War Stories (Book 1) - Keith R.A. DeCandido [14]
Mark laughed. “Fine. I’ll see you at 1930.”
“The problem,” Bart said between mouthfuls of the yellow-leaf salad the Trills called grakizh, “is that there isn’t anything to work from. Anytime you’ve got a code, there’s some kind of base for it. Something to build off of. Every Dominion code up until now has had similar algorithms at the root. Or at least similar enough that we could extrapolate something. Sometimes we’ve been lucky enough to stumble into things, and sometimes they’ve been careless. But this latest one—it just doesn’t match anything—no mathematical or linguistic pattern we’ve seen before, from the Dominion, from the Breen, from the Cardassians. It’s a big mess.”
“Sounds it,” Mark said, leaning back in his chair, having long since finished his meal by dint of not being able to get a word in edgewise.
“I’m sorry,” Bart said sheepishly. “I’ve been talking shop all night.”
Mark grinned. “That’s all right—I would’ve just spent the whole meal bitching and moaning about Commander DuVall. This is a nice reminder that other people have problems, too.”
“Yeah.” Bart took a bite of his grakizh.
“Maybe the Dominion’s come up with an unbreakable code.”
“No such thing—remember, if there’s no way to decode it, there’s no way the other side gets the message. Of course, it could just be something straightforward and simple and we’re overthinking it.” Bart chuckled. “Overthinking is definitely an occupational hazard with this bunch.”
“Well, I hope for my sake you come up with something soon. DuVall got a very terse communiqué from Admiral Ross today and—well, let’s just say that the abused tend to kick downward.”
Bart gave Mark a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry, Commander, but—”
Mark laughed.
“What?”
“‘Commander’?”
“Well, I can’t call you ‘hey you’ anymore. I promised.”
Mark nodded. “Fair enough. Anthony will do, I think.”
“Fine, Anthony.” Bart speared the last of his grakizh with his fork. “Actually, one of the more famous ‘unbreakable code’ stories was from Earth—the Second World War. One side’s code kept being broken by the other side, so instead of an actual code, they transmitted everything in an obscure language by a people they’d conquered over a century earlier. That ‘code’ was never broken during the hostili—” Bart cut himself off. “My stars and garters, I think that’s it.”
“What’s it?”
“We’re complete and total idiots.” He got up. “I’ve got to go. I may have stumbled onto the right track.”
Mark grinned. “Then we both have to go.” He tapped his combadge. “Cryptography team, please report to the wardroom immediately.”
“So you’re saying—what are you saying?” Phrebington said. The lizardlike Gnalish was standing in one corner of the wardroom, pointedly positioning himself as far from Kerasus as possible. The elderly human, for her part, sat placidly at the head of the wardroom table, with Throckmorton and Novac sitting to her left, T’Lura on her right. Anthony stood leaning against a rear bulkhead, with Bart sitting at the other head of the table.
Bart leaned forward. “I’m saying that we need to try investigating a language from the Dominion that’s as obscure to us as the Navajo language was to the Axis powers in World War Two on Earth.”
“Ah, yes, because, after all, we’ve had such tremendous cultural exchanges with them,” Phrebington said with a snort.
“Mr. Phrebington’s sarcasm notwithstanding,” T’Lura said, “he is right. Our cultural information on the Dominion is limited.”
“We know about their language, though,” Kerasus said in a voice that was at once paper-thin and rich with authority. Bart had spent the last several weeks wondering if he’d be able to pull that off when he was that old.
“What do we possibly know about their language?” Phrebington asked sharply.
Her tone now withering, Kerasus said, “Quite a bit, if you actually have paid attention to the recorded conversations and discussions involving the Founders, the Vorta, and other Dominion members. Untranslated, of course.”
“What good would that do?” Novac asked, sounding confused.
Throckmorton added,