The End of All Things: The Fourth Instalment Read Online Free PDF Page A

governments. We have had people feeding us information for a while now.”
    “And we never did anything on it? We let it get to this point?”
    “With the politics of the colony worlds the Colonial Union prefers to do things as quietly as possible, until they can’t be handled quietly anymore.” Abumwe shrugged. “It worked before, for decades. The Colonial Union is resistant to change. And at the top there’s the belief that things can still be managed quietly. That we will be able to control the actions of the colonies.”
    “That’s not working out very well at this point, Ambassador,” Balla said.
    “No, it isn’t,” Abumwe agreed.
    “And we knew nothing about Equilibrium’s involvement.”
    “Remember that one of the prime movers of Equilibrium turned out to be a highly placed member of our State Department,” I said, to Balla. “It’s entirely possible that what we thought we knew about the independence movements on the colony worlds was based on highly edited information. And once Ocampo was retaken, Equilibrium would naturally change tactics. That would be my guess, anyway.”
    Balla turned to me. “Have you always had this sort of paranoid mind?”
    I smiled. “Captain, the problem is not that I’m paranoid. The problem is that the universe keeps justifying my paranoia.”
    Abumwe turned her attention back to me. “So, your analysis, paranoid or otherwise, is that this encounter was a success for Equilibrium.”
    “Yes,” I said. “It wasn’t perfect; I think they would have liked to have destroyed the Tubingen, killed everyone aboard, made it look like the Khartoumian government was entirely responsible for it all, and have us none the wiser for it. But as it is, they’ll be able to sell their version to people who are receptive to hear it. Equilibrium’s been working on a strategy of making us look deceptive and dissembling for a while now. It works because we are, in fact, deceptive and dissembling.”
    “What’s their next step, then?” Hart asked.
    “I think that may be the lieutenant’s point,” Abumwe said. “They don’t have to have a next step. They just have to wait for us to do what we always do, the way we always do it.”
    I nodded. “Why do the work to destabilize us when we’ll do it for ourselves.”
    “But there still has to be a point to it,” Balla said, to Abumwe. She turned to me. “Look, Lieutenant, I understand that you are deeply enthusiastic about this convoluted web of actions that you’re spinning. I’m not going to say that it’s wrong. But Equilibrium isn’t doing this just for the fun of it. They’re not nihilists. There has to be a point. There has to be a plan. This has to lead to something.”
    “It leads to the end of all things,” I said. “Or less dramatically, to either or both the Colonial Union and the Conclave fracturing, and the return of every species in our local slice of space being constantly at war with each other.”
    “I still don’t know why anyone would want that,” Hart said.
    “Because it worked really well for some people,” I said. “Let’s not lie, Hart. It worked really well for us. For humans. And more specifically for the Colonial Union. A system of government, stable for centuries, predicated on killing the shit out of everyone else and taking their land. That’s practically the modus operandi of every successful human civilization to date. No wonder some of us wanted to return to it, even at the risk of destroying the Colonial Union itself. Because if we got back, we’d be meaner than ever before.”
    “Unless we weren’t, and were just wiped out instead.”
    “Well, there is that. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, but you also have to make sure that what’s inside the egg makes it to the pan.”
    “I … don’t know what that means,” Hart said.
    “It means destroying the Colonial Union isn’t a trivial act for the survival of the human race,” I said. “We might not have