The Seventh Angel - Страница 67

This new confidence level was more than high enough to justify abandoning the search plan to pursue the source of the frequencies. Mouse shifted from search mode to autonomous mission mode, so it could carry out the next phase of the mission. And that’s when the problem occurred.

The mode shift triggered a bug in Mouse’s core operating program. If the code had functioned as its programmers intended, a subroutine would have recorded the nature of the mistake for future correction, and then bypassed the error to allow the robot to continue functioning. But the software glitch got in the way.

Instead of bypassing the error, the faulty program activated Mouse’s emergency maintenance routine, falsely informing the robot that it had suffered crippling damage, and ordering it to return to its point of launch to surface for repairs.

The robot noted the damage alert immediately, and prepared to terminate the mission and head for the launch and recovery coordinates.

But Ann Roark’s software patch was installed and at work. As with the rescue of the Nereus, the software workaround had four elements: one conditional statement, and three commands:

...

(1) <<<< IF [emergency_maintenance_routine = active]

(2) CANCEL [emergency_maintenance_routine]

(3) RESUME [normal_operation]

(4) INVERT [last_logical_conflict] >>>>

The first line of code triggered the workaround the instant that Mouse’s computer kicked into emergency maintenance mode. The second line canceled the order for emergency maintenance mode. The third line ordered the robot to ignore the error and continue operating as if no fault had been reported. The last line of the workaround inverted the logical conflict that had triggered the original error.

The Mouse unit had responded to a false report that it had sustained critical damage. Ann’s code patch inverted the logical state of the erroneous report, switching “CRITICAL DAMAGE = YES” to “CRITICAL DAMAGE = NO” in the robot’s memory.

The conflict was eliminated. The computer determined that all conditions had been met for the autonomous phase of the mission to commence. The robot made a five degree starboard turn to improve its angle of approach, and began moving toward the target.

Mouse had no idea of the nature of its quarry, or the ultimate purpose of its mission. It thought only in terms of waypoints, frequencies, obstacles, and manipulator functions.

Two hundred feet beneath the ice pack, in a body of water that most people couldn’t find on a map, a small unarmed robot glided through the darkness toward a 13,000-ton nuclear missile submarine.

CHAPTER 55

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

SOUTHEASTERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

2206 hours (10:06 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Ann Roark was looking the other way when the icon popped up on the display of her laptop. When she looked up, the computer showed only the ship’s position indicator and a silhouette map of the Sea of Okhotsk. She glanced back down, perhaps a second later, and the triangular green symbol was burning bright on the screen.

Ann had the laptop speakers muted, so the arrival of the icon came without sound or commotion, but it startled her just the same. Something heavy clunked inside of her, as she realized that the next scene of this crazy little drama was about to play itself out.

She thumbed the trackball, scrolling the computer’s cursor over the green triangle. A small block of alphanumerical data appeared to the left of the icon. Ann read the little status report twice, to be certain that she was interpreting the situation correctly.

Then she leaned back in her seat and glanced around. None of the Navy people happened to be standing nearby at the moment, so she stood up, stretched, and walked briskly over to the Tactical Action Officer’s station.

She didn’t know the man in the TAO chair, but she recognized from the silver bars on his collar that he was a lieutenant. The Navy guys called those bars railroad tracks. She was starting to learn this stuff. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing.

She tapped the TAO on the shoulder. The man recoiled at her touch, and Ann felt a tiny hint of satisfaction at having startled one of the warrior types. Obviously, she wasn’t the only person feeling the pressure.

When the man looked up, Ann pretended she hadn’t noticed his flinch. “I don’t have a headset, so I couldn’t call you on the net,” she said. “My robot has found your submarine.”

The man sat up straighter. “What? Are you sure?”

Ann looked back toward her laptop. “Yeah. That’s what Mouse is telling me, anyway.”

The man keyed his microphone, and spoke into his headset. “USWE — TAO. Can you step over to my station, Chief? I need to talk to you.”

The redheaded Sonar Technician, Chief McPherson, appeared at the TAO’s chair a few seconds later. The cord of a disconnected headset was draped around her neck. “What’s up, sir?”

The TAO inclined his head in Ann’s direction. “Ms. Roark’s robot has detected the target.”

Chief McPherson raised her eyebrows. “You’ve got high-confidence classification on the contact?”

“Yeah,” Ann said. “Mouse detected three frequencies consistent with a Delta III submarine. One of them is flagged as a class identifier.”

The chief gave a thumbs-up gesture. “Excellent! We need to get a tactical feed to Fire Control immediately.”

Her face took on a thoughtful expression. “We can’t hook your laptop into CDRT or Fire Control, so we’ll have to do this old school. I’ll station a phone talker over your shoulder. He’ll relay the data to us, and we’ll punch it into the system manually.”

Ann held up a hand. “Whoa there, cowboy. I can get you a recent position for the sub, but I can’t give you real-time information.”

Chief McPherson’s eyebrows narrowed. “Why not?”

Ann struggled to keep the frustration out of her voice. “Because your captain told me to lock out the acoustic modems,” she said. “Remember that strategy meeting in the wardroom? You guys decided to restrict Mouse’s communications to low-power UHF, so the submarine can’t detect him. He can’t transmit or receive UHF when he’s under the ice. Every time he needs to make a report, he has to break off his track of the submarine and come out to open water, where he can drive to the surface. With transit time and everything, our first fix is already nearly twenty minutes old.”

Chief McPherson grimaced. “Damn! I forgot about that. What about the beacon? Did he attach it to the submarine’s hull?”

“Yes,” Ann said. “Your beacon is in place, and waiting to be triggered.”

“That’s one piece of good news,” Chief McPherson said.

“We need to bring the Captain in on this,” the TAO said. “Get whatever information you have punched into the CDRT so I can call it up on the screen. Then we can try to figure out the best way to tactically exploit this situation.”

The chief nodded. “Aye-aye, sir.” She looked at Ann. “Let’s go see what you’ve got.”

* * *

Five minutes later, they were gathered around the TAO station again, joined by Captain Bowie and the Executive Officer.

The big Aegis display screen depicted a highly-magnified view of the tactical situation. The water and landmasses were shown in the same weird shades of blue and brown, and the ice appeared in white.

Seen at this scale, the southern border of the ice pack appeared to be carved and fissured with irregular inlets, like the fjords of Norway cast in ice. Some of the larger passages wound and twisted for miles into the ice, before ending suddenly in blind cul-de-sacs. Ann knew that the ice fjords had a name, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Polly-something. Pollyanna? That couldn’t be right.

The display showed a red rectangular symbol representing one of the submarine’s prepared launch positions. The rectangle was not crossed out by diagonal lines. This launch position hadn’t been used up, or disarmed. It was still active. The other four launch positions, all now defunct, did not appear on the map at its current resolution.

A few inches to the left of the rectangle was a red circle, enclosing a downward-pointing arrow. This was the datum symbol: the last known position of the submarine. In this case, that amounted to the last place Mouse had seen the sub, prior to breaking off contact to transit out from under the ice.

Mouse’s green triangular icon was south of datum, an inch or so below the border between ice and water. A half inch below that was the circular green symbol that represented the ship.

Captain Bowie’s eyes were locked on the screen. “This is not an easy call to make,” he said. “We can’t prosecute the contact if all of our reports are twenty minutes time-late.”

“Or more,” Ann said. “Every time he breaks off contact to report to us, Mouse is going to have to search for the submarine again. He’s smart enough to calculate an intercept point, based on the sub’s last observed course and speed, but that’s only valid if the submarine doesn’t maneuver between search runs. Mouse may not always find the contact easily.”

The captain nodded gravely. “For that matter, there’s no guarantee that your robot will reacquire the submarine at all.”

“That’s true,” Ann said. She didn’t voice the other thing on her mind. Every time Mouse had to go through the search and acquire process, he would have to make the shift from search mode to autonomous mission mode. Her software patch was only a temporary fix for a bug that she hadn’t even identified yet. The patch wasn’t bulletproof. Every time the mode shift occurred, there was a risk that her little robot would lose his freaking mind, software patch or no software patch.