Redshirts by John Scalzi Page A

Q’eeng and the others seem oblivious to the fact that most of the ship’s crew go out of their way to avoid them,” Mbeke said. “They’re also oblivious to the fact that they kill off a lot of the crew.”
    “How can they be oblivious to that?” Dahl said. “Hasn’t someone told them? Don’t they know the stats?”
    Dahl’s four lab mates shared quick glances at each other. “It was pointed out to the captain once,” Collins said. “It didn’t take.”
    “What does that mean?” Dahl asked.
    “It means that talking to them about the amount of crew they run through is like talking to a brick wall,” Cassaway said.
    “Then tell someone else,” Dahl said. “Tell Admiral Comstock.”
    “You don’t think that’s been tried?” Cassaway said. “We’ve contacted Fleet. We’ve contacted the Dub U’s Military Bureau of Investigation. We’ve even had people try to go to journalists. Nothing works.”
    “There’s no actual evidence of malfeasance or command incompetence, is what we’re told,” Trin said. “Not us, specifically. But whoever complains about it.”
    “How many people do you have to lose before it becomes command incompetence?” Dahl asked.
    “What we’ve been told,” Collins said, “is that as the flagship of the Dub U, the Intrepid takes on a larger share of sensitive diplomatic, military and research missions than any other ship in the fleet. Because of that, there is commensurate increase of risk, and thus a statistically larger chance crew lives will be lost. It’s part of the risk of such a high-profile posting.”
    “In other words, crew deaths are a feature, not a bug,” Cassaway said, dryly.
    “And now you know why we just try to avoid them,” Mbeke said.
    Dahl thought about this for a moment. “It still doesn’t explain the Box.”
    “We don’t have any good explanation for the Box,” Collins said. “No one does. Officially speaking, the Box doesn’t exist.”
    “It looks like a microwave, it dings when it’s done and it outputs complete nonsense,” Dahl said. “You have to present its results in person, and it doesn’t matter what you say when you give the data to Q’eeng, just so long as you give him something to fix. I don’t really have to point out all the ways that’s so very fucked up, do I?”
    “It’s how it’s been done since before we got here,” Trin said. “It’s what we were told to do by the people who had our jobs before us. We do it because it works.”
    Dahl threw up his hands. “Then why not use it for everything?” he asked. “It’d save us all a lot of time.”
    “It doesn’t work with everything,” Trin said. “It only works for things that are extraordinarily difficult.”
    “Like finding a so-called counter-bacterial in six hours,” Dahl said.
    “That’s right,” Trin said.
    Dahl looked around the room. “It doesn’t bother you that a science lab has a magic box in it?” he asked.
    “Of course it bothers us!” Collins said sharply. “I hate the damn thing. But I have to believe it’s not actually magic. We just somehow got hold of a piece of technology so incredibly advanced it looks that way to us. It’s like showing a caveman your phone. He wouldn’t have the first idea how it worked, but he could still use it to make a call.”
    “If the phone were like the Box, the only time it would let the caveman make a call would be if he were on fire, ” Dahl said.
    “It is what it is,” Collins said. “And for some reason we have to do the Kabuki dance of showing off gibberish to make it work. We do it because it does work. We don’t know what to do with the data, but the Intrepid ’s computer does. And at the time, in an emergency, that’s enough. We hate it. But we don’t have any choice but to use it.”
    “When I came to the Intrepid, I told Q’eeng that at the Academy we had trouble replicating some of the work you guys were doing on the ship,” Dahl said. “Now I know why. It’s because you