“How many of their birds did you get IFF codes on, Russ?” she asked.

“Um, nine so far, Ma’am,” Sanko replied.

“And their encryption?”

“There wasn’t any, Ma’am—except for the system autoencrypt, that is. That was pretty decent when it was put in, I suppose, but our software is several generations newer than theirs. It decrypts their traffic automatically, thanks to our satellite tap, and we downloaded all the crypto data to memory, of course.” He eyed his Commodore thoughtfully. “If you wanted to, Ma’am, we could duplicate their message formats with no sweat at all.”

“I see.” Honor nodded and then leaned back, stroking Nimitz’s ears while she considered that.

Sanko was undoubtedly right, she mused. However confident the present proprietors of Hell had become, the people who’d originally put the prison planet together eighty-odd years ago for the old Office of Internal Security had built what were then state-of-the-art security features into their installations. Among those features was a communications protocol which automatically challenged and logged the identity of the sender for every single com message, but it appeared the current landlords were less anxious about such matters than their predecessors had been. They hadn’t gone quite so far as to pull the protocol from their computers, but they were obviously too lazy to take it very seriously. Camp Charon’s central routing system simply assigned each shuttle a unique code derived from its Identification Friend or Foe beacon and then automatically interrogated the beacon whenever a shuttle transmitted a message. All transmissions from any given shuttle thus carried the same IFF code so the logs could keep track of them with no effort from any human personnel.

For the rest of it, rather than bother themselves with changing authentication codes often enough to provide any sort of genuine security, those human personnel relied on an obsolete, canned encryption package which was worse than no security system at all. If anyone ever even bothered to think about it—which Honor doubted happened very often—the fact that they had a security screen in place helped foster the kind of complacency which kept them from considering whether or not it was a good screen. And almost as important as that gaping hole in their electronic defenses, only Champ Charon’s central switchboard computers worried about authenticating the source of a transmission at all. As far as the human operators seemed to be concerned, the fact that a message was on the net in the first place automatically indicated it had a right to be there.

Actually, they probably aren’t being quite as stupid as I’d like to think, Honor told herself thoughtfully. After all, they “know” they’re the only people on the planet—or in the entire star system, for that matter—who have any com equipment. And if there’s no opposition to read your mail, then there’s no real need to be paranoid about your security or encode it before you send it, now is there?

She raised her hand to knead the nerve-dead side of her face gently, and the living side grimaced. One could make excuses for the Peeps’ sloppiness, but that didn’t make it any less sloppy. And one thing Honor had learned long ago was that sloppiness spread. People who were careless or slovenly about one aspect of their duties tended to be the same way about other aspects, as well.