Into the Light

by David Weber

  “I know!” O’Malley entered another command, and his expression shifted from one of baffled irritation to the beginning of genuine alarm. “I’ve got three more warnings,” he said. “Different subsystems, too.”

  “That’s—” Sanchez began, then broke off, whirling back to his own console as a red light began to flash. He tapped keys and smothered a few colorful comments of his own.

  “I’m getting the same warnings on Arm Two!” he said tersely.

  “That really is crazy,” O’Malley said, and keyed his com.

  “Twain,” a contralto voice responded almost instantly in his headset.

  “Sam,” O’Malley said into his headset mic; Invictus’ personnel were comfortable with informality, “we’ve got a problem down here. Arms Two and Three are both showing structural faults.”

  “That’s crazy,” Twain said, and O’Malley and Sanchez shared a nervous grin at her choice of adjective. “Hold one.”

  A musical tone beeped in both controllers’ headsets as the supervisor logged directly into their displays. Even as she did, two fresh warning lights began to blink on Sanchez’ display. He muttered and began typing a query into the system when—abruptly, with zero additional forewarning, dozens of other lights flashed brightly.

  More telltales turned crimson on displays all around the large compartment, and an audible alarm warbled.

  “Warning,” a dispassionate computer voice said suddenly. “Warning. Structural failure imminent. Structural failure imminent.”

  “Can’t be!” Twain sounded stunned by the speed of the totally unexpected threat’s expansion, but she reacted quickly. The neat columns of data on the status of structural components arriving from the already active printers vanished from the master display on the large compartment’s forward bulkhead as she reconfigured it to a visual feed. The camera she’d selected had an excellent view of Refinery Six, her crew’s current responsibility, and—

  “What the fuck?!” Samantha Twain blurted as the brilliant sparkle of shorting circuits flared along a third of Arm Two’s length. Sanchez stared at the display in disbelief, then swallowed an incredulous curse as his entire panel went red.

  “Warning,” the computer voice said. “Structural failure Arm Two. Structural failure Arm Two. Structural failure Arm Two. Struc—”

  The warning died in mid-word as the heel of Twain’s hand slammed down on the big red button on her console. The one no one had ever expected to need.

  “Emergency shutdown procedures initiated,” the voice said calmly. “Proceeding. Shutdown confirmed. All drones at standby.”

  “Well, that’s a hell of a mess,” Sanchez said quietly, to no one in particular, as a four-hundred-foot length of Arm Two simply … detached from the refinery and began drifting slowly away from it.

  “Yeah, and somehow I don’t think Director MacQuarie’s gonna be real pleased about it,” O’Malley agreed.

  * * *

  “DAMN, DAMN, DAMN!”

  Despite its low volume, Major Sheila McIlhenny could almost physically feel the intensity of Roger MacQuarie’s soft-voiced profanity as it came over her headset. Partly, she thought, that was because she knew he practically never swore. Or maybe she only recognized it because both of them could see what had evoked it simply by glancing through her cockpit’s crystoplast and she knew exactly how … frustrating it must be for him. She was MacQuarie’s personal pilot. She’d come to know him well over the last few months, and she’d decided he was one of the best bosses she’d ever had. He was hardworking, conscientious, considerate of his personnel, imaginative, and willing to think outside the box.

  And at the moment, he was also very, very frustrated and angry.

  “Well, at least we know what happens when we get too enthusiastic. That’s useful,” Doctor Claude Massengale said over the com channel. His tone was deliberately bright, almost chirpy, and McIlhenny smothered a chuckle as MacQuarie scowled.

  “Listen, half pint—you aren’t doing yourself any favors where my Christmas list is concerned,” MacQuarie replied, glaring at the construction drones drifting inertly between him and the Refinery Six platform, and McIlhenny turned another chuckle into a rather unconvincing cough as Massengale made a rude sound over the com.

  It would have been difficult to imagine two men with less in common, physically speaking. MacQuarie was six and a half feet tall, the father of three, with Herculean shoulders, blond hair, hazel eyes, and a thick, closely cropped beard which had been on the wild and bushy side until he found himself forced to deal with space helmets. At fifty-seven, Massengale was fifteen years older, a wiry confirmed bachelor, ten inches shorter, built more for speed than power, clean-shaven, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a café au lait complexion. He was also the veteran of nine orbital missions and two assignments aboard the International Space Station prior to the Shongair invasion, whereas MacQuarie had never been off Earth until he was assigned as Director for Invictus. Despite which, they had formed a tightknit working relationship and an equally tight friendship.

  It probably helped, McIlhenny thought, that both of them were smart, organized, and absolutely determined to succeed. And Massengale’s attempt to divert MacQuarie from his self-anger with humor didn’t surprise her one bit.

  “I doubt I was very high on your list to begin with,” Massengale said now. “And such petty threats don’t invalidate my observation.”

  “No, they don’t,” MacQuarie sighed. “And you were right. We should have been more conservative.”

  “Maybe.” Massengale’s voice was considerably more serious now. “On the other hand, you had a point when you quoted Fisher, too—the best scale for an experiment is twelve inches to a foot.” MacQuarie visualized his assistant director’s shrug. “It’s not like we have time to be cautious about these things, and you did restrict the tweak to Refinery Six. And it’s not like it was a total disaster, either.”

  “Not quite,” MacQuarie muttered, gazing through the crystoplast at the huge, half-wrecked refinery platform two kilometers from the workboat. When it was completed, it would be capable of ingesting tons of pulverized asteroid, liquid gasses mined from Jupiter’s atmosphere, or ice quarried from Ganymede—or anything else, for that matter—and separating it into the finely divided components Hegemony-level printers required.

  Of course, it wasn’t going to be completed quite as soon as it might’ve been, he reflected moodily.

  “I got too carried away,” he said after a moment. “Or too optimistic, maybe, about our grasp of the system mechanics. And Karahalios even warned us about exactly that.” He grimaced. “God, he’s going to be hard to live with when he finds out about this!”

  “I suggest we don’t tell him,” Massengale said, and MacQuarie snorted in sour amusement. Neither of them considered Damianos Karahalios their favorite person. “Seriously,” Massengale went on, “you and I both know the real reason he gave you that warning was to cover his own ass in case something like this happened. Oh, this time he was right—damn it—but that’s what he always does. And this kind of crap is bound to happen. This isn’t just a simple matter of moving back and forth between human-designed applications and operating systems, Rog, and we’re all going to be cursed with the ‘book learning’ aspect of neural education until we’ve had more field experience.”

  “Tell me about it!” MacQuarie growled.

  “Well, if he does hear about it and he gets snippy, I suggest we—very respectfully, you understand—point out to him that he doesn’t have any field experience,” Massengale suggested, and despite his mood, MacQuarie laughed. Not that the situation was all that amusing. And despite Massengale’s encouragement, Roger MacQuarie knew exactly who was responsible for it.

  Unlike Massengale, who held a doctorate in astrophysics, MacQuarie had spent the last ten years in various administrative posts. On the other hand, he held a Masters in Robotics System Integration, which was the reason—combined with that Human Resources background—Judson Howell had
picked him to run Invictus. Well, that and the fact that he and Howell had roomed together in college and remained close personal friends. Judson Howell wasn’t the sort who operated on the basis of favoritism, but he did believe in trust, and he trusted both MacQuarie’s intelligence and his integrity. Besides, as he’d said at the time, when he already knew the round peg he needed for the hole in question, there wasn’t much point interviewing other candidates.

  And it’s that SI crap that got you in trouble with Refinery Six, he told himself. It’s the reason you knew what you were doing—you thought—and you were so pleased with how you were going to tweak efficiency by stripping out all those redundant steps.

  Once upon a time, Invictus had been named Sword of Empire in a language no human would ever be able to pronounce and Doctor Tiffany Samuelson’s Space Platform Provocatio, located at the L4 Lagrange point, had been named Stellar Dawn in the same language.

  MacQuarie much preferred their new names, but he and his crews had experienced plenty of hiccups in learning to use an alien-designed technology. There were any number of places for humans to stub their toes, and he was pretty sure he and his people would soon run smack into any they’d managed to avoid so far. It wasn’t just sizes or shapes or life support requirements, either. It was entirely different units of measure and—far worse, in many ways—entirely different conceptual starting points.

  The differences between how the Hegemony and humanity approached cybernetics and systems integration threw the truly alien origin of “their” new technology into stark contrast, and the Hegemony’s approach only got more frustrating as they gained more familiarity with it. The incredible profusion of fail-safes, checking processes, safety protocols (especially where what a human would have called AI and the Hegemony called SMS, for Self-Managing Software, was concerned), sensors, sensors that watched the sensors, independent processors, and multiply redundant code was enough to drive any self-respecting human insane. For example, any SMS program had a minimum of not one, not two, but at least three additional programs doing nothing but making sure it stayed within its designed parameters at every single step. And when those programs had to negotiate with every other program—the literally tens of thousands of other programs—in something like Refinery Six, the efficiency degradation had to be seen to be believed. A human programmer, once he was confident an AI app had been properly debugged, preferred to put a human decision maker into the loop at any critical points and otherwise let the computers do what the hell they’d been designed to do without seven billion other programs looking over their shoulder to pounce if the app strayed one photon beyond its proper bounds. The Hegemony, on the other hand, didn’t seem to believe its SMS could be debugged thoroughly enough for that. It was almost as if their cyberneticists were convinced Skynet really did lurk just across the horizon!

  He and his staff had been stripping out the inhibitory aspects on Hegemony AI functions from the beginning, and the same … design timidity applied where things like construction and repair drones were concerned. MacQuarie’s crews had been able to increase efficiency by over thirty-five percent just by giving the drone software more discretion about how to prioritize and reallocate task elements, and he’d been confident their ongoing efforts would soon double that increase, at least. But he’d gone a bit too far in that respect in his enthusiasm where Refinery Six was concerned. Or, more probably, one of his programmers had missed a problem.

  Which was still MacQuarie’s responsibility, since it had happened on his watch and the platform staff took their cue from him.

  One of the most frustrating of the many frustrating things about working with Hegemony software was the multi-layered confirmation prompts. MacQuarie appreciated being asked if he really wanted to do something, especially if the “something” in question was critically important. It was the way programmers reminded themselves and other users that computers didn’t care what you told them to do, only that you told them to do it, and he’d worked with enough of them over his lifetime to fully understand how necessary that reminder was. And that it didn’t always prevent someone from making a serious mistake anyway. But like everything else connected to its IT, the Hegemony took it to ridiculous lengths. It didn’t matter what you wanted to change; any programming change was queried at least twice. And anything that changed something the original programmer had classified as critical—which seemed to be true of at least two-thirds of the code in their industrial modules—was queried a dozen times. Literally. The Hegemony used base-twelve numbering, and apparently someone, somewhen had decided that a round dozen was a suitable number of confirmation prompts. Which meant that even normally attentive human programmers’ brains tended to numb out and they simply automatically punched “yes” whenever they were prompted.

  He wasn’t positive that was what had happened here, but he suspected they’d discover it had been something along those lines. The consequences were clear enough, however.

  The Refinery Six construction drones were divided into multiple arrays, each responsible for a particular facet of its construction, all under the supervision of a master controller (which, in turn, was supervised by twelve additional consulting controllers). Within each array, each drone was driven by its own processor (with consulting controllers), and each of its internal systems was driven by its own processor (with consulting controllers), and each component of each internal system was driven by its own processor (with consulting controllers). What had been supposed to happen was for all but two of the consulting controllers to be deactivated at each stage and to give each drone’s master processor authority to override fault warnings so long as they were reported by only one of the three controllers on any of its subcomponents.

  What had actually happened was that, in addition to the desired changes, they’d somehow shut down the master control link. That ought to have brought everything to a screeching halt, but it hadn’t—almost certainly because someone had automatically hit that “yes” button the umptiumpth time it appeared—and the consequences had been … spectacular as the construction arrays stopped cooperating and began competing.

  At least no one had been killed or injured when they started scavenging from other construction elements to complete their own. And at least the damned things hadn’t gotten into the equivalent of fistfights over who a particular girder belonged to! But they had managed to gut quite a bit of already completed construction before the shift supervisor realized what was happening and hit the manual stop button.

  “The good news is that we’ve demonstrated it works,” Massengale continued. “Maybe not perfectly, this time, but anything you learn from is valuable. And they were awfully efficient when they started taking things apart.”

  That was also true, MacQuarie acknowledged. In fact, it was the main reason they’d managed to do so much damage before Samantha Twain shut them down. The drones in question had been ripping the platform apart at well over twice the speed their original Hegemony systems architecture would have permitted. Once they got their minor bug fixed and they started working together again, that would probably be a Very Good Thing. It was just a little hard to cling to that thought at the moment.

  “Okay,” he said after another second or two, “I’m going to go ahead and finish the flyby. Why don’t you see if Tiffany can meet with us when Sheila and I get back to the barn? Oh, and see if Sang-wei can join us, too. I want to touch base with her on the new shielding protocols for those mining collector hub habitats.”

  “Sure, sure! You go have fun and leave me to do all the drudge work. That’s all right. I’m used to it by now.”

  “And so damned cowed, too.” MacQuarie shook his head and grinned at McIlhenny as the major chuckled again. “I can see I’ve been applying exactly the right amount of iron fist.”

  “Tyrant!” Massengale said, then laughed. “I’ll set up the conference. You want Sang-wei to join you in the wardroom, or can she remote in? I’m not sure, but I think she’s on the Argus platform rig
ht now.”

  “Remote will be fine. Tiffany’s going to be remoting in, after all! And at least there wouldn’t be as much transmission lag for Sang-wei.”

  “True,” Massengale conceded. “I’ll get on that, then. Ping me when you head back in.”

  “Will do,” MacQuarie agreed, then turned his head to smile at McIlhenny.

  “I believe that’s your cue to do what you pilots do,” he said, waving one hand at the bottomless vista beyond the cockpit, and McIlhenny shook her head.

  “You have so little respect for the mysteries of my profession, Sir,” she said mournfully as the workboat accelerated.

  “Nonsense! I have plenty of respect for them—I just don’t understand them very well.”

  McIlhenny laughed, and MacQuarie sat back in his flight couch and watched the clutch of powered-down construction drones slide rapidly to one side as the small craft pulled away from them. It never ceased to fascinate him, since McIlhenny was accelerating at a leisurely twenty gravities. The Hegemony’s inertial compensator could handle up to sixty gravities with no apparent acceleration, and the only sense of movement he had was the visual cue as the drones shrank rapidly from sixty-foot globes to sparkles of reflected sunlight.

  Even at their current acceleration rate, it would take them two minutes to reach Refinery Five, almost six hundred kilometers from their starting point. Five was due to go online sometime in the next seventy-two hours, and the first four refineries were already in full production. The first-tier plan for Invictus called for a total of ten, each feeding a cluster of ten printer platforms. Once that was all online, Invictus would be rechristened Invictus Alpha, and one Roger MacQuarie would move on to building Invictus Bravo. Ultimately, there would be at least ten nodal control platforms—Invictus Alpha through Invictus Juliette—each with its brood of refineries and printers, located here at the L5 Lagrange point, equidistant from Earth and the Moon. That meant a hundred refineries feeding a thousand printers, each effectively its own assembly line capable of producing the equivalent of fourteen Greyhound buses per minute. That came to a combined equivalent of nine thousand “buses” a minute, or just under 7.4 billion per year, for the entire complex. Given the world’s post-invasion population, that amounted to 3.7 Greyhounds for every surviving man, woman, and child. Put another way, the entire world’s pre-invasion total production of motor vehicles of all types had come to just over 97 million per year—less than two percent of that. Now, admittedly, the world had manufactured a lot more than just cars, trucks, and buses. For that matter, Invictus wasn’t making any actual buses. It was making things like Starlanders, emergency shelters and heaters, LENR reactors, contra-grav cargo lorries, and a bazillion other things Earth desperately needed. But a member of his planning staff had used the bus example in one of her briefings to help conceptualize the sheer scale of production, and for some reason, MacQuarie couldn’t get it out of his head. Maybe because buses were so much more familiar than alien-designed, human-redesigned transatmospheric craft the size of a pre-invasion missile cruiser?