Cato negotiates an alliance with Mii-Es

Cato and Mii-Es Negotiations are the turning point at which Mii-Es moves from observing Cato as a dangerous outsider to considering cooperation against the Core Worlds. The exchange is not a simple conversion or surrender: Mii-Es seeks protection for herself, her world, her allies, and other clanless deities, while Cato seeks access, intelligence, and a political opening inside the divine structure that supports the System. Their eventual arrangement extends Cato’s anti-System campaign from military resistance into clandestine alliance-building and post-System survival planning.

Background and Strategic Context

Mii-Es approaches Cato after years of observing the conflict from the position of a vulnerable System-god. Cato has spread from Earth through the System, built industrial capacity across hundreds of worlds, and committed himself to destroying the System rather than merely exploiting its rules. His stated grievance is against the System itself, which brings people into conflicts, assigns lethal quests, imposes punishing Essence costs, and repeatedly destroys entire planets. Cato insists that the people subjected to the System are not his enemies, but he also accepts that those who take up arms to preserve it may have to be defeated.

Mii-Es understands that the coming struggle between Cato and the Core Worlds will crush small powers regardless of their intentions. She already knows that the Core Worlds cares little for the livelihood of her world and her allies, whereas Cato claims to value their preservation. This difference gives the negotiations their central pressure: Cato offers a possible future outside the System, while Mii-Es risks being identified as a traitor before she has secured any reliable protection.

The wider divine context is already unstable. Muar reports on the Crusade and records which World Deities pay attention to it and which ignore it, while Initik represents a different kind of System-god: one who remembers the arrival of the System and regards the beings under his protection as his people. Cato’s negotiations with Mii-Es therefore occur within a divided religious order, not between a unified System and an isolated rebel. The later revelation that Cato has also made an offer to Initik confirms that he is cultivating several relationships at once, although the details of those arrangements remain deliberately concealed from one another.

Opening the Negotiation

Cato reaches Mii-Es through a projection device at Yaniss’s Estate after receiving word that a god wishes to contact him. The image that greets him belongs to a species distinct from Yaniss’s, but the immediate question of Mii-Es’s identity gives way to the political reason for her timing. She explains that politics takes time and that she needed a secure method of communication that would not endanger her. Her first position is deliberately cautious: she does not yet know exactly what she wants from Cato, only that remaining exposed to the Core Worlds is unacceptable.

Mii-Es’s uncertainty is itself a strategic fact. She cannot approach Cato as an equal military power, and she cannot safely commit to absolute treason against the order in which she has lived. She therefore frames the possible bargain in terms of protection, an accord, or a route of escape. Cato immediately identifies the underlying need and proposes that she may want a means of protecting her people or leaving the System entirely. Mii-Es accepts that interpretation, but keeps the terms open until she knows what Cato can actually provide.

Cato’s offer gives the conversation its leverage. He can provide riches and knowledge beyond anything Mii-Es ordinarily controls, and he claims that survival after the fall of the System can be arranged not only for her but for anyone willing to leave it. His offer to restore her race is especially powerful; Mii-Es later admits to Initik that Cato has made her an offer she is unsure she can refuse, while withholding the detail because revealing it would compromise her. Cato’s most potent weapon is therefore not only force. It is the promise that the losses created by the System may be reversed.

The Alliance of Clanless Gods

Mii-Es reveals that she is not the only god at odds with the Core Worlds. After the purges, several clanless deities gathered together, and they may be able to provide Cato’s agents with separate blessings. Those blessings could make the agents anonymous and prevent the operation from being traced directly to Mii-Es or her allies. The proposed support is consequently covert rather than ceremonial: divine aid becomes a method of concealment, deniability, and resistance within the System’s own hierarchy.

Mii-Es’s price is collective rather than personal. She asks Cato to protect a list of planets and establish arrangements that will allow other deities to survive when the System falls, because she believes the crossfire could annihilate them even if they avoid taking a direct side. Cato cannot promise to stop every destructive consequence, but he can move assets toward threatened worlds and prepare evacuation or preservation measures. His answer transforms the alliance from a private pact into a rescue network for endangered populations and divine communities.

Cato also accepts that the prospective allies may not yet have agreed to join him. Mii-Es warns that opposition to the depredations of the Core Worlds is not the same as committing absolute treason. Cato responds with double-blind passphrases, one-time pads, dead drops, and controlled disclosures, explaining that the gods can know an ally exists and learn how to verify that ally without exposing their identities before the decisive moment. His technological vocabulary initially lies outside Mii-Es’s experience, but he expects her to learn quickly. The negotiation thus imports espionage into a divine political environment built around revelation, hierarchy, and direct authority.

Cato’s Political and Ethical Terms

Cato’s willingness to help the independent gods is bounded by a warning: life outside the System will not be effortless. Exfiltration is possible, but excellence in base reality still requires work, even if the work differs from advancement under System rules. This qualification prevents the offer from becoming a promise of effortless paradise. Cato presents freedom as a change in conditions and responsibilities, not as an escape from consequence or labor.

The same concern shapes his view of leadership. He does not want to decide who should control planets and populations, yet removing the System and its existing hierarchy would leave him responsible for creating a replacement. He recognizes that power might fall into the hands of high-rank System psychopaths who could misuse railguns, retroviral engineering, or digitization. Cato therefore becomes a king-maker against his own preference: refusing to choose would still amount to choosing, because handing dangerous capabilities to irresponsible rulers would reproduce the abuses he is trying to end.

This produces the negotiation’s deepest contradiction. Cato fights the System because it reduces choice and imposes a repetitive, programmatic order, but his campaign requires intelligence control, selective access to technology, military force, and decisions about legitimate authority. Mii-Es, for her part, seeks autonomy from the Core Worlds while asking Cato to organize protection for powers that have not yet openly defected. Their alliance is therefore not founded on absolute trust or ideological purity. It is a practical attempt to preserve people and worlds while a larger order collapses.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The negotiations give Cato a potential network of divine intermediaries at a moment when his industrial expansion is becoming strategically decisive. Exponential growth has spread his forces and production across hundreds of worlds, allowing each world to manufacture armies, warframes, mines, refineries, solar panels, and convertible industrial infrastructure. Mii-Es’s alliance can complement that material power by supplying blessings, local knowledge, political cover, and access to actors who would otherwise remain unreachable.

The relationship also changes Mii-Es’s position. She is no longer merely a god waiting to be crushed between Cato and the Core Worlds; she becomes a broker for other clanless deities and a participant in the design of a post-System future. Her later conversation with Initik shows that Cato’s offer has already created a private bond between them, even though neither she nor Initik reveals the terms of their respective agreements. Cato’s diplomacy thus produces a concealed web of overlapping commitments, in which secrecy protects the participants but also prevents complete mutual confidence.

The negotiations anticipate the larger conflict between Cato and the System by placing preservation beside destruction. Cato’s declared objective is the System’s destruction, yet he repeatedly insists that his purpose is to save as many people and things as possible. Mii-Es tests whether that promise extends beyond his own agents and immediate allies; Cato answers by accepting responsibility for worlds and gods that may never publicly acknowledge him. The bargain therefore makes rescue an operational component of rebellion rather than a sentiment attached after victory.

The alliance also foreshadows the later confrontation with Misse Eln and Muar. When Cato insists to Misse that his quarrel is with the System rather than with her personally, the claim echoes the distinction that made cooperation with Mii-Es possible. Misse sees Cato as the cause of the collapse threatening her order, while Cato sees the System as the fundamental enemy. The negotiations with Mii-Es show the constructive side of that principle: a System-god can become a partner when survival and liberation are separated from loyalty to the institution. In that sense, the event is both a diplomatic bargain and a test of whether the System’s own servants can imagine a future beyond it.