I waved him in. “What do you have for me?” I asked.
“On the creatures, nothing,” Bennett said. “I did all sorts of search parameters and came out with squat. There’s not a lot to go on. They didn’t do a whole lot on exploring on this planet.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.
“All right,” Bennett said. “You know that video file of the Conclave blasting that colony?”
“Yes,” I said. “What does that have to do with this planet?”
“It doesn’t,” Bennett said. “I told you, I checked all the data files for edits under a batch command. It scooped up that file with all the rest of them.”
“What about the file?” I asked.
“Well, it turns out the video file you have is only part of another video file. The metadata features time codes for the original video file. The time codes say your video is just the tail end of that other video. There’s more video there.”
“How much more?” I asked.
“A lot more,” Bennett said.
“Can you get it back?” I asked
Bennett smiled. “Already done,” he said.
Six hours and a few dozen strained conversations with colonists later, I let myself into the Black Box. The PDA Bennett had loaded the video file into was on his desk, as promised. I picked it up; the video was already queued up and paused at the start. Its first image was of two creatures on a hill, overlooking a river. I recognized the hill and one of the creatures from the video I’d already seen. The other one I hadn’t seen before. I squinted to get a better look, then cursed myself for being stupid and magnified the image. The other creature resolved itself.
It was a Whaid.
“Hello,” I said to the creature. “What are you doing, talking to the guy who wiped out your colony?”
I started the video to find out.
EIGHT
The two stood near the edge of a bluff overlooking a river, watching the sunset over the far prairie.
“You have beautiful sunsets here,” General Tarsem Gau said to Chan orenThen.
“Thank you,” orenThen said. “It’s the volcanoes.”
Gau looked over at orenThen, amused. The rolling plain was interrupted only by the river, its bluffs and the small colony that lay where the bluffs descended toward the water.
“Not here,” orenThen said, sensing Gau’s unspoken observation. He pointed west, where the sun had just sunk below the horizon. “Half a planet that way. Lots of tectonic activity. There’s a ring of volcanoes around the entire western ocean. One of them went up just as autumn ended. There’s still dust in the atmosphere.”
“Must have made for a hard winter,” Gau said.
OrenThen made a motion that suggested otherwise. “Big enough eruption for nice sunsets. Not big enough for climate change. We have mild winters. It’s one of the reasons we settled here. Hot summers, but good for growing. Rich soil. Excellent water supply.”
“And no volcanoes,” Gau said.
“No volcanoes,” orenThen agreed. “No quakes, either, because we’re right in the middle of a tectonic plate. Incredible thunderstorms, however. And last summer, tornadoes with hail the size of your head. We lost crops with that. But no place is entirely perfect. On balance this is a good place to start a colony, and to build a new world for my people.”
“I agree,” Gau said. “And from what I can tell, you’ve done a marvelous job leading this colony.”
OrenThen bowed his head slightly. “Thank you, General. Coming from you, that’s high praise indeed.”
The two returned their attention to the sunset, watching as the early dusk deepened around them.
“Chan,” Gau said. “You know I can’t let you keep this colony.”
“Aah,” orenThen said, and smiled, still looking into the sunset. “So much for this being a social call.”
“You know it’s not,” Gau said.
“I know,” orenThen said. “Your knocking my communications satellite out of the sky was my first clue.” OrenThen pointed down the slope of the bluff, where a platoon of Gau’s soldiers stood, warily eyed by orenThen’s own escort of farmers. “They were my second.”
“They’re for show,” Gau said. “I needed to be able to talk to you without the distraction of being shot at.”
“And blasting my satellite?” orenThen said. “That’s not for show, I suspect.”
“It was necessary, for your sake,” Gau said.
“I doubt that,” orenThen said.
“If I left you your satellite, you or someone in your colony would have sent a skip drone, letting your government know you were under attack,” Gau said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“You just told me that I can’t keep this colony,” orenThen said.
“You can’t,” Gau said. “But that’s not the same thing as being under attack.”