“And if everything doesn’t go well?” Schmidt asked.

“Then we’ll all have bigger problems, won’t we,” Wilson said.

They both looked at the shuttle, which Wilson was about to reenter after a brief pit stop in the Clarke’s bay.

“You really are insane, you know that,” Schmidt said, after a moment.

“I always think it’s funny when people get told what they are by other people,” Wilson said. “As if they didn’t already know.”

“We could just set the autopilot on the shuttle,” Schmidt said. “Send it out that way.”

“We could,” Wilson said. “If a shuttle was like a mechanical vehicle you could send on its way by tying a brick to its accelerator pedal. But it’s not. It’s designed to have a human at the controls. Even on autopilot.”

“You could alter the programming on the shuttle,” Schmidt said.

“We have roughly fifteen minutes before the Utche arrive,” Wilson said. “I appreciate the vote of confidence in my skills, but no. There’s no time. And we need to do more than just send it out, anyway.”

“Insane,” Schmidt 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.