There were none. “Good,” Abumwe said. “I don’t believe I have to tell any of you that if these negotiations go well, then it is good for us. For all of us. If they go poorly, then it will go badly for all of us as well. But it will go especially poorly for whichever ones of you were not completely up to speed and dragged the rest of your team down with you. I need you to be crystal clear on that.”
They were.
“Lieutenant Wilson, a word with you,” Abumwe said, as the room began to clear. “You too, Schmidt.” The room cleared except for the ambassador, Hillary Drolet, Schmidt and Wilson.
“Why did you ask about why there was a rush?” Abumwe asked.
Wilson made a conscious effort not to let the thought I’m being called on the carpet for that? show up on his face. “Because everyone wanted to know, but no one else wanted to ask, ma’am.”
“Because they knew better,” Abumwe said.
“Except possibly for Fucci, yes, ma’am,” Wilson said.
“But you don’t,” Abumwe said.
“No, I know better, too,” Wilson said. “But I still thought someone should ask.”
“Hmmm,” Abumwe said. “Lieutenant, what did it say to you that we have twenty hours to prepare for this negotiation?”
“Are you asking me to speculate, ma’am?” Wilson asked.
“It’s rather obvious that’s what I’m asking,” Abumwe said. “You’re Colonial Defense Forces. You no doubt have a military perspective on this.”
“It’s been years since I’ve been anywhere near actual combat, ma’am,” Wilson said. “I’ve been with CDF Research and Development for years, even before they lent me to you and the Clarke as your tech consultant.”
“But you are still CDF, yes?” Abumwe said. “You still have the green skin and the computer in your head. I imagine if you dig deeply, you might still have the ability to look at things from a military point of view.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Wilson said.
“Then give me your analysis,” Abumwe said.
“Someone’s humped the bunk,” Wilson said.
“Excuse me?” Abumwe said. Wilson noted Schmidt suddenly looked paler than usual.
“Humped the bunk,” Wilson repeated. “Screwed the pooch. Gone FUBAR. Insert your own metaphor for things going sideways here. You don’t have to have military experience to see that; everyone in this room had that thought. Whatever this Sara Bair and her team were supposed to do, they blew it, and for whatever reason the Colonial Union needs to attempt a salvage, so you and your team are the last-minute, last-chance substitute.”
“And why us?” Abumwe said.
“Because you are good at what you do,” Wilson said.
Abumwe’s thin smile returned. “If I want smoke blown up my ass, Lieutenant, I could have your friend here,” she said, nodding toward Schmidt.
“Yes, ma’am,” Wilson said. “In that case, I’d guess because we’re close to jump, which makes us easy to reroute, that you’ve had at least some experience with the Utche, and that if you fail, and you probably will because you’re the last-minute replacement, you’re low enough on the diplomatic totem pole that it can be chalked up to your incompetence.” Wilson looked over to Schmidt, who looked as if he were about to implode. “Stop that, Hart,” he said. “She asked.”
“I did indeed,” Abumwe said. “And you are right, Lieutenant. But only half-right. The other reason that they picked us is because of you.”
“I beg your pardon?” Wilson said, now thoroughly confused.
“Sara Bair didn’t fail at her task, she disappeared,” Abumwe said. “Along with the whole of her diplomatic mission and a CDF frigate called the Polk. It and them, gone. No trace.”
“That’s not good,” Wilson said.
“You are once again stating the obvious,” Abumwe said.
“How do I matter here, ma’am?” Wilson said.
“They don’t think the Polk just vanished, they think it was destroyed,” Abumwe said. “And they need you to look for the black box.”
“Black box?” Schmidt asked.
“A data recorder,” Wilson said. “If the Polk was destroyed and the black box survived, then it could tell us what happened to the ship, and who killed it.”
“And we couldn’t find it without you?” Schmidt asked.
Wilson shook his head. “They’re small and they don’t send out a locator beacon unless they’re pinged with an encrypted signal, specific to that ship. It’s a military-grade cipher. You need a very tall security clearance for that. They don’t just hand those out to anyone, and not to anyone outside the CDF.” He turned his attention to Abumwe. “But they don’t just hand them out to random lieutenants, either.”
“Then we are lucky you are not just a random lieutenant,” Abumwe said. “I am told that in your history it seems that you once had a very high security clearance.”
“I was part of a team doing research on BrainPal security,” Wilson said. “Again, it’s been years. I don’t have that clearance level anymore.”
“You didn’t,” Abumwe said. She nodded to her assistant, who once again pressed on her PDA. Wilson immediately saw a ping light for his queue in his peripheral vision. “Now you do.”
“Okay,” Wilson said slowly, and scanned the details of the security clearance. After a moment he spoke again. “Ambassador, I think you should know this security clearance comes with a level of executive authority that technically means I can give orders to the Clarke’s crew in the furtherance of my mission,” he said.
“I would suggest you not try to exercise that privilege with Captain Coloma,” Abumwe said. “She hasn’t put anyone on the wrong side of an airlock, but if you gave her an order, she might make an exception for you.”
“I will keep that in mind,” Wilson said.
“Do,” Abumwe said. “In the meantime, as you’ve no doubt read by now, your orders are to find the black box, decode it and find out what happened to the Polk.”
“Got it, ma’am,” Wilson said.
“It’s been implied to me by my own superiors that your finding the black box is of equal or greater importance to me actually successfully concluding these negotiations with the Utche,” Abumwe said. “To that end I have detailed you an aide for the duration.” She nodded to Schmidt. “I don’t need him. He’s yours.”
“Thank you,” Wilson said, and noted that he’d never seen Hart look more pained than just now, when he had been deemed inessential by his boss. “He’ll be useful.”
“He’d better be,” Abumwe said. “Because, Lieutenant Wilson, the warning I gave to my staff goes double for you. If you fail, this mission fails, even if my half goes well. Which means I will have failed because of you. I may be low on the diplomatic totem pole, but I am sufficiently high enough on it that when I push you, you will die from the fall.” She looked over to Schmidt. “And he’ll kill you when he lands.”
“Understood, ma’am,” Wilson said.
“Good,” Abumwe said. “One more thing, Lieutenant. Try to find that black box before the Utche arrive. If someone’s trying to kill us all, I want to know about it before our negotiating partners show up.”
“I’ll do my best,” Wilson said.
“Your best got you stationed on the Clarke,” Abumwe said. “Do better than that.”
V.
“Please stop that,” Wilson said to Schmidt, as they sat in the Clarke lounge, reviewing their project data.
Schmidt looked up from his PDA. “I’m not doing anything,” he said.
“You’re hyperventilating,” Wilson said. He had his eyes closed, the better to focus on the data his BrainPal was streaming at him.
“I’m breathing completely normally,” Schmidt said.
“You’ve been breathing like a labored elephant for the last several minutes,” Wilson said, still not opening his eyes. “Keep it up and you’re going to need a paper bag to breathe into.”
“Yes, well,” Schmidt said. “You get told you’re
inessential by your boss and see how you feel.”
“Her people skills aren’t the best,” Wilson agreed. “But you knew that. And as my assistant, I actually do need you to be helpful to me. So stop thinking about your boss and think more about our predicament.”
“Sorry,” Schmidt said. “I’m also not entirely comfortable with this assistant thing.”
“I promise not to ask you to get me coffee,” Wilson said. “Much.”
“Thanks,” Schmidt said, wryly. Wilson grunted and went back to his data.
“This black box,” Schmidt said a few minutes later.
“What about it?” Wilson asked.
“Are you going to be able to find it?” Schmidt asked.
Wilson opened his eyes for this. “The answer to that depends on whether you want me to be optimistic or truthful,” he said.
“Truthful, please,” Schmidt said.
“Probably not,” Wilson said.
“I lied,” Schmidt said. “I want the optimistic version.”
“Too late,” Wilson said, and held out his hand as if he were cupping an imaginary ball. “Look, Hart. The ‘black box’ in question is a small, black sphere about the size of a grapefruit. The memory portion of the thing is about the size of a fingernail. The rest of it consists of the tracking beacon, an inertial field generator to keep the thing from floating down a gravity well, and a battery powering both of those two things.”
“Okay,” Schmidt said. “So?”
“So, one, the thing is intentionally small and black, so it will be difficult to find by anyone but the CDF,” Wilson said.
“Right, but you’re not looking for it,” Schmidt said. “You’re going to be pinging it. When it gets the correct signal, it will respond.”
“It will, if it has power,” Wilson said. “But it might not. We’re working on the assumption the Polk was attacked. If it was attacked, then there was probably a battle. If there was a battle, then the Polk probably got torn apart, with the pieces of it flying everywhere from the added energy of the explosions. It’s likely the black box probably spent all its energy trying to stay mostly in one place. In which case when we signal it, we’re not going to get a response.”
“In which case you’ll have to look for it visually,” Schmidt said.
“Right,” Wilson said. “So, again: small black grapefruit in a search area that at this point is a cube tens of thousands of kilometers on a side. And your boss wants me to find it and examine it before the Utche arrive. So if we don’t locate it within the first half hour after the skip, we’re probably screwed.” He leaned back and closed his eyes again.
“You seem untroubled by our imminent failure,” Schmidt said.
“No point hyperventilating,” Wilson said. “And anyway, I didn’t say we will fail. It’s just more likely than not. My job is to increase the odds of us succeeding, which is what I was doing before your labored breathing started to distract me.”
“So what’s my job?” Schmidt asked.
“Your job is to go to Captain Coloma and tell her what things I need, the list of which I just sent to your PDA,” Wilson said. “And do it charmingly, so that our captain feels like a valued part of the process and not like she’s being ordered around by a CDF field tech.”
“Oh, I see,” Schmidt said. “I get the hard part.”
“No, you get the diplomatic part,” Wilson said, cracking open an eye. “Rumor has it diplomacy is a thing you’ve been trained to do. Unless you’d like me to go talk to her while you figure out a protocol for searching a few million cubic kilometers of space for an object the size of a child’s plaything.”
“I’ll just go ahead and go talk to the captain, then,” Schmidt said, picking up his PDA.
“What a marvelous idea,” Wilson said. “I fully endorse it.” Schmidt smiled and left the lounge.
Wilson closed his eyes again and focused once more on his own problem.
Wilson was more calm about the situation than Schmidt was, but that was in part to keep his friend on the right side of useful. Hart could be twitchy when stressed.
In fact, the problem was troubling Wilson more than he let on. One scenario he didn’t tell Hart about at all was the one where the black box didn’t exist. The classified information that Wilson had included preliminary scans of the chunk of space that the Polk was supposed to have been in; the debris field was almost nonexistent, meaning that either the ship was attacked with such violence that it had vaporized, or whoever attacked the Polk took the extra time to atomize any chunk of debris larger than half a meter on a side. Either way it didn’t look good.
If it had survived, Wilson had to work on the assumption that its battery was thoroughly drained and that it was floating, quiet and black, out in the vacuum. If the Polk had been nearer to one of the Danavar system planets, he might have a tiny chance of picking up the box visually against the planet’s sphere, but its skip position into the Danavar system was sufficiently distant from any of that system’s gas giants that even that “Hail Mary” approach was out of the question.
So: Wilson’s task was to find a dark, silent object that might not exist in a debris field that mostly didn’t exist, in a cube of space larger than most terrestrial planets.
It was a pretty problem.
Wilson didn’t want to admit how much he was enjoying it. He’d had any number of jobs over his two lifetimes—from corporate lab drone to high school physics teacher to soldier to military scientist to his current position as field tech trainer—but in every one of them, one of his favorite things to do was to whack away at a near insoluble problem for hours on end. With the exception that this time he had rather fewer hours to whack away on this problem than he’d like, he was in his element.
The real problem here is the black box itself, Wilson thought, calling up what information he had on the objects. The idea of a travel data recorder had been around for centuries, and the phrase “black box” got its cachet with terrestrial air travel. Ironically, almost none of the “black boxes” of those bygone days were actually black; they were typically brightly colored to be made easy to find. The CDF wanted their black boxes found, but only by the right people. They made them as black as they could.
“Black box, black hole, black body,” Wilson said to himself.
Hey.
Wilson opened his eyes and sat up.
His BrainPal pinged him; it was Schmidt. Wilson opened the connection. “How’s diplomacy?” he asked.
“Uh,” Schmidt said.
“Be right there,” Wilson said.
* * *
Captain Sophia Coloma looked every inch of what she was, which was the sort of person who was not here to put up with your shit. She stood on her bridge, imposing, eyes fixed at the portal through which Wilson stepped. Neva Balla, her executive officer, stood next to her, looking equally displeased. On the other side of the captain was Schmidt, whose studiously neutral facial expression was a testament to his diplomatic training.
“Captain,” Wilson said, saluting.
“You want a shuttle,” Coloma said, ignoring the salute. “You want a shuttle and a pilot and access to our sensor equipment.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Wilson said.
“You understand you want these as we are about to skip into what is almost certainly a hostile situation, and directly before sensitive negotiations with an alien race,” Coloma said.
“I do,” Wilson said.
“Then you can explain to me why I should prioritize your needs over the needs of every other person on this ship,” Coloma said. “As soon as we skip, I need to scan the area for any hostiles. I need to scan the area comprehensively. I’m not going to let the Clarke’s sole shuttle out of its bay before I’m absolutely certain it and we are not going to be shot out the sky.”
“Mr. Schmidt explained to you my current level of clearance, I imagine,” Wilson said.
“He did,” Coloma said. “I’ve also been informed that Ambassador Abumwe has given your
needs a high priority. But this is still my ship.”
“Ma’am, are you saying that you will go against the orders of your superiors?” Wilson asked, and noticed Coloma thin her lips at this. “I’m not speaking of myself here. The orders come from far above both of us.”
“I have every intention of following orders,” Coloma said. “I also intend to follow them when it makes sense to do so. Which is after I’ve made sure we’re safe, and the ambassador and her team are squared away.”
“As far as the scanning goes, what you need to do and what I need to do dovetail,” Wilson said. “Share the data with me and run a couple of scans that I need and I’ll be fine. The scans I need to run will add another layer of security to your own scans.”
“I’ll run them after I’ve run our standard scans,” Coloma said.
“That’s fine,” Wilson said. “Now, about the shuttle—”
“No shuttle, no pilot,” Coloma said. “Not until after I’ve sent Abumwe to the Utche.”
Wilson shook his head. “I need the shuttle before then,” he said. “The ambassador told me to find and access the black box before she met with the Utche. She wanted to know whether there is a danger to them, not only us.”
“She doesn’t have authority on this,” Coloma said.
“But I do, ma’am, and I agree with her,” Wilson said. “We need to know everything we can before the Utche arrive. It’s going to put a damper on negotiations if one of us explodes. Especially if we could have avoided it. Ma’am.”
Coloma was silent.
“I’d like to make a suggestion,” Schmidt said, after a minute.
Coloma looked at Schmidt as if she’d forgotten that he was there. “What is it?” she asked.
“The reason we need the shuttle is to get the black box,” Schmidt said. “We don’t know if we can find the black box. If we don’t find it, we don’t need it. If we don’t find it within the first hour or so, then even if we found it we couldn’t retrieve it before the Utche show up and you would need the shuttle for Ambassador Abumwe’s team. So let’s say that we have the shuttle on standby for that first hour. If we find it by then, once you’re confident the area is secure, we’ll go out and get it. If we find it after, we wait until after you’ve delivered the ambassador’s team to the Utche.”