No Preparation mission items available in Preparation system

I recently pledged allegiance to Zachary Hudson. From reading forums and wiki pages, I understand his Preparation missions are supposed to be completed as follows:

• Go to a system listed in the Powers Preparation tab
• Go to a station (not sure if it's any station or has to be a specific one)
• Access Powers Contact in the stations Contacts menu
• Pick up Restricted Intel from Powers Contact
• Deliver intel to a controlled system

I had a nice little mining route going with my Type-6, but I abandoned it to try and get some merit points by doing preparation tasks. I traveled a huge distance to get to a Preparation system (Meenates), and now there's no option to pick up intel at any station in that system. There's an option to nominate the Meenates for expansion in every Powers contact menu, but I don't have any nominations to use currently.

From what I've read on forums, someone somewhere in this system should be able to sell/give me up to 10 intels (I'm at allegiance level 1), but I've visited every station and no such luck.

Am I missing something here? Is it too late in the weekly "cycle" to get intel? Is it because my faction can't afford to expand here this cycle? I'm with Hudson, and we can't afford to expand anywhere this cycle, so I thought that didn't matter.

So why not just try another Preparation system?

The Prep systems are pretty far apart for my current FSD, so before I travel a huge distance to another Prep system, or just go all the way back to my route, I'd like to plan my moves to be efficient. If there's a reason to target some Prep systems instead of others, that'd be great to know in advance.