Laddertop 3

Laddertop 3: The Laddertop Series, Book 3 by Emily Janice Card and Orson Scott Card

Laddertop concludes with us discovering that there are "noble colonists" come to inhabit the earth. They are sending a giant colonizing mission that will involve wiping out humans and making earth fit for themselves. A few of the aliens have sympathy for the humans and hatch a plan to preserve them. They planted the laddertops and gave them the technology. The plan was to send a small group of humans off to another planet so that they could continue their society there. This would involve the destruction of the rest of humanity. However, this is better than complete annihilation. Nevertheless, humans are not fond of that. They discover a way to work together and use the technology to wipe out the colonization ship. They also communicate with some of the kind aliens and decide to work together It seems like an interesting parallel to colonial endeavors. What if a few Europeans had helped the Native Americans to use gunpowder to destroy European ships and then worked together to share technology? Well, disease would have still wiped out most of the native population. Fiction has the ability to ignore those messy details.