For the rest of it, rather than bother themselves with changing authentication codes often enough to provide any sort of genuine security, those human personnel relied on an obsolete, canned encryption package which was worse than no security system at all. If anyone ever even bothered to think about itwhich Honor doubted happened very oftenthe fact that they had a security screen in place helped foster the kind of complacency which kept them from considering whether or not it was a good screen. And almost as important as that gaping hole in their electronic defenses, only Champ Charons central switchboard computers worried about authenticating the source of a transmission at all. As far as the human operators seemed to be concerned, the fact that a message was on the net in the first place automatically indicated it had a right to be there.
Actually, they probably arent being quite as stupid as Id like to think, Honor told herself thoughtfully. After all, they "know" theyre the only people on the planetor in the entire star system, for that matterwho have any com equipment. And if theres no opposition to read your mail, then theres no real need to be paranoid about your security or encode it before you send it, now is there?
She raised her hand to knead the nerve-dead side of her face gently, and the living side grimaced. One could make excuses for the Peeps sloppiness, but that didnt make it any less sloppy. And one thing Honor had learned long ago was that sloppiness spread. People who were careless or slovenly about one aspect of their duties tended to be the same way about other aspects, as well.
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 theyre 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. "Youre right enough about that," he observed, "but these are assault shuttles, not the trash haulers they use on their grocery runs. Were not going to have the same emissions signature, and if they take a good sensor look at us, theyll spot us in a heartbeat."
"Im sure they would," Honor agreed. "On the other hand, everything weve 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 its seen all along."
"You figure that theyll settle for querying our IFF."
"I think thats exactly what theyll settle for. Why shouldnt they? They own every piece of flight-capable hardware on the planet, Alistair. Thats why theyre lazy. Theyd 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 hed 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."
"Ive 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. "Im 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 didnt have the time to pay a whole lot of attention to the planethe was too busy figuring out how to get to the ships control systems and get us down here in the first placebut there were some interesting numbers in the dirtside data hed 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."
"A half-million? " Honor repeated, and Mayhew nodded.
"At least," he repeated. "Remember that theyve been dumping what they considered to be their real hard cases here for eighty T-years, My Lady. Weve got fairly hard numbers on the military POWs theyve sent here. Most of them are from the various star systems the Peeps picked off early on, from Tambourine to Trevors Star. You had to be a pretty dangerous fellow to get sent to Hell, of coursesort of the cream of the crop, the kind of people who were likely to start building resistance cells if you were left to your own devices. Of course, if State Security had been running things at that point, they probably wouldve just shot the potential troublemakers where they were and saved themselves the bother of shipping them out here.
"At any rate, there werent very many additions to the POW population for about ten years before they attacked the Alliance, and the nature of the POWs sent here since the war started is a bit different from what Id expected." Honor raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. "If I were StateSec, and I had a prison whose security I felt absolutely confident about, thats where Id send the prisoners I figured had really sensitive information. I could take my time getting it out of them, and Id have complete physical security while I went about itthey couldnt escape, no one could break them out, and for that matter, no one could even know that was where I had them, since the location of the system itself was classified. But StateSec apparently prefers to do its interrogating closer to the center of the Republic, probably on Haven itself. Instead of using Hell as a holding area for prize prisoners, theyve been using it as a dumping ground. People who make trouble in other camps get sent here, where they cant get into any more mischief."
"What sort of mischief were they getting into?" McKeon asked in an interested tone.
"Just about anything you can think of, Sir," Mayhew replied. "Escape attempts, for a lot of them... or else they were guilty of being the kinds of officers and noncoms whod insist on maintaining discipline and unit cohesion even in a prison camp. The troublemakers."
"And theyve been skimming them off and dumping them here, have they?" Honor murmured, and there was a wicked gleam in her good eye. "You could almost say theyve been distilling them out of the rest of their prison population, couldnt you?"
"Yes, My Lady, you could," Mayhew agreed. "According to the best numbers Scotty and I could come up with, we figure there are between a hundred eighty and two hundred thousand military prisoners down here. It could run as high as two hundred and fifty, but thats a maximum figure. The other three or four hundred thousand are civilians. About a third of those were shipped out after various civilian resistance groups from conquered planets were broken up, but most are the more usual run of political prisoners."
"Um." Honor frowned at that and rubbed the tip of her nose. After a moment, she moved her hand from her nose to Nimitz, stroking the cats spine.
"A high percentage of them are from Haven itself, with the biggest single block of them from Nouveau Paris," Mayhew told her. "Apparently, both InSec and StateSec concentrated their housecleaning on the capital."
"Makes sense," McKeon said again. "Authority in the PRH has always been centralized, and every bit of it passes through the command and control nodes on Haven. Whoever controls the capital controls the rest of the Republic, so its not unreasonable for them to want to make damned sure potential troublemakers on Haven were under control. Itd probably work, too. Hey, Prole! You get uppity around here, andPffft! Off to Hell with you! Except that since the Harris Assassination, theyve been sending off elitists instead of proles, of course."