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Pantala appears to be the primary source of GI technology.”
    â€œWe’re looking at a very wide area of space,” said Hando, gazing at the projection. Holographic light gleamed off his bald head. “Talee were probably even more advanced at their second E.L.E. than we are now. So they’d have mining colonies, exploration colonies, research outposts. They’d be scattered all over, even more than we are. Yet still the E.L.E. managed to kill most of them, nearly all of them.”
    Ibrahim frowned. “Explain.”
    â€œNo no no, he’s right,” said Ari with more typically Ari-animation. “There are projection studies done to simulate a mass-extinction war between League and Federation, a mass V-strike conflict. It’s pretty horrific stuff, but though most of the major worlds get wiped out, there’s always small colonies and outposts surviving, too far off the beaten track for anyone to bother destroying.
    â€œThen you run the simulation forward . . . you think about it, it only takes a few of those survivors to rebuild a civilisation. They have the technology, or at least the records to rebuild most of the tech that’s been lost, they live in space so they wait until the worlds that have been hit recover habitable climates . . . some of them never do, but most are okay within a few decades, maybe longer, the bigger ones anyway. Civilisation’s massively reduced in scale, but the technological level remains the same . . . all that remains is to build scale back up; reproduction technology makes that pretty easy, cloning, birth tanks, no need to wait for women to get pregnant, you could double a population in size every few years if you wanted. Do that often enough, it doesn’t take too long in the scheme of things to turn a few hundred thousand people into tens of millions, and tens of millions into hundreds and even billions.”
    â€œRecent experience tells me,” Sandy said drily, “that childcare for all those kids would be more of a problem than you make out.”
    Laughter around the table. It was more of a humorous reaction than Sandy had expected or intended. Confronting this kind of problem for real, and not merely in the hypothetical, was stressful. People needed to laugh.
    â€œSure,” said Ari, smile fading. “Great big mess, of course. But the point is that recovery happens quite fast, all things considered. But Cai said the Talee took a thousand years.” He looked around the table, watching that sink in.
    â€œSo they lost all their technology,” Ibrahim murmured. “That implies the destruction was systemic.”
    â€œWorse than systemic,” Ari said. “Genocidal.” Deathly silence. The air felt very cold, all previous humour forgotten. “They didn’t just try to win a conflict. They . . . whatever constitutes a ‘side’ for the Talee, racial, religious, ideological, I doubt Cai will enlighten us . . . they tried to exterminate each other, right down to the last individual, to the last functioning microcircuit. Every outpost, every mining colony.”
    â€œTechnology survived on Pantala,” Hando countered. “For League to find.”
    â€œPantala shouldn’t have habitable atmosphere anyway,” Ari replied, “there’s so little vegetation. Federation’s never had a chance to study it, what if it used to be more habitable? What if the Talee never left? What if it got hit, maybe not a V-strike, maybe biological, chemical . . . who knows what other advanced nastiness the Talee have? All traces of life gone, including much of the native stuff, but the old habitations remain?”
    â€œShit,” Chief Boyle murmured, rubbing his forehead. “League would know, they’ve had Pantala for over a hundred years. Something like that, they’d know. Which means they’ve known the Talee are a post-E.L.E. species for a long time.”
    â€œSpeculation