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.
As I watched, some of the Magellan crew were moving one of the containers into place into the barrier, using top lifters to set the container in place and then turning off their power and letting the container fall a couple of millimeters to the ground with a thump. Even from this distance I felt the vibration in the ground. Whatever was in that container, it was heavy. Probably farming equipment that we weren’t allowed to use anymore.
Gretchen had already gotten far ahead of me. I thought about racing to catch up with her but then noticed Jane coming out from behind the newly placed container and talking to one of the Magellan crew. I walked toward her instead.
When Dad talked about sacrifice, in the immediate term he was talking about two things.
First: no contact between Roanoke and the rest of the Colonial Union. Anything we sent back in the direction of the Colonial Union was something that could give us away, even a simple skip drone full of data. Anything sent to us could give us away, too. This meant we were truly isolated: no help, no supplies, not even any mail from friends and loved ones left behind. We were alone.