“Unless you want to make an effort at questioning Sovereign,” I said, staring at him.
His head was bald, his beard gone, and his lined face looked peculiar even in the spots where the flesh had healed from his unfortunate scalding. “I will talk to him if you wish it, but I don’t think it will help. We have steered rather clear of each other for a very long time, and with good reason.”
“Yeah,” I said, harkening back to the story he’d told us, “but do you think talking to him would do any positive good?”
“If you are looking to aggravate him, perhaps,” Janus said with a shrug. “Otherwise, I doubt it.”
“We’ll skip that for now,” I said.
“Never underestimate the value of annoying people,” Reed said, and I wondered if he knew how much he was living out his own advice at the moment.
“Well, if there’s nothing else to discuss …” I said.
“Hold it,” Li said from his end of the table. “We still have no actionable plan on what we’re going to do when we find this meeting. You’re talking about facing down one hundred—”
“Eighty,” I said. “Or maybe seventy; I’ve lost count.” I paused, thinking about it for a second.
“You’ve killed so many people you’ve lost track of the numbers,” Li said, surprisingly calm.
I started to open my mouth to protest out of reflex, and stopped. “Yes,” I said, in slightly numb surprise. “I have.”
“She’s doing her job,” Foreman said quickly, not hazarding a look in my direction. “Every member of Century that’s removed from their organization makes it more likely that we’re going to be able to take them out.” He laid his knuckles on the table as he leaned over. “I’ve heard the basics about this Ares-type they’re holding onto, and I have to say—it scares the hell out of me. Watching them come for our people one by one was frightening; knowing they possess the capability to wipe out every last one of our defenders pushes my fear of them up to the next level. They need to be taken out, by any means necessary.”
“I am fine with that,” Li said, calmly assertive. “But in terms of a plan, even walking in with auto shotguns doesn’t seem like it’s going to cover all the bases. If we can’t just fire a missile and take them out of existence, then that means a fight—”
“No,” I said. I felt a slow grin crack my face. “No, it doesn’t. We’ve been looking at this all wrong. If we’re at war, and we’re up against an army … we need an advantage, right?”
“Right,” Foreman said, giving me a cautious look. “But as previously pointed out, we have no advantage to give you. No tanks, no soldiers, no planes—”
“We don’t need any of those things,” I said, shaking my head. “We just need one thing, and one thing alone—other than the location of their meeting, obviously.”
The smile on my face must have been very disquieting, because some cracks of nervousness started to show up in Foreman’s facade. “And what would that be?”
I blinked at him demurely. “The same thing any army uses when they want to take out a number of enemies fast and efficiently.” I leaned forward. “A bomb.”
Chapter 40
I sat in my office after the meeting, the blinds cracked open and the sunlight pouring in. It was blissfully silent, which was a hell of a contrast to how it had been in the meeting after I’d dropped my own particular bomb.
The reaction was predictable, the arguments equally so, and there was a lot of anger and rage. Also predictable. I didn’t really care, though, because when you start arguing about killing people, what’s the difference whether it’s fast or slow? My preference was for fast, obviously, given how much damage these particular people could do if given time to react.
Foreman had been necessarily skeptical, but I thought I’d finally gotten through to him at the end. Maybe. He was a tough guy to read, and I would struggle to guess whether that was because of his meta abilities or his career in politics. Either way, it left me nothing more than the hope that he’d pass my request up the line and get us a bomb we could work with. I’d even talked with him for a minute privately after the meeting to make sure he got the right message. I still couldn’t read him, though.
So I sat in my office and waited for the next inevitable knock. Whether it would be Scott and Rocha, hopefully with some news to share, or Ariadne with a budget projection that she knew I’d just sign off on, or someone else wanting to have any number of conversations I didn’t necessarily see the value in, it would come as surely as Century’s looming meeting.