“It’s not wrong,” Jared said. “It is hostile. I’ve seen enough combat to know that.”
“But all you’ve seen is combat,” Boutin said. “You’ve never been out where you weren’t killing whatever the Colonial Union tells you to. And it’s certainly true that the universe is hostile to the Colonial Union. And the reason for that is, the Colonial Union is hostile to the universe. In all the time humanity has been out in the universe we’ve never not been at war with nearly every other species we’ve come across. There are a few here or there the Colonial Union deems useful as allies or trade partners but so few as to have their numbers be insignificant. We know of six hundred and three intelligent species inside the Colonial Union’s Skip horizon, Dirac. Do you know how many the CU classifies as a threat, meaning the CDF is able to preemptively attack at will? Five hundred and seventy-seven. When you’re actively hostile toward ninety-six percent of all the intelligent races you know about, that’s not just stupid. It’s racial suicide.”
“Other species are at war with each other,” Jared said. “It’s not just the Colonial Union that goes to war.”
“Yes,” Boutin said. “Every species has other species it competes with and goes to war against. But other species don’t try to fight every other species they come across. The Rraey and the Enesha were longtime enemies before we allied them, and who knows, maybe they will be again. But neither of those species classifies all the other races as a permanent threat. Nobody does that but the Colonial Union. Have you heard of the Conclave, Dirac?”
“No,” Jared said.
“The Conclave is a great meeting between hundreds of species in this part of the galaxy,” Boutin said. “It convened more than twenty years ago to try to create a workable framework of government for the entire region. It would help stop the fighting for real estate by apportioning new colonies in a systematic way, rather than having every species run for the prize and try to beat off whoever tries to take it away. It would enforce the system with a multispecies military command that would attack anyone who tried to take a colony by force. Not every species has signed on to the Conclave, but only two species have refused even to send representatives. One is the Consu, because why would they. The other is the Colonial Union.”
“You expect me to take your word for that,” Jared said.
“I don’t expect anything from you,” Boutin said. “You don’t know about it. The rank-and-file CDF doesn’t know about it. The colonials certainly don’t know about it. The Colonial Union has all the spaceships, Skip drones and communication satellites. It handles all the trade and what little diplomacy we engage in on its space stations. The Colonial Union is the bottleneck through which all information flows, and it decides what the colonies learn and what they don’t. And not just the colonies, it’s Earth too. Hell, Earth is the worst.”
“Why?” Jared asked.
“Because it’s been kept socially retarded for two hundred years,” Boutin said. “The Colonial Union farms people there, Dirac. Uses the rich countries there for its military. Uses the poor countries for its colonial seed stock. And it likes the arrangement so much that the Colonial Union actively suppresses the natural evolution of society there. They don’t want it to change. That would mess up their production of soldiers and colonists. So they sealed Earth off from the rest of humanity to keep the people there from knowing just how perfectly they’re being held in stasis. Manufactured a disease—they called it the Crimp—and told the people on Earth it was an alien infection. Used it as an excuse to quarantine the planet. They let it flare up every generation or two just to maintain the pretense.”
“I’ve met people from Earth,” Jared said, thinking of Lieutenant Cloud. “They’re not stupid. They would know if they were being held back.”
“Oh, the Colonial Union will allow an innovation or two every couple of years to make them think they’re still on a growth curve, but it’s never anything useful,” Boutin said. “A new computer here. A music player there. An organ transplant technique. They’re allowed the occasional land war to keep things interesting. Meanwhile, they have all the same social and political structures they had two hundred years earlier, and they think it’s because they’ve reached a point of genuine stability. And they still die of old age at seventy-five! It’s ridiculous. The Colonial Union has managed Earth so well it doesn’t even know it’s being managed. It’s in the dark. All the colonies are in the dark. Nobody knows anything.”
“Except you,” Jared said.