As he mentioned the catwalks, his eyes drifted: up the tunnel wall, above the storefronts, past the second story apartments, at the point where the wall curved back overhead.
Bao said something and Mike nodded absent-mindedly.
The maintenance catwalks up there that gave access to the overhead lights and other infrastructure were the old style - extruded steel decking imported from Earth.
"Mike?"
The new type he was using in the lower tunnels was better - locally produced, for one thing, which made the turnaround time quicker than importing them. Better than the local sourcing was that AriAlu Extrusion catwalks had a nice design tweak to the installation keys. A small tweak, but it cut his labor cost, which meant -
"Mike!"
"Huh? Oh! Sorry." He'd done it again - drifted off into a reverie about infrastructure. Like most kids, he'd been infatuated with big earth-moving equipment - bulldozers, dump trucks, back hoes. Unlike most kids, he'd never grown out of it. One of the few things more fun than thinking about big iron, he'd learned, was operating it. And the only thing better than that was standing behind the scenes, running the show. And to do that - to make a dozen backhoes dance at your command - you needed to line up a strip mall project, find financing, find prospective tenants. Take that, fast forward twenty years, add one political prosecution, one distant friend-of-a-friend physicist, and a few dozen tunnel boring machines -
Suddenly he realized he was doing it again. Back to the present. "Yeah, Bao, you were saying?"
"Over lunch you said that you wanted to talk about two things. You told me about the problem with Leroy. What's the second thing?"
Mike told him about the college kid who'd killed himself mountain climbing, and how Morlock had insured Trang for liability.
"Ouch. That sucks, but what makes it a huge problem?"
"The fact that the dead kid's best friend has pull in DC."
"A kid has pull?"
"His mom's a senator. Linda Haig."
"The one with the speeches about getting serious about the 'tax cheaters' who leave the country?"
"The same," Mike said sourly. "She's in the internationalist faction."
Bao shrugged. "They don't have as much pull as -"
"That used to be true. After the California quake and the rollout of her New Economic Recovery Plan, though? She's been stealing influence from the populists."
"So she's got pull?" Bao said. "Are you worried that this could escalate?"
Mike nodded. "That's why I need your advice on how to -"
Bao's phone squealed and Bao held up one finger. "Hang on, I'm getting an emergency message." He looked at the screen.
"Mike... it says here all Gamma's sats have gone dead."
Chapter 17
2064: Moscow Sea, Lunar Farside
Blue sat on his cushion near one wall of the tent and tapped at his slate, trying to figure out what the problem with the satellites was. He'd made a mental bet with himself: Rex had been screwing around, "improving" some part of the protocol stack, and had fubared things. He shook his head. He still remembered the time they'd lost all of their video logs after Rex had installed some optimized database query engine. Although he had to admit that once they'd nailed down the problem, Rex had also been the one who'd fixed it. Blue paged down, checking the commit logs. Still nothing. Maybe the antenna effector controllers? He opened new files.
A meter away from Blue, Rex was sprawled on his back on an aerogel cushion, holding his slate over his head with one paw and poking it with the other. The younger Dog suddenly rolled over. "John, check this out." Blue raised one eyebrow and watched as John put down his slate and walked over.
"Have you found the software problem?"
"No. I'm checking something different." Rex flicked the window off the edge of his slate. It popped up on the wall screen. He narrated as he tapped the controls. "I'm calling up a map of satellite overflights. Now I'm opening the protocol setup. OK, look at com laser settings."
John furrowed his eyebrows. "OK, I'm looking at azimuth and declination settings, and -"
"We know exactly when Gamma's satellites are popping over the horizon...and that shows that we're pointing the laser straight at them."
John nodded and raised a finger as he caught up. A minute passed before he spoke. "OK, yeah, the laser is pointed correctly. We assumed that. So -"
"Now look at the TCP packet logs." He opened another window. "We're sending, but the satellites aren't responding when we ping them. See?" Rex extended one paw to point at a window on the wall screen. A small animated logo of a shark swam back and forth relentlessly on the drag bar, but below that a few lines of inscrutable numbers and text had been highlighted. "There: right IP, right MAC address, right port. Timeouts are correct. Everything's good - except the satellite isn't responding. It's not a software problem. At least, not at our end."
Blue leaned forward. He often found Rex insufferable, but the Dog was in his element now, and worth paying attention to. All of the Dogs were decent coders, but Rex could jump into any system and master it effortlessly. Blue had no idea if this was the first time that Rex had dug into the tent's communication logs, or if he spent his late nights reading obscure code stacks when everyone else was playing games or listening to music.
Neither would have surprised him.
John tilted his head back for a moment, as if he could look through the tent ceiling and the solar shield at the satellites swinging by 90 km overhead, and then turned back to Rex. "We're talking to the satellites - so why aren't they responding?"
Rex shrugged wordlessly.
John thought for a moment, and then raised his voice, including Max, Duncan, and Blue in the conversation. "I need some ideas here."
Blue closed the commit log window on his slate and looked around the tent. Max had his head tilted and his red eyebrows furrowed as he thought about the question. Rex was typing again, and Duncan...Duncan was absorbed in some RPG he was playing on his slate. The sound effects of swords slashing against shields were clear. Blue felt his upper lip rising in a sneer, then shouted at him. "Duncan!"
Duncan swiped a paw across his pad to silence it, then looked up. "What?"
Blue closed his eyes for just a moment.
John repeated his question. Duncan shrugged. "Uh...what's the big deal? Rex was complaining just the other day that Gamma's not giving us good data, so who cares if we don't talk to Gamma for a while?"
John was patient - more patient than Blue would be. "Duncan, all of our communications, including our requests for supply drops, are scheduled via this uplink. Without it we have no way to talk to Aristillus."
Duncan looked at him quizzically, apparently still half lost in his game.
John closed his eyes for a moment. "We've got eleven days of air left, Duncan, and we don't know if we're going to get any more. After that runs out we die."
Duncan's eyebrows went up. "Oh. Oh. Oh...man!"
"Yeah," John said drily.
Rex had been ignoring the conversation as he typed but turned back to it now. "Eleven days of air... we can't hike anywhere useful with that, can we?"
Blue's ears perked up. "Goldwater had an exploratory mine about 700 km away that they abandoned a few years ago."
John shook his head. "I thought of that. We're lucky if we cover 30 km per day. We'd never get there in time."
Rex nodded. "Besides, we don't even know if there are any air scrubbers there, or if we could break in to get them."
Duncan, his attention belatedly engaged, said, "We could talk to Aristillus by radio instead of laser -"
Blue shook his head. "No ionosphere, no propagation."
Duncan looked crestfallen for a moment, and then rallied. "Wait. It's possible that someone else is out on the surface on Farside with us. If there is someone around, we might only have to hike to the nearest hill and broadcast."
"Good brainstorming," John said, "but there's rarely anyone out here...and besides, the tallest local
point is back the way we came. We'd waste three days getting there, and then when we find that there's no one around, we'd spend another three days getting back here."
Blue finished his sentence. "- and that uses up 6 of our 11 days of air, to no effect."
The tent fell silent for several long moments.
Blue thought, and then spoke again. "This is classic game theory. There was something in World War II: the allies having to decide which bombers to give escorts to -"
Where Duncan spent his time on RPGs and Rex spent his reading source code, Max used all of his free time reading books, almost all of it military history. He interrupted: "No, it was about which path to send destroyers between islands."
"A paper by Oskar Morgenstern ?" Blue asked.
Max should his head. "No, maybe von Neumann -"
Max was another first generation Dog, and Blue's pack mate for just over twenty years. The two fell into their normal clipped debating mode.
"You remember the paper?"
"The gist of it. Can't decide for sure, but play the odds -"
"We split up?"
"No; figure the odds and stochastically -"
"If it were iterated, maybe, but if it's just once -"
The back and forth sped up until the two were half-grunting, half-barking at each other, then both fell silent.
John looked around blankly. "Uh... and?"
Blue turned to him. "We keep hiking. The supply drops might already be there. Or maybe we have a good uplink and it's just a downlink problem. No matter what, hiking on is the most predictable move on our part, and we have to depend on Aristillus predicting our predictions of their predictions, and so on." He paused. "So we act predictably."
John scratched his three-day growth of beard thoughtfully, then nodded. "I'd been thinking the same thing - but with more intuition and less math." He looked around. "Everyone agreed?" They were. "OK, we hike on."
Duncan scratched his flank with one rear leg. "I wish there was some way to look at the satellites."
John shook his head. "They're ninety kilometers up. If we had a telescope -"
Rex interrupted him. "We do."
John swiveled his head. "No we don't. I know what's packed on the mule, and -"
Rex didn't bother hiding the look of scorn for John's merely above-average intelligence. Blue knew that look and didn't like it. Rex should have more respect.
Rex said, "We make one. We spread out several suit cameras on the ground, write some code to do a long exposure, then write some more code to process it as if it's a very large-aperture lens."
John looked almost sucker-punched. "So what you're saying is -"
"Give me an hour and I'll get you high-resolution pictures of the satellites."
Duncan looked up, having finally heard some aspect of the crisis that sounded like as much fun as his video game. "My game is running in offline mode anyway, so there's no time pressure."
Blue looked at him. "And the relevance is?"
"I volunteer to spread out the cameras!"
Blue nodded. "I'll help you."
Someone needed to supervise him.
* * *
Blue sat in the lunar dust and used his gloved forepaws to wiggle the camera, seating it in the loose gravel. He stepped back and verified that it was pointing close to vertical. One down, and one to go.
How far to the next placement? He looked left, at the small blue dome of the tent and the golden tarp over it. The mule was hunched down ten meters away, its solar panels spread wide. If the two of them were aligned north/south, that meant that the next camera placement point was... there. He turned and walked across the featureless gray landscape.
Halfway to the next drop point Blue gave in to temptation and issued the suit command to eavesdrop on Max and Duncan.
Max was saying "- thing your generation doesn't get about the humans is how violent and vicious they are. Your particular problem is that you really don't understand violence. You spend all of your time in video games, and when you kill an NPC it just vanishes, and if you kill another player he just respawns. You need to read more history. Humans are bloody-minded. Just look at the number of wars they've fought - it's insane. Even outside their formal wars, they pick out the weak and they go after them. They're vicious." He paused. "Animals."
"Yeah, sure, but the violence has been going down for centuries. Blue was talking about it the other night, that guy - Pinkman?"
"Pinker."
Blues ears pricked. He'd had no idea that he'd made any impact on Duncan.
Duncan continued. "Anyway, it's not like it was hundreds of years ago. Now humans settle things by laws and courts, and you know, nonviolent resolutions are better than -"
Max interrupted him. "There's no such thing as a nonviolent resolution. There's explicit violence and there's veiled violence. Humans using courts isn't less violent. If anything, it's just evidence that they've learned how to use violence efficiently."
"Huh?"
Blue reached his second location, put the camera down, and adjusted its angle while he kept listening.
Max said, "The humans learned that they can make an example of one person and the rest fall in line. If in one century people kill ten percent of the population, but in the next century the government jails - enslaves - ten percent of the population to keep the rest in line, are you telling me that's any better?
Duncan paused for a moment then said, "Well...isn't it always better if there's less violence?"
"But there's not less violence. At least the first system is honest. You know where you stand. The government is trying to kill you. But the second system? It's full of lies. When a government says you're going to get a fair trial - well, look at Mike Martin. At least he was smart enough to see that it was a trap and bribed his way out...but most of those stupid bastards they rounded up believed the promises. Look at them now."
"So what's your point?"
"My point is that you need to realize that the humans are violent - deeply, systematically violent. Their 'peaceful' system is rigged. That's the truth, no matter what Blue says."
Blue felt his canines clack together in anger.
"And what does realizing that accomplish?"
Max growled. "It lets you know that when governments come to kill you, you should fight back and kill some of the apes first. Better to die on your feet than -"
"Max, you're sounding crazy. People can't 'fight back' against their governments. They-"
"I'm not talking about just people."
"So, what? We Dogs should fight? What if we'd done that in the labs? Instead of escaping to the moon, we'd all be dead."
Max grunted. "At least some of them would be dead too."
The two lapsed into silence.
Blue realized that his shoulders were hunched and his ears flat. He willed himself to relax, but the knot was still there. Max scared him sometimes. It wasn't that he was angry - it was that he was consumed by it. Yes, the anger was warranted - but what use was it? At least the Dogs had managed to escape BuSuR and make it to the moon. Why dwell on the past?
Blue's suit beeped. He'd reached his third and final point in the camera grid. He sat and placed his last camera the same way as the other two as he continued to listen.
It seemed Duncan agreed with Blue. "What's the point of getting all upset and angry about something you can't change?"
Max said, "You have to understand your enemy. And humans are the enemies of Dog kind."
"Says who?"
"Do you pay any attention to how humans treat regular dogs in China? Or Africa? And what about our litter-mates and cousins who were killed in Palo Alto and Cambridge?"
Duncan whined a bit and Max reprimanded him. "Don't whine. You've got to face facts. You'd rather sit around and play games than think about the truth. The truth is that humans - and human governments - signed a death warrant for every one of us. Genocide."
"Sure, not everyone made it out -"
"Cut the euphemisms
. What does 'made it out' mean? Most of us were killed. Killed. By individual humans, working for the human governments. Don't forget that." Max paused. "OK, that's the last of my cameras. Are your - Duncan, where the hell are you?"
"Huh? I'm right here!"
Blue looked around. Where was Duncan anyway? He'd lost sight of him. There he was - back near his first camera location. Blue yelled out. "Duncan! What are you doing back there? Have you placed your cameras?"
"Oh - oh, crap! Sorry, no, just the first one. I got distracted by this cool chunk of basalt with this neat streaking on it - "
Blue growled. "Damn it, Duncan! Do I have to do it for you?"
"No, no, I'll do it!"
Blue shook his head, then lifted one leg over a rock and urinated. The waste went into the suit collection bag and would be recycled later by the tent. The spraying-water sound effect Rex had added was a nice touch. He could acknowledge that now, but the first time he'd peed after Rex's upgrade he'd panicked, thinking his suit had a leak. He shook his head. He had to admit the truth: his entire species was a band of misfits - Max always ranting about genocide and fighting back, Duncan playing RPGs when he should be paying attention, and Rex was hacking anything and everything from cameras to - well - piss bags.
He was interrupted by a beep and an error message in the shared-virtual-overlay in his helmet screen.
0x13 runtime: geotag.xr unable to mark piss location
Blue blinked, then shook his head. Of course. They'd lost contact with the satellites. And Rex had added another feature to the urine collection code module.
* * *
Blue was climbing out of his suit - he was the last one there except Duncan, who was still cycling in - when Rex yipped excitedly. "I've got images!"
Blue looked at John and the other Dogs clustered around the wall screen.
Rex continued. "I don't have all the libraries I'd like - I had to depend on what was cached in my suit, and I didn't know ahead of time that we'd need good post-processing -"
The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1) Page 7
