* * *
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Abumwe said to her current brain trust, which at the moment was Hillary Drollet, her assistant; Neva Balla, the captain of the Chandler; my friend Hart Schmidt; and me. All of us were crammed into that same small room. “It won’t be long before Equilibrium discovers that their attack has failed.”
“I don’t think it did,” I said.
“How do you figure?” Balla said, to me. “The Tubingen isn’t entirely destroyed. The two ships attacking it were. The Rraey attack on our soldiers was likewise countered and the Rraey eliminated, except for our two prisoners. And Khartoum isn’t independent. If anything it’s just signed up for more direct Colonial Union oversight. There are twenty CDF ships on the way here now to make that point.”
I pointed at her for emphasis. “But, see, that’s the victory condition.”
“Explain yourself, Lieutenant,” Abumwe said to me.
“What does Equilibrium want?” I asked the room. “It wants to destabilize and destroy the Colonial Union. And the Conclave, too, but let’s focus on us for a minute.”
“Right,” Balla said. “And they failed. Khartoum is still in the Colonial Union. It didn’t destroy the Colonial Union.”
“It’s not just destroy. It’s also destabilize,” I said. “The CDF is sending ships not just to deal with the Tubingen’s survivors, but to exert control over a rebellious planet. You said twenty ships, Captain.”
“That’s right.”
“When was the last time the Colonial Union committed that number of CDF ships to a colonial world that wasn’t directly under attack by another species?”
“You’re the one with the computer in your head,” Balla said. “You tell us.”
“It hasn’t happened in over a century,” I said.
“We’ve never had the level of uprisings we’re seeing now,” Hart said, to me. He looked around the room. “Harry and I talked to Lieutenant Lee, who led that Tubingen platoon to get the prime minister. She said that all of her previous recent missions were either stopping rebellions on Colonial Union planets or containing them if they’d already begun. That’s new. That’s different.”
“This goes to my point,” I said. “The Colonial Union is already destabilizing. Bringing in twenty ships won’t help.”
“I don’t know about that,” Balla said. “I think no one on Khartoum is going to start anything anytime soon.”
“But the audience here isn’t just Khartoum,” Abumwe said, to Balla, and then looked at me. “That’s what you’re going to say next, isn’t it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Because it’s not. We know that Khartoum was one of ten colony worlds that were going to jointly announce their independence. Equilibrium got them to jump the gun for its own purposes. I think part of that purpose was to invoke an outsized military response on our part.”
“But that would just intimidate the other colonies,” Balla said.
“Or anger them,” Hart said.
“Or inspire them to stick to their guns, as it were,” I said.
“‘Stick to their guns’ is a curious phrase to use,” Balla said. “Because they don’t have any. The Colonial Union has all the weaponry on its side. Whether they’re inspired or angry or both, the colonies can’t miss the Colonial Union’s message that the party’s over.”
I glanced over to Abumwe.
“Unless Equilibrium has been talking to these other colonies as well,” she said.
“Right,” I said. “Equilibrium is small so it has to maximize its impact. It has to go for gestures that make a splash. It’s something they learned from us.”
“How so?” Abumwe asked.
“Like when we fought the Conclave over Roanoke,” I said. “It’s four hundred alien races, all with their own military reach. We couldn’t possibly take them on ship-to-ship. So when we wanted to destroy it, we lured them into a trap we devised, destroyed their grand fleet by subterfuge, and waited for the fallout to take down the Conclave.”
“There is the minor detail that the plan didn’t work,” Balla said. “The Conclave survived.”
“But the Conclave wasn’t the same after that,” I pointed out. “Before Roanoke, the Conclave was this dauntingly large force that was impossible to fight. After Roanoke, there was an open rebellion and there was the first assassination attempt on General Gau, their leader. Those tensions never went away, and Gau was in fact later assassinated. We were there for it. You can lay out a path from Roanoke to Gau’s death. The Conclave today is what the Colonial Union made it. Which also means in some way the Colonial Union helped create the conditions that make Equilibrium possible.”
“And now Equilibrium is shaping the Colonial Union,” Abumwe said.
“It’s certainly making the effort, yes.”