The Human Division #1: The B-Team (5 page)

The discussion with Captain Coloma was not entirely pleasant. She demanded a rundown of the protocol used to locate the black box, which Wilson provided, quickly, his eye on the clock. Wilson suspected the captain hadn’t expected him to locate the black box within the time allotted to him and was nonplussed when he had, and was now trying to manufacture a reason not to let him at the shuttle. In the end she couldn’t manufacture one, although for security reasons, she said, she didn’t release the shuttle pilot. Wilson wondered, if something bad happened to the shuttle while it was in his possession, what good it would do to have a shuttle pilot on board the
Clarke
. But in this as in many things, he let it go, smiled, saluted, and then thanked the captain for her cooperation.

The shuttle was designed for transport rather than for retrieval, which meant that Wilson would have to do some improvisation. One of the improvisations would include opening the interior of the shuttle to the hard vacuum of space, which was a prospect that did not excite Wilson, for several reasons. He pored over the shuttle specifications to see whether the thing could handle such an event; the
Clarke
was a diplomatic rather than a military ship, which meant it and everything in it had been constructed in civilian shipyards and possibly on different plans from those of the military ships and shuttles Wilson had become used to. Fortunately, Wilson discovered, the diplomatic shuttle, while its interior was designed with civilian needs in mind, shared the same chassis and construction as its military counterparts. A little hard vacuum wouldn’t kill it.

The same could not be said for Wilson. Vacuum would kill him, although more slowly than it would anyone else on the
Clarke
. Wilson had been out of combat for years, but he was still a member of the Colonial Defense Forces and still had the genetic and other improvements given to soldiers, including SmartBlood, artificial blood that carried more oxygen and allowed his body to survive significantly longer without breathing than that of an unmodified human. When Wilson first arrived on the
Clarke,
one of his icebreaker tricks with the diplomatic staff had been holding his breath while they clocked him with a timer; they usually got bored when he hit the five-minute mark.

Be that as it may, there was a manifest difference between holding one’s breath in the
Clarke
’s lounge and staying conscious while airless, cold vacuum surrounding you as the air in your body was trying to burst out of your lungs and into space. A little protection was in order.

Which is how, for the first time in more than a dozen years, Wilson found himself in his standard-issue Colonial Defense Forces combat unitard.

“That’s a new look,” Schmidt said, smiling, as Wilson walked toward the shuttle.

“That’s enough out of you,” Wilson said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in one of those things,” Schmidt said. “I didn’t even know you had one.”

“Regulations require active-duty CDF to travel with a combat unitard even on noncombat postings,” Wilson said. “On the theory it’s a hostile universe and we should be prepared at all times to kill anyone we meet.”

“It’s an interesting philosophy,” Schmidt said. “Where’s your gun?”

“It’s not a
gun,
” Wilson said. “It’s an MP-35. And I left it in my storage locker. I don’t really anticipate having to
shoot
the black box.”

“A dicey risk,” Schmidt said.

“When I want a military assessment from you, Hart, I’ll be sure to let you know,” Wilson said.

Schmidt smiled again and then held up what he was carrying. “Maybe this will be to your liking, then,” he said. “CDF-issue hard connector with battery.”

“Thanks,” Wilson said. The black box was dead; he’d need to put a little power into it in order to wake up the transmitter.

“Are you ready to fly this thing?” Schmidt asked, nodding toward the shuttle.

“I’ve already plotted a path to the black box, and put it into the router,” Wilson said. “There’s also a standard departure routine. I’ve chained the departure routine to the predetermined path. Reverse everything on the way home. As long as I’m not required to actually try to pilot, I’ll be fine.”

What the hell?
Wilson thought. On his shuttle’s forward monitor, on which he had pumped up light source collection to see star patterns over the glare of his instrument panel, another star had become occluded. That was two in the last thirty seconds. There was some object in the path between him and the black box.

He frowned, powered the shuttle into motionlessness, and pulled up the data from the surveys he’d run on the
Clarke
.

He saw the object on the survey; another one of the debris chunks that had been ever so slightly warmer than the surrounding space. It was large enough that if the shuttle collided with it, there would be damage.

Looks like I have to pilot after all,
Wilson thought. He was annoyed with himself that he hadn’t applied his survey data to his shuttle plot; he now had to waste time replotting his course.

“Is there a problem?” Schmidt asked, voice coming through the instrument panel.

“Everything’s fine,” Wilson said. “Something in my way. Routing around it.” The survey heat data noted the object’s size as approximately three to four meters on a side, which made it considerably larger than anything that the standard scans had picked up, but not so large that it required a major change in pathing. Wilson created a new path that dropped the shuttle 250 meters below the object and resumed travel to the black box from there, and he inserted it into the navigational router, which accepted the change without complaint. Wilson resumed his journey, watching the monitors to see the object in his way occlude a few other stars as the shuttle moved relative to it.

The shuttle arrived at the black box a few moments later. Wilson couldn’t see it with his own eyes, but after he had first located it he’d run supplementary scans that fixed its location to within about ten centimeters, which was precise enough for what he was about to do. He fired up the final navigational sequence, which made a series of minute maneuvers. This took another minute.

“Here we go,” Wilson said, and commanded his unitard to wrap around his face, which it did with a snap. Wilson hated the feeling of the unitard’s face mask; it felt as if someone had tightly duct-taped his entire head. It was simply better than the alternative in this case. Wilson’s vision was totally blocked by his face mask; his BrainPal compensated by feeding him a visual stream.

That accomplished, Wilson commanded the shuttle to air out the interior. The shuttle’s compressors sprang to life, sucking the shuttle’s air back into its tanks. Three minutes later, the interior of the shuttle had almost as little open air in it as the space surrounding it.

Wilson cut off the shuttle’s artificial gravity, unstrapped himself from the shuttle pilot chair and very gingerly pushed off toward the shuttle door, stopping himself directly in front of it and gripping the guide handle on its side to keep himself from drifting. He pressed the door release, and the door slid into the wall of the shuttle. There was an almost imperceptible whisper as the few remaining free molecules of human-friendly atmosphere rushed out the open portal.

Still holding the guide handle, Wilson reached out into space—gently!—and after a second wrapped his fingers around an object. He pulled it in.

It was the black box.

Excellent,
Wilson thought, and released the guide handle to press the door button and seal the interior of the shuttle once more. He commanded the shuttle to start pumping air back into the cabin and to turn the artificial gravity back on—and nearly dropped the black box when he did. It was heavier than it looked.

After a minute, Wilson retracted his face mask and took a physically unnecessary but psychologically satisfying huge gulp of air. He walked back to the pilot’s chair, retrieved the hard connector and then spent several minutes looking at the box’s inscrutable surface, searching for the tiny hole he could plunge the connector into. He finally located it, lanced the box with the connector, felt it click into position, and waited the thirty required seconds for enough energy to transfer over and power up the black box’s receiver and transmitter.

With his BrainPal, he transmitted the encrypted signal to the black box. There was a pause, followed by a stream of information pushed into Wilson’s BrainPal fast enough that he almost felt it physically.

The last moments of the
Polk
.

Wilson started scanning the information with his BrainPal as quickly as he could begin opening the data.

In less than a minute, he confirmed what they already strongly suspected: that the
Polk
had been attacked and destroyed in the battle.

A minute after that, he learned that one escape pod had been launched from the
Polk
but that it appeared to have been destroyed less than ten seconds before the black box itself had been launched, cutting out its own data feed. Wilson guessed that the occupant of the escape pod would have been the mission ambassador or someone on her staff.

Three minutes after that, he learned something else.

“Oh shit,” Wilson said, out loud.

“I just heard an ‘Oh shit,’” Schmidt said, from the instrument panel.

“Hart, you need to get Abumwe and Coloma on the line, right now,” Wilson said.

“The ambassador’s in her preparatory briefings right now,” Schmidt said. “She’s not going to want to be interrupted.”

“She’s going to be a lot more upset with you if you don’t interrupt her,” Wilson said. “Trust me on this.”

“The
Polk
was attacked by what?” Abumwe said. She and Coloma were tied into a conference video, Coloma from her ready room and Abumwe from a spare conference room Schmidt had almost had to drag her into.

“By at least fifteen Melierax Series Seven ship-to-ship missiles,” Wilson said, talking into the pilot instrument panel and the small camera there. “It could have been more, because data started getting sketchy after enough systems failed. But it was at least fifteen.”

“Why does it matter what type of missiles destroyed the
Polk
?” Abumwe asked, irritated.

Wilson glanced over to the image of Captain Coloma, who looked ashen. She got it, at least. “Because, Ambassador, Melierax Series Seven ship-to-ship missiles are made by the Colonial Union,” Wilson said. “The
Polk
was attacked with our own missiles.”

“That’s not possible,” Abumwe said, after a moment.

“The data says otherwise,” Wilson said, choosing not to go on a rant about the stupidity of the phrase “that’s not possible,” because it would likely be counterproductive at this point.

“The data could be incorrect,” Abumwe said.

“With respect, Ambassador, the CDF has gotten very good at figuring out what things are being shot at them,” Wilson said. “If the
Polk
confirmed the missiles as being Melierax type, it’s because it was able to identify them across several confirming points, including shape, size, scan profile, thrust signature and so on. The likelihood of them not being Melierax Series Seven is small.”

“What do we know about the ship?” Coloma said. “The one that fired on the
Polk
.”

“Not a lot,” Wilson said. “It didn’t identify itself, and other than a basic scan the
Polk
didn’t spend any time on it. It was roughly the same size as the
Polk
itself, we can see that from its survey signature. Other than that, there’s not much to go on.”

“Did the
Polk
fire back on the ship?” Coloma asked.

“It got off at least four missiles,” Wilson said. “Also Melierax Series Seven. There’s no data on whether they hit their target.”

“I don’t understand,” Abumwe said. “Why would we attack and destroy one of our own ships?”

“We don’t know if it was one of our own ships,” Coloma said. “Just that it was our own missiles.”

“That’s right,” Wilson said, and raised his finger to rebut.