The Directory's next probe was more direct. A single, unarmed hypersonic jet breached The Aerie's airspace, ignored all hails, and dropped a single, hardened data capsule into the center of the courtyard before shooting back into the stratosphere.
Inside the capsule was not a weapon, but an invitation. A summit. A meeting of "sovereign interests" to be held in neutral territory—an orbital hotel owned by a Directory-front corporation.
The audacity of it was breathtaking. They weren't asking; they were summoning her.
Her entire court advised against it. It was an obvious trap.
" It's a test of status," Kaito argued. "If you go, you acknowledge their authority to summon you. If you don't, you appear weak, afraid to leave your nest."
Mo Chen saw a third option. She would not go herself. But she would send an ambassador.
She didn't choose Silas or Kaito. She went to The Forge. For days, she worked alone, channeling the [Phoenix Forge] not on a grand scale, but with microscopic precision. She used the most heat-resistant ceramics and alloys, fusing them around a core of the supercomputer that had been born from burned servers.
She was not building a machine. She was building a person.
When she was done, a figure stood in the workshop. It had her height, her build, and a face of smooth, featureless ceramic. It was an automaton, a golem, but imbued with a sliver of her will through the system, a psychic echo housed in advanced quantum computing.
She named it "Emissary."
It would be her voice, her eyes, her unblinking presence at the summit. It could not be threatened, bribed, or killed. It was the perfect representative for a nation whose law was annihilation.
She was not going to play their game. She was going to change the board.