Applebloom - 4th of Snowfall - EveningApplebloom - 4th of Snowfall - Evening
Things had gotten pretty hectic around here, what with Sombra apparently coming back to life and all. This meant two things for the three of us. First, we had a good opportunity to get some information we wanted while every pony including Phoenix's was busy working out battle plans just in case. Second, we could get the other half of our plan going and gain access to Phoenix's astrometrics sensors.
"Alright... I'm in her dataloop..." Scootaloo whispered.
"Find anything that looks like plans?" Sweetie asked quietly, in case extra security had kicked in.
"Not yet... wait, here we go!" Scoots twitched slightly as she did something to the computers. I never really could understand how she worked them without a tool.
A few secoonds later and our replicator hummed. A thick stack of parchment pages appearing on it's shelf.
"I told the computer to print it as a text file." Scoots said with a smile. "Now we can just read it without working about security systems!"
I trotted over tot he replicator and looked at the top page of the stack. "Uh- Nope." I said in a frustrated tone.
"What do you mean?" Scoots asked as Sweetie walked over to look.
"Scootaloo, you printed the program's code! Come over and read this for us." Sweetie exclaimed.
"What? No I didn't!" She objected matching over to the replicator.
Her eyes caught the groups of random letters and numbers and widened in surprise, "Well, I didn't print the program's code... But I'm pretty sure I printed a code."
I groaned and leaned into my hoof. "Great! Now we need to dust off our Cutiemark Crusader Codebreaker hats!"
"Yay!" Sweetie cheered sarcastically as she flopped onto her plot in a huff.
"I'm sorry! I didn't think to check and see if it was encrypted..." Scoots apologized.
I took a deep breath, "Okay... here's what we do. We scan this into our omnitools, do our best to break it, but we also mail it to Celestia so somepony actually good at codes can look at it. That way we can start scanning for her instead of taking forever to figure out what these bunches of numbers and letters mean."
Scoots sighed and nodded. "That's a good plan... everypony make a copy. I'll stuff this in with mother's reply to Celestia."
Enigma Breaker - 5th of Snowfall - Morning
“Enigma!”
I jumped half way out of my fur, knocking quills and parchment off my desk as the angry and urgent bellowing of Sargent Apparently-Doesn't-Know-I’m-Not-A-Military-Stallion jerked me out of a post-migraine snooze.
“Huh yeah what?” I asked incoherently.
Sargent Way-to-yellow-to-look-good-in-bronze rolled his eyes at me through his helmet. “It’s oh three thirty hours. What by Discords Horns do you think you are doing asleep?”
“Being a civilian contractor in the espionage sector and not say, Dirk Ironhoof, badflank extrordinair.” I responded in my best go-the-buck-away-I-don’t-work-for-you voice.
His horn glowed a bright pink, both lifting a thick scroll from his saddlebag and changing his nickname to Sargent Pink. He held the scroll out to me with an evil grin. “This just came in for you! Your friends up at Canterlot couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and the Princesses need it yesterday. You get me?”
I smiled condescendingly at Sargent Pink. “Oh please. I’ve been cracking codes since I was three.” I pulled the scroll open with my forehooves. “Stick around so you can just take the deciphered text back when I-”
What the bucking hay was this pile of horse apples?
After three seconds, Sargent Pink began to laugh. That mean, jock in the locker room laugh. The sort of laugh which makes you immediately hate somepony that much more for laughing like that at you.
He finally wiped his eyes and shook his head. “Guess that just teaches you what karma is, nerd.”
“Buck off to your calorie wasting exercises, jock!” I shot back.
Sargent Pink trotted off down the barracks hall chuckling smugly. Fine, good, let him go. I needed silence for this one.
The code was groups of two characters, either a numeral and a letter, or two numerals. No letter-numeral, or letter-letter pairings. According to my translation spell, the numerals expressed were the language’s equivalents of zero through nine, and in the entire code only six letters ever appeared.
The code itself was fifty sheets of parchment long, and composed of sixty six thousand, four hundred, and thirty two grouped pairs. It looked to be entirely random, and my enchanted glasses couldn’t make out even one bucking word.
“This is going to be awesome!” I exclaimed completely sincerely.
It had been a long time since I cracked a completely new code.