Cato's political alliance with Mii-Es

Cato and Mii-Es are joined by a pragmatic political alliance forged under the pressure of the System’s impending war with Cato. Mii-Es is not converted into an unquestioning follower, nor does Cato treat her as a subordinate. She is a World Deity protecting her own world, allies, and political survival; he is an insurgent industrial power whose stated quarrel is with the System rather than with its people. Their alliance therefore rests on negotiated protection, shared danger, and the possibility of surviving the destruction of the order that gives both of them power.

Mii-Es Seeks a Counterweight to the Core Worlds

Mii-Es first approaches Cato through Yaniss, whose communications lizards and connection to Cato have made her a potential channel despite the precautions surrounding the relationship. Yaniss has become increasingly divided between the raw base reality represented by Cato’s off-world infrastructure and the System-bound existence she still cannot bring herself to abandon. Mii-Es exploits that opening. In the Temple, she appears through a crystalline projection device as a large avian deity rather than as a member of Clan Ikent, and she openly acknowledges that Yaniss has been unusually circumspect while secretly maintaining a farcaster connection.

The deity’s initial position is both candid and politically defensive. Mii-Es admits that she wants to speak with Cato, then explains that the conflict between him and the Core Worlds threatens small powers such as herself, her world, and her allies. She has concluded that the Core Worlds care little for their livelihood, whereas Cato claims to care about the people caught inside the System. Her objective is not yet a fully defined treaty. She is searching for an arrangement that would make dealing with Cato preferable to obedience or submission to the Core Worlds, whether through protection, an accord, or a route of escape.

Cato recognizes the strategic logic immediately. He interprets Mii-Es’s request as a demand for protection against stronger System powers and understands that any agreement must address the danger facing her personally as well as the danger facing her world. Diplomacy is preferable to war, but the fundamental difficulty remains that Cato intends for the System to disappear. Mii-Es would therefore have to trust him with her life after the political structure that presently sustains her authority had been dismantled.

Bargaining, Leverage, and Mutual Secrecy

Cato is surprised when Yaniss reports that Mii-Es has reached out, although he is pleased by the opportunity to turn a god toward his side. He travels to Yaniss’s Estate by glider and remote Ikent frame, reaching the projection device less than an hour after beginning his descent. Mii-Es explains that politics and the need to establish safe communications delayed her decision. She also makes clear that she does not yet know exactly what she wants from him, because her first concern is survival rather than a settled ideological commitment.

The alliance is consequently transactional from its first direct conversation. Cato can offer Mii-Es protection, knowledge, wealth, and a possible way to survive beyond the System. Mii-Es can offer access to local divine authority, intelligence about the political climate among the gods, and assistance that Cato cannot safely obtain through ordinary System channels. Neither side fully trusts the other. Cato conceals his existing dialogue with Initik because revealing that secret could endanger many people, while Mii-Es keeps private the possibility that Cato might restore her race, knowing that such an offer would compromise her independence if it became known.

The unequal balance of the negotiations also matters. Cato dictates terms while offering resources beyond Mii-Es’s imagination, leaving her uncomfortable with the one-sided nature of the arrangement. She therefore seeks leverage by asking what favor he needs. Her response is not mere opportunism: if Cato’s predictions are correct, her present power will eventually become irrelevant, and any personal advantage gained from the old order may vanish along with it. Her bargaining shifts from immediate political gain toward the preservation of other deities and populations.

Divine Assistance for Cato’s Agents

Mii-Es’s most concrete contribution is a covert blessing for Cato’s agents. After the purges, she reveals that she is not the only deity opposed to the Core Worlds. Several clanless gods have begun cooperating, and together they may be able to provide scattered blessings that conceal Cato’s agents and prevent those agents from being directly traced to Mii-Es or her allies.

Cato sends Dyen and the Sydean versions of Raine and Leese to the Temple because Mii-Es’s protection makes the journey comparatively safe. Their reluctance reflects the danger of depending on a System-god, but Cato assures them that Mii-Es has reason to oppose the Core Worlds even if she does not share his entire objective. At the center of the Temple nave, a faint golden emission surrounds the sisters. The light resembles the artificial spectral signature of divine Skills, and Mii-Es explains that the blessing will obscure them and mark them as a god’s Chosen agents. Even the System should register them as god-blessed rather than as identifiable operatives connected to Cato.

This assistance gives the alliance operational substance. Mii-Es does not merely speak for Cato or express sympathy with his cause; she changes the status under which his agents can move through the System. The blessing also demonstrates the limits of her independence. A Core Deity might still revoke it, and the protection works because it uses the System’s own categories of divine favor rather than escaping those categories altogether.

A Wider Pact for Survival Beyond the System

Mii-Es’s larger demand is that Cato prepare a refuge for other deities whose worlds may be purged. She proposes giving him a list of planets so he can arrange for their inhabitants, or at least their endangered divine populations, to survive the coming conflict. Cato can potentially scan and digitize those who reach him, transfer them to his infrastructure, or receive them elsewhere if their home worlds are destroyed. The request turns their bilateral alliance into the beginnings of a broader clanless-deity coalition.

The proposal also exposes a practical obstacle. Cato does not yet know where the Core is located. He has mapped most of the System and placed its central region somewhere within the Large Magellanic Cloud, but the Inner Worlds are densely clustered, and the available telemetry from the Sydean Lineage is insufficient to identify the exact center. His versions in the Inner Worlds are still establishing themselves, leaving him without enough bandwidth to search millions of stars for an unknown system. Mii-Es’s political cooperation therefore arrives before Cato possesses complete strategic information, forcing the alliance to operate under severe uncertainty.

The danger becomes immediate when Mii-Es informs Cato that Gyvestral has been condemned and will soon be purified. Its deity has already reached an agreement with the Core Worlds, apparently because he is one of their scions, while the Great Clans seek to avoid the resentment caused by earlier purges. Gyvestral is especially significant because it was the last world where Raine and Leese were seen by Muar and the world from which Yaniss evacuated them. The condemnation transforms Mii-Es’s general proposal into an emergency test: Cato must mobilize within the short interval before exterminatus, while Mii-Es supplies the warning and the political context.

Political Meaning and Limits of the Alliance

Mii-Es and Cato represent opposing interpretations of the System without reducing their relationship to a simple religious conversion. Muar experiences the System as purpose, truth, progress, and divine reassurance; he enters a Temple on Uriva, recoils from the memory of System-less emptiness, and meditates before a System crystal until he receives the Divine Insight Skill. Cato, by contrast, treats the System as an imposed structure whose restrictions suppress advanced technology and whose interface can be manipulated through a biological warframe. Mii-Es stands between those positions. She remains a deity of the System, but she recognizes that the Core Worlds may sacrifice smaller worlds and gods to preserve their dominance.

That intermediate position gives the alliance both its flexibility and its fragility. Mii-Es can use divine mechanisms that Cato cannot reproduce, while Cato offers post-System survival that no conventional blessing can guarantee. Their cooperation is therefore built from incompatible premises: Mii-Es seeks to preserve people and deities through the crisis, while Cato ultimately seeks to end the System itself. Their shared political interest is not a common theology but a common opposition to concentrated Core authority.

The alliance remains secretive even as it grows. Mii-Es later meets Initik and admits that Cato has made her an offer she is unsure she can refuse, while Initik reveals that he has received an offer as well. Neither deity discloses the terms of the respective bargains. This parallel confirms that Cato’s strongest weapon is not only industrial capacity or military force but the promise of alternatives to annihilation. His political method is to make survival outside the existing order imaginable, then use that possibility to fracture the loyalties holding the order together.

The relationship reaches its sharpest political contrast when Cato speaks with Misse Eln, another power consolidating authority after the absorption of Mishkell and the collapse of the frontier. Misse tells him that these actions would not be necessary if he were not her enemy; Cato replies that his quarrel is with the System, not with her personally. Mii-Es’s alliance embodies the possibility that a deity can distinguish between the System and its inhabitants, while Misse’s position shows how easily resistance to Cato becomes identified with defense of the System itself.

Mii-Es’s alliance with Cato thus functions as a bridge between divine authority and System-less survival. It supplies covert blessings, political intelligence, emergency warnings, and a possible network for evacuating threatened populations. At the same time, it never erases the asymmetry or danger of the bargain. Mii-Es wants protection for herself, her world, her allies, and fellow deities; Cato needs divine cooperation while preparing for a future in which divine and System authority will no longer be secure. Their political alliance is powerful precisely because it is provisional: a coalition formed not from agreement about the future, but from the recognition that the existing future promises destruction.