The first two deliveries went as expected. Ajenio, a round, florid man, insisted on trying a sesame cookie in front of Haodan, and then offered him one. Haodan declined. He knew the manager would take a dim view of his saying yes. Besides, she already sent him home with a basket of treats every evening and he was convinced he was gaining weight.
By the time he freed himself from Ajenio, who was capable of waxing poetic about a cookie to a degree even an Andan would find embarrassing, he was twelve minutes behind schedule. Still, not disastrous.
The office Haodan went to after that was in a building that had its back up against one of the ward’s walls. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that escape passages were involved, although the Shuos attempts at scan had been inconclusive. He had been here before. His face and his uniform with the swan-and-ribbon logo were familiar to security. They waved him through, smiling. He smiled back. It was only polite.
Seventeen minutes late. He still had some margin.
Up to the fourth floor. Lucky unlucky four, as the Kel would say. The target worked in this office sometimes, instead of being holed up in the Fortress’s command center all the time. Judging from some of the infiltrators’ gossip, the heretics didn’t all get along. She probably wanted to monitor the ward in person, or hide some of her activities from her putative superior.
The target’s assistant sat at the front desk. She was stabbing at the terminal. Too bad: if he had a different pretext he could have offered to help her with the problem, but as it stood that would arouse suspicion. Besides, odds were that a Shuos had caused the problem to begin with.
Haodan bobbed in a calculatedly nervous bow. “Swan and Ribbon. Sorry to interrupt, should I drop this off or take it in?” He always asked.
The assistant never let him take it in, but he had gotten one of the other infiltrators to run a flickerform servitor into the ceiling above the target’s office. Maddeningly, the target had enough shielding and scan machinery in there to outfit a warmoth. Even the servitor spy was a risk. All it did was listen, and at a random time each day it sent an encrypted databurst to indicate what times it detected human activity in there. No luck getting clean vocals out.
The office was located far to the back, with additional security in the way. It would have been nice to go in and do the job personally, but Haodan wasn’t suicidal.
“I’ll make sure it gets to her,” the assistant said with a wan smile.
“Rough day?” Haodan said, placing the parcel on her desk.
“You have no idea. And now this terminal.”
“Sorry, I can’t help you with that,” Haodan lied. His orders had been specific: assassination, not intelligence-fishing. Besides, the target would have seen through the tired “I’m here to fix that hardware glitch” routine. Her weaknesses were gustatory, so Haodan had tailored his approach accordingly.
“Oh, you’re always a help,” the assistant said, smiling more genuinely. “She loves those sweets. They’ll put her in a good mood, all the better for the rest of us.”
“That’s good to hear,” Haodan said. This was a weakness in the plan. If the target kept to schedule, she’d be in the office in approximately twenty-seven minutes. He had set the timer accordingly. There was a strong chance the bomb would kill the assistant, too. Haodan was sorry about this, as he had grown to like her, but contriving a way to keep her safe would have elevated the risk to unacceptable levels.
The assistant went back to wrestling with her terminal. “I’d best be going,” Haodan said. She said something indistinct in response.
Down to the ground floor, back to the scooter. Haodan had no intention of returning to the confectionary now that the job had served its purpose, but he might as well finish the day’s deliveries. It only seemed fair.
Seven minutes after Haodan left, a round-faced man in white-and-gold entered the fourth floor office suite and rapped on the wall.
“Pioro,” the assistant said, “she’s not in yet—”
“She won’t be for some time,” Pioro said. “Emergency meeting, need-to-know, all of that. I’m on the way myself, but I remembered she’s always bitchy if she misses the sweets, especially since Zai’s taken to serving vegetable rolls with fish sauce lately, so I thought I’d stop by to pick them up. Don’t worry, I’ll save you a couple.”
“Yes, that would be good,” the assistant said. “I don’t suppose you have time to look at this synchronization error—”
Pioro’s eyebrows shot up as he leaned over to glance at the display. “Probably some Shuos grid diver. Bad sign if they’re this far in. I ought to run, but you should lock down and restore to clean state. It’s a pain, but we have to take precautions.” He hefted the parcel. “Must be something good in there. Fortunately, she likes to share.”
“Thanks for your help, Pioro,” the assistant said.
“Anytime,” Pioro said as he left with the parcel and its tasteful paper decorations.
THE FIRST THING Vahenz afrir dai Noum did when she cracked General Jedao’s message was start the self-destruct in her remote office. She knew how much that equipment had cost, and how irritated her employers would be, but you could always buy new equipment. She, on the other hand, would be hard to replace. They’d already gotten Pioro with an attack clearly meant for her; she wasn’t about to let them get her too. A pity about the associated casualties, but she didn’t excel at her job by being sentimental.
(Interesting that Jedao had fetched up in a woman’s body, but then, the Shuos didn’t care about that sort of thing. She would have expected it to give the Kel fits, though. Maybe the mere fact of Jedao’s presence made them twitch so much that the issue of the body didn’t even register.)
The second thing Vahenz did was head for the command center to meet Liozh Zai. The Liozh name was an affectation, but it defined Zai. One of the things she liked about Zai was her radiant sincerity, even if it seemed to come hooked into lamentably ascetic tastes in food and drink; Vahenz had always made a point of bringing her own snacks to Zai’s meetings rather than being stuck eating things like sour fruits and unsweetened tea. Trivial points of law mattered to Zai, but because she believed in them, other people believed in them, too. If she’d had more time to season Zai to the grubby realities of politics, Vahenz could have done more with that nascent charisma. But then, what could you expect from someone who had grown up in a glorified warriors’ guild? Zai had been deeply wounded when the hexarchs stripped her of her post as a shield operator for protesting the hexarchs’ calendrical experiments, but that had made Zai into a resource.
Vahenz hoped that Gerenag Abrana’s cryptologists were slower than she was, that her specialized code and superior intelligence gave her the necessary edge. It was her fault for not spotting the tap earlier. She hadn’t realized how good Abrana’s security people were. But once she saw Jedao’s message, she knew the tap had to exist. She had broken the encryption too easily; it was meant to be spied on. And she knew Zai, knew Zai hadn’t been engaged in secret negotiations with the fucking ninefox general. Which meant that the message’s intended recipient was Abrana, or Stoghan, or anyone with a grudge. People who would believe the lie because they half-believed it already.
The recent spate of sabotage and assassinations hadn’t helped. Most victims had been lower-level followers, but people were rattled, and rattled people didn’t think clearly. Everything had targeted Zai’s lieutenants but not Zai herself. They hadn’t found logic spikes or mazes in Zai’s grid systems not because they had been better hidden, but because there had been nothing to find, a fact that Abrana’s people would have noted.