Shadow of the Hegemon, the - Book 2 (Ender)

Some were promising and he saved them for later exploration.
    "Why is it in Greek now?" asked Carlotta.
    She was looking over his shoulder again. He hadn't heard her get up and come over behind him.
    "I converted the original message to Greek characters so that I wouldn't get distracted by trying to read meanings into letters I hadn't decoded yet. The ones I'm actually working on are in Roman letters."
    At that moment, his program showed the letters "iggi."
    "Piggies," said Sister Carlotta.
    "Maybe, but it doesn't flag anything for me." He started cycling through the dictionary matches with "iggi," but none of them did any better than "piggies" had.
    "Does it have to be a word?" said Carlotta.
    "Well, if it's a number, then this is a dead end," said Bean.
    "No, I mean, why not a name?"
    Bean saw it at once. "How blind can I be." He plugged the letters w and n to the positions before and after "iggi" and then spread the results through the whole message, making the program show hyphens for the undeciphered letters. The two lines now read
    ---n--------g---n---n---n---i----n --- g
    -n-n-wiggin--
    "That doesn't look right for Common," said Carlotta. "There should be a lot more i's than that."
    "I'm assuming that the message deliberately leaves out letters as much as possible, especially vowels, so it won't look like Common."
    "So how will you know when you've decoded it?"
    "When it makes sense."
    "It's bedtime. I know, you're not sleeping till you've solved it." He barely noticed that she moved away from behind him. He was busy trying the other doubled letter. This time he had a more complicated job, because the letters before and after the double pair were different. It meant far more combinations to try, and being able to eliminate g, i, n, and w didn't speed up the process all that much.
    Again, there were quite a few readings that he saved-more than before-but nothing rang a bell until he got to 'Jees." The word that Ender's companions in the final battle used for themselves. "Jeesh." Could it be? It was definitely a word that might be used as a flag.
    h--n--jeesh-g-_en--s-ns--n ---- si --- n --- s--g
    -n-n-wiggin --
    If those twenty-seven letters were right, then he had only thirty left to solve. He rubbed his eyes, sighed, and set to work.
    It was noon when the smell of oranges woke him. Sister Carlotta was peeling a mexerica orange. "People are eating these things on the street and spitting the pulp on the sidewalk. You can't chew it up enough to swallow it. But the juice is the best orange you'll ever taste in your life."
    Bean got out of bed and took the segment she offered him. She was right. She handed him a bowl to spit the pulp into. "Good breakfast," said Bean.
    "Lunch," she said. She held up a paper. "I take it you consider this to be a solution?"
    It was what he had printed out before going to bed.
    hlpndrjeeshtgdrenrusbnstun6rmysiz4Ontrysbtg
    bnfndwigginptr
    "Oh," said Bean. "I didn't print out the one with the word breaks." Putting another mexerica segment in his mouth, Bean padded on bare feet to the computer, called up the right file, and printed it. He brought it back, handed it to Carlotta, spat out pulp, and took his own mexerica from her shopping bag and began peeling.
    "Bean," she said. "I'm a normal mortal. I get 'help' and is this 'Ender'?"
    Bean took the paper from her.
    hlp ndr jeesh tgdr en rus bns tun 6 rmy siz 40
    n try sbtg
    bn fnd wiggin ptr
    "The vowels are left out as much as possible, and there are other misspellings. But what the first line says is, 'Help. Ender's jeesh is together in Russia-' "
    "T-g-d-r is 'together'? And 'in' is spelled like French?"
    "Exactly," said Bean. "I understood it and it doesn't look like Common." He went on interpreting. "The next part was confusing for a long time, until I realized that the 6 and the 40 were numbers. I got almost all the other letters before I realized that. The thing is, the numbers matter, but there's no way to guess them from context. So the next few words are designed to give a context to the numbers. It says 'Bean's toon was 6'-that's because Ender divided Dragon Army into five toons instead of the normal four, but then he gave me a sort of ad hoc toon, and if you added it to the count, it was number six.
    Only who would know that except for somebody from Battle School? So only somebody like me would get the number. Same thing with the next one. 'Army size 40.' Everyone in Battle School knew that there were forty soldiers in every