Текст книги "The Human Division"

Автор книги: John Scalzi

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

“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 Clarkesent 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 Clarkehas 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 Clarkeis 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 Polkwas 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 Clarkeis 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 Polkwas, 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 Polkdidn’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 Polkwanted 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 Polkis 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 restof 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 testtoday, Harry,” Schmidt said, annoyed.

“You saidit already,” Wilson said. “The ship was probably vaporized. Whoever did this to the Polktook 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.”

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 coulddo 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 Polkmolecules 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 Polkwith 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 Clarkewas 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 shootthe 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 Polkhad been attacked and destroyed in the battle.

A minute after that, he learned that one escape pod had been launched from the Polkbut 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 Polkwas 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 Polkwas 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 Polkconfirmed 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 Polkdidn’t spend any time on it. It was roughly the same size as the Polkitself, we can see that from its survey signature. Other than that, there’s not much to go on.”

“Did the Polkfire 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.

“It’s possible that we sold the missiles to another race,” Coloma said. “Who then attacked us.”

“It’s possible, but there are two things to consider here,” Wilson said. “The first is that most of our weapon trades are for higher-end technology. Any one race who can make a spaceship can make a missile. The Melierax Series are bread-and-butter missiles. Every other race has missiles just like it. The second is that these are ostensibly secret negotiations. In order to hit us, someone had to know we were here.” Coloma opened her mouth. “And to anticipate the next question, we haven’t sold any Melierax missiles to the Utche,” Wilson said. Coloma closed her mouth and stared stonily.

“So we have a mystery ship targeting the Colonial Union with our own missiles,” Abumwe said.

“Yes,” Wilson said.

“Then where are they now?” Abumwe said. “Why aren’t weunder attack?”

“They didn’t know wewere coming,” Wilson said. “We were diverted to this mission at the last minute. It would usually take the Colonial Union several days at least to have a new mission in place. By which time these particular negotiations would have failed, because we weren’t there for them.”

“Someone destroyed an entire ship just to foul up diplomatic negotiations?” Coloma said. “This is your theory?”