The Veil by William Bowden Read Free Book Online Page A

Lucy’s true nature?” another delegate asks of Joseph. “As you have divulged it to us?”
    “He is not, and that will remain the case,” answers Joseph.
    “Can we trust her?”
    “We can’t rely on ground control,” Joseph says. “Not at these distances. Only an MBI can pilot the Afrika solo. And Lucy was involved in the design of its systems.”
    “My question was whether we can trust her. Given the machine’s past, and its…inner form, our reliance on her is troubling to say the least. Dr. Rain?”
    Rain takes a moment to ponder the Freudian subtleties of the question posed—the machine ’s past and their trust in her . They are not polarized in their thinking. That’s a relief —
    “It is important to remember that her nature is, in part, a façade,” Rain says to them, careful to make eye contact with each as he speaks. “Regardless of what that façade conjures up in your mind, Lucy’s integrity and sense of duty far exceed that which could be expected of a human. She is ideally suited to this task and as such we can trust her.”
    “And as a machine?”
    “She is, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.”
    * * *
    Chief Justice Garr and a somewhat pale and drawn Senator Blake watch proceedings from the mission control observation booth, looking down on a sea of empty controller desks, the big board of screens above it all showing the key elements—the Afrika’s lunar approach, its telemetry and the crew on board the Centaur some ten kilometers away.
    It’s not going well. A slew of technical glitches from the reawakened Afrika have delayed their launch preparations and now they are running out of time. They need to start the main engines during the transit across the far side of the Moon and burn them for at least ten minutes. The transit window is just fifteen minutes.
    A stressed Tobias Montroy darts from one control desk to another performing the status checks across the Afrika’s myriad of systems. There had been no time to consolidate mission control and so they had to resort to using the original control rooms set up for the test flights, abandoned a decade ago but never decommissioned. A status alarm goes off on the far side of the room—a lone colleague attends to it, allowing a visibly relieved Montroy to check the primary coolant pumps servicing the main reactor.
    “This is crazy,” Blake says to Garr. “Just two of them? They can’t keep up.”
    “Secrecy is everything now, Julian.” But Garr can’t hide her own concern.
    Montroy is done with the coolant pumps and is at another console. The reaction mass valves should be open by now and injector heaters on—
    “Chief Mission Controller Montroy?”
    “What is it, Lucy?”
    “There is an imbalance on pressure valve two-two-three-oh servicing the plasma containment field on motor one, Chief Mission Controller Montroy.”
    “Adjust it please.”
    “Yes, Chief Mission Controller Montroy.”
    Montroy misses a step in the reaction valve check list and it resets.
    “ Crap! ”
    “Adjustment complete, Chief Mission Controller Montroy.”
    “Dammit, Lucy! Cut the long-winded names, will ya. We ain’t the time.”
    He starts the valve check list once again, but a thought halts him. She didn’t answer back.
    “Lucy?”
    Montroy has spent enough time with Lucy to know her character and right now they cannot afford any principled tantrums.
    “Lucy—?”
    “I shall address you as Tobias.”
    “Toby—” Montroy blurts out.
    “Toby, I think it would be much faster if you let me complete all the flight checks.”
    Up on the big board Dr. Panchen leans into the Centaur’s flight-deck camera to get their attention.
    “Control. We’re running out of lunar occlusion and coming up on our minimum burn time. We need to light those engines now .”
    Montroy runs his hands over his sweaty, balding head.
    “Okay, Lucy. You have control.”
    Nervous glances all round, not least from Chief