John Scalzi - Tales From the Clarke

“I have a crew member watching the door,” Wilson said. “They’ll let me know if one or more of them try to slip away. I’m also tracking their PDAs, which so far, at least, they don’t seem to separate themselves from. So far none of them show the slightest inclination to sneak off.”

“What we’re trying to decide now is what Colonel Rigney knows about this,” Coloma said. “He’s the one we’ve been dealing with for this mission. It seems impossible to me he’s not behind this charade.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Wilson said. “The Colonial Defense Forces have a long history of inborn sneakiness. It’s one of the things that got us in trouble with the Earth in the first place. It’s entirely possible someone above Rigney is pulling a fast one on him, too.”

“But it still doesn’t make any sense,” Balla said. “No matter who has dropped fake Earth diplomats here, we’re still not going to be selling this ship to anyone on Earth. This charade doesn’t add up.”

“There’s something we’re not getting,” Wilson said. “We might not have all the information we need.”

“Tell me where we can get more information,” Coloma said. “I’m open to suggestion.”

Coloma’s PDA pinged. It was Basquez. “We have a problem,” he said.

“Is this another ‘I think we have a potential energy flow’ kind of problem?” Coloma asked.

“No, this is a ‘Holy shit, we’re all definitely going to die a horrible death in the cold endless dark of space’ kind of problem,” Basquez said.

“We’ll be right down,” Coloma said.

“Well, this is interesting,” Wilson said, looking at the pinprick-sized object at the end of his finger. He, Coloma, Balla and Basquez were in engineering, beside a chunk of conduit and a brace of instruments Basquez used to examine the conduit. Basquez had shooed away the rest of his crew, who were now hovering some distance away, trying to listen in.

“It’s a bomb, isn’t it,” Basquez said.

“Yeah, I think it is,” Wilson said.

“What sort of damage could a bomb that size do?” Coloma said. “I can barely even see it.”

“If there’s antimatter inside, it could do quite a lot,” Wilson said. “You don’t need a lot of that stuff to make a big mess.”

Coloma peered at the tiny thing again. “If it was antimatter, it would have annihilated itself already.”

“Not necessarily,” Wilson said, still gazing at the pinprick. “When I was working at CDF Research and Development, there was a team working on pellet shot-sized antimatter containment units. You generate a suspending energy field and wrap it in a compound that acts like a battery and powers the energy field inside. When the power runs out, the energy field collapses and the antimatter connects with the wrapping. Kablam.”

“They got it to work?” Basquez asked.

“When I was there? No,” Wilson said, glancing over to Basquez. “But they were some very clever kids. And we were decoding some of the latest technology we’d stolen from the Consu, who are at least a couple millennia ahead of us in these things. And I was there a couple of years ago.” His gaze went back to the pinprick. “So they could have had time to perfect this little baby, sure.”

“You couldn’t take down the whole ship with that,” Balla said. “Antimatter or not.”

Wilson opened his mouth, but Basquez got there first. “You wouldn’t need to,” he said. “All you have to do is rupture the conduit and the energy inside would take it from there. Hell, you wouldn’t even need to rupture it. If this tore up the inside of the conduit enough, the disruption of the energy flow would be all you need to make it burst apart.”

“And that has the added advantage of making it look like an explosion based on material failure rather than an actual bombing,” Wilson said.

“Yeah,” Basquez said. “If the black box survived, it would only show the rupture, not the bomb going off.”

“Time this thing so it goes off right before a skip, when you’re feeding energy to the skip drive,” Wilson said. “No one would be the wiser.”

“Rigney said we needed to keep to a schedule,” Basquez said, to Coloma.

“Wait, you don’t think we planted this bomb, do you?” Balla asked.

Coloma, Wilson and Basquez were silent.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Balla said, forcefully. “It makes no sense at all for the Colonial Union to blow up its own ship.”

“It doesn’t make sense for the Colonial Union to put fake Earthlings on the ship, either,” Wilson pointed out. “And yet here they are.”

“Wait, what?” Basquez said. “Those diplomats aren’t from Earth? What the hell?”

“Later, Marcos,” Coloma said. Basquez lapsed into silence, glowering at this latest twist of events. Coloma turned to Wilson. “I am open to suggestions, Lieutenant.”

“I have no answers to give you,” Wilson said. “I don’t think any of us have any answers at this point. So I would suggest we try finding alternate means of acquiring answers.”

Coloma thought about this for a moment. Then she said, “I know how we can do that.”

“Everything’s ready,” Coloma said, to Wilson, via her PDA. Her words were being ported into his BrainPal so he’d be the only one to hear them. Wilson, on the floor of the shuttle bay with the fake Earthlings, glanced over to the shuttle bay control room and gave her a very brief nod. Then he turned his attention to the Earthlings.

“We’ve already seen the shuttle bay, you know, Harry,” Marlon Tiege said to Wilson. “Twice, now.”

“I’m about to show it to you in a whole new way, Marlon, I promise,” Wilson said.

“Sounds exciting,” Tiege said, smiling.

“Just you wait, ” Wilson said. “But first, a question for you.”

“Shoot,” Tiege said.

“You know by now that I enjoy giving you shit about the Cubs,” Wilson said.

“They would kick you out of the Cards fan club if you didn’t,” Tiege said.

“Yes, they would,” Wilson said. “I’m wondering what you would ever do if the Cubbies actually ever took the Series.”

“You mean, before or after my heart attack?” Tiege said. “I would probably kiss every woman I saw. And most of the men, too.”

“The Cubs won the Series two years ago, Marlon,” Wilson said.

“What?” Tiege said.

“Swept the Yankees in four. Final game of the series, the Cubs hurler pitched a perfect game. Cubs won a hundred and one games on the way to the playoffs. The Cubbies are world champions, Marlon. Just thought you should know.”

Coloma watched Marlon Tiege’s face and noted that the man’s physiognomy was not well suited to showing two emotions at once: utter joy at the news about the Cubs and complete dismay that he’d been caught in a lie. She couldn’t say, however, that she was not enjoying the spectacle of the man’s face trying to contain both at the same time.

“Where are you from, Marlon?” Wilson asked.

“I’m from Chicago,” Tiege said, regaining his composure.

“Where are you from most recently?” Wilson asked.

“Harry, come on,” Tiege said. “This is crazy.”

Wilson ignored him and turned to one of the women, Kelle Laflin. “Last year a hurricane smacked straight into Charleston,” he said, and watched her go pale. “You must remember.”

She nodded mutely.

“Great,” Wilson said. “What was the name they gave the hurricane?”

Coloma noted that Laflin’s face was already primed for dismay.

Wilson turned back to Tiege. “Here’s the deal, Marlon.” He pointed over to the control room. Tiege followed the vector of the point to see Captain Coloma sitting there, behind a console. “When I give the captain the signal, she’s going to start pumping air out of this shuttle bay. It’ll take a minute for that cycle to happen. Now, don’t worry about me, I’m Colonial Defense Forces, which means that I can hold my breath for a good ten minutes if I have to, and I also have my combat uniform on under my clothes at the moment. So I’ll be fine. You and your friends, however, will likely die quite painfully as your lungs collapse and vomit blood into the vacuum.”