"We did exceed our mission parameters. The original briefing was to retrieve Remi, not Remi and the magistrate and six baby aliens. In which case, there might be too many of us. Ashari and Ankat and Kaliyan could have brought back a willing agent on their own." And they would have done it more quietly and with less fuss, though Sasha's not going to give Ashari the satisfaction of saying so out loud.

This is seven different flavors of stupid fucking politics. That's not Sasha's specialty, and she's going to get things wrong. But the Rahal are still thinking like Rahal, and that's wrong, too. "You can't expect the rebellion to be organized from the top down, or to have consistent lines of authority. That would be a security nightmare, because the second the Shuos got in, they'd roll everything up. There have to be divisions and redundancies. My guess is, we're dealing with a single person or a small group who have chosen to exploit those redundancies to build a personal powerbase. They're cutting back on training and orientation that would link us to other parts of the organization. They'd like us divided from each other and grateful to them, I'm guessing."