I took a sniff and did some nose wrinkling of my own. “I think the pilot landed in a pile of rancid socks,” I said. I calmed Babar, who was with us and who seemed excited about something; maybe he liked the smell.
“That’s the planet,” said Anna Faulks. She was one of the Magellan crew, and had been down to the planet several times, unloading cargo. The colony’s base camp was almost ready for the colonists; Gretchen and I, as children of colony leaders, were being allowed to come down on one of the last cargo shuttles rather than having to take a cattle car shuttle with everyone else. Our parents had already been on planet for days, supervising the unloading. “And I’ve got news for you,” Faulks said. “This is about as pretty as the smells get around here. When you get a breeze coming in from the forest, then it gets really bad.”
“Why?” I asked. “What does it smell like then?”
“Like everyone you know just threw up on your shoes,” Faulks said.
“Wonderful,” Gretchen said.
There was a grinding clang as the massive doors of the cargo shuttle opened. There was a slight breeze as the air in the cargo bay puffed out into the Roanoke sky. And then the smell really hit us.
Faulks smiled at us. “Enjoy it, ladies. You’re going to be smelling it every day for the rest of your lives.”
“So are you,” Gretchen said to Faulks.
Faulks stopped smiling at us. “We’re going to start moving these cargo containers in a couple of minutes,” she said. “You two need to clear out and get out of our way. It would be a shame if your precious selves got squashed underneath them.” She turned away from us and started toward the rest of the shuttle cargo crew.
“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.”