Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3306-01-19 17:58 Galactic Standard Time
Commander Graves took a sip from his coffee bulb and pretended to read a local GalNet news article on his data tablet. He was sitting in a small coffee shop situated on one side of a small pentagonal public space about ten meters across. Five moderately busy passageways converged here and there was a reasonably steady stream of people and delivery drones passing by. It was close enough to the outside of the station to have decent gravity so few of the people walking by wore mag-boots. To those people he looked like a faction official having a well deserved coffee after busy work day. In a way he was, but he had another motive too.
He was back at work for Official Tewanta Order for about a month now. He split his time between Wilson Port and Cortes Base. Cortes Base was where he dealt with most of his operational and planning duties for Official Tewanta Order. It was also where he trained himself and administered training to junior analysts. He came to Wilson Port for meetings with other factions, out of system contacts, and independent traders. These meetings arranged military escort for transports and VIPs and discrete black operations: assassinations, hacking, smuggling of goods, etc. He was particularly proud of the smuggling operation that he had managed to set up to transport survival shelters, stolen from Tall Base, out of the system. Not only did The Order make money from the operation, but The Buurian Protectorate struggled to keep enough working shelters to ensure the safety of the citizens of Tall Base after the industrial accident there. The last of his reasons to come to Wilson Port was to engage in espionage, which was what he was doing now.
When he arrived he had magnetically fixed his hand terminal to the table. There wasn't anything unusual in that: most people who were used to low-g environments did that out of habit. However, it did allow him to precisely aim an infrared communications laser at one of the intersection's three surveillance cameras: the hidden one. The debacle with the assassin did have one positive outcome: it familiarized him with the technical workings of the station's surveillance cameras. He was surprised to find how much processing power they had and how much data that they could store. When the war went badly with The Buurian Protectorate, he had eleven of them, particularly covert ones, repurposed as data dead drop servers. They were removed from the normal surveillance network, had their maintenance records deleted, and new firmware installed to configure them for their new role. The initial plan was to allow the resistance cells to use them to coordinate activities. Unfortunately, the resistance cells were mopped up before they started effectively using this data exchange network. The positive side of this, was that, as far as he could tell, the repurposed cameras hadn't been discovered. This allowed him to use them to exchange data with highly competent espionage organizations. He checked the time on his data tablet and noted that it was 18:01. He took a casual sip of his coffee, looked around to see if he was watched and issued a command on his data tablet that caused his hand terminal to connect to the repurposed camera. The camera's firmware detected the connection request, verified the one time code, extracted the precise position of the hand terminal from the connection request, and used its repurposed infrared illumination lasers to direct a tightbeam response to the request and begin the encryption negotiation. Milliseconds later the tight beam connection was opened, encrypted, and ready to transfer data.
Commander Graves checked if the data cache he was expecting had been uploaded by the spy he hired. It wasn't there. That was okay, he thought to himself: the protocol was that the data would be uploaded shortly after 18:00. He may have checked too early. Things hadn't gone wrong yet, but he was feeling a little nervous. He checked his urgent messages to pass the time and took another sip of coffee. There were three new messages.
The first was from Captain Luciano to indicate that CMDR Yaga Shura had been spotted loitering in HR 5960 and to request authorization to dispatch a wetwork team to assassinate him. Commander Graves quickly sent a message denying the request along with an explanation, that if CMDR Yaga Shura was loitering, then he was either waiting to rendezvous with other Buur Pit CMDRs, or had a particular trap set. Either outcome would result in the loss of the wetwork team.
The second message was from Captain Fredericks. It indicated that an analysis of the evolving Buur Pit and The Buurian Protectorate command structure had been completed and uploaded to the servers in Cortes Base. He was looking forward to reading this as Captain Fredericks was a thorough analyst. They had known for a while now that there was a from of collective command structure in place where Progenitor Eisley delegated certain operations to the Buur Pit commanders. In particular, CMDR General Zoff was identified as the strategic genius behind expansion and military operations, with the normal faction command structure essentially providing support and logistics. He, in turn, delegated specific operations to different battle groups: Strikeforce Snert, Yaga Shura's Marines, Pink Ops, among others. It was an effective setup. He was looking forward to reading more details on this. It was too sensitive to read here, though, so he would look into it when he returned to Tewanta A 7 A.
The last message was another announcement of the completion of an analysis report, this time about The Buurian Protectorate finances. The executive summary was that the Low Temperature Diamond market in Wilson Port was stable after the latest market negotiation software upgrade from the Pilots' Federation and that the Buur Pit Mining Corporation, another sub-organization in The Buur Pit, had already pivoted to take advantage of that fact. That was bad news. He was considering what options there were to disrupt this when the gunfire started.
Out in the intersection a man in Imperial style clothing was firing a laser pistol at station security. One security officer had been injured in the leg. A comrade of his was trying to pull him around the corner out of the line of fire while a third security officer laid down covering fire. Civilians were panicking, running for cover. Commander Graves dived from his chair into a roll and took cover behind the service counter in the coffee shop. He looked back at his hand terminal. It was still in place. He checked his tablet, the file was on the server - "Alliance Command Strategy For Tewanta and Neighbouring Systems". He initiated the download. The firefight continued. He glanced around the corner of the counter in time to see the man, who he guessed was the data courier, take a burst of bullets to the chest and fall releasing what looked to be a grenade. He ducked back into cover just as the blast blew out the windows and overturned all the chairs and tables in the cafe. His hand terminal bounced across the floor and came to a stop three meters from him. He resisted the barista pulling him into the kitchen at the back of the cafe, long enough to scoop it up. He glanced at it quickly as he was shepherded into a service tunnel. The file was there and it was time for him to be elsewhere.