The Seventh Angel

Peters had only been in the water a couple of minutes, and his speech was already thick, and slurred.

Ann, who had never been much colder than she was right now — standing on the boat deck, could not even imagine what it must be like down there. Just the sound of the man’s increasing discomfort was beginning to make her own muscles contract and cramp. The frigid water was leaching the life out of him, and Ann was listening to it happen.

“Almost … got … it …,” Peters murmured thickly. “Almost …”

The sound of a ragged exhalation came through the headphones. “Fuck! Missed … I … fucking … missed … it…”

Ann stood at the lifelines, looking down toward the water. The eastern sky was beginning to lighten now, and she could see the swimmer’s orange wetsuit, bobbing near the yellow form of the robot. The suit was thick, and supposedly designed for cold water dives, but it didn’t sound like it was doing Peters a lot of good.

That was probably a false impression, she knew. Without his protective suit, the Sailor might already be unconscious by now, or dead.

She watched Peters thrash in the water as he made another lunge for the cover plate on the robot’s dorsal access port. The trio of propulsion pods on the machine’s stern were still pushing it forward, relentlessly powering through another in a series of continuous clockwise circles.

The retaining latches on the cover plate were mounted flush with the curve of the hull, to minimize hydrodynamic drag. To release them, Peters had to depress each one, and turn it ninety degrees.

Ann knew from experience that this was not an easy task, even in relatively comfortable water temperatures. Mouse was streamlined, wet, and very slippery. The robot pitched and rolled with the waves, and the continuous thrust from the propulsion pods had the effect of constantly scooting the rounded machine away from you.

Peters had three of the latches released. He had only one more to go, but it didn’t look or sound like he was up to finishing the job.

The Sailor wasn’t talking at all now. His breathing had become an irregular rhythm of strangled groans.

Ann looked up at Boats. The sky in the East was still growing brighter, and the big Sailor was becoming easier to see by the minute.

“That’s enough,” she said. “Peters can’t do it. We’ve got to pull him out of the water.”

“Yeah,” Boats said solemnly. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

He nodded to the two Sailors holding the swimmer’s tending line. “Standby to heave around.”

A muffled exclamation came over the headphones. The words, if they were actually words, were totally incomprehensible. But the tone of voice carried an unmistakable note of triumph.

Ann turned back toward the water, her eyes scanning rapidly until they located Peters and Mouse. The access cover on the robot’s spine was open, and Mouse was no longer circling. Peters had released the final latch, and hit the emergency kill switch.

“Good job,” Ann said quietly. She looked up at Boats. “Let’s lower the hook, and get them both up on deck.”

* * *

Ann sat in her stateroom an hour later, drinking crappy Navy coffee and uploading Mouse’s error logs to her laptop. Mouse was safely strapped to the boat deck, and the ship was headed south at high speed, trying to distance itself from unfriendly territory before the sun was too far above the horizon.

The swimmer, Peters, had been half-led/half-carried toward some place called sickbay. Ann wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded Navy enough to arouse her instinctive skepticism.

Then again, maybe the sickbay thing wasn’t as iffy as it sounded. Sheldon probably knew all about it. She’d ask him later. Right now, she needed to figure out what had gone wrong with her baby.

A soft bleep informed her that the upload was complete. She wiggled her fingers to limber them up, and reached for the computer keys.

The situational response algorithms in Mouse’s core program were written in ARIX, Norton’s proprietary programming language. Like many adaptive computer languages, ARIX had a built-in parser for translating error codes into an easily-understood English-based syntax.

Ann didn’t need the parser. She was perfectly comfortable reading the codes in their native hexadecimal.

She located the most recent time index, the last error recorded before the robot had been powered down. The hexadecimal code read, “46 41 55 4C 54 30 30,” which translated as, FAULT 00.

That wasn’t exactly a surprise. FAULT 00 indicated a critical error that Mouse couldn’t identify. It was a catch-all error designation, common for complex machines in the prototype stages. That particular fault would appear less and less often, as Mouse’s self-diagnostic capabilities were redesigned and improved over time.

The previous time index showed the same hex code, as did the time index before that, and the one before that, and the one before that …

Ann scrolled through several screens of recorded time indexes, seeing hex code 46 41 55 4C 54 30 30 repeated again, and again, and again. The fault — whatever it was — had obviously occurred several hours earlier. She had to work backwards through a few thousand repetitive error codes to locate the triggering event.

After paging through a seemingly endless number of screens, all completely identical except for the time indexes, Ann finally spotted what she was looking for. The triggering event had occurred almost exactly five and a half hours into Mouse’s search mission.

Prior to the occurrence of the fault, every time index read, “54 52 41 4E 53 49 54.” That was the hex code for TRANSIT. Mouse had been operating in normal search/transit mode, carrying out his search plan without errors or problems.

At the five and a half hour mark, the instant before the error had been triggered, the hex code had changed to 43 4F 4E 54 41 43 54, for a single processing cycle, followed by hex code 4D 49 53 53 49 4F 4E.

Ann’s heart froze as she stared at the screen. The two strings of characters seemed to stand out more brightly than anything else in the jumble of letters and numerals on the laptop display.

Ann swallowed, and closed her eyes, trying to change those two error codes by force of will. She must have looked at the screen wrong. Her eyes were getting tired. Because those codes couldn’t be right. They couldn’t be.

She opened her eyes. The codes were still there, staring at her out of the laptop screen like a pair of accusing eyes.

Ann tried not to think about what they meant, but her brain performed the translation automatically. The first code translated as CONTACT. The second translated as MISSION.

She slammed the lid of the laptop closed. Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it!

Mouse had done his job. He had found the submarine. And then, when the robot had attempted to shift from transit mode into mission mode, he’d run into the same software glitch that Ann had been wrestling with for weeks. Right in the middle of the mode shift, his software had faulted and then triggered his emergency maintenance subroutine.

He’d been close enough to complete the mission, and instead, he’d turned away and returned to his launching coordinates.

How had that happened? Ann had written a software patch, to bypass that very problem. What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t it worked?

She opened the lid of the laptop, backed out of the error logs, and loaded the program modules she had written to prepare Mouse for this mission.

It took her only a few seconds to find the address in the program where the patch should have been installed. It wasn’t there.

Oh god! How had that happened? Had she forgotten to install the patch? She couldn’t have. There was just no way.

But she had forgotten. She’d been so cocky, so sure that she had done everything perfectly. And she had somehow forgotten a critical step. Maybe even the critical step.

This whole mess with the missile submarine could have been over by now, if she’d done her job. But she’d