John Scalzi - 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 faction could legitimately claim the throne, thus the two centuries of civil war.”

“See, this is why I can’t support monarchy as a system of government,” Wilson said. He reached down to start reassembling the portion of the shuttle he had taken apart.

“The good news is that everyone’s tired of it all and they’re all looking for a face-saving way to end the conflict,” Schmidt said. “The bad news is that one of the reasons they are trying to end the conflict is that they are thinking of joining the Conclave, and the Conclave won’t accept them as members unless there is a single government for the entire planet. And this is where we come in.”

“We’re going to help them end their civil war in order to join the Conclave?” Wilson asked. “That seems counterintuitive to our own agenda.”

“We’ve volunteered to mediate between the factions, yes,” Schmidt said. “We’re hoping that by doing so, we’ll generate enough goodwill that the Icheloe will choose an alliance with us, not the Conclave. That in turn will help us build alliances with other races, with an eye toward establishing a counterweight to the Conclave.”

“We tried that before,” Wilson said, reaching for a spanner. “When that General Gau fellow was putting the Conclave together, the Colonial Union tried to form an alternative. The Counter-Conclave.”

Schmidt handed him the spanner. “That wasn’t about building actual alliances, though,” he said. “That was about disrupting the Conclave so it couldn’t form at all.”

Wilson smirked at this. “And we wonder why no other intelligent race out there trusts the Colonial Union any further than they can throw us,” he said. He went to work with the spanner.

“It’s why this negotiation is important,” Schmidt said. “The Colonial Union got a lot of credibility with the Danavar negotiations. The fact we put one of our ships in the path of a missile showed a lot of alien races that we were serious about building diplomatic solutions. If we can be seen as good-faith negotiators and mediators with the Icheloe, we’re in a much better position going forward.”

“Okay,” Wilson said. He replaced the outside panel on the shuttle and began sealing it. “You don’t have to sell me on the mission, Hart. I’m going regardless. You just need to tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

“Well, so you know, Ambassador Abumwe isn’t going to be the lead on this mediation,” Schmidt said. “The ambassador and the rest of us will be acting in support of Ambassador Philippa Waverly, who has experience with the Icheloe and who is friendly with a Praetor Gunztar, who is acting as a go-between between the factions on the negotiating council.”

“Makes sense,” Wilson said.

“Ambassador Waverly doesn’t travel alone,” Schmidt said. “She’s a little quirky.”

“Okay,” Wilson said, slowly. The shuttle compartment was now completely sealed.

“And the important thing to remember here is that there are no small jobs on a diplomatic mission, and that every task is important in its own unique way,” Schmidt said.

“Hold on,” Wilson said, and then turned around to face Schmidt directly. “Okay, hit me with it,” he said. “Because with an introduction like that, whatever idiot thing you’re going to have me do has got to be good .”

“And of course, Praetor Gunztar, you remember Tuffy,” Ambassador Philippa Waverly said, motioning to her Lhasa apso, which stuck out its tongue and lolled it, winningly, at the Icheloe diplomat. Wilson held the leash attached to the dog’s collar. He smiled at Praetor Gunztar as well, not that it was noticed.

“Of course I do,” Praetor Gunztar exclaimed in a chittering burst duly translated by a device on his lanyard, and leaned toward the dog, which scampered with excitement. “How could I possibly forget your constant companion. I was worried that you were not going to be able to get him past quarantine.”