"I know," I said. "But you know as well as I do we've got nothing on this world. You two have seen the same files I have. Whoever did the so-called survey of this planet apparently didn't bother to spend more than ten minutes on it. We've got the basic biochemistry of the planet and that's pretty much it. We've got almost no information on flora and fauna, or even if it breaks down into flora and fauna. We don't know if the soil will grow our crops. We don't know what native life we can eat or use. All information the Department of Colonization usually provides a new colony, we don't have. We have to find all this stuff out for our own before we start, and unfortunately in that we've got a pretty big handicap."

We arrived at the information center, which was a grand name for the cargo container we'd modified for the purpose. "After you," I said, holding the first set of doors for Trujillo and Zane. Once we were all in, I sealed the door behind me, allowing the nanobotic mesh to completely envelop the outer door, turning it a featureless black, before opening the interior door. The nanobotic mesh had been programmed to absorb and cloak electromagnetic waves of all sorts. It covered the walls, floor and ceiling of the container. It was unsettling if you thought about it; it was like being in the exact center of nothing.

The man who had designed the mesh waited inside the center's interior door. "Administrator Perry," Jerry Bennett said. "Captain Zane. Mr. Trujillo. Nice to see you back in my little black box."

"How is the mesh holding up?" I asked.

"Good," Bennett said, and pointed at the ceiling. "No waves get in, no waves get out. Schrodinger would be jealous. I need more cells, though. The mesh sucks power like you wouldn't believe. Not to mention all the rest of this equipment." Bennett motioned to the rest of the technology in the center. Because of the mesh, it was the only place on Roanoke where there was technology that you wouldn't find past the middle of the twentieth century on Earth, save power technology that did not run on fossil fuels.

"I'll see what I can do," I said. "You're a miracle worker, Bennett."

"Nah," he said. "I'm just your average geek. I've got those soil reports you wanted." He handed over a PDA, and I fondled it for a moment before looking at the screen. "The good news is the soil samples I've seen so far look good for our crops in a general sense.

There's nothing in the soil that will kill them or stunt their growth, at least chemically. Each of the samples was crawling with little critters, too."

"Is that a bad thing?" Trujillo asked.

"Got me," Bennett said. 'What I know about soil management I read as I was processing these samples. My wife did a little gardening back on Phoenix and seemed to be of the opinion that having a bunch of bugs was good because they aerated the soil. Who knows, maybe she's right."

"She's right," I said. "Having a healthy amount of biomass is usually a good thing." Trujillo looked at me skeptically. "Hey, I farmed," I said. "But we also don't know how these creatures will react to our plants. We're introducing new species into a biosphere."

"You're officially beyond anything I know about the subject, so I'll move on," Bennett said. "You asked if there was any way for me to adapt the technology we have to switch off the wireless components. Do you want the long or short answer?"

"Let's start with the short answer," I said.

"Not really," Bennett said.

"Okay," I said. "Now I need the long answer."

Bennett reached over and grabbed a PDA that he had earlier pried apart, lifted the top off it and handed it to me. "This PDA is a fairly standard piece of Colonial Union technology. Here you see all the components; the processor, the monitor, the data storage, the wireless transmitter that lets it talk to other PDAs and computers. Not a single one of them is physically connected to any of the other parts. Every part of this PDA connects wirelessly to every other part."

"Why do they do it that way?" I asked, turning the PDA over in my hands.

"Because it's cheap," Bennett said. "You can make tiny data transmitters for next to nothing. It costs less than using physical materials. They don't cost much either, but in aggregate there's a real cost differential. So nearly every manufacturer goes that way. It's design by accountant. The only physical connections in the PDA are from the power cell to the individual components, and again that's because it's cheaper to do it that way."

"Can you use those connections to send data?" Zane said.

"I don't see how," Bennett said. "I mean, sending data over a physical connection is no problem. But getting into each of these components and flashing their command core to do it that way is beyond my talents. Aside from the programming skills, there's the fact each manufacturer locks out access to the command core. It's proprietary data. And even if I could do all that, there's no guarantee it would work. Among everything else, you'd be routing everything through the power cell. I'm not sure how you get that to work."

"So even if we turn off all the wireless transmitters, every one of these is still leaking wireless signals," I said.

"Yeah," Bennett said. "Across very short distances—no more than a few centimeters—but, yeah. If you're really looking for this sort of thing, you could detect it."

"There's a certain point at which this all becomes futile," Trujillo said. "If someone's listening for radio signals this weak, there's a pretty good chance they're scanning the planet optically as well. They're just going to see us."

"Hiding ourselves from sight is a difficult fix," I said to Trujillo. "This is an easy fix. Let's work on the easy fixes." I turned to Bennett, and handed back his PDA. "Let me ask you something else," I said. "Could you make wired PDAs? Ones without wireless parts or transmitters?"

"I'm sure I could find a design for one," Bennett said. "There are public domain blueprints. But I'm not exactly set up for manufacturing. I could go through everything we have and cobble up something. Wireless parts are the rule but there are some things that are still wired up. But we're never going to get to a place where everyone's walking around with a computer, much less being able to replace the onboard computers on most of the equipment we have. Honestly, outside this black box, we're not getting out of the early twentieth century any time soon."

All of us digested that for a moment. "Can we at least expand this?" Zane finally asked, motioning around him.

"I think we should," Bennett said. "In particular I think we need to build a black box medical bay, because Dr. Tsao keeps distracting me when I'm trying to get work done."

"She's hogging your equipment," I said.

"No, she's just really cute," Bennett said. "And that's going to get me in trouble with the wife. But also, I've only got a couple of her diagnostic machines :n here, and if we ever have a real medical problem, we're going to want more available."

I nodded. We'd already had one broken arm, from a teenager climbing up on the barrier and then slipping off. He was lucky not to have broken his neck. "Do we have enough mesh?" I asked.

"This is pretty much our entire stock," Bennett said. "But I can program it to make some more of itself. I'd need some more raw material."

"I'll have Ferro get on that," Zane said, referring to the cargo chief. "We'll see what we have in inventory."

"Every time I see him, he seems really pissed," Bennett said.

"Maybe it's because he's supposed to be at home and not here," Zane snapped. "Maybe he doesn't much like being kidnapped by the Colonial Union." Two weeks had not served to make the captain any more mellow about the destruction of his ship or the stranding of his crew.

"Sorry," Bennett said.