“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 surrounding 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.”
“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.