Old Man's War 03 - The Last Colony (v1.5)

by Scalzi, John

  “You’re saying the Department of Colonization would put twenty-five hundred people at risk to get back at you,” I said.

  “No,” Trujillio said. “Not to get back at me. But to counter a threat to its colonial practices? To help the CU keep the colonies in their place? Twenty-five hundred colonists are not too many for a thing like that. If you know anything about colonization, you know twenty-five hundred colonists is the standard size for a seed colony. We lose seed colonies from time to time; we expect to lose a few. We’re used to it. It’s not twenty-five hundred people, it’s just one seed colony.

  “But this is where it gets interesting. One seed colony lost is well within expectations for DoC colonization protocols. But the colonists come from ten different CU worlds, all of which are colonizing for the first time. Each of those worlds will feel the failure of the colony. It’s a blow to the national psyche. And then the DoC can turn around and say, this is why we don’t let you colonize. To protect you. They’ll spoon-feed that argument to the colonies, all the colonies will swallow it down, and we’ll be back to the status quo.”

  “It’s an interesting theory,” I said.

  “Perry, you were in the Colonial Defense Forces for years,” Trujillo said. “You know the end results of CU policies. Can you honestly tell me, with all your experience, that the scenario I’ve outlined for you is completely outside the realm of possibility?”

  I kept quiet. Trujillo smiled grimly. “Food for thought, Perry,” he said. “Something for you to consider the next time you and your wife are slamming the door on the rest of us at one of our advisory meetings. I trust you’ll do what you think is best for the colony.” He glanced over my shoulder, looking at something beyond it. “I think our daughters have met,” he said.

  I turned around to see Zoe talking animatedly with one of the girls I had seen earlier; she was the one who had beckoned Zoe over. “It appears they have,” I said.

  “They seem to get along,” Trujillo said. “Our Roanoke colony starts there, I think. Maybe we can follow their example.”

  “I’m not sure I can swallow the idea of a selfless Manfred Trujillo,” Jane said. She had propped herself up in bed. Babar lolled at the end of the bed, his tail thumping contentedly.

  “That’s two of us,” I said. I was sitting in the chair next to the bed. “The problem is I can’t entirely discount what he’s saying, either.”

  “Why not?” Jane said. She began to reach for the pitcher of water she had at the bedside table, but was awkwardly positioned. I took the pitcher and the glass next to it and started pouring.

  “You remember what Hickory said about Roanoke planet,” I said, handing her the glass.

  “Thanks,” she said, and downed the entire glass in about five seconds.

  “Wow,” I said. “You sure you’re feeling better?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just thirsty.” She handed the glass back to me; I poured her more water. She sipped this one more moderately. “Roanoke planet,” she said, prompting me.

  “Hickory said that Roanoke planet was still under the control of the Obin,” I said. “If the Department of Colonization really thinks this colony is going to fail, that might actually make sense.”

  “Why trade for a planet you know your colonists aren’t going to keep,” Jane said.

  “Exactly.” I said. “And there’s another thing. I was in the cargo hold today going over the manifest with the cargo chief, and he mentioned that we were packing a whole lot of obsolete equipment.”

  “That’s probably to do with the Mennonites,” Jane said, and sipped her water again.

  “That’s what I said, too,” I said. “But after I talked to Trujillo I went through the manifest again. The cargo chief was right. There’s more obsolete equipment there than we can chalk up to the Mennonites.”

  “We’re underequipped,” Jane said.

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “We’re not underequipped. We have a whole bunch of obsolete equipment, but it’s not in place of more modern equipment, it’s there in addition to it.”

  Jane considered this. “What do you think it means?” she asked.

  “I don’t know that it means anything,” I said. “Supply error happens all the time. I remember one time when I was in the CDF we were shipped dress socks instead of medical supplies. Maybe this is that kind of screwup, a couple degrees of magnitude larger.”

  “We should ask General Rybicki about it,” Jane said.

  “He’s off the station,” I said. “He left this morning for Coral, of all places. His office says he’s overseeing the diagnostics of a new planetary defense grid. He won’t be back for a week standard. I asked his office to look into the colony’s inventory for me. But it’s not a high priority for them—it’s not an obvious problem for the well-being of the colony. They have other things to worry about before we ship out. But maybe we’re missing something.”

  “If we’re missing something, we don’t have a lot of time to find it,” Jane said.

  “I know,” I said. “As much as I’d like to peg Trujillo as just another self-aggrandizing prick, we have to work on the theory that he might actually have the interests of the colony at heart. It’s galling, all things considered.”

  “There’s the possibility he’s a self-aggrandizing prick and he has the interests of the colony at heart,” Jane said.

  “You always look on the bright side,” I said.

  “Have Savitri go through the manifest with an eye toward what we might be missing,” Jane said. “I had her do a lot of research on recent seed colonies. If there’s something missing, she’ll find it.”

  “You’re giving her a lot of work,” I said.

  Jane shrugged. “You always underutilized Savitri,” Jane said. “That’s why I hired her. She was capable of a lot more than you gave her. Although it’s not entirely your fault. The worst you had to deal with were those idiot Chengelpet brothers.”

  “You’re just saying that because you never had to deal with them,” I said. “You should have tried it, one time.”

  “If I had dealt with them, one time would be all I needed,” Jane said.

  “How was your thing today with General Szilard?” I asked, changing the subject before my competence could be questioned further.

  “It was fine,” Jane said. “He was saying some of the things Trujillo was saying to you today, actually.”

  “That the DoC wants the colony to fail?” I asked.

  “No,” Jane said. “That there’s a lot of political maneuvering going on that you and I don’t know much about.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “He didn’t get into specifics,” Jane said. “He said that was because he was confident in our ability to handle things. He asked me if I wanted my old Special Forces body back, just in case.”

  “That General Szilard,” I said. “A first-class kidder.”

  “He wasn’t entirely joking,” Jane said, and then raised a placating hand when I gave her my best confused look. “He doesn’t have my old body on hand. That’s not what I mean. He just means he’d prefer not to have me go to this colony with an unmodified human body.”

  “That’s a cheerful thought,” I said. I noticed Jane had begun to sweat. I felt her forehead. “I think you actually have a fever. That’s new.”

  “Unmodified body,” Jane said. “Had to happen sometime.”

  “I’ll get you some more water,” I said.

  “No,” Jane said. “I’m not thirsty. I feel like I’m starving, though.”

  “I’ll see if I can get you something from the galley,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “What have they got?” Jane said.

  “Pretty much everything,” I said.

  “Good,” Jane said. “I’ll have one of everything.”

  I reached for my PDA to contact the galley. “It’s a good thing the Magellan is carrying a double load of food,” I said.

  “The way I feel right now, it won’
t be carrying it for long,” Jane said.

  “All right,” I said. “But I think the old saying is that you should starve a fever.”

  “In this case,” Jane said. “The old saying is dead wrong.”

  * * *

  FOUR

  « ^ »

  It’s like a New Year’s Eve party,” Zoe said, looking around the recreation deck from our perch on a small dais, at the mass of colonists celebrating around us. After a week of travel by the Magellan, we were less than five minutes from the skip to Roanoke.

  “It’s exactly like a New Year’s Eve party,” I said. “When we skip, the colony’s clock officially starts. It’ll be second one of minute one of day one of year one, Roanoke time. Get ready for days that are twenty-five hours, eight minutes long, and years that are three hundred and five days long.”

  “I’ll have birthdays more often,” Zoe said.

  “Yes,” I said. “And your birthdays will last longer.”

  Beside me and Zoe, Savitri and Jane were discussing something Savitri had queried in her PDA. I thought of ribbing them about catching up on work, now of all times, but then I thought better of it. The two of them had quickly become the organizational nexus of the colonial leadership, which was not at all surprising. If they felt something needed to be dealt with right that moment, it probably did.

  Jane and Savitri were the brains of the outfit; I was the public relations guy. Over the course of the week I spent several hours with each colonist group, answering their questions about Roanoke, myself and Jane, and anything else they wanted to know about. Each group had its quirks and curiosities. The colonists from Erie seemed a bit distant (possibly reflecting the opinion of Trujillo, who sat in the back of the group while I talked) but warmed up when I played the idiot and trotted out the fractured Spanish I learned in high school, which led to a discussion of the “new Spanish” words that had been coined on Erie for native plants and animals.

  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 Zoe actually mocked the boys into submission, proving that one should never underestimate the power of teenage girl scorn, but when Zoe 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 Zoe had said it was like a New Year’s Eve party, she hit it right on the nose.

  “How much time?” Zoe asked me.

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

  “Let me see that,” Zoe 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 Zoe 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 Zoe; one of the boys put his arm around Zoe’s waist.

  “Hey,” I said to Jane, and pointed over to Zoe. “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.

  Zoe 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 Zoe jumping between us and trying to kiss us bo
th.

  After a couple of minutes I untangled myself from Zoe 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—” Zoe barged over and demanded a hug from Savitri. Savitri gave her one but her eyes never left me.

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

  “Sure,” Zoe 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.”