The Imperial Intelligence academy to which Lokin was sent was on a small world of otherwise minimal strategic value, unsettled as far as he knew apart from the Imperial Intelligence organisation. It was not just an academy, it was the regional Intelligence HQ as well. Consequently it was large, well over a thousand people working in the complex of buildings, only around fifty of them agents in training.

Other than the people employed directly by Intelligence, there was a sizable town surrounding it made up mainly of support – schools, hospitals, shops, communications, transport, power generation, droid production, etc; architects, civil engineers, builders and allied trades to provide and maintain roads, housing, offices and all the other buildings. There was a large agricultural region and hydroponics enough to make the world largely self-supporting foodwise. There was a police force, a set of barracks for the military, and a spaceport. All of this needed industry to support it with manufacture, assembly, maintenance and repairs of droids and machinery. Then there were the cosmetic things: gardeners to maintain the parks, a small colony of artists, musicians, actors.

Lokin had never thought before about just how interconnected everything was and how complex the web of a city could be. They studied these linkages a lot later on when considering sabotage tactics. The thousands of occupants of the town were, on the whole, fairly tolerant about their workplaces being used for practicing infiltration and sabotage by the trainee agents. Mostly the damage was minor, and Intelligence always paid for full repairs plus quite generous compensation for the inconvenience.

For the first few days after he arrived at the academy they were put through a series of intensive medical tests to assess everything from resting heart rate down to how fast their toenails grew, or so it seemed. Quite a few of his his intake - a group of ten all around 16 or 17 years old - became vociferously fed up, but Lokin was fascinated and asked question after question. The medics seemed amused by his interest and patiently answered all of them. (A long time later he found a note in his file from one of them which simply read: "Insatiable curiosity. Recommend full medical training so someone else can answer his questions for a change.")

Then they started on the physical and mental ability testing, fitness, balance, hand-eye coordination, pattern finding, problem solving. Individual strengths and weaknesses started to emerge, all noted in their files by the instructors. There was a debriefing session after each test, and Lokin not only found himself stretched by the testing but learning a huge amount from the post-test discussions.

He managed to make a mark very early on during the testing. They were given a series of questions about obscure things and told to find the answers any way they could. Naturally the group went immediately to their holonet terminals, and started searching. Lokin was going to initiate a search, but then sat frowning thoughtfully at his screen. The instructor had said "any way you can". Any way. He remembered that, during the initial orientation tour, they had been shown a place called, or possibly just nicknamed, the Link, an information hub filled with about twenty people (and a hundred or so data screens) whose whole job was just to find things out.

Lokin typed a few random things into his terminal then locked it, blanked the screen and stood up. The girl next to him, a hard-faced cynical 17-year-old called Adnega, eyed him. "Where are you going?"

"Just to get a drink", Lokin replied blandly. "Set a search algorithm up, it'll take a while for the results."

: "Insatiable curiosity. Recommend full medical training so someone else can answer his questions for a change.")

Hahaha! Cute, and very Lokin, lol.

He wandered casually out of the room, then went swiftly and purposefully to the Link. Assuming a confidence he didn't really feel, he walked up to the reception desk and handed the clerk on duty his datapad. "Can you get that information for me?"

The clerk, a middle-aged man with greying hair and twinkling blue eyes, glanced over the list then gave Lokin a knowing smile. "Of course we can, Mr Lokin, we'll probably have most of it on file somewhere. But you gave me your datapad, not a good idea." He shook his head with mock sadness.

Lokin was a bit taken aback. "Why not?"

"Well, for a start, I have this little gadget here", he tapped a plain black box on his desk, about two centimetres thick and ten square. "I just have to rest your datapad on this for six seconds and it'll take a full mirror of all the information on it. And then I've got this one", he pointed at something that just looked like an innocent pen. "That'll apply a microdot transmitter so I could track you wherever you go."

Lokin's eyes were widening and the clerk chuckled. "I've got this too, though it's a bit more obvious, but I'd just have to distract your attention for about thirty seconds or so and I'd have the case open, an extra little chip inserted and case closed again, and then I'd be able to see everything you do on the pad. Or I could spray various drugs on the surface which are absorbed through the skin, and in a few minutes have you unconscious, singing your life story to the world, or just dead."

Lokin stared at him, horrified. "I am never handing my datapad to anyone again, ever!"

The clerk chuckled again. "Lesson learned, excellent. Name's Stac Pollaidh by the way, just call me Poll, everyone else does."

"Thanks ...err.. Poll. Can I come back and talk to you again some time about all these gadgets and stuff?" Lokin looked hopeful.

"Oh, you'll get all this in your lessons later on, don't worry. But sure, any time you're passing, drop in. Anyone here will be happy to chat about what they do. After all, you might end up as one of us some day." Poll winked. "Now, let's see about this information."

Half an hour later, Lokin was striding cockily back to his holonet terminal. The others were all still hard at work. He surreptiously uploaded the data and then sat back for a moment, smirking with satisfaction. But then he pretended to carry on working, just so the others wouldn't suspect anything.

Another couple of hours passed, and then the instructor returned to see how they were doing. All of the group had obtained at least some of the information, some more than others, but only Lokin had the complete set.

The instructor knew exactly what Lokin had done, unfortunately. Whether the trainees were tracked constantly (probably) or whether Poll had reported it (possibly), he didn't know, but he waited with defiant resignation for the inevitable dressing down.

However, to the amazement of all and jealous stares of the others, the instructor awarded him a commendation. "Mr Lokin did what none of the rest of you did. He listened to exactly what I asked for, and found the swiftest and most efficient way to do it. Don't see this as cheating or getting around the rules, round here it's called lateral thinking and it's strongly encouraged. Always remember that, whilst Agents sometimes work alone, they are almost never in complete isolation. Imperial Intelligence is like a single organism, each part of it supporting the others.”

He looked round at the group. “The object of Agent training is to turn you into specialised generalists.”

Then he smiled at their confused expressions. "We need you to be able to do many different things and to a high level, but no-one can do everything or know everything. When it comes to needing something very specific, use all the specialist resources you have. That might be a team of people that you're working with directly, or it might be calling back to Central Headquarters or a local HQ such as this one for support. Mr Lokin has demonstrated this admirably."

Initially that caused a certain amount of resentment and Lokin found himself ostracised for a few days. But within a couple of weeks, they were all vying with one another to find the best ways of 'cheating', and discussing their methods together.

They all learned very quickly that, by the nature of the work, Intelligence constantly expected to be operating in a web of lies and deceit. They were trained to suspect everything, to weigh up and judge all information against knowledge and experience. But never too much, a balance of sanity needed to be maintained and an unhealthy paranoia must not be allowed to develop. They underwent thorough psychological assessments on a regular basis.

The majority of them were loners by preference, but they were forced into frequent situations where they had to cooperate to succeed, or indeed to survive. Despite their solitary instincts, most of them developed a circle of close friends and learned to rely on each other. Many, including Lokin, even had a few brief affairs with fellow students over the years he spent at the Academy. But none lasted, and no-one expected that they would. Friendship was one thing, but close emotional attachments were definitely not encouraged.

That was probably part of the attitudes trained into them by the monthly so-called orientation sessions, which all were required to attend without exception. Death might have been a possible excuse, but even then it was reckoned among the trainees that you would need to present a fully signed death certificate in person.

None of them knew what happened in these sessions. For all of them it was the same; they remembered walking into the room, sitting at the desks, putting on a pair of headphones. Then they were outside the room and walking away again. The two hours in between were a blank. Obviously there was some sort of hypnosis and probably drug administration going on.

Lokin and a couple of the others doing medic training tried several times with blood and urine samples from themselves, taking them before and after the sessions and looking for any telltale metabolites, but there was never anything that they managed to identify. If there was a drug, it was a low dose with a very short half-life and which broke down into metabolic products indistinguishable from normal body chemistry. He never found out whether there was a drug or not.

Apart from the orientation sessions, the training was much as might be expected.

Certain elements were common to all of the trainees, such as survival, living off the land, coping with hostile environments and wildlife; also survival of life in general, dealing with all sorts of cities, political systems, and social environments. They studied history, sometimes of the most obscure events and worlds imaginable, but which provided examples of different missions, approaches, outcomes. And general galactic knowledge, important strategic planets and trade routes, famous and not so famous battlegrounds. In general, anything which might prove useful to be built on in the future.

With regard to the more practical aspects of the job, all the recruits received at least basic training in the entire spectrum of the curriculum, but each of them rapidly identified the areas which their strengths lay. With the constant oversight of the instructors, and regular psych assessments, they were steered into the specialisations where they would be most useful and effective.

To his slight disappointment, Lokin didn't get very far in weapons training. He couldn't seem to cope with ranged attacks at all, consistently scoring way below average in target practice. He also didn't have the patience or eye for terrain needed for long range sniping, and it bored him, scouting an area, setting up cover and then possibly waiting hours for the one perfect shot. He would have missed the shot anyway, and wanted more action than that. Scouting was fine, but only as long as it was looking for a way to get into somewhere, out of somewhere, or past something.

So the instructors moved him into advanced infiltration and close quarters combat, training him in the use of stealth technology and sneak attacks, either unarmed or with close range weapons. He finally settled on vibroknife and blaster pistol as his weapons of choice, but never became more than acceptably competent with either.

He learned everything possible about security systems and defence mechanisms, memorising the schematics of all the common Empire and Republic spaceships and frequently used buildings. (As with the Empire, the Republic had its favoured designs for such things as spaceports, troop barracks, government and military administrative centres, and so on.) He practiced until he could literally get through the layouts blindfolded, not entirely practical in terms of watching out for the area's defences, but very useful for a swift exit from a building filled with dense smoke or a ship with complete power loss including lighting.

Sabotage and the use of explosives didn't interest him much, though he learned to use them for infiltration purposes.

What he most enjoyed was evading fighting altogether: techniques of avoidance, disguise, misdirection, diversion, distraction, or best of all, using his wits to just talk his way out of things. He was extremely good at this.

Building on that, he received intensive training in deceit, obfuscation, diplomacy, intimidation, misdirection, seduction, persuasion, questioning, and interrogation techniques. He studied in which situations to use them, and to counter them when they were being used on him, either resisting or using the opportunity to supply convincing misinformation. Making up the misinformation was fun too.

He went back to the Link fairly regularly, chatting with Poll and his colleagues, and learning everything he could about the gadgets they had and the practical everyday use of all his theoretical training. He learned about searching, cross-referencing, linking, hacking, slicing, spiking, tracing, security, encryption, monitoring, code-breaking, in fact anything at all that could reasonably come under the heading of "sneaky computer stuff". With the extra knowledge he acquired this way, he was very rapidly moved into the advanced classes.

Lokin loved almost every minute of it. He was stretched and challenged far beyond anything he'd imagined, just as Minder Seventy-two had promised. He was with other students every bit his equal, for the first time in his life, and the competition pushed all of them even further up.

Lol, classic agent training - let's teach you all how to cheat!

Agents don't cheat, they adapt to circumstances

Simultaneously with his Agenting education, he was also doing full medical training, including specialisations in areas which caught his interest. Whether he genuinely chose these areas or whether he was subtly pushed towards them he never knew, but in any case he threw himself into studying with an enthusiasm he'd never known he could feel.

He worked with many doctors at the hospitals, but a few caught his attention more than most. One was a doctor called Geodha Ruadh, close to retiring, but who was a specialist in xenobiology. That being one of Lokin's interests, he spent a disproportionate amount of time with Dr Ruadh. The older man cultivated a constant air of bland benignity, perfectly friendly but completely opaque, impossible ever to know what he was really thinking. This intrigued Lokin, and he began to try to project the same sort of aura himself, though with little success. The other trainees just asked him what he was smirking about all the time.

He also received extra medical training at the academy, particularly in the pharmacology and toxicology area. There was the obvious matter of field medicine, in which he was highly competent but not particularly interested. (The psych analysis said this was because he preferred not to engage in combat.) What interested him far more was the use of drugs and poisons, and here he excelled.

He added a tiny discreet sleep dart projector to his gadget collection, and started to build up a selection of drugs to carry around with him. With these he could kill quickly or slowly; anaesthetise for a few minutes or many hours; mimic various diseases; lower inhibitions; reduce strength, coordination or willpower; cause confusion; induce hypnosis, etc. These (along with antidotes where available) were all added to the medical kit* he took on operations with the standard kolto packs, surgical probes, toxin scanners and so on.

He also discovered, during his advanced pharmacology studies, that Minder Seventy-two had lied to him, that the fruit juice had in fact been laced with a rapidly-absorbed and fast-acting hyoscyamine derivative, which is why he'd talked so much to the Minder in the initial interview. But by the time he found that out, he was so far indoctrinated into the Imperial Intelligence ethos that he wasn't surprised, or even resentful, just a little scornful of the naïve youngster he'd been at the time.

* It's probably best not to go into the experimentation which led to the selection of the extra contents of Lokin's medical kit; it certainly wouldn't get through any Ethics Committee/Institutional Review Board on Earth.

In the name of science!! And sneakiness

Aged twenty-one, a doctor of medicine with specialisations in xenobiology and cytogenetics, as well as surviving and succeeding in the intensive Imperial Agent training. Lokin had come a very long way from the rebellious boy caught vandalising the Spires of Victory. He felt able to take on pretty much anything. When he put on the official uniform for the first time that morning, and walked unchallenged into the central operations room of Imperial Intelligence HQ, he actually felt proud of himself.

He went through various formalities, was briefly introduced to the Head of Operations, known as Keeper, who gave him what was obviously a generic welcome speech, and then passed back to a Minder who gave him his sealed assignment orders. With mingled excitement and trepidation he entered the requisite passwords and ID and read them. They stated: “Assigned to Cipher Twelve by request. Report to Watcher One.” That was it?

Wondering, he asked a couple of people where to find Watcher One, and was eventually directed to a terminal to the side of the room, where a middle-aged man with greying hair, dark skin and eyes, and an intent expression was working. “Sir, Junior Agent Eckard Lokin. I’m to report to you.”

“Ah yes, Lokin. Sit down, I need to finish this then I’ll be with you.”

The code on the screen in front of the Watcher wasn’t one that he recognised. He could see patterns in it, but the display moved too fast for him to fix anything long enough to analyse it. After about five minutes, One cleared the board and switched off the screen.

“So... a brand new Agent, come to show us old ones how to do the job, eh?” A friendly smile, no sneering.

“Well sir”, he started but the Watcher cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Just call me One, or Watcher. Been that so long I’m not even sure what my name was any more.”

“Watcher, then.” He hesitated, unsure of himself.

“First posting is always tough”, Watcher One nodded sympathetically. “I’m not trained in field work myself, though I think the next generation of Watchers may have that as a requirement, but I’ve seen enough of you pass through my hands.” He looked old and tired for a moment, but then resumed his relaxed good humour.

“You’ve been assigned to our newest Cipher Agent - you understand what a Cipher is?”

Lokin nodded.

“Then you should understand why your orders are so brief. Basically, you go where the Cipher requires you to be and do what he needs done, which may or may not come directly from central Intelligence orders and protocols. Ciphers have a high degree of autonomy. They make their own decisions and do what’s needed to complete the mission, and it won’t necessarily follow the standard operating procedures you’ve been trained on.”

He pondered for a moment. “You’ll be part of a small team – Cipher Twelve, yourself, and another junior Agent, who is also at the final stage of her training to become a full Agent. She’s due in tomorrow, you’ll meet her then. Twelve has shown excellent training and mentoring skills, which is why he tends to get lumbered with the beginners.” One grinned. “He seems to enjoy it, and he selected you both himself from the lists.”

Lokin listened. This wasn’t exactly the sort of briefing he’d expected.

“Twelve has only just been given the Cipher designation. Ciphers are pretty rare, it needs a very special sort of person, and a lot of Agents don’t even survive long enough to be considered, so he starts off by being exceptional. He’s very experienced, very intelligent, and very knowledgeable. And very secretive too.” He chuckled. “But then, aren’t we all? What I’m saying is that you need to trust him and he needs to be able to rely on you. You’ll learn a lot from him, not just about the job.”

“Got it, Watcher”, Lokin nodded again. “I keep my ears open, my mouth shut, and follow orders.”

Watcher One frowned slightly. “That would be an excellent answer if this was a straightforward military posting. You should know by now that Intelligence is different. Still, as a starting principle it will do. But you will need to learn independent thought and especially adaptability, if you're to be a good Agent.”

He glanced at the blank screen for a moment as if seeking inspiration. “Ah yes, the important bit: I’m your liaison. I’m normally here, or if I’m not, one of the other Watchers can always find me. Anything you need, any data you find, I’m the one you come to. I and my team are responsible for supporting you in any way we can, including linking your data into data from other sources, and feeding back whatever’s necessary. Also any information you request or we think you need, and anything particular we need you to go after.”

He paused and then added, “Unsurprisingly, everything you do is confidential, except to Cipher Twelve and myself. By the nature of the work, Cipher operations are at the very top level of the secrecy pole. From this moment on, unless you’ve got specific instructions from Twelve, you will communicate only with me or Keeper within Imperial Intelligence.”

Lokin was tapping into his datapad. This was more like it.

“Incidentally, by “everything you do”, he means everything. I don’t want you even talking about what type of fruit juice you want to drink without thinking about the implications”, came a familiar voice from behind him.

“There you are, Twelve”, Watcher One smiled cheerily. “Here’s your brand new Agent, all nice and shiny, fresh from the academy, just like you ordered.”

Lokin swung round in astonishment, to meet the well-remembered cool grey-blue faintly smiling eyes of the thin-faced Minder Seventy-two from five years ago.

Twelve told Lokin to spend the rest of the day familiarising himself with the headquarters while he attended to some business, and then to meet him in one of the briefing rooms the next morning. Lokin was only too willing to indulge his curiosity and happily wandered around where he could – his ID wasn't enough to get him through many of the doors, but the attempts didn't seem to get him into any trouble.

He found the archives, but was smilingly prevented from doing any research by overly helpful archivists. (He noted as many of the security details as he could, for future reference when he had time to think about getting around them.) So he spent most of his time in the main operations rooms, observing what went on and chatting to a few of the Minders, Fixers and even briefly again with Watcher One, about what they did and how things worked. He'd heard it all in theory, and been through it in mock missions at the Academy, but the real thing was still subtly different.

The next morning he went straight to the briefing room, but instead of Cipher Twelve, he found a small young woman with black hair cut very short and lively brown eyes, who bounced out of her chair as soon as he came in.

“Hey, you must be Eckard Lokin! I'm Cirean Geardail, Junior Agent. Cipher Twelve told me about you, we'll be working together with him. Great to meet you! Grab a coffee and come and sit down!”

Lokin was rather taken aback by such ebullience, but pulled himself together and replied with his best opaque blandness, as much like Dr Ruadh as possible. “Ah yes, I was told that there would be another Agent working with us. Very pleasant to make your acquaintance.”

Cirean laughed. “Sorry, I guess I do come over a bit excitable, but really, you know, this is exciting, isn't it? Our first time being real Agents?"

“I think we should be taking our role seriously”, replied Lokin, a bit repressively.

“Come on, lighten up a bit!” She grinned. “I'll calm down, I promise.”

Lokin got himself a coffee, the aroma reminding him forcibly of the interview with Minder Seventy-two. It seemed like half a lifetime ago, but the memory was still vivid.

He took a seat across from Cirean, and studied her while he sipped. After a minute, he realised she was studying him just as intently.

“See?” she said. “I can be quiet and calm, if I try really really hard.” She winked at him.

Reluctantly, Lokin chuckled. “All right, I admit it, you can be quiet.” She was actually quite attractive, he thought, and obviously intelligent or she wouldn't have undergone Agent training. It was quite possible that her over-excited inconsequential chatter was a pose, just as much as his own attempts at unreadable blandness were.

“Cipher Twelve told me he recruited you, but wouldn't tell me anything about it.” She smiled mischievously. “He brought me in too, I was playing truant from school one day – I was at Northern High – and decided to try free climbing Lord Ergast's monument. He stood at the bottom and watched, then applauded when I reached the top. Then he arrested me when I came down, at least that's what I thought he was doing. What happened to you?”

Lokin blinked. “Surprisingly similar. Though I'd just been expelled from Kaas City West, I didn't do much playing truant.”

Cirean grinned. “I think NH would have expelled me fairly soon, I was hardly there most of the time and was nothing but trouble when I was. So what did he find you doing?”

He grinned back. “I was vandalising the Spires of Victory sculpture, using desh metal to change the light flows. He let me finish, then brought me over here. If I'm honest, I was so scared I thought I was going to need fresh underwear.”

“Me too”, she nodded sympathetically. “So why did you get expelled?”

“I knew more than the teachers, got bored, messed around a lot until they kicked me out.” He shrugged.

“Yeah, my teachers were idiots too. But messing around is fun! I once reprogrammed the physics teacher's computer to play the short opening chorus from Victory at Chabosh – the opera about Tulak Hord, you know? - at high volume every time he changed the display slide. He couldn't stop it, but he was determined to pretend it didn't matter and finish the lesson. After half an hour, everyone in the class was singing along.” She beamed with joyful reminiscence. “I got a whole month detentions for that, but I only turned up for about half of them. The school complained to my parents, but they gave up on me years ago.”

Lokin laughed. “Do you know, I actually wish I'd thought of doing that.”

They carried on chatting, swapping tales of misbehaviour at school, and anecdotes from their Agent training. By the time Cipher Twelve joined them, after an hour or so, they'd both come to the conclusion that their skills balanced each other quite neatly, and they were well on the way to becoming firm friends.

Oh I'm so glad that his recruiter returned! Interesting guy, looking forward to this!

Excellent *rubs hands with Montgomery Burns-type glee and plans more plot twists*

(Six months later)

The missions Twelve had taken them on so far had given them a good idea of each other’s capabilities, and it rapidly became plain that he had made excellent choices; they all fitted together as though they’d been made for each other, not just in skills but as friends.

The missions had been almost laughably easy, however, and, despite his liking for Twelve, Lokin found himself inwardly sneering at the son of a Moff who’d obviously got his Cipher position through his father and just picked the simple jobs with little danger.

However, Twelve had just informed them that all the previous missions, although genuine enough, had been selected for training purposes. But this one was serious and for real. And there was a problem. A big problem. It wasn’t completely clear what had gone wrong, but the data Watcher One had supplied was totally inadequate for the facility that they needed to penetrate. The schematics were out of date, and security had clearly been beefed up considerably since the information on file. There was supposed to be an Imperial contact, but he hadn't reported in for over a year, and somehow no-one had thought to chase this up before.

The mission was critical, however, involving a Republic agent who was believed to have corrupted a high ranking Moff. Twelve was the only agent in the sector qualified to infiltrate the local Republic headquarters, discover exactly who the Republic agent was, any information he or she had retrieved, and find confirmation or otherwise of the Moff’s connection. At the same time, they needed to gather up to date and accurate information about the HQ facility itself, as well as troop dispositions, since they were there. Additionally, they were to try and find out what had happened to the embedded Imperial contact.

Twelve and Cirean expected to have to adjust on the fly, but Lokin still liked to plan ahead and know what he was going into and wasn’t pleased. “You’re sending us in there half-prepped! We have no idea what we’ll be up against and we probably won’t come out. Don’t you care what happens to us?”

Twelve’s expression didn’t change. “We are all expendable, Agent. Only the mission matters. Always remember that. If you cannot divorce yourself from your feelings, you have no place in Imperial Intelligence.”

“How can you be so cold?!”

“If you survive long enough, you'll find out. The odds are fair, for this one. Don’t underestimate yourselves. Now let’s go.”

They went, and did survive, surprisingly easily. This was by far the toughest job they’d done, but the practice missions had shown them exactly how to work together, each supporting the others. Whether it was the extra adrenalin or not he wasn’t sure, but all of them moved up several gears. Cirean was almost uncanny. She seemed to know where all the guards and defence positions were by instinct, and with absolute coolness and precision she dealt with them as necessary, slicing hostile droids, employing shielding tech while Lokin was working and they were stationary, tossing distracting and stunning grenades, and sending perfectly aimed lethal bolts from her sniper rifle. Almost nothing came close enough to need her vibroknife, but she was equally proficient with that when it was required.

He hadn't done advanced weapons training, of course, and wasn’t familiar enough with most of the gadgetry she employed, but his own basic training with blaster pistol and vibroknife gave him the realisation that, no matter how he practised, he would never in his whole life reach anything close to Cirean's standard. He already knew she was competent, but his respect for her rose considerably, and he accepted that the assessments at the academy had indeed been right; he could not do what she did.

All the while he spiked the computer terminals he needed and downloaded the data as Twelve directed. A lot of the data security was remarkably simple to crack - it didn’t occur to him at the time that it was actually quite good, but his training surpassed it by a wide margin and he was on top of his game. He kept a constant monitor on Cirean’s vital signs, sending a kolto stream her way when needed, supplying stims and adrenals, and occasionally using his carbonite projector to immobilise anything that looked too close or dangerous.

While Cirean and Lokin went through the building, Twelve had headed straight to the control centre and taken it over single-handedly. From there, he was keeping tabs on them throughout, relaying information that they needed, directing them to the right areas, advising them on tactics, picking up the data Lokin sent back. It all went like clockwork. They made a perfect team. That didn’t stop Lokin resenting Twelve’s willingness to sacrifice them for the sake of the mission.

Several missions later, some of the resentment was still there. But Lokin was learning to improvise a lot more, and he was also beginning to concede that it didn’t matter whether Twelve was the son of the Emperor or a Rylothian back alley slave trader. He was not a political appointee but someone who was very, very good at his job.

The three of them were back on Dromund Kaas for a couple of weeks R&R before heading out again. At least, that was the intention. Unfortunately, two days into their break, when they were relaxing over a drink in the Nexus Room cantina, Watcher One contacted them.

"Sorry to break into your leave, Twelve." He sounded cheerful and not at all apologetic.

"Not a problem", said Twelve politely, while Lokin and Cirean grimaced at each other, out of sight of the holocom. Twelve cast them a quelling glance, at which Lokin grinned and Cirean giggled.

"We've got a situation developing. If you could call into Headquarters as soon as possible, Keeper would be glad to see you."

"We'll be there first thing in the morning, One", said Twelve, and cut the call before the Watcher could say anything else. He switched his holocom off and returned it to his pocket.

"Have you two juniors no respect for your superiors?" he complained.

"Not a lot", said Lokin. He rolled his eyes expressively.

"Me neither", said Cirean, and giggled again.

"True, I did notice that about both of you from the start, I should have guessed it would extend to me too. I shall drown my sorrows in drink." He sighed heavily as he picked up his glass, and then grinned as Cirean poked him hard in the ribs.

***

The briefing the next morning was quite short. Carn Ban, a senior research administrator with the Imperial Science Bureau was planning to defect. He had access to a large amount of information about Imperial military research and technology, and it was vital to prevent that getting into Republic hands. Ban had got himself transferred to oversee some experiments on the Warhammer, a dreadnought temporarily assigned to military research, and which was scheduled to leave in two days. It was known that a Republic SIS unit was intending to intercept the ship to get him off.

The task was obvious: extract Carn Ban quickly and silently before the SIS got there, and get him back to Dromund Kaas. In the unlikely event that the extraction couldn't be completed, they were to neutralise him. A fast Intelligence patrol ship fitted with stealth technology would follow the Warhammer to do the pickup, staying just out of sensor range. They themselves would infiltrate the Warhammer covertly, rather than being officially assigned to the crew or the research passengers, as they would all be leaving with Ban. One person vanishing is odd, but four would be a lot more noticeable.

 

For anyone who was curious, the Moff had not been corrupted. The SIS agent had made several approaches, which was known, but the Moff had not succumbed to her charms. However, he hadn't reported the approaches either (hence the suspicion), so he was censured, demoted, and transferred to a dead end position in the Outer Rim. The SIS agent was identified and all her details passed back to Imperial Intelligence. The local contact had had a nervous breakdown from stress, resigned his position with the Republic military, married a local girl, and was peacefully and happily working in a speeder repair shop. However, Twelve reported that he'd died and a replacement was required.

It's interesting to see a fairly non-cynical Lokin. Before the fall, so to speak.

I read from that that you find young Lokin convincing, which is encouraging, thank you He does have a lot of falling to do, poor man.

Attention to detail, always important.

Why is it that outlines work so well in my head but then get totally out of control when I actually come to write them? I got to 3 pages on that one 'short' episode, then I gave up and summarised it, but since I had the outline I didn't want to ignore it totally

Getting onto the Warhammer was entirely straightforward. They simply walked through security as themselves, then donned military uniforms with the Warhammer's insignia and strolled onto the ship amongst the rest of the crew complement. Once aboard, they split up, Lokin to the medical bays, Twelve to the engineering deck, and Cirean to the passenger quarters.

This was only one of many extractions the team had carried out, and the plan was straightforward. Cirean would find Ban and use the breakfast service to administer a delayed release short-acting anaesthetic which would cause him to collapse after a couple of hours. The delay meant the collapse would occur while he was working, and in front of witnesses with Cirean not being in the immediate vicinity. He would then be taken to the medical bay, followed by Cirean acting as a concerned crew member. There, Lokin could immobilise him properly under the pretext of examining and treating him.

While they were doing that, Twelve would get access to the bridge computers and tie the following patrol craft in with a covert secure link, giving them full knowledge of the Warhammer's speed and course. He would also rig the escape pod nearest to the medical bay to eject without notification to the bridge and without setting off any alarms. They would all then enter the escape pod with Ban, eject, and signal the patroller which would engage its stealth drive and come to pick them up. All very routine, no problems, home-in-time-for-lunch sort of job, as Cirean put it.

I've got a bad feeling about this...

Naturally