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."

I looked at Jane. She shrugged. "It will take us at least a day to prepare supply containers for transport down to the planet surface. Another couple of days before the majority of the colonists are ready to go. There's no reason we can't go through the motions of getting the containers ready."

"That means putting your cargo hold people to work," I said to Zane.

"As far as they know, we're where we're supposed to be," Zane said.

"Start your cargo prep tomorrow morning, then," I said. "We'll give you until the first containers are ready to make the trip to the planet. If you haven't figured out the problem then, we're talking to the colonists anyway. All right?"

"Fair enough," Zane said. One of Zane's officers came up to speak to him; he shifted his attention away. I turned my attention to Jane.

"Tell me what you're thinking," I said quietly.

"I'm thinking about what Trujillo said to you," Jane said, also keeping her voice down.

"When he said that the Department of Colonization was sabotaging the colony, I don't think he was suggesting they'd do it like this," I said.

"They would if they wanted to make the point that colonization is a dangerous business, and if someone was worried that it might actually succeed when they wanted it to fail," Jane said. "This way they have a lost colony right out of the box."

"Lost colony," I said, and then my hand went to my eyes. "Jesus Christ."

"What?" Jane said.

"Roanoke," I said. "There was a Roanoke colony on Earth. First English settlement in America."

"So?" Jane said.

"It disappeared," I said. "Its governor went back to England to ask for help and supplies, but when he returned all of the settlers were gone. The famous lost colony of Roanoke."

"Seems a bit obvious," Jane said.

"Yeah," I said. "If the," really planned to lose us, I don't think they'd tip their hand like that."

"Nevertheless, we are Roanoke colony, and we are lost," Jane said.

"Irony is a bitch," I said.

"Perry, Sagan," Zane said. "Come here."

"What is it?" I asked.

"We've found someone out there," he said. "Encoded tight-beam. He's asking for the two of you."

"That's good news," I said.

Zane grunted noncommittally and pressed a button to put our caller on the intercom.

"This is John Perry," I said. "Jane Sagan and I are here."

"Hello, Major Perry," the voice said. "And hello Lieutenant Sagan! Wow, an honor to talk to you both. I'm Lieutenant Stross, Special Forces. I've been assigned to tell you what you're supposed to do next."

"You know what's happened here?" I asked.

"Let's see," Stross said. "You skipped to what you thought was Roanoke colony, only to find yourselves orbiting an entirely different planet, and now you think you're completely lost. And your Captain Zane there has found out he can't use his engines. That sound about right?"

"Yes," I said.

"Excellent," Stross said. "Well, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that you're not lost. We know exactly where you are. The bad news is you're not going anywhere anytime soon. I've got all the details for you when we meet, you two and Captain Zane and me. How about in fifteen minutes?"

"What do you mean, meet?" Zane said. "We're not picking up any ships in the area. We have no way of verifying who you say you are."

"Lieutenant Sagan can vouch for me," Stross said. "As for where I am, clip in a feed from your external camera fourteen and turn on a light."

Zane looked exasperated and confused, and then nodded over to one of his bridge officers. Zane's overhead monitor blinked to life, showing a portion of the starboard hull. It was dark until a floodlight clicked on and scooped out a cone of light.

"I'm not seeing anything but hull," Zane said.

Something flickered, and suddenly there was a turtle-like object in the camera, floating a foot or so off the hull.

"What the hell is that?" Zane said.

The turtle waved.

"Son of a bitch," Jane said.

"You know what that thing is?" Zane said.

Jane nodded. "That's a Gameran," she said, turning to Zane. "That's Lieutenant Stross. He's telling the truth about who he is. And I think we have just entered a world of shit."

"Wow, air," said Lieutenant Stross, waving his hand back and forth in the expanse of the shuttle bay. "I don't get to feel this much." Stross was floating lazily in the air he was grooving on, thanks to Zane having cut the gravity in the bay to accommodate Stross, who lived primarily in microgravity situations.

Jane explained it to me and Zane, as we took the elevator to the shuttle bay. Gameraris were humans—or at least, their DNA originated from human stock and had other things added in—radically sculpted and designed to live and thrive in airless space. To that end they had shelled bodies to protect them from vacuum and cosmic rays, symbiotic genetically altered algae stored in a special organ to provide them with oxygen, photosynthetic stripes to harness solar energy and hands on the ends of all their limbs. And, they were Special Forces soldiers. All those rumors in the general CDF infantry about wildly mutant Special Forces turned out to be more than rumors. I thought of my friend Harry Wilson, who I met when I first joined the CDF; he lived for this sort of stuff. I'd have to tell him the next time I saw him. If I ever saw him again.

Despite being a Special Forces soldier, Stross acted deeply informal, from his vocal mannerisms (vocal being a figurative term; vocal cords would be useless in space, so he didn't have any—his "voice" was generated in the BrainPal computer in his head and transmitted to our PDAs) to his apparent tendency to get distracted. There was a word for what he was.

Spacey.

Zane didn't waste any time on courtesy. "I want to know how the hell you got control of my ship," he said, to Stross.

"Blue pill," Stross said, still waving his hand about. "It's code that creates a virtual machine on your hardware. Your software runs on top of it, and never even knows it's not running on the hardware. That's why it can't tell anythings wrong."

"Get it off my computers," Zane said. "And then get off my boat."

Stross held open three of his hands, the other one still cutting air. "Do I look like a computer programmer to you?" he asked. "I don't know how to code it, I just know how to operate it. And my orders come from someone who outranks you. Sorry, Captain."

"How did you get here?" I asked. "I know you're adapted to space. But I'm pretty sure you don't have a Skip Drive in there."