“It’s good to see you today, Yan. How are you? Would you like some tea?” the old man said, as a pretty girl brought in a lacquered tray with a traditional tea service on it. She looked about sixteen, but could have been anything from fourteen to forty. She placed the tea on the desk and left quietly, shooting a quick glance at Stewart under her lashes.
“Yes, thank you. I’m having a very good day, and you?” Standard opening, no real clue to his mindset. Stewart accepted a cup poured by the man who held his life and death in his hands. Of course that was always the case with Fleet Strike. Superior officers had the power of life and death. At least theoretically. I should be used to it by now.
“You would shudder to see my schedule.” He poured his own cup of tea and sat behind his desk, fixing a direct gaze on the younger man.
Translation: I’d better not be wasting his time. That’s fine, since I’m not. “There is… history of the war that our people rarely speak of, and never when we are not face to face,” he said. Yeah, like those Darhel bastards sandbagging Earth’s defenses and letting the Posleen through to eat three billion people in Asia.
“Our organization has much history, all worthy of study. We have a very long history of survival.” The old man regarded him with a gimlet stare over the rim of the tea cup.
Right, we keep our mouths shut because we don’t want our people to die. Stewart carefully kept his eyes fixed on the Grandfather’s collar. Respect was key in this meeting — was always key with someone this far up the chain. Stewart had grown up in latino gangs, and gone from there into the entirely Westernized Fleet Strike. The differences in eye contact rules in Asian culture were still something he had to think about. One thing his counterintelligence training in Fleet Strike had stressed was how difficult it was to overcome the little gestures and telltales every agent drank in with his mother’s milk. The trick was to identify the ones that you, personally, always had to be mindful of. Even when your “role” was now your real life.
“An excellent example for study, sir. Another of our strengths is that we have always patiently sought opportunities to recoup debts of honor and exploited them, when the costs were affordable, and most eagerly when honor could be reclaimed at a profit.” God, what a mouthful. All that to say that we owe the Darhel and I’ve got a way to screw them and make money doing it.
The only thing that moved in the Grandfather’s face was his eyes. A couple of rapid blinks confirmed that he’d understood. One of the other reasons the Darhel haven’t caught on to how bitter the Tong’s enmity is with them. The Darhel’s information processing and artificial intelligence capabilities were awe-inspiring, but there were still things computers just didn’t do very well. One of them was parsing the indirect communication that was an absolute rule of courtesy in some human cultures. For all that, the Darhel must engage in very indirect communication themselves when hiring out their violent dirty work, Cally had confirmed for him, once, something the Tong and Fleet had long suspected. Perhaps because the Darhel were much less indirect in their business communications, even their best AIs completely missed the subtext of the more indirect human conversations. Except when violence was contemplated — they caught indirect conversations about that very well. The Darhel analysts just weren’t as good as they thought they were about remembering that other species were alien. Humans had a leg up on that skill, being the most polycultural of all the known sentient species. The Tong had exploited that Darhel weakness ruthlessly to gain and maintain a high and pervasive institutional awareness of all that the Darhel were, all they intended, and all the payback the Organization owed them. Payback had been a long-term project, contemplated only in the abstract — until now. The fucking elves were too used to assuming absolute species supremacy in business matters, and the Tong was about to fuck them right in the pocketbook. Stewart had his own debts to pay to his ghosts. He ruthlessly suppressed the feral grin that threatened to break through his polite mask, but couldn’t quite prevent it shining through in his eyes. The Grandfather’s eyes narrowed and lit with an answering gleam as the old man leaned forward.
“The advent of such an opportunity, if proper care could be taken, would be auspicious. Very, very auspicious. You begin to interest me.” The head of the largest and most powerful, unsubverted, solely human organization in the Galaxy set his tea to the side and leaned forward in his chair. The fires banked underneath the cold rage, so long held in check, began to burn. Stewart could almost see the man silently counting his dead and reckoning the interest.
“I apologize that time constrained me to send the first ships before we could meet. The opportunity would have been lost.” Stewart allowed his eyes to meet his superior’s for a moment. When the old man nodded, he continued, “This is what we have set in motion…”
The Indowy Aelool walked the halls of the O’Neal Bane Sidhe base with one of his younger clan brothers, but recently arrived on Earth. The youngster had tested as a high genius for the aptitudes important in the field of xenopsychology, leading the clan head to request his presence especially as an apprentice. Coming from his Clan Head, the request had more force than the strongest human command. A human would have been surprised that a clan head of even a tiny group like Clan Aelool — tiny only by Indowy standards — could disappear for long periods without ringing alarm bells in the heads of the Darhel. It was actually the youngster whose disappearance had taken more arranging. Clan heads were some of the very few Indowy who were not under contract to one Darhel Group or another, instead serving the clan as a whole. As such, the Darhel were long accustomed to having little to no contact with the head of this clan or that clan for centuries at a time. As long as the clan’s members were meeting their contracts and causing no trouble, the Darhel reasonably presumed that the clan head was off somewhere doing his job. Wasting time worrying about a relative handful of Indowy among the trillions and trillions would have cut into real business. For the Darhel, the clan heads had no other function than to maintain the system that kept the masses of Indowy well under control.
In the new apprentice’s case, the clan had made vague mumblings about administration work and bought out the childling’s contract, apportioning his former duties among other apprentices in his family. The Darhel had never marked him as particularly smart or talented — Indowy being careful about such things, Clan Aelool more than most.
The head of his breeding group was also unusually smart. She had made certain the child displayed some conspicuous mistakes and clumsiness in his work, making the Cnothgar Group happier than not to see the slow-learning, incompetent youngling become someone else’s problem. If he thought about it at all, the Cnothgar Group’s local factor would assume the clan had removed the little fuck-up to someplace where he couldn’t further dishonor Clan Aelool.
“I do not understand why you are such a determined contrarian regarding human civilizability, Clan Father Aelool. I have read the other clans’ reports on the failures of the Sub-Urb dietary experiments, and, most respectfully, they run exactly counter to your positions. My wisdom is lacking. Enlighten me, please?” his new apprentice said.