"Zhang has been squeezed for all he's worth, which wasn't much," Pike said. "If he's holding out for a better deal, I'm not sure what the hell more he expects us to offer. Either way, he's now claiming he's told us everything he knows."

The newest class of Broadhead Pike flew was a significantly larger ship than its predecessors. Even though, it was still becoming cramped with four passengers aboard, two of them children with short attention spans. Jillian had begged him to be put to work, so Pike had let her start parsing through the intel he'd received from Wolfe's traitor, thinking he would humor her just to occupy the time.

She'd surprised him, however, when she quickly noticed patterns in the dispatches between Trapp and her handlers, things Pike had missed completely. After that humbling, the trained Agent had been giving the former Fleet officer full rein to see what else she could dig up that he overlooked or dismissed.

"There seems to be three dynamics at play here not two," Jillian said, looking at the ceiling as she did when concentrating. "We've not been able to figure out what the Alliance has been doing because we've been assuming they're moving in a coordinated effort. What I'm seeing is that this shadow council—I made that up so you can't take credit for it—has been provoking the Federation to get specific responses. Those responses confuse the Alliance's traditional military command, but they're still forced to counter them as best they can."

"And then those responses make no sense to us, but they might if we take into account they might not know what your shadow council has done already," Pike said. "It tracks. It would also be pretty easy for an analyst to chew the data and correlate all the major events on timeline and prove or disprove your theory. In fact, I'm forwarding that on now."

"You trust your data analysis division to give you a straight answer?"

"I have access to outside analysts I trust," Pike said. "Keeps it off the official record. It's too bad your husband blew up the Cube. I bet it would be able to look at all this and build us a predictive model telling us where to pick up the head bad guy while he was taking a crap."

"Charming," Jillian said, making a face. "But you do have a point. That machine almost made things too easy sometimes."

"Does Jackson still talk about it?" Pike asked. "I know he and it were…close."

"I think he very much regrets what he had to do. The Cube was a unique, precious thing in the universe, and the two of them did have a special bond. Destroying it has never sat well with him, and it wasn't because of what it could do for the Federation or humanity in general. He told me that he felt like it was a betrayal of his oath, like he'd killed one of his human crewman to save his own ass."