That flight took several hours; she fell asleep in the noisy cargo compartment, waking when the aircar came down through the late afternoon sun. This far north, a chill wind rattled the few fading leaves left on the trees planted around the base’s central drill field, and the short prairie grass had turned various shades of russet and maroon. She handed the base commander his copy of the directives, and signed into the TOQ for the night. When she walked around outside, she could almost believe she was on Xavier—until dark, when the night sky looked very different. Were they really that close to the Scarf?
Next day, she was scheduled for a long-distance flight to the west coast bases, Big Trees and Dark Harbor (she wondered again who had been allowed to name these places) and then she would embark on the more dangerous journey to the Stack Islands bases.
The long distance flight was not by aircar, but in a pressurized aircraft flying much higher than the ’cars; beneath her the land faded into a dim patchwork of dun and wrinkled brown, with white tips on the tall mountains she hoped to see in person some day. Also on the flight were replacement officers and enlisted; she was crammed into her seat with only a brief glimpse through the window whenever the neuroenhanced marine beside her leaned back for some reason.
Still, it was travel. She had come to learn, and this was learning. She memorized everything she could about the inside of the aircraft.
They landed at Big Trees, the runway a long gash in the forest. She had grown up among trees, clumps and woodlots and scattered groves on the meadows, but those trees had been rounder, softer. She had seen more, and taller, trees during her years at the Academy. But the trees had always had space around and between them. Despite the pictures, she had not really imagined what this forest would be like—great spires many times the height of the buildings on base. After delivering her package to the base commandant, she found she could not get transport to Dark Harbor until the next day.
“You should see our trees,” she was told. “There’s nothing like them anywhere else.”
So she wandered out into the afternoon light, and up to the margin of the forest. Behind her mowers buzzed, trimming the emerald grass in the quadrangle; she could hear the closer click of feet on the walkways. Looking away from all that, she faced a massive dark bole like a slightly curved wall. Ferns the height of her head grew near it, trimmed back in a straight line on the base side. Between the chinks of its bark—she thought it must be bark—other plants grew, mosses and ferns and something with bright yellow flowers like tiny fireworks.
She edged around the tree, following a vague path. Under her feet, the ground felt spongy, and when she had cleared the curve of the great tree’s bole, she realized she could not hear the base . . . the great tree lay between, soaking up the sound. Uneasy in the thick growth, she went back the way she’d come, and then back across the quadrangle to base housing.
Her flight up the coast the next morning, again in an aircar, revealed how little of the land had been touched by humans—the great forest lay green and unbroken from the base to the foothills of the mountains, and almost all the way to Dark Harbor, where it eased gradually into smaller trees, and then into broken shrubland.
In Dark Harbor, she had to wait several days for a transocean flight to the Stack Islands bases. A storm system had moved in, and no one was going to risk a flight during it, not for a mere courier. In the meantime she was supposed to familiarize herself with cold water ocean survival techniques. It was already early winter in the northern Big Ocean. Margiu learned to wriggle into the PPU and fasten the hood with one hand; she went over lifeboat drill and abandon-craft drill at least four separate times.
Corporal Asele Martin-Jehore stood satellite watch at the remote Blue Islands facility. Unlike Stack Islands, the archipelago known as Blue Islands lay in warm equatorial waters. Assignment to Blue was as coveted as Stack Islands was feared: the big sea predators which lay in wait for escapees from Stack were force-netted away from the beautiful white beaches and turquoise lagoons of Blue. All the permanent personnel onplanet tried to wangle at least a week’s leave time on Blue.
Martin-Jehore had worked years to earn this assignment, but help from a friend in Personnel didn’t hurt. He had proven himself time and again—he had recalibrated the number four signal array after a seastorm, when his senior supervisor was out with gut flu. And—because he showed talent with recalcitrant electronics—he had been permanently assigned to MetSatIV, the weather and surveillance satellite responsible for covering the northern third of Big Ocean.
MetSatIV had been a problem since it was installed. The contractor had replaced it twice, and each time found nothing wrong. The second time, the contractor’s project engineer had made the unwelcome suggestion that someone in Fleet was screwing up the software. That had been Jurowski, who held the position before Martin-Jehore. It hadn’t, in fact, been anything Jurowski did which bollixed the bird, but in the interest of satisfying the contractor that all steps had been taken, Jurowski had been taken off the roster for MetSatIV.
MetSatIV was still buggy. Martin-Jehore was sure it was an AI glitch—so was Jurowski, but Martin-Jehore had one vital piece of information Jurowski lacked: the command set for MetSatIV’s AI.
In theory, every transmission from Blue Islands was logged. In practice, a very good communications tech could tightbeam a satellite without detection. Not often, but occasionally. Martin-Jehore had chosen his moments carefully, gradually gaining control of MetSatIV’s AI at a level no mere communications tech was expected to reach.
Now he needed only the cover of a routine test transmission to cause the desired failure.
MetSatIV’s AI compared the instruction set to those previously received, and agreed that they matched in syntax and content. Then it turned off its IR scan, and tipped itself 30° around its z-axis.
In the observatory below, one of the dozen screens in satellite surveillance went from a clear visual of a seastorm in progress, a vast swirl of white, to an eye-wrenching jiggling blaze of hash.
“Blast. There goes Watchbird again.” Martin-Jehore glared at the screen. “I’ll bet it’s a clock problem.”
“Nah—it’s too random.” Jurowski wasn’t going to agree with anything Martin-Jehore said. Eighteen months, and he was still sore about losing his place as Watchbird’s senior tech.
“Well, let’s see if C-28 will get it back.” Sometimes command C-28 would bring Watchbird back online, and sometimes it wouldn’t. This time it wouldn’t, but Martin-Jehore punched in that command sequence, anyway. The hash on his screens remained. “Not this time.” When C-28 didn’t work, the problem usually took longer to fix, but so far he had always been able to do so.
“Try the 43-120 set,” Jurowski suggested. While he could not resist the initial jibe, he was a generous-hearted man, and always willing to help. Martin-Jehore nodded, and entered it. It wouldn’t work either, but it would eat up several minutes while not working. The screen hash changed to a finer grain, but nothing else happened.
“Somebody rejuved its AI,” Jurowski said. The whole room chuckled appreciatively. Headquarters might not know about any connection between rejuv and mental problems, but the lower ranks had figured it out long since.
As required by regulation, Martin-Jehore reported to his superior that MetSatIV was ineffective within the hour, when the first three standard interventions didn’t bring it back online. CPO Gurnach sighed, and told him to keep trying. Martin-Jehore could tell she wasn’t really worried. Big Ocean was mostly empty, and the storm MetSatIV had shown was already in the model. Stack Islands already knew about it—in fact, it was just clearing them now—and it wouldn’t reach the mainland for days.