Any second I expected a cordon of armed guards to come galloping out of there with collapsers ablaze in our direction. Any moment now, we'd all be separated into hot protons and flying clouds of electronic sparks.
I came to a stumbling halt, and ceased all conjecture.
For just inside those glass doors, Chief Philip Baxter was standing with his hands raised over his head, and there were men approaching him with drawn weapons. And not the rebels, either. His own security guards! IS had won.
"Hey!" said Ted, tugging at my arm. "They must have gotten my message! Lucky thing the rebels were the losers, hey?"
I spun about, giving him a dazed look. "What message?" was all I could choke out.
"In the Phobos II," he said happily. "I scratched it on the wall over my takeoff rack."
"I didn't see any message," I complained.
"It was in code," he explained, with the head-shaking condescension toward an idiot of which only small boys are capable. "Snow and me, we have a secret code."
"I know that!" I growled. "But how in the world—"
He gave a lazy what-does-it-matter shrug. "You probably didn't notice it because you didn't know the code. Otherwise, it looks like chicken-scratches. But I was pretty sure a good cryptograph man would figure it out. It's only a substitution code, after all."