Three days later, a message arrived on Hoda’s personal relay. No sender identifier. The encryption was Ves’sol-pattern, which she couldn’t break, but the text was in Common:
“Voreth has been running this operation for four years. Sixteen ships. You are the first captain to deviate from the route. We needed evidence that a captain would make that choice — a real choice, under real conditions, not a simulation. Your route deviation triggered a full audit trail that we could not legally initiate ourselves. Customs authority has frozen Voreth’s accounts and detained him at Rek’sha pending review. The transit documents for your nine passengers have been restored. They are free to travel.
The order not to open the bay was always going to be opened. We needed to know when, and by whom, and what you would do next.
Thank you, Captain Farouk.”
There was no signature.
But at the bottom of the message, there was a notation — brief, in a cipher she didn’t recognize, followed by a single word in Common that someone had apparently decided to leave in plaintext, perhaps intentionally, perhaps as the closest thing to an honest introduction available:
Rethkai.
Hoda read it twice. Then she set the message to archive and went to see about fuel.
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