John Scalzi - We Only Need the Heads

“It was caught early enough that Deputy Ambassador Zala was in no real danger,” Abumwe said. “She will be fine in a few days.”

“That’s good to hear,” Ting said. “Interesting how such a small part can threaten the health of an entire system.”

“I suppose it is,” Abumwe said.

Ting sat there for a moment, companionably silent, and then with a start grabbed the PDA her assistant had laid before her. “Well, let us begin, shall we. We don’t want our diplomatic system grinding to a halt because of us .”

The hand-tooled sign at the edge of the colony read, “New Seattle.” As far as Wilson could see, it was the only thing in the colony that hadn’t burned.

“Teams, report in,” Lee said. There were no teams other than her own near her; her voice was being carried by BrainPal. Wilson opened up the general channel in his own head.

“Team one here,” said Blaine Givens, the team leader. “I’ve got nothing but burned huts and dead bodies.”

“Team two here,” said Muhamad Ahmed. “I’ve got the same.”

“Team three,” said Janet Mulray. “More of the same. Whatever happened here isn’t happening now.” The three other teams reported the same.

“Anybody finding survivors?” Lee asked. Responses came in: None so far. “Keep looking,” she said.

“I need to get to the colony HQ,” Wilson said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Lee nodded and moved her team forward.

“I thought we weren’t colonizing anymore,” Jefferson said to Wilson as they moved into the colony. “The aliens told us they’d vaporize any planet we colonized.”

“Not ‘the aliens,’” Wilson said. “The Conclave. There’s a difference.”

“What’s the difference?” Jefferson asked.

“There are about six hundred different alien races we deal with,” Wilson said. “Maybe two-thirds of them are in the Conclave. The rest of them are like us, unaffiliated.” He routed around a dead colonist who lay, charred, in the path.

“And what does that mean, sir?” Jefferson asked, routing around the same body but letting his eyes linger on it.

“It means they’re like us,” Wilson said. “If they colonize, the Conclave will blast the crap out of them, too.”

“But this is a colony,” Jefferson said, turning his eyes back to Wilson. “Our colony.”

“It’s a wildcat colony,” Wilson said. “It’s not sanctioned by the Colonial Union. And this is someone else’s planet anyway.”

“The Conclave’s?” Jefferson asked.

Wilson shook his head. “No, the Bula. Another group of aliens entirely.” He motioned at the burned-out huts and sheds around them. “When these guys headed here, they were on their own. No support from the CU. And no defense, either.”

“So not our colony,” Jefferson said.

“No,” Wilson said.

“Will the aliens see it that way, sir?” Jefferson asked. “Either group, I mean.”

“Since we’d be screwed either way if they didn’t, let’s hope so,” Wilson said. He looked up and saw that he and Jefferson had gotten off the pace of Lee. “Come on, Jefferson.” He jogged to catch up with the platoon leader.

Two minutes later, Wilson and Lee’s squad were in front of a partially collapsed Quonset hut. “I think this is it,” Lee said, to Wilson. “The HQ, I mean.”

“How do you figure?” Wilson said.

“Largest building inside the colony proper,” Lee said. “Have to have some place for town meetings.”

“I can’t argue with that logic,” Wilson said, and looked at the hut, concerned about its stability. He looked over at Lee and her squad.

“After you, Lieutenant,” Lee said. Wilson sighed and pried open the door to the hut.

Inside the hut were two bodies and a whole lot of mess.

“Looks like something’s been at them,” Lee said, tapping one with a foot. Wilson saw Jefferson, looking at the body, turn a sicklier shade of green than he already was.

“How long have they been dead, do you think?” Wilson asked.

Lee shrugged. “Between the time they sent the distress call and we got here? Couldn’t be less than a week.”

“Since when do wildcat colonies report back?” Wilson asked.

“I just go where they tell me, Lieutenant,” Lee said. She motioned to Jefferson and pointed at one of the bodies. “Check that body for an ID chip. Colonists sometimes put them in so they can keep track of each other.”

“You want me to go through the body?” Jefferson asked, clearly horrified.

“Ping it,” Lee said, impatiently. “Use your BrainPal. If there’s a chip, it’ll respond.”

Wilson turned away from Lee and Jefferson’s truly compelling discussion and headed farther into the hut. The bodies had been in an open area that he suspected, true to Lee’s hunch, was used for colony gatherings. Farther in were a set of what used to be cubicles and a small enclosed room.

The cubicles were a shattered mess; the room, from the outside, at least, looked intact. Wilson was hoping the colony’s computing and communications hardware were in there.

The room door was locked. Wilson jiggled the door handle a couple of times to be sure, then looked at the other side of the door. He pulled out his multipurpose tool, formed it into a crowbar and pulled the pins out of the door hinges. He set the door aside and looked into the room.

Every piece of equipment had been hammered into oblivion.

“Crap,” Wilson said to himself. He went into the room anyway to see if anything was salvageable.

“Find anything?” Lee asked a few minutes later, appearing by the door.

“If someone likes puzzles, they could have fun with this,” Wilson said. He stood up and gestured to the remains of the equipment.

“So nothing you can use,” Lee said.

“No,” Wilson said. He bent down and grabbed a piece of debris and held it out for Lee to take. “That’s supposed to be the memory core. It’s been hammered out of usability. I’ll take it back and try to get something out of it anyway, but I wouldn’t be holding out hope.”

“Maybe some of the colonists’ computers and handhelds will have something,” Lee said. “I’ll have my people collect them.”

“That would be nice,” Wilson said. “Although if everything tied through this central server, it’s possible everything got wiped before this got broken up.”

“It wasn’t just destroyed in the fighting,” Lee said.

Wilson shook his head and motioned to the wreckage. “Locked room. No other damage to this part of the hut. And it looked to me like the damage here was methodical. Whoever did it didn’t want what was stored on it to get captured.”

“But you said the door was locked,” Lee said. “Whoever ran over this place didn’t stop to check the computer.”

“Yeah,” Wilson said, and then looked over at Lee. “What about you? Get anything off the bodies?”

“Yeah, once Jefferson figured out what he was doing,” Lee said. “Martina and Vasily Ivanovich. In the absence of any other evidence to the contrary, I’ve nominated them as the two who ran the computers here. I’m having the teams check the other bodies for ID chips, too.”

“Anything else but their names?” Wilson asked.

“The usual biometric data,” Lee said. “I pinged the Tub to see if there was anything in its databases, but there wasn’t anything. I wasn’t expecting there to be, unless they happened to be ex-CDF.”

“Just two more idiots on a spectacularly ill-advised colonization attempt,” Wilson said.

“With about a hundred and fifty other idiots,” Lee said.

“And thus the Colonial Union is infinitesimally smarter,” Wilson said. Lee snorted.

In the distance came the sound of someone retching. Lee craned back to look. “Oh, look, it’s Jefferson,” she said. “He’s popped.”