Before

The man in black sat in the dark so that he seemed like just a white, floating face. His eyes were shadowed like a skull’s.
“Maintaining secrecy will be the greatest issue. If I am to bring you in, that might mean a confrontation. If it’s too clean… Central might smell a rat.”
The woman with him smiled and said: “Just don’t do any permanent damage, and we’ll call it even. It’ll be worth it to get a shot at the bullseye, anyway. No matter what the outcome is.”
“If you say so,” said the man in black. He hadn’t been fighting the good fight as long as she had, though he was the older of the two of them by a handful of decades. He didn’t look it – he had a lifetime of psychic conditioning from the Agency to thank for that. “I’m not sure. My instincts…” he pressed a palm to the side of his head as a stinging pain began to ring in his brain. “They’re screaming at me not to go through with this. The odds are too thin,”
“Too thin for two, perhaps.” said Lydia Marsage

Captain Wisdom was drinking in the Old Tub, the local watering hole of choice for star-sailors and the like. Her crisp uniform was ill at ease with the rest of the regulars, but her money was as good as anybody’s. Even so, conversations took place in hushed tones when she was around. A uniform like that meant Imperial oversight was rarely far away.
As she went to her pocket to pay for her last drink, a gloved hand placed a couple of chip on the bar and pushed it towards the tender.
“Can we talk?” said the man in black. Captain Wisdom looked the man up and down. She immediately recognised the outfit as Agency undercover gear, and being asked for a private chat by the agency usually ended in being nailed to a chair and asked questions you didn’t know the answer to. Something, however, told her otherwise in this instance. Maybe it was the fact he had paid for her drink. Maybe it was the fact he had come in to speak rather than flattening the bar from outside. She couldn’t detect any mental intrusion to make her feel well-disposed towards him, so she decided it must be genuine.

During

Agent Black sat cross-legged on the bed of the cruise ship and composed his report. …believe Marsage to be travelling on cruiser vessel Pluton…will engage…recommend zero-interference. That should do it. They wouldn’t be able to resist giving the game away to the captain, and that would be her signal. That radio technician was a genius, and they would have the coordinates of the Command Station within days.

While Holness Black sent his report, the formidable Madame Palastora and her taciturn daughter went among the passengers. Dr. Chase was of particular interest to her. Though she was compelled to maintain her cover, she found herself just as sure that Chase would be easily brought over to their way of thinking. Of course, Chase was one of Wisdom’s ‘special passengers’ anyway.
Inside the Madame Palastora disguise, behind the black compound eyes of a Hulnian, Lydia Marsage kept her eyes out for any suspicion in the eyes that surrounded her. Palastora was flamboyant, but an old woman is easily overlooked. She couldn’t rule out the possibility of another agent. If Central had twigged to their plan, it could be over before move one had even been completed.
The businessmen seemed strange. Vocally they were rivals, but they seemed to follow each other around all over the ship, seemingly for the sole purpose of always having someone to argue with. She watched them for a while, spoke with them once or twice, and decided that they were if not harmless to each other, at least that they weren’t in the direct employ of the Agency.

After the storm, Captain Wisdom took Muijen aside and told her to ignore what she had said about the communication system to the crew and treat it as her top priority. Muijen was a brilliant technician, but not overly invested in The Plan. Then, she knew that she always had the rendevous in her back pocket as an escape plan.
After the message came through as the Captain knew it would, she went straight to Agent Black. They knew that what happened next, between the ship being immobilised and the Agency Retrieval vessel’s arrival which was already being prepared, was crucial.

Dr Chase was a smart woman, and it hadn’t taken her long to realise there was more to Madame Palastora than met the eye. She didn’t realise just how much, though, until they were discussing her plans to leave the ship at the same time as the Captain’s secret passengers down in the hold.
“Do you have a plan?” said Palastora. “You’re too important to just disappear, surely!”
Chase could only shrug. She hoped not, was all she said.

The shot that was heard all over the ship, the one from the snub barrel of Lydia Marsage’s handheld force projector, impacted harmlessly into the wall. “Go!” she shouted, ushering Dr Chase and her family out. Black had waited for the perfect moment, his Agency training granting him the utmost patience. The retrieval ship wouldn’t come until he had her in chains. The Captain’s comm beeped as the Chases ran into the elevator and made for the hold, where the cargo container would be dropped into the emptiness of space with all souls aboard.
There it floated for one, two three hours, during which time the Pluton was well out of scanner reach. Then, a black ship, modified with highly non-standard exhaust dampers and emergency heat sinks that made it invisible to radia-sensators and highly resistant to visual-spectrum search, scooped up the hermetically sealed container. They would go back to the secret place, Croth Minor, and be made part of the tiny upstart community there, Dr Chase and all.

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, you pig!” yelled Marsage as she was taken aboard by the Agency thugs. The Captain accepted her arrest with slightly more bemusement, but Agent Black had assured her that this was perfectly normal. “Remember what I told you, Muijen,” she said quietly to the unassuming technician. The technician, born of Thiss and shortly to become a heroic figure to millions across the multigalactic sector, said: “Sure.”

Now

Agent Holness Black walked into the observation chamber, where two analysts and a Reverend Allan watched on black-and-white videoscreens over the footage of the interrogations. They were particularly enjoying watching Lydia Marsage’s, as the cursing woman spat out increasingly violent expletives in between explosions of violence.

The woman actual, as opposed to the digital representation of same, was languishing in a cell, dark, deep and dire indeed until she remarked to her guard that she had just remembered something very important she had forgotten to mention in her interrogation. She popped open two buttons on her shirt and said that it was so secret that she would have to whisper it to him and him alone and well; if he fell for that then frankly they may as well have left the cell unlocked and unguarded.

The Captain, Lucille Wisdom, said to a fellow-sailor, one of the technicians on the roving vassal-station that carried them: “Have you heard? Loose lips sink ships,” when she heard him mention an upcoming fleet movement. Then she laughed as if at a joke only she could hear.

On a million planets, anywhere with a receiver dish or even a wire connection, a sudden broadcast came through on top of everything else, overwriting the news, the weather, and the results of Who Wants To Fall In Love With A Nameless Space Entity season eighteen, in which the nameless space entity shocked viewers by not only refusing to choose any of its suitors as winner, but had also decided that it was tired of being a nameless space entity and chosen to become a middle-management clerk named Eric Golbthwait. (Things like this happen every day somewhere in the universe)
The contents of the unwanted message were extraordinarily simple, and simply extraordinary: Precise spatiordinates of the central command base of the Agency, which had remained hidden for a thousand years, since the dawning of the current Imperial Dynasty. Suddenly, it seemed, the Agency’s secret operations were a little more accessible.

Holness Black, who had already handed in his resignation, walked to the hangar bay of the vassal-station with a smile on his face for the first time in years. While everyone about him was losing their head, he strolled up to the deck of one of the personal transports, locked in a set of spatiordinates for it to fly to at top speed, and made himself a cup of coffee. He wanted to be alert when he arrived.

On the Pluton, oblivious to the rest of the galaxy, the two businessmen continued to argue over which manufacturer of useless computer parts was better.