The Human Division #7: The Dog King Read Online Free Page A

The skeleton was roughly a meter and a half long and mostly intact; it was missing what looked like a rib—which was what Tuffy was now chewing on quite contentedly—and its head. Wilson flicked the light slightly and caught the white flash of something round. Ah, thought Wilson. There’s the head, then .
    It took him a few seconds to realize that what he was looking at was the skeleton of an Icheloe adult.
    It took another few seconds, and Tuffy wandering through the light cone, sparkling as he did so, before Wilson realized which Icheloe’s skeleton it was likely to be.
    “Oh, shit,” Wilson said, out loud.
    “Harry?” Schmidt said, suddenly cutting in. “Uh, just so you know, I’m not alone on this end anymore. And we have a bit of a problem here.”
    “We have a bit of a problem on this end, too, Hart,” Wilson said.
    “I’m guessing your problem isn’t Ambassador Waverly looking for her dog,” Schmidt said.
    “No,” Wilson said. “It’s oh so very much larger.”
    There was an indignant squawk on the other end of the line; Wilson imagined Schmidt putting his hand over the PDA’s microphone to keep Wilson from hearing ambassadorial venting. “Is it Tuffy? Is Tuffy all right?” More squawking. “Is Tuffy, uh, alive ?”
    “Tuffy is fine, Tuffy is alive, Tuffy is perfectly good,” Wilson said. “But I’ve found something down here that’s none of those things.”
    “What do you mean?” Schmidt said.
    “Hart,” Wilson said, “I’m pretty sure I just found the lost king.”

    “Do you hear that?” Ambassador Waverly said, pointing out the window of one of the many sitting rooms of the royal palace. The window was open, and in the distance was a rhythmic chittering that reminded Wilson of the cicadas that would fill the midwestern nights with their white noise. These were not cicadas.
    “Those are protesters,” Waverly said. “Thousands of Icheloe reactionaries who are here to demand a return to royalty.” She pointed at Wilson. “ You did that. More than a year of background work and persuasion and angling to get us a seat at the table—more than a year to line up the dominoes just right for us to position this negotiation as the first step to make a legitimate counter to the Conclave—and you blow it all in two hours . Congratulations, Lieutenant Wilson.”
    “Wilson didn’t intend to find the lost king, Philippa,” Ambassador Abumwe said, to her counterpart. She was in the room with Wilson and Waverly. Schmidt was there, too, pulled in because he was, as Waverly put it, an “accomplice” to Wilson’s shenanigans. Tuffy was also present, gnawing on a toy ball volunteered by the palace staff. Wilson had discreetly separated Tuffy from the royal bones long before they both had exited the cave. The crown remained with the dog; it had somehow attached itself and refused to be removed. All five were awaiting the return of Praetor Gunztar, who had been pulled into emergency consultations.
    “It doesn’t matter what he intended to do,” Waverly shot back. “What matters is what he did do. And what he did was single-handedly disrupt a long-running diplomatic process. Now the Icheloe are back on the verge of civil war and we are to blame.”
    “It doesn’t have to be as bad as that,” Abumwe said. “If nothing else, we’ve solved the disappearance of the king, which was the cause of the civil war. The war started because one faction blamed the other for kidnapping and killing him. Now we know that never happened.”
    “And that simply doesn’t matter, ” Waverly said. “You know as well as I that the disappearance of the king was just the polite fiction the factions needed to go after each other with guns and knives. If it hadn’t been the king going missing, they would have found some other reason to go at each other’s throats. What’s important now is that they wanted to end that fight.” Waverly pointed again at Wilson. “But now he’s dragged up that damn king,