Watch your own circle, Marshal. Watch it the way you'd watch an enemy's, and forgive yourself in advance for how much that's going to cost you, because I suspect it's going to cost you a great deal before this is finished.
Taisen.
The reply took the better part of a full day to arrive, routed, when it finally did, through the same three relay stations as the last, and this time Alita and Lyn were both already in his quarters when the alert chimed, having taken, over the last week, to simply staying near him during the hours a reply was plausible, an arrangement none of them had discussed out loud and all three had settled into without argument.
Zhang's voice, when it began, carried none of the careful, formal weight of the last message. It sounded, instead, like a man who hadn't slept properly in several days and had decided sleep was a luxury he'd get back to once this particular fire was out.
Commander. I read your message four times before I let myself believe it, and then I did the thing I should have done the moment the recall order first crossed my desk, which is stop assuming the leak had to be someone senior enough to matter to me politically, and start asking, instead, who was close enough to me personally to see the Beluga's mission profile before it ever went active. That's a considerably shorter list than I wish it were.
Three names. I'll give you all three, because you've trusted me with worse and because I don't have anyone else left in this uniform I trust enough to say them out loud to.
Commodore Priya Anand. My logistics chief for eleven years. She saw the Beluga's exact loadout and sortie timing three days before Usyk ever launched. Nothing moves through this fleet without her signature on the manifest first. If it's her, it's the worst version of this. She still controls half the supply lines this fleet is currently running on. Pulling her without proof shuts down more than her career.
Colonel Marcus Oyelaran. My adjutant. I've groomed that man for my own chair for six years, Commander. He has seen every private communication that's crossed my desk since before you ever wore a uniform of your own, and if it's him, I have spent six years training my own replacement to hand my empire's secrets to the people trying to burn it down, and I do not know yet how I survive knowing that, even privately, even if it turns out to be true and nothing worse follows from it.
And Master Sergeant Elin Farrow. My personal comm clerk. Twenty years in this service, nineteen of them at my elbow. The kind of person you stop seeing after a decade, because they've become part of the furniture of your own trust. If it's her, it's the quietest and cruelest version of all three. It means the leak was never someone I overlooked. It was someone I stopped looking at entirely, and called that stopping loyalty. Instead of what it actually was.
Carelessness. Dressed up as familiarity.
I have no proof against any of them. I want to be plain about that, because I know what a list like this can do in the wrong hands, including mine, if I let suspicion outrun evidence. I am not moving against any of the three tonight. I am watching, quietly, the way you told me to, and I am going to hate every hour of it, because I have trusted all three of these people with things I would not have trusted my own family with, and I am now going to spend however long this takes wondering, every single time one of them speaks to me, whether I'm looking at a colleague or a knife I've been carrying against my own throat for years without knowing it.
I'll set a check-in schedule with this relay. Every seventy two hours, a signal, nothing more, just confirmation that I'm still standing and still holding the door for you the way I promised. If you ever miss two in a row from me, assume the worst and act accordingly. I'd rather you overreact to my silence than trust it past the point it deserved trusting.
Go carefully, Commander. I intend to.
Zhang.
The message ended, and the small room held its silence a long moment, the three of them sitting with three names that had, a minute ago, been nothing at all to any of them and were now, whether they liked it or not, the outer edge of a decision that could ruin an innocent life as easily as it might catch a guilty one.
"Anand controls supply for half the fleet," Alita said, quietly, into the quiet. "If Zhang so much as looks at her sideways and he's wrong, and word gets back to the people under her, you could see logistics for an entire theater seize up out of pure suspicion, which is its own kind of gift to hand the Reza, whether she's guilty or not."
"Oyelaran's worse in a different way," Lyn said. "Groomed successors don't survive being suspected, even cleared. The suspicion becomes the whole of their record whether it's ever proven or not. Zhang knows that. It's why his voice sounded the way it did saying the name."
"And the sergeant," Alita said, "is the one nobody will think to protect if this goes wrong, because rank decides, in every inquiry I've ever read a transcript of, how loudly a person's ruin gets noticed. Anand and Oyelaran would survive being wrongly accused with their names intact, eventually, given enough time and the right lawyers. A twenty year enlisted clerk with no one senior enough to vouch for her publicly might not survive it at all."
"So we say nothing," Lyn said, "and let Zhang watch, and hope he watches carefully enough not to tip whichever one of them it actually is before he's certain."