"I know there's been a lot of speculation as to how, or if, the ESA has superluminal com capability," she said. "There was a lot of evidence pointing to the fact they must, and now we know how. We've identified eleven Bluebird boxes, all assigned to CIS, that appear to be in Alliance hands. They're using our network to pass messages to each other, encoding them with simple text ciphers so they don't trip the automated checks by transmitting encrypted data streams."

"Son of a bitch," Celesta muttered. "That's brazen."

"To say the least," Jillian said. "Once we were able to verify how they were doing it, we were able to pull the raw message data from the archives to see exactly what they were doing. Once we put the whole picture together, their actions along the border region make a lot more sense."

"I'm awake now," Pitt said.

"Me too," Jackson said, leaning forward.

"There is a small group within the ESA's government working with a small group of people within the Federation's government," Pike said. "At first, we thought this was the ESA working with traitors within our own government to topple the Federation, but now, we realize it's a group of highly connected insiders trying to take down both."

"You said what?" Jackson asked after a long pause as people tried to digest that news.

"This…cabal…for lack of a better term is not working with the blessing of the Alliance Council. What they're trying to do is drive both sides to war with each other with their thumb the on the scale to make sure the Alliance comes out victorious. As soon as that happens, this shadow group will move quickly to take control of the Alliance, thus controlling all of humanity with the exception of Earth." Pike paused to take a drink and look at something off-camera. "And nobody wants Earth, of course."

"We've picked out the major players within the ESA: Makov, Chan, and Pak. Zhang was also part of the inner circle, but I snagged his dumb ass shortly after the Odmena disaster."

"Where does Kohl fit into this?" Jackson asked.

"He's their attack dog," Pike said. "He has autonomy and a lot of access to military units thanks to Councilman Makov. His job is to create chaos and, like we thought before, become the Alliance's answer to you. They wanted his name to be feared and in the general population's lexicon the way Wolfe is within the ESA.

"The war crimes he committed at Odmena, and the loss of so much critical hardware, caused them some concern. There was talk of retiring him permanently, but the decision was they were already too far committed on their course of action to try and bring in another flag officer to command their semi-legal military units they had harassing Federation settlements and bases along the border region."

"Do we know who is involved on our side?" Pitt asked.

"Nobody is mentioned by name in the dispatches," Jillian said. "We have a few people in mind, but our side is much more careful about masking their involvement. We do feel confident in saying there are at least five people from within the CIS and another eight in CENTCOM who have been actively helping this cabal. We're also assuming they have help from within Parliament."