“What happens if it doesn’t?” I asked.
Dad laughed a very small and bitter laugh. “If it doesn’t, then I don’t think the Conclave is going to be in any mood for negotiations,” he said.
“Oh, God,” I said. “We have to tell people, Dad.”
“I know we do,” he said. “I tried keeping things from the colonists before, and it didn’t work very well.” He was talking about the werewolves there, and I reminded myself that when all this was done I needed to come clean to him about my own adventures with them. “But I also don’t need another panic on our hands. People have been whipsawed enough in the last couple of days. I need to figure out a way to tell people what the CU has planned without putting them in fear for their lives.”
“Despite the fact they should be,” I said.
“That is the catch,” Dad said, and gave another bitter chuckle. Then he looked at me. “It’s not right, Zo?. This whole colony is built on a lie. Roanoke was never intended to be a real colony, a viable colony. It exists because our government needed a way to thumb its nose at the Conclave, to defy its colonization ban, and to buy time to build a trap. Now that it’s had that time, the only reason our colony exists is to be a goat at a stake. The Colonial Union doesn’t care about us for who we are, Zo?. It only cares about us for what we are. What we represent to them. What they can use us for. Who we are doesn’t actually enter into it.”
“I know the feeling,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Dad said. “I’m getting both abstract and depressed.”
“It’s not abstract, Dad,” I said. “You’re talking to the girl whose life is a treaty point. I know what it means to be valued for what I am rather than who I am.”
Dad gave me a hug. “Not here, Zo?,” he said. “We love you for you. Although if you want to tell your Obin friends to get off their asses and help us, I wouldn’t mind.”
“Well, I did get Hickory and Dickory to swear not to kill you,” I said. “So that’s progress, at least.”
“Yes, baby steps in the right direction,” Dad said. “It’ll be nice not to have to worry about being knifed by members of my household.”
“There’s always Mom,” I said.
“Trust me, if I ever annoyed her that much, she wouldn’t use something as painless as a knife,” Dad said. He kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks for coming to tell me what Hickory said, Zo?,” he said. “And thanks for keeping it to yourself for now.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, and then headed for the door. I stopped before I turned the handle. “Dad? How long do you think it will take before the Conclave is here?”
“Not long, Zo?,” he said. “Not long at all.”
In fact, it took just about two weeks.
In that time, we prepared. Dad found a way to tell everyone the truth without having them panic: He told them that there was still a good chance the Conclave would find us and that the Colonial Union was planning on making a stand here; that there was still danger but that we had been in danger before, and that being smart and prepared was our best defense. Colonists called up plans to build bomb shelters and other protections, and used the excavation and construction machinery we’d kept packed up before. People kept to their work and stayed optimistic and prepared themselves as best they could, readying themselves for a life on the edge of a war.
I spent my time reading the stuff Hickory and Dickory gave me, watching the videos of the colony removals, and poring through the data to see what I could learn. Hickory and Dickory were right, there was just too much of it, and lots of it in formats I couldn’t understand. I don’t know how Jane managed to keep it all straight in her head. But what was there was enough to know a few different things.
First, the Conclave was huge: Over four hundred races belonged to it, each of them pledging to work together to colonize new worlds rather than compete for them. This was a wild idea; up until now all the hundreds of races in our part of space fought with each other to grab worlds and colonize them, and then once they created a new colony they all fought tooth and nail to keep their own and wipe out everyone else’s. But in the Conclave setup, creatures from all sorts of races would live on the same planet. You wouldn’t have to compete. In theory, a great idea—it beats having to try to kill everyone else in the area—but whether it would actually work was still up in the air.