Norman Jones was sitting at his desk without a visible emotion. His office was a statement in minimalist design. No decorations adorned its walls, no flowers or plants interrupted the straight lines of its walls. It had no windows. As the head of an intelligence organization, Jones knew the options for eavesdropping and was humble enough to understand that there were likely some he was not aware of. So his office, and all the sensitive parts of his headquarter, was underground. Even the air had a distinctive absence of smells.

Jones knew of the effect his office had on visitors. He compounded it with stretches of silence just a hint longer than they should be.

„Troubling news.“, he said.

General Tebbs was sitting in the visitor chair strategically placed right in the center of the office. He was one of the few people who seemed to be largely immune to the multi-layered games of psychology played.

„Moreover“, Jones continued, „we must assume that the entire enemy organization has been warned and vanished.“

„Erulas has grounded all ships for now.“, Tebbs let the intelligence chief know, though he probably knew already.

„Not something they can keep up for more than a few days.“, Jones remarked.

Unknown to them, one floor higher and a few corridors away, two prisoners were being interrogated. Agent Ayres was getting impatient, but he had left the process to experts. Of course he had interrogation training himself, but not as in-depth as them, and not with as much real-life experience.

„We know you’ve been spying on us.“, one of the interrogators said as Ayres watched on from behind the wall. Inside the room, the wall would appear a dark grey as long as he kept the lights in the observation room off. „And soon we will have all the details from the computer systems we confiscated.“, the interrogator continued, „If you talk now, you will save us some time and effort and we will take that into account when it comes to the military tribunal for treason you are facing.“

A similar message was given, separately, in the other room to the other prisoner. Neither of them seemed to be breaking soon. Neither Ayres nor the interrogators had expected them to.

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But Agent Ayres had been in the business long enough to understand that they were not working alone. These two were the small fish. He needed to get the head of the operation, or at least a good lead.

Not-Smith had given him some useful intelligence, but he needed confirmation from another source before betting his career on it. For Ayres, it was vital that the two prisoners broke down and gave him something.

He got a text message and pulled out his tablet, folding it open. The team he sent to search the homes of the prisoners had come up with nothing.

Minutes stretched into hours. The prisoner’s resistance was slowly being eroded away, but it took forever. They behaved in the way that people who are waiting for a rescue they are sure will come do. Ayres silently applauded himself for keeping this operation off the books. If their lawyers or inside friends were looking for them, they would hit a wall.

As morning dawned somewhere above on the surface, the long night ended with a minor success. The team tasked with analyzing the equipment and computers they had found came back with a first result. With tired eyes, Ayres scanned the preliminary report. Definitely equipment suitable for interception of hyperspace messages. Some alien tech. Some decrypted messages and a large amount of encrypted storage. Not-Smith had been truthful, they definitely were intercepting messages from the intelligence headquarters.

The team was still tracing the equipment to figure out who bought it. Ayres would wait for those results and then get his reward. He needed a few hours of sleep first.

Norman Jones had taken a short rest and returned to his office early in the morning, significantly before standard office times. Not unusual for him to get out of office after dark or return before sunrise. In the winter months, he could spend a week without seeing the sun.

He had reports from counter-intelligence units on his secure tablet and skimmed them. A number of suspects had been cleared, at least of this particular crime. Intelligence work was slow and methodical. It would take days, weeks, months to find the traitors.

The best chance, to him, was the observation of the alien technology markets. If, as was the guess Erulas had communicated, they were paid in alien technology, it had to be sold somewhere. Alien tech does not buy bread or pay rent.

It did make sense that the Qyrl would pay their collaborators this way. It was easy, required no currency conversion, and offered plausible deniability. With human pirates routinely stealing alien tech and all that.

His people had identified an initial list of sellers with no obvious source of the items they were selling. They had started investigating them. In a few days he expected the list to be much shorter. As an aside he noticed that none of the fences on the pirate outpost called Binary Bloom were on the list, with a note saying contact with their operative there had been lost for the past day.