Beowulf Denn choked. “What is this?” he burst out.
“Surprised, eh?” said Richard jocularly, turning his chair back to the table. “Of course, she won’t get the message for about ten minutes. But when she does, we’ll be able to say, ‘mission accomplished’!”
“What is this?” Commander Lewis echoed Beowulf Denn.
“It was Robert’s idea, really,” began Richard, “and he ought to be telling the tale, but he is too modest to do so. Robert and I cooked up the plan between us and told no one else. Just in case there was a leak somewhere—and apparently there was!—Robert made a fuss about wanting to offer his freighters to convey the probes to the deployment site. He offered rather expensive freighters for service. Robert felt badly about, well, about making a scene when we met with the President and wanted to make up for it.”
Robert glanced down at the table so as not to meet anyone’s eyes, but it was evident that the success of his plan was deeply gratifying to him.
“The NME freighters were decoys. The real probes were sent out on SE freighters to different spots along the face of deployment. They were sent out without any fanfare whatever on the normal delivery schedule we follow for all shipments to Mars and the Asteroid Belt. It would never have done, anyway, to send the probes out in a tight bunch as the seven NME freighters; deployment must be simultaneously effected from several sites, and this is the command I just gave Captain Marks-Owens.
“If the pirates took the bait, then they would go back to their base believing that they had stopped us. And if they didn’t know about our plans or the decoy, well, no harm done. Deployment would still go on as scheduled. That’s about two minutes from now.”
The visitors were stunned. “Why, that’s terrific!” stammered Commander Lewis. “No one else knew about this? Not even the President?”
“No one,” said Richard. “Only Robert and I. And it’s a good thing we did it that way, too. Without the decoy, the launch would have gone as planned with everyone knowing about it. As it is, we’re safe now.”
“Not only that—” contributed John Rwakatare in his deep bass voice, “we’ve learned something of immense value. There is a leak somewhere. Someone informed the pirates of the launch from NME.”