The documents show, the report came to Mikhail Corain's desk, the operation involved a clandestine military operation and the landing of 40,000 Union personnel, the majority of them azi. The mission was launched in 2355, as a Defense operation.
There was no further support given the colony. The operation was not sustained.
The best intelligence Alliance has mustered says that there are thousands of survivors who have devolved to a primitive lifestyle. Beyond question they are descended of azi and citizens. The assumption is that they had no rejuv and that after sixty years the survivors must be at least second and third generation. There are ruins of bubble-construction and a solar power installation. The world is extremely hospitable to human life and the survivors are in remarkably good health considering the conditions, practicing basic agriculture and hunting. The Alliance reports express doubt that the colonists can be removed from the world. The ecological damage is as yet undetermined, but there is apparently deep penetration of the colony into the ecosystem, and certain of the inhabitants have retreated into areas not easily accessible. It is the estimate of Alliance that the inhabitants would not welcome removal from the world and Alliance does not intend to remove the colony, for whatever reason.
The estimation within the Defense Bureau is that Alliance is interested in interviewing the survivors. Defense however will oppose any proposal to retrieve these Union nationals as an operation which Alliance will surely reject and which would be in any case counter-productive.
The azi were primarily but not exclusively from Reseune military contracts.
See attached reports.
The majority of citizens were military personnel.
Nye will offer a bill expressing official regret and an offer of cooperation to the Alliance in dealing with the colonists.
The Expansionist coalition will be unanimous in that vote.
Corain flipped through the reports. Pages of them. There was a sub-sapient on the world the colonists called Gehenna. There were a great many things that said Defense Bureau, and Information Unavailable.
There was no way in hell Alliance or Union was going to be able to retrieve the survivors, for one thing because they were scattered into the bush and mostly because (according to Alliance) they were illiterate primitives and Alliance was going to resist any attempt to remove them, that much was clear in the position the Alliance ambassador was taking.
Alliance was damned mad about the affair, because it had been confronted with a major and expensive problem: an Earth-class planet in its own sphere of influence with an ecological disaster and an entrenched, potentially hostile colony.
So was Corain angry about it, for reasons partly ethical and partly political outrage: Defense had overstepped itself, Defense had covered this mess up back in the war years, when (as now) Defense was in bed with Reseune and gifted with a blank credit slip.
And if Corain could manage it, there was going to be a light thrown on the whole Expansionist lunacy.