The End of All Things: The Fourth Instalment (4 page)

Abumwe stood up again, less dramatically this time.

“What’s going to happen now?”
Okada asked.

“We’ll make sure you stay intact,” Abumwe said.

“That’s not what I meant.
I meant, what’s going to happen to Khartoum.
What is the Colonial Union going to do to my planet.
To my people.”

“I don’t know, Minister Okada,” Abumwe said.
I wondered if he noticed that she gave him his honorific the one time he gave thought to those he was supposed to represent, and not just himself.

* * *

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Abumwe said to her current brain trust, which at the moment was Hillary Drollet, her assistant; Neva Balla, the captain of the
Chandler
; my friend Hart Schmidt; and me.
All of us were crammed into that same small room.
“It won’t be long before Equilibrium discovers that their attack has failed.”

“I don’t think it did,” I said.

“How do you figure?”
Balla said, to me.
“The
Tubingen
isn’t entirely destroyed.
The two ships attacking it were.
The Rraey attack on our soldiers was likewise countered and the Rraey eliminated, except for our two prisoners.
And Khartoum isn’t independent.
If anything it’s just signed up for more direct Colonial Union oversight.
There are twenty CDF ships on the way here now to make that point.”

I pointed at her for emphasis.
“But, see, that’s the victory condition.”

“Explain yourself, Lieutenant,” Abumwe said to me.

“What does Equilibrium want?”
I asked the room.
“It wants to destabilize and destroy the Colonial Union.
And the Conclave, too, but let’s focus on us for a minute.”

“Right,” Balla said.
“And they
failed
.
Khartoum is still in the Colonial Union.
It didn’t destroy the Colonial Union.”

“It’s not just destroy.
It’s also
destabilize,
” I said.
“The CDF is sending ships not just to deal with the
Tubingen
’s survivors, but to exert control over a rebellious planet.
You said twenty ships, Captain.”

“That’s right.”

“When was the last time the Colonial Union committed that number of CDF ships to a colonial world that wasn’t directly under attack by another species?”

“You’re the one with the computer in your head,” Balla said.
“You tell us.”

“It hasn’t happened in over a century,” I said.

“We’ve never had the level of uprisings we’re seeing now,” Hart said, to me.
He looked around the room.
“Harry and I talked to Lieutenant Lee, who led that
Tubingen
platoon to get the prime minister.
She said that all of her previous recent missions were either stopping rebellions on Colonial Union planets or containing them if they’d already begun.
That’s new.
That’s different.”

“This goes to my point,” I said.
“The Colonial Union is already destabilizing.
Bringing in twenty ships won’t help.”

“I don’t know about that,” Balla said.
“I think no one on Khartoum is going to start anything anytime soon.”

“But the audience here isn’t just Khartoum,” Abumwe said, to Balla, and then looked at me.
“That’s what you’re going to say next, isn’t it.”

“Yes,” I said.
“Because it’s not.
We know that Khartoum was one of ten colony worlds that were going to jointly announce their independence.
Equilibrium got them to jump the gun for its own purposes.
I think part of that purpose was to invoke an outsized, military response on our part.”

“But that would just intimidate the other colonies,” Balla said.

“Or anger them,” Hart said.

“Or inspire them to stick to their guns, as it were,” I said.

“‘Stick to their guns’ is a curious phrase to use,” Balla said.
“Because they don’t have any.
The Colonial Union has all the weaponry on its side.
Whether they’re inspired or angry or both, the colonies can’t miss the Colonial Union’s message that the party’s over.”

I glanced over to Abumwe.

“Unless Equilibrium has been talking to these other colonies as well,” she said.

“Right,” I said.
“Equilibrium is small so it has to maximize its impact.
It has to go for gestures that make a splash.
It’s something they learned from us.”

“How so?”
Abumwe asked.

“Like when we fought the Conclave over Roanoke,” I said.
“It’s four hundred alien races, all with their own military reach.
We couldn’t possibly take them on ship-to-ship.
So when we wanted to destroy it, we lured them into a trap we devised, destroyed their grand fleet by subterfuge, and waited for the fallout to take down the Conclave.”

“There is the minor detail that the plan didn’t work,” Balla said.
“The Conclave survived.”

“But the Conclave wasn’t the same after that,” I pointed out.
“Before Roanoke, the Conclave was this dauntingly large force that was impossible to fight.
After Roanoke, there was an open rebellion and there was the first assassination attempt on General Gau, their leader.
Those tensions never went away, and Gau was in fact later assassinated.
We were there for it.
You can lay out a path from Roanoke to Gau’s death.
The Conclave today is what the Colonial Union made it.
Which also means in some way the Colonial Union helped create the conditions that make Equilibrium possible.”

“And now Equilibrium is shaping the Colonial Union,” Abumwe said.

“It’s certainly making the effort, yes.”

“There is some irony to that.”

I nodded at this.
“And the thing we have to remember is that it’s doing it for its own purposes.”
I pointed in the direction of the very small room in which we were currently keeping Khartoum’s prime minister.
“Okada and his government got sold a bill of goods by Equilibrium, which attacked us.
But it’s not Equilibrium who is being punished, it’s Khartoum.”

“When you lay down with dogs, you get fleas,” Hart said.

“Yes.
I’m not defending Okada’s act.
He and the planet wouldn’t be in the position they are today if he and his government hadn’t let Equilibrium through the door.
But Equilibrium got what it wanted out of the exchange.
More Colonial Union oversight means more resentment of the Colonial Union, not just here, but everywhere that finds out about it.”

“The Colonial Union holds a virtual monopoly on information,” Balla said.

“It did,” I agreed.
“It doesn’t anymore.
And, leaving aside the general philosophical issue with a single source bottlenecking every bit of communication for its own purposes, that presents its own problems.”

“Like Equilibrium creating its own version of events here on Khartoum and presenting it to the other colonies,” Abumwe said.

“Right again,” I said.
“Which goes back again to my point about Equilibrium maximizing its efforts.
It doesn’t take a lot for them to leverage mistrust of the Colonial Union into the appearance of being a fair dealer to the colonial worlds.”
I pointed to Abumwe.
“You said we don’t have much time.
I think it’s more correct to say that we’re already out of time.
Equilibrium is almost certainly already out there selling its version of events, and when it shows a feed of all our ships floating above the surface of Khartoum, that’s just going to act as confirmation to the rebellious colonies.”

“How do we know about the rebellious colonies?”
Balla asked.

“The Colonial Union is not entirely without friends on the colony worlds,” Abumwe said.
“Or in their governments.
We have had people feeding us information for a while now.”

“And we never did anything on it?
We let it get to this point?”

“With the politics of the colony worlds the Colonial Union prefers to do things as quietly as possible, until they can’t be handled quietly anymore.”
Abumwe shrugged.
“It worked before, for decades.
The Colonial Union is resistant to change.
And at the top there’s the belief that things can still be managed quietly.
That we will be able to control the actions of the colonies.”

“That’s not working out very well at this point, Ambassador,” Balla said.

“No, it isn’t,” Abumwe agreed.

“And we knew nothing about Equilibrium’s involvement.”

“Remember that one of the prime movers of Equilibrium turned out to be a highly placed member of our State Department,” I said, to Balla.
“It’s entirely possible that what we thought we knew about the independence movements on the colony worlds was based on highly edited information.
And once Ocampo was retaken, Equilibrium would naturally change tactics.
That would be my guess, anyway.”

Balla turned to me.
“Have you always had this sort of paranoid mind?”

I smiled.
“Captain, the problem is not that I’m paranoid.
The problem is that the universe keeps justifying my paranoia.”

Abumwe turned her attention back to me.
“So, your analysis, paranoid or otherwise, is that this encounter was a success for Equilibrium.”

“Yes,” I said.
“It wasn’t perfect; I think they would have liked to have destroyed the
Tubingen,
killed everyone aboard, made it look like the Khartoumian government was entirely responsible for it all, and have us none the wiser for it.
But as it is, they’ll be able to sell their version to people who are receptive to hear it.
Equilibrium’s been working on a strategy of making us look deceptive and dissembling for a while now.
It works because we are, in fact, deceptive and dissembling.”

“What’s their next step, then?”
Hart asked.

“I think that may be the lieutenant’s point,” Abumwe said.
“They don’t have to have a next step.
They just have to wait for us to do what we always do, the way we always do it.”

I nodded.
“Why do the work to destabilize us when we’ll do it for ourselves.”

“But there still has to be a
point
to it,” Balla said, to Abumwe.
She turned to me.
“Look, Lieutenant, I understand that you are deeply enthusiastic about this convoluted web of actions that you’re spinning.
I’m not going to say that it’s wrong.
But Equilibrium isn’t doing this just for the fun of it.
They’re not nihilists.
There has to be a point.
There has to be a plan.
This has to
lead
to something.”

“It leads to the end of all things,” I said.
“Or less dramatically, to either or both the Colonial Union and the Conclave fracturing, and the return of every species in our local slice of space being constantly at war with each other.”

“I still don’t know why anyone would want that,” Hart said.

“Because it worked really well for some people,” I said.
“Let’s not lie, Hart.
It worked really well for us.
For humans.
And more specifically for the Colonial Union.
A system of government, stable for centuries, predicated on killing the shit out of everyone else and taking their land.
That’s practically the modus operandi of every successful human civilization to date.
No wonder some of us wanted to return to it, even at the risk of destroying the Colonial Union itself.
Because if we got back, we’d be meaner than ever before.”

“Unless we weren’t, and were just wiped out instead.”

“Well, there is that.
You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, but you also have to make sure that what’s inside the egg makes it to the pan.”

“I … don’t know what that means,” Hart said.

“It means destroying the Colonial Union isn’t a trivial act for the survival of the human race,” I said.
“We might not have time to think up something new before we’re wiped out.”

“That’s what I said,” Hart pointed out.
“More compactly.”

“Whether or not it leads to the end of all things is not my concern right now,” Balla said.
“My concern is the next
specific
thing that Equilibrium is going to do, or wants to have happen.”