The door burst into the room, flying off its hinges breaking under the impact. It was immediately followed by a flash grenade. A bright flash to blind and an acoustic shock to deafen temporarily. Five SWAT officers in body armor piled into the office room, taking up positions to cover all angles. A small decorative table near the door had been pushed over by the grenade’s explosion, some of the papers on the first desk were flying through the air as well.


    Two bullets pierced the window from outside, leaving two clean holes. They were too fast to shatter the glass. They hit the two mannequins representing enemies, each in the shoulder of their weapon arms. Easier to hit than hands, which on actual people tended to move around more.


    The SWAT team secured the room in a well-trained sweeping maneuver, left and right, overlapping arcs of fire. Then two of them ran towards the other door, opening it and throwing another flash grenade through, then taking down the third mannequin inside with well-placed double-taps.


    ?Eight-point-six seconds.“, a voice from outside the training space announced.


    ?Sub ten seconds the third time in a row.“, another high-ranking police officer standing around the planning table concluded.


    The third man at the table was Norman Jones. As head of the intelligence agency, this was his operation. His face betrayed no emotion. Calmly, he ordered them to vary the layout of the location again and do another training run.


    Jones looked at his watch. Two hours since he had been briefed. He had been lucky that it was training day and everyone had already been assembled.


    Similar scenes would unfold across Dangorod over the day, and on Erulas. But not on Dephyr. He had sent a fast courier ship to Dephyr, but even a high-speed ship would need about a day.


    Jones did not know how soon they would face reality. He switched on his tablet. A quick glance at the incoming messages showed what he had expected - no cell of Qyrl collaborators had yet been identified.


    Jones walked outside while the training continued. He had seen enough and had other matters to attend to. Traitors to the human race. The SWAT team had the easy part of that. Finding them in the first place was the hard part. Jones liked a good challenge.


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    He saw one of the messages confirmed another fast ship had left from Dangorod for Erulas. It carried a quantum memory bank with a few terabytes of random data. An entangled copy was kept at the intelligence headquarters. The quantum nature of the memory ensured that reading the bytes destroyed them. MDI-QKD was the technical term. Jones understood the basics, but not the details. What he did know was that one-time-pads were considered unbreakable. Exchanging and keeping the one-time-pads securely was the challenge.


    Jones walked to his waiting shuttle. He had gained some respect for his counterpart on Erulas. They had sent out an open broadcast on government frequencies directed at any Dangorod spies listening in, letting them know that they urgently needed to send a truly secure message to Dangorod. The Erulas president herself had given a personal guarantee of immunity to anyone coming forward, revealing themselves. Of course the spies Dangorod had in place had quantum one-time-pads with them in any case. To the planets it was easy to send new ones. The disadvantage was in the name: You could only use a one-time-pad once. He regretted letting logistics reasons come in the way of using the same scheme for that pirate outpost. He would have wanted more details then just the short code message he had received as the last communication from there.


    Ten minutes later, his shuttle touched down at a local agency office. Five minutes after that, Jones was sitting in a secure conference room with the local head of operations and holograms of seven others around the planet.


    ?Agents“, he began, ?tell me what we have so far.“


    They went around the table in an orderly fashion. There were leads, but no certainty. They were all speaking in the vague manner of people all knowing what they are talking about but never saying it out loud. Any eavesdroppers would not know, at least not for sure.


    It was too early to strike, Jones decided. He dismissed everyone and remained in the room alone. There was time to think, so he did exactly that. He began to visualize the operation as if he were in charge. Where would he put the listening posts? What kind of people would he approach? What would he offer them? Which measures would he take to protect the mission?


    Calling up a holographic globe of Dangorod, and a map of the Junkstorm next to it, he began planning a hypothetical operation.