“I stand by Mazeret’s decision,” Mikodez said. “She had her choice of targets and she knows as well as everyone how dangerous Jedao is. For love of fox and hound, he had threshold winnowers in orbit around the Fortress with who knows what modifications. We’re lucky we didn’t have a replay of Hellspin.”
“We need to discuss why you felt the need to plant a spy in our fortress,” Tsoro said, her tone wintry. “As the commandant. What were you trying to prove, Shuos?”
Mikodez gave her an equally chilly smile. “Yes, about that,” he said. “Let’s talk extradition.”
“Need I remind you that we’re facing a madman who has the unsavory habit of winning all his battles?” Shandal Yeng said. “This is hardly the time—”
“This is exactly the time,” Mikodez said. “I’m not in the habit of letting loyal agents rot in detention. Talk to me, Tsoro.”
“We can deal with this later,” Tsoro said.
“We’re hashing this out now. You’re going to have a fun time chasing Jedao and the Hafn when your listening posts start going deaf.”
“Shuos—”
“Look, I get that individual Kel are as expendable as tinder and you can use formation instinct to yank them in whatever direction your strategy requires, but I don’t have that option. If I operated that way, no one would want to work for me anymore. Mazeret belongs to me, Tsoro. Your quarrel’s with me, not the agent. Give.”
Iruja looked faintly irritated by the exchange. “Is it worth throwing a tantrum over one agent, Mikodez? Unless you’re planning on mass-assassinating the Hafn all by yourself.”
“Oh, I don’t intend to try anything of the sort,” Mikodez said respectfully. “But I can take down a scary number of Kel listening posts in an amount of time you’re happier not knowing, and the agent is important to me.”
“Tsoro,” Iruja said after a considering moment, “I realize that, like everyone here at some point, you’re fantasizing about running Mikodez through with a bamboo pole for his latest caprice. But let him have the agent as a favor to me. The Rahal will reckon with him later.”
“As you desire, Rahal,” Tsoro said, inclining her head.
Mikodez decided it would be better not to smirk at Tsoro. Why couldn’t one of the Kel with a sense of humor be hexarch? “Tsoro’s earlier remark brings up an interesting possibility,” he said. “If Jedao’s so hell-bent on exchanging bullets with the Hafn, why not let him wear himself out that way?”
“What an intriguing proposal from someone who recently agreed to have the man offed,” Psa said.
“I’m adaptable?” Mikodez suggested.
“We could get lucky,” Shandal Yeng said. “Maybe the Hafn will kill him for us.”
Tsoro coughed. When Shandal Yeng raised her eyebrows, Tsoro said, “We’d be left trying to defeat the general who defeated Jedao. This is unlikely to be a strategic improvement.”
“If there’s no way of retrieving the swarm,” Iruja said, “we may be stuck with that.”
“This is the curious part,” Faian said. “If General Khiruev’s stray staff officer is to be believed, the Kel on the command moth authenticated off the wrong thing, to the extent authentication’s even possible with a revenant. All of Jedao’s anchors inherited his movement patterns and, eventually, his accent, thanks to bleed-through. Of course, the Kel are used to reading each other that way.” As part of formation instinct, a certain baseline body language was imprinted on cadets. “Neither of those proves anything, however. A sufficiently good actor or infiltrator could fake them. It’s the apparent inheritance of Jedao’s skills, too, that’s more worrisome.”
“Nobody’s ever scrounged up any evidence that Captain Cheris had the least scrap of acting ability,” Tsoro said. “We made some inquiries with former instructors and classmates. She couldn’t even shed her low language accent until she was a second-year cadet.”
“I wish I knew why anyone would capitulate to Jedao to the point of giving up her own existence,” Faian said.
Tsoro shrugged. “No one else could hear what he said to her, so we’ll never know for sure. The fact that she responded to being nudged toward Jedao in the first place is suggestive, but for all that, she was determined to be a good Kel. She joined up despite family resistance.”
“No ties there, then,” Psa said, thoughtful.
“Not entirely true,” Tsoro said. “She wrote to her parents regularly, and exchanged the occasional letter with some of her old classmates.”
“Well, then,” Psa said. “We could apply pressure from that direction. We already have Cheris’s parents under surveillance, as a precautionary measure. We could detain them and let Jedao know, see if we get a reaction.”
“That isn’t a good idea,” Faian said, her brow creasing. “If any part of Cheris is alive in there, she’s not remotely psychologically stable.”
“Faian,” Iruja said, “that may give us the opening we need.”
“It may drive her even crazier.”
Tsoro was thinking about something else. “If we’re applying pressure anyway,” she said, “we might as well turn it up all the way. Cheris used to write to her parents in Mwen-dal, which is only spoken by her mother’s people, the Mwennin. There are scattered communities of them on the second-largest continent of Bonepyre, and there are so few of them that they’re extinct by any reasonable standard. We could round them up and threaten to wipe them out if the swarm isn’t restored to Kel control. Vidona, you’ll find a use for them sooner or later, won’t you? It’s too bad they’re so obscure that a massacre of them would be no use as a calendrical attack. In any case, if Cheris is indeed alive in there, it might give her the incentive she needs to resist Jedao’s influence.”
“I don’t see that anything’s lost by trying it,” Shandal Yeng said. “I for one would feel better if we didn’t have a rogue swarm rampaging through the hexarchate.” How many times had she said that already? Or, more accurately, had her protocol program said that to cover for the side conversation she was having, and which Mikodez was recording for review after the meeting now that he’d picked it up? “If this works, then fine.”
Iruja turned a hand palm-up. “I have no objections either.”
“I’ll make it a priority,” Psa said.
Nirai Faian looked intensely frustrated, but said nothing. She knew when she’d lost, and she was the least powerful hexarch.
“No,” Mikodez said. “That’s as in absolutely not, we’re not doing this.”
Shandal Yeng pulled off one of her rings and slammed it down out of sight. “I wasn’t expecting you to be the one with the sudden attack of humanitarianism.”
“This is me, remember?” Mikodez said. “I could care less about that. I don’t object to atrocities because of ethics, which we’ve never taught at Shuos Academy anyway.” She rolled her eyes at the old joke. “I object to atrocities because they’re terrible policy. It may be the case that no one cares about the Mwennin or whatever they call themselves, but if we had so tight a hold over the populace as we like to advertise, we wouldn’t perennially be dealing with heretic brushfires. Make threats against Cheris’s own parents, fine. But it’s unwise to be indiscriminate about these things. We’ll just be creating a new group of heretics, however small.”
Iruja steepled her hands and sighed. For a moment Mikodez was reminded of her age: 126 years, old enough to feel every clock’s ticking heart. “Are you going to throw a fit over this, too?”
As if that would work. Iruja had intervened earlier because she wanted to get the meeting moving and the agent had already been exposed. (Mikodez bet that there would be a lot of extra personnel screening in the next months, though.) On this issue, however, only Faian agreed with Mikodez, and she wasn’t a credible ally. “It’s not worth it to me,” he said.