"The alternative is exposing every other colonist to the risk of being found and killed," Jane said, clipping off her words. "I guess your people are just going to have to suffer." Piro started to open her mouth to respond, but then seemed to think better of it.

"Even if we dig out the locators, there's still every other piece of equipment we have," Gutierrez said, bringing the conversation back around to him. "It's all wireless. Farm equipment. Medical equipment. All of it. What you're telling us is that we can't use any of the equipment we need to survive."

"Not all the equipment in the cargo hold supports a wireless connection," Hiram Yoder said. "None of the equipment we brought with us does. It's all dumb equipment. It all needs a person behind the controls. We make it work just fine."

"You have the equipment," Gutierrez said. "We don't. The rest of us don't."

"We'll share everything we can," Yoder said.

"It's not a matter of sharing," Gutierrez spat. He took a second to calm himself. "I'm sure you would try to help us," he said to Hiram. "But you brought enough equipment for you. There's ten times as many of the rest of us."

"We have the equipment," Jane said. Everyone at the table looked down toward her. "I've sent you all a copy of the ship manifest. You'll see that in addition to all the modern equipment we have, we were also provided with a full complement of tools and implements that were, until today, obsolete. This tells us two things. It tells us that the Colonial Union fully intended for us to be on our own. It also tells us that they don't intend for us to die"

"That's one spin on the subject," Trujillo said. "Another is that they knew they were going to abandon us to this Conclave and rather than give us anything we could use to defend ourselves, told us to keep quiet and keep our heads down, and maybe the Conclave won't hear us." There were murmurs of agreement around the table.

"Now's not the time for that discussion," I said. "Whatever the CU's rationale, the fact is we're here and we're not going anyplace else. When we're on the planet and have the colony sorted, then we can have a discussion on what the CU's strategy means. But for now, we need to focus on what we need to do to survive. Now, Hiram," I said, handing him my PDA. "Among all of us, you are the one who has the best idea of the capability of this equipment for our needs. Is this workable?"

Hiram took the PDA and scrolled through the manifest for several minutes.

"It's hard to say," he said finally. "I would need to see it in front of me. And I would need to see the people who would operate it. And there are so many other factors. But I think we could make it work." He looked up and down the table. "I tell all of you now that whatever I can do to help you, I will. I can't speak for all of my brethren on the matter, but I can tell you that in my experience each of them is ready to answer the call. We can do this. We can make it work."

"There's another option," Trujillo said. All eyes went to him. "We don't hide. We use all the equipment we have—all the resources we have—for our survival. When and if this Conclave comes calling, we tell it we're a wildcat colony. No affiliation with the CU. Its war is with the Colonial Union, not a wildcat colony."

"We'd be disobeying orders," said Marie Black.

"The disconnect works both ways," Trujillo said. "If we need to be isolated, the CU can't check up on us. And even if we are disobeying orders, so what? Are we in CDF? Are they going to shoot us? Are they going to fire us? And beyond that, do we here at this table honestly feel these orders are legitimate? The Colonial Union has abandoned us. Whats more, they always planned to abandon us. They've broken faith with us. I say we do the same. I say we go wildcat."

"I don't think you know what you're saying when you say we should go wildcat," Jane said to Trujillo. "The last wildcat colony I was at had all its colonists slaughtered for food. We found the bodies of children in a stack, waiting to be butchered. Don't kid yourself. Going wildcat is a death sentence." Jane's statement hung in the air for several seconds, daring anyone to refute it.

"There are risks," Trujillo finally said, taking up the challenge. "But we're alone. We are a wildcat colony in everything but name. And we don't know that this Conclave of yours is as horrible as the Colonial Union has made it out to be. The CU has been deceiving us all this time. It has no credibility. We can't trust it to have our interests at heart."

"So you want proof the Conclave means us harm," Jane said.

"It'd be nice," Trujillo said.

Jane turned to me. "Show them," she said.

"Show us what?" asked Trujillo.

"This," I said. From my PDA—which I would soon no longer be able to use—I turned on the large wall monitor and fed it a video file. It showed a creature en a hill or bluff. Beyond the creature was what looked like a smell town. It was bathed entirely in blinding light.

"The village you see is a colony," I said. "It was established by the Whaid, not long after the Conclave told the nonaffiliated races to stop colonizing. The Conclave jumped the gun, because it couldn't enforce its decree at the time. So some of the nonaffiliated races colonized anyway. But now the Conclave is catching up."

"Where is that light coming from?" asked Lee Chen.

"It's coming from the Conclave ships in orbit," Jane said. "It's a terror tactic. It disorients the enemy."

"There's got to be a lot of ships up there," Chen said.

"Yes," Jane said.

The beams of light illuminating the Whaidian colony suddenly snapped off.

"Here it comes," I said.

The killing beams were hardly detectable at first; they were tuned for destruction, not for show, and nearly all their energy went into their targets, not out to the camera. There was only a waver in the air from the sudden heat, visible even at the distance the camera sat.

Then, within a fraction of a second, the entire colony ignited and exploded. Superheated air blew the fragments and the dust of the colony's buildings, structures, vehicles and inhabitants up into the sky in a whirling display that illuminated the power of the beams themselves. The flickering fragments of matter mimicked and mirrored the flames that were now themselves reaching up toward the heavens.

A shock wave of heat and dust expanded out from the charred remains of the colony. The beams flickered off again. The light show in the sky disappeared, leaving behind smoke and flames. Outside the periphery of the destruction, an occasional solitary eruption of flame would appear.

"What is that?" asked Yoder.

"Some of the colonists were outside the colony when it was destroyed, we think," I said. "So they're cleaning them up."

"Christ," Gutierrez said. "With the colony destroyed those people would probably be dead anyway."

"They were making a point," Jane said.

I turned off the video. The room was dead silent.

Trujillo pointed at my PDA. "How did we get that?" he asked.

"The video?" I asked. He nodded. "Apparently, this was hand-delivered to the CU State Department, and to every non-Conclave-affiliated government, by messengers from the Conclave itself."

"Why would they do that?" Trujillo said. "Why would they show themselves committing an… atrocity like this?"

"So there's no doubt they mean what they say," I said. "What this says to me is that no matter what we think of the Colonial Union at the moment, we can't afford to work on the assumption that the Conclave will act reasonably toward us. The CU has thumbed its nose at these guys, and they're not going to be able to ignore that. They're going to come looking for us. We don't want to give them an opportunity to find us." This was met with more silence.

"Now what?" asked Marta Piro. "I think you need to have a vote," I said.