“I intend to find out what did happen.” ^ “Do you? Do you? Let me lay this word in your lap: U either you come up with proof that’ll stand up in court martial, or this investigation is closed. Dekker climbed into that pod on drugs, because he has an Attitude the same as all the other misfits this facility’s been loaded with, he believes he’s cornered the market on right, he’s a smartass who thinks his reflexes make up for his lack of discipline, and if you drop that chaff in the hearing you won’t like the result. If you want this program to fly, and I assume you do, then you’d better reflect very soberly what effect your appearance and your testimony this afternoon is going to have on your captain’s credibility—on the credibility of your service and the judgment of its personnel. Don’t speculate. Keep to the facts.”
“The facts are, Dekker saw what was happening, he called the right moves. It’s on the mission control tape.. ..”
“You’re so damned cocksure what your boys can do, mister, but it’s easy to call the right moves when you’re not the one in the pilot’s seat. You won’t sit those controls. You won’t fly those ships. Will you?”
Fair question, except they’d been over that track before. “That’s exactly the point. I’m not synched to a rider crew. Cross-training would risk both ships.”
“The truth is, lieutenant, your Fleet doesn’t want its precious essential personnel flying a suicide ship, your Fleet won’t let go of its hare-brained concept before it stinks. Your Conrad Mazian isn’t a ship designer, he isn’t an engineer, he’s a merchant captain in a ragtag militia trying to prove it’s qualified for strategic decisions. This ship needs interdicts on a pilot that’s stressing out.”
“That ship needs its combat edge, colonel. If Wilhelmsen had had an AI breathing down his neck he’d have had one more thing on his mind: Is the damned thing going to take my advice or not? At what mission-critical split second that I happen to be right is it going to cut me out of the loop? You can’t cripple a ship with a damned know-it-all robot snatching control away because the pilot pushed the £’s for a reason that, yes, might be knowingly suicidal, for a reason that wasn’t in the mission profile. Besides which, longscan’s after you, and what are you going to do, give a Union longscanner a hundred percent certainty an AI’s going to interdict certain moves? If he knows your cutoffs, he knows your blind spots. If he knows you can’t push it and he can, what’s he going to do, colonel?”
“When the physiological signs are there, you’re going to lose that ship, that’s a hundred percent certainty, and nobody else is going to be exceeding that limit.”
“Wilhelmsen was leaning hard on the Assists. He could have declined that one target, that’s inside the parameters, that’s a judgment a rider’s going to have to make. But he’d have looked bad for the senators. He wanted that target. That’s an Attitude. There’s a use for that in combat. Not for a damned exhibition.”
“Wilhelmsen was saving the program, lieutenant, saving your damned budget appropriation, in equipment that’s got six men in the hospital and seventeen dead. You don’t push machines or human beings past the destruct limit, and you don’t put equipment out there that self-destructs on a muscle-twitch. The pilot was showing symptoms. The AI should have kicked him out of the loop right then, but it can’t do that, you say he can’t have it breathing down his neck—a four-billion-dollar missile with a deadman’s switch, that’s what you’ve got—it needs an integrative AI in there—“
“Watch the pilots cut it off. Which you can’t do with that damned tetralogic system you’re talking about, it’s got to be in the loop talking to the interactives constantly, and no matter the input it got after, its logic systems are exactly the same as the next one’s, same as the ships are. The only wildcard you’ve got is the humans, the only thing that keeps the enemy longscanners guessing. The best machine you’ve got can’t outguess the human longscanner—why should you assume they’re going to outperform the pilot?”