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one, the heavy door swinging out with a soft groan and the faint hiss of a pressure differential. Stepping into the spacious room, her eyes fixed on the the redheaded genius hunched over a laptop, typing furiously at a black console with indecipherable green text scrolling past.
    “Rowe, you wanted to see me?”
    Summer twisted in her seat, glancing over her shoulder. For a moment, Liao saw the old Summer; fiery and energetic, a massive grin stamped on her freckled face as she stabbed a finger at the laptop’s screen.
    “ Wrong , Captain. You fucking wanted to see me.”
    Smiling at the redhead’s audacity, the Chinese captain stepped up behind her and laid her good hand over the sitting woman’s shoulder. “Okay, okay. Show me what you’ve got.”
    Summer tapped a key and the laptop screen displayed a large image—a garden full of plants, beams of sunlight filtering through the trees. It looked like a stock image from a photography portfolio and, for a second, reminded Liao of home.
    “Pretty, but what does this have to do wi—”
    “Ah-ah-ah, Captain, don’t interrupt the magician. Watch. I'll remove all but the two least significant bits of each color component, copy them into a separate image, then one subsequent normalization later, and tada!” With a cheeky grin, she tapped a few more keys and the image abruptly changed. There were now lines of text across the screen, slightly slanted, as though the image was of a picture of a letter written by hand.
    “It’s stenography. The art of concealing an image withinanother image. A fairly old technique, but it’s still quite effective.”
    Liao could see that the words were written in Mandarin. She frowned, leaning forward, scanning the characters.
    “ I’m glad you were able to receive my latest missive. The three ships are called the Tehran , the Beijing, and the Sydney .They are being constructed on this planet’s moon. The Tehran is expected to be launched in three days, and…,” Liao read aloud.
    Her voice fell off. “It’s intelligence. Someone is—or was—communicating with the Toralii.” She turned to Summer, her eyes wide. “A mole! Does the message say who sent it?”
    Rowe shook her head. “Nope. Whoever it was, they were very careful to avoid leaving any incriminating evidence. I scanned all the characters and ran them through a baby names dictionary—no matches.And the structure of the messages doesn’t indicate that they’re being signed with any kind of codename or identifier.”
    Liao nodded, placing her good hand on her hip, sucking in a deep breath. “I’ll get a translator to take a look at these and comb over every detail. There might be codewords or aliases hidden in there. Maybe they used a rare character at some point which might indicate—”
    “Or, you know, I could just tell you who sent it.” Summer had an impish grin stamped on her face, smirking at her captain’s confusion. “Oh, come on, you wouldn’t think I’d let a mystery like thisevade me?”
    Liao stared a moment. “Who is it?”
    “ Was . Who wasit. See, there was something interesting about the place I found the images. They were in the Toralii datastore, yeah, but they were not in a location that would indicate they were communications. Instead, they were filed under ‘intelligence,’ which strongly suggested to me that this was something they were investigating as well. Why would they be investigating something if they already knew everything about it, I thought.”
    “Okay, so?”
    Rowe turned back to her laptop. “So, on a hunch, I decided to see if any of these images were on our ownsystems. I ran a hashing algorithm on the files we recovered, then hashed everything on our own systems and compared. Turns out…”
    Another stab of the keyboard. The ship’s email system popped up, and Summer pointed at a section of the Beijing’s data storage.
    “Remember when our email server kept running out of space because Sheng was getting so many