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and then target hundreds of major population areas with nuclear warheads.”
    “ Nuclear warheads,” Rigney said.
    “Where the hell are they getting nukes?” Egan said. “Who still uses them?”
    “Tvann indicated that many of them came from the stores of planets now aligned with the Conclave,” Abumwe said. “The Conclave doesn’t allow their use as weapons, so they’re supposed to be dismantled and the fissionable material disposed of. It was a trivial matter for Equilibrium to insert itself into that process and come away with warheads and fissionable material.”
    “How many are we talking about?” Rigney said. “Warheads, I mean.”
    Abumwe looked at me. “Tvann didn’t know all the specifics,” I said. “The ones he seemed to consider standard yield would be the equivalent to three hundred kilotons. He said there were several hundred of those.”
    “Jesus Christ.”
    “They could do the same damage without nuclear weapons,” Egan said. “At this point in weapons technology, using nuclear weapons is only a step up from using the longbow.”
    “The point is to use the nuclear weapons,” Abumwe said. “Not just for the immediate devastation, but for everything else that follows.”
    “When the Romans defeated Carthage, they salted the ground there so nothing could live or grow there anymore,” I said. “This is the same concept, writ large.”
    “Equilibrium would be slitting their throat by doing this,” Rigney said.
    “If you can find their throats to slit them,” I pointed out.
    “I think we would be motivated, Lieutenant.”
    “Colonel, you’re missing the important thing here,” Abumwe said.
    “And what is that, Ambassador?” Egan asked.
    Abumwe gestured up toward the image floating there. “That every one of the ships tasked to the attack is originally from the Conclave. We are meant to believe this is an attack not by Equilibrium, but by the Conclave. We’re meant to believe the Conclave has decided that the only way to deal with humanity—to deal with the Colonial Union—is to destroy the source of its soldiers and colonists once and for all, so we can never get it back, either by force or negotiation. This is meant to be the earnest of the Conclave’s intent to wipe us from the universe forever.”
    Rigney nodded. “Yes, all right.”
    “We would blame the Conclave, refuse its denials, assume it was behind Equilibrium all along,” Egan said. “We’d go to war with the Conclave. And we’d be defeated.”
    “Inevitably, yes,” Abumwe said. “We are far too small to take it on directly. And even if all the colony worlds stopped fighting us for independence—or we crushed all their attempts at independence—it would still take us time to fully convert to the colonies being the well from which we draw our soldiers. And meanwhile elements of the Conclave would be agitating for our destruction, because whether the Conclave attacked us or not, we would now be a clear and present danger to it.”
    “We’d lose in a fight with the Conclave,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean the Conclave would win.”
    Abumwe nodded. “It wouldn’t simply be about us attacking the Conclave. It would be the internal stresses the Conclave would face in being obliged to obliterate us permanently. It goes against every reason the Conclave was founded in the first place. It would be antithetical to the goals of General Gau.”
    “Not to mention that of the Conclave’s current leader, Hafte Sorvalh,” I said. “And she would be criticized relentlessly if she refused to deal with us. And no matter how capable she is—and she’s very capable—she’s not General Gau. She won’t be able to keep the Conclave together through her own sheer force of will like the general could. It will fracture and die.”
    “Which is Equilibrium’s ultimate goal,” Egan said.
    “Yes,” Abumwe said. “Again, our destruction is part of its plan, too. But we are mostly incidental. We are the lever