“We need to tell Captain Augustyn about this,” Lee said.

“He’s the captain,” Tomek said. “He probably already knows.”

“If he already knew, he probably wouldn’t have let me order you to examine these two,” Wilson said. “No matter what my security level. No, I think this is going to be as much of a surprise to him as it is to us.”

“So we tell him,” Lee said. “We tell him, right?”

“Yes,” Wilson said. “He’ll send a skip drone detailing what we’ve found. And I expect that immediately thereafter we’ll get new orders, telling us that it’s no longer just an extraction job.”

“What will it be now?” Lee asked.

“A cover-up,” Tomek said, and Wilson nodded. “Destroy any evidence this was anything but a wildcat colony.”

“We’re supposed to be destroying all the evidence anyway,” Lee said.

“Not just down there,” Wilson said. He pointed to the Ivanoviches. “I mean turning these two—and their BrainPals—into a fine powder. Not to mention obliterating any information on what we just found out, and that data card we found. And if these two really were still active in the CDF, I suspect they’ll be posthumously demoted for not blowing their own heads off with a shotgun.”

Lee went to speak with Captain Augustyn; Tomek stored the bodies. Wilson wandered toward the officers mess to get a cup of coffee. As he did so, he pinged his BrainPal’s message queue and found there was a message there from Hart Schmidt. Wilson smiled and prepared for a delightful dose of Schmidt’s special brand of wan neuroticism. He stopped smiling when Hart noted he’d been assigned to be Ambassador Abumwe’s right-hand man for the Bula negotiations and that Sub-Ambassador Ting’s personality was like that one time on Phoenix Station he and Wilson had met up with that other Bula.

“Shit,” Wilson said. There’s no way that Hart put that phrasing in that sentence coincidentally.

Wilson thought about it for several minutes before muttering, “Fuck it,” composing a note and encrypting it. Then with his BrainPal he took an image of his coffee, created a steganographic picture with it and the encoded note, addressed it to Hart and sent it off to the data queue for transmission on the next skip drone, which given the bombshell Lee was dropping into Captain Augustyn’s lap at the moment would probably go out almost instantly.

Wilson wasn’t under the impression that his sleight-of-hand encoding of the message into the image of the coffee would stay unnoticed forever. What he was hoping for was that it would stay encrypted long enough that Hart could do whatever he needed with the information before it got found out.