Cultists!
There had always been espionage on the moon. Wars were expensive; spies were cheap. Governments spied on each other, on the mega-corporations, and in the European Union’s case, itself. There was plenty of market-driven spying, too. Companies needed an edge just as much as governments did, and business was brisk.
Or at least it had been. Recent events had been bad for the spy business. Ironically, the most prominent one Tobias could find wasn’t even from his country.
“I knew Shirley, a little,” Rushan Turkel told him when he called her. She had been Qocho Khaganate in the old days, but was now all-in on supporting Hu Mali and her Chinese Coalition. “Not enough to know her real name, you understand.”
“Why would you know her at all?”
Turkel gave him the tiredest smile he had ever seen. It was hard to guess a long-termer’s age on the moon, thanks to the lower gravity, but when she smiled she looked close to what used to be the mandatory retirement age. “We had to make sure that Shirley’s Space Force embezzlement rings had nothing to do with my Red Imperial sleeper cults. After that? There just weren’t that many of us up here. We could talk shop, if we were careful.”