The Last Colony Page 24

  “But you would risk alienating the Colonial Union,” Jane said.

  “The Colonial Union has a number of other priorities at the moment,” Hickory said. “We do not feel the repercussions of aiding an independent Roanoke will be significant in the long run.”

  “So you will help us,” I said. “You just want us to declare ourselves independent of the Colonial Union first.”

  “We neither advise you to secede nor to stay,” Hickory said. “We merely note that if you should secede, we will help defend you.”

  I turned to Jane. “What do you think?”

  “I doubt the people of this colony are ready for us to declare their independence,” Jane said.

  “If the alternative is death?” I said.

  “Some of them probably would prefer death to being a traitor,” Jane said. “Or to being permanently cut off from the rest of humanity.”

  “Let’s ask them,” I said.

  The attack on Wabash colony was not much of an attack at all; a few missiles to destroy the colony’s administrative offices and landmarks, and a small invading force of a few hundred Bhav soldiers to shoot up the place. But then Wabash wasn’t the target. The targets were the three CDF cruisers that skipped in to defend the colony. The skip drone that had alerted the CDF to the attack indicated one Bhav cruiser and three smaller gunboats, all of which could be easily handled by three cruisers. What the skip drone could not indicate is that shortly after it skipped away from Wabash space, six additional Bhav cruisers skipped in, destroyed the satellite that launched the skip drones, and readied themselves for an ambush.

  The CDF cruisers entered Wabash space cautiously—by this time it was clear that the Colonial Union was under a general attack, and the CDF ship commanders were neither stupid nor rash. But the odds were against them from the moment they arrived in Wabash space. The CDF cruisers Augusta, Savannah and Portland took down three of the Bhav cruisers and all of the smaller gunships before they were overwhelmed and destroyed, scattering metal, air and crew into the space above the planet. It was three fewer cruisers the CDF had to defend the Colonial Union. It was also a signal that every new incident would have to be met with overwhelming force, constricting the number of colonies the CDF could defend at one time. Priorities already shifted to the new realities of war shifted once again, and not in the CU’s favor, nor in Roanoke’s.

  “You’re out of your mind,” said Marie Black. “We’re under attack from this Conclave, it wants to kill us all dead, and your solution to the problem is to go it alone, with no help from the rest of the human race? That’s just insane.”

  The looks up and down the Council table told me that Jane and I were all alone on this one, just like Jane suspected we would be. Even Manfred Trujillo, who knew the situation better than anyone, was taken aback by the suggestion we declare our independence. This was the original tough crowd.

  “We wouldn’t be alone,” I said. “The Obin will help us if we’re independent.”

  “That makes me feel safer,” Black said, mockingly. “Aliens are planning to murder us all, but don’t worry, we’ve got these pet aliens to keep us safe. That is, until they decide they’re better off siding with the other aliens.”

  “That’s not a very accurate assessment of the Obin,” I said.

  “But the Obin’s primary concern isn’t our colony,” said Lee Chen. “It’s your daughter. God forbid something happens to your daughter, because then where will we be? The Obin will have no more reason to help us. We’d be isolated from the rest of the Colonial Union.”

  “We’re already isolated from the rest of the Colonial Union,” I said. “Planets are under attack all over the union. The CDF is already scrambling to respond. We’re not a priority. We won’t be a priority. We’ve served our purpose.”

  “We have only your word for that,” Chen said. “We’re getting news reports, now that we’ve got access to our PDAs. There’s nothing in the news about anything of this.”

  “You have my word for it as well,” Trujillo said. “I’m not ready to sign on to independence, either, but Perry’s not lying. The Colonial Union has its priorities right now, and we’re definitely not one of them.”

  “I’m not trying to say that either of you are not as good as your word,” Chen said. “But think of what you’re asking us to do here. You’re asking us to risk everything—everything—on your word.”

  “Even if we were to agree to this, what then?” asked Lol Gerber, who had replaced Hiram Yoder on the council. “We’d be isolated. If the Colonial Union survives, we’d have to settle with them for raising rebellion. If the Colonial Union were to fall, then we’d be all that is left of the human race, and reliant on the grace of another people for our survival. How long could we expect them to shelter us, if the whole host of the intelligent races want us dead? How could we in good conscience ask the Obin to put their own survival at stake for ours? The Colonial Union is humanity. We belong in it, for better or worse.”

  “It’s not all of humanity,” I said. “There’s Earth.”

  “Which is kept in a corner by the Colonial Union,” Black said. “It’s not going to be any help to us now.”

  I sighed. “I can see where this is going to go,” I said. “I asked the Council for its vote, and Jane and I will abide by it. But I beg you, think about it. Don’t let your prejudice of the Obin,” I glanced at Marie Black, “or a feeling of patriotism blind you to the fact that we are now in a war, and we are at the front line—and we have no support from home. We are on our own. We need to consider what we have to do to survive, because no one else is looking out for us.”

  “You’ve never been this bleak before, Perry,” said Marta Piro.

  “I don’t think things have been this bleak before,” I said. “All right then. Let’s vote.”

  I voted to secede. Jane abstained; it was our tradition to only cast one vote between us. Every other member of the Council voted to stay in the Colonial Union.

  Technically speaking, mine was the only vote that counted. Of course, technically speaking, by voting to leave the Colonial Union, I had just voted for treason. So maybe everyone else was doing me a favor.

  “We’re a colony,” I said. “Still.” Smiles broke out across the table.

  “Now what do we do?” Marie Black asked.

  “I’m thinking,” I said. “Believe me, I’m thinking.”

  Bonita was a planet that lived up to its name, a lovely place with abundant wildlife with just the right genetic components for human consumption. Bonita had been settled fifteen years earlier; still a young colony, but established enough to have its own personality. Bonita was attacked by the Dtrutz, a species of more ambition than brains. This is one encounter that went decisively for the Colonial Union; the trio of CDF cruisers over Bonita made short work of the Dtrutz invading force, picking off their poorly designed ships first during the initial attack and then in a more leisurely fashion as the Dtrutz ships attempted to reach skip distance before the CDF rail gun projectiles reached the Dtrutz ships. The Dtrutz were not at all successful in this endeavor.

  What made the Dtrutz attack notable was not its complete incompetence but the fact that the Dtrutz were not a Conclave species; like the Colonial Union, they were unaffiliated. The Dtrutz were under the same ban on colonization as the Colonial Union. They attacked anyway. They knew—as did an increasing number of races—that the Colonial Union was locked in a wide struggle with elements of the Conclave, and that meant the possibility of peeling away some of the lesser human colonies while the CDF was otherwise occupied. The Colonial Union was wounded and shedding blood in the water, and the lesser fish were coming up from the depths to get a taste.

  “We’ve come for your daughter,” Hickory said to me.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said. Despite everything, I couldn’t resist the urge to crack a grin.

  “Our government has determined that it is inevitable that Roanoke will be attacked and destroyed,” Hickory said.

>   “Swell,” I said.

  “Dickory and I both regret this eventuality,” Hickory said, leaning forward slightly for emphasis. “And our inability to assist you in preventing this.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said, hoping it didn’t sound too insincere.

  Apparently, it did not. “We are not allowed to interfere or offer aid, but we have decided that it is acceptable to remove Zoë from danger,” Hickory continued. “We’ve requested a transport ship for her and for us; it is on its way. We wanted to let you know of these plans because she is your daughter, and because we have also secured permission to transport you and Jane if you wish.”

  “So the three of us can escape from this mess,” I said. Hickory nodded. “What about everyone else?”

  “We have no permission to accommodate others,” Hickory said.

  “But does no permission mean you can’t accommodate others?” I asked. “If Zoë wants to take her best friend Gretchen, are you going to tell her no? And do you think Zoë is going to leave if Jane and I stay?”

  “Do you plan to stay?” Hickory asked.

  “Of course we do,” I said.

  “You will die,” Hickory said.

  “We might,” I said, “although I’m working to avoid that right now. But regardless, Roanoke is where we belong. We’re not leaving, and I suspect you’ll have a difficult time convincing Zoë to leave without us, or without her friends.”

  “She would leave if you told her to,” Hickory said.

  I smiled, reached on my desk to key my PDA, and sent a message to Zoë to meet me immediately in my office. She arrived a few minutes later.

  “Hickory and Dickory want you to leave Roanoke,” I said.

  “Are you and Mom coming?” Zoë asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then the hell with that,” Zoë said, looking directly at Hickory as she said so.

  I held my hands open in supplication to Hickory. “Told you,” I said.

  “You didn’t tell her to come away,” Hickory said.

  “Go away, Zoë,” I said.

  “Screw you, ninety-year-old dad,” Zoë said, smiling and yet deadly serious at the same time. Then she turned back to the Obin. “And screw the both of you, too. And while we’re at it, screw being whatever it is that I am to the Obin. If you want to protect me, protect the people I care about. Protect this colony.”

  “We cannot,” Hickory said. “We’ve been forbidden to do so.”

  “Then you have a problem,” Zoë said. Her smile was gone, and her eyes were glistening. “Because I’m not going anywhere. And there’s nothing either you or anyone can do to change that.” Zoë stormed out.

  “That went pretty much exactly as I expected,” I said.

  “You didn’t do all you could do to convince her,” Hickory said.

  I squinted at Hickory. “You’re suggesting I was insincere.”

  “Yes,” Hickory said. Its expression was even more unreadable than usual, but I can’t imagine that saying something like that was easy for it; the emotional response would probably cause it to shut down its interface soon.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I was insincere.”

  “But why?” Hickory asked, and I was surprised by the plaintiveness in its voice. It was shaking now. “You have killed your own child, and the child of Charles Boutin.”

  “She’s not dead yet,” I said. “And neither are we. Neither is this colony.”

  “You know we cannot allow Zoë to come to harm,” Dickory said, breaking his silent act. I was reminded that he was in actuality the superior of the two Obin.

  “Are you going to go back to the plan of killing me and Jane to protect Zoë?” I asked.

  “It is to be hoped not,” Dickory said.

  “What a delightfully ambiguous answer,” I said.

  “It’s not ambiguous,” Hickory said. “You know what our position is. What it must be.”

  “And I’d ask you to remember what my position is,” I said. “I’ve told you that in every circumstance you should protect Zoë. That position has not changed.”

  “But you have made it substantially more difficult,” Hickory said. “You may have made it impossible.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Let me make a proposal to the two of you. You have a ship arriving soon. I’m going to promise you that Zoë will leave with you on that ship. But you have to promise me that you take her where I am going to ask her to go.”

  “Where is that?” Hickory said.

  “I’m not going to tell you yet,” I said.

  “That will make it difficult for us to agree,” Hickory said.

  “That’s the breaks,” I said. “But I guarantee you where you’re taking her will be more safe than here. Now. Agree, and I’ll make sure she goes with you. Don’t, you’ll have to find a way to protect her here, or kill me and Jane trying to drag her away. These are your choices.”

  Hickory and Dickory leaned in and conversed for several minutes, longer than I had ever seen them converse before.

  “We accept your condition,” Hickory said.

  “Good,” I said. “Now all I have to do is get Zoë to agree. Not to mention Jane.”

  “Will you tell us now where we will be taking Zoë?” Hickory asked.

  “To deliver a message,” I said.

  The Kristina Marie had just docked at Khartoum Station when its engine compartment shattered, vaporizing the back quarter of the trading ship and driving the front three-quarters of the ship directly into Khartoum Station. The station’s hull buckled and snapped; air and personnel burst from the fracture lines. Across the impact zone airtight bulkheads sprang into place, only to be torn from their moorings and sockets by the encroaching inertial mass of the Kristina Marie, itself bleeding atmosphere and crew from the collision. When the ship came to rest, the explosion and collision had crippled Khartoum Station, and killed 566 people on the station and all but six members of the Kristina Marie’s crew, two of whom died shortly thereafter of their injuries.

  The explosion of the Kristina Marie did more than destroy the ship and much of Khartoum Station; it coincided with the harvest of Khartoum’s hogfruit, a native delicacy that was one of Khartoum’s major exports. Hogfruit spoiled quickly after ripening (it got its name from the fact Khartoum’s settlers fed the overripe fruit to their pigs, who were the only ones who would eat them at that point), so Khartoum had invested heavily to be able to harvest and ship for export its hogfruit crop within days of ripening, via Khartoum Station. The Kristina Marie was only one of a hundred Colonial Union trade ships above Khartoum, awaiting its share of the fruit.

  With Khartoum Station down, the streamlined distribution system for the hogfruit ground into disarray. Ships dispatched shuttles to Khartoum itself to try to pack in as many crates of the fruit as possible, but this led to confusion on the ground in terms of which hogfruit producers had priority in shipping their product, and which trade ships had priority in receiving them. Fruit had to be unpacked from storage containers and repacked into shuttles; there were not nearly enough cargo men for the job. The vast majority of hogfruit rotted in its containers, delivering a major shock to the Khartoum economy, which would be compounded in the long term by the need to rebuild Khartoum Station—the economic lifeline for other exports as well—and bolster the defenses of Khartoum from further attack.

  Before the Kristina Marie docked at Khartoum Station, it transmitted its identification, cargo manifest and recent itinerary as part of the standard security “handshake.” The records showed that two stops previous, the Kristina Marie had traded at Quii, the homeworld of the Qui, one of the Colonial Union’s few allies. It had docked next to a ship of Ylan registry, the Ylan being members of the Conclave. Forensic analysis of the explosion left no doubt that it was intentionally triggered and not an accidental breach of the engine core. From Phoenix came the order that no trade ship that had visited a nonhuman world in the last year was to approach a space station without a thorough scan a
nd inspection. Hundreds of trade ships floated in space, their cargo unpacked and crews quarantined in the original Venetian sense of the word, awaiting the eradication of a different sort of plague.

  The Kristina Marie had been sabotaged and sent on its way, to the place where its destruction could have the most impact, not just in deaths but in paralyzing the economy of the Colonial Union. It worked brilliantly.

  The Roanoke Council didn’t react well to the news that I had sent Zoë to deliver a message to General Gau.

  “We need to discuss your treason problem,” Manfred Trujillo said to me.

  “I don’t have a problem with treason,” I said. “I can stop anytime.” I looked around the table at the rest of the Council members. The little joke didn’t go over well.

  “Goddamn it, Perry,” Lee Chen said, angrier than I’d ever seen him. “The Conclave is planning to kill us, and you’re passing notes to its leader?”

  “And you’ve used your daughter to do it,” Marie Black said, disgust creeping into her voice. “You’ve sent your only child to our enemy.”

  I glanced over at Jane and Savitri, both of whom nodded to me. We knew this was going to come up; we had discussed how best to handle it when it did.

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “We have enemies and lots of them, but General Gau isn’t one of them.” I told them of my conversation with General Szilard of the Special Forces, and his warning of the assassination attempt on Gau. “Gau has promised us that he wouldn’t attack Roanoke,” I said. “If he dies, there’s nothing between us and whoever wants to kill us.”

  “There’s nothing between us and them now,” Lee Chen said. “Or did you miss the attack on us a couple of weeks back?”

  “I didn’t miss it,” I said. “And I suspect it would have been much worse if Gau didn’t have at least some control over the Conclave. If he knows about this assassination attempt he can use it to get back control of the rest of the Conclave. And then we’ll be safe. Or at least safer. I decided it was worth it to take the risk to let him know.”