John Scalzi - The Last Colony

"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 both.

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."

"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."