“I don’t think you know what you’re saying when you say we should go wildcat,” Jane said to Trujillo. “The last wildcat colony I was at had all its colonists slaughtered for food. We found the bodies of children in a stack, waiting to be butchered. Don’t kid yourself. Going wildcat is a death sentence.” Jane’s statement hung in the air for several seconds, daring anyone to refute it.
“There are risks,” Trujillo finally said, taking up the challenge. “But we’re alone. We are a wildcat colony in everything but name. And we don’t know that this Conclave of yours is as horrible as the Colonial Union has made it out to be. The CU has been deceiving us all this time. It has no credibility. We can’t trust it to have our interests at heart.”
“So you want proof the Conclave means us harm,” Jane said.
“It’d be nice,” Trujillo said.
Jane turned to me. “Show them,” she said.
“Show us what?” asked Trujillo.
“This,” I said. From my PDA—which I would soon no longer be able to use—I turned on the large wall monitor and fed it a video file. It showed a creature on a hill or bluff. Beyond the creature was what looked like a small town. It was bathed entirely in blinding light.
“The village you see is a colony,” I said. “It was established by the Whaid, not long after the Conclave told the nonaffiliated races to stop colonizing. The Conclave jumped the gun, because it couldn’t enforce its decree at the time. So some of the nonaffiliated races colonized anyway. But now the Conclave is catching up.”
“Where is that light coming from?” asked Lee Chen.
“It’s coming from the Conclave ships in orbit,” Jane said. “It’s a terror tactic. It disorients the enemy.”
“There’s got to be a lot of ships up there,” Chen said.
“Yes,” Jane said.
The beams of light illuminating the Whaidian colony suddenly snapped off.
“Here it comes,” I said.
The killing beams were hardly detectable at first; they were tuned for destruction, not for show, and nearly all their energy went into their targets, not out to the camera. There was only a waver in the air from the sudden heat, visible even at the distance the camera sat.
Then, within a fraction of a second, the entire colony ignited and exploded. Superheated air blew the fragments and the dust of the colony’s buildings, structures, vehicles and inhabitants up into the sky in a whirling display that illuminated the power of the beams themselves. The flickering fragments of matter mimicked and mirrored the flames that were now themselves reaching up toward the heavens.
A shock wave of heat and dust expanded out from the charred remains of the colony. The beams flickered off again. The light show in the sky disappeared, leaving behind smoke and flames. Outside the periphery of the destruction, an occasional solitary eruption of flame would appear.
“What is that?” asked Yoder.
“Some of the colonists were outside the colony when it was destroyed, we think,” I said. “So they’re cleaning them up.”
“Christ,” Gutierrez said. “With the colony destroyed those people would probably be dead anyway.”
“They were making a point,” Jane said.
I turned off the video. The room was dead silent.
Trujillo pointed at my PDA. “How did we get that?” he asked.
“The video?” I asked. He nodded. “Apparently, this was hand-delivered to the CU State Department, and to every non-Conclave-affiliated government, by messengers from the Conclave itself.”
“Why would they do that?” Trujillo said. “Why would they show themselves committing an . . . atrocity like this?”
“So there’s no doubt they mean what they say,” I said. “What this says to me is that no matter what we think of the Colonial Union at the moment, we can’t afford to work on the assumption that the Conclave will act reasonably toward us. The CU has thumbed its nose at these guys, and they’re not going to be able to ignore that. They’re going to come looking for us. We don’t want to give them an opportunity to find us.” This was met with more silence.
“Now what?” asked Marta Piro.
“I think you need to have a vote,” I said.
Trujillo looked up, a slight look of incredulity on his face. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I almost thought I heard you say we should have a vote.”
“The plan on the table right now is the one we’ve just put in front of you,” I said. “The one that was given to Jane and me. In light of everything, I think it’s the best plan we’ve got for now. But it’s not going to work if all of you don’t agree. You are going to have to go back to your colonists to explain this. You are going to have to sell this to them. If this colony is going to work, everyone has to be on board with this. And that starts with all of you.”
I stood up; Jane followed. “This is a discussion you need to have without us,” I said. “We’ll be waiting outside.” We left.
“Is there something wrong?” I asked Jane, as we exited.