“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?”