Free The Human Division #1: The B-Team by John Scalzi Page B

reiterated.
    “Relax, Hart,” Wilson said. “For my sake. You’re making me twitchy.”
    “Sorry,” Schmidt said.
    “It’s all right,” Wilson said. “Now, tell me what you’re going to do after I leave.”
    “I’m going to the bridge,” Schmidt said. “If you’re not successful for any reason, I will have the Clarke send out a message on our frequencies warning the Utche of the trap, to not confirm the message or to broadcast anything on their native communication bands, and request that they get the hell out of Danavar space as quickly as possible. I’m to invoke your security clearance to the captain if there are any problems.”
    “That’s very good,” Wilson said.
    “Thank you for the virtual pat on the head, there,” Schmidt said.
    “I do it out of love,” Wilson assured him.
    “Right,” Schmidt said dryly, and then looked over at the shuttle again. “Do you think this is actually going to work?” he asked.
    “I look at it this way,” Wilson said. “Even if it doesn’t work, we have proof we did everything we could to stop the attack on the Utche. That’s going to count for something.”

    Wilson entered the shuttle, fired up the launch sequence and while it was running took the high-density battery and connected it to the Polk ’s black box. The battery immediately started draining into the black box’s own power storage.
    “Here we go,” Wilson said for the second time that day. The shuttle eased out of the Clarke ’s bay.
    Schmidt had been right: This all would have been a lot easier if the shuttle could have been piloted remotely. There was no physical bar to it; humans had been remote piloting vehicles for centuries. But the Colonial Union insisted on a human pilot for transport shuttles for roughly the same reason the Colonial Defense Forces required a BrainPal signal to fire an Empee rifle: to make sure only the right people were using them, for the right purposes. Modifying the shuttle flight software to take the human presence out of the equation would not only require a substantial amount of time, but would also technically be classified as treason.
    Wilson preferred not to engage in treason if he could avoid it. And so here he was, on the shuttle, about to do something stupid.
    On the shuttle display, Wilson called up the heat map he’d created, and a timer. The heat map registered each of the suspect missile silos; the timer counted down until the scheduled arrival of the Utche, now less than ten minutes away. From the mission data given to Ambassador Abumwe, Wilson had a rough idea of where the Utche planned to skip into Danavar space. He plotted the shuttle in another direction entirely and opened up the throttle to put sufficient distance between himself and the Clarke, counting the kilometers until he reached what he estimated to be a good, safe distance.
    Now for the tricky part, Wilson thought, and tapped his instrument panel to start broadcasting a signal on the Utche’s communication bands.
    “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Wilson said to the missiles.
    The missiles did not hear Wilson. They heard the shuttle’s signal instead and erupted from their silos, one, two, three, four, five. Wilson saw them twice, first on the shuttle’s monitor and second through the Clarke ’s sensor data, ported into his BrainPal.
    “Five missiles on you, locked and tracking,” Wilson heard Schmidt say, through the instrument panel.
    “Come on, let’s play,” Wilson said, and pushed the shuttle as fast as it would go. It was not as fast as the missiles could go, but that wasn’t the point. The point was twofold. First, to get the missiles as far away from where the Utche would be as possible. Second, to get the missiles spaced so that the explosion from the first missile on the shuttle would destroy all the other missiles, moving too quickly to avoid being damaged.
    To manage that, Wilson had broadcast his signal from a point as close to equidistant to all five