03 The Last Colony by John Scalzi

Author:John Scalzi
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

NINE

Jane had gotten out of the medical bay and was waiting for me on the porch of our bungalow, eyes up at the stars.

“Looking for something?” I asked.

“Patterns,” Jane said. “All the time we’ve been here, no one’s made any constellations. I thought I’d try.”

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Terrible,” she said, looking at me. “It took me forever to see the constellations on Huckleberry, and they were already there. Making up new ones is even more trouble. I just see stars.”

“Just focus on the bright ones,” I said.

“That’s a problem,” Jane said. “My eyes are better than yours now. Better than everyone else’s. They’re all bright. That’s probably why I never saw constellations until I came to Huckleberry. Too much information. You need human eyes to see constellations. Just another piece of my humanity taken away.” She looked up again.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, watching her.

“I’m fine,” Jane said. She raised up the hem of her shirt; the slash in her side was livid even in the dim light, but far less worrisome than it had been before. “Dr. Tsao patched it up, but it was healing even before she got to it. She wanted to take a blood sample to check for infection but I told her not to bother. It’s all SmartBlood by now, anyway. I didn’t tell her that.” She dropped her hem.

“No green skin, though,” I said.

“No,” Jane said. “No cat’s eyes, either. Or BrainPal. Which is not to say that I don’t have increased capabilities. They’re just not obvious, for which I’m grateful. Where have you been?”

“Watching the director’s cut of the Whaidi colony annihilation,” I said. Jane looked at me quizzically; I recounted what I’d just been watching.

“Do you believe it?” Jane asked me.

“Do I believe what?” I asked.

“That this General Gau was hoping not to destroy the colony,” Jane said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The discussion was honest enough. And if he simply wanted to destroy the colony, he could have done it without having to go through the mime show of trying to get the colony to surrender.”

“Unless it was a terror tactic,” Jane said. “Break the colonists’ will, get them to surrender, destroy them anyway. Send the evidence to other races to demoralize them.”

“Sure,” I said. “That only makes sense if you’re planning to subjugate the race. But that doesn’t sound like how the Conclave is supposed to work. It sounds like it’s a union of races, not an empire.”

“I’d be careful of making assumptions based on one video,” Jane said.

“I know,” I said. “But it’s bothering me. The video the CU gave us shows the Conclave simply destroying the Whaidi colony. We’re supposed to see the Conclave as a threat. But the video I’ve just seen says to me it’s not that simple.”

“That’s why it was edited out,” Jane said.

“Because it’s ambiguous?” I asked.

“Because it’s confusing,” Jane said. “The Colonial Union sent us here with specific instructions and gave us the information to support those instructions, without the information that would cause us to doubt them.

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