SECOND DRAFT: Hard Bank Left

31

From what Graham could gather, Krys had forced the hand of many community-based Caste members, people hiding in large population centers aligned with the Caste without being active operatives. The codes used as a tagline in the end of the message had been based on old Caste transceivers that Graham had developed while working for Krys's mother. The original purpose of the transceivers being to send travel routes to docking towers days in advance and not have them cracked by pirates. When Krys sold the company she took several transceivers with her to distribute them among the Caste.

The Cast set up the transceivers in the hands of trained codebreakers in key population centers and developed their own revolving code atop the transceiver's encryptions. Anyone at a port picking up messages from the Caste would see their messages as nothing more than garbled noise. The codebreakers, however, the one the Caste called "Watchers" would have the exact translation in a matter of moments. The message was as follows:

Don't let their stories go untold. Check the common drop off points. Relay back on frequency attached to TMT-109-WS. Use additional Caste cyphers.

It was wicked. No one would question the daughter of Kayle Torrent. Her name wasn't on any of the Caste's blacklists, and if it was, that name still carried enough weight to mean something to at least some of the Watchers. Alasier and Elicith be damned, Kryseis Pride ran the Caste now.

There would be a period of intercommunication between the Watchers. They'd have to speak to their local chapters. Handlers would need to be put on alert. If need be, Actives would need to be put on the ground to protect new gifteds and evacuate them if necessary. The trouble is where would they go? What would they do with the sudden influx of members?

Graham worried that this would be taken advantage of, that Elicith would find some way to put herself in a position of power for when Constantine came down. Yes, on the surface they were freedom fighters. But what happened when the freedom was won?

Celeste had been assigned the task of collecting the information sent to them by the Watchers, stories, locations, scraps of intel. More than some would be false positives, planted information. The local chapters of the Caste couldn't investigate every claim. Thankfully, Celeste had access to one of the largest data bases of public information still left ot humanity. It had to be redownloaded and stored every time they entered a population center, but Celeste still had access to all the information available when they were in Chicago. It would be accurate enough to make calculated guesses as to the credibility of information.

The thing was, when people lied, they tended to leave enough truth to make the lie seem plausible. If the Keypers were listening, and rest assured they were, there would be a lot of lies. Celeste had to filter through this, decyfer which stories rang true and which were clearly a trap. Krys would be reliant on Celeste's calculations when making her plan of attack. Graham had every confidence that she was up to the task.

It took several days for things to start trickling in and an additional several days for any real information to come through. Krys had enough stories to read one or two on air by the time the next broadcast rolled around.

Graham found things to do around the ship, most of it had to do with heating. The reports were coming in of another storm due to hit the next day. Given this he had to find a solution fast because there was no way in hell they could convince him to sleep in a vardo again. Waking up in what felt like a coffin made of blankets and smelling of incense was not his idea of a good morning.

The boiler engine normally vented its excess heat to the green room, making it the warmest room in the ship most of the time. He wasn't about to go syphon any heat from the plants, they couldn't risk any of them dying and besides, Krys would kill him. There had do be something else generating heat which could be distributed between Krys's room and the pilotry that didn't add an exorbitant amount of weight to their payload. No, forget that. They weren't flying anywhere any time soon, the payload shove it for now. He needed heat and a lot of it.