Chapter 195 The Royal Breakfast
POV: Callum | Neutral territory, Aldgate meeting house
The meeting house in Aldgate belongs to no faction, which is why it was chosen, and it has the quality of spaces that have been used for neutral negotiations for a long time, which is a specific worn quality, the quality of furniture and floors that have absorbed a lot of tension and which carry it in their grain.
Twelve people around the table. Parliament vampires on one side, four of them, Alteroni at the center with three others whose names I know from documents rather than conversations. Rookeries wolves on the other side, Cormac and Tom and myself. Two fae representatives, which Tom arranged through his community contacts and which required three separate security guarantees before they agreed to be in the same room as Parliament vampires. Two dragon intermediaries, neither of them Vermithrax, which means Vermithrax is expressing interest without committing, which is its own kind of commitment.
And Mordaunt. Mordaunt at the far end of the table, present by virtue of the five votes that did not go to Alteroni and which he still represents, and which make excluding him from the defense planning more dangerous than including him in it.
Valentina is beside me. The Parliament vampires look at her with the specific attention of people assessing something they have not yet categorized, which is what they always do with Valentina, and Valentina looks back at them with the flat considering expression she has developed over the past three years, which is the expression of someone who has decided that being assessed is not the same as being defined by the assessment.
The awkwardness of the room is real and I do not try to perform past it because performing past it would make it worse. Former enemies in the same space planning the same defense is not comfortable and it is not supposed to be comfortable. It is supposed to be functional.
Tom begins with the maps.
The Covenant force is coming from the south and east. The American packs are coming from the north, through Scotland, which means the offset Cormac identified is real, six to eight hours between first contact and second contact if both forces move at their projected speeds. Six hours is the window.
"We engage the Covenant force when it arrives," Cormac says, his finger on the southern approaches. "Full coalition, everything we have. We cannot let them establish a position before the American packs arrive, because if both forces are positioned simultaneously we have nowhere to maneuver."
"Parliamentary forces hold the eastern sector," Alteroni says. He says it with the specific authority of someone who has done military planning before, which he has, Parliament having maintained a defensive force for two centuries. "That's our historical strength. We know that ground."
"Rookeries takes the south," I say. "Packless wolves move faster in urban terrain and we know the Rookeries geography better than any Covenant commander is going to know it in the time they have."
"Fae hold the bridge network," Tom says, and the fae representatives look at each other and then back at Tom and nod, which is more commitment than I expected from them at the first meeting.
"And the dragon intermediaries?" I ask.
"Vermithrax's formal position," says the one on the left, whose name is Alder and who speaks with the careful precision of someone delivering an authorized message rather than expressing a personal view, "is that the dragons are economically invested in London's stability and will provide logistical and financial support to the defense coalition. Active military participation is not authorized at this time."
Money and logistics. Not combat. It is not everything but it is more than nothing and it means the supply lines are backed by resources that neither the Covenant nor the American packs can easily outspend.
The planning takes two hours. The battle plan that emerges is not elegant but it is real and it has the quality of something that multiple people have argued about and which is better for having been argued about.
The scout's message arrives as we are wrapping, passed in through the door by Tom's network contact outside and read aloud by Tom in the flat voice he uses for bad numbers.
"European Covenant army arrives in three days. American packs in five." Tom sets the paper down. "We're outnumbered three to one."
The room absorbs it.
Three to one means the plan we spent two hours building needs to be perfect. It means the six-hour window between forces is not a tactical advantage, it is the only advantage, and if we do not use it completely the window closes and we are simply outnumbered until we are not.
Mordaunt speaks from the end of the table. "Three to one is manageable," he says, "if the three are not coordinated. The Covenant and the Americans have agreed on the invasion and on nothing else. Every hour we can drive between them is an hour they are not a unified force." He says it without looking at me, directing it at the room generally, which is the specific posture of someone contributing to a collective effort while maintaining the position that they are doing so on their own terms.
He is correct. Again.
"Three days," I say. "We use all of them."