THE NEXT DAY. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 4:15 AM EST. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2025.
The dank cold of
predawn early winter mornings in Athens smells like a soggy
snowball shoved up your nose. Cam’s warm coat and watch cap felt
good as he hurried along the path. No point in varying his route;
his awkward shadow, who occasionally crashed around in the bushes
behind him, knew perfectly well that he was going to the crypto
radio facility. And he knows I’m going there
to call Pueblo or Olympia, because I need enemies and neutrals to
keep my “friends” from taking over. Must be how the last few
Bourbons, Romanovs, and Tokugawas felt.
While Athens techs
talked to Pueblo techs, he savored the big mug of coffee that the
night tech had waiting for him, concentrating on each sip, drinking
it all before it could cool, finishing it before Heather came on
the line.
They talked at this
hour because it was Cam’s getting-up time, Leo’s
middle-of-the-night feeding, and the best time in the ionosphere
for long-range radio. But since it looked sneaky, they needed the
appearance of a possibly innocent reason for sneaking. So this
morning, like every other, they began with the usual array of
flirty double-entendres, wasting ten minutes or so out of the half
hour in pretending to be on the brink of phone sex.
Next Cam rattled off
a list of sentences about colors, animals, and a
not-impossible-to-break code for dates and times that coincided
with meeting various officials in the TNG government, none of which
was at all important, except that since he knew Grayson’s people
would be trying to match up codes to people and actions, looking
for RRC agents, he sowed suspicion onto some of Grayson’s
loyalists.
Today he began with
“Brown Hen polishes silverware with Green Dog” and read on down
through “Gray Weasel is cooking macaroni for Red Squirrel’s
barbecue.” As always, purposely he used Red Dog to refer to a
passionately Post Raptural lieutenant he saw for a few minutes
every week, implying that he was betraying Grayson’s secrets to
Peet.
In fact, all the
apparent messages either referred to random events of no real
importance, minor matters it didn’t hurt for the opposition to
learn, and things it was useful to tell them (whether true or
disinformational). If the other side read them, they would gain
nothing other than another layer of deception. The real message was
in a positional code, one of the World War One era pencil and paper
expedients that the absence of computers had forced on them. The
first eight and last three sentences were nulls. The number of
messages between the first eight and last three was an hour between
one and twelve, the first letter of the last word in the eighth
sentence indicating a.m. or p.m., and the last letters of the last
three null sentences coding urgency, possible topic, and level of
danger.
Together, they told
Heather what to relay to Red Dog: a safe meeting time and the
relative urgency of meeting. Today Cam was sending VERY HIGH
URGENCY, POLITICAL MATTER, HIGHER THAN AVERAGE DANGER, TEN THIRTY
A.M.
After the cryptic
sentences they traded gossip about mutual friends for a few
minutes, and Heather gave him a quick summary of what the Lost
Quarter expedition had reported. She read him a nonsense text; he
memorized every fourth word, after the first number in the text was
“seven,” because he added seven to the first number and dropped the
high digits. This was a longer message than usual; twenty pairs of
words.
They finished by
talking longingly about how lonely they were. Cam found that much
too easy.
Back at his office,
Cam riffled through his dictionary as he did so often; lately he’d
made a habit of complaining to his assistants about their limited
vocabularies and improper use of words, and leafed through the
dictionary often. This time, though, as he waited for his
breakfast, he took the first word pair: tear
clearance. Tear was the eleventh
word on page 648, clearance the third
on page 98; reversing pages and positions gave the eleventh word on
page 98 (clean) and the third word on
648 (team).
Writing nothing down,
he lost his place and had to start over a couple of times, but
finally he knew
Clean team available november two zero early est smash stall if can or bail and defect if must halt messy extraction possible on one week notice fractionate but even after success civil war certain and failure risk astronomical replete whoa
Heather’s coding
always amused him; she was always careful to use synonyms for
stop and break so as not to create a pattern that might
identify the dictionary to the opposition, but there was something
inspired, he felt, about fractionate
for break and replete whoa for full
stop. Also, he liked astronomical and horrendous; in a dictionary code it is not only as
easy to send a big word as a small one, but more secure because it
varies the vocabulary.
November 20th at earliest, he thought, pulling his
attention away from the interesting coding to the frustrating
message. Forty days from today. The time it
rained on Noah, or the time Jesus spent in the wilderness. Of
course, they had a hell of a lot more and better backup on tap than
I have.