Tales From the Clarke Read Online Free PDF Page 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