Rybicki grinned wryly, and tossed his sorghum to the ground. “All right,” he said. “After you left the service, Perry, I got a promotion and a transfer. I’m with the Department of Colonization now; the folks who have the job of seeding and supporting new colonies.”
“You’re still CDF,” I said. “It’s the green skin that gives you away. I thought the Colonial Union kept its civilian and military wings separate.”
“I’m the liaison,” Rybicki said. “I get to keep things coordinated between the both of them. This is about as fun as you might think it is.”
“You have my sympathy,” I said.
“Thank you, Major,” Rybicki said. It’d been years since anyone referred to me by my rank. “I do appreciate it. The reason I’m here is because I was wondering if you—the two of you—would do a job for me.”
“What kind of job?” Jane asked.
Rybicki looked over to Jane. “Lead a new colony,” he said.
Jane glanced over to me. I could tell she didn’t like this idea already. “Isn’t that what the Department of Colonization is for?” I asked. “It should be filled with all sorts of people whose job it is to lead colonies.”
“Not this time,” Rybicki said. “This colony is different.”
“How?” Jane said.
“The Colonial Union gets colonists from Earth,” Rybicki said. “But over the last few years the colonies—the established colonies, like Phoenix and Elysium and Kyoto—have been pushing the CU to let their people form new colonies. Folks from those places have made the attempt before with wildcat colonies, but you know how those go.”
I nodded. Wildcat colonies were illegal and unauthorized. The CU turned a blind eye to wildcatters; the rationale was that the people who were in them would otherwise be causing trouble at home, so it was just as well to let them go. But a wildcat colony was well and truly on its own; unless one of your colonists was the kid of someone high up in the government, the CDF wouldn’t be coming when you called for help. The survival statistics for wildcat colonies were impressively grim. Most didn’t last six months. Other colonizing species generally did them in. It wasn’t a forgiving universe.
Rybicki caught my acknowledgment and went on. “The CU would prefer the colonies keep to their own knitting, but it’s become a political issue and the CU can’t brush it off anymore. So the DoC suggested that we open up one planet for second-generation colonists. You can guess what happened then.”
“The colonies started clawing each other’s eyes out to be the one whose people got to colonize,” I said.
“Give the man a cigar,” Rybicki said. “So the DoC tried to play Solomon by saying that each of the agitants could contribute a limited number of colonists to the first wave colony. So now we have a seed colony of about twenty-five hundred people, with two hundred and fifty from ten different colonies. But now we don’t have anyone to lead them. None of the colonies want the other colonies’ people in charge.”
“There are more than ten colonies,” I said. “You could recruit your colony leaders from one of those.”
“Theoretically that would work,” Rybicki said. “In the real universe, however, the other colonies are pissed off that they didn’t get their people on the colony roster. We’ve promised that if this colony works out we’ll entertain the idea of opening other worlds. But for now it’s a mess and no one else is inclined to play along.”
“Who was the idiot who suggested this plan in the first place?” Jane asked.
“As it happens, that idiot was me,” Rybicki said.
“Well done,” Jane said. I reflected on the fact it was a good thing she wasn’t still in the military.
“Thank you, Constable Sagan,” General Rybicki said. “I appreciate the candor. Clearly there were aspects of this plan I didn’t expect. But then, that’s why I’m here.”
“The flaw with this plan of yours—aside from the fact that neither Jane nor I have the slightest idea how to run a seed colony—is that we’re colonists now, too,” I said. “We’ve been here for nearly eight years.”
“But you said it yourself: you’re former soldiers,” Rybicki said. “Former soldiers are a category all their own. You’re not really from Huckleberry. You’re from Earth, and she’s former Special Forces, which means she’s not from anywhere. No offense,” he said to Jane.
“That still leaves the problem of neither of us having any experience running a seed colony,” I said. “When I was doing my public relations tour of the colonies way back when, I went to a seed colony on Orton. Those people never stopped working. You don’t just throw people into that situation without training.”
“You have training,” Rybicki said. “Both of you were officers. Christ, Perry, you were a major. You commanded a regiment of three thousand soldiers across a battle group. That’s larger than a seed colony.”