“Looks like Century plans to keep up their tradition of using human mercs to supplement their ethnic cleansing efforts,” I said, looking down at my bare desk. The light grain of the wood running across the near-white surface caught my attention.
“Why stop running a play that’s working?” Scott asked. “These guys managed to handle the small-scale dirty work, freeing up their metas to hit the cloisters.”
“Which is even more important now that they’ve lost their big gun.” I thought again of Raymond, the man who had been my great uncle, and of how I’d watched him die in London. It was uncharitable to think of it this way, but his death had bought us months of time. Time which I felt like I was wasting, one grain through the hourglass at a time. I sighed, pissed off and more than a little desperate.
“So what now?” Scott asked. “We’ve got no more leads than we did before they attacked. We’re back to square one and minus a few really good people.”
I thought about that. We had lost good people, decent people, and had gotten a handful of pawns in return. The only thing I’d learned from the mercenaries was the address of that warehouse in Chicago, and that Weissman—that turd—had given the orders, right before he’d caught a flight back to an undisclosed location. Presumably wherever he was setting up the next phase of the extermination. I’d also caught one other thing—each and every one of the mercs had been shown a photo of me and was told not to kill me, on pain of his own death. Of course, they couldn’t have known it was me fighting through a cloud of tear gas and jumping through the air to distract them, but that was almost irrelevant.
Something bothered me, though, something about my conversation with mother. “Actually, we do know a little more.” I chewed my lower lip. “They either don’t have us under enough surveillance or penetrated enough to know that the telepaths are dead. Hell, it’s why they sent these guys.”
Scott looked at me in askance. “You can’t think that this was a serious attempt to get back the telepaths.”
“It was a decent operational concept,” I said. “Hardly foolproof, or a sign they were tossing everything they had at us, but it was a workable plan. It could have been carried off, forcing us to negotiate with them for the release of the telepaths.” I felt slightly warm, and I knew it was more than the beam of light that was shining in across my seat. “They think we have something that they want. That they need.”
Scott looked at Ariadne. “And this is good news ... how? Unless you want to bring the wrath of Century down on us even quicker than it would otherwise come landing on our heads?” His face went serious. “Because if that’s your plan, uhm ... let me know so I can vacate the premises immediately, please.”
“That’s my plan,” I said, nodding as I thought it through.
“Okay,” Scott said. “I was sort of kidding about the running thing, but I have to admit I’m a little uneasy now that your confessed desire is to bring them down on us—”
“Think about it,” I said. “Those telepaths make their job so much easier. Without them, it’s going to take twice as long to do what they mean to do. They’re going to divert other forces here so long as they think the telepaths are alive. It’s a game of resources, and they started with the most expendable thing they had, the same way you don’t expose the queen to danger in a chess game if you can accomplish something with a pawn. We beat that, and now it’s going to take more of their attention to get the job done, so they’ll send more because the alternative is adding months or years to their schedule of extermination.” I folded my arms and leaned back in my chair. “They’ll be coming again, no doubt about it.”
Ariadne looked from me to Scott then back. “I still fail to see the good news. They’ve proven that they’ll come at you in treacherous ways—taking hostages—in order to get the telepaths back. Wouldn’t we be better off delaying our confrontation with them until we’ve worn them down a little better? Make the odds less overwhelming?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Because right now we’re the lightning rod, drawing the strikes away from other things they could be concentrating on. This is good, because every day we can delay them is another day we buy time to counter them.”
Scott cocked his head sideways. “The problem you’re obviously missing is that if you’re a lightning rod, you’re pretty much asking to be struck by lightning.”