Page 44 of Radiant Exception
Vaughn released an amused snort.
“Do you truly know anyone on this ship? Your crew could be capable of anything. If they’re running an empire, or at least helping to run it, they would have years of experience hiding their true nature from others. You need to keep an open mind,” I scolded him.
“He’d have to be running quite the long con,” Vaughn argued. “I served with his brother.” A shadow passed over his face, making me assume that meant he’d been lost on Enceladus, or before. “Ethan has always been Ethan, trust me.”
I realized I did trust Vaughn in that moment, but I also trusted that the Phoenix could pull the wool over all of our eyes.
“And Rion? What nefarious things have you uncovered?” he teased.
“You asked,” I snapped. “Darren sent me here to see what you can’t.”
“Lark.” He ran a hand down my arm in an attempt to calm me. “I’m listening.”
I huffed, unsure if that was true, but I continued regardless. “Other than Jordan, Rion is pretty high on my list,” I revealed.
Vaughn raised a disbelieving brow.
“He’s incredibly technologically savvy, has access to all the ship’s systems, and although he doesn’t have as much social influence himself, he is closest with Natalie, who could be unintentionally influencing others on his behalf.” I let my shoulders slump. “Honestly, he seems sweet and shy, and I don’t want it to be anyone on this ship, but between him and Jordan, and maybe Ethan, it must be one of them.”
“You forgot Cassidy,” Vaughn retorted dryly.
I rolled my eyes. “So what have you been working on after ruling out your entire crew from the suspect list?”
Vaughn took a deep, steadying breath. “So I should probably tell you about the code.”
“Idiscovered the code not too long after we started doing runs in the ship,” I told Lark. Her eyes were wide with interest. “Thing is, the part of the network where I found the coding can only be accessed directly from the ship.” She hadn’t expected there to be more; Darren hadn’t told her much, after all. “That was when I first reached out to Darren to see if he could help. Even he admitted he’d never seen such an advanced encryption cipher.”
“How did you find it?”
“I was running regular diagnostics, and one of them showed an error, but when I went to go find it, it had disappeared. The same thing happened a couple more times, and then I started looking through the code myself and finding odd strings that appeared harmless, but were useless for the ship itself. And they would appear and disappear at will. In the early days, whoever was doing it was a lot sloppier. I can still find the coding now, but it’s much more difficult to isolate, and if I hadn’t found it back then, I never would have known what to look for,” I explained.
“It’s been maddening knowing that my ship is somehow aiding in the destruction Meridian has caused, but if I do anything about it, I risk spooking them, and losing the trail,” I admitted.
“Xavier was always the one who loved encryption—he actually specialized in it at university.” She shook her head, seemingly disappointed she couldn’t offer more help in the moment. “He would know exactly what to do. At least we can close the book on having to consider past crew members as suspects, if it’s impossible to send the code without physically being on theRadiant.”
“Exactly,” he agreed. “While Darren and I monitored the ephemeral coding, he was the one who pointed out that there seemed to be an increase in frequency and volume around larger operations or attacks linked to Meridian. And I knew the moment he told me that one of their operatives had infiltrated my ship.” I sighed in discontent.
“Why is Darren so convinced it’s the Phoenix themself?” Lark asked.
“He recognized the cipher,” I told her. “He’s been following the Phoenix since before they even had a name.”
“I remember him mentioning that.”
“In the early days, he was just trying to track the financials of Meridian when they started to expand, and quickly found rumors circling around a new up-and-comer who was responsible for putting Elysian on the market,” I parroted what he’d told me himself.
“If I remember correctly, Darren was the one who was pretty much single-handedly responsible for linking the Elysian boom to Meridian.” Lark looked to me for confirmation.
I nodded. “When I sent him the code to see if he could help me with the encryption, he was shocked he recognized the signature. It was crude, but effective, low frequency, and like nothing he’d ever seen before—except for when he first started chasing the Phoenix.”
“But I still don’t understand why they chose theRadiant. There are so many hidden places the Phoenix could operate in the lap of luxury. Why do all of this, only to have to go to work every day? Working on small ships like this isn’t some cushy vacation. It doesn’t make sense.” She shook her head, trying to assign reason to something that was so obvious to me.
“But most of those places are stationary. And even though Meridian clearly has the capability to utilize far advanced encryption to hide their location, no cipher is impenetrable, given enough time. There are hundreds of thousands of ships floating around the system. Even if someone figured out the signals were coming from a ship, it would be like finding a needle in a haystack, hiding in plain sight.”
“I want to see the code,” she stated suddenly, swinging one leg over me to remove herself from my lap, much to my dismay.
“What? Now?” I scrambled after her.
“Why not?”
