The Human Division (6 page)

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.

PART TWO

VI.

“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.”