Battle Surgeons by Michael Reaves Steve Perry

Author:Michael Reaves, Steve Perry [Michael Reaves, Steve Perry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Star Wars
ISBN: 0345463102
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

30

The spy was known by two aliases—Lens to Black Sun and Column to the Separatists. It was the latter identity that sat and frowned at the odd-looking squiggle on the computer’s holoproj. To the uninitiated, the little mark might seem nothing more than a flaw in the projector’s image resolver. To those in the know, the glitch meant something else entirely.

The spymaster on Drongar had sent yet another of a series of all-too-frequent communications. It was irritating. Of the dozens of coded messages that had been sent, none had yet offered anything of substance. The messages were trivial intelligence, along the lines of “Keep an eye on the bota” … useless in general, and a particular waste of time to a field agent in Column’s circumstance. It took hours to decode the blasted things, which were Feraleechi onetime loops. In a dull, repetitive, manual process a cipher was partially decoded, using a keyword in the early-morning holonews. This gave a series of numbers that were then keyed to a particular textbook available on the library ’cast, always something so boring that reading it aloud could stop a full-scale cantina riot dead—Aridian Procedures for Development of Agricultural Fertilizer on Lythos Nine or some such mindless twaddle. Then it had to be translated from Basic into Symbian, a language dead, but unfortunately not buried, for thirty thousand years, and every sixth word transposed. The end of all this labor was usually a message along the lines of, “How’s it going?”

The spymaster must not have much to do, and must be paranoid in the extreme to boot.

Which, Column thought, teetered on the edge of silly. Even if somebody managed to intercept one of the messages—unlikely—and even if they were the best slicer in the galaxy and somehow broke the cipher—unlikelier still—learning the number of cases of Phibian beer delivered to the military canteen at Prime Base last month would hardly be worth the effort.

Column sighed. It was how the Separatists chose to do things, and no there was no help for it. It would have to be done, but not right now. Later.

Much later …

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