“This black box,” Schmidt said a few minutes later.

“What about it?” Wilson asked.

“Are you going to be able to find it?” Schmidt asked.

Wilson opened his eyes for this. “The answer to that depends on whether you want me to be optimistic or truthful,” he said.

“Truthful, please,” Schmidt said.

“Probably not,” Wilson said.

“I lied,” Schmidt said. “I want the optimistic version.”

“Too late,” Wilson said, and held out his hand as if he were cupping an imaginary ball. “Look, Hart. The ‘black box’ in question is a small, black sphere about the size of a grapefruit. The memory portion of the thing is about the size of a fingernail. The rest of it consists of the tracking beacon, an inertial field generator to keep the thing from floating down a gravity well, and a battery powering both of those two things.”

“Okay,” Schmidt said. “So?”

“So, one, the thing is intentionally small and black, so it will be difficult to find by anyone but the CDF,” Wilson said.

“Right, but you’re not lookingfor it,” Schmidt said. “You’re going to be pinging it. When it gets the correct signal, it will respond.”

“It will, if it has power,” Wilson said. “But it might not. We’re working on the assumption the Polkwas attacked. If it was attacked, then there was probably a battle. If there was a battle, then the Polkprobably got torn apart, with the pieces of it flying everywhere from the added energy of the explosions. It’s likely the black box probably spent all its energy trying to stay mostly in one place. In which case when we signal it, we’re not going to get a response.”

“In which case you’ll have to look for it visually,” Schmidt said.

“Right,” Wilson said. “So, again: small black grapefruit in a search area that at this point is a cube tens of thousands of kilometers on a side. And your boss wants me to find it and examine it before the Utche arrive. So if we don’t locate it within the first half hour after the skip, we’re probably screwed.” He leaned back and closed his eyes again.

“You seem untroubled by our imminent failure,” Schmidt said.

“No point hyperventilating,” Wilson said. “And anyway, I didn’t say we willfail. It’s just more likely than not. My job is to increase the odds of us succeeding, which is what I was doing before your labored breathing started to distract me.”

“So what’s my job?” Schmidt asked.

“Your job is to go to Captain Coloma and tell her what things I need, the list of which I just sent to your PDA,” Wilson said. “And do it charmingly, so that our captain feels like a valued part of the process and not like she’s being ordered around by a CDF field tech.”

“Oh, I see,” Schmidt said. “I get the hard part.”

“No, you get the diplomaticpart,” Wilson said, cracking open an eye. “Rumor has it diplomacy is a thing you’ve been trained to do. Unless you’d like meto go talk to her while youfigure out a protocol for searching a few million cubic kilometers of space for an object the size of a child’s plaything.”

“I’ll just go ahead and go talk to the captain, then,” Schmidt said, picking up his PDA.

“What a marvelous idea,” Wilson said. “I fully endorse it.” Schmidt smiled and left the lounge.

Wilson closed his eyes again and focused once more on his own problem.

Wilson was more calm about the situation than Schmidt was, but that was in part to keep his friend on the right side of useful. Hart could be twitchy when stressed.

In fact, the problem was troubling Wilson more than he let on. One scenario he didn’t tell Hart about at all was the one where the black box didn’t exist. The classified information that Wilson had included preliminary scans of the chunk of space that the Polkwas supposed to have been in; the debris field was almost nonexistent, meaning that either the ship was attacked with such violence that it had vaporized, or whoever attacked the Polktook the extra time to atomize any chunk of debris larger than half a meter on a side. Either way it didn’t look good.

If it hadsurvived, Wilson had to work on the assumption that its battery was thoroughly drained and that it was floating, quiet and black, out in the vacuum. If the Polkhad been nearer to one of the Danavar system planets, he might have a tiny chance of picking up the box visually against the planet’s sphere, but its skip position into the Danavar system was sufficiently distant from any of that system’s gas giants that even that “Hail Mary” approach was out of the question.

So: Wilson’s task was to find a dark, silent object that might not exist in a debris field that mostly didn’t exist, in a cube of space larger than most terrestrial planets.

It was a pretty problem.

Wilson didn’t want to admit how much he was enjoying it. He’d had any number of jobs over his two lifetimes—from corporate lab drone to high school physics teacher to soldier to military scientist to his current position as field tech trainer—but in every one of them, one of his favorite things to do was to whack away at a near insoluble problem for hours on end. With the exception that this time he had rather fewer hours to whack away on this problem than he’d like, he was in his element.

The real problem here is the black box itself,Wilson thought, calling up what information he had on the objects. The idea of a travel data recorder had been around for centuries, and the phrase “black box” got its cachet with terrestrial air travel. Ironically, almost none of the “black boxes” of those bygone days were actually black; they were typically brightly colored to be made easy to find. The CDF wanted their black boxes found, but only by the right people. They made them as black as they could.

“Black box, black hole, black body,” Wilson said to himself.

Hey.

Wilson opened his eyes and sat up.

His BrainPal pinged him; it was Schmidt. Wilson opened the connection. “How’s diplomacy?” he asked.

“Uh,” Schmidt said.

“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.”