Zoe's Tale (Old Man's War, #4)(19)

"Nice," I said, to Gretchen. "I don't think now was a smart time to remind her that she's stuck here."

Gretchen shrugged. "She deserved it," she said, and started toward the cargo doors.

I bit the inside of my cheek and decided not to comment. The last several days had made everyone edgy. This is what happens when you know you're lost.

On the day we skipped to Roanoke, this is how Dad broke the news that we were lost.

"Because I know there are rumors already, let me say this first: We are safe," Dad said to the colonists. He stood on the platform where just a couple of hours earlier we had counted down the skip to Roanoke. "The Magellan is safe. We are not in any danger at the moment."

Around us the crowd visibly relaxed. I wondered how many of them caught the "at the moment" part. I suspected John put it in there for a reason.

He did. "But we are not where we were told we would be," he said. "The Colonial Union has sent us to a different planet than we had expected to go to. It did this because it learned that a coalition of alien races called the Conclave were planning to keep us from colonizing, by force if necessary. There is no doubt they would have been waiting for us when we skipped. So we were sent somewhere else: to another planet entirely. We are now above the real Roanoke.

"We are not in danger at the moment," John said. "But the Conclave is looking for us. If it finds us it will try to take us from here, again likely by force. If it cannot remove us, it will destroy the colony. We are safe now, but I won't lie to you. We are being hunted."

"Take us back!" someone shouted. There were murmurings of agreement.

"We can't go back," John said. "Captain Zane has been remotely locked out of the Magellan's control systems by the Colonial Defense Forces. He and his crew will be joining our colony. The Magellan will be destroyed once we have landed ourselves and all our supplies on Roanoke. We can't go back. None of us can."

The room erupted in angry shouts and discussions. Dad eventually calmed them down. "None of us knew about this. I didn't. Jane didn't. Your colony representatives didn't. And certainly Captain Zane didn't. This was kept from all of us equally. The Colonial Union and the Colonial Defense Forces have decided for reasons of their own that it is safer to keep us here than to bring us back to Phoenix. Whether we agree with this or not, this is what we have to work with."

"What are we going to do?" Another voice from the crowd.

Dad looked out in the direction the voice came from. "We're going to do what we came here to do in the first place," he said. "We're going to colonize. Understand this: When we all chose to colonize, we knew there were risks. You all know that seed colonies are dangerous places. Even without this Conclave searching for us, our colony would still have been at risk for attack, still a target for other races. None of this has changed. What has changed is that the Colonial Union knew ahead of time who was looking for us and why. That allowed them to keep us safe in the short run. It gives an advantage in the long run. Because now we know how to keep ourselves from being found. We know how to keep ourselves safe."

More murmurings from the crowd. Just to the right of me a woman asked, "And just how are we going to keep ourselves safe?"

"Your colonial representatives are going to explain that," John said. "Check your PDAs; each of you has a location on the Magellan where you and your former worldmates will meet with your representative. They'll explain to you what we'll need to do, and answer the questions you have from there. But there is one thing I want to be clear about. This is going to require cooperation from everyone. It's going to require sacrifice from everyone. Our job of colonizing this world was never going to be easy. It's just become a lot harder.

"But we can do it," Dad said, and the forcefulness with which he said it seemed to surprise some people in the crowd. "What's being asked of us is hard, but it's not impossible. We can do it if we work together. We can do it if we know we can rely on each other. Wherever we've come from, we all have to be Roanokers now. This isn't how I would have chosen for this to happen. But this is how we are going to have to make it work. We can do this. We have to do this. We have to do it together."

I stepped out of the shuttle, and put my feet on the ground of the new world. The ground's mud oozed over the top of my boot. "Lovely," I said. I started walking. The mud sucked at my feet. I tried not to think of the sucking as a larger metaphor. Babar bounded off the shuttle and commenced sniffing his surroundings. He was happy, at least.

Around me, the Magellan crew was on the job. Other shuttles that had landed before were disgorging their cargo; another shuttle was coming in for a landing some distance away. The cargo containers, standard-sized, littered the ground. Normally, once the contents of the containers were taken out, the containers would be sent back up in the shuttles to be reused; waste not, want not. This time, there was no reason to take them back up to the Magellan. It wasn't going back; these containers wouldn't ever be refilled. And as it happened, some of these containers wouldn't even be unpacked; our new situation here on Roanoke didn't make it worth the effort.

But it didn't mean that the containers didn't have a purpose; they did. That purpose was in front of me, a couple hundred meters away, where a barrier was forming, a barrier made from the containers. Inside the barrier would be our new temporary home; a tiny village, already named Croatoan, in which all twenty-five hundred of us - and the newly-resentful Magellan crew - would be stuck while Dad, Mom and the other colony leaders did a survey of this new planet to see what we needed to do in order to live on it.