"So many," I said. There were tears in my eyes.

General Gau noticed. "I will give you time to return to your colony, Administrator Perry," he said. "And I promise it will be quick and painless. Be strong for your people."

"I'm not crying for my people, General," I said.

The General stared at me and then looked up in time to see the first of the ships in his fleet explode.

Anything is possible, given time and the will.

The Colonial Union certainly had the will to destroy the Conclave's fleet. The existence of the fleet was an intolerable threat; the Colonial Union decided to destroy it as soon as it learned of its existence. There was no hope that the Colonial Union could destroy the fleet in a toe-to-toe battle; with 412 battleship equivalents, it was larger than the entire CDF battle fleet. The Conclave fleet was assembled in whole only when removing the colonies, so there was the possibility of attacking each ship individually. But that would have been equally futile; each ship could be replaced in the fleet by its government, and it meant the Colonial Union would be picking a fight with each of the more than four hundred races in the Conclave, many of whom posed no real threat to the CU.

But the Colonial Union wanted to more than destroy the Conclave's fleet. It wanted to humiliate and destabilize the Conclave; to strike at the heart of its mission and its credibility. The Conclave's credibility came from its size and its ability to enforce its ban on colonization. The Colonial Union needed to hit at the Conclave in a way that would neutralize its size advantage and make a mockery of its ban. It had to strike at the Conclave at precisely the moment it was showing its strength: When it was attempting to remove a colony. One of our colonies.

Only the Colonial Union had no new colonies under threat from the Conclave. The most recent new colony, Everest, slipped in mere weeks before the Conclave's ban. It was not under threat. Another colony would need :o be founded.

Enter Manfred Trujillo and his crusade to colonize. The Department of Colonization had ignored him for years, and not simply because the Secretary of Colonization hated his guts. It had long been understood that the best way to keep a planet was to grow so many people on it that it was impossible to kill all of them efficiently. Colonial populations were needed to make more colonists, not more colonies. Those could be founded with surplus population from Earth. Barring the appearance of the Conclave, Trujillo could have campaigned to colonize until he was put into the ground and he wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

But now Trujillo's campaign became useful. The Colonial Union had kept the fact of the Conclave from the colonies themselves, as it had so many other things. Sooner or later, however, the colonies would need to be made aware of its existence; the Conclave was simply too big to ignore. The Colonial Union wanted to establish the Conclave as the enemy, in no uncertain terms. It also wanted the colonies to be invested in the struggle against the Conclave.

Because the Colonial Defense Forces were comprised of recruits from Earth—and because the Colonial Union encouraged the colonies to focus primarily on their local politics and issues rather than CU-wide concerns—colonists rarely thought of anything that didn't involve their own planet. But by stocking Roanoke with colonists from the ten most-populated human planets, Roanoke would become the direct concern of more than half the population of the Colonial Union, as would its struggle against the Conclave. In all, a neat potential solution to a raft of issues.

Trujillo was informed that his initiative was being approved; then it was taken away from him. That was because Secretary Bell hated his guts. But it also served to remove him from the command loop. Trujillo was too smart not to have picked up the pieces if they were laid out in a way he could follow. It also helped create a political subtext that pitted the founding colonies against each other for a leadership position; this drew attention away from what the CU was really planning for the colony.

Add in two colony leaders dropped in at the last moment, and no one in Roanoke's command structure would have the context to muck up the Colonial Union's plan: to create the time and the opportunity to destroy the Conclave's fleet. Time created by hiding Roanoke.

Time was critical. When the Colonial Union concocted its plan, it was too early to implement it. Even if the Colonial Union could have moved against the Conclave, other races whose colonies were threatened by the Conclave would not follow in the CU's footsteps. The Colonial Union needed time to create a constituency of allies. The best way to do that, it was decided, would be to have them lose their colonies first. These races, with their amputated colonies, would see the hidden colony Roanoke as evidence that even the mighty Conclave could be confounded, raising the Colonial Union's status among them and cultivating potential allies for when the moment was right.

Roanoke was a symbol, too, for some of the more dissatisfied members of the Conclave, who saw the burden of its grand designs fall on them without the immediate benefits they had hoped to gain. If the humans could defy the Conclave and get away with it, what value was there in being in the Conclave at all? Every day Roanoke stayed hidden was a day these lesser Conclave members would stew in their own dissatisfaction with the organization they'd surrendered their sovereignty to.

Primarily, however, the Colonial Union needed time for another reason entirely. It needed time to identify each of the 412 ships that comprised the Conclave's fleet. It needed time to discover where these ships would be when the fleet was not in action. It needed time to position a Gameran Special Forces soldier, just like Lieutenant Stross, in the general area of each of these ships. Like Stross, each of these Special Forces members were adapted to the rigors of space. Like Stross, each of them was covered in embedded nano-camouflage that would allow them to approach and even secure themselves on these ships, unseen, for days or possibly weeks. Unlike Stross, each of these Special Forces soldiers wielded a small but powerful bomb, in which perhaps a dozen grams of fine-grained antimatter were suspended in vacuum.

When the Sacajawea returned with the crew of the Magellan, the Gamerans prepared themselves for their task. They silently and invisibly hid themselves in the hulls of their target spacecraft and went with them as they assembled at the agreed-upon rendezvous point, and readied themselves for yet another awe-inspiring mass entrance above a world filled with cowering colonists. When the skip drone from the Gentle Star popped into space, the Gamerans oh-so-gently placed their bombs on the hulls of their respective starships and then just floated off the ship hulls before the ships made their skip. They didn't want to be around when those bombs went off.

They didn't need to be. The bombs were remotely triggered by Lieutenant Stross, who, stationed a safe distance away, polled the bombs to make sure they were all accounted for and active, and detonated them in a sequence determined by him to have the greatest aesthetic impact. Stross was a quirky fellow.

The bombs, when triggered, fired the antimatter like a shotgun blast onto the hulls of their spaceships, spreading the antimatter across a wide surface area to ensure the most efficient annihilation of matter and antimatter. It worked beautifully, and terribly.

Much of this I learned much later, under different circumstances. But even in my time with General Gau, I knew this much: Roanoke was never a colony in the traditional sense of the term. Its purpose never was to give humans another home, or to extend our reach in the universe. It existed as a symbol of defiance, as a creator of time, and as a honey trap to lure a being who dreamed of changing the universe, and to destroy that dream while he watched.