Another high-security stratcom room was now the stage for a highest-level meeting which included top leaders of the Earth Federation. The Admiral spoke, "In case any of you might be a bit confused by the recent events, I will let Dorothy summarize everything." Dorothy began, "So here's the short version: Nearly 3 weeks ago we went to assess the situation on our distant colony of half-million people that had just been visited by the very friendly Vellari. Something seemed off, so we decided to travel to Vellari space and investigate further, and this is what we found: When Vellari find an inhabited world they strip it of any useful resources using slave labor, then move on to the next. This labor was once done by their robots who eventually rebelled and were destroyed; now they simply use the native population as slaves, but in a very clever way - using some type of sophisticated viral agent. When infected, the entire population becomes more than willing to be worked to death in order to please the Vellari - they basically enslave themselves with no need for violence - quite ingenious. If, for example, they were to arrive on Earth your population would end up on Vellari side before you could fully mobilize your military defenses against them. Furthermore, I suspect the Vellari weapon systems to be quite advanced, so to gather more up-to-date information and avoid any nasty surprises I'm leaving for the colony shortly to meet with Polaris." "And what exactly would you suggest we do?" asked a Senator in a somewhat cynical tone. "Option 1 -" Dorothy continued, "You welcome Vellari as friends and within 4 months humanity on every world becomes Vellari slaves till they die happy knowing they served their glorious masters well; while all non-organic life gets destroyed." "Option 2 - You tell Vellari to leave immediately, and if they resist, launch a full scale attack to scare them as far away as possible and let other species deal with them as they please --- then sit back and hope they never return even stronger and smarter, assuming they don't overpower you first." "Option 3 - You do nothing. Close this subject, don't ask questions and just look the other way while a few hundred of our droids, with the help of Vampires, take care of this matter permanently. And yes, I've already spoken with 2 Vampire clans and they'd be more than happy to assist." The Defense Secretary cut in: "We would need to be fully involved in something like this, and coordinate it all." "Trust me," said Dorothy, "Your involvement would only slow things down, screw everything up and lead to a failure probability of 100 percent. If option 3 is not to your liking then simply choose another one." ------------------ (AI input, PSP and manual postwork)