"You're referring, I imagine, to the three warships that struck the capital." Zhang's eyes, hazel, flat, didn't so much as flicker. "They are a threat to my nation. You'll forgive me if I don't take a stranger's word for the shape of a threat I'm still assembling from wreckage."
"They're not only a threat to your nation, Commander. They're a threat to my people, and, if the pattern holds the way I suspect it does, to everyone the Federation has ever bothered to protect."
"And you believe you can help eliminate it."
"I can."
"And in exchange." Zhang's gaze sharpened, the closest thing to genuine interest Taisen had seen cross it yet. "What, exactly, do you want from the United Nations of Earth."
"Nothing today. Consideration, when the day comes that my people need it." Taisen let the pause sit exactly as long as it needed to. "I offer my knowledge and my skill now, on trust, in exchange for your goodwill later, when I come to collect."
"And if I choose not to extend that goodwill, once the day comes."
"Then I will have gambled, and lost. I have until that day to convince you my interests and yours run in the same direction. I don't need you to believe it now. I only need you to find it useful enough not to say no."
Zhang leaned back very slightly in his chair, and something in the movement told Taisen, with the same certainty he read a fighting stance, that the answer had already been decided before the question was fully asked: that everything since the door opened had been theatre for a decision Zhang had made alone, in this office, long before any of them had walked in.
"I've met men with your particular quality of self-regard before," Zhang said. "Most of them broke the first time their nobility collided with something that didn't care about it."
"I've already collided with something that didn't care about it, Commander. I'm not offering you nobility. I'm offering you a weapon that happens to have opinions. Use the weapon. Ignore the opinions if it's easier for you."
Something in that landed. Zhang's mouth did the almost-smile again, briefer this time.
"Colonel Lyn's reports on you have been thorough," he said. "Suspiciously thorough, for someone she claims to have known only a matter of weeks." He didn't look at Lyn when he said it, which Taisen understood, immediately, was its own kind of message. Taisen clocked it, tucked it behind the dozen other threats already queued in his head, and let it wait its turn. "Tell me. If you served the UN, and a threat arose against your own people at the same time, whose orders would you follow?"
"I see no conflict in sharing what I know with both sides."
"I'm not asking about information, Sahir. I'm asking about service. Obedience. The thing your soldiers back on Kharsat presumably still call by an older, less comfortable word."
There was a pause, longer than any before it. "If I served the United Nations, the United Nations would command my allegiance. My word is my collateral on that. Colonel Lyn can speak, if you'd like, to what that word has been worth so far."
"Colonel?" Zhang's eyes flicked to her, and did not linger.
"He's saved my life twice," Lyn said. "He's never lied to me about anything that mattered to my crew's survival. What he's lied to me about otherwise, I couldn't say; I doubt any of us could."
"An honest answer," Zhang said, "which is more than I usually get in this office." He folded his hands. "Very well. I accept your assistance, on the terms as stated." Then, without any visible change in tone, as if the sentence belonged to an entirely different conversation: "Colonel, when is your Ensign scheduled to complete her training at the Academy?"
Lyn blinked, caught flat-footed for the first time since they'd entered. "In six months, Commander. We'd planned to return her when the Boettia incident cost us the time."
"Ensign Alita is promoted to Lieutenant, effective immediately, and assigned as aide to Commander Taisen, who is granted temporary commission and operational command of the UNS Arctic, an Arctic-class cutter, pending Senate review."
The room went very still. Even the stone admirals along the wall seemed to be listening harder.
"Sir," Lyn said, with the careful, precise diction of a woman deciding exactly how much of her objection was safe to say aloud, "with respect: those are extraordinary measures, for an officer who hasn't graduated the Academy and an alien who's never worn the uniform at all."
"They are." Zhang didn't so much as shift in his chair. "These are extraordinary times, Colonel, and I have found, across a long and largely thankless career, that extraordinary times punish institutions that insist on ordinary procedure long after the procedure has stopped protecting anyone. I am not doing this because I trust either of them personally. I am doing this because a Sahir warrior with no political capital to lose and no faction in this building that will grieve him if he fails is, at present, the single most useful asset I have access to, and I intend to use him exactly as far as his usefulness extends and not one inch further." His eyes settled on Taisen for the first time with something like real attention. "You should understand precisely what you are to me, Commander, before you accept this commission. You are not a hero to this Senate. You are a tool with excellent references, and I am a man who has never once lost sleep over the fate of a tool. If that arrangement is acceptable to you, we have nothing further to discuss. If it isn't, say so now, and save us both the paperwork of undoing this later."
Taisen studied him for a long moment: the stillness, the deliberate lack of warmth, the coldness laid out on the table with no apology attached to it at all, as if honesty about one's own ruthlessness were simply a more efficient currency than the pretense of virtue everyone else in this building traded in.