Mikodez yawned pointedly and curled up in his chair, slate tucked under his arm.
Eight minutes later, the door opened, but it was only a servitor come to clear Mikodez’s tray. Mikodez had only eaten half the ration bar, but he only ever ate half, so it knew to take the dish away. As for other food, the conference table was already home to two lavish plates of cookies and pastries (mostly for Mikodez, who had never met a sweet he didn’t like), seasoned rare meats cut up into slivers and stuck with absurdly decorative gold-toned toothpicks, spring rolls, slices of crisp fruit. Mikodez believed that no one thought well on an empty stomach, so while people were certainly welcome to eat before they came to meetings, he made sure they could fill up during them if they chose to.
A minute after that, the division heads filed in one by one. Mikodez’s eyes were closed, but he listened to the exchange of greetings. Istradez would be smiling at each person individually because that was what Mikodez himself did.
For a while Mikodez followed the threads of his people’s interactions. Shenner’s voice was more shrill than usual. She despised the Hafn not because she’d lost family to them but because she had once met a Hafn aristocrat and he had commented disparagingly about her accent speaking in his language. Shenner was vain about her language skills. Fortunately, Accounting interrupted what could have been a lengthy diatribe. In the early days, Mikodez would debrief with Istradez after meetings, pointing out things he would have done differently. These days that was rarely necessary.
While he didn’t feel drowsy in the slightest, Mikodez’s mind felt fuzzy. The medications hadn’t kicked in yet. Medical didn’t like the number of drugs he was abusing. He could tell because instead of lecturing him about it (ineffectual), every single one of the courtesans he saw was painstakingly and consistently polite about how he needed artificial assistance to do his job (also ineffectual, but at least it saved everyone the arguments). While sex didn’t interest Mikodez, he believed firmly that all of his people should talk to trained conversationalists/therapists on a regular basis. He did not exclude himself from this requirement.
Idly, Mikodez brought up a puzzle on his slate and began playing it. It wasn’t a cover for anything. A cadet had designed it during the academy’s games competition several years ago, and it had been one of the top entries in its category. Mikodez liked the game not for its originality but for its ability to numb his brain. It involved pattern-matching, music (piped in through his augment, although this made it difficult to follow the meeting at the same time), and just enough randomness to make it a challenge. Right now Mikodez couldn’t score points to save his life, which confirmed his decision to hand off the meeting to Istradez. He hadn’t asked Medical whether the game was a reasonable test of his cognitive function, but he didn’t need to.
Partway through an impassioned speech by Propaganda on how the Andan were botching the media fallout by allowing the broadcast of dramas about Jedao portraying him in a favorable light, the drug hit Mikodez. It was as though all the lights in the room had sparked brighter. Istradez glanced at him very briefly. He knew. Instead of drawing attention to Mikodez, Istradez instead pointed out that they were going to have to offer the Andan incentives to step on the dramas. Unfortunately, the Andan liked profit as much as anyone else. The dramas had to be making them a lot of money just now.
Mikodez dismissed the game, wondering in passing how that cadet was doing, then opened one of the files on Jedao’s history. Opened another one on Kujen. Four centuries in one case, nine in another. Both of them contained frustrating lacunae. Or rather, Jedao’s profile existed in as much detail as you’d expect, minus the usual slow rot of history. No one had anticipated that he’d prove to be a time bomb. Kujen, on the other hand, had actively obfuscated his profile for so long that Mikodez didn’t trust everything in the files. But he had to start somewhere.
Jedao had responded to Mikodez’s second attempt to contact him not with a direct communication but a simple message: Make you a deal, Shuos-zho. You stay out of my way, I’ll stay out of yours. We can hash out the rest after the Hafn are gone.
Not a bad offer, as such things went. Even if Mikodez and his staff had good reason to believe that ensuring the Hafn’s trickling survival was Jedao’s primary plan. After all, Jedao couldn’t claim to be defending the hexarchate without the invader. Admittedly, getting rid of the Hafn wouldn’t help much, as the hexarchate had plenty of other enemies, but it might trip Jedao up. Mikodez had not said anything in response to the message. Jedao wouldn’t expect assurances in any case.
His attention turned to Kujen, whose disappearance had left such an odd hole in Mikodez’s life. They were not friends. Kujen might understand friendship as an abstraction, but he was no more friends with another human being than a shark was with a fish.
They were, however, colleagues, and they had consulted with each other on many occasions since Mikodez took the seat. Mikodez had grown dangerously fond of him, even if he hadn’t become aware of it until now. But he liked challenges, and there was no denying that dealings with Kujen, however cordial, were never safe.
Mikodez had visited Kujen’s home station twice. Kujen preferred to let his false hexarchs administer the faction, or so he said, although Mikodez had good evidence that he kept a close eye on what was being done on his behalf. Faian had ascended to false hexarch twelve years after Mikodez himself took the seat, under circumstances that strongly suggested that Kujen objected personally to Faian’s predecessor skimming off parts of the budget. The man in question had later turned up as a technician on Kujen’s personal staff—“No sense wasting talent,” Kujen had said blithely. He was much prettier, and much more docile, after Kujen got through with him.
Kujen’s taste for the beautiful was not limited to men (and the rare woman or alt). He surrounded himself with luxuries from the hexarchate’s bounty of worlds. Even if Mikodez hadn’t known from the threadbare records that Hajoret Kujen had spent his childhood as a refugee on a world whose name had changed twice in the past nine centuries, he would have guessed it from Kujen’s particular obsession with everything from hand-woven carpets to blown-glass figurines of flowers to cabinets inlaid with abalone and slivers of moonstone. He collected these objects but took no notice of them once he owned them. Mikodez had given up trying to bribe him with such mundanities long ago. When he really needed a favor, he instead offered ancient sextants and finely made orreries, artifacts that appealed to the scientist in Kujen.
Faian had stopped waffling and her people had taken control of Kujen’s old base. Mikodez expected that she’d be turning it upside-down for clues for the next decade without much luck. He’d offer help, except she was unlikely to take kindly to the suggestion that she needed it. That, and she didn’t trust him. Which, fair enough. Since he spent all that time cultivating his reputation, he couldn’t blame people for taking it to heart.
“...Miki.”
The use of his childhood nickname made Mikodez look up. Istradez wouldn’t have used it if any of the division heads remained anywhere near the room. “Yes?” he said, and rubbed his eyes. His stomach rumbled. When was the last time he had eaten?
“Fine, cookies,” Istradez said. He was standing over Mikodez with his hands on his hips. “If I can’t get you to eat anything better. And then you are going to bed.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Mikodez said. “You haven’t debriefed me on what the hell went on in the meeting.”