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up.”
    “I’ll do my best,” Wilson said.
    “Your best got you stationed on the Clarke, ” Abumwe said. “Do better than that.”

V.
    “Please stop that,” Wilson said to Schmidt, as they sat in the Clarke lounge, reviewing their project data.
    Schmidt looked up from his PDA. “I’m not doing anything,” he said.
    “You’re hyperventilating,” Wilson said. He had his eyes closed, the better to focus on the data his BrainPal was streaming at him.
    “I’m breathing completely normally,” Schmidt said.
    “You’ve been breathing like a labored elephant for the last several minutes,” Wilson said, still not opening his eyes. “Keep it up and you’re going to need a paper bag to breathe into.”
    “Yes, well,” Schmidt said. “ You get told you’re inessential by your boss and see how you feel.”
    “Her people skills aren’t the best,” Wilson agreed. “But you knew that. And as my assistant, I actually do need you to be helpful to me. So stop thinking about your boss and think more about our predicament.”
    “Sorry,” Schmidt said. “I’m also not entirely comfortable with this assistant thing.”
    “I promise not to ask you to get me coffee,” Wilson said. “Much.”
    “Thanks,” Schmidt said, wryly. Wilson grunted and went back to his data.
    “This black box,” Schmidt said a few minutes later.
    “What about it?” Wilson asked.
    “Are you going to be able to find it?” Schmidt asked.
    Wilson opened his eyes for this. “The answer to that depends on whether you want me to be optimistic or truthful,” he said.
    “Truthful, please,” Schmidt said.
    “Probably not,” Wilson said.
    “I lied,” Schmidt said. “I want the optimistic version.”
    “Too late,” Wilson said, and held out his hand as if he were cupping an imaginary ball. “Look, Hart. The ‘black box’ in question is a small, black sphere about the size of a grapefruit. The memory portion of the thing is about the size of a fingernail. The rest of it consists of the tracking beacon, an inertial field generator to keep the thing from floating down a gravity well, and a battery powering both of those two things.”
    “Okay,” Schmidt said. “So?”
    “So, one, the thing is intentionally small and black so it will be difficult to find by anyone but the CDF,” Wilson said.
    “Right, but you’re not looking for it,” Schmidt said. “You’re going to be pinging it. When it gets the correct signal, it will respond.”
    “It will, if it has power,” Wilson said. “But it might not. We’re working on the assumption the Polk was attacked. If it was attacked, then there was probably a battle. If there was a battle, then the Polk probably got torn apart, with the pieces of it flying everywhere from the added energy of the explosions. It’s likely the black box probably spent all its energy trying to stay mostly in one place. In which case when we signal it, we’re not going to get a response.”
    “In which case you’ll have to look for it visually,” Schmidt said.
    “Right,” Wilson said. “So, again: small black grapefruit in a search area that at this point is a cube tens of thousands of kilometers on a side. And your boss wants me to find it and examine it before the Utche arrive. So if we don’t locate it within the first half hour after the skip, we’re probably screwed.” He leaned back and closed his eyes again.
    “You seem untroubled by our imminent failure,” Schmidt said.
    “No point hyperventilating,” Wilson said. “And anyway, I didn’t say we will fail. It’s just more likely than not. My job is to increase the odds of us succeeding, which is what I was doing before your labored breathing started to distract me.”
    “So what’s my job?” Schmidt asked.
    “Your job is to go to Captain Coloma and tell her what things I need, the list of which I just sent to your PDA,” Wilson said. “And do it charmingly, so that our captain feels like a valued part of the process and not