Midshipman's Hope (The Seafort Saga Book 1) Read online

  I was puzzled. “What do you mean, Ricky?”

  “Like Derek. When he goes to the supply locker by himself and cries. Will I have to do that?”

  “No, I don’t think so. You’re too happy to cry.” My thoughts raced. “How do you know about Derek?”

  “I saw him, sir, and heard it. I didn’t tell him that.”

  “Don’t. That’s an order. Dismissed, Mr. Fuentes; go memorize the oath. If you can’t remember it I won’t sign you up.”

  “Aye aye, sir!” As he left the room his step was almost a bound. If only all personnel problems were as easy to solve.

  The Chief, Pilot Haynes, and I sealed the bridge, put Darla on keyboard-only, removed the safeties we had reinstalled, and got to work. I typed each correction on the keyboard, and both the Chief and the Pilot checked before I entered it. We had only nine parameters to delete and reenter, but it took over an hour. I had to be absolutely sure we didn’t make a mistake.

  Finally, we were done. Just to be sure, I ran a new copy of input parameters and checked each of the items we had corrected. The proper figures were displayed on the holovid screen.

  “What do you think, gentlemen? Are we ready to put her on-line?”

  The Pilot and the Chief exchanged glances. “We’ve gone through every step by the book,” said Mr. Haynes. The Chief nodded.

  “Very well.” Step by step we restored Darla, reactivating her antitampering mechanisms and safeties. Finally there was nothing left but to bring back her personality. I typed in, “Restore conversational overlays.”

  “VERIFY CONVERSATIONAL OVERLAYS RESTORED.”

  “Cancel alphanumeric response only.”

  “IT’S ABOUT TIME! VERIFY ALPHANUMERIC RESPONSE CANCELED.”

  I tapped, “Cancel screen display only. Restore voice response.”

  “Verified, Captain.” Her friendly voice was a reunion with an old friend.

  “Cancel keyboard entry only,” I typed. “Can you hear me, Darla?” I said.

  “Of course I can hear you, Mr. Seafort. Why’d you put me to sleep?”

  “Had to run some checks, Darla. Please run a self-test.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Just a minute.” She was silent awhile. We waited. “I check out, Captain. All chips firing.”

  “Whew.” My tension began to dissipate. “Thanks, Chief. You too, Pilot. Well done.”

  The Chief stood. “If we’re going to Fuse soon I need to finish my maintenance.”

  “Very well. Dismissed, and thanks.” As he retreated, I had a thought. “Darla, what’s ship’s base mass?”

  “215.6 standard units,” she said impatiently. “Why do you keep asking?” The Chief Engineer froze, a few steps from the hatch. The hairs rose on the back of my neck.

  “Try again, Darla. Use the figure from input variables.”

  “215.6 standard units.” Her tone had sharpened. “Anyway, mass isn’t a variable, it’s a fixed parameter.”

  My glance was wild. The Pilot looked as if he’d seen a ghost. I swallowed. “What’s the CO2 exchange rate, please?”

  “Are you asking me, Captain? 38.9 liters. Look it up, it’s in the tables.”

  The Chief’s eye met mine. I looked at the Pilot, then at the keyboard. He nodded.

  I went to the console, tried to keep my voice level. “Keyboard entry only, Darla. Alphanumeric response, displayed on screen.”

  We were in big trouble.

  When we were sure Darla couldn’t hear us except through the keyboard, the Pilot, the Chief, and I conferred. Unthinkingly we huddled in the corner farthest from Darla.

  “We changed the parameters, didn’t we? We all saw it.” I needed the reassurance.

  “And it took, Captain.” The Pilot. “I’ve got the new printout right here. See? We moved base mass from input parameter to variable and changed the default at the same time.”

  I shivered. “What’s happening?”

  “She’s glitched bad.” Chief McAndrews. “When she’s alive she can’t recognize the changes we made. It goes deeper than the data.”

  “Can we fix her?”

  The Pilot shook his head. “I’m not sure we could even find the problem.”

  “Well, how does she store parameters?” The Chief.

  “In a file,” said Haynes.

  “What kind?”

  I demanded, “Are you onto something?”

  The Chief shrugged. “When we ask her to display variables, she just reads the contents of a file. Can we get below that, to look at the file structure?”

  “We’re about to try,” I said.

  Meticulously, we stripped Darla down once more. It seemed to get easier with practice. In an hour we had the puter opened to the level we’d previously reached.

  Manual in lap, the Pilot began to search Darla’s memory banks for file directories. ASCII, hex, and decimal values filled the screen, in patterns that were gibberish to my untrained eye. Occasional words such as “EMOTION/OVERLAY” or “VARIATION/PATTERN” appeared, indicating directory entries for those files.

  The Pilot scoured the memory areas indicated by the manual. Finally, he called up two entries, “PARAMETER/INPUT” and “VARIABLE/INPUT”. Translating the code that followed, he obtained the file sectors. He tapped in the coordinates.

  It was a long file, over fourteen hundred entries. He screened each one and quickly moved to the next. The file entries were in English words: “ship length: 412.416 meters”. My attention wandered while we screened through endless data. Abruptly the screen displayed, “End of fiTS SHE’S GOT ON HER, JORY!”

  “What the hell was that?” I asked, frightened.

  The Pilot bit his lip. “Lord God. I don’t know.”

  He tapped the keyboard. The screen flashed, “NOT BAD FOR A GROUNDSIDER, HUH?”

  “Go back.”

  The Pilot obediently thumbed backward past the two glitched entries.

  “Shaft diameter: 4.836 meters. LOOK AT THE TI”

  The Chief swore. I listened with respect, learning new combinations I might someday find useful. I said, “Run the three of them together.”

  Pilot Haynes displayed the three sectors. “Shaft diameter: 4.836 meters. LOOK AT THE TI end of fiTS SHE’S GOT ON HER, JORY! NOT BAD FOR A GROUNDSIDER, HUH?”

  “Christ!” blurted the Pilot. “Look at that! They wrote over the end of file!”

  “Explain,” I said sharply. “And don’t blaspheme.”

  Pilot Haynes colored. “Sorry, sir. In NAVDOS, data is stored in files, usually in alphanumeric characters just like you’d write it. Puters operate so fast, the language interpreters are so sophisticated that there’s no need for compression. It makes it easier for Dosmen to run their checks if all they have to do is display and read the files.”

  “So?”

  “Files all end with an ‘end of file’ statement. Someone wrote those messages over an end marker. Darla stores the fixed parameters just before the variables. She had no way to tell one from the other. No wonder she’s glitched!”

  “But who?” I asked. “And why?”

  The Chief said angrily, “Between cruises a ship’s Log is relayed to the Dosmen at Luna Central. If there have been modifications, fixed parameters can change. The Dosmen burn the new stats into the Log, and relay it back. They must have been having fun that day.” The Chief’s face grew redder as he spoke.

  “Naval Dosmen?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Yes, those”—he spluttered—“those damned hackers!”

  “Chief!” I said, scandalized. Ever since the Young Hackers’ League invaded the puter banks at U.N. Headquarters and wiped out half the world’s taxes, the term “hacker” was not used lightly.

  “That’s what they are!” he snapped. “May Lord God Himself damn them for eternity!”

  It was blasphemy unless he meant it literally, and I decided he did. “Amen,” I said, to make clear I interpreted it as a prayer. Then, “Check the nearby sectors. Copy any overwrites you find into the Log.”

/>   “Aye aye, sir.” The Chief tapped his console, his face dark. “The bloody Dosmen were skylarking like raw cadets. Data banks have dead space to write in, but they were careless and burned their garbage into a live file.”

  And put my ship in peril.

  My voice was tight. “When we get home I’ll file charges against them. If they’re acquitted, I do hereby swear by God’s Grace to call challenge against the offenders.” A foolish gesture, but I was too angry to care.

  Dueling had been relegalized in the reforms of 2024, in an effort to control a growing epidemic of unlicensed homicides. What made my gesture reckless was that I had no idea what martial skills the Dosmen had, and I was committed for my soul’s sake. Choice of weapons would be theirs.

  The Chief looked at me in approval. “I’ll join you, sir. I hereby—”

  “Be silent!” I rounded on him in fury. “I forbid you to swear an oath!”

  “Aye aye, sir.” It was all he could say.

  “I’m sorry, Chief. The responsibility’s mine. I have faster reaction time, anyway.”

  “Yes, sir.” He glowered at me, annoyed but not angry. Heavy and middle-aged, he might not survive a duel and knew it. However, the chances of dueling were remote. As soon as we presented our Log to Admiralty a Dosman named Jory would be unceremoniously hauled in for polygraph and drug questioning.

  I frowned, as a new thought struck. “Are you telling me the life of everyone aboard depends on a simple file marker? Doesn’t Darla have redundancies? Safeguards?”

  “Of course,” said the Pilot. “She’s constantly checking for internal inconsistencies.”

  I let his remark hang unanswered. It was the Chief who finally stated the obvious. “Well, at some point she stopped. Why?”

  Pilot Haynes snarled, “Do I look like a Dosman? How am I supposed to guess—”

  “Belay that!” They subsided under my glare. “Pilot, can we fix the glitch?”

  “Rewriting the end of file statement should do it.”

  “I don’t think so.” The Chief.

  “Why not?” The Pilot and I spoke as one.

  “Because Darla didn’t spot the problem herself.” Chief McAndrews took in a deep breath, chewed his lip. “A puter applies math routines to numeric problems, and goes to fuzzy logic programs to decipher what we tell her. That’s how she translates your spoken questions into parameters she can dredge up from a file.”

  “And?”

  “It’s fuzzy logic that would tell her that base mass and adjusted mass should differ, and to accept the difference. She didn’t figure it out. Anyway, the parameters are certainly stored twice, at least, with backups. As Mr. Haynes said, her internal security checks would spot discrepancies.”

  “And they didn’t.”

  “Right. She isn’t reading the backups, and something’s skewing nine of her parameters. Without a Dosman we may never know why, but I suspect those damn—those bloody clowns corrupted her fuzzy logic programs, so Darla didn’t know when to apply logic, or when she had a problem. When to call for help.”

  I stood to pace, found my knees strangely weak. “Can we cure her?”

  The Chief Engineer’s voice was heavy. “If Darla is so far gone she can’t spot a corrupt file marker or warn us of internal contradictions, reprogramming her is way beyond any of us.”

  Silence.

  “I think he’s right, sir.” The Pilot.

  I sat, gripped the armrests. “Complete power down and reboot?”

  The Chief shook his head. “It would reset her personality overlays; she’d reassemble as an entirely different persona. But if her programs are corrupt, it wouldn’t do any good. The glitches would still be within her.”

  “We can order her to go to backups.”

  “They’re copies of the master programs we received at Luna. They’d have the same glitches.”

  I swore. Then, “Can we reassemble her as a limited computational device? Rewrite the end of file, block off her fuzzy logic instructions, use only her monitoring capabilities, work her strictly from the keyboard?” At least our exhausted crewmen could get some sleep.

  They exchanged glances. “Possibly,” said the Pilot. “She wouldn’t be much of a puter when we were done.”

  “Get started.” I stood, stretched. “Anything you’re not sure of, block out. I’ll be back by midnight watch, and we’ll activate her then.” I sealed the hatch behind me.

  I went directly to my cabin, washed off the reek of fear. As I put on a fresh shirt I shook my head, amazed at the good fortune that had alerted us. I took the printout from my pocket, slumped with it in my easy chair. So many glitches.

  The base mass parameter was bad enough, the recycler rates even worse. And one of our backup astronav systems was haywire. It wouldn’t affect us this cruise, but Lord God help Hibernia if she Defused near Vega and tried to pinpoint her location; that section of her star maps was unusable.

  Other items didn’t seem to matter. If Darla miscalculated the length of the east ladder shaft, what difference did it make? And, so what if she misremembered the volume of the passenger mess, by a factor of ten?

  My eye skimmed the figures.

  Odd, that factor of ten. It applied to other skewed measurements.

  The mass of the ship’s launch, for example, and the volume of the passenger mess.

  I sat yawning. In their repairs, Pilot Haynes and the Chief would cut out most of Darla’s consciousness. As the Pilot said, Darla would be a poor excuse for a puter when we were done with her, but at least she’d be able—

  “Oh, Lord God!” I leapt from my chair. No time for my jacket. I slapped open the hatch, raced down the corridor. “Pilot, Chief! Stop!” They couldn’t hear, of course. I skidded to a halt at the sealed bridge hatch, pounded on the control. “Let me in!”

  The camera swiveled; in a moment the hatch slid open.

  “Get away from the keyboard! Don’t touch her!”

  “Aye aye, sir.” The Chief slid back his chair.

  “Is she on-line?”

  His tone showed his surprise at the thought he might disobey an order. “No, sir. You told us you’d activ—”

  “Off the bridge, flank!” I gestured to the corridor.

  Astonished, they followed me outside. I resealed the hatch, led the way to my cabin. Inside, we all took seats around the conference table.

  I said, “I don’t think she has sensors here.”

  They exchanged a quick glance, as if doubting my sanity.

  My voice was hushed. “You see, she killed Captain Haag. I don’t want her to find out.”

  “Captain, are you sure you ... we’ve been under a lot of stress lately and—”

  I slapped the printout on the table. “It was in plain sight all the time. She misread the launch’s mass by a factor of ten. Who computed a course for the launch’s last run?”

  The Chief’s eyes closed. For a moment he looked gray and tired. “Darla.”

  The Pilot said, “But the launch puter handled its own power calls.”

  “No.” Mr. McAndrews’s voice was somber. “Not for that last trip. If Darla tightbeamed her a course as Captain Haag ordered, she’d have overridden all other pertinent data as well. Gross weight with passengers and cargo. Power requirements.”

  I said, “The launch puter was told it needed ten times as much thrust as it really did.” The cursed Dosmen. My lip curled. Who would visit the happy young woman in the holo, bringing news of Mr. Haag’s death?

  “We missed it in the official inquiry.” The Pilot was glum. “Our focus was on the launch’s puter. We never imagined it could be Darla.”

  I forced my mind back to the present. “Anyway, we can’t just restore her end of file marker. I don’t think we can use her at all.”

  “I don’t under—”

  “I’d shut her down completely before I’d sail with a puter who realized she killed her Captain. It would contradict her most fundamental instruction set. She’d go insane.” I didn’t
know a lot about puters, but I recalled that much from puter class at Academy.

  “Sir, you talk as if she’s alive. She’s just—”

  “Remember Espania?” A week before they docked at Forester, her Captain had died in an airlock accident. The puter’s records showed the suit he donned had been pulled for repair; a negligent crewman had tossed it back in the rack with the others. The puter hadn’t noticed and blamed himself. No one could dissuade him.

  Two days out of Forester, under her new Captain, Espania had Fused.

  Twelve years later, she was still missing.

  We sat silent.

  The Chief said, “Lord God help us if we have to sail to Hope Nation without a puter.”

  “I know. We’d never make it.” I brooded. Then, “But perhaps we don’t have to.”

  “Sir?”

  “Thank Ms. Dagalow.” Where Lieutenant Cousins would send a wayward middy to the barrel, Lisa Dagalow settled him down with extra studies. One time or another I’d had to memorize the contents of virtually the entire hold, and I knew just where to find the stasis box. Thanks to our conversations on the bridge, I even knew what it was for. “The stasis box.”

  “The what, sir?”

  “What you might call an ultimate backup. The entire contents of Darla’s registers, taken at completion of the last cruise. Darla as she used to be.”

  The Pilot frowned. “Why in heaven would we carry an old version of our puter?”

  “Ms. Dagalow said all ships do, since Espania. Standing orders.” I shrugged. “The important thing is, we have her.”

  “But that’s—she’d have lost a year’s memories. What of everything that’s happened since?”

  “We leave her databanks untouched, and let the Darla from last cruise read and assimilate what’s occurred since she went off-line.”

  Silence.

  “It’s worth a try.”

  The Pilot shook his head. “And when she finds she killed the Captain?”

  Lisa Dagalow had strong opinions on puter awareness. I said, “If Darla’s consciousness is at all like ours, a learned memory won’t be like one she experienced.” Please, Lord. Let it be so.

  “Pardon, sir, but if you’re wrong?” The Chief.

  “Then we power down flank, and let her overlays assemble into a new personality on reboot.”