Time was critical. When the Colonial Union concocted its plan, it was too early to implement it. Even if the Colonial Union could have moved against the Conclave, other races whose colonies were threatened by the Conclave would not follow in the CU’s footsteps. The Colonial Union needed time to create a constituency of allies. The best way to do that, it was decided, would be to have them lose their colonies first. These races, with their amputated colonies, would see the hidden colony Roanoke as evidence that even the mighty Conclave could be confounded, raising the Colonial Union’s status among them and cultivating potential allies for when the moment was right.
Roanoke was a symbol, too, for some of the more dissatisfied members of the Conclave, who saw the burden of its grand designs fall on them without the immediate benefits they had hoped to gain. If the humans could defy the Conclave and get away with it, what value was there in being in the Conclave at all? Every day Roanoke stayed hidden was a day these lesser Conclave members would stew in their own dissatisfaction with the organization they’d surrendered their sovereignty to.
Primarily, however, the Colonial Union needed time for another reason entirely. It needed time to identify each of the 412 ships that comprised the Conclave’s fleet. It needed time to discover where these ships would be when the fleet was not in action. It needed time to position a Gameran Special Forces soldier, just like Lieutenant Stross, in the general area of each of these ships. Like Stross, each of these Special Forces members were adapted to the rigors of space. Like Stross, each of them was covered in embedded nano-camouflage that would allow them to approach and even secure themselves on these ships, unseen, for days or possibly weeks. Unlike Stross, each of these Special Forces soldiers wielded a small but powerful bomb, in which perhaps a dozen grams of fine-grained antimatter were suspended in vacuum.
When the Sacajawea returned with the crew of the Magellan, the Gamerans prepared themselves for their task. They silently and invisibly hid themselves in the hulls of their target spacecraft and went with them as they assembled at the agreed-upon rendezvous point, and readied themselves for yet another awe-inspiring mass entrance above a world filled with cowering colonists. When the skip drone from the Gentle Star popped into space, the Gamerans oh-so-gently placed their bombs on the hulls of their respective starships and then just floated off the ship hulls before the ships made their skip. They didn’t want to be around when those bombs went off.
They didn’t need to be. The bombs were remotely triggered by Lieutenant Stross, who, stationed a safe distance away, polled the bombs to make sure they were all accounted for and active, and detonated them in a sequence determined by him to have the greatest aesthetic impact. Stross was a quirky fellow.
The bombs, when triggered, fired the antimatter like a shotgun blast onto the hulls of their spaceships, spreading the antimatter across a wide surface area to ensure the most efficient annihilation of matter and antimatter. It worked beautifully, and terribly.
Much of this I learned much later, under different circumstances. But even in my time with General Gau, I knew this much: Roanoke was never a colony in the traditional sense of the term. Its purpose never was to give humans another home, or to extend our reach in the universe. It existed as a symbol of defiance, as a creator of time, and as a honey trap to lure a being who dreamed of changing the universe, and to destroy that dream while he watched.
As I said, anything is possible, given the time and the will. We had the time. We had the will.
General Gau stared as his fleet blew itself apart silently but brilliantly. Behind us his soldiers squalled horribly, confused and terrified by what they were seeing.
“You knew,” Gau said, in a whisper. He did not stop looking at the sky.
“I knew,” I said. “And I tried to warn you, General. I asked you not to call your fleet.”
“You did,” Gau said. “I can’t imagine why your masters let you.”
“They didn’t,” I said.
Gau turned to me then, wearing a face whose map I could not read, but which I sensed expressed profound horror, and yet, even now, curiosity. “You warned me,” Gau said. “On your own initiative.”
“I did,” I said.
“Why would you do that?” Gau asked.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I admitted. “Why did you decide to try to remove colonists instead of killing them?”
“It’s the moral thing to do,” Gau said.
“Maybe that’s why I did it,” I said, looking up to where the explosions continued their brilliance. “Or maybe I just didn’t want the blood of all those people on my hands.”
“It wasn’t your decision,” Gau said. “I have to believe that.”
“It wasn’t,” I said. “But that doesn’t matter.”
Eventually the explosions stopped.
“Your own ship was spared, General Gau,” I said.
“Spared,” he repeated. “Why?”