"Plan?" Gideon shrugged, and then continued in a low voice, "Archives make sense to me. I think we ought to think about what we're doing next real carefully, though. I figure our big, scary acquaintances are tracking anomalous Mist use and isolated signals out here; our new friend here is a mist user and they probably expect her to go for the first phone or radio set and call for help. So we should keep mum and get out of here. But Darryl's got a point; we cannot hide this forever. They just kicked off the war again. We're in the middle of the reason why. Deep shit," he added in conclusion. Those two words were the ones that kept him tossing and turning the night through. We. Are. In. Deep. Shit.

He'd seen the news reports on TV, because he'd been up early, and it shook him to the core. Gideon didn't like TV news much; some bobblehead reporter was hamming up how endangered they were for the camera. Gideon actually was rooting for a Vangar sniper to aim carefully next time. They missed real wide on the reporter, real fucking waste of a round. He was a newspaper kind of guy. Then he realized; the Vangar didn't just fire a stray round, the guy aiming the gun put followup shots on the reporter. They weren't worried about a kinder-gentler sort of invasion where they were telling everyone how nice it'd be once they took over and everyone got fitted for their collars. They were pushing with tanks and just blowing cover into rubble to get it all over with. The reporter, used to being treated as immune by the enemy, suddenly was realizing that it was a new phase of the war. Of course, the guy was so busy talking about how the Vangar Empire didn't respect the press that he missed the wider implications as the artillery rained down -- TOT, walked fire, very coordinated, and highly destructive, hitting places that'd been spared previously to root out resistance.

Gideon, of course, thought twisty, about detection and probabilities, and figured that someone was benefitting from this, and that would probably be the guys that engineered the whole fucking disaster by derailing the peace talks. And those guys would be looking for Collete and anyone that knew too much and had to be shut up before word got out.

Tradecraft, the spooks called it, and he had a passing acquaintance with it, but also a grounding in common sense and instinct. He liked the sneaky stuff, and he didn't believe in straight up fights. He also tried to get into the enemy's head, even when the enemy was mostly an unknown. He'd changed out clothes to something not sweat-stained and combat soiled. He'd also collected everyone else's dirty clothes and put them through a wash that was mostly intended to be a decontamination, to help disable mist-or-technological tracking, just in case someone put the trace on them -- it was when he caught the news reports and chewed on it mentally.

He'd paced all night long and gotten about three hours of sleep working through what he could on what little information there was. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with three buttons at the collar, two of them unbuttoned. It showed off shoulders and lats to good effect, and made him look like the  jock he was. He threw a coat over that, mostly to cover up the gun he was still wearing underneath it, tucked away. There were some bags under his eyes, but he'd learned to move through things even when exhausted. He'd catch a cat nap sooner or later, he reckoned.

"So I suggest two ways of making that contact. Either we mail an old fashioned letter and wait a couple of days and take the scenic route, or we find a really populated place, preferably, during a sports event where we can get lost in traffic," he gestured to Colette's new hat, "and get a burner phone and make a call. I think we ought to really think about who we report to though, because if we tip off the wrong person, we might be swallowing polonium while 'detained' or eating a bullet. We're loose ends and people are going to stop caring about the nuances now that the Vangar Empire has stopped giving a shit about collateral damage." 

Which meant that the pro-peace side was going to argue even more loudly that they couldn't withstand the magnitude of the Vangar war machine. Sure, there'd be an initial boost of patriotic animosity for the guys that invaded, but eventually there'd be renewed yells for peace. There would be calls for surrender and stopping the war fast by giving the Vangars everything they want.

"Anyway, I kind of favor option #2, we can do it on the way to the Archive, because more risk but...tick-tock. Our country is about to burn." 

He was referring to the renewed offensive on the news. The Vangar invasion had been occupation-oriented before; they wanted to knock off the Rassvet government and probably turn the Royal Family into leash-dogs of some sort. They wanted the resources. But now? Well, it looked like they were driving harder, with more firepower and less concern for collateral damage. That was what awaited them on the front line.

Gideon wasn't Mr. Comforting when it came to a bleak outlook on factional politics or their strategic situation as a nation. Even in Rassvet, there was some really disturbing political hardball played in the name of varying agendas. Some people were going to be selling them out to stop the war; [i]"It was their fault; here's the Palatine back. Yes, your Imperial Pissed Offedness, we took care of those meddling children. Please stop the shelling and accept their corpses as our abject apology and oath of fealty."[/i] Blam! 

As a Royal Family member, he wasn't happy that Rassvet had its surrender monkeys and they were probably freaking out at this very moment. He just acknowledged that they'd be tripping over themselves to stop the war before a bunch of people died, which he supposed was an admirable goal that explained the potential methodology of just raising the white flag. They had stock portfolios, careers and children. They even had a point. But Gideon wasn't ready to just hand over the country to a bunch of guys that said, "Give it here."

Still, he detested the whole scenario, so he got it. Stop the madness and stop the bleeding. This wasn't even a war Rassvet started, but here they were.

Prepaid phone in a populated area might spoof them, might not, "In the meantime, we gotta start figuring out who might want to derail the peace efforts and why. So here's a good question for our new friend: Who knew your flight plans, and could identify that location as a good place to strike? Who knew on your side and who knew on our side?" He asked that calmly, without heat. It was a good question: if people turned her over to the wrong faction in Vangar, she'd be eating a bullet too, likely. Nothing was as monolithic as it seemed, even in an empire full of people marching around saluting the absolute ruler.