processor growth that handles the cracker for the torch
...
we ran this cable ourselves, you and me. This is the main trunk going from the Three-C server closet at Deck Two, Forward
...
Cross corridor 8?”

Ken nodded. “Cross 9. Not bad,” he said grudgingly, “for a coder who never did figure out which end of the screwdriver to hold.”

“You hold it by the round end,” said Trent mildly, “the part that is unlike the top of your head. The flat end, that is like the top of your head, goes into the slot on the screw.”

Ken stared at him for a long moment, and then turned away, shaking his head. “Boy goes downside five measly years, turns into a wit.
Half
-right.”

It was enough of a warning: Trent spent the rest of the day playing straight man.

THEY WORKED THEIR way up the ship. It took nearly ten hours, aft to fore: Trent was impressed by the old man’s energy. From the cracker they went on to examine the fusion power plant, the torches that drove the ship, and the circuitry that controlled the torches. There was little aboard the ship that could not be controlled by Monitor: most of it was supposed to be controlled by Monitor, was intended to be run by humans only in an emergency. As a result there was no significant part of the ship that did not fall within Information Systems’ overview. The optical transputer engine that Monitor ran on was tucked away at the center of the ship, next to the Bridge; the best protected spots aboard the ship. A dive through the sun’s corona would have damaged much of the ship’s outer layers beyond salvaging, but humans on the Bridge and the machinery at InfoSystems Control would have survived without even getting warm.

From the torches they followed the Two-C lines fore, the backbone lines that gave Monitor control of the ship’s nav systems, weapons, and lifesystems. Most of the cabling aboard the ship served either Two-C or Three-C, control and communications respectively. One-C, command functions, rode along the Two-C and Three-C hardware, but in practice most of the work on One-C consisted of coding, fine-tuning Monitor in its interactions with the rest of the universe. It was one of the two reasons Yovia had been offered the Chief’s job: Yovia had done the bulk of the original integration work on Monitor.

The other reason was the previous Chief’s nervous breakdown after nearly dying when a bomb had taken out most of InfoSystems Control two months prior.

Two-C and Three-C were close to being done; they could not have been destroyed except by destroying the
Unity
itself.

One-C had to be done over again, almost from scratch.

Four people had died in the explosion.

It was the Erisian Claw’s work, with help from the SpaceFarers’ Collective; Trent had not known of it and had disapproved when he’d learned about it – and it bothered Trent, a lot, that he found himself wondering sometimes if it might not have been worth the cost.

AT 2:12 P.M. they floated together in the InfoSystems Control complex, in a large space half the size of a football field, crammed with transputer modules and RTS RAM that had yet to be installed.

Ken said, “Monitor?”

The voice that answered was deep, calm, male, inviting confidence. A newsdancer’s baritone with a touch of Real Authority. The voice conjured images of a Wise Old Man, just down off the mountain with a pair of stone tablets allegedly handed to him by God – Trent imagined that voice made your average Peaceforcer want to come to attention. “Good afternoon. Sub-Chief Wilson, and I assume this is Chief Yovia.”

“That’s right. How are we today?” Ken asked.

“I do not know how ‘we’ are; I have no information about the modes of being currently experienced by yourself and Chief Yovia. As to myself, I am operative at thirteen percent of capacity.”

“No improvement at all,” Ken whispered to Trent.

“I am still missing seventy-eight percent of my processor base, and nearly ninety percent of my online storage; only offline storage is functionally complete. It is unreasonable to expect improvement in functional operability while hardware requirements remain unmet.”

“What an attitude,” said Ken. “At-ti-tude.”

Trent said, “Are your libraries in place?”

“Chief Yovia, my libraries are stored offline. Though I have access to them, there has been no attempt to reintegrate them into me since the explosion. I am so designed that I may not relink them without supervision from a human being.”

“You can patch into the workstation in my office,” Trent said. It was not entirely a question, given the bombing; his office was up a deck and aft a good bit.

Monitor hesitated noticeably. “Yes. You will lack certain functionality that exists in InfoSystems Control; some server functions may be slowed enough for you to notice a time lag between requests and actions on my part. Also, I am so designed that I may not be disassembled except from local workstations in InfoSystems Control.”

“Yes,” said Trent. “I helped compose those guidelines.”

“I did not know that. Your personnel file has not yet been made available to me,” said Monitor. “Presumably before you come on duty at 08:00 Monday morning, this will be rectified.” Monitor paused –

Trent waited.

“I look forward to working with you,” Monitor said.

Ken grinned at Trent, and Trent nodded. Not bad – not bad at all, for a PKF expert system running at thirteen percent of capacity. It had caught a conversational lull, and filled it with an appropriate null sentence.

A certain perceptiveness, there, one unusual in expert systems, or in AIs for that matter, where humans were concerned.

Trent couldn’t wait to see it running full bore, with access to the address space it had been designed to run in, and the processor base it had been designed to run on.

Trent couldn’t wait to look at its code.

12

A LONG DAY.

Before it was over they had inspected the torches, the cracker, the water tanks that fed the cracker, the oxygen and hydrogen tanks that the cracker fed. The oxygen could be bled directly into the air shafts, if necessary, in the event the lifesystem was damaged. Both the oxygen and hydrogen could be vented into space in the event of an oversupply. Under full boost the cracker would feed the hydrogen tanks as fast as it could crack the water. The system used hydrogen faster than it used oxygen: in the event of prolonged boost, the
Unity
would have to vent oxygen, or risk fires from over-oxygenated air.

They inspected most of the laser cannon, the missile emplacements, the slipship bay at mid-starboard, with over two hundred slipships. It was the image that stayed with Trent, at the end of the day: row upon row upon row of the small needle-like craft, two dozen rows of five slipships, each slipship capable of carrying one Space Force pilot, or of being operated remotely, or of fighting under control of its onboard computer. Each slip carried laser cannon pointing fore and aft and was equipped to carry a single missile. The ships boosted fast and hot, burning monatomic hydrogen in a chemical reaction.

Trent looked at the missile mountings, and thought,
Nukes. I bet anything they’re going to be nukes.

Over two hundred of them. There were some four thousand SpaceFarer ships scattered across the System
...
but perhaps as few as a quarter of those SpaceFarer ships would stand a chance in a battle against a Unification slipship; the other three thousand would be plasma within minutes.

They moved on and looked over the troop carrier bay at mid-port, with its six troop carriers. They inspected the lifesystem, and the three Bridges, fore, center, and aft. They examined the sensor arrays, the radar and deep radar, the neutrino detectors, the telescopes and the optical holocams. They inspected the trauma center, the machine shop, and the barracks.

Everything was an odd mix of the sparkling new and items that had been installed almost a decade ago: the
Unity
had been under construction a very long time.

There was security everywhere, both visible holocams and Space Force guards. It was impossible to go from one deck to another without showing ID and undergoing a retinal scan. The same checks were performed at some, but not all, bulkheads, as they moved forward.

As sure as Trent was flipping bits there was security he could not see.

Near the torches the ship was not quite two kilometers tall; it sported one hundred and thirteen decks of unequal height. Some were only three or four meters tall; others scaled up fifty meters or more.

Bulkheads were spaced more evenly, one every seventy-five meters, down the seven kilometer length of the ship.

It reminded Trent of a spacescraper, laid temporarily on its side. Though the humans inhabiting it were random about their local vertical, depending on how recently they’d come from Earth, the ship itself had a local vertical:
down
was the direction toward the torches,
up
the direction toward the bridge. When the ship finally saw boost, it would be as if someone had attached fusion rockets to the world’s largest spacescraper.

Trent was thoroughly chilled by the time they were done – knowing the ship’s schematics was not the same thing as seeing the ship that had been built around those schematics. A big nuke, planted amidships, might break the ship in two, slow down the Unification’s construction of this ship
...
but that was about it. And Trent doubted that even that would stop them; they’d just reassemble the ship and rebuild the parts that had been damaged.

He and Ken quit at 21:15. Ken assured Trent that he didn’t have to worry – if he worked hard all day Sunday, Trent would have some idea what was going on before he had to face the staff on Monday. “So you won’t look
too
silly. In the meantime,” Ken concluded, “you
might as well
lose a few games of chess at dinner.”

THEY PLAYED AT a coffee house that Ken favored, Highland Grounds. Yovia had described it during his interrogation; a lot of the Halfers who played chess, played it at Highland Grounds. It was located in a quarter gee donut out toward the Edge; it took Trent and Ken fifteen minutes by sled to get there.

Ken ordered a black cup of Folgers coffee, and Trent the Uncatchable, one of the best known coffee junkies in the System, in a coffee house filled with the smell of exotic Earth-grown coffees, ordered Eugene Yovia’s favorite black breakfast tea.

Trent tried hard not to despise Eugene Yovia, and his taste in women and drinks, as he sat in the quarter gee at Highland Grounds wearing Adam Selstrom’s face and sipping bitter black English tea without lemon out of a bulb.

Mostly he failed.

Ken withdrew a long, thin wallet out of his back pocket after they’d seated themselves at a small table on the upper level, overlooking the stage, and set up the board.

Ken unfolded and spread out on the table top a flat sheet of elderly paper.

“What’s that?”

Ken turned it around to show it to Trent. Two columns; at the top of the left column, in slightly shaky calligraphic handwriting, it said,
Ken, The Grand, The Most High and Exalted Kicking-Butt Chess Champion.

The right hand column said,
Crud
.

Ken the Grand, Most High, etc., was beating Crud 32 games to 6.

“That’s me, on the left,” Ken said. “Over on the right –”

“Right.”

Trent won the first game on the thirty-eighth move.

“My game,” said Trent. He brought his rook up from C1 to C6, took the pawn protecting the black King. “Check.” The black Queen, sitting in row 6, had no choice; to get her King out of check, she had to take the rook, which would put her on the same diagonal with the white bishop, which would leave the black King sitting naked in the middle of the board –

“Want to play this out?”

Ken studied the board. “Nope
...
you’ve gotten better, Gene.”

“At almost everything,” said Trent.

“I guess four years and three months is a long time, for you young fellows. I’ve got white this time, I guess I’ll whip you all over the board.”

He took fifty-eight moves to turn his one-move advantage into a win, Queening a pawn at fifty-three, checkmating Trent at fifty-eight. He sat back and studied the board when he was done. “You don’t play the way you used to, Gene. More careful like, and I don’t recall you using that King’s Indian defense before, either.” He paused and said quickly, “You sure you’re not playing out of your inskin?”

“Wouldn’t do that to you, Ken.”

Ken nodded reluctantly. “You’ve got a hell of a lot better, son.”

Trent grinned at him. “I still suck at dropball.”

“I guess that’s some consolation.”

Trent promptly lost the next four games, and put Ken in a substantially improved mood.

NEAR TWO A.M. Ken decided to call it a night. “Thirty-seven games to
seven
, I guess that’s a stopping point. Us old guys have to get our sleep. Or else we
die
.”

“You’ll probably outlive me,” said Trent.

Ken nodded. “That’s the way of it, isn’t it? Those of us with nothing to live for, live forever. Whereas you young folks with your hopes and dreams and desires,
whammo!
Usually that type gets snuffed at an early age. See you in the morning. We’ll go play some dropball.”

The man didn’t say good-bye; he just scooped his chess pieces into the bag he carried, rolled up the mat they’d been playing on, saluted Trent once, and walked out.

Trent waited until he had cycled through the airlock.

He got up and went down to the bar. The counterman was a husky young fellow about twenty, Samoan at a guess, dressed in what looked to be a hand-sewn black gown with a little matching black cap. “What’ll it be, chief?”

Trent looked at him. “You know who I am?”

The counterman blinked. “I don’t think so. Should I?”

“Never mind. Small ‘c’, I get it. I’d like to try that
...
what’s it called? Jamaican Blue? How about a bulb of that?”

“Cream? Sugar?”

“Black,” Trent assured him. “Black as death. Just to see if I like it.”

It was a foolish thing to do. Out of character for Eugene Yovia, to be sure –

Jesus and Harry, though. It was his birthday, and he hadn’t been
whammoed
yet.

ON SUNDAY, MARCH 10, 2080, Ken woke him early. “Get up!” he yelled through the door to Trent’s quarters. He banged on the door twice. “Up I say! Early bird gets the worm! Big fat juicy worms!”

It was 06:10.

Trent reminded himself that Ken and Yovia were friends; he was personally starting to hate the man.

They played one on one dropball in a chamber up on the hotel’s ten percent gee ring, for most of an hour, playing by ones to eleven. Trent lost every game. Yovia had clearly thought it the oddest request he’d been faced with during his interrogations, but he’d complied. Luna’s surface gravity of one sixth gee is, by a bit, too heavy for a good game of dropball: Trent’s people had boosted Yovia up off Luna, into orbit –

Where he had played dropball for two hours.

Trent had watched the holos. Yovia was a lousy player. He had no sense of timing, no shooting eye, had rotten ball control, and got faked into the popcorn machine with abysmal regularity.

The wins put Ken in a good mood. They sat together in the sauna afterward, letting the heat work the kinks out of them. “You keep this up, Gene, keep it up. We’ll work that fat off you yet.”

“If it doesn’t kill me.” The sweat poured down Trent; his right knee throbbed. “I’m completely out of practice.” It was true enough. Trent had rarely been out of condition in his life, but the last two months in low gravity, favoring his right knee, had taken its toll.

“Nah, this won’t kill you. This wouldn’t kill a
Girl Scout!
Tomorrow morning we’ll play again, and that’ll probably kill you. No loss, you don’t have anything to live for anyway, I ’spect.”

“I’m going to go to work,” Trent said. “There’s entirely too much local color in this sauna.”

“I’ll just have a
nap
in here,” Ken announced.

SHUTTLES LEFT THE hotel for the
Unity
every half hour. Trent showered, dressed in sensible clothes, and took the 8:30 A.M. shuttle over.

In his office – at Deck 35, Bulkhead 212, Cross 9, addressed as 35,212,9 – Trent sorted through his work. The computerist staff reported for duty tomorrow: fourteen individuals, fifteen counting Trent, working three rotating shifts, twenty-four hours around. They got weekends off. (In the earliest days of the project they had worked six-day weeks; that had lasted almost two years before the civilians working on the
Unity
had begun protesting. Midway into the second year, as the size of the project became apparent, as it became more and more clear that the
Unity
would never be finished by its original, late ’75 deadline, with thirty percent of the civilian staff refusing extensions to their contracts and heading back downside despite the high pay, working conditions had been improved; it had been years since the computerists had been required to work more than six days in a week.)

Six of the programmers were PKF DataWatch, and six were civilians. Two were Space Force.

There was one serious problem with his staff. Trent had known about the problem since deciding to take over Yovia’s position, and still was not certain how to deal with it.

Trent had picked up a good fraction of the Reb records in the mess following the end of the ’76 rebellion; and one of the Space Forcers, Lt. Keith Daniels, was a Reb agent, stranded inside Space Force when the Rebs collapsed.

Trent did not intend to make any overtures to Daniels. It appeared to Trent that Daniels was free of suspicion, but appearances were deceptive when dealing with the PKF. So far as Trent knew the man had not had contact with his Reb handlers since late ’76. It was not at all impossible that he’d been tagged by the PKF, and left to sit inside Space Force to see what happened, who tried to contact him. Space Force would not have kept an officer they knew had been turned; they’d have shot him as soon as they were sure, and pulled him from sensitive duty long before that. But Trent knew for a fact that the PKF were not above leaving a known agent inside Space Force; they had done it on other occasions.

For now, no action with Daniels. Treat him no differently than any of the others.

Three of the team members had worked with Yovia, four-plus years ago. Trent would have to be careful with them. Reserved, perhaps even depressed, over his divorce. Given the deadlines Trent intended to impose on them, no socializing would be necessary; certainly none was desirable.

Ken was one of the nine; the others included a pair of the DataWatch officers, Eloise Legut and Jean-Paul Troileac.

Careful and reserved should do it: four years absence could account for a lot of changes in an individual.

Six DataWatch officers.

TRENT SPENT THE rest of the day studying Monitor’s code, the code he had allegedly helped write. Monitor consisted of a remarkable collection of sub-systems, of improbable libraries bound together in service of the
Unity
.

Trent waded into it not long after 10 A.M.

When he became aware of the world again, it was almost midnight.

He just made the midnight shuttle back to the hotel, and sat in the shuttle with his eyes closed, floating in the darkness, not thinking, not feeling, until the shuttle docked, and he took the elevator down to his quarters, undressed and showered and got in bed –

“
Command
,” he said aloud. “Lights off.”

He lay in bed in the darkness, listening to the gentle hum of the ventilators.

How do you destroy the finest code you’ve ever seen in your life?

Trent would have given a year of his life to upload that code into the Black Beast, to disassemble it with the full power of the Black Beast at his disposal.