Rigney smiled. I’ll be at your office in two minutes,he sent.

I’m not there,Egan returned. Go to the State Department conference complex. I’m in Theater Seven.

What are you doing there?Rigney sent.

Scaring the children,Egan replied.

Three minutes later, Rigney slipped into the back of Theater Seven. The room was darkened and filled with midlevel members of the Colonial Union diplomatic corps. Rigney took a seat at one of the higher rows in the room and looked across at the faces of the people there. They appeared rather grim. Down on the floor of the theater stood Colonel Egan, a three-dimensional display, currently unlit, behind her.

I’m here,Rigney sent to Egan.

Then you can see I’m working,she replied. Shut up and give me a minute.

What Egan was doing was listening to one of the midlevel diplomats drone on in the vaguely condescending way that midlevel diplomats will do when presented with someone they assume is below their station. Rigney, who knew that in her past life Egan had been the CEO of a rather substantial media empire, settled in to enjoy the show.

“I’m not disagreeing that the new reality of our situation is challenging,” the diplomat was saying. “But I’m not entirely convinced that the situation is as insoluble as your assessment suggests.”

“Is that so, Mr. DiNovo,” Egan said.

“I think so, yes,” the diplomat named DiNovo said. “The human race has always been outnumbered out here. But we’ve managed to keep our place in the scheme of things. Small, albeit important details have changed here, but the fundamental issues are largely the same.”

“Are they,” Egan said. The display behind her flashed on, picturing a slowly rotating star field that Rigney recognized as the local interstellar neighborhood. A series of stars flashed blue. “To recap, here we are. All the star systems which have human planets in them. The Colonial Union. And here are all the star systems with other intelligent, star-faring races in them.” The star field turned red as a couple thousand stars switched colors to show their allegiance.

“This is no different than what we’ve always had to work with,” the diplomat named DiNovo said.

“Wrong,” Egan said. “This star chart is misleading, and you, Mr. DiNovo, appear not to realize that. All that red up there usedto represent hundreds of individual races, all of whom, like the human race, had to battle or negotiate with any other race they encountered. Some races were stronger than others, but none of them had any substantial strength or tactical advantage over most of the others. There were too many civilizations too close to parity for any one of them to gain a long-term lead in the power struggle.

“That worked for us because we had one advantage other races didn’t,” Egan said. Behind her, one blue star system, somewhat isolated from the main arc of human systems, glowed more brightly. “We had Earth, which supplied the Colonial Union with two critical things: colonists, with which we could rapidly populate the planets we claimed, and soldiers, which we could use to defend those planets and secure additional worlds. Earth supplied the Colonial Union more of each than it would have been politically feasible to provide itself from its own worlds. This allowed the Colonial Union both a strategic and tactical advantage and allowed humanity to come close to upending the existing political order in our region of space.”

“Advantages we can still exploit,” DiNovo began.

“Wrong again,” Egan said. “Because now two critical things have changed. First, there’s the Conclave.” Two-thirds of the formerly red stars turned yellow. “The Conclave, formed out of four hundred alien races which formerly fought among themselves, but now acting as a single political entity, able to enforce its policies by sheer mass. The Conclave will not allow unaffiliated races to engage in further colonization, but it does not stop those races from raiding each other for resources or for security purposes or to settle old scores. So the Colonial Union still has to contend with two hundred alien races targeting its worlds and ships.

“Second, there’s Earth. Thanks to the actions of former Roanoke Colony leaders John Perry and Jane Sagan, the Earth has at least temporarily suspended its relationship with the Colonial Union. Its people now believe that we’ve been holding back the planet’s political and technological development for decades to farm it for colonists and soldiers. The reality is more complicated, but as with most humans, the people on Earth prefer the simple answer. The simplest answer is the Colonial Union’s been screwing them. They don’t trust us. They don’t want anything to do with us. It may be years before they do.”

“My point is that even without the Earth we still have advantages,” DiNovo said. “The Colonial Union has a population of billions on dozens of planets rich with resources.”

“And you believe that the colony worlds can replace the colonists and soldiers the Colonial Union until very recently received from Earth,” Egan said.

“I’m not saying there won’t be grumbling,” DiNovo said. “But yes, they could.”

“Colonel Rigney,” said Egan, speaking her compatriot’s name but keeping her eyes on DiNovo.

“Yes,” Rigney said, surprised at being called on. An entire room of heads swiveled to look at him.

“You and I were in the same recruiting class,” Egan said.

“That’s right,” Rigney said. “We met on the Amerigo Vespucci. That was the ship that took us from Earth to Phoenix Station. It was fourteen years ago.”

“Do you remember how many recruits were on the Vespucci?” Egan asked.

“I remember the CDF representative telling us there were one thousand fifteen of us,” Rigney said.

“How many of us are still alive?” Egan asked.

“There are eighty-nine,” Rigney said. “I know that because one of us died last week and I got a notification. Major Darren Reith.”

“So a ninety-one percent fatality rate over fourteen years,” Egan said.

“That’s about right,” Rigney said. “The official statistic that the CDF tells recruits is that in ten years of service the fatality rate is seventy-five percent. In my experience, that official statistic is low. After ten years recruits are allowed to leave the service, but many of us stay in.” Because who wants to start getting old again,Rigney thought, but did not say.

“Mr. DiNovo,” Egan said, returning her full attention to her diplomat, “I believe you are originally from the colony of Rus, is that correct?”

“That’s correct,” DiNovo said.

“In its entire history of more than one hundred and twenty years, Rus has never been asked to supply the Colonial Union with soldiers,” Egan said. “I want you to tell me how you believe the colony will respond when it is informed by the Colonial Union that it will require— require,not ask—one hundred thousand of its citizens annually to join the Colonial Defense Forces, and that at the end of those ten years seventy-five percent of them will be dead. I want you to tell me how the Rus citizens will respond when they learn that part of their job is to quell rebellions on colonies, which happens more often than the Colonial Union prefers to admit. How will recruits from Rus feel about firing on their own people? Will they do it? Will you,Mr. DiNovo? You are in your early fifties now, sir. You’re not that far off from the CDF recruitment age. Are you ready to fight and very likely die for the Colonial Union? Because you are, in yourself, the advantageyou say we have.”

DiNovo had nothing to say to this.

“I’ve been giving these presentations to the diplomatic corps for a month now,” Egan said, turning her eyes away from the silenced DiNovo and scanning the room. “In every presentation I have someone like Mr. DiNovo here making the argument that the situation we are in is not that bad. They, like he, are wrong. The Colonial Defense Forces lose a staggering number of soldiers on an annual basis and have for more than two hundred years. Our developing colonies cannot quickly grow themselves to a size sufficiently large to avoid extinction by breeding alone. The existence of the Conclave has changed the math of human survival in ways we cannot yet imagine. The Colonial Union has survived and thrived because it has exploited an unearned surplus of humans from Earth. We don’t have that surplus anymore. And we don’t have the time to develop a new surplus from within the Colonial Union system and population.”