Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (71 page)

The Mennonites from Kyoto, on the other hand, started off genially by presenting me with a fruit cobbler. That pleasantry out of the way, they then grilled me mercilessly on every aspect of colonial management, much to the amusement of Hiram Yoder. “We live a simple life, but we’re not simple,” he told me afterward. The colonists from Khartoum were still upset about not being berthed according to planetary origin. The ones from Franklin wanted to know how much support we would have from the Colonial Union and whether they could travel back to Franklin for visits. Albion’s colonists wondered what plans were in place if Roanoke were attacked. The ones from Phoenix wanted to know if I thought they would have enough time after a busy day of colonizing to start a softball league.

Questions and problems large and small, immense and trivial, critical and frivolous—all of them got pitched to me, and it was my job to gamely field them and try to help people to come away, if not satisfied with the answers, then at least satisfied that their concerns were taken seriously. In this, my recent experience as an ombudsman turned out to be invaluable. Not just because I had experience in finding answers and solving problems, but because I had several years practice in listening to people and reassuring them something would get done. By the end of our week on the
Magellan
I had colonists coming up to me to help them settle bar bets and petty annoyances; it seemed like old times.

The question-and-answer sessions and fielding issues of the individual colonists were useful for me as well—I needed to get a sense of who all these people were and how well they would mesh with each other. I didn’t subscribe to Trujillo’s theory of a polyglot colony as a bureaucratic sabotage tactic, but I wasn’t pollyanna about harmony, either. The day the
Magellan
got under way we had at least one incident of some teenage boys from one world trying to pick a fight with some others. Gretchen Trujillo and Zoë actually mocked the boys into submission, proving that one should never underestimate the power of teenage girl scorn, but when Zoë recounted the event over dinner, both Jane and I took note of it. Teenagers can be idiotic and stupid, but teenagers also model their behavior from the signals they get from adults.

The next day we announced a dodgeball tournament for the teenagers, on the theory that dodgeball was universally played in one form or another across all the colonies. We hinted to the colony representatives that it would be nice if they could get their kids to show up. Enough did—the
Magellan
didn’t have
that
much for them to do, even after just one day—that we could field ten teams of eight, which we created through random selection, casually thwarting any attempt to team up by colony. Then we created a schedule of games that would culminate with the championship match just before the skip to Roanoke. Thus we kept the teenagers occupied and, coincidentally, mixing with the kids from the other colonies.

By the end of the first day of play, the adults were watching the games; there wasn’t much for
them
to do, either. By the end of the second day, I saw adults from one colony chatting up adults from other colonies about which teams had the best chance of going all the way. We were making progress.

By the end of the third day, Jane had to break up a betting ring. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t
all
progress. What are you going to do.

Neither Jane nor I were under the illusion that we could create
universal harmony through dodgeball, of course. That’s a little much to rest on the shoulders of a game played with a bouncy red ball. Trujillo’s sabotage scenario wouldn’t be sent out of the game with a snappy
pong
sound. But universal harmony could wait. We would settle for people meeting and getting used to each other. Our little dodgeball tournament did that well enough.

After the dodgeball final and the award ceremony—the underdog Dragons managed a dramatic victory over the previously undefeated Slime Molds, whom I had adored for their name alone—most of the colonists stayed on the recreation deck, waiting for the few moments until the skip. The multiple announcement monitors on the deck were all broadcasting the forward view of the
Magellan
, which was a blank black now but would be filled with the image of Roanoke as soon as the skip happened. The colonists were excited and happy; when Zoë had said it was like a New Year’s Eve party, she hit it right on the nose.

“How much time?” Zoë asked me.

I checked my PDA. “Whoops,” I said. “A minute twenty seconds to go.”

“Let me see that,” Zoë said, and grabbed my PDA. Then she grabbed the microphone that I had used when I was congratulating the Dragons on their victory. “Hey!” she said, her voice amplified across the rec deck. “We’ve got a minute left until we skip!”

A cheer went up from the colonists, and Zoë took it on herself to count off the time in five-second intervals. Gretchen Trujillo and a pair of boys ran up to the stage and clambered up to take their places next to Zoë; one of the boys put his arm around Zoë’s waist.

“Hey,” I said to Jane, and pointed over to Zoë. “Do you see that?”

Jane looked over. “That must be Enzo,” she said.

“Enzo?” I said. “There’s an Enzo?”

“Relax, ninety-year-old dad,” Jane said, and then rather uncharacteristically hooked her arm around my waist. She usually
saved displays of affection for our private time. But she’d also been friskier since getting over her fever.

“You know I don’t like it when you do that,” I said. “It erodes my authority.”

“Cram it,” Jane said. I grinned.

Zoë got to the ten-second mark; she and her friends counted down each second, joined by the colonists. When everyone got to zero, there was a sudden hush as eyes and heads turned to the monitor screens. The blank blackness held for what seemed an eternity, and then it was there, a world, large and green and new.

The deck erupted in cheers. People began to hug and kiss, and for lack of a more appropriate song, belted out “Auld Lang Syne.”

I turned to my wife and kissed her. “Happy new world,” I said.

“Happy new world to you, too,” she said. She kissed me again, and then we were both nearly knocked over by Zoë jumping between us and trying to kiss us both.

After a couple of minutes I untangled myself from Zoë and Jane, and saw Savitri staring intently at the closest monitor.

“The planet’s not going anywhere,” I said to her. “You can relax now.”

It took a second before Savitri seemed to hear me. “What?” she said. She looked annoyed.

“I said,” I began, but then she was looking at the monitor again, distracted. I came up closer to her.

“What is it?” I asked.

Savitri looked back at me and then suddenly came in close, as if to kiss me. She didn’t; instead she put her lips to my ear. “That’s not Roanoke,” she said, quietly but urgently.

I backed up from her a step and for the first time gave the planet in the monitor my full attention. The planet was green and lush, like Roanoke. Through the clouds I could see the outline of the landmasses below. I tried recalling a map of Roanoke in my head
but was drawing a blank. I had focused mostly on the river delta where the colony would live, not on the maps of the continents.

I came back over to Savitri, so our heads were close. “You’re sure,” I said.

“Yes,” Savitri said.

“
Really
sure,” I said.

“Yes,” Savitri said.

“What planet is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Savitri said. “That’s just it. I don’t think
anyone
knows.”

“How—” Zoë barged over and demanded a hug from Savitri. Savitri gave her one but her eyes never left me.

“Zoë,” I said, “can I have my PDA back?”

“Sure,” Zoë said, and gave me a quick peck on the cheek as she handed it over. As I took it the message prompt began to flash. It was from Kevin Zane, captain of the
Magellan
.

“It’s not in the registry,” Zane said. “We’ve done a quick read for size and mass to match it. The closest match is Omagh, and that is definitely not Omagh. There is no CU satellite in orbit. We haven’t done an entire orbit yet, but so far there’s no sign of any intelligent life, ours or anyone else’s.”

“There’s no other way to tell what planet this is?” Jane asked. I had pulled her away from the celebration as discreetly as I could, and left Savitri to explain our absence to the rest of the colonists.

“We’re mapping stars now,” Zane said. “We’ll start with the relative positions of the stars and see if it matches any of the skies we know. If that doesn’t work we’ll start doing spectral analysis. If we can find a couple of stars we know, we can triangulate our position. But that’s likely to take some time. Right now, we’re lost.”

“At the risk of sounding like an idiot,” I said. “Can’t you put this thing in reverse?”

“Normally we could,” Zane said. “You have to know where you’re going before you make a skip, so you could use that information to plot a trip back. But we programmed in the information for Roanoke. We should be there. But we’re not.”

“Someone got into your navigation systems,” Jane said.

“More than that,” said Brion Justi, the
Magellan
’s executive officer. “After we skipped, engineering was locked out of the primary engines. We can monitor the engines but we can’t feed them commands, either here on the bridge or in the engine rooms. We can skip in close to a planet, but to skip out we need to get a distance away from the planet’s gravity well. We’re stuck.”

“We’re drifting?” I asked. I was not an expert on these things, but I knew that a spaceship didn’t necessarily skip into perfectly stable orbits.

“We have maneuvering engines,” Justi said. “We’re not going to fall into the planet. But our maneuvering engines aren’t going to get us to skip distance anytime soon. Even if we knew where we were, at the moment we don’t have a way to get home.”

“I don’t think we want to make that public knowledge just yet,” Zane said. “Right now the bridge crew knows about the planet and the engines; the engineering crew knows just about the engines. I informed you as soon as I confirmed both issues. But at the moment, I think that’s the extent of it.”

“Almost,” I said. “Our assistant knows.”

“You told your
assistant
?” Justi asked.

“She told us,” Jane said sharply. “Before
you
did.”

“Savitri isn’t going to tell anyone,” I said. “It’s bottled up for now. But this isn’t something we’re going to be able to keep from people.”

“I understand that,” Zane said. “But we need time to get our
engines back and to find out where we are. If we tell people before then, there’s going to be a panic.”

“That is if you can get yourself back online at all,” Jane said. “And you’re ignoring the larger issue, which is that this ship has been sabotaged.”

“We’re not ignoring it,” Zane said. “When we get back control of the engines we should have a better idea of who did this.”

“Did you not run diagnostics on your computers before we left?” Jane asked.

“Of course we did,” Zane said testily. “We followed all standard procedures. This is what we’re trying to tell you. Everything checked out. Everything
still
checks out. I had my tech officer run a full system diagnostic. The diagnostics tell us everything is fine. As far as the computers are concerned, we are at Roanoke, and we have full control of the engines.”

I thought about this. “Your navigation and engine systems aren’t right,” I said. “What about your other systems?”

“So far, so good,” Zane said. “But if whoever did this can take away our navigation and engines and fool our computers into thinking there’s no problem, they could take away
any
of the systems.”

“Shut down the system,” Jane said. “Emergency systems are decentralized. They should keep functioning until you reboot.”

“That’s not going to be very useful in not causing a panic,” Justi said. “And there’s no promise that we’d have control again after we reboot. Our computers think everything’s fine now; they’ll just revert to their current status.”

“But if we don’t reboot we run the risk of whoever’s screwing with your engines and navigations messing with life support or gravity,” I said.

“I have a feeling that if whoever did this wanted to play with life support or gravity, we’d be dead already,” Zane said. “You want my opinion, there it is. I’m going to keep systems as is while we try to
root out whatever it is that’s locking us out of navigation and engines. I’m captain of this ship. It’s my call to make. I’m asking you two to give me time to fix this before you inform your colonists.”

I looked at Jane. She shrugged. “It will take us at least a day to prepare supply containers for transport down to the planet surface. Another couple of days before the majority of the colonists are ready to go. There’s no reason we can’t go through the motions of getting the containers ready.”

“That means putting your cargo hold people to work,” I said to Zane.

“As far as they know, we’re where we’re supposed to be,” Zane said.

“Start your cargo prep tomorrow morning, then,” I said. “We’ll give you until the first containers are ready to make the trip to the planet. If you haven’t figured out the problem then, we’re talking to the colonists anyway. All right?”

“Fair enough,” Zane said. One of Zane’s officers came up to speak to him; he shifted his attention away. I turned my attention to Jane.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I said quietly.

“I’m thinking about what Trujillo said to you,” Jane said, also keeping her voice down.

“When he said that the Department of Colonization was sabotaging the colony, I don’t think he was suggesting they’d do it like this,” I said.

“They would if they wanted to make the point that colonization is a dangerous business, and if someone was worried that it might actually succeed when they wanted it to fail,” Jane said. “This way they have a lost colony right out of the box.”

“Lost colony,” I said, and then my hand went to my eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

“What?” Jane said.