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

by Scalzi, John

  “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.

  “Roanoke,” I said. “There was a Roanoke colony on Earth. First English settlement in America.”

  “So?” Jane said.

  “It disappeared,” I said. “Its governor went back to England to ask for help and supplies, but when he returned all of the settlers were gone. The famous lost colony of Roanoke.”

  “Seems a bit obvious,” Jane said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “If they really planned to lose us, I don’t think they’d tip their hand like that.”

  “Nevertheless, we are Roanoke colony, and we are lost,” Jane said.

  “Irony is a bitch,” I said.

  “Perry, Sagan,” Zane said. “Come here.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “We’ve found someone out there,” he said. “Encoded tight-beam. He’s asking for the two of you.”

  “That’s good news,” I said.

  Zane grunted noncommittally and pressed a button to put our caller on the intercom.

  “This is John Perry,” I said. “Jane Sagan and I are here.”

  “Hello, Major Perry,” the voice said. “And hello Lieutenant Sagan! Wow, an honor to talk to you both. I’m Lieutenant Stross, Special Forces. I’ve been assigned to tell you what you’re supposed to do next.”

  “You know what’s happened here?” I asked.

  “Let’s see,” Stross said. “You skipped to what you thought was Roanoke colony, only to find yourselves orbiting an entirely different planet, and now you think you’re completely lost. And your Captain Zane there has found out he can’t use his engines. That sound about right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Excellent,” Stross said. “Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that you’re not lost. We know exactly where you are. The bad news is you’re not going anywhere anytime soon. I’ve got all the details for you when we meet, you two and Captain Zane and me. How about in fifteen minutes?”

  “What do you mean, meet?” Za
ne said. “We’re not picking up any ships in the area. We have no way of verifying who you say you are.”

  “Lieutenant Sagan can vouch for me,” Stross said. “As for where I am, clip in a feed from your external camera fourteen and turn on a light.”

  Zane looked exasperated and confused, and then nodded over to one of his bridge officers. Zane’s overhead monitor blinked to life, showing a portion of the starboard hull. It was dark until a floodlight clicked on and scooped out a cone of light.

  “I’m not seeing anything but hull,” Zane said.

  Something flickered, and suddenly there was a turtle-like object in the camera, floating a foot or so off the hull.

  “What the hell is that?” Zane said.

  The turtle waved.

  “Son of a bitch,” Jane said.

  “You know what that thing is?” Zane said.

  Jane nodded. “That’s a Gameran,” she said, turning to Zane. “That’s Lieutenant Stross. He’s telling the truth about who he is. And I think we have just entered a world of shit.”

  “Wow, air,” said Lieutenant Stross, waving his hand back and forth in the expanse of the shuttle bay. “I don’t get to feel this much.” Stross was floating lazily in the air he was grooving on, thanks to Zane having cut the gravity in the bay to accommodate Stross, who lived primarily in microgravity situations.

  Jane explained it to me and Zane, as we took the elevator to the shuttle bay. Gamerans were humans—or at least, their DNA originated from human stock and had other things added in—radically sculpted and designed to live and thrive in airless space. To that end they had shelled bodies to protect them from vacuum and cosmic rays, symbiotic genetically altered algae stored in a special organ to provide them with oxygen, photosynthetic stripes to harness solar energy and hands on the ends of all their limbs. And, they were Special Forces soldiers. All those rumors in the general CDF infantry about wildly mutant Special Forces turned out to be more than rumors. I thought of my friend Harry Wilson, who I met when I first joined the CDF; he lived for this sort of stuff. I’d have to tell him the next time I saw him. If I ever saw him again.

  Despite being a Special Forces soldier, Stross acted deeply informal, from his vocal mannerisms (vocal being a figurative term; vocal cords would be useless in space, so he didn’t have any—his “voice” was generated in the BrainPal computer in his head and transmitted to our PDAs) to his apparent tendency to get distracted. There was a word for what he was.

  Spacey.

  Zane didn’t waste any time on courtesy. “I want to know how the hell you got control of my ship,” he said, to Stross.

  “Blue pill,” Stross said, still waving his hand about. “It’s code that creates a virtual machine on your hardware. Your software runs on top of it, and never even knows it’s not running on the hardware. That’s why it can’t tell anything’s wrong.”

  “Get it off my computers,” Zane said. “And then get off my boat.”

  Stross held open three of his hands, the other one still cutting air. “Do I look like a computer programmer to you?” he asked. “I don’t know how to code it, I just know how to operate it. And my orders come from someone who outranks you. Sorry, Captain.”

  “How did you get here?” I asked. “I know you’re adapted to space. But I’m pretty sure you don’t have a Skip Drive in there.”

  “I hitched a ride with you,” Stross said. “I’ve been sitting on the hull for the last ten days, waiting for you to skip.” He tapped his shell. “Embedded nano-camo,” he said. “Reasonably new trick. If I don’t want you to notice me, you won’t.”

  “You were on the hull for ten days?” I asked.

  “It’s not that bad,” Stross said. “I kept busy by studying for my doctorate. Comparative literature. Keeps me busy. Distance learning, obviously.”

  “That’s nice for you,” Jane said. “But I’d prefer to focus on our situation.” Her voice snapped out, cold, a counterpoint to Zane’s hot fury.

  “All right,” Stross said. “I’ve just zapped the relevant files and orders to your PDAs, so you can peruse them at your leisure. But here’s the deal: The planet you thought was Roanoke was a decoy. The planet you’re over now is the real Roanoke colony. This is where you’ll colonize.”

  “But we don’t know anything about this planet,” I said.

  “It’s all in the files,” Stross said. “It’s mostly a better planet for you than the other one. The life chemistry is right in line with our food needs. Well, your food needs. Not mine. You can start grazing right away.”

  “You said the other planet was a decoy,” Jane said. “A decoy for what?”

  “That’s complicated,” Stross said.

  “Try me,” Jane said.

  “All right,” Stross said. “For starters, do you know what the Conclave is?”

  * * *

  FIVE

  « ^ »

  Jane looked like she’d been slapped.

  “What? What is it? What is the Conclave?” I asked. I looked over to Zane, who opened his hands apologetically. He didn’t know, either.

  “They got it off the ground,” Jane said, after a pause.

  “Oh, yeah,” Stross said.

  “What is the Conclave?” I repeated.

  “It’s an organization of races,” Jane said, still looking over at Stross. “The idea was to band together to control this part of space and to keep other races from colonizing.” She turned to me. “The last I heard about it was just before you and I went to Huckleberry.”

  “You knew about this and you didn’t tell me,” I said.

  “Orders,” Jane said; it came out snappishly. “It was part of the deal I had. I got to leave the Special Forces on my terms, provided I forgot everything I’d ever heard about the Conclave. I couldn’t have told you even if I had wanted to. And anyway, there was nothing to tell. Everything was still in the preliminary stages and from what I knew, it wasn’t going anywhere. And I learned about it through Charles Boutin. He wasn’t the most credible observer of interstellar politics.”

  Jane seemed genuinely angry; whether at me or the situation I couldn’t tell. I decided not to push it and turned toward Stross. “But now the Conclave thing is a growing concern.”

  “It is,” Stross said. “For over two years now. The first thing it did was warn every species who wasn’t part of the Conclave not to colonize anymore.”

  “Or what?” Zane asked.

  “Or the Conclave would wipe out their new colonies,” Stross said. “That’s the reason for the switcharoo here. We led the Conclave to believe we were forming a colony and settling it on one world. But in fact we sent the colony to another world entirely. One that isn’t in the records or on the charts or that anyone knows about, other than a few very highly placed people. And me, because I’m here to tell you this. And now you. The Conclave was all set to attack Roanoke colony before you could even get your people on the ground. Now they can’t attack you because they can’t find you. It makes the Conclave look foolish and weak. And that makes us look better. That’s the thinking as I understand it.”

  Now it was my turn to get angry. “So the Colonial Union is playing hide-and-seek with this Conclave,” I said. “That’s just jolly.”

  “Jolly’s a word,” Stross said. “I don’t think it’ll be so jolly if they find you, though.”

  “And how long is that going to take?” I asked. “If this is as much of a blow to the Conclave as you say, they’re going to come looking for us.”

  “You’re right about that,” Stross said. “And when they find you, they’re going to wipe you out. So now it’s our job to make you hard to find. And I think this is the part you’re really not going to like.”

  “Point number one,” I said, to the representatives of Roanoke colony. “No contact whatsoever between Roanoke colony and the rest of the Colonial Union.”

  The table erupted into chaos.

  Jane and I sat on either ends, waiting for the fracas to calm. It took a few
minutes.

  “That’s insane,” said Marie Black.

  “I agree entirely,” I said. “But every time there’s a contact between Roanoke and any other colony world, it leaves a trail back to us. Spaceships have crews that number in the hundreds. It’s not realistic that none of those would talk to friends or spouses. And you all already know that people will be looking for us. Your former governments and your families and the press will all be looking for someone who can give them a clue to where we are. If anyone can point a finger back to us, this Conclave will find us.”

  “What about the Magellan?” asked Lee Chen. “It’s going back.”

  “Actually, no, it’s not,” I said. This news received a low gasp. I remembered the absolute fury in Captain Zane’s face when Stross told him this bit of information. Zane threatened to disobey the order; Stross reminded him be had no control over the ships engines, and that if he and the crew didn’t head to the surface with the rest of the colonists, they’d discover they had no control over life support, either. It was a fairly ugly moment.

  It got worse when Stross told Zane the plan was to get rid of the Magellan by driving it right into the sun.

  “The crew of the Magellan have families back in the CU,” said Hiram Yoder. “Spouses. Children.”

  “They do,” I said. “That will give you an idea how serious this is.”

  “Can we afford them?” asked Manfred Trujillo. “I’m not saying we refuse them. But the colony stores were meant for twenty-five hundred colonists. Now we’re adding, what, another two hundred?”

  “Two hundred and six,” said Jane. “It’s not a problem. We shipped with half again as much food stores as are usual for a colony this size, and this world has plant and animal life we can eat. Hopefully.”

  “How long will this isolation continue?” asked Black.