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like she’s being ordered around by a CDF field tech.”
    “Oh, I see,” Schmidt said. “I get the hard part.”
    “No, you get the diplomatic part,” Wilson said, cracking open an eye. “Rumor has it diplomacy is a thing you’ve been trained to do. Unless you’d like me to go talk to her while you figure out a protocol for searching a few million cubic kilometers of space for an object the size of a child’s plaything.”
    “I’ll just go ahead and go talk to the captain, then,” Schmidt said, picking up his PDA.
    “What a marvelous idea,” Wilson said. “I fully endorse it.” Schmidt smiled and left the lounge.
    Wilson closed his eyes again and focused once more on his own problem.
    Wilson was more calm about the situation than Schmidt was, but that was in part to keep his friend on the right side of useful. Hart could be twitchy when stressed.
    In fact, the problem was troubling Wilson more than he let on. One scenario he didn’t tell Hart about at all was the one where the black box didn’t exist. The classified information that Wilson had included preliminary scans of the chunk of space that the Polk was supposed to have been in; the debris field was almost nonexistent, meaning that either the ship was attacked with such violence that it had vaporized, or whoever attacked the Polk took the extra time to atomize any chunk of debris larger than a half a meter on a side. Either way it didn’t look good.
    If it had survived, Wilson had to work on the assumption that its battery was thoroughly drained and that it was floating, quiet and black, out in the vacuum. If the Polk had been nearer to one of the Danavar system planets, he might have a tiny chance of picking up the box visually against the planet’s sphere, but its skip position into the Danavar system was sufficiently distant from any of that system’s gas giants that even that “Hail Mary” approach was out of the question.
    So: Wilson’s task was to find a dark, silent object that might not exist in a debris field that mostly didn’t exist, in a cube of space larger than most terrestrial planets.
    It was a pretty problem.
    Wilson didn’t want to admit how much he was enjoying it. He’d had any number of jobs over his two lifetimes—from corporate lab drone to high school physics teacher to soldier to military scientist to his current position as field tech trainer—but in every one of them, one of his favorite things to do was to whack away at a near insoluble problem for hours on end. With the exception that this time he had rather fewer hours to whack away on this problem than he’d like, he was in his element.
    The real problem here is the black box itself, Wilson thought, calling up what information he had on the objects. The idea of a travel data recorder had been around for centuries, and the phrase “black box” got its cachet with terrestrial air travel. Ironically, almost none of the “black boxes” of those bygone days were actually black; they were typically brightly colored to be made easy to find. The CDF wanted their black boxes found, but only by the right people. They made them as black as they could.
    “Black box, black hole, black body,” Wilson said to himself.
    Hey.
    Wilson opened his eyes and sat up.
    His BrainPal pinged him; it was Schmidt. Wilson opened the connection. “How’s diplomacy?” he asked.
    “Uh,” Schmidt said.
    “Be right there,” Wilson said.

    Captain Sophia Coloma looked every inch of what she was, which was the sort of person who was not here to put up with your shit. She stood on her bridge, imposing, eyes fixed at the portal through which Wilson stepped. Neva Balla, her executive officer, stood next to her, looking equally displeased. On the other side of the captain was Schmidt, whose studiously neutral facial expression was a testament to his diplomatic training.
    “Captain,” Wilson said, saluting.
    “You want a shuttle,” Coloma said, ignoring the salute. “You want a