The Human Division #1: The B-Team by John Scalzi Read Free Book Online Page A

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