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

the other spheres. “What the Clarke is 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 Polk was, 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 Polk didn’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 Polk wanted 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 Polk is 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 rest of 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 test today, Harry,” Schmidt said, annoyed.
    “You said it already,” Wilson said. “The ship was probably vaporized. Whoever did this to the Polk took 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,”