Alice sat alone in her office. She couldn't bear the thought of returning to the Satellite Control Room. Every time she thought about going back there, it brought tears to her eyes. She had teased Jake remorselessly, and kept him constantly on his toes, but she realised now that he had been her closest friend in the last few years. She would never forget what had happened to him. He was a commander of Central Command, but in his heart he had been such a gentle man. He hadn't deserved to die like that. He had always been there for her. Without him, she felt more alone than ever.
She had decided to stay away from the Satellite Control Room for a while. The platforms were shut down anyway, and she could work on other matters just as easily from her small office. It provided a change of scenery, something different to distract her mind. Alice sat in silence, sipping herbal tea from a small blue cup. It tasted more bitter than usual. The tea was hot but her fingers felt less sensitive where the tips had been frozen. The skin on her fingertips had faded to a pale shade of grey. An hour ago, the guys from the medical labs had made a rare visit to give her some ointment. It was more for pain relief than anything else. They told her to expect the outer skin to fall off in the coming days, giving way to fresh pink skin underneath. The medics had warned her that she might have some nerve damage.
Alice rested her hands on her desk. Her green eyes sparkled in the overhead lights. She wasn't going to start crying again. General Markov had told her that she could take a few days off duty, but she had decided not to rest. She wanted to keep herself busy so she didn't have time to think about what had happened. She was also sure that Markov didn't really want her to take time off. He had been pressured into making the offer by some of the other commanders. He was good at his job, but he wasn't the most compassionate person she had ever met.
Alice pulled a paper tissue from her pocket and blew her nose on it. She had been catching up on some of the more mundane tasks, going through the alerts, and checking for any new maintenance jobs that had arisen during the last few days. So far, she had found reports about a malfunctioning camera in Tower Three's stairwell, and a diagnostics alert about a proton cannon in Tower One. The automated support droids could repair the camera, but she would have to send a team of engineers to run tests on the proton cannon. They would need to use a Monkey droid to help them climb out onto the side of the tower where they could gain access to the failing systems. Alice filled in an action report and submitted it for review. Someone in Tower Three would check it over and carry out whatever work she had recommended. If there were no major problems, she expected both problems to be resolved before the end of her ten-hour shift.
As well as going through the recent diagnostic alerts, she had also been looking through some of the older, historical reports. She liked to look for any sign of underlying patterns. It was something she had started doing in the last few months. Often it provided more of an insight into what was really causing a problem, rather than looking at individual faults on their own. She had already identified several patterns of misuse, poor maintenance and bad design. She had been able to recommend changes to working practices, maintenance schedules, and some of the designs that were used by the tech factories. The number of alerts had already fallen by thirty percent because of the recommendations that she put in place.
She pulled up the last three months of data from the White Spear's Dome Shield monitoring systems and fed it into a set of pattern matching algorithms that she had implemented herself. The algorithms helped spot subtle anomalies across large data sets. Sometimes she was able to identify problems that hadn't yet caused any alerts. It enabled her to suggest preventative measures before a system failed. She had never been involved with any Dome Shield alerts before. Such alerts were quite rare, and they were usually handled by the Heart. None of the commanders could modify the core systems. They were considered too important for any human operator to have access to. Alice had no problem with that. She had enough problems monitoring the systems that she could access.
The Heart had escalated one alert to all controllers. It was an unusual occurrence. The Heart only escalated warnings if it considered them to be important enough for widespread monitoring through Central Command, and even then it would only do so if the warning wasn't too classified to be disclosed. Alice pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear as she examined the data. She used her own custom algorithms in the pattern matchers to get a better understanding of the data before she formed any firm opinions about it.
After a few minutes, she found a tiny fluctuation in the Dome Shield. It was localised, and it had lasted for less than one-trillionth of a second. The Heart had detected it instantly and had corrected the fluctuation before it had caused any side effects. The Heart had already sent out security forces to patrol the area around the fluctuation. Alice dug a little deeper, pulling up additional reports that had been filed by the patrol. The report said that the team had searched the area for any suspicious activity, and had found the whole area stripped clean. There were some images in the report, showing how the ground near to the Dome Shield had been wiped clean of the stones and dry vines that would usually be littered across the ground in such areas. The report said that it suspected the area had been cleared by suction droids. Alice thought that was likely too. The ground looked spotless out to a radius of exactly one hundred metres from the edge of the Dome Shield. After that it reverted to its usual rough covering of broken vines and small irregular shaped rocks.
Alice rubbed her tired eyes. Her freckles darkened across her nose and cheeks as she checked the report again, hunting for any clues that she might have missed. She wondered how long the patrol had spent investigating the site of the shield anomaly. It looked like a standard report that had been thrown together in less than an hour. It lacked the kind of depth that she was accustomed to in her own work. If the Heart had thought the incident worthy of a patrol, then the investigation should have been more thorough. She checked the location of the site again and cross-referenced it to the location of the nearest reconnaissance drones. Most of the drones had gone south under the orders of Commander Jim Parker. She was surprised to see that he had requisitioned over seventy percent of the active drone fleet. She wondered what he could be looking for that was so important. She would make a point of asking him about it later.
A small number of reconnaissance drones were on standard surveillance duty to the north-east of Cinnamon City. She could use those for a while. Alice took control of the drone that had travelled furthest north and overrode its operational instructions with an algorithm of her own. The drone acknowledged her instructions and accelerated to its maximum velocity, heading for the site of the shield anomaly. It had a very basic propulsion system. It would take forty-eight minutes to reach its destination.
Alice left the drone on autopilot and continued to work through the other reports in her list, filing actions against each one in turn. She kept one eye on the progress of the reconnaissance drone in the corner of her console's display. There were a lot of reports to go through. The time passed quickly. By the time the reconnaissance drone had reached the target area, she had filed twenty-three reports. Her eyelids were feeling heavy again. Her head nodded forwards before she caught herself on the edge of falling asleep.
'Okay,' she said, as she began punching in her search criteria.
The drone was to follow a series of concentric circles, progressing inwards from the site of the shield anomaly. She was hoping she might find something that the original patrol had missed. They had been content to assume that all evidence had been cleaned away by the suction droids, but what if the droids had missed something further away from the shield? She realised too late that it was a large area for a single drone to cover. She wished that she had sent more than one drone. She had been trying not to hog all available resources like Parker had done. With only one drone, the search was going to take forever. She found her head sinking further and further towards the desk. Each time she caught herself falling asleep, the desk looked closer than it had before. Her eyes were sliding shut once more when a high-pitched beep brought her back to her senses.
Alice sat upright with her heart racing. 'Jake?' she said, forgetting that he wasn't with her anymore.
The memories of the day flooded over her. Jake was dead. She had seen him lying on the floor with frost on his beard and face. There had been no life in his eyes, and his body had been so cold that it had injured her hand just to touch him. She rested her head on the desk, ignoring her console's beeps, and let the tears flow. She had been brave. She had held herself together, working hard despite everything that had happened, but she couldn't come to terms with how Jake had died. He had deserved so much more from life. He had taken care of her like a father, and he had been her best friend. Their times in the Satellite Control Room had been good times. She already missed his cheeky comments. She couldn't hold back the tears any longer. Alice buried her face in her arms and sobbed.