The Air War by Adrian Tchaikovsky

There, as promised, was a gagged and bound
Wasp-kinden, his pack beside him lying open to display a sheaf of documents.
    Esmail knelt next to him, seeing the Wasp’s eyes flare with hatred at this newcomer – Just some nondescript halfbreed , was the man’s first thought, no doubt. The
prisoner looked to be a few years short of thirty, but his clothes were finer than mere army-issue would account for, and he had a couple of rings and a torc that all spoke of good family. It was
his face that interested Esmail the most, though: high cheekbones, straight, dark hair worn a little longer than army standard, blue eyes set in that pale skin the Wasps had. Not a bad face, all
told, and it could have been the setting for a great many virtues. Instead of which, of course, it was crawling with so much hate and loathing that there was no room at all for fear.
    Esmail leafed through the papers, wondering what he would be taking to Capitas. They were trivial stuff, the sort of humdrum logistics reports that nobody would bother a man of the
captive’s rank and station with: coded messages therefore, but that would not pose a problem.
    The captive’s expression said plainly, I will tell you nothing , but he had not quite understood his situation or his purpose here.
    Esmail took a deep breath, feeling rusty and out of practice. His training was no suitable pursuit for a family man, and he had not been sad to set it aside, either. In the back of his mind,
however, he had always known that he would be calling on these hard-learned skills once again. Spies never really retired, they said, and it was true, whether talking of a Rekef man or a Lowlander
agent or . . . what Esmail was.
    The Wasp’s was a good enough face, he reflected again, and he should be grateful for that. It would be more familiar to him than his own soon enough, seen in every mirror, distorted in
every polished piece of armour. He felt its contours, the straight nose, the slightly hollow cheeks, the squared-off chin, that slight nick beneath one ear that was probably a trophy of shaving
rather than a duel. The prisoner had gone very still, and when Esmail reopened his eyes – blue eyes now, not his natural dark ones – the Wasp was trading fear and shock for all the
other expressions he was capable of.
    But Esmail was not finished yet. Some initiates of his mystery had to resort to crude torture to perfect their guises, or perhaps they chose to do so, but he had been trained in the higher arts
of the spy, and had had his education finished off by the Moths themselves.
    He put his hands either side of the man’s face and bent his head forward until their foreheads were almost touching.
    Who ? he asked, and the helpless, uncontrolled answer came back, Ostrec .
    My name is Ostrec , Esmail told himself, knowing that he would answer to that name as swiftly as to his own – more swiftly even – as long as he wore this stolen face. Show
me all that is Ostrec. Family, friends, contacts, rank, passwords, codes, missions.
    The Wasp arched and twisted, the old Grasshopper leaning on him to hold him down, and his life began to tumble into Esmail’s mind in fragments and pieces, never to be quite assembled,
never to be a complete whole, but with luck enough for Esmail to wear Ostrec’s shoes. After the initial incredulous horror, the Wasp was fighting him, an Apt mind forced into an Inapt arena
and finding what defences it could. Ostrec hid his thoughts from Esmail just as he would keep them off his face before a superior officer, forcing the spy to hunt him through the rooms of his own
mind, beating down doors, creeping through keyholes.
    Esmail was an old hand at this, and at last he had enough: there were gaps still, odd holes and voids in his internal picture of Ostrec, but he knew that he could scavenge nothing more from the
picked-out interior of the Wasp’s brain. He nodded at the Grasshopper: not a cut throat, with all the mess that would make, but a