Betrayer: Foreigner #12 Read Online Free PDF

under her small dark cloud.
    And he’d known her long enough he could accept that she’d take quiet offense, and be upset, and want to know intimately everything that was going on. He’d known her long enough and well enough to accept her reactions with a total failure to give a damn, except for Toby’s sake.
    Getting her back to Toby and getting both of them on their boat, out of atevi waters and back to safety at Port Jackson, where he could be sure they weren’t a target . . . even that had to be put on a lesser priority. All personal questions did. Toby mattered in these equations only because he was, among other things, an agent of the Mospheiran government and knew things that might be of interest to certain people on this side of the straits. Barb knew an uncomfortable lot—but couldn’t speak but half a dozen words of Ragi.
    But the only way now to keep that knowledge out of play was to ignore it, stop worrying about Toby—and hope Barb never dropped the wrong name near a hidden microphone. He couldn’t even tell her what names not to drop.
    He stood, he thought through things Lord Machigi might ask him, and what he could answer—he asked himself what he could possibly offer as inducements for better relations with a young warlord bent on conquest as a means of keeping his several clans in line. Machigi had been practicing the old Momentum theory of leadership: start a war, keep everyone facing the enemy—and avoid discussing domestic problems for another decade.
    Most long-term successful leaders of the Marid had adopted that policy in one form or another.
    So how could he get anything different out of Machigi? How to be sure he caught Machigi’s lasting interest?
    Trade him something really good short-term?
    What did a young warlord want that a diplomat could give him?
    What was Machigi going to want that the aiji-dowager could give him?
    They had talked vaguely yesterday about the space station, but that was far, far from something Machigi could actually realize—let alone explain to the peasant fishermen and the city ship owners and merchants who were the majority of Machigi’s district. Fishermen and merchants were his constituency, the people who kept him in power, despite the ambitions of certain high-level local influences that might want to replace him. Machigi’s hold on them was his popularity with the trades—and with the subclans. But it was a precarious hold, and let Machigi present some proposal that was too far from the interests of fishermen and merchants, and he could lose that popularity.
    Tell them they were all going to be prosperous up in space? Or as a result of others going into space?
    They weren’t going to understand that. They wouldn’t believe the Ragi would give them an equal chance at anything.
    Tell them they were going to give up on conquering the west coast and accept an alliance with the hated north?
    That wasn’t going to be an easy sell, either.
    Then there was the old quarrel with the west coast Edi, an ethnic group who had been moved onto that coast many, many decades ago, at the very founding of the aishidi’tat. The Marid had been claiming the west coast—and the Ragi, the ruling clan of the aishidi’tat, had high-handedly moved Edi refugees in and given the west coast to them—fierce fighters and absolutely determined on their own independence. The Edi themselves were allied to the Gan, another displaced ethnic group to the north, who would involve themselves inside the hour if things blew up. And the Edi in particular had been the target of Marid reprisals, and there was exceedingly bad blood there.
    Tell these fishermen and merchants the Edi, already entrenched in Najida Peninsula, were going to gain a lordship in the aishidi’tat and be voting, thanks to the other part of the aiji-dowager’s personal agenda? The whole Marid was going to have a fit when they found that out.
    What in hell could he offer Machigi to induce him to let that slide by