The new information.
The data Ocampo was given since he got here—here, incidentally, being a military base hollowed out of an asteroid, made and run by the Rraey until some recent tangles with the Colonial Union and some others made them scale way, way back—and information he’d created since he’d been here.
With this group.
With the Equilibrium.
Which is what they were calling themselves, anyway.
I thought it was a stupid name. But they weren’t giving me a vote. And if they did I would probably name it “The League of Assholes,” so I don’t think they would mind not having my input.
This new information included audio and video recordings of meetings and the automatic transcriptions of the same. Those were useful because they tagged who was saying what. This was useful because some of the people in the meetings were from species I’d never encountered before—a fact that was not especially impressive since most of my travel was within the Colonial Union, but still something to deal with.
Most of the transcriptions were of meetings about unexciting things—discussions about the maintenance of the base, for one, which apparently had a mold problem that was aggravating the respiratory systems of several of the species there, to which I thought, Well, good.
But then I found some interesting transcripts after all.
For example: one recorded only a couple of weeks into our stay at the base, which started off with Ku Tlea Dho, a Rraey diplomat, catching Ocampo not paying attention.
“You seem distracted, Secretary Ocampo,” Dho said. The video had him down the arc of the table that dominated a tiny meeting room, which had a dozen people in it, most from different races.
“I’m still getting my bearings on the station, Ambassador Dho,” Ocampo said.
“You will be here for a while, Secretary,” Dho said. “You will have time.”
Ocampo smiled here. “Hopefully not too much more time.”
“How do you mean?” asked Ake Bae. He was an Eyr. The Eyr were members of the Conclave, or so I learned when I checked the files Ocampo brought with him. Increasingly unhappily members of the Conclave.
“The time has come to discuss the endgame,” Ocampo said, to the room. “Our endgame.”
“Has it.”
“It’s why I am here, Ake Bae,” Ocampo said.
“Indeed,” said Ake Bae. “Are you sure, Secretary Ocampo, that you’re not confusing your own endgame with our endgame? I understand that you are now in exile from the Colonial Union for the duration of the campaign at the very least. That does not imply that Equilibrium must now change its schedule to accommodate your personal needs or inclinations.”
Ocampo smiled again, but not exactly a nice smile. “I understand the concern,” he said, looking around the room. “I know very well that many of you have the view that humans, individually and as a species, have an outsized opinion of our importance to events, both in general and here with our particular activity. I’m also aware that many of you are of the opinion that I’ve always been a pain in the ass.”
There were noises in the room that I assumed equated to laughter.
“Let me remind you, however, that the roots of this rebellion of ours come from when we, the Colonial Union, struck out against the Conclave at Roanoke,” Ocampo continued. He looked around the room at the assembled species. “How many of your governments watched the Conclave form, and felt helpless to do anything about it?” He looked at Ake Bae. “How many of your governments joined the Conclave rather than fight it? The Colonial Union—humanity—were the only ones to bloody the Conclave. The only ones to show they could be bloodied. The only ones to show that General Gau’s experiment with hegemony could be toppled.”
“You seem to be discounting the attempted coup of Gau after Roanoke,” Ake Bae said.
“A coup given impetus by the Colonial Union’s attack on the Conclave fleet,” Ocampo countered. “My point, Ake Bae, is that we are here today because of what humans have done. If we have a high opinion of our importance to this cause of ours, it’s because we’ve earned it. It’s not merely ego.”
“There’s irony in praising the Colonial Union’s actions against the Conclave when it’s that very action that convinced us all that it must be destroyed along with the Conclave,” said Utur Nove. Nove was from Elpri. I had no idea until that moment that a planet named Elpri even existed.
“We all agree that the return to an equilibrium of power is best for all of our species,” Ocampo said. “Thus the very name of our organization. The Conclave represents the primary threat to that equilibrium. We agree about that. We also agree that the Colonial Union grew too powerful in opposition to the Conclave. But don’t confuse the Colonial Union with humanity.”