And the Peeps on this planet are way overconfident and complacent. Not that I intend to complain about that!

“All right,” she said, gesturing for McKeon to come closer and then tapping the map again. “It looks like they’re using very simple IFF settings, Alistair… and we just happen to have exactly the same hardware in our shuttles. So if we can just borrow one of their ID settings—”

“We can punch it into our own beacons,” McKeon finished for her, and she nodded. He scratched his nose for a moment, then exhaled noisily. “You’re right enough about that,” he observed, “but these are assault shuttles, not the trash haulers they use on their grocery runs. We’re not going to have the same emissions signature, and if they take a good sensor look at us, they’ll spot us in a heartbeat.”

“I’m sure they would,” Honor agreed. “On the other hand, everything we’ve seen so far says to me that these people are lazy. Confident, and lazy. Remember what Admiral Courvosier used to say at ATC? ‘Almost invariably, “surprise” is what happens when one side fails to recognize something it’s seen all along.’ ”

“You figure that they’ll settle for querying our IFF.”

“I think that’s exactly what they’ll settle for. Why shouldn’t they? They own every piece of flight-capable hardware on the planet, Alistair. That’s why they’re lazy. They’d probably assume simple equipment malfunction, at least initially, even if they got a completely unidentifiable beacon return, because they know any bird they see has to be one of theirs.” She snorted. “Scan techs have been making that particular mistake ever since a place called Pearl Harbor back on Old Earth!”

“Makes sense,” he said after a moment, and scratched his head mentally, wondering where he could track the reference down without her finding out he’d done it. She had the damnedest odds and ends of historical trivia tucked away in her mental files, and figuring out what had called any given one of them to the surface of her thoughts had become a sort of hobby of his.

“The question,” Honor mused aloud, “is how often they make their delivery flights.”

“I’ve been running some numbers on that, My Lady,” Mayhew offered. He was to her left, and she turned in her chair to look at him with her working eye. “I’m not sure how reliable they are, but I ran some extrapolations based on the data Chief Harkness got for us and what I could glean from the transmissions we monitored.”

“Go on,” Honor invited.

“Well, Commander Lethridge and Scotty and I have been playing with the stuff the Chief managed to pull out of Tepes’ secure data base,” Mayhew said. “He didn’t have the time to pay a whole lot of attention to the planet—he was too busy figuring out how to get to the ship’s control systems and get us down here in the first place—but there were some interesting numbers in the dirtside data he’d never gotten a chance to look at. As nearly as Scotty and I can figure out, there are at least a half-million prisoners down here.”