The Human Division #1: The B-Team (4 page)

“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 a 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.”

“I can live with that,” Wilson said. “If you’ll bump up my scans in your queue.”

“And if I don’t believe the area is secure?” Coloma said.

“I’ll still need to go get it,” Wilson said. “But if I know where it is, between autopilot and my BrainPal, I can go get it myself. You won’t have to risk your pilot.”

“Just the shuttle,” Coloma said. “Because that’s not in any way
significant
.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Wilson said, and waited.

Coloma glanced at her executive officer. “Have Mr. Schmidt here get Neva your information. We have four hours to jump. Sometime in the next half hour will be fine.”

“Yes, Captain,” Wilson said. “Thank you, ma’am.” He saluted again. Coloma returned the salute this time. Wilson turned to go, Schmidt hustling by the captain to catch up with him.

“Lieutenant, one more thing,” Coloma said.

Wilson turned back to her. “Ma’am?”

“Just so you know, if you take the shuttle out, any damage you put on it, I’m taking out on you,” she said.

“I’ll treat it like it was my own car,” Wilson said.

“See that you do,” Coloma said. She turned away. Wilson took the hint.

“That was a nice touch about the car,” Schmidt said, once the two of them were off the bridge.

“As long as you don’t know about what happened to my last car, yes,” Wilson said.

Schmidt stopped.

“Relax, Hart,” Wilson said. “It was a joke. Come on. Lots to do.” He kept walking.

After a minute, Schmidt followed.

“That was XO Balla,” Schmidt said. He and Wilson were in an unused storage room, where Wilson had set up a three-dimensional monitor. They had waited out the skip into the Danavar system in its confines. “The
Clarke
sent out a ping using the
Polk
’s encrypted signal. Got nothing back.”

“Of course we didn’t,” Wilson said. “Why would the universe make it easy for us?”

“What do we do now?” Schmidt asked.

“Let me answer that question with a question,” Wilson said. “How does one look for a black box?”

“Are you serious?” Schmidt said, after a second. “We’re running out of time here and you want to have a Socratic dialogue with me?”

“I wouldn’t put this on the level of Socrates, but yeah, I do,” Wilson said. “It’s the former high school physics teacher in me. And call me crazy, but I think you’ll actually be more helpful to me if I don’t treat you like a completely useless monkey. I’m going to go on the assumption that you might have a brain.”

“Thanks,” Schmidt said.

“So, how does one look for a black box?” Wilson asked. “In particular, a black box that doesn’t want to be found?”

“Fervent prayer,” Schmidt said.

“You’re not even trying,” Wilson said, reprovingly.

“I’m new at this,” Schmidt said. “Give me a hint.”

“Fine,” Wilson said. “You start by looking for what the black box was originally attached to.”

“The
Polk,
” Schmidt said. “Or what’s left of it.”

“Very good, my young apprentice,” Wilson said.

Schmidt shot him a look, then continued. “But you told me that the previous scans of the area from the automated drones didn’t turn up anything.”

“True,” Wilson said. “But those were preliminary scans, done quickly. The
Clarke
has better sensors.” He dimmed the light in the storage room and fired up the monitor, which appeared to show nothing but a small, single dot at the center of its display.

“That’s not the
Polk,
is it?” Schmidt asked.

“It’s the
Clarke,
” Wilson said. A series of concentric circles appeared, arrayed on three axes. “And this is the area the
Clarke
is intensively scanning, with distance displayed logarithmically. It’s about a light-minute to the outer edge.”

“If you say so,” Schmidt said.

Wilson didn’t take the bait and instead called up another dot, close to the
Clarke
’s dot. “This is where the
Polk
was supposed to have appeared after its skip,” he said. “Let’s assume it blew up when it arrived. What would we expect to see?”

“The remains of the ship, somewhere close to where the ship was supposed to be,” Schmidt said. “But to repeat myself, the drone scans didn’t turn up anything.”

“Right,” Wilson said. “So now let’s use the
Clarke
’s sensor scans, and see what we get. This is using the
Clarke
’s standard array of LIDAR, radio and radar active scanning.”

Several yellow spheres appeared, including one near the
Polk
’s entry point.

“Debris,” Schmidt said, and pointed to the sphere closest to the
Polk
.

“It’s not conclusive,” Wilson said.

“Come on,” Schmidt said. “The correlation is pretty strong, wouldn’t you say?”

Wilson pointed to the other spheres. “What the
Clarke
is picking up is agglomerations of matter dense enough to reflect back its signals. These can’t all be ship debris. Maybe this one isn’t, either. Maybe it’s just what got pulled off a comet as it came through.”

“Can we get any closer?” Schmidt asked. “To the one near where the
Polk
was, I mean.”

“Sure,” Wilson said, and swooped the view in closer. The yellow debris sphere expanded and then disappeared, replaced by tiny points of light. “Those represent individual reflective objects,” Wilson said.

“There are a lot of them,” Schmidt said. “Which suggests to me they were part of a ship.”

“Okay,” Wilson said. “But here’s the thing. The data suggests that none of these bits of matter are much larger than your head. Most of it is the size of gravel. Even if you add them all up, they don’t come close to equaling an entire CDF frigate in mass.”

“Maybe whoever did this to the
Polk
didn’t want to leave evidence,” Schmidt said.

“Now you’re being paranoid,” Wilson said.

“Hey,” Schmidt said.

“No—” Wilson held up a hand. “I mean that as a compliment. And I think you’re exactly right. Whoever did in the
Polk
wanted to make it difficult for us to find out what happened to it.”

“If we could get to that debris field, we could take samples,” Schmidt said.

“No time,” Wilson said. “And right now finding what happened to the
Polk
is the means to an end. We still have to be reasonably sure this is what’s left of the
Polk,
though. So how do we do that?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Schmidt said.

“Think, Hart,” Wilson said. He waved at the monitor image. “What happened to the
rest
of the
Polk
?”

“It probably got vaporized,” Schmidt said.

“Right,” Wilson said, and waited.

“Okay,” Schmidt said. “So?”

Wilson sighed. “You were raised by a tribe of chimps, weren’t you, Hart?” he asked.

“I didn’t know I’d be taking a
science test
today, Harry,” Schmidt said, annoyed.

“You
said
it already,” Wilson said. “The ship was probably vaporized. Whoever did this to the
Polk
took the time to cut, slice and blast into molecules most of it. But they probably didn’t cart all the atoms off with them.”

Schmidt’s eyes widened. “A big cloud of vaporized
Polk,
” he said.

“You got it,” Wilson said, and the display changed to show a large, amorphous blob, tentacles stretching out from the main body.

“That’s the ship?” Schmidt asked, looking at the blob.

“I’d say yes,” Wilson said. “One of the extra scans I had Captain Coloma run was a spectrographic analysis of the local neighborhood. It’s not a scan we’d usually do.”

“Why not?” Schmidt asked.

“Why would we?” Wilson said. “Searching your immediate environment for molecule-sized bits of frigate isn’t a standard protocol. Spectrographic analysis is usually reserved for science missions where someone’s sampling atmospheric gases. Spaceships themselves typically don’t have to be concerned with gases unless we’re near a planet and we have to figure out how far out the atmosphere extends. And with systems we’ve already surveyed, all that information is already in the database. I’m guessing whoever did this probably knew all of that. They weren’t concerned that an invisible cloud of metallic atoms would give them away.”

“They didn’t think we’d see it,” Schmidt said.

“And normally they’d be right,” Wilson said, and pulled out the view to capture all the other debris fields. “None of the other debris fields show the same density of molecular particles, and what particles there are aren’t the same sorts of metals we use to make our ships.” He pulled the view in again. “So this is almost certainly what’s left of the
Polk,
and it was almost certainly intentionally attacked and methodically destroyed.”

“Which means that someone leaked the information,” Schmidt said. “This mission was meant to be secret.”

Wilson nodded. “Yes, but that’s not anything you and I have to worry about at the moment. We’re still looking for the black box. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that this narrows down considerably the volume of space we need to search.”

“So we go back to the first scan and start picking through those remaining bits of the
Polk,
” Schmidt said.

“We
could
do that,” Wilson said. “If we had a month.”

“This is where you make me look stupid again, isn’t it,” Schmidt said.

“No, I’m going to spare you this time because the answer isn’t obvious,” Wilson said.

“That’s a relief,” Schmidt said.

“To go back to your suggestion, even if we did go through the earlier scans, we’d be unlikely to come up with anything,” Wilson said. “Remember that the CDF wants the black box to be found only by its own people.”

“That’s why the black box is black,” Schmidt said.

“Not just black, but aggressively nonreflective,” Wilson said. “Covered with a fractal coating that absorbs most radiation that hits it and scatters the rest of it. Sweep it with a sensor scan and nothing comes back directly. From the point of view of a sensor array, it doesn’t exist.”

“All right, Harry Wilson, supergenius,” Schmidt said. “If you can’t see it and can’t sweep for it, then how do you find it?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Wilson said. “When I was thinking about the black box, my brain wandered to the phrase ‘black body.’ It’s an idealized physical object that absorbs every bit of radiation thrown at it.”

“Like you said this thing does,” Schmidt said.

“Sort of,” Wilson said. “The black box is not a perfect black body; nothing is. But it reminded me that any object in the real world that absorbed all the radiation thrown at it would heat up. And then I remembered that the black box came equipped with a battery to power its processor and inertial dampener. And that the battery is not one hundred percent efficient.”

Schmidt looked at Wilson blankly.

“It’s
warm,
Hart,” Wilson said. “The black box had a power source. That power source leaked heat. That heat kept it relatively warm long after everything else around it entropied itself into equilibrium.”

“The battery is dead,” Schmidt said. “Even if it was warm, it wouldn’t be anymore.”

“That depends on your definition of ‘warm,’” Wilson said. “The design of the black box means that it has some areas inside of it acting like insulators. Even if the battery’s dead, it’ll take longer for the black box to reach a temperature equilibrium with space than it would if it were a solid shard of metal. I don’t need it to be warm like the inside of this room, Hart. I just need it to be a fraction of a degree warmer than everything else around it.”

The display screen flickered and the ghostly blob of attenuated
Polk
molecules was replaced by a thermal map that was a deep blue black. Wilson gave the thermal map his attention.

“So you’re looking for something that’s ever so slightly above absolute zero,” Schmidt said.

“Space is actually a couple of degrees above absolute zero,” Wilson said. “Particularly inside a planetary system.”

“Seems like an irrelevant detail,” Schmidt said.

“And you call yourself a scientist,” Wilson said.

“No, I don’t,” Schmidt said.

“Good thing, then,” Wilson said.

“So what happens if it has entropied out?” Schmidt said. “If it’s the same temperature as everything else around it?”

“Well, then, we’re screwed,” Wilson said.

“I don’t love your bracing honesty,” Schmidt said.

“Ha!” Wilson said, and suddenly the image in the display pitched inward, falling vertiginously toward something that was invisible until almost the last second, and was an only slightly lighter blue-black than everything around it even then.

“Is that it?” Schmidt asked.

“Let me change the false color temperature scale,” Wilson said. The object, spherical, suddenly blossomed green.

“That’s the black box,” Schmidt said.

“It’s the right size and shape,” Wilson said. “If it’s not the black box, the universe is messing with us. There are some other warmer objects out there, but they’re not the right size profile.”

“What are they?” Schmidt asked.

Wilson shrugged. “Possibly chunks of the
Polk
with sealed pockets of air in them. Right now, don’t know, don’t care.” He pointed at the sphere. “This is what we came for.”

Schmidt peered closely at the image. “How much warmer is it than everything around it?” he asked.

“Point zero zero three degrees Kelvin,” Wilson said. “Another hour or two and we would never have found it.”

“Don’t tell me that,” Schmidt said. “It makes me retroactively nervous.”

“Science is built on tiny variances, my friend,” Wilson said.

“So now what?” Schmidt asked.

“Now I get to tell Captain Coloma to warm up the shuttle, and you get to tell your boss that if this mission fails, it will be because of her, not us,” Wilson said.

“I think I’ll avoid putting it that way,” Schmidt said.

“That’s why you’re the diplomat,” Wilson said.