The door crashed into the wall from the battering ram impact it had received, and a split second later a flash grenade rolled across the floor. Its explosion blinded and deafened the two people inside the small, tidy office. Four members of Dangorod’s intelligence police entered the room, their visors un-tinting automatically. They were wearing light body armor over their uniforms. The first two into the room were holding automatic pistols ready and aimed, the next two entered with tasers.


    As the reverberations of the flash grenade ceased and the ear protectors of the intrusion team opened up again, the faint pings, static and humming of the electronic equipment scattered around the room came through again. It was a faint but constant background noise.


    The team was trained to take no chances, and the two people inside the room were immediately hit with taser shots. Jerking with uncontrolled muscle contractions, they fell over, one slumping down in his chair and hitting the desk and keyboard in front of him with his head, the other crashing to the floor.


    ?Secure“, one of the armed police, from the voice apparently a female but otherwise unrecognizable under the gear, shouted.


    Edric Ayres slowly entered the room. The small amount of smoke from the grenade billowed over his legs as he walked, only appropriate music missing for a cinematic dramatic entrance. He walked right to the middle of the room, now fairly crowded with seven people inside. The air smelled of coffee and a half-eaten sandwich.


    The intrusion team switched towards securing the area. The two who had used their tasers now holstered them and pulled out their automatic pistols. The other two went outside to secure the corridor. The explosion of a flash grenade was sure to alert everyone on this floor and at least the two floors above and below. According to the registration data, there were only ordinary offices, but so was, on paper, the one behind them.


    Ayres took in the scene, inspecting the equipment and documents he found carefully. Behind him, his team tied up the two people they had surprised and searched for weapons and ID. The equipment was about what he had expected, but only a part of it. The more bulky antennas and dishes had to be somewhere else. For example through the second door. They had scanned the floor just before entering and there had been no signs of anyone in the other rooms connected to this office, so it was only after tying up the prisoners that the two police officers moved towards that door to secure the next room.


    The next room smelled of dust and stale air. It was dimly lit, the windows covered with simple cloth. Inside, what could have been a large office for a dozen people was in a state of bare walls and floors, an unfinished construction site. Probably the condition before any work to install offices was done. Agent Ayres had seen the layout of the area on the blueprints he had obtained from the building register. The first room had been intended as the lobby. There would be two more rooms, a kitchen and a toilet. But he had already found what he was searching for. While walls, floor and ceiling had been left unfinished, the room in front of him was far from empty.


    Despite his extensive training, Ayres could barely contain his excitement. The informant had been truthful. The jumble of equipment in front of him was clearly several interception devices, parts of it reaching all the way to the ceiling and some parts of it disappearing midway in strange angles the eye refused to properly recognize. These were the most exciting parts - multi-dimensional parts used to intercept hyperspace communications. Nobody outside the military should have these. In fact, even the military had just two of them. If for nothing else, there would be enough legal grounds for the arrests they had just conducted.


    His team was already moving out to secure the other rooms. There was nothing unexpected in the toilet and kitchen. One of the two smaller offices connecting to the large room - intended as supervisor offices or meeting rooms - was empty and the stale, dusty smell made it obvious it had not been used for quite a while, if ever. The other room contained an UPS to enable the other equipment to function even during a power failure and a small storage server. This was the Crown Jewels in Ayres’ mind. He expected it to contain the intercepted and possibly decrypted messages that would validate his actions and ensure his promotion. A few flashing lights showed it was still active. The enemy had had no time to shut it down, and he hoped it would still be decrypted.


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    He pulled out his communicator while walking back towards the control room they had busted into. ?Send in the tech team.“, he ordered. He would spend the five or so minutes it would take them pressing keys at the computers in the front to ensure no automatic screen lock activated. Taking them out without warning in the middle of the day had given him the opportunity to catch them in the middle of work, logged in.


    It took twenty minutes for the second listening post on the other side of Dangorod, in the unofficial industrial hub of the planet, to realize that something was wrong. The operation was even smaller, instead of two people per shift for three shifts around the clock, it was just three people in total, with overlapping times so they could cover the extended workday from about six in the morning to about eight in the evening. There was little activity at night, with the few factories running around the clock mostly automated anyways.


    Their equipment was less sophisticated as well. And their command structure went through the main site that had just been raided. There was an almost visible tension hanging in the air after they had realized the situation and the implications dawned on them. Once it did, the two traitors currently in the room acted rapidly. At the left workstation, a standard office computer standing on a standard office desk, the middle-aged woman rapidly entered the commands to wipe the data storage. At the other desk, a man in his mid-twenties had panic in his eyes as he typed out a message to the network of listening posts this one was but a part of. He thought of omitting the Dangorod main station so that whoever compromised it was not warned. The message was short and to the point: ?Dangorod main likely compromised. Dangorod secondary initiating data wipe and retreat.“


    He sent the message through the encryption pipeline and out into hyperspace. Doing so had a high probability of revealing their position, as all hyperspace senders on Dangorod had to be registered and theirs wasn’t. The necessary technology and power demands limited them to large corporations and a few very wealthy individuals, so the total number on the planet was less than a hundred. An unknown sender suddenly transmitting was certain to start an investigation.


    Glancing over his shoulder he noticed his companion still busy with erasing as many digital traces as possible, so he sent out a second message, via ground wave. It was directed at their colleagues. It read: ?Station compromised. Disappear.“


    He pressed ?send“ with a slight tremor in his hand. He had known about the security protocol, but after three years on the job had not really expected it to be used, much less by him. He shook himself back to the moment and walked quickly over to the corner with the three lockers. Within a minute, he had dressed and put his personal belongings and some of the small or mobile computer equipment into a large backpack.


    ?You done, Tracy?“, he asked the woman, his fear of what would come next bleeding slightly into his tone of voice. She nodded factually: ?Almost. Ten seconds.“


    He hesitated for a few seconds about whether he should go or wait. Twice he turned his body towards the door and back into the room. Tracy was more of a co-worker than a friend, but they had spent many hours working next to each other. Finally he decided that anyway ten second were almost over and he could just as well wait. The faint humming of the equipment in the next room faded out as the listening post shut down. It was far above his understanding of communications technology, which had always bothered him slightly.


    Tracy jumped out of her seat and took the small computer with her as he sprinted across the room, without unplugging it first. Cables snapped and the locker door clattered as she threw it open. In just a few seconds she had shoveled her personal items into a bag, stuffed the computer in with them and half donned her coat. She walked over to the exit while dressing.


    For the last time, the two left the listening post.