"Wow," Jillian said. "That's…despicable."

"It's also one of the few ways someone would be allowed to permanently leave Earth. Back then, Earth citizens were treated as pariahs and most of the old Confederacy didn't allow travel from there, much less immigration. Wolfe being admitted into the Academy had been one of the high-profile cases, but the CIS and CENTCOM regularly poached the EDF for bright new talent."

"But Jack had to wear his Earther badge on his chest, unable to hide from it like you and the others," Jillian said bitterly. "I'm sorry, Pike, I just realized that sounded accusatory."

"No problem," he said. "I know Wolfe had a harder time of it, dealing with the open discrimination of being from Earth and dealing with idiots like Admiral Winters trying to sabotage his career at every turn. Hell, even Joseph Marcum seemed to have it out for him at certain times. I was aware of him by reputation, but I didn't ever actually meet him until Aston Lynch requested a diplomatic courtesy aboard the Blue Jacket. That was actually right before he ran across the Phage's handiwork on Xian."

As an Agent, Pike routinely had to pretend to be someone else to get the job done. More than the others, however, he had a particular aptitude for it. He created whole personas he swapped in and out, becoming the other person so completely even those who knew him were fooled. Aston Lynch had been one of his more useful creations. Lynch had rubbed elbows with the powerful and connected, even serving at one time as the personal aide of President Augustus Wellington.

"Fourth cipher is cracked," Jillian said as the console put up a green alert box. She seemed grateful for an excuse to drop the conversation. The computer automatically took the newly cracked code and started applying it to all the flagged messages that remained encrypted. "They took an awfully big chance using such a rudimentary system for encoding their messages."

"It was a gamble, but one that had been paying off. Someone had told them how our automated checks over Bluebird work, and this was a pretty clever way to circumvent those," Pike said. "These have been slipping through the cracks without raising any flags for the better part of a year now. If you look at the later messages, they were becoming complacent that they'd never be caught."

"Perhaps they weren't aware that Bluebird messages are all saved and archived by CENTCOM," Jillian said. "That's not a widely advertised fact."

"Maybe," Pike said.

Over the next several hours, the pair pored over the newly uncovered correspondences, the computer helping by putting them in the correct order per the Bluebird timestamp on each. Slowly, a picture of what the ESA's overall strategy for the Federation was emerged…and it was not what they had expected it would be.

"Well," Pike said, "this adds a new and interesting complexity to the problem."

"You think?" Jillian said, rubbing her temples. "Kohl, Odmena, the fighters all of it just smoke and mirrors."