"That's the first time you've ever called me sir," I said, after a long minute.

Trujillo grinned. "I was saving it for a special moment," he said.

"Well, then," I said. "Well done. Well done, indeed."

Trujillo stood up. "I'll see you around this evening, then," he said.

"You will," I said. "I'll try to be reassuring. Thanks, Man." He waved off the thanks and left as someone else came walking up to my porch. It was Jerry Bennett.

I waved him in. "What do you have for me?" I asked.

"On the creatures, nothing," Bennett said. "I did all sorts of search parameters and came out with squat. There's not a lot to go on. They didn't do a whole lot on exploring on this planet."

"Tell me something I don't know," I said.

"All right," Bennett said. "You know that video file of the Conclave blasting that colony?"

"Yes," I said. "What does that have to do with this planet?"

"It doesn't," Bennett said. "I told you, I checked all the data files for edits under a batch command. It scooped up that file with all the rest of them."

"What about the file?" I asked.

"Well, it turns out the video file you have is only part of another video file. The metadata features time codes for the original video file. The time codes say your video is just the tail end of that other video. There's more video there."

"How much more?" I asked.

"A lot more," Bennett said.

"Can you get it back?" I asked

Bennett smiled. "Already done," he said.

Six hours and a few dozen strained conversations with colonists later, I let myself into the Black Box. The PDA Bennett had loaded the video file into was on his desk, as promised. I picked it up; the video was already queued up and paused at the start. Its first image was of two creatures on a hill, overlooking a river. I recognized the hill and one of the creatures from the video I'd already seen. The other one I hadn't seen before. I squinted to get a better look, then cursed myself for being stupid and magnified the image. The other creature resolved itself.

It was a Whaid.

"Hello," I said to the creature. "What are you doing, talking to the guy who wiped out your colony?"

I started the video to find out.

EIGHT

The two stood near the edge of a bluff overlooking a river, watching the sunset over the far prairie.

"You have beautiful sunsets here," General Tarsem Gau said to Chan orenThen.

"Thank you," orenThen said. "It's the volcanoes." Gau looked over at orenThen, amused. The rolling plain was interrupted only by the river, its bluffs and the small colony that lay where the bluffs descended toward the water.

"Not here" orenThen said, sensing Gau's unspoken observation. He pointed west, where the sun had just sunk below the horizon. "Half a planet that way. Lots of tectonic activity. There's a ring of volcanoes around the entire western ocean. One of them went up just as autumn ended. There's still dust in the atmosphere."

"Must have made for a hard winter," Gau said.

OrenThen made a motion that suggested otherwise. "Big enough eruption for nice sunsets. Not big enough for climate change. We have mild winters. It's one of the reasons we settled here. Hot summers, but good for growing. Rich soil. Excellent water supply."

"And no volcanoes," Gau said.

"No volcanoes," orenThen agreed. "No quakes, either, because we're right in the middle of a tectonic plate. Incredible thunderstorms, however. And last summer, tornadoes with hail the size of your head. We lost crops with that. But no place is entirely perfect. On balance this is a good place to start a colony, and to build a new world for my people."

"I agree," Gau said. "And from what I can tell, you've done a marvelous job leading this colony."

OrenThen bowed his head slightly. "Thank you, General. Coming From you, that's high praise indeed."

The two returned their attention to the sunset, watching as the early dusk deepened around them.

"Chan," Gau said. "You know I can't let you keep this colony."

"Aah," orenThen said, and smiled, still looking into the sunset. "So much for this being a social call."

"You know it's not," Gau said.

"I know," orenThen said. "Your knocking my communications satellite out of the sky was my first clue." OrenThen pointed down the slope of the bluff, where a platoon of Gau's soldiers stood, warily eyed by orenThen's own escort of farmers. "They were my second."

"They're for show," Gau said. "I needed to be able to talk to you without the distraction of being shot at."

"And blasting my satellite?" orenThen said. "That's not for show, I suspect."

"It was necessary, for your sake," Gau said.

"I doubt that," orenThen said.

"If I left you your satellite, you or someone in your colony would have sent a skip drone, letting your government know you were under attack," Gau said. "But that's not why I'm here."

"You just told me that I can't keep this colony," orenThen said.

"You can't," Gau said. "But that's not the same thing as being under attack."

"The distinction escapes me, General," orenThen said. "Particularly with a very expensive satellite blown to bits by your guns, and your soldiers on my soil."

"How long have we known each other, Chan?" Gau said. "We've known each other a long time, as friends and adversaries. You've seen how I do things, up close. Have you ever known me to say one thing and mean another?"

OrenThen was quiet for a moment. "No," he said, finally. "You can be an arrogant ass, Tarsem. But you've always said what you meant to say."

"Then trust me once more," Gau said. "More than anything, I want this to end peacefully. It's why ," am here, and not anyone else. Because what you and I do here matters, beyond the planet and this colony. I can't let your colony remain here. You know that. But that doesn't mean you or any of your people lave to suffer for it."

There was another moment of silence from orenThen. "I have to admit I was surprised that it was you on that ship," he eventually said to Gau. "We knew there was the risk that the Conclave would come for us. You didn't spend all that time wrestling all those races into line and declaring an end to colonization just to let us slip through the cracks. We planned for this possibility. But I assumed it would be some ship with a junior officer at the helm. Instead we get the leader of the Conclave."

"We are friends," Gau said. "You deserve the courtesy."

"You are kind to say so, General," orenThen said. "But, friend or not, it's overkill."

Gau smiled. "Well, possibly. Or, perhaps it's more accurate to say it would be overkill. But your colony is more important than you think, Chan."

"I don't see how," orenThen said. "I like it. There are good people here. But we're a seed colony. There are hardly two thousand of us. We're at subsistence level. All we do is grow food for ourselves and prepare for the next wave of settlers. And all they will do is prepare for the wave of settlers after them. There's nothing important about that."

"Now it's you who is being disingenuous," Gau said. "You know very well that it's not what your colony grows or makes that makes it important. It's the simple fact it exists, in violation of the Conclave Agreement. There are to be new colonies that are not administered through the Conclave. The fact your people ignored the agreement is an explicit challenge to the legitimacy of the Conclave."

"We didn't ignore it," orenThen said, irritation creeping into his voice. "It simply doesn't apply to us. We didn't sign the Conclave Agreement, General. We didn't, nor did a couple hundred other races. We're free to colonize as we will. And that's what we did. You have no right to question that, General. We are a sovereign people."