by John Scalzi
“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 so
meone’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.
VII.
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 surrounded 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.”
