Unfortunately, the Peeps didn’t seem to use the net very much, for aside from routine, automatic downloads of telemetry from the weather sats to Camp Charon’s Flight Ops, there was no traffic on it at all. And weather data was completely useless for Sanko’s and Mayhew’s current purposes.

But I guess it actually makes sense, he acknowledged sourly. After all, they’re all parked on their butts up there at Camp Charon itself. They don’t need comsats to talk to each other, and they couldn’t care less what happens in any of the prisoner camps, so there’s no reason to install ground stations at any of them, either. Hell, their CO can probably just stick his head out the window and shout at anybody he actually wants to talk to!

There wasn’t much for the eavesdroppers to do under the circumstances. If they’d just had some decent computer support, there wouldn’t even have been any need for them to be here at all—they could have left the routine listening watch up to the computers. Well, to be honest they could probably have trusted a simple listening watch to them anyway, but they were talking about Peep computers, which brought the ancient and honorable term “kludge” forcibly to mind every time he had anything to do with them. No wonder Senior Chief Harkness had been able to fry the net aboard that damned battlecruiser! Worse, the shuttles had extremely limited computer support compared to their Allied equivalents. What they needed for flight ops, fire support missions, troop drops, and that sort of thing was adequate—not great, but adequate. But most functions that weren’t absolutely essential were done the old-fashioned way… by hand, or at least by extremely specific, canned software so limited, and with such crude heuristic functions, it made a man want to sit down and cry. Which meant real live human beings had to sit here to watch over the computers, because their AI functions were so stupid they would have gotten lost in downtown Landing on a night with a full moon if—

“Base, this is Harriman,” a bored voice said suddenly, spilling from the com speakers. “You want to give me the count on Alpha-Seven-Niner?”

Sanko’s eyes widened, and his hands darted for the console even as Mayhew snapped upright in his chair at the tactical station.

“Harriman, you dickhead!” an exasperated female voice replied in a tone that could have blistered battle steel. “I swear, you are stupider than a retarded rock! How the hell did you lose the numbers again?”

Mayhew’s fingers flew over the keyboard of the shuttle’s main computers while Sanko worked equally frantically at the communications station. All the information on Hades that Horace Harkness had managed to pull out of Tepes’ data bases before her destruction had been dumped from his minicomp to the shuttle’s larger memory, and Sanko heard a sound of triumph from Mayhew as something correlated between the overheard conversation and Harkness’ stolen data. At the same time, Sanko himself was working with the comsat serving as the relay link for the exchange between “Harriman” and Camp Charon. His equipment might not be up to the high standards of the Royal Manticoran Navy, but it was newer than the opposition’s, and his updated software had let him into the satellite’s on-board computers without anyone dirtside knowing a thing about it. The tight-beam tap he’d set up had been cut entirely out of Camp Charon’s net, which meant the base’s traffic computers didn’t even know it was there to log, and his eyes glowed as information from the comsat began downloading smoothly to his own station. All the security and encryption data buried in the transmissions’ automatic security linkages spilled over the display before him, and his lips drew up in the snarl of a hunting Sphinx hexapuma.