>Lu pressed her lips together as she thought about it. “Maybe. If people aren’t too far into the fight. But even if it did calm things down for the moment, if we don’t manage to get some version of what I asked for, that tipping point will come sooner or later. A compromise would probably just push it down the line a bit.”

“The folks trying to destroy us have to know that. What’s their endgame?”

Lu had been thinking about that a lot. “They have to be planning a new, reduced-energy form of living.”

“Like what? Hope is already about as energy-efficient as a community of ten-thousand can be.”

“Cryo chamber probably. Last I checked, frozen people require a tiny fraction of the energy that true-living people do. The ship coul...

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