Up Against It - M. J. Locke [18]
There was a tense silence. Tania and Aaron exchanged looks.
“Are we done? I need to get back to the warehouse.”
“We’re not done. Sit down.”
Sean glared at her, an intimidating hulk of a man. Jane glared back. She wondered if he was going to disobey her. But his military training took hold, and he settled back onto his seat. The only evidence of his agitation was his fingers drumming a beat on the table.
Jane said, “Tania.”
Tania Gravinchikov was a short, plump woman in her early sixties. Her red hair and clothes were rumpled, and her pale grey eyes were as bloodshot as Aaron’s and Sean’s. But this crisis did not weigh on her as it did for Aaron or Sean; for her it was like surfing a tidal wave. She flashed Jane a smile. “We’ve been running checks on life support, and something odd was definitely going on.”
“Odd?” Jane frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the life-support computer systems suffered a mini-nervous breakdown in response to the crisis. You know those doors in Warehouse 2-H? Well, my code jockeys tell me they stayed open longer than they should have. Much longer. And they were big doors. The influx of air from the maintenance tunnels kept the dome temperature from dropping as rapidly as it should have. If the doors had closed when they were supposed to, according to our projections, the bugs would have frozen per the design specs, before they chewed through the warehouse walls, and the damage would have been much less severe. The release wouldn’t have reached the lake, and only Kovak, the driver, would have been killed—the bugs would likely not have destroyed the emergency life-support lockers before Carl Agre could get to them.”
Jane pondered that. “Have you isolated the problem yet?”
“Not yet. We’re working on it. We’ve combed through about ten million lines of code so far. Imagine, Jane, some of our life-support tech goes back to the first lunar base! You should see the stuff we’ve dug up!” Tania spoke with an enthusiasm only a software designer could feel. “I’m finding all sorts of ancient oddities,” she went on. “Did you know we’ve got chunks of code written by Pater de Felice and his monastic or—”
Jane cleared her throat pointedly.
“Anyw-a-a-ay…” Tania continued, “we’re closing in on the problem code, but there won’t be much to report until we actually corner the bug, or bugs, that caused the problem. We’ve been able to replicate many of the conditions that caused the failure, though—in simulation, of course,” she added hurriedly, seeing their looks of alarm, “and we’re getting interesting results.” She gave Jane a meaningful look. “I fully expect to have answers by this afternoon and be able to present you with some options for next steps.” Jane got Tania’s meaning: she expected to know how it had happened by the time of their offline meeting at one-thirty. Perhaps even how to fix it? Jane did not want to get her hopes up.
“Anything else? Comments?” No one replied. “Very well. Use the eyes-on list for any new developments. Let’s get to work.”
* * *
Her heads-up reminded her with an increasingly urgent graphic that the “Stroiders” privacy costs were stacking up, so she approved the cancellation of the privacy screen. The “Stroiders-live” icon lit up her waveface, and a handful of miniature rovers crept into the room, along with a wave of motes, as her staff left.
Jane called up her staff’s reports. Ogilvie & Sons, eh? An awful hunch took shape. She summoned her analytical sapient, Jonesy, and had it pull all available shipping logs for Ogilvie & Sons and its subsidiaries, going back eighteen months. Jonesy tossed them into a space-time mapping program, and plotted the ships’ trajectories, while Jane sat back and watched. The tiny dots—Ogilvie & Sons shipments—crawled around the solar system at 10x speed.
She had to rerun it several times to be absolutely sure.
Ogilvie & Sons had a fleet of about sixty ships it owned or leased. Before about ten months ago, they all moved around the outer solar system in a random shipping pattern—dropping