“Like you said, a cloaking-field detector can’t tell if the subject is actually human or Lorann.”

“Yes, it merely detects—oh.”

Patrick looked at Nat, then frowned. “What?”

Nat smiled at him. “If we can get an image of a human disguise that a Lorann is using, Sheldon could easily disguise one of us as that same image. If we trip a cloaking-field detector, they’d simply assume that it was Grog in his human disguise.”

“Grog?” Sheldon exclaimed. “How exactly do you visualize the Loranna, anyway?”

Disregarding Sheldon, I said to Nat, “That’s a good idea in its basics. But what if Oog the guard says, ‘Hey Grog, how’s it hanging?’ in Lorann?”

Sheldon’s voice was becoming increasingly exasperated. “It’s Lorannic. And Grog? Oog? What is wrong with you people?”

I chuckled. “Chill, Sheldon. Nat, there’s no way we can learn Lorann—excuse me, Lorannic—well enough to pull that off. Sheldon, do you speak Lorannic?”

“Of course. Language files are a basic part of my functionality. I speak every language in the Covenant.”

“Could someone wear a receiver with a speaker, and could you fill in the conversational part?”

“But you’d need to move your lips in sync with what Sheldon was saying,” Nat objected.

“And anyone would be able to tell right away if a voice was coming from a speaker,” Patrick added.

“Wrong on both counts. Please stop telling your alien A.I. grandma how to suck eggs.” Sheldon waited for silence. “We use just such a procedure occasionally, when someone has to go out in the field and hasn’t had time to get the native language deep-induced. I can program the field on the fly for the lip-synching to be credible. We’ll have to do a dry run or two first of course, to practice. And as to the speaker issue, the reason Terran speakers sound artificial is because they drop most of the highest- and lowest-frequency harmonics. Tinny is the common description, right? Gen speakers can deliver sound from subsonic right up to the frequencies used by bats. Such speaker systems are generally built into specialized necklaces. I have some in inventory.”

“So what I’m hearing is that we may actually have a viable plan for infiltrating a Lorannic stronghold,” Nat said.

Still sounding exasperated, Sheldon replied, “If you stretch the definition of the word plan until it screams for mercy, then yes.”

There seemed to be some kind of modification of reality in effect, so that as we got closer to actual results, our time at work stretched asymptotically longer. But after a millennium or two, we were all gathered once again in the Halo’s conference room.

A map of the Tate Industrial Park was starting to take shape in one of the wall monitors. Sheldon had put up a 3D isometric view, with floating annotations beside individual buildings. It looked a little like a Sim City game in progress.