If you can’t see the target, you can’t flash them. If you can’t flash them, the best you can do is shout into the wind and hope there isn’t too much noise to drown you out. Most of the time, that would get the job done. Company ciphers are as close to unbreakable as you can get without their own machines being locked out of the loop, but that’s the problem. A hollow Decatur can read company code just as well as it could if it were whole.

Ask Hail for her saddle numbers.

The pale shell is quiet for a moment. We can almost hear Salt playing it back to himself and trying to understand.

Saddle hash is meaningless to anyone who doesn’t have to sit in the thing every day. They’re three lines of serial numbers: one for the seat, one for the jacks, and one for the sync-surfaces. You call them out when spares come in, and use them to find hardware from the same foundries, or better yet, from the same batches as the parts you’re replacing. Each foundry unit has its own character, its own set of tiny imperfections, so small you’d never see them. It’s not about finding something flawless, just making sure you get the same flaws as you had before. Every jockey knows their numbers back to front, even if each line is sixteen digits long.

A ’dragger chief will usually have hands on all three, but you might have to beat it out of them. You could badger a lowly flight tech for the old spares, or an admin for the manifests, but that’s the kind of thing that gets you tailed to your bunk, maybe an awkward conversation in an unmarked room.

It’d be easy work for a Werewolf, though.

This is bad, decides the pale shell, isn’t it?

We’d smile at that, if we could. The Authority might have something similar, but even if it didn’t, Salt’s already working through it. You don’t need to be NorCol to know that a saddle-coded cipher is desperation talking. The puddle at the bottom of the last ditch.

If we’re down this far, at least one NorCol shell’s been hollowed out, if not more; taken body and soul and ciphers intact.

Another few seconds pass.

No dice. Any other ideas?

Hail knew Andrade before the rest of us, but if it isn’t hers—

Try mine, we send, files attached.

There’s a pause.

Hail’s got a clean fit. Decipher in progress.

The Spirit’s mind-state buzzes in the background, as if it can hear us whisper her name.

Rook?

Hail?

Read you, she replies. How did you guess that it was saddle-coded?