by John Scalzi
“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 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.
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.”
