“They might,” she repeated, “but there’s some pretty good equipment in the base com center, Warner. In fact, it’s substantially better than its software appears to be… and I’ve got a clutch of very capable programmers to teach it all sorts of new tricks. Once they’ve had a chance to do that, and once we identify the com people we want, I feel confident we can record enough imagery of them for our reeducated computers to let us fake up an acceptable talking head. Harkness has already found an enormous file of what appear to be conversations between Tresca and incoming vessels. We won’t know for certain that that’s what it is until we get past the security fences, but if it is, we should be able to put together just about anything we want from its contents. It’s possible—even probable—that we’ll find similar files for the regular communications people, as well, and I hope we will. But I want to be prepared if we don’t, too.”

“I see.” Caslet looked at her respectfully, unaware that he and Alistair McKeon were thinking very similar thoughts at that moment. Honor felt the glow of admiration from both of them, but she allowed no sign of it to show in her expression as she let her chair come back upright. What they were so busy admiring, after all, was no more than the minimum foresight that duty required of her.

“All right,” she said crisply. “It sounds like we’re as on top of things as we can be with so few people, so our priorities are, first, to get the StateSec stragglers to surrender so we can protect them.” She shook her own head wryly at that one, but continued without pausing. “Second, to convince their ex-slaves to stop massacring them and accept our promise that they’ll stand their trials. Third, to get into the personnel records and find out where we can scare up some reinforcements—preferably,” she nodded to McKeon, “Manticoran, or at least Allied personnel. Fourth, to locate any additional survivors from Proxmire’s crew and try to find out when or if he was due to be relieved. And, fifth, to identify and segregate all of the communications staff we can find. Is that about all?”

“Just about,” McKeon agreed. “I would like to bring up one other worry, though.” She nodded for him to continue, and he shrugged. “The bad guys hiding in the boonies may already know when they expect someone else to arrive, which suggests two unpleasant possibilities to my nasty suspicious mind. One is that if they do know when someone’s coming, they may try to come up with some way to warn them. We control the main communications facility, and we think we got all of their vehicles, but we can’t be certain that they didn’t get away with a few transmitters with more reach than a hand com. If they did, they may try to cobble up something. It wouldn’t have to be very sophisticated—even a really crude signal could be enough to make someone suspicious. Bearing that in mind, I think we need to start making some overflights. Peep sensors may not be good enough to spot people hiding in the woods, but we ought to be able to detect hidden vehicles or power sources if we look hard enough, long enough, from low enough.”