John Scalzi

Tales From the Clarke

“So, Captain Coloma,” Department of State Deputy Undersecretary Jamie Maciejewski said. “It’s not every starship captain who intentionally maneuvers her ship into the path of a speeding missile.”

Captain Sophia Coloma set her jaw and tried very hard not to crack her own molars while doing so. There were a number of ways she expected this final inquiry into her actions in the Danavar system to go. This being the opening statement was not one of them.

In Coloma’s head a full list of responses, most not in the least appropriate for the furtherance of her career, scrolled past. After several seconds, she found one she could use. “You have my full report on the matter, sir,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” Maciejewski said, and then indicated with a hand State Department Fleet Commander Lance Brode and CDF liaison Elizabeth Egan, who with Maciejewski constituted the final inquiry panel. “We have your full report. We also have the reports of your XO, Commander Balla, of Ambassador Abumwe, and of Harry Wilson, the Colonial Defense Forces adjunct on the Clarke at the time of the incident.”

“We also have the report of Shipmaster Gollock,” Brode said. “Outlining the damage the Clarke took from the missile. I’ll have you know she was quite impressed with you. She tells me that the fact that you managed to get the Clarke back to Phoenix Station at all is a minor miracle; by all rights the ship should have cracked in half from material stresses during the ship’s acceleration to skip distance.”

“She also says that the damage to the Clarke is extensive enough that repairs will take longer to make than it would take for us to just build an entire new Robertson-class diplomatic ship,” Maciejewski said. “It would possibly be more expensive to boot.”

“And then there is the matter of the lives you put at risk,” Egan said. “The lives of your crew. The lives of the diplomatic mission to the Utche. More than three hundred people, all told.”

“I minimized the risk as much as possible,” Coloma said. In the roughly thirty seconds I had to make a plan, she thought but did not say.

“Yes,” Egan said. “I read your report. And there were no deaths from your actions. There were, however, casualties, several serious and life-threatening.”

What do you want from me? Coloma felt like barking at the inquiry panel. The Clarke wasn’t supposed to have been in the Danavar system to begin with; the diplomatic team on it was chosen at the last minute to replace a diplomatic mission to the Utche that had gone missing and was presumed dead. When the Clarke arrived they discovered traps had been set for the Utche, using stolen Colonial Union missiles that would make it look as if the humans had attacked their alien counterparts. Harry Wilson-Coloma had to keep in check some choice opinions just thinking the name-took out all but one of the missiles by using the Clarke’s shuttle as a decoy, destroying the shuttle and nearly killing himself in the process. Then the Utche arrived and Coloma had no choice other than to draw the final missile to the Clarke, rather than have it home in on the Utche ship, strike it and start a war the Colonial Union couldn’t afford at the moment.

What do you want from me? Coloma asked again in her mind. She wouldn’t ask the question; she couldn’t afford to give the inquiry panel that sort of opening. She had no doubt they would tell her, and that it would be something other than what she had done.

So instead she said, “Yes, there were casualties.”

“They might have been avoided,” Egan said.

“Yes,” Coloma said. “I could have avoided them entirely by allowing the missile-a Colonial Union Melierax Series Seven-to hit the Utche ship, which would have been unprepared and unready for the attack. That strike would have likely crippled the ship, if it did not destroy it outright, and would have caused substantial casualties, including potentially scores of deaths. That seemed the less advisable course of action.”

“No one disputes your actions spared the Utche ship considerable damage, and the Colonial Union an uncomfortable diplomatic incident,” Maciejewski said.

“But there still is the matter of the ship,” Brode said.

“I’m well aware of the matter of the Clarke,” Coloma said. “It’s my ship.”

“Not anymore,” Brode said.

“Pardon?” Coloma said. She dug her fingernails into her palms to keep herself from leaping across the room to grab Brode by the collar.

“You’ve been relieved of your command of the Clarke,” Brode said. “The determination has been made to scrap the ship. Command has been transferred to the port crew that will disassemble it. This is all standard practice for scrapped ships, Captain. It’s not a reflection on your service.”

“Yes, sir,” Coloma said, and doubted that. “What is my next command? And what is the disposition of my staff and crew?”

“In part, that’s what this inquiry is about, Captain Coloma,” Egan said, and glanced over at Brode, coolly. “It’s regrettable that you had to learn about the disposition of your ship in this way, in this forum. But now that you do know, you should know what we’re going to decide is not what we think about what you did, but where we think you should go next. Do you understand the difference here?”

“With apologies, ma’am, I’m not entirely sure I do,” Coloma said. Her entire body was coated in a cold sweat that accompanied the realization that she was now a captain without a ship, which meant in a very real sense she was no longer a captain at all. Her body wanted to shiver, to shake off the clamminess she felt. She didn’t dare.

“Then understand that the best thing you can do now is to help us understand your thinking at every step in your actions,” Egan said. “We have your report. We know what you did. We want a better idea of the why.”

“You know the why,” Coloma said before she could stop, and almost immediately regretted it. “I did it to stop a war.”

“We all agree you stopped a war,” Maciejewski said. “We have to decide whether how you did it justifies giving you another command.”

“I understand,” Coloma said. She would not admit any defeat into her voice.

“Very good,” Maciejewski said. “Then let’s begin at the decision to let the missile hit your ship. Let’s take it second by second, shall we.”

The Clarke, like other large ships, did not dock with Phoenix Station directly. It was positioned a small distance away, in the section of station devoted to repair. Coloma stood at the edge of the repair transport bay, watching crews load into the work shuttles that would take them to the Clarke, to strip the ship of anything and everything valuable or salvageable before cutting down the hull itself into manageable plates to be recycled into something else entirely-another ship, structural elements for a space station, weapons or perhaps foil to wrap leftovers in. Coloma smiled wryly at the idea of a leftover bit of steak being wrapped in the skin of the Clarke, and then she stopped smiling.

She had to admit that in the last couple of weeks she’d gotten very good at making herself depressed.

In her peripheral vision, Coloma saw someone walking up to her. She knew without turning that it was Neva Balla, her executive officer. Balla had a hitch in her gait, an artifact, so Balla claimed, of an equestrian injury in her youth. The practical result of it was that there was no doubt of her identity when she came up on you. Balla could be wearing a bag on her head and Coloma would know it was her.

“Having one last look at the Clarke?” Balla asked Coloma as she walked up.

“No,” Coloma said; Balla looked at her quizzically. “She’s no longer the Clarke. When they decommissioned her, they took her name. Now she’s just CUDS-RC-1181. For whatever time it takes to render her down to parts, anyway.”

“What happens to the name?” Balla asked.

“They put it back into the rotation,” Coloma said. “Some other ship will have it eventually. That is, if they don’t decide to retire it for being too ignominious.”

Balla nodded, but then motioned to the ship. “Clarke or not, she was still your ship.”

“Yes,” Coloma said. “Yes, she was.”

The two stood there silently for a moment, watching the shuttles angle toward what used to be their ship.

“So what did you find out?” Coloma asked Balla after a moment.

“We’re still on hold,” Balla said. “All of us. You, me, the senior staff of the Clarke. Some of the crew have been reassigned to fill holes in other ship rosters, but almost no officers and none of those above the rank of lieutenant junior grade.”

Coloma nodded. The reassignment of her crew would normally come through her, but technically speaking they were no longer her crew and she no longer their captain. Balla had friends in the Department of State’s higher reaches, or more accurately, she had friends who were assistants and aides to the department’s higher reaches. It worked out the same, informationwise. “Do we have any idea why no one important’s been reassigned?”

“They’re still doing their investigation of the Danavar incident,” Balla said.

“Yes, but in our crew that only involves you and me and Marcos Basquez,” Coloma said, naming the Clarke’s chief engineer. “And Marcos isn’t being investigated like the two of us are.”

“It’s still easier to have us around,” Balla said. “But there’s another wrinkle to it as well.”

“What’s that?” Coloma asked.

“The Clarke’s diplomatic team hasn’t been formally reassigned, either,” Balla said. “Some of them have been added on to existing missions or negotiations in a temporary capacity, but none of them has been made permanent.”

“Who did you hear this from?” Coloma asked.

“Hart Schmidt,” Balla said. “He and Ambassador Abumwe were attached to the Bula negotiations last week.”

Coloma winced at this. The Bula negotiations had gone poorly, in part because the Colonial Defense Forces had established a clandestine base on an underdeveloped Bula colony world and had gotten caught red-handed trying to evacuate it; that was the rumor, in any event. Abumwe and Schmidt having anything to do with that would not look good for them.

“So we’re all in limbo,” Coloma said.

“It looks like,” Balla said. “At least you’re not being singled out, ma’am.”

Coloma laughed at this. “Not singled out, but being punished, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t know why we would be punished,” Balla said. “We were dropped into a diplomatic process at the last minute, discovered a trap, and kept the trap from snapping shut. All without a single death. And the negotiations with the Utche were successfully completed on top of that. They give people medals for less.”

Coloma motioned to what used to be the Clarke. “Maybe they were just very attached to the ship.”

Balla smiled. “It seems unlikely,” she said.

“Why not?” Coloma said. “I was.”

“You did the right thing, Captain,” Balla said, becoming serious. “I said so to the investigators. So did Ambassador Abumwe and Lieutenant Wilson. If they don’t see that, to hell with them.”

“Thank you, Neva,” Coloma said. “It’s good of you to say that. Remember it when they assign us to a tow barge.”

“There are worse assignments,” Balla said.

Coloma was about to respond when her PDA pinged. She swiped to her message queue and read the mail there. Then she shut down the screen, put the PDA away and returned her gaze to what used to be the Clarke.

Balla watched her captain for a moment. “You’re killing me over here,” she finally said.

“Remember when you said that there are worse assignments than a tow barge?” Coloma said, to her XO.

“Considering it’s the second to last thing I said, yes,” Balla said. “Why?”

“Because we may have just gotten one of those assignments,” Coloma said.

“The ship was the Porchester,” Colonel Abel Rigney said. “At least for its first thirty years of service, when it was a Hampshire-class corvette in the CDF. Then it was transferred to the Department of State and renamed the Ballantine, after an old secretary of the department. That was another twenty years of service as a courier and supply ship. It was decommissioned last year.”

Coloma stood on the bridge with Rigney and Balla and looked over the quiet banks of monitors. The atmosphere on the ship was thin and cold, befitting a ship that no longer had a crew or a purpose. “Any immediate reason for the decommissioning?” she asked.

“Other than age? No,” Rigney said. “She ran fine. Runs fine, as you’ll discover when you put her through her paces. She’s just old. There are a lot of klicks on this ship, and eventually being on her began to look like a hardship assignment.”

“Hmmm,” Coloma said.

“But it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it,” Rigney said, quickly, moving past the implied but unintentional insult he’d just offered Coloma. “If you’re new to space travel, and don’t have your own fleet of ships, then what you and I see as old and past its prime will look shiny and new. The folks from Earth who we are proposing to sell this ship to are going to look at this baby as their first step into the wider universe. It’s right about their speed.”

“So that’s my job,” Coloma said. “Take a hand-me-down and convince the rubes they’re getting something that’s top of the line.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, Captain,” Rigney said. “We’re not trying to deceive the folks from Earth. They know we’re not offering them the latest technology. But they also know they’re not trained and ready to handle our latest ships. The only real spacefaring tech they’ve had to this point are shuttlecraft working around the space station over their planet. We’ve handled everything else up to now.”

“So we’re giving them a ship with training wheels on it,” Coloma said.

“We prefer to think of it as that we’re offering them a classic piece of technology to learn on and build from,” Rigney said. “You know the Earth folks aren’t happy with the Colonial Union right now.”

Coloma nodded; that was common knowledge. And she couldn’t blame them. If she were from Earth and discovered that the Colonial Union had been using the entire planet as a farm for soldiers and colonists, she’d be pissed at it, too.

“What you probably don’t know is that the Earth folks aren’t just talking to us,” Rigney said. “The Conclave has been very aggressively courting them, too. It would be very bad for the Colonial Union if Earth decided to join the Conclave, and not just because we’d be fresh out of colonists and CDF. This ship is one of the ways we’re hoping to get back on their good side.”

“Then why are you selling it to them, sir?” Balla asked. “Why not just give it to them?”

“We’re already gifting the Earth folks lots of other technology,” Rigney said. “We don’t want to start looking like we’re offering reparations. And anyway, the governments of Earth are suspicious of us. They’re worried that we’re offering up Trojan horses to them. If we make them pay for this ship, they’re more likely to trust us. Don’t ask me about the psychology here. I’m just telling you what they tell me. We’re still giving it to them at a sharply reduced price, and mostly in barter. I think we’re selling it mostly for field corn.”

“We’re selling it to the Earth folks as a way to get our foot in the door,” Coloma said.

Rigney rolled his hand toward Coloma. “Precisely,” he said. “And so we come to you and your crew. It’s perfectly reasonable that you would see a temporary assignment to a decommissioned ship as punishment for what happened at Danavar. But in fact, Captain Coloma, Commander Balla, what we’re asking you to do is a task that’s of great importance to the Colonial Union. Your job is to highlight the ship, to make the Earth people feel that it’s going to be of benefit to them, answer all their questions and give them a positive experience with the Colonial Union. If you pull it off, you’ll be doing the Colonial Union a service. A very significant service. One that means you’ll be able to write your own ticket afterward.”

“I have your word on that, Colonel?” Coloma asked.

“No,” Rigney said. “But that’s my point. Sell this ship and you won’t need my word.”

“Understood,” Coloma said.

“Good,” Rigney said. “Now. Tour the ship, check out the systems, tell me what you need, and you’ll get it. But do it quickly. You have two weeks from today before the Earth delegation arrives to see what this ship can do. Be ready for them. Be ready for us.”

“Here’s the problem,” Marcos Basquez said, pointing to a series of tubes in the engine room of the ship. He was yelling over the din of his crew banging away at updates and repairs.

“I see tubes, Marcos,” Coloma said.

“You see power conduits,” Basquez said.

“And?” Coloma said.

“We have two types of engines on a spaceship,” Basquez said. “We got the conventional engines, which push us through normal space, and we got the skip drive, which punches holes in space-time. Both of them are powered from the same source, okay? These days, because we know what we’re doing, we can seat the engines and the skip drive in the same place. Fifty years ago, when this pile of shit was put together, we had to separate the two.” He pointed to the power conduits. “These are the conduits that send power to the skip drive from the engine.”

“All right,” Coloma said. “So what?”

“So they’re degraded and need to be replaced,” Basquez said.

“So replace them,” Coloma said.

Basquez shook his head. “If it were that easy, I wouldn’t be telling you about it. This engine design is half a century old. This ship was the last of its kind in service. There isn’t another ship out there with this engine design. They haven’t made replacement stock for this engine design in more than a decade.”

“You can’t replace the conduits because the replacement conduits don’t exist,” Coloma said.

“Right,” Basquez said.

“Power conduits are still being made,” Coloma said. “We had them all over the Clarke.”

“Right, but they’re not rated for this sort of power output,” Basquez said. “Trying to use the current standard conduit here would be like stuffing a Great Dane into a Chihuahua sweater.”

Coloma had to stop for a moment to take in the visual Basquez just offered. Then she said, “Would these conduits last through our mission? We’re only skipping to the Rus system and back.”

“There’s two ways of answering that,” Basquez said. “The first one is to say that these conduits probably won’t overload and rupture, or destroy this section of the ship, or rupture the hull, or kill everyone on board, including those important Earth visitors. The second one is that if you decide not to replace them, I hope you don’t mind if I do my work remotely, like from Phoenix Station.”

“What do you suggest?” Coloma asked.

“How much time do we have before we have to be under way?” Basquez asked.

“Twelve days,” Coloma said.

“We have two options,” Basquez said. “We comb through CDF and civilian shipyards looking for this size of conduit and hope they’re not as degraded as these are, or we commission some made from scratch from the shipyards, based on this specification, and hope they arrive in time.”

“Do both,” Coloma said.

“Belt and suspenders, very wise,” said Basquez. “This is the part where you send a note to that Rigney guy telling him to yell at people to get those parts here on time, right? I want a couple of days with them to make sure they have the capacity we’ll need.”

“I’ll do it on my way to my next meeting,” Coloma said.

“This is why I like working with you, Captain,” Basquez said, and then turned his attention to one of his engineers, who evidently needed yelling at.

Rigney promised to get the conduit specialists at the CDF shipyards on Phoenix Station on the job and told Coloma to have Basquez send the specs to him directly. Coloma smiled as she disconnected from her talk with Rigney. Civilian captains and ships were almost always prioritized below Colonial Defense Forces ships when it came time to allot materials and expertise; it was nice to be at the front of the line for once.

Coloma’s next meeting, in one of the ship’s tiny conference rooms, was with Lieutenant Harry Wilson.

“Captain,” Wilson said as she approached him. He saluted.

“Why do you do that?” Coloma asked him. She sat down at the conference room table.

“Ma’am?” Wilson said, lowering his arm.

“Why do you salute me?” Coloma asked. “You’re Colonial Defense Forces and I am not. You’re not required to salute civilian captains.”

“You still outrank me,” Wilson said.

“That’s not what you told me at Danavar, when you flashed your security clearance at me and ordered me to give you my shuttle,” Coloma said. “Which you then destroyed.”

“Sorry about that, ma’am,” Wilson said. “It was necessary at the time.”

“You still have that security clearance?” Coloma asked.

“I do,” Wilson said. “I think they forgot they gave it to me. I’m pretty harmless with it. I use it mostly to check box scores for baseball games back on Earth.”

“I understand you’ve just returned from being a hostage,” Coloma said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Wilson said. “An unfortunate incident with the Bula. We ended up with six of their ships planning to blow us out of the sky. Ambassador Abumwe was part of the diplomatic team that got us released. They’re still ironing out the details of the ransom, I believe. Letting us go early was a sign of good faith. They have other things to hold over us.”

“You certainly find yourself in the middle of a number of interesting incidents,” Coloma said.

“I wouldn’t mind not having that talent,” Wilson said.

“I have a job for you,” Coloma said. “I’m prepping this ship to display and then sell to a group of representatives from Earth. I need someone to be their guide and liaison while they are here on the ship. I want you to do it.”

“Seems to me you have an entire diplomatic corps you can call on to do that job,” Wilson said. “I’m a CDF tech specialist.”

“You’re from Earth,” Coloma said. “All the diplomats I could use are from the Colonial Union. My job is to make these people comfortable with the ship and with us. I think it would be useful to have someone here who speaks their language.”

“I might not speak their language,” Wilson said. “There are a couple hundred of them in service on Earth.”

“It’s an expression,” Coloma said, testily, and pulled out her PDA. “I meant someone who has a shared history with them and who can cogently describe the advantages of the Colonial Union to them. Your technical background will come in handy because that means you can explain details of the ship to them, which no normal diplomat could do. Also, the files I have on these representatives says that they are all from either the United States or Canada. I think you will be able to speak their language just fine.” She played her fingers across the PDA. “There. I’ve sent you their information.”

“Thank you,” Wilson said. “If you want me, I’m happy to serve in this role for you. I’m just surprised you want me. I was pretty sure I was on your shit list, Captain.”

“You were,” Coloma said. “You are. But help me with this and you’ll get off of it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wilson said.

“Good. Then we’re done here,” Coloma said. “You’re dismissed.”

“Of course,” Wilson said, and then saluted Coloma again.

“I already told you that wasn’t necessary,” Coloma said to Wilson.

“You put your ship in the path of a missile meant to kill members of an alien race, and kept the Colonial Union from having to fight a fight we’d have lost,” Wilson said. “That deserves a salute, ma’am.”

Coloma returned the salute. Wilson left.

Basquez got his conduits a day before departure and was not in the least happy about it. “We’ve barely got time to install them, much less test them,” Basquez said, through the PDA. “And I haven’t had time to update the engineering systems down here. We’re still working off of fifty-year-old stations. You need to ask your Rigney for a delay.”

“I already did and he already said no,” Coloma said. She was in the shuttle bay’s control room with Balla and Wilson, waiting for the arrival of the Earth diplomats. “They’ve got these people on a tight schedule.”

“His precious schedule will be disrupted if we blow the hell up,” Basquez said.

“Is that really going to be a problem?” Coloma said.

There was a pause on the other end of the PDA. “No,” Basquez admitted. “I did a preliminary test of their throughput when I unpacked them. They should hold up.”

“It will take us three days to get to skip distance,” Coloma said. “That should be more than enough time to do your tests.”

“It would be better to do the tests here in the dock,” Basquez said.

“I’m not disagreeing with you, Marcos,” Coloma said. “But it’s not up to us.”

“Right,” Basquez said. “I’ll have these bastards installed in about six hours, and I’ll run a few more tests off the engineering stations. If I can, I’ll update the stations with new software tomorrow. It might give us more accurate readings.”

“Fine,” Coloma said. “Let me know.” She ended the discussion.

“Problems?” Balla asked her.

“Other than Basquez being paranoid, no,” Coloma said.

“It’s not a bad thing for an engineer to be paranoid,” Balla said.

“I prefer them that way,” Coloma said. “Just not when I’m busy with other things.”

“The shuttle is twenty klicks out and slowing,” Wilson said. “I’m going to purge atmosphere and open the doors.”

“Do it,” Coloma said. Wilson nodded and communicated directly with the shuttle bay systems with the BrainPal computer in his head. There was a chugging sound as the bay reclaimers sucked in the air and stored it for rerelease. When the bay was sufficiently airless, Wilson cracked up the bay doors. The shuttle hovered silently outside.

“Here come the Earthlings,” Wilson said.

The shuttle landed. Wilson closed the doors and reintroduced the atmosphere; when it was back, the three of them filed out to wait for the shuttle door to open and disgorge its passengers.

To Coloma’s eye they did not seem especially impressive: three men and two women, all middle-aged and homogeneous in appearance and attitude. She introduced herself, Balla and Wilson; the leader of the Earth contingent introduced himself as Marlon Tiege and likewise announced his team, fumbling over the names of two of them. “Sorry,” he said. “We’ve had a long journey.”

“Of course,” Coloma said. “Lieutenant Wilson will be your liaison while you are here; he’ll be more than happy to show you your quarters. We’re on standard universal time on this ship, and we’re scheduled to depart from Phoenix Station at 0530 tomorrow morning; until then, please rest and relax. If you need anything, Wilson will make it happen.”

“I am at your service,” Wilson said, and then smiled. “My files tell me you’re from Chicago, Mr. Tiege.”

“That’s right,” Tiege said.

“Cubs or White Sox?” Wilson asked.

“You have to ask?” Tiege said. “Cubs.”

“Then I feel honor-bound to inform you I’m a Cards fan,” Wilson said. “I hope that won’t cause a diplomatic incident.”

Tiege smiled. “I think in this one case I’ll be willing to let it pass.”

“We’re talking baseball,” Wilson said to Coloma, noting her look, which was positioned between puzzlement and irritation. “It’s a popular team sport in the United States. His favorite team and my favorite team are in the same division, which means they are rivals and frequently play against each other.”

“Ah,” Coloma said.

“They don’t have baseball up here?” Tiege asked Wilson.

“Mostly not,” Wilson said. “Colonists are from different parts of the world. The closest most colonies come is cricket.”

“That’s crazy talk,” Tiege said.

“Tell me about it,” Wilson said, and then motioned with his hand, leading the Earth mission from the shuttle bay while Tiege nattered on about the Cubs.

“What just happened?” Coloma asked Balla, after a minute.

“You said you wanted someone who would speak their language,” Balla reminded her.

“I expected to be able to speak their language a little,” Coloma said.

“Better learn more about baby bears,” suggested Balla.

The first day of the trip consisted of Wilson giving the visitors a tour of the ship. Coloma wasn’t thrilled when the contingent from Earth showed up on her bridge, but the entire point of the trip was to sell them on the ship, so she did her best impression of a polite, engaged captain who had nothing better to do than answer inane questions about her ship. While she was doing this, she would occasionally glance over at Wilson, who seemed preoccupied.

“What is it?” Coloma asked him, when Balla had led the Earth contingent over to the life support and energy management displays.

“What is what?” Wilson said.

“Something is bothering you,” Coloma said.

“It’s nothing,” Wilson said. Then, “I’ll tell you about it later, ma’am.”

Coloma considered pressing him on the subject, but then Tiege and his cohort returned to Wilson, who took them elsewhere. Coloma made a note to follow up with Wilson and then got lost in the day-to-day management of the ship.

It was as Rigney had advertised to her: old but serviceable. Its systems ran well, with the occasional bump occasioned by the fact that she and every other crew member had to learn archaic systems. Some of the systems, like those in the engine room, had never been updated because the systems they were tied to had never been updated, either. Other systems were revamped when the ship made the transition from military to civilian use, and others-like the weapons systems-were removed almost entirely. Regardless, none of the systems were newer than fifteen years old, a period of time two years longer than Coloma herself had been in the Department of State’s fleet service. Fortunately, neither the CDF nor the Department of State was the sort of organization to radically change the interface of its command systems. Even engineering’s fifty-year-old consoles were simple enough to navigate through once you made a few concessions to antiquity.

It’s not a bad ship, Coloma said to herself. The people of Earth weren’t getting something new, but they weren’t getting a lemon, either. She’d hesitate to go so far as to call it a classic, however.

Sometime later, Coloma’s PDA pinged; it was Basquez. “I think we may have a problem,” he said.

“What kind of problem?” Coloma asked.

“The sort where I think you might want to come down and have me explain it to you in person,” Basquez said.

“I tried updating the engineering software on the consoles, but that didn’t work because the consoles are fifty years old and the hardware can’t keep up with the new software,” Basquez said, handing his PDA to Coloma. “So I went in the opposite direction. I took the software from the consoles, ported it into my PDA and created a virtual environment to run it. Then I updated it inside that environment to boost its sensitivity. And that’s where I saw this.” He pointed to a section of the PDA, which was displaying a picture of what looked like a glowing tube.

Coloma squinted. “Saw what?” asked. “What am I looking at?”

“You’re looking at the energy flow through a section of the conduit we just installed,” Basquez said. “And this”-he pointed again at a section of the PDA, tapping it for emphasis-“is a kink in the flow.”

“What does that mean?” Coloma said.

“Right now it doesn’t mean anything,” Basquez said. “We’re only passing ten percent of capacity through the conduit to prep and test the skip drive. It’s a disruption of maybe one ten-thousandth of the total flow. Small enough that if I hadn’t updated the software, I would have missed it. The thing is, there’s a reason we keep power flows as smooth as possible-disruptions introduce chaos, and chaos can mean ruptures. If we push more capacity through the conduit, there’s no guarantee that the disruption won’t scale at a geometric or logarithmic rate, and then-”

“And then we would have a rupture and then we’d be screwed,” Coloma said.

“It’s a very small risk, but you’re the one the Colonial Union is telling to make this thing go off without a hitch,” Basquez said. “So this is a hitch. A potential hitch.”

“What do you want to do about it?” Coloma said.

“I want to take down that chunk of tube and run some scanners through it,” Basquez said. “Find out what’s causing the problem. If it’s an imperfection in the physical conduit or the sheathing inside, that’s something we can fix here. If it’s something else…well, I have no clue what else it could be except a physical imperfection, but if it’s something else, we should figure out what it is and what we can do about it.”

“Does this set us back on our itinerary?” Coloma asked.

“It might, but it shouldn’t,” Basquez said. “I’m about 99.99 percent sure it’s something we can deal with here. My people will need about ninety minutes to take down that section, another sixty to scan it the way it should be scanned, about ten minutes to buff out any imperfections we find, and another ninety minutes to reinstall the section and run some tests. If everything checks out, we can push more power through on schedule. You won’t miss your skip.”

“Then stop talking to me about it and do it,” Coloma said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Basquez said. “I’ll let you know when everything’s cleaned up.”

“Good,” Coloma said. She turned away from Basquez and saw Wilson walking up to her. “You’ve lost your flock,” she said to him.

“I didn’t lose them, I parked them in the officers lounge to watch a video,” he said. “Then I went to the bridge to find you, and Balla said you were here.”

“What is it?” Coloma said.

“It’s our Earthlings,” Wilson said. “I’m pretty sure they’re not actually from Earth. Not recently, anyway.”

“You’re basing your suspicions on a baseball team?” Neva Balla asked, disbelievingly. Coloma had her report to the conference room she and Wilson were in and had Wilson repeat what he had said to her.

“It’s not just any baseball team, it’s the Cubs,” Wilson said, and then held out his hands in a helpless sort of gesture. “Listen, you have to understand something. In all of the history of professional sports, the Cubs are the ultimate symbol of complete failure. The championship of baseball is something called the World Series, and it’s been so long since the Cubs have won it that no one who is alive could remember the last time they won it. It’s so long that no one alive knew anyone who was alive when they won it. We’re talking centuries of abject failure here.”

“So what?” Balla said.

“So the Cubs won the World Series two years ago,” Wilson said. He nodded to Coloma. “I made a joke to Captain Coloma here that I’ve been using that security clearance I have to check baseball box scores. Well, it’s not a lie, I do. I like having that connection back home. Yesterday when Tiege mentioned being a Cubs fan, I sent in a request for the Cubs’ season stats going back to when I left Earth. As a Cards fan, I wanted to rub his face in his team’s continued failure. But then I found out the Cubs had broken their streak.”

Balla looked at Wilson blankly.

“Two years ago the Cubs won a hundred and one games,” Wilson continued. “That’s the most games they’ve won in over a century. They only lost a single game in their entire playoff run, and swept the Cards-my team-in their divisional series. In game four of the World Series, some kid named Jorge Alamazar pitched the first perfect game in a World Series since the twentieth century.”

Balla looked over to her captain. “This isn’t my sport,” she said. “I don’t know what any of this means.”

“It means,” Wilson said, “that there’s no possible way a Cubs fan who has been on Earth anytime in the last two years would fail to tell any baseball fan that the Cubs won the series. And when I identified myself as a Cards fan, Tiege’s first reaction should have been to rub the Cubbies’ victory in my face. It’s simply impossible.”

“Maybe he’s not that big of a fan,” Balla said.

“If he’s from Chicago, it’s not something he would miss,” Wilson said. “And we talked enough about baseball last night that I’m pretty confident he’s not just a casual viewer of the sport. But I grant you could be right, and he’s either not enough of a fan or too polite to mention the Cubs ending a centuries-long drought. So I checked.”

“How did you do that?” Balla asked.

“I talked about the Cubs being the ultimate symbol of professional sports futility,” Wilson said. “I needled Tiege about it for about ten full minutes. He took it and admitted it was true. He doesn’t know the Cubs won the Series. He doesn’t know because the Colonial Union is still enforcing a news blackout from the Earth. He doesn’t know because either he’s a colonist bred and born or is former Colonial Defense Forces who retired and colonized.”

“What about the other people on his team?” Balla asked.

“I talked to them all and casually dropped questions about life on Earth,” Wilson said. “They’re all very nice people, just like Tiege is, but if any of them know anything about Earth anytime since about a decade ago, it got past me. None of them seemed to be able to name things that anyone from the United States or Canada should know, like names of sitting presidents or prime ministers, popular music or entertainment figures, or anything about big stories of the last year. A hurricane hit South Carolina last year and flattened most of Charleston. One of the women, Kelle Laflin, says she’s from Charleston but seems completely oblivious that the hurricane happened.”

“Then what’s going on?” Balla said.

“We’re asking the same question,” Coloma said. “We have a team from Earth here to buy this ship from the Colonial Union. But if they’re not from Earth, where are they from? And what do they intend with the ship?”

Balla turned to Wilson. “You shouldn’t have left them alone,” she said.

“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.”

“You can’t do that,” Tiege said. “We’re a diplomatic mission.”

“Yes, but from whom?” Wilson said. “Because you’re not from Earth, Marlon.”

“Are you sure about that?” Tiege said. “Because if you’re wrong, think about what will happen when the Earth finds out you’ve killed us.”

“Yes, well,” Wilson said, and fished out a small plastic case that contained the pinprick bomb in it, resting on a ball of cotton. “You would have been dead anyway after this bomb went off, and we along with you. This way, the rest of us still get to live. Last chance, Marlon.”

“Harry, I can’t-,” Tiege began, and Wilson held up his hand.

“Have it your way,” he said, and nodded to Coloma. She started the purge cycle. The shuttle bay was filled with the sound of air being sucked into reservoirs.

“Wait!” Tiege said. Wilson motioned to Coloma with their agreed-upon signal and sent a “stop” message to her PDA via his BrainPal. Coloma aborted the purge cycle and waited.

Marlon Tiege stood there for a moment, sweating. Then he cracked a rueful smile and turned to Wilson.

“I’m from Chicago, and these days I live on Erie. I’m going to tell you everything I know about his mission and you have my word on that,” he said, to Wilson. “But you have to tell me one thing first, Harry.”

“What is it?” Wilson asked.

“That you weren’t just fucking with me about the Cubs,” Tiege said.

“You want explanations,” Colonel Abel Rigney said to Coloma from behind his desk at Phoenix Station. In a chair in front of the desk, Colonel Liz Egan sat, watching Coloma.

“What I want is to walk you out of an airlock,” Coloma said, to Rigney. She glanced over to Egan in her chair. “And possibly walk you out after him.” She returned her gaze to Rigney. “But for now, an explanation will do.”

Rigney smiled slightly at this. “You remember Danavar, of course,” he said. “A CDF frigate named the Polk destroyed, the Utche ship targeted and your own ship mortally wounded.”

“Yes,” Coloma said.

“And you know about the recent incident with the Bula,” Egan said. “A human wildcat colony on one of their worlds was attacked, and it was discovered that three modified, undercover CDF members were among them. When we tried to retrieve what was left of the colony, the Bula surrounded the ship and we had to ransom it and its crew back from them.”

“I knew about some of that from Wilson and Ambassador Abumwe’s people,” Coloma said.

“I’m sure you did,” Rigney said. “Our problem is that we suspect whoever ambushed the Polk and your ship at Danavar got information about the Polk’s mission from us. Same with that wildcat colony in Bula territory.”

“Got the information from the CDF?” Coloma asked.

“Or from the Department of State,” Egan said. “Or both.”

“You have a spy,” Coloma said.

“Spies, more likely,” Egan said. “Both of those missions are a lot of ground to cover for one person.”

“We needed a way to pinpoint where the leak was coming from, and how much they knew. So we decided to go fishing,” Rigney said. “We had a decommissioned spacecraft, and after your actions with the Clarke, we had a spacecraft crew without a ship. It seemed like an opportune time to cast out a line and see what we came up with.”

“What you came up with was a bomb that would have destroyed my ship and killed everyone on it, including your fake Earth mission,” Coloma said.

“Yes,” Egan said. “And look what we discovered. We discovered that whoever tried to sabotage you has access to confidential Colonial Defense Forces research. We discovered whoever it was has the ability to access communications through Colonial Defense Forces channels. We discovered they have access to CDF shipyards and fabrication sites. We have a wealth of information that we can sift through to narrow down the person or persons selling us out, and to stop it from happening again. To stop anyone else from dying.”

“A fine sentiment,” Coloma said. “It glosses over the part where I and my crew and your people all die.”

“It was a risk we had to take,” Rigney said. “We couldn’t tell you because we didn’t know where the leaks were coming from. We didn’t tell our people, either. They’re all retired CDF and people who occasionally do work for us when someone being green would be overly conspicuous. They know there’s a chance of death involved.”

“We didn’t,” Coloma said.

“We needed to know if someone was going to try to sabotage that mission,” Rigney said. “Now we know and now we know more than we ever have before about how these people work. I won’t apologize for the actions we took, Captain. I can say I regret that the actions were necessary. And I can say that I’m very glad you didn’t die.”

Coloma stewed on this for a moment. “What happens now?” she asked, finally.

“What do you mean?” Egan asked.

“I have no command,” Coloma said. “I have no ship. I and my crew are in limbo.” She motioned at Egan. “I don’t know what your final inquiry has decided about my future.” She looked back at Rigney. “You told me that if I completed this mission successfully, I could write my own ticket. I can’t tell if this was a successful mission, or even if it was, whether your promise is any more true than anything else you’ve said to me.”

Rigney and Egan looked at each other; Egan nodded. “From our point of view, Captain Coloma, it was a successful mission,” Rigney said.

“As for the final inquiry, it’s been decided that your actions at Danavar were consistent with the best traditions of command and of diplomacy,” Egan said. “You’ve been awarded a commendation, which has already been placed in your file. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Coloma said, a little numbly.

“As for your ship,” Rigney said. “It seems to me you have one. It’s a little old, and being stationed on it has been seen as a hardship post. But on the other hand, a hardship posting is better than no posting at all.”

“Your crew is already used to the ship by now,” Egan said. “And we do need another diplomatic ship in the fleet. Ambassador Abumwe and her staff have a list of assignments and no way to get to them. If you want the ship, it’s yours. If you don’t want the ship, it’s still yours. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Coloma said again, this time completely numbly.

“You’re welcome,” Egan said. “And you’re dismissed, Captain.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Coloma said.

“And, Captain Coloma,” Rigney said.

“Yes, sir,” Coloma said.

“Give her a good name.” He turned back to Egan, and the two of them fell into a conversation. Coloma walked herself out of the door.

Balla and Wilson were waiting for her outside Rigney’s office. “Well?” Balla said.

“I’ve gotten a commendation,” Coloma said. “I’ve been given a ship. The crew stays together. Abumwe’s team is back on board.”

“Which ship are we getting?” Wilson asked.

“The one we’ve been on,” Coloma said.

“That old hunk of junk,” Wilson said.

“Watch it, Lieutenant,” Coloma said. “That’s my ship. And she has a name. She’s the Clarke.”

Content

John Scalzi
Tales From the Clarke