John Scalzi - We Only Need the Heads

Wilson wasn’t under the impression that his sleight-of-hand encoding of the message into the image of the coffee would stay unnoticed forever. What he was hoping for was that it would stay encrypted long enough that Hart could do whatever he needed with the information before it got found out.

“Hopefully that won’t take too long,” Wilson said, to his coffee. His coffee was mute on the subject. Wilson slurped some of it and then called up the data he’d transferred from Vasily Ivanovich’s data card into his BrainPal. They were indeed entirely pedestrian reports on colony life, but Wilson had already found something important in there. He didn’t want to miss anything else. He suspected he didn’t have all that much time left to go through the data before he was ordered to delete all of it.

Schmidt didn’t know what strings Ambassador Abumwe had to pull to get her way, but she pulled them. Across the table from her and Schmidt were Anissa Rodabaugh, chief of the mission for the Bula negotiations, Colonel Liz Egan, the liaison between the Colonial Defense Forces and the Department of State, and Colonel Abel Rigney, whose exact position was not known to Hart but whose presence here was nevertheless slightly unsettling. The three of them eyed Abumwe coolly; she returned the favor. No one was paying attention to Schmidt, and he was fine with that.

“We’re here,” Egan said, to Abumwe. “You have five minutes before you and Ambassador Rodabaugh have to get back to it. So tell us why you so urgently needed to see us all.”

“You haven’t been entirely forthcoming with me about this wildcat colony on Wantji,” Abumwe said. Schmidt noted the clipped tone that Abumwe’s voice took on when she was especially irritated; he wondered if it was noticeable to anyone else at the table.

“In what way?” Egan asked.

“In that it’s not a wildcat colony at all, it’s an under-the-radar Colonial Defense Forces outpost,” Abumwe said.

This received about ten seconds of silence, with Rodabaugh, Egan and Rigney studiously not looking at one another. “I’m not entirely sure why you think that is,” Egan said.

“Are we going to waste the next five minutes with this sort of bullshit, Colonel?” Abumwe said. “Or are we actually going to talk about how this is going to affect our negotiations?”

“It’s not going to affect the negotiations at all-,” Rodabaugh said.

“Really,” Abumwe said, cutting her off. Schmidt noted the chagrin on Rodabaugh’s face at this, but she and Abumwe were technically of the same diplomatic rank, so there was little she could do about it. “Because, Anissa, I have a Bula sub-ambassador I’ve been talking to for the last day who I am almost entirely certain knows more about this so-called colony than I do. I think as a result I’m being led down a very short pier. I think when I get pushed off, the entire negotiation is going to go down with me. If I fail at a negotiation because of my own failures, I accept that. If I fail because I’m being screwed by my own side, that I will not accept.”

Colonel Rigney, who had been silent to this point, turned to Schmidt. “Your friend Harry Wilson’s on the Tubingen, ” he said, to Schmidt. “I just checked through my BrainPal. He’s the one who’s feeding you information.”

Schmidt opened his mouth, but Abumwe reached out to touch Schmidt on the shoulder. This as much as anything else shocked Schmidt into silence; he couldn’t remember another time Abumwe had physically touched him before. “If Hart or Harry Wilson have done anything, it’s been on my orders,” she said.

“You ordered him and Wilson to essentially spy on a Colonial Defense Forces mission,” Rigney said.

“I reminded them of their obligation to help me achieve our goals as diplomats,” Abumwe said.

“By spying on the Colonial Defense Forces mission,” Rigney repeated.

“I appreciate the attempt to run out the clock by distracting me into a side discussion, Colonel Rigney, but let’s not,” Abumwe said. “I repeat: We have a military mission on a Bula world. I’m almost certain the Bula we are negotiating with are aware of it.”

“What’s your proof of that?” Rodabaugh asked.

“Nothing hard,” Abumwe said. “But I know when people aren’t negotiating in good faith.”

“That’s it?” Rodabaugh said. “You have a feeling ? You’re dealing with an alien species, for Christ’s sake. Their whole psychology is entirely different.”

“And that doesn’t matter at all, because in fact we have an illegal military outpost on this alien species’ planet,” Abumwe said. “If I am wrong, then we lose nothing. If I am right, however, then we risk the failure of the entire process.”

“What do you want from us, Ambassador?” Egan asked Abumwe.

“I want to know what’s really going on,” Abumwe said. “It’s bad enough that I went into negotiations having to deal with the possibility that the Bula would discover we snuck a military ship into their territory to remove an attacked wildcat colony, but at least I could spin that if I had to. There is no way to spin a CDF ship coming to the aid of a covert military installation.”

“It wasn’t a covert military operation,” Rigney said, leaning forward.

This got Egan’s attention. “Are you really going to do this, Abel?” she asked, turning to Rigney.

“She already knows more than she should, Liz,” Rigney said. “I don’t think a little context is going to matter at this point.” He turned back to Abumwe. “It really is a wildcat colony,” he said.

“A wildcat colony with CDF soldiers in it,” Abumwe said. The skepticism in her voice was impossible to miss.

“Yes,” Rigney said. “Since the Conclave has restricted us and other unaffiliated species from colonizing, we’ve been dropping a few CDF members into wildcat colonies. The rest of the colonists don’t know. We modify their bodies to look and act like natural human bodies, but keep their BrainPals in. They record data and send it along occasionally. We recruit CDF members with a background in technical work so they usually end up being in control of their colonies’ communications systems.”

“To what end?” Abumwe asked.

“We want to see how the Conclave responds to wildcat colonies,” Rigney said. “Whether it sees them as a threat, whether they respond to them the same way as an official colony, and whether ultimately wildcat colonies-or colonies that give the appearance of being wildcat colonies-are a way we can keep expanding our presence without having a conflict with the Conclave.”

“And you thought colonizing a planet already claimed by another species was a smart thing to do,” Abumwe said.

Rigney spread his hands. “We don’t pick the planets,” he said. “We just put our people into the colony undercover.”

“How many of your people were on Wantji?” Abumwe asked.

“We typically put in a couple of people,” Rigney said. “Most wildcat colonies are small. We’ll put in one for every fifty colonists or so.” He turned to Schmidt. “How many did your friend Wilson wash up?”

Schmidt glanced over at Abumwe, who nodded. “Two, sir,” he said.

“That sounds about right,” Rigney said. He settled back in his chair.

“What do we do about this?” Abumwe asked.

“And by ‘we,’ you mean ‘you,’” Rigney said.

“Yes,” Abumwe said.

“We don’t do anything,” Egan said. “The Bula haven’t brought it up to us.”

“We’re not going to be the ones to bring it up to them,” Rodabaugh said. “If they do ask about the wildcat colony, then we tell them that as soon as we found out about it, we moved to remove them-so quickly that we didn’t ask permission first, so sorry. We’ll be out of there before then.”