“Well, I sure as hell don’t want to have to come back here again,” he said, to Suel and Dorb.

Suel and Dorb stared at him for a moment, and then made a sound that Wilson’s BrainPal translated as [laughter].

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, the Utche shuttle left the Clarkewith Abumwe and her diplomatic team aboard. From the shuttle bay control room, Coloma, Wilson and Schmidt watched it depart.

“Thank Christ that’s over,” Coloma said, as it cleared the bay. She pivoted to return to the bridge, without looking at Wilson or Schmidt.

“The ship’s not really secure, is it,” Wilson said, to her back.

“Of course it’s not,” she said, turning back. “The only true thing I said was that we had no deaths, although it’s probably more accurate to say that we don’t have any deaths yet. As for the rest of it, our life support and energy systems are hanging by a thread, most of the other systems are dead or failing, and it will be a miracle if the Clarkeever moves from this spot under her own power. And to top it all off, some idiot destroyed our shuttle.”

“Sorry about that,” Wilson said.

“Hmmm,” Coloma said. She started to turn again.

“It was a very great thing, to risk your ship for the Utche,” Wilson said. “I didn’t ask you to do that. That came from you, Captain Coloma. It’s a victory, if you ask me. Ma’am.”

Coloma paused for a second and then walked off, with no response.

“I don’t think she likes me much,” Wilson said, to Schmidt.

“Your charm is best described as idiosyncratic,” Schmidt said.

“So why do youlike me?” Wilson said.

“I don’t think I’ve actually ever admitted to liking you,” Schmidt said.

“Now that you mention it, I think you may be right,” Wilson said.

“You’re not boring,” Schmidt said.

“Which is what you like most about me,” Wilson said.

“No, boring is good,” Schmidt said, and waved his hand around the shuttle bay. “This is the shit that’s going to kill me.”

XI.

Colonel Abel Rigney and Colonel Liz Egan sat in a hole-in-the-wall commissary at Phoenix Station, eating cheeseburgers.

“These are fantastic cheeseburgers,” Rigney said.

“They’re even better when you have a genetically-engineered body that never gets fat,” Egan said. She took another bite of her burger.

“True,” Rigney said. “Maybe I’ll have another.”

“Do,” Egan said. “Test your metabolism.”

“So, you read the report,” Rigney said to Egan between his own bites.

“All I do is read reports,” Egan said. “Read reports and scare midlevel bureaucrats. Which report are we talking about?”

“The one on the final round of negotiations with the Utche,” Rigney said. “With the Clarke,and Ambassador Abumwe and Lieutenant Wilson.”

“I did,” Egan said.

“What’s the final disposition of the Clarke?” Rigney asked.

“What did you find out about those missile fragments?” Egan asked.

“I asked you first,” Rigney said.

“And I’m not in the second grade, so that tactic doesn’t work with me,” Egan said, and took another bite.

“We took a chunk of missile your dockworkers fished out of the Clarkeand found a part number on it. The missile tracks back to a frigate called the Brainerd. This particular missile was reported launched and destroyed in a live-fire training exercise eighteen months ago. All the data I’ve seen confirms the official story,” Rigney said.

“So we have ghost missiles being used by mystery ships to undermine secret diplomatic negotiations,” Egan said.

“That’s about the size of it,” Rigney said. He set down his burger.

“Secretary Galeano isn’t going to be very pleased that one of our own missiles was used to severely damage one of her department’s ships,” Egan said.

“That’s all right,” Rigney said. “My bosses aren’t very pleased that a mole in the Department of State told whoever was using our own missiles against your ship where that ship was going to be and with whom it was negotiating.”

“You have evidence of that?” Egan asked.

“No,” Rigney said. “But we have pretty good evidence that the Utche sprung no leaks. The process of elimination applies from there.”

“I’d like to see that evidence about the Utche,” Egan said.

“I’d like to show it to you,” Rigney said. “But you have a mole problem.”

Egan looked at Rigney narrowly. “You better smile when you say that, Abel,” she said.

“To be clear,” Rigney said, “I would—and have,you’ll recall from our combat days—trust you with my life. It’s not you I’m worried about. It’s everyone else in your department. Someone with a high enough security clearance to know about the Utche talks is engaging in treason, Liz. Selling us out to our enemies. Which enemies, we don’t know. But our friendsdon’t blow up one of our ships and try to go after a second.”

Egan said nothing to this, choosing to stab a fry into ketchup instead.

“Which brings us back to the Clarke,” Rigney said. “How is the ship?”

“We’re trying to decide which will cost less, a complete rehaul or scrapping it and building a new ship,” Egan said. “If we scrap it, at the very least we recoup the salvage value.”

“That bad,” Rigney said.

“The CDF makes excellent ship-to-ship missiles,” Egan said. “Why do you ask?”

“For a B-team, Abumwe and her team were pretty impressive, don’t you think?” Rigney said.

“They did all right,” Egan said.

“Really,” Rigney said, and held up a hand to start ticking off points on his fingers. “Wilson and Schmidt develop a new protocol for locating powerless CDF black boxes and retrieve data revealing what happened to the Polk. Then Wilson takes multiple spacewalks clad only in a CDF combat unitard and discovers a plan to destroy the Utche diplomatic mission with our missiles. He destroys four of those missiles and then Captain Coloma sacrifices her own ship to make sure the last missile doesn’t hit the Utche. Coloma then flat-out lies to the Utche about the state of her ship to make sure Abumwe has a shot at the negotiations, and Abumwe basically strong-arms the Utche—the Utche—into completing their negotiations. Which they do,with only a day’s preparation.”

“They did all right,” Egan said again.

“What more would you likethem to do?” Rigney asked. “Walk on water?”

“Where is this going, Abel?” Egan asked.

“You said the most notable negotiation these folks did before this was another situation where they were forced to think on their feet and improvise,” Rigney said. “Has it occurred to you that the reason Abumwe and her people are on your B-list is not because they’re not good at what they do, but because you’re not putting them in the right situations?”

“We didn’t know these negotiations were going to be the ‘right’ situation,” Egan said.

“No, but now you know what arethe right situations for them,” Rigney said. “High-risk, high-reward situations where the path to success isn’t laid out but has to be cut by machetes through a jungle filled with poison toads.”

“The poison toads are a nice touch,” Egan said, reaching for another french fry.

“You see what I’m getting at,” Rigney said.

“I do,” Egan said. “But I’m not entirely sure I’m going to be able to convince the secretary that a bunch of B-listers is who she wants for high-risk, high-reward missions.”

“Not all of them,” Rigney said. “Just the ones where the usual diplomatic bullshit won’t work.”

“Why do you care?” Egan said. “You seem awfully passionate about a bunch of people you had no idea existed just a week ago.”

“You say it yourself every time you scare your State Department middle managers,” Rigney said. “We’re running out of time. We don’t have the Earth anymore, and we need more friends than we’ve got if we’re going to survive. Part of that can be something like the Clarkecrew already is—a fire team we parachute in when nothing else is working.”