"A truce," Kade said, once the room had settled enough to hear him properly. "Not peace. I'm not naive enough to ask any of you for that, and you're not foolish enough to grant it if I did. A truce. Temporary. Narrow. Every force currently operating outside its own borders patrols, incursions, standing arrangements, whatever euphemism each of you prefers for it withdraws, effective immediately, for the duration."
"For how long," Voss asked, flat, already treating the proposal as a negotiation rather than a suggestion.
"Long enough for all six of us to actually assess what we're sitting on." Kade gestured at the image still hanging above the table, green ground and a single impossible pine tree. "I'd rather each of you spend the next season cataloguing what's recovering inside your own territory than spending it fighting each other over land none of us has properly surveyed yet. Growth first. Territory disputes can resume once there's something worth actually disputing."
Bellarmine inclined his head slightly, already turning the idea over with the same careful patience he brought to scripture. "Arx Sancta has no forces beyond its own walls to withdraw. We'll observe the terms easily enough."
"Tumaini as well," Zuri said, quick, eager, already halfway to agreement before anyone had finished asking. "We've never wanted anyone else's ground. Just more of ours to grow into."
Rurikov's eyes moved to her for a moment too long, something cold and unhidden passing behind them before he looked away. He said nothing about it the truce didn't require him to like the company he was keeping it with but the silence carried its own weight all the same. He had never sat at a table with one of them before, not as an equal, not as anyone whose voice counted the same as his own, and something in him clearly still hadn't decided how to hold that. It didn't help, watching her now, that Tumaini's ground stayed green and generous while half of what Zastava called home still refused to grow anything worth eating. A Supe, at the table, speaking of abundance she'd never had to bleed for. He filed the resentment away where he filed most things that didn't serve an immediate purpose, and said nothing else.
Su Wen said nothing, which everyone at the table had, by now, learned to read as agreement rather than resistance Anning kept to itself regardless of what the rest of the world decided to do, and a truce cost her nation nothing it hadn't already been observing on its own terms for a decade.
Rurikov grunted something that might have been assent, arms crossed, clearly less interested in the growth Kade was selling than in simply being left alone by everyone at the table a while longer.
Voss was quiet for a moment longer than the rest, and Kade, watching her, seemed to already know why.
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"There's a detail I think needs addressing before anyone signs onto this," Kade said, and something in his tone shifted, the affable host giving way, briefly, to something colder. "Since we're discussing forces operating outside their own borders."
"Say what you mean," Voss said.
"The United Front's arrangement with Zastava." Kade didn't look away from her. "Mechs for children. I imagine the Marshal's government has found it a very convenient trade — your hardware in exchange for whatever gifted his people find inside their own walls and would rather not deal with themselves." A pause, letting that land fully around the table. "That's precisely the kind of standing arrangement a truce like this is supposed to end."
Rurikov's jaw tightened, but he said nothing, which told the room more than an objection would have.
Voss's face didn't move. "It's an efficient arrangement," she said, after a moment. "Zastava doesn't want what it finds. We have use for it. Nobody's territory is being contested by a handful of frightened children changing hands."
"That's not the objection," Bellarmine said quietly, and for once, his and Kade's positions lined up without either of them intending it to. "The objection is that it's exactly the sort of quiet, standing exchange this truce claims to be ending. If the terms mean anything, Commander, they mean this too."
The silence that followed had a different weight to it than the one before less shock, more the particular tension of a room watching two people decide, in real time, how much a piece of paper was actually worth to either of them.
Voss held Kade's gaze a moment longer, then gave the smallest possible nod, the kind that cost her something to give and made sure everyone at the table saw exactly how much.
"Effective immediately," she said. "No further transactions with Zastava, or with any signing nation, for the duration of the truce."
Rurikov's jaw worked once, silently, and then he nodded too, terse, clearly unhappy, equally clearly unwilling to be the one nation left standing outside an agreement the other five had just closed around him.
Voss watched Bellarmine make his quiet, principled objection and said nothing about what her own intelligence reports already knew — that Arx Sancta's faith came with an edge nobody at this table said out loud, a doctrine that called correction the kinder alternative to death but rarely bothered to stop at correction, carried out in a scatter of bases far enough from any border to stay comfortably deniable. Everyone believed, eventually, one way or another. Arx Sancta simply hadn't found the honesty yet to admit how many of its converts arrived at faith by way of a knife instead of a sermon. She filed that alongside everything else she knew and chose not to spend, the way she filed most leverage — not forgotten, just not yet useful enough to spend.
Six nations sat around that table, and as far as Voss's own reports could account for, only one of them had nothing of that shape hiding behind its borders. Anning simply watched, catalogued, and kept to itself, the same as it always had the one seat at the table, Voss thought, that didn't cost anyone anything to sit next to.
Kade allowed himself, finally, something that looked almost like satisfaction.
"Then we're agreed," he said. "A season. Growth, not conquest. No standing arrangements crossing borders in the meantime, mechs or otherwise." He lifted his glass, an old, almost forgotten gesture from a world that used to close its meetings this way. "Let's see what's actually worth fighting over, once we know what we're looking at."
Nobody raised a glass with him. But nobody left the table either, and for the six nations still standing in the wreckage of everything that had come before them, that, for the moment, would have to pass for agreement enough.