We Only Need the Heads

by John Scalzi

  “Team one here,” said Blaine Givens, the team leader. “I’ve got nothing but burned huts and dead bodies.”

  “Team two here,” said Muhamad Ahmed. “I’ve got the same.”

  “Team three,” said Janet Mulray. “More of the same. Whatever happened here isn’t happening now.” The three other teams reported the same.

  “Anybody finding survivors?” Lee asked. Responses came in: None so far. “Keep looking,” she said.

  “I need to get to the colony HQ,” Wilson said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Lee nodded and moved her team forward.

  “I thought we weren’t colonizing anymore,” Jefferson said to Wilson as they moved into the colony. “The aliens told us they’d vaporize any planet we colonized.”

  “Not ‘the aliens,’” Wilson said. “The Conclave. There’s a difference.”

  “What’s the difference?” Jefferson asked.

  “There are about six hundred different alien races we deal with,” Wilson said. “Maybe two-thirds of them are in the Conclave. The rest of them are like us, unaffiliated.” He routed around a dead colonist who lay, charred, in the path.

  “And what does that mean, sir?” Jefferson asked, routing around the same body but letting his eyes linger on it.

  “It means they’re like us,” Wilson said. “If they colonize, the Conclave will blast the crap out of them, too.”

  “But this is a colony,” Jefferson said, turning his eyes back to Wilson. “Our colony.”

  “It’s a wildcat colony,” Wilson said. “It’s not sanctioned by the Colonial Union. And this is someone else’s planet anyway.”

  “The Conclave’s?” Jefferson asked.

  Wilson shook his head. “No, the Bula. Another group of aliens entirely.” He motioned at the burned-out huts and sheds around them. “When these guys headed here, they were on their own. No support from the CU. And no defense, either.”

  “So not our colony,” Jefferson said.

  “No,” Wilson said.

  “Will the aliens see it that way, sir?” Jefferson asked. “Either group, I mean.”

  “Since we’d be screwed either way if they didn’t, let’s hope so,” Wilson said. He looked up and saw that he and Jefferson had gotten off the pace of Lee. “Come on, Jefferson.” He jogged to catch up with the platoon leader.

  Two minutes later, Wilson and Lee’s squad were in front of a partially collapsed Quonset hut. “I think this is it,” Lee said, to Wilson. “The HQ, I mean.”

  “How do you figure?” Wilson said.

  “Largest building inside the colony proper,” Lee said. “Have to have some place for town meetings.”

  “I can’t argue with that logic,” Wilson said, and looked at the hut, concerned about its stability. He looked over at Lee and her squad.

  “After you, Lieutenant,” Lee said. Wilson sighed and pried open the door to the hut.

  Inside the hut were two bodies and a whole lot of mess.

  “Looks like something’s been at them,” Lee said, tapping one with a foot. Wilson saw Jefferson, looking at the body, turn a sicklier shade of green than he already was.

  “How long have they been dead, do you think?” Wilson asked.

  Lee shrugged. “Between the time they sent the distress call and we got here? Couldn’t be less than a week.”

  “Since when do wildcat colonies report back?” Wilson asked.

  “I just go where they tell me, Lieutenant,” Lee said. She motioned to Jefferson and pointed at one of the bodies. “Check that body for an ID chip. Colonists sometimes put them in so they can keep track of each other.”

  “You want me to go through the body?” Jefferson asked, clearly horrified.

  “Ping it,” Lee said, impatiently. “Use your BrainPal. If there’s a chip, it’ll respond.”

  Wilson turned away from Lee and Jefferson’s truly compelling discussion and headed farther into the hut. The bodies had been in an open area that he suspected, true to Lee’s hunch, was used for colony gatherings. Farther in were a set of what used to be cubicles and a small enclosed room.

  The cubicles were a shattered mess; the room, from the outside, at least, looked intact. Wilson was hoping the colony’s computing and communications hardware were in there.

  The room door was locked. Wilson jiggled the door handle a couple of times to be sure, then looked at the other side of the door. He pulled out his multipurpose tool, formed it into a crowbar and pulled the pins out of the door hinges. He set the door aside and looked into the room.

  Every piece of equipment had been hammered into oblivion.

  “Crap,” Wilson said to himself. He went into the room anyway to see if anything was salvageable.

  “Find anything?” Lee asked a few minutes later, appearing by the door.

  “If someone likes puzzles, they could have fun with this,” Wilson said. He stood up and gestured to the remains of the equipment.

  “So nothing you can use,” Lee said.

  “No,” Wilson said. He bent down and grabbed a piece of debris and held it out for Lee to take. “That’s supposed to be the memory core. It’s been hammered out of usability. I’ll take it back and try to get something out of it anyway, but I wouldn’t be holding out hope.”

  “Maybe some of the colonists’ computers and handhelds will have something,” Lee said. “I’ll have my people collect them.”

  “That would be nice,” Wilson said. “Although if everything tied through this central server, it’s possible everything got wiped before this got broken up.”

  “It wasn’t just destroyed in the fighting,” Lee said.

  Wilson shook his head and motioned to the wreckage. “Locked room. No other damage to this part of the hut. And it looked to me like the damage here was methodical. Whoever did it didn’t want what was stored on it to get captured.”

  “But you said the door was locked,” Lee said. “Whoever ran over this place didn’t stop to check the computer.”

  “Yeah,” Wilson said, and then looked over at Lee. “What about you? Get anything off the bodies?”

  “Yeah, once Jefferson figured out what he was doing,” Lee said. “Martina and Vasily Ivanovich. In the absence of any other evidence to the contrary, I’ve nominated them as the two who ran the computers here. I’m having the teams check the other bodies for ID chips, too.”

  “Anything else but their names?” Wilson asked.

  “The usual biometric data,” Lee said. “I pinged the Tub to see if there was anything in its databases, but there wasn’t anything. I wasn’t expecting there to be, unless they happened to be ex-CDF.”

  “Just two more idiots on a spectacularly ill-advised colonization attempt,” Wilson said.

  “With about a hundred and fifty other idiots,” Lee said.

  “And thus the Colonial Union is infinitesimally smarter,” Wilson said. Lee snorted.

  In the distance came the sound of someone retching. Lee craned back to look. “Oh, look, it’s Jefferson,” she said. “He’s popped.”

  Wilson got up to look. “That took a little bit longer than I expected,” he said.

  “He’s been driving us all a little crazy with the gung ho thing,” Lee said.

  “He’s new,” Wilson said.

  “Hopefully it wears off,” Lee said, “before the rest of us kill him.”

  Wilson smiled at this and then threaded back through the mess to Jefferson.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. He was kneeling by the body of the late Vasily Ivanovich, a puddle of sick off to his side. His other two fire team members had found some other place to be.

  “You’re hanging out near two partially decomposed, partially eaten bodies,” Wilson said. “Being sick is a perfectly rational response.”

  “If you say so,” Jefferson said.

  “I do say so,” Wilson said. “My first mission, I almost wet myself. Throwing up is fine.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Jefferson said.

  Wilson patted J
efferson on the back and glanced over at Vasily Ivanovich. The man was a mess, bloated and with a significant amount of his abdomen chewed away by scavengers. From his vantage point, Wilson could see into the gnawed-on remains of Ivanovich’s digestive system.

  Inside of which something glinted.

  Wilson frowned. “What is that?” he said.

  “What is what, sir?” Jefferson asked.

  Wilson ignored him and looked closer and then, after a minute, thrust his glove into what remained of Ivanovich’s stomach.

  Jefferson gagged but didn’t have anything else to throw up, so instead he stared openly at the small, glittery thing in Wilson’s gore-coated hand. Wilson delicately picked out the thing with his other hand and held it up in the light.

  “What is that?” Jefferson asked.

  “It’s a data card,” Wilson said.

  “What was it doing in his stomach?” Jefferson asked.

  “I have no idea,” Wilson said, and then turned his head. “Lee!” he shouted.

  “What?” Lee shouted back from the other side of the hut.

  “Have your people look for a functioning PDA and bring it to me immediately,” he said. “One that takes data cards.”

  Shortly thereafter, Wilson had jammed the data card into a handheld and connected his BrainPal to the computer.

  “Why would he swallow a data card?” Lee asked, as she watched Wilson.

  “He wanted to keep the data out of enemy hands,” Wilson said. He was simultaneously going through the file hierarchy on the data card.

  “That’s why he destroyed the computer and communications equipment,” Lee said.

  “I’d have more answers for you if you let me actually concentrate on what I’m doing,” Wilson said. Lee shut up, slightly annoyed. Wilson ignored this, closed his eyes and focused on his data.

  Several minutes later, Wilson opened his eyes and looked at Ivanovich with something that approached wonder.

  Lee noticed. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

  Wilson looked up at Lee blankly, and then back to Ivanovich, and then at the body of Martina Ivanovich.

  “Wilson,” Lee said.

  “I think we better take back these bodies,” Wilson said.

  “Why?” Lee asked, looking at the corpses.

  “I’m not sure I can tell you,” Wilson said. “I don’t think you have the clearance.”

  Lee looked back at Wilson, annoyed.

  “It’s not about you,” Wilson assured her. “I’m pretty confident I don’t have the clearance either.”

  Lee, not precisely satisfied, looked back at the Ivanoviches. “So you want us to haul these up to the Tub.”

  “You don’t have to bring all of them,” Wilson said.

  “Come again?” Lee said.

  “You don’t have to bring their entire bodies,” Wilson said. “Their heads will do just fine.”

  “You feel it, too, don’t you,” Abumwe said to Schmidt, during a break in negotiations. The two were in the conference room hallway, drinking the tea Schmidt had gotten them.

  “Feel what, ma’am?” Schmidt said.

  Abumwe sighed. “Schmidt, if you don’t want me to keep believing that you are entirely useless to me, then you have to actually be useful to me,” she said.

  Schmidt nodded. “All right,” he said. “There’s something not right about Sub-Ambassador Ting.”

  “That’s right,” Abumwe said. “Now tell me what that something not right is.”

  “I don’t know,” Schmidt said. He saw Abumwe get a look on her face and held up his hand peremptorily. This surprised Abumwe into silence. “Sorry,” Schmidt said, hastily. “I say I don’t know because I’m not sure what the cause of it is. But I know what the result is. She’s being too easy on us in the negotiations. We’re getting too many of the things we want from her. We’re getting something close to a rubber stamp.”

  “Yes,” Abumwe said. “I’d like to know why.”

  “Maybe she’s just a bad negotiator,” Schmidt said.

  “The Bula pulled out these parts of the negotiations specifically for more detailed attention,” Abumwe said. “This suggests they are not trivial to the Bula. The Bula also aren’t known for being pushovers in negotiations. I don’t think they’d put a poor negotiator in charge of this part of the process.”

  “Do we know anything about Ting?” Schmidt asked.

  “Nothing Hillary could find,” Abumwe said. “The Colonial Union files on diplomatic missions focus on the primary diplomats, not the secondary ones. I have her looking for more, but I don’t expect to find too much. In the meantime, what are your suggestions?”

  Schmidt took a small moment to internally register surprise that Abumwe was indeed asking for options from him, and then said, “Keep doing what we’re doing. We are getting what we want from her. The thing we have to worry about at this point is getting them too soon, and getting done before the Tubingen finishes her mission.”

  “I can come up with some reason to suspend negotiations until tomorrow,” Abumwe said. “I can ask for some more time to research some particular point. That won’t be difficult to do.”

  “All right,” Schmidt said.

  “On the subject of the Tubingen, any news from your friend?” Abumwe asked.

  “I sent him an encrypted note on the next skip drone to the ship,” Schmidt said.

  “You shouldn’t trust our encryption,” Abumwe said.

  “I don’t,” Schmidt assured her. “But I think it would have been suspicious for me to send him an unencrypted note, considering the mission. The note itself is innocuous blather, which contains a line that says, ‘It was like that time on Phoenix Station.’”

  “What does that mean?” Abumwe said.

  “Basically it means ‘Tell me if something interesting is going on,’” Schmidt said. “He’ll understand it.”

  “Do you want to explain to me how it is the two of you have your own little secret code?” Abumwe said. “Did you make it up together when you were six?”

  “Uh,” Schmidt said, uncomfortable. “It just sort of came about.”

  “Really,” Abumwe said.

  “Harry would see you pissed at me during some negotiation or another and came up with it as a way to let me know he was interested in knowing the details later,” Schmidt said, quickly. He looked away as he said it.

  “Are you actually that scared of me, Schmidt?” Abumwe said, after a second.

  “I wouldn’t say ‘scared,’” Schmidt said. “I would say I have a healthy respect for your working methods.”

  “Yes, well,” Abumwe said. “For the moment, at least, your terrified obsequiousness is not going to be useful to me. So stop it.”

  “I’ll try,” Schmidt said.

  “And let me know if you hear from your friend,” Abumwe said. “I don’t know what Sub-Ambassador Ting is up to, either. It’s making me uncomfortable. But I have a worry that somehow that wildcat colony on Wantji is involved. If it is, I want to know how before anyone else.”

  “You want me to do what?” asked Doctor Tomek. They had taken the entire bodies of the Ivanoviches after all, and both of them were now spread out on examination tables. Doctor Tomek was too much of a professional to register displeasure at the sight and smell of the decayed bodies, but she was not notably pleased with Lieutenant Wilson for bringing them into her medical bay unannounced.

  “Scan their brains,” Wilson said. “I’m looking for something.”

  “What are you looking for?” Tomek asked.

  “I’ll tell you if I find it,” Wilson said.

  “Sorry, I don’t work that way,” Tomek said. She glanced over to Lieutenant Lee, who had remained after her soldiers had hauled the Ivanoviches into the medical bay. “Who is this guy?” she asked, pointing at Wilson.

  “He’s temporarily replacing Mitchusson,” Lee said. “We’re borrowing him from a diplomatic mission. And there’s something else about him.”

  “What?”
Tomek asked.

  Lee motioned with her head to Wilson, who took that as his cue.

  “I’ve got top-level security clearance that allows me to order anyone on the ship to do what I want them to do,” Wilson said, to Tomek. “It’s left over from my last mission. They didn’t get around to revoking it from me.”

  “I’ve already complained to Captain Augustyn about it,” Lee said. “He agrees it’s a crock of shit but also that there’s nothing we can do about it right now. He’ll send a complaint with the next skip drone. Until then, you’ve got to do what he tells you.”

  “It’s still my medical bay,” Tomek said.

  “Which is why I’m asking you to do the scan,” Wilson said, and nodded at the body scanner tucked into a cubbyhole in the back of the medical bay. “I’ve serviced those, and have trained on them. I could do the scan myself. But you’d do it better. I’m not trying to shut you out, Doctor. But if what I’m looking for isn’t actually there, then it’s best for everyone if my paranoid delusions are kept to myself.”

  “And if it is there?” Tomek asked.

  “Then things begin to get really complicated,” Wilson said. “So let’s hope we don’t find it.”

  Tomek glanced back over to Lee, who shrugged. Wilson caught the substance of the shrug. Humor this idiot, it said. We’ll be rid of him soon enough. Well, that worked for him.

  Tomek walked over to the cubbyhole and retrieved the scanner and the reflection plate, then came back to the examining table that held Vasily Ivanovich. She donned gloves, gently lifted Ivanovich’s head and set the plate behind it.

  “Where’s the visual going?” Wilson asked. Tomek motioned with her head to the display above the examination table; Wilson turned it on. “Ready when you are,” he said. Tomek positioned the scanner, activated it and after a couple of seconds looked up at the display.

  “What the hell?” she asked, after a moment.

  “Lovely,” Wilson said, looking at the display. “And by ‘lovely,’ I mean ‘Oh, crap.’”

  “What is it?” Lee asked, coming over to get a better look at the thing Wilson and Tomek were looking at.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Wilson said. “We’ve all got one in our head.”