“Did Livadhi falsify his ID at the commercial level that time when he hailed us with the wrong name?”
“You saw through it,” Koutsoudas said.
“Yes, but we had military scan, as you know. I didn’t bother to check what a commercial scan would have shown. How did you do it, how long does it take, and could you have falsified your beacon to military scanning?”
“It’s pretty simple,” Koutsoudas said. “It’s all in knowing how; it takes maybe an hour or two, that’s all. Yeah, you could do it for both kinds of beacon transmissions . . . of course it is illegal.” He said that in a pious tone that made Heris chuckle. “Captain Livadhi didn’t want anyone in Fleet to mistake him.”
“I’m sure,” Heris said, with deliberate irony. “Could you do it for this ship?”
“Well . . . yes. Why?”
“Oblo has installed two different fake beacon IDs in the yacht. If we could patch something up for this ship, and Paradox, we could give the Benignity something to think about.”
“We still have only two real warships—”
“But they don’t know that. They know Despite said that, running away, which can’t have been the plan. They were expecting Garrivay and friends to be here, welcoming them in. They probably had a name, possibly even a familiar contact. They drop out of FTL and find one of their expected allies fleeing, telling them not to worry there’s only a single cruiser and patrol. Would you believe that, if you were a CH captain?”
“No . . .” Koutsoudas looked thoughtful. “I wouldn’t. I’d think double-cross. The conspirators discovered . . . betrayal. Something like that, anyway.”
“Right. Is this a hands-on patch, or can you explain to Paradox how to change their beacon too? I want both ships to be able to switch back and forth—”
“It’s doable, but it doesn’t change the basic scan—nothing’s going to convince them that there’s more ships, if the beacon data on a masspoint suddenly changes.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Heris said. “Just get hold of Oblo, and the two of you give us some fake identities that would hold up to Fleet standards. I have an idea.” She had more than one; ideas flickered through her mind almost too fast to see.
Off to one side, she imagined the Benignity formation commander—he would be one of their Elder Sons, equivalent to the R.S.S. admiral minor. Hearne’s message would make him bunch his formation, counting on its weight of weapons and numerical superiority as long as he found what he expected: a cruiser smaller than any of his ships, a patrol ship, a lightly armed yacht, and a slow-moving, nearly toothless scow. But if the scan data didn’t fit—or worse, if it was inconsistent, suggesting that Hearne had lied—he would hesitate, pause behind his screening barrage, and prepare for a more extended combat. He might even be unwise enough to detach a ship or so.
If each of her three ships could appear to be one or two other ships—and if she could use the Benignity’s barrage as a screen for her own movements—
“We could fake some beacons, as well—launch them—” That was Tinsi, over on Paradox. Heris nodded; she hadn’t expected him to show that much imagination.
“No mass readings,” Koutsoudas said. “It won’t fool them more than a few seconds—”
“If we could get mass?” Another glimmer of an idea. Xavier’s system wasn’t overly full of handy rocks the right size, but those shuttles, loaded with anything massive from the station, and with faked beacons, might distract the CH commander.
“You and Oblo get on it,” Heris said to Koutsoudas. “We need it done before their scans clear from jump insert.”
“Yes, sir.”
Heris looked around at the others, and saw thoughtful looks, only the reasonable amount of tension. “Let’s get going,” she said.
When she reached the bridge, Koutsoudas called her over. He had the first reasonably detailed scans of the arriving force.
“They’re sticking to normal tactics,” Koutsoudas said. “Throwing out a screening barrage on jump exit . . . it’ll have tags keyed to their IDs. Coming on in a clump—”
“When will they have scan return?” Heris asked.
“Normally—a solid twelve hours after jump exit, and that’s with efficient boosts. They exited eight to nine hours ago, so that means we have three blind hours for certain. But with Despite’s signal, if they picked it up—”
“They’ll have a lot more detail than the best scans would give them. Current ship IDs. But not everything.” That was less comforting than it might have been.
“I’m getting some separation in that clump, though,” Koutsoudas went on. “Looks like one or two may be trailing back a bit farther than normal.”
“Jump-exit error?”
“Could be. I’ll stay on it.”
Cecelia strolled into the bridge compartment trailed by the two young soldiers. Sirkin sat at the navigation console, looking scared. Brun perched where Petris usually sat, looking excited. Cecelia could not tell who was in charge, and was annoyed with herself for not knowing what all the insignia and markings were.
Cecelia had had no direct experience with the military until she hired Heris. Now she watched as the young man with two comma-shaped bits of metal on his collar organized his crew and set about carrying out Heris’s orders. He looked to be Ronnie’s age, or perhaps a few years older—she couldn’t tell—but he had a hard-edged quality unlike her nephew’s. Not courage, exactly—Ronnie was brave—but a definition, a focus, as if he were carved out of a single hard material by a sharp tool. So were the rest. She had noticed that with Heris’s old crew, but assumed it was the result of the ordeals they’d been through as a result of Lepescu. And they had been cordial to her, once they knew her. Even Oblo. Of course, she’d never seen them in anything but civilian shipsuits. These all wore R.S.S. gray, with sleeve and shoulder patches and marks that meant something to them and nothing to her. Most seemed very young, but the one sitting where she remembered Oblo had a grizzled fringe around the margin of his bald head.
“You’re Lady Cecelia,” the young man in charge said. “I’m Junior-Lieutenant Faroe. Jig Faroe is the more common way to say it. Commander Serrano says you offered to help out—”
Cecelia grinned at him. “I presented her with a dilemma, is what you and she both mean. There’s bound to be something simple that you need done. Watching gauges or something.”
His expression suggested that that had been a stupid idea. “I wish I knew her better—how she thinks. What she thinks you might do—”
“That I can help you with,” Cecelia said briskly. “I’ve worked with her for a couple of years now—” She admitted to herself that the time she spent in an apparent coma wasn’t exactly “working with” Heris, but the start of a war was no time for long explanations. And she certainly knew more about Heris’s thought processes than this young man. One had only to see someone ride across country to know more about their character than any dozen psychological analyses, no matter what the experts said.
“Oh—you were part of her . . . uh . . . cover?” He looked both eager and embarrassed, someone who wanted desperately to ask what he knew he should not.
“I don’t think I should discuss it,” said Cecelia. Especially when she hadn’t the faintest idea what Heris had actually said and done.
“Oh—no, sir—of course not. Sorry.” He dithered visibly, in the way Cecelia found so amusing in the young, and finally blurted, “But feel free, ma’am, to . . . to advise me whenever you have any insight into Commander Serrano’s wishes.”