Chapter 15: Ceth Orrand Chooses His Courier

The response came on a Thursday, which meant nothing operationally and everything personally, because Ceth had spent his career assigning significance to the days of the week based on what had happened in them, and Thursday had been, for the past eleven years, the day he did not think about the shuttle.

He had been moderately successful at this.

He read Mira Solen's message three times, which was twice more than he needed and once less than he wanted. She had written four sentences. The first established that she had received the document. The second asked whether the routing address would remain active. The third asked, with a precision that told him everything about her training, whether the cipher string in the document's seventh section was reproduced verbatim or reconstructed from memory. The fourth sentence was not a question. It read: *The spectral analysis in the incident report from fourteen months ago is consistent with what you describe. I recognized it then. I did not report it.*