The Seventh Angel

He looked out the window at jagged terrain of the ice pack. It was time to go kick some ass. Time to go be Marines.

CHAPTER 50

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

0821 hours (8:21 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Captain Bowie leaned back in his chair, and set his coffee cup on the wardroom table. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Your Mouse unit decided on its own to abandon the search, and return to the position where we launched it?”

Ann Roark nodded. She didn’t like the way this conversation was starting out.

“That’s right,” she said. “According to Mouse’s internal error logs, he operated without problems for the first five and a half hours of the run. Then an event that occurred during the run triggered a spontaneous mission abort.”

“Do you have any idea what that event was? What triggered this spontaneous mission abort?”

Ann took a breath and nodded. “I know what caused it. But it’s a little bit complicated.”

The Navy man lifted his coffee cup and took a swallow. “I’ve got a few minutes. See if you can spell it out for me.”

Ann sighed loudly, and then instantly regretted it. She was a civilian, and technically free to say whatever she wanted, but she knew that senior military people didn’t react well to signs of reticence or dissatisfaction.

Her father had been a major in the Army, until a roadside bomb outside of Ramadi had turned his up-armored HMMV into a few thousand pounds of Swiss cheese. Major Dad had been big on discipline and outward displays of respect. He’d been quick to decode Ann’s body language for any hint of dissent or defiance. He’d interpreted every huff, every roll of the eyes, and every hunched shoulder as a sign of rebellion: a challenge to his authority.

There wasn’t a lot of reason to believe that this Navy captain would be any different. With that single pronounced sigh, she had telegraphed her frustration in a language that the military mind could only interpret in one way. She might as well have told him to fuck off. God, she hated dealing with these people. They made her crazy.

Ann nearly sighed again, but she caught herself, realizing that it would only rebroadcast her frustration. She shifted mental gears, and tried to think of a way to phrase the problem with Mouse.

“Search mode is not much different than transit mode,” she said finally. “As it moves through the water, the robot is using its onboard sensors to scan for the submarine, but it’s essentially following a programmed series of navigational waypoints. We set the waypoints ahead of time, when we plan the search pattern. I upload the coordinates of each waypoint to the robot prior to launch, and Mouse travels from one waypoint to the next, like following a trail of breadcrumbs.”

The captain nodded for her to continue.

“As long as Mouse was searching for the submarine,” Ann said, “he was essentially operating in directed transit mode.”

“I’ve got that,” Captain Bowie said. “So what happened?”

Ann paused. He really wasn’t going to like this part. “Mouse found the submarine,” she said. “About five and a half hours into the search.”

She spoke quickly now, trying to get across the rest of her message before Bowie’s brain had a chance to process the first part.

“That’s what triggered the problem,” she said. “When he found the sub, Mouse shifted from directed transit mode to autonomous mission mode, so he could carry out the next phase of the operation and plant the beacon on the hull of the submarine. And during the mode shift, something glitched in his operating program. I haven’t had a chance to look at it in detail yet, but I think it was that same program error we were getting a couple of weeks ago, when we were running tests … before we rescued that submersible.”

“You wrote a software patch for that, didn’t you?” Bowie asked.

“Yeah,” Ann said. “A workaround. It didn’t fix the bug in the program code. It just bypassed the problem, and allowed Mouse to keep working if the error showed up.”

“So what went wrong?” Captain Bowie asked. “Was this some unforeseen permutation of the error? Something your software patch couldn’t handle?”

Ann hesitated before answering. It would be easy to lie here, attribute the problem to untraceable software glitches. Mouse was a prototype, and they knew he had bugs. If she blamed the problem on unreliable software, she’d probably never get caught.

She decided to stick with the truth. It might bring her some grief, but she wouldn’t have any trouble looking at herself in the mirror.

“I screwed up,” she said. “There was nothing wrong with the patch. I just forgot to re-upload it.”

“I thought it was already installed,” Bowie said. “You uploaded it weeks ago, when you were getting the Mouse unit ready to search for the Nereus.”

“It was installed,” Ann said. “But the program parameters needed for this mission were different from the ones we used for the submersible. I decided that our best chance of success would be to get a clean load. Dump the old operating program, and reload from scratch. That gave me a clean slate to work with when I was modifying the operating program for this mission.”

Bowie looked at her without speaking.

Ann plunged on. “I had about a hundred things to do to prepare Mouse to go after this submarine. I had to modify a lot of code to give him the functions he needs to get the job done. And I didn’t remember to reinstall the patch. I just … forgot.”

“You forgot?”

“Yes,” Ann said. “I forgot. I don’t know how. I thought I had everything covered, but I was trying to cram two days worth of programming into a few hours. And I missed something. I forgot the patch. I … forgot.”

“So your Mouse unit found the damned submarine, and — instead of planting the beacon and alerting us to the sub’s position — your robot ran back to its launch position and drove around in circles?”

Ann nodded. “Yes.”

It was the first time she’d heard one of the Navy people use the dreaded R-word to describe Mouse. But given the nature of the conversation, there wasn’t much pleasure in the tiny victory.

Bowie glanced at the wardroom clock. “We could have engaged the submarine seven hours ago. We could have brought this whole tragic mess to an end.”

“I know that,” Ann said. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t intentional. It was an oversight. An accident.”

Bowie drummed his fingertips lightly on the table top. “Are you sure about that?”

His tone of voice took Ann by surprise.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you certain it was an accident?” Bowie asked. “You’ve made it plain since the minute you came aboard. You don’t like me; you don’t like this ship; and you don’t like the Navy.”

Ann started to respond, but he kept talking.

“I don’t know what you’ve got against us, and I frankly don’t care. Your opinions are your business. You don’t have to like us. You don’t even have to pretend to like us. It doesn’t matter to me, as long as you don’t actively antagonize my crew, or let your personal views interfere with the job. But now it looks like they are interfering with the job, Ms. Roark. They’re interfering with the mission of my ship. We had an opportunity to finish this, but I think you might be more interested in jerking our chain than in getting the job done.”

He set his coffee cup down a little too hard. “Between the United States, Russia, and Japan, there are