The Human Division #7: The Dog King by John Scalzi Read Free Book Online

Episode Seven: The Dog King
    “Don’t step on that,” Harry Wilson said to Deputy Ambassador Hart Schmidt, as the latter walked up to the shuttle that the former was working on. An array of parts and tools was splayed out on a work blanket; Schmidt was on the edge of it. Wilson himself had his arm shoved deep into an outside compartment of the shuttle. From the inside of the compartment, Schmidt could hear bumping and scraping.
    “What are you doing?” Schmidt asked.
    “You see tools and parts and my arm shoved inside a small spacecraft, and you really have to ask what I’m doing?” Wilson said.
    “I see what you’re doing,” Schmidt said. “I just question your ability to do it. I know you’re the mission’s field tech guy, but I didn’t know your expertise went to shuttles.”
    Wilson shrugged as best he could with his arm jammed inside a shuttle. “Captain Coloma needed some help,” he said. “This ‘new’ ship of hers is now the oldest active ship in the fleet, and she’s got the rest of the crew going through all its systems with a microscope. She didn’t have anyone to go over the shuttle. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I volunteered.”
    Schmidt backed up a step and looked over the shuttle. “I don’t recognize this design,” he said, after a minute.
    “That’s probably because you weren’t born when this thing was first put into service,” Wilson said. “This shuttle is even older than the Clarke . I guess they wanted to make sure we kept the vintage theme going.”
    “And you know how to fix these things how, exactly?” Schmidt asked.
    Wilson tapped his head with his free hand. “It’s called a BrainPal, Hart,” he said. “When you have a computer in your head, you can become an instant expert on anything.”
    “Remind me not to step inside that shuttle until someone actually qualified has worked on it,” Schmidt said.
    “Chicken,” Wilson said, and then smiled triumphantly. “Got it,” he said, extracting his arm from the shuttle compartment. In his hand was a small blackened object.
    Schmidt leaned forward to look. “What is that?”
    “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a bird nest,” Wilson said. “But considering that Phoenix doesn’t actually have native birds per se on it, it’s probably a nest for something else.”
    “It’s a bad sign when a shuttle has animal nests in it,” Schmidt said.
    “That’s not the bad sign,” Wilson said. “The bad sign is that this is the third nest I found. I think they may have literally hauled this shuttle out of a junkyard to give it to us.”
    “Lovely,” Schmidt said.
    “It’s never a dull day in the lower reaches of the Colonial Union diplomatic corps,” Wilson said. He set down the nest and reached for a towel to wipe the soot and grime from his hand.
    “And this brings us to the reason I came down to see you,” Schmidt said. “We just got our new mission assigned to us.”
    “Really,” Wilson said. “Does this one involve me being held hostage? Or possibly being blown up in order to find a mole in the Department of State? Because I’ve already done those.”
    “I’m the first to acknowledge that the last couple of missions we’ve had have not ended on what are traditionally considered high notes,” Schmidt said. Wilson smirked. “But I think this one may get us back on the winning track. You know of the Icheloe?”
    “Never heard of them,” Wilson said.
    “Nice people,” Schmidt said. “Look a little like a bear mated with a tick, but we can’t all be beautiful. Their planet has had a civil war that’s been flaring up off and on for a couple hundred years, since the king disappeared from his palace and one faction of his people blamed the other faction.”
    “Was it their fault?” Wilson said.
    “They say no,” Schmidt said. “But then they would, wouldn’t they. In any event, the king left no heir, his sacred crown went missing and apparently between those two things no one