The General twisted his manipulators again, in the Shoal equivalent of a nod, before guiding Trader towards a more secluded corner of the chamber.

'Surely we don't need to hide from your own interrogators?' Trader protested.

'Forgive an old fish's habits, but I'd feel better if we spoke with at least the illusion of privacy' The General switched their comms mode over to a private one-to-one network, the timbre of his voice changing slightly as a result. 'We have a discovery of major importance here, my old friend. And it's not necessarily good news.'

A leaden weight sank to the very core of Trader's being, like a falling star plummeting to the depths of the Mother of Oceans. He knew immediately he wasn't going to like whatever the General had to tell him, because the old fool would never have dragged him all this way if Trader himself weren't already somehow deeply involved.

'Continue,' Trader replied at length.

'We have been tracking the movements of several Bandati scouts for some time now,' the General explained. 'They each separately boarded a coreship visiting a Bandati system known as Night's End, then exploited a flaw in our security protocols to smuggle themselves into areas of the galaxy not normally permitted to their species. Once we discovered the breach in security, we managed to keep track of our friend here through four different star systems and three different coreships before he briefly fell off our radar.'

Coreships were the means by which the Shoal ruled a substantial part of the galaxy, having jealously guarded the secret of faster-than-light travel for more than a quarter of a million years. They were planet-sized multi-environment starships, capable of carrying entire populations rapidly between different systems. The majority of species were rarely allowed to travel more than a few hundred light-years beyond their home systems, but with sufficient subterfuge, some might find the means to travel further.