4: High Value Target
ABOARD THE IMPERIAL-CLASS STAR DESTROYER ASSERTER
LOCATION: THE EDGE OF THE ANOAT SYSTEM
ROLE: PATROL AND INTERCEPT
CURRENT MISSION: CLASSIFIED
The communiqué came in from a source codenamed “Magus.” Sensor Specialist Kyril Loman was the one to receive it, and after going through the standard Imperial codes and running it through base threading to ensure it had not been intercepted by Rebel forces, Kyril read it and found himself somewhat alarmed. The communiqué was from someone at IIS. Someone within the Kingdom, to be specific. Very few intel officers had clearance for that level of state secrets, and Kyril was one of only two aboard the Asserter. That was why it came to his station.
Once he read it twice, Kyril sent back the response code to verify receipt, then waved his hand to the interactive holo-display on his right and sent the message up two levels, to Commander Ollgrenn’s office. There, the Imperial Intelligence Service commander read over the message and realized its significance. This intel was both verified and actionable, for it had come from Magus, a classified intelligence source whose identity was well above his paygrade.
He got on a secure line and transmitted a message across an encrypted subspace channel. The message was sent to another ship in the fleet, the Terror. He waited six sweating minutes for his superiors to get back with him. Once they did, the message was clear: Commander Ollgrenn was to forget he’d ever gotten the message. He was to delete it from his records and order Sensor Specialist Kyril Loman to do the same.
In less than a minute, it was done.
Unknown to either Loman or Ollgrenn, however, the message had already been intercepted by someone. For deep in the bowels of the Asserter, where its subspace receiver/transceiver was buried and protected behind seven firewalls, a sleeper bug had gone off. Four months prior, when the Asserter had docked at port in high orbit around the world of Sullust, a single Rebel operative had come on board, disguised as an Imperial maintenance officer and using forged military records to show he had clearance to do refit and repair work on the Asserter. That Rebel had moved quickly to the lower decks, opening panels and squeezing between deeply imbedded electronics towers, in order to place a single Bothan-made device.
The Bothans called the device ok’chah, “messiah,” and it was able to intercept coded transmissions after they had been decrypted by Asserter’s sensor specialists. Once the subspace radio sent out a transmission to relay the coded message to its intended target, ok’chah encouraged the subspace radio to send out a single, tiny, almost invisible signal burst that piggybacked off the first signal, and sent the message to the nearest Rebel listening outpost.
It took only minutes for it to reach Bespin.
* * *
CLOUD CITY, BESPIN
URJIGAL BUSINESS DISTRICT
Changwa Hastra was two floors below the newly-restored Bo’lu’nak Theater, inside a secret room that had been built months back by Rebel operatives. Disguised as construction workers, the Rebels had altered some of the schematics and site plans to include this small area. The old theater’s owner was a Twi’lek, just like Changwa, and also a Rebel sympathizer. She had agreed to let a single Rebel cell operate hidden below her theater, despite the mandate by tibanna-gas magnate Lando Calrissian that said Cloud City should remain neutral in the Galactic Civil War.
Sympathizers were crucial to the Rebellion’s survival, and it was up to Changwa to recruit them wherever she encountered them.
Changwa Hastra had once been a lawyer, specializing in data fraud for several megacorporations such as SoroSuub and Jant’wun Industries. She was briefly imprisoned by the Empire when she showed up to an anti-Imperial protest on Coruscant. After being released with a warning, she found Princess Leia Organa and went to work for the Rebellion. Since then, she had worked as a data analyst and decryption expert for the Rebel Alliance.
Changwa’s “office,” if it could be called that, was a room just eight meters long and almost as wide, with five separate autonomous holo-boards, all with independent connections to the HoloNet and subspace radio. She had two slicer droids working around the clock down here with her, keeping eyes on her comms array whenever she had to sleep—which wasn’t often these days. The Empire had suffered a major defeat with the Death Star’s destruction, and now they were more determined than ever to weed out secret Rebel cells like the one Changwa ran.
From here, she monitored the bugs that had been planted inside the offices of a high-ranking Moff, feeds from cameras on Bespin that had been sliced, messages sent from a trio of dancers at a local club that had gained the trust of Imperial officers, and dozens of other covcom, or covert communications, all connected to undercover operatives.
Changwa sat here, listening to the thunderous applause and laughter of the audiences above. The theater was putting on a heck of a show tonight, a retelling of Kantra’s Twin Moonlight Array.
When the hijacked message came in from the Asserter, Changwa was at her desk having lunch, a Twi’leki salad made from imported onarooyi fish. Many pieces of intel were routed through her comms station, which had been embedded by the Rebellion’s finest hardware guys and slicers. Changwa used it to manage dozens of clandestine operations from right here. She had only ever gotten three messages from ok’chah, and whenever she did, it was always flagged, and always something worth sending up the chain-of-command immediately.
She read the message, which had been meant only for IIS Commander Ollgrenn’s eyes and one of his superiors. When she finished rereading it, Changwa sat there a moment in consternation. What does this mean? The message seemed to indicate that at least one IIS agent was being sent to Hoth.
Hoth? Why? What else is there to do there? They’ve already chased halfway across—
And the other piece of tantalizing information was the mention of something called “the Kingdom,” as well as two people referred to as “Ageless Void” and “Horizon Lost.”
Changwa ran a search merger in her database. Nothing about the Kingdom, Ageless Void, or Horizon Lost had ever shown up on her plate before. That was surprising, since her station had dealt with thousands of such communiqués and the message made it sound like these terms ought to be well known by the IIS or ISB upper echelons.
Changwa shrugged inwardly and finished her job. She encrypted a data package with the message and sent it to New Dawn. Her job completed, she leaned back in her chair and finished her fish salad. Later in the hour, she would start working on the ground cables from across Anoat sector.
* * *
DANTOOINE, FOURTH PLANET OF THE DANTOOINE SYSTEM
THE CITY OF QUESHIK
REBEL ALLIANCE BLACK SITE “NEW DAWN”
As soon as the encrypted cable came in from Bespin, Commander Lorna Fera, a tattoo-faced Mirialan and leader of the Alliance Intelligence Network’s Fourth Department, shot up from her desk and jogged down the corridor of the underground black site. New Dawn was a freshly-built site, barely a year old, and already it was handling a quarter of the intercepted Imperial messages from all over the galaxy. Fera had been at this a long time. She had once been a member of the Emperor’s Will, a tightknit group of intelligence officers inside IIS. She left after the “Kopal Incident” on her homeworld of Mirial, and had been working with the Rebel Alliance to redeem herself ever since.
The hallways were filled with intelligence officers and protocol droids racing from one end of the compound to the other. Most of the officers wore disheveled uniforms, lacking much of the Empire’s efficiency of dress and procedures. They were a ragtag group, but they were slowly coming together. The formation of the Alliance Intelligence Network, or AIN, was a step in the right direction and had happened in part because of Fera’s insistence on something more regimented than the Rebels’ usual chaotic fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach.
But while the structure of the AIN might have been her idea, she was not put in charge. Rather, she was relegated to Fourth Department, which sifted through enemy intercepts and often utilized “wetworks” operatives—mercenaries for hire, smugglers, even bounty hunters if that was what it took.
When she came into the office of the Director of Operations, Fera did not knock. She never knocked. The DO had told her about that and yet still she didn’t—she found formalities in such a war as this a waste of time. She had been in the intelligence field long enough to know that literally every single second counted.
She also did not stand on ceremony or excuse herself when the door swished open and she interrupted Director Eeja’s meeting with two high-ranking commanders. “We’ve got a lead on the Kingdom,” she panted, cutting to the point.
Eeja blanched. He removed a pair of vision-enhancing goggles and tossed them onto the table. “We have protocols here, Fera—”
“We don’t have time. We have a positive on a message coming straight from the Kingdom to IIS officers in the Anoat system and Ageless Void is in play. It comes from an asset we have on the Star Destroyer Asserter. This is actionable intel, sir.”
Director Eeja’s eyebrows lifted fractionally. Then he hove a sigh and leaned back in his chair, which creaked under the Human’s considerable weight. He looked at the other two befuddled commanders in the room and said, “My friends, will you please excuse us?”
The two commanders were known to Fera. Commander Soolek from the newly-formed Special Operations Group, or SOG, and Officer Razzalesh from Field Intel. Soolek was a Human female from Corellia, and Razzalesh was a pink-skinned Twi’lek who had never set foot off his homeworld of Ryloth before three years ago when the Empire dissolved the local law enforcement agency he had headed up. Both of them were used to her interrupting meetings, and they each gave her a severe look as they gathered up their briefcases and datapads and stood to leave.
“Wait,” Eeja said. “You stay, Soolek. This may concern you.”
Soolek sat back down. Her eyes raked across Fera’s, the two women sizing each other up. There was no doubting the umbrage each of them took to the other being here. Soolek was nearly sixty years old and a former information broker for Arukk the Hutt, but her allegiances to the Rebel Alliance began the very same day of its formation, whereas Fera had not left the Empire until after the “Kopal Incident” on her homeworld. Fera abhorred the Hutt cartels, and syndicates in general, but Soolek outright despised anyone that had not dropped out of the Empire from the very day of its inception.
The two of them were natural enemies, even though neither one of them came from “pure” backgrounds.
Director Eeja waited a beat before he waved an inviting hand. “All right, Fera. Let’s hear it.”
Fera opened her datapad and shot the encrypted cable over to Eeja’s and Soolek’s datapads. Soolek appeared confused by what she was reading. After the director had put on his goggles to read it, he removed them and steepled his fingers on his desk. “So, recommendations?”
“We send a dozen assets to Hoth,” she said. “Immediately. We have this lead, and I don’t want to waste it—”
“Wait a minute,” Soolek said, setting her datapad down. “What is this? What did I just read? It means nothing to me, it’s just codenames—”
“The message says that the Kingdom has reason to believe that Ageless Void is alive, and that they are sending one of their own assets, a person codenamed Horizon Lost, to neutralize him.” She looked at the director. “Sir, they are planning to kill one of their own.”
“Yes, Fera,” said Soolek, “we all read that much. But what is the Kingdom? And who are these two operatives—Ageless Void and Horizon Lost?”
Fera looked at Director Eeja for permission to share this classified information. Eeja nodded. Normally in the intelligence world, meetings needed to be held and signatures given before someone could be granted access to Grade-5 classified intel, but this was the Rebellion and everything here had to happen without bureaucracy or else it would always be too late to act on any intel at all.
“The Kingdom is a top-secret black ops squad inside Imperial Intelligence Services,” Fera said, still not sitting. She stood in front of the director’s desk like a caged animal waiting for its moment to be set loose and do what it did best. “They are an offshoot of the Service’s Ninth Directorate. They were tasked with identifying high-value targets and eliminating them.”
“A kill squad?” Soolek said.
“Much of the time, yes. But they’ve also been trained in spying, slicing, and rescue ops. At least that was the rumor.”
“Rumor?”
Director Eeja sighed. “When Fera here was with the Empire, she only heard whispers of this group. Whispers. And we’ve had scant leads on them. Isn’t that right, Fera?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I heard the Kingdom mentioned by name only on three occasions, about a year before I became disavowed and…well, you know the rest.” Her past was shameful, and she preferred not to recount it. Everyone at AIN knew it, anyway. “The Kingdom came online about a decade ago, and before that it was called the Nest, which was simply a training program for elite special forces personnel, former darktroopers trained to work alone, which was against their nature. It taught them to vanish, merge with the civilian population in enemy territory, stay on the move, never in one place for too long, and oftentimes working for months on end without checking in with IIS.”
Soolek nodded, intrigued. “Go on.”
“Nest agents have almost complete autonomy—once they are given an assignment, they can carry it out any way they see fit. They perform the reconnaissance, then develop their own plan, sometimes check in with IIS for extra help or resources, then execute the plan.”
“Ghosts,” Soolek said. “Like our own Zero Souls.” She was referring to a group of Rebel spies that had been trained since just before the Battle of Yavin to do something similar. The Bothans had had a heavy hand in training a myriad of agents from across many species to be Zero Souls, and very few soldiers made the cut.
“Not even close,” Fera said. “The Kingdom is years ahead of our people. They’ve received medical procedures to change the way their brains work, improving reflexes and basic motor functions, sometimes with cybernetic implants, such as one called SCENE-it, which searches for threats in a crowd. Their muscles receive direct electroshock treatment to give them a faster quick-twitch response. Before being chosen by the Kingdom, they have to have been darktroopers for at least two years, then after completing the training in the Nest, they are set upon each other, two at a time, to kill one another.”
Soolek’s eyes almost popped out of her skull. “I’m sorry, say that again?”
“Twelve are selected at a time,” Fera said. “Six groups of two. They fight to the death. The six that make it are chosen to be in the Kingdom. They are near-thoughtless killing machines, trained in a martial art called isk maega, developed by the best IIS self-defense instructors. They are taught how to survive in the wilderness for years if they have to, put through anti-interrogation and torture survival training. They learn how to vanish in crowds and fight multiple opponents at once. In the intelligence world, Kingdom agents are the apex predators.”
Director Eeja looked over at Soolek to gauge her reaction. To Fera’s surprise, Soolek looked more fascinated than anything. The two women had a natural distrust of each other—Fera had come from the Empire, literally from the enemy, while Soolek had a long-standing relationship with the Hutt cartels, whom Fera had infinite distaste for.
Soolek leaned forward and said, “And how do you know all this? IIS told you this when you worked for them?”
“No,” Fera said, knowing it probably gave Soolek great satisfaction to bring up her past. “As I said, it was mentioned only three times in my presence and by accident. Just before I left the Empire’s service, I decided to leave a few surveillance devices behind. I bugged a few conference rooms on Coruscant and Denon, as well as allowed a back door into my field office’s servers, giving access to Rebel slicers for a whole month before they were detected and the back doors were eradicated by IIS’s own counter-slicers.”
“The information we gleaned during that time helped us put the pieces together concerning the Kingdom,” Director Eeja told Soolek. “But in all the years Fera has been with us, we’ve had no leads on either the Kingdom or the Nest training grounds.” He shrugged. “We’ve never had proof that the Kingdom went ahead with the training of these agents.”
“So…you don’t even know if it’s still up and running?” Soolek said. “Or even if it got off the ground in the first place?”
Fera fumed, then controlled her anger. Does she not see what I’ve just brought them? Does she not see the power of this intel report? She looked down at the former Hutt servant, and felt old prejudices trying to sway her. Fera had tracked too many Hutts in her time at IIS not to be biased, and knew all about how they trafficked spices, weapons, and people. How Soolek had managed to stay with them that whole time…
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“We know that the Kingdom exists because it’s right there in that communiqué,” she said, pointing to their datapads.
“Or this could be a purposeful leak,” Soolek said. “A disinformation tactic. Something meant to lead us away from more important things, or even lead our own agents into a trap.”
Fera was baffled. “What sort of trap could they be headed into at Hoth? There’s nothing left there. Echo Base is abandoned, destroyed.”
“I don’t know. The Empire might only be fishing, testing to see if their transmissions are being intercepted. It wouldn’t be the first time something this big landed in our laps and ended up being a wraith-in-smoke.” Soolek eyed her. “You’ll recall the incident on Malastare two years ago.”
Fera’s jaw clenched. “That isn’t fair. You know as well as I do that that information was vetted by two separate trusted sources—”
“Both of which were former Imperial pals of yours.”
“Suggesting what?” Fera said, taking a step towards Soolek before she knew it. “Just what are you suggesting?”
“I think you know.”
“If you have something to say to me, Commander—”
“I think I’ve just said it.”
“You dealt in illegal spices and aided Human traffickers, and you dare to call my loyalty into—”
“Enough!” the director shouted. Eeja shot to his feet and leveled a finger at both of them. “Enough.” He said it much quieter this time, and much more ominously. “I trust Fera with my life, Soolek. I trust her with all our lives. She’s worked hard for us, sacrificed friends and family, and her intel has helped us in this war more than you can possibly know, more than I am authorized to comment on.” He sighed, and turned his baleful gaze on Fera. “And you should know that Soolek’s history is a matter that is also above your paygrade to know the full details of.”
The two women glared blaster bolts at each other.
A long silence passed. It was Fera who broke it. “Apologies, Director Eeja. I’m just…I’m a little anxious to move on this intel, that’s all. And I cannot afford to have its authenticity called into question. We can’t afford that. Frankly it wastes as much time as this argument.”
Soolek did not offer an apology, but she did visibly relax.
“You said you wanted to send in a dozen assets,” Eeja said.
“I do,” Fera replied sharply.
“I can’t do that.”
Her heart sank. “Eeja…sir, with all due respect, did you read the whole message?”
“I did.”
“Then you know what’s at stake here. A Kingdom agent has potentially been disavowed, Ageless Void no less. He’s been left for dead and now Horizon Lost is being sent to kill him.”
Soolek raised her hand. “Sorry, who are these two people? You never did tell me.”
Fera looked at her. “Ageless Void. He was mentioned in one of the conference room recordings at IIS headquarters, he was there at the beginning.”
“The beginning of what?”
“All of it. The Nest, the initial training, the transition into the Kingdom, all of it. He’s one of their best, they based most of what would become the Kingdom on his training results, and if we can bring him in…Director Eeja, you know what this could mean. Names, dates, locations of other Kingdom agents and Imperial cells hiding on Alliance-sympathetic worlds. This could rip the covers off of dozens of clandestine operations, maybe thousands!”
“I can’t send a dozen assets, Fera,” Eeja repeated. “I’m sorry.”
“Sir, just two days ago I had a grab team on Drohzensk Ruz who say they came close to nabbing a Kingdom operative who was there to meet a contact,” Fera pleaded. “The operative took out half my team, killed two of them. We need this. This is key—”
“I can’t. We’re spread too thin as it is.”
“Director—”
“I can’t do it, Fera. I’m sorry.”
You have to, she wanted to say. We need this. I need this. Her heart ached at the thought of letting this lead pass them by. A chance to roll up the Kingdom and be done with it was too enticing a prospect. For years now, several Rebel operations had been taken down by suspiciously accurate decapitation strikes—Rebel generals and admirals being killed just on the eve of a large-scale assault on a key world, taken out by an unknown sniper or a bit of poison or suicide. Alliance intelligence had wondered at these series of events, often separated by years.
They aren’t isolated incidents, she thought. It’s the Kingdom. They’re doing this to us.
Fera had always suspected the Kingdom. She felt it. In the marrow of her bones she felt it. Near the end of her tenure with IIS she had seen a lot of escalation—more severe abuse of non-Human prisoners such as Wookiees and Twi’leks, vicious attacks on Rebel hideouts near schools, and, of course, the poisoning of the entire water supply of the city of Kopal. The deaths she had seen…the bodies in the streets…piling so high…and the stench…
The rest of the galaxy had not been able to prove the Empire was behind the Kopal Incident, and of course the Empire forcefully denied it. But Fera knew the truth. She knew the truth because she had been a part of the staging operation called DOWNFALL, which rehearsed scenarios such as what happened on Kopal.
But she thought it would only be the water supply of key Rebel bases, not entire cities.
The Empire had taken on a scorched-earth approach, and it reached its pinnacle with Alderaan. Now everything was different for her, and she knew she could never be whole again.
But there were ways she could make a difference, ways for her to make amends. As a Mirialan, the tattoos across her green flesh told a story—other beings only saw meaningless symbols, but to all Mirialans, it showed her shame, and her need to account for it. She was reserving a space on her face for a new tattoo, one that would tell the world she was redeemed.
“We need this win, Director,” she pressed. “We need to bring Ageless in. We need to find the rest of the Kingdom’s agents and take them out. We’re at a critical time. The Empire is at our throats after Yavin and they’re gaining ground. We can’t afford to pass this up!”
“I can’t give you a dozen of our agents, Fera,” he said again. “I just can’t. We need them elsewhere.” He sighed heavily. “But I can give you one. Just one. Select your best, and have them go check on the veracity of this intelligence. Soolek, check with the rest of SOG and see if you can give our asset any help on their way to Hoth. Use your smuggler contacts if you have to.”
“We have a ship,” Soolek said. “A special stealth ship the Bothans made for us—the Shadow of Alderaan, built out of a modified CR-91. It might be able to help with the infiltration of Hoth, if that’s where your agent is going. She’s a good ship.”
Fera nodded. “Thank you.”
Director Eeja said, “Good. Have the Shadow’s pilots ready for immediate departure.”
“Yes, sir,” said Soolek, already opening her datapad and getting to work. Say what you will about the SOG commander, but when she was given an order, she followed through without hesitation or argument, and she always got the job done.
But Fera’s mind was far afield. Slipping back into the Hoth system unseen was going to be nearly impossible, even with a stealth ship. The Imperials were camped out not too far away and would definitely have left at least a few probe droids to monitor the planet in case any Rebels returned looking for survivors. Their asset would need to slip in unseen, rousing no suspicions, a gifted student of stealth and evasion, as well as a survivalist to endure the harsh environment of Hoth. Who could she send for that?
One name leapt to mind.
* * *
CORUSCANT, “IMPERIAL CENTER”
TOP LEVEL OF THE 18,097TH MEGABLOCK
THE ISTE HOTEL
The commlink on her nightstand twittered. Though it was nighttime on Coruscant, Namyr Abjura was not asleep. She was sitting up in bed, her back against the headrest. In front of her, the holo-projector was showing a local play, a new one by Solme Fe’hir, a playwright favored by the Emperor for his stories of pro-Imperial messaging. Namyr’s eyes were on the play, but her focus was elsewhere. It was on the bolt-lock in her hand—she had a set of metal pins in her hand, and she was practicing her lockpicking skills.
When the commlink went off, though, she set the bolt-lock aside at once and answered. “Yes?”
“Message from your mother, Mistress Abjura,” said a helpful feminine voice. It was the voice of the droid clerk from downstairs. The Iste Hotel had excellent service.
A message from Mother? So soon? Commander Lorna Fera had sanctioned Namyr’s operation on Coruscant only a week ago, and Namyr had just gotten her bearings and started a job at a local cantina, starting to blend in with the locals. That would be her cover for the next month while she helped coordinate with other Rebel cells in the area, all waiting to activate for some unknown mission. They weren’t supposed to get their orders so soon.
“Patch it through,” she said, sitting on the edge of her bed.
“Yes, Mistress.”
There was a click, and then a familiar female voice said, “Namyr?”
“Hello, Mother,” she said tersely, playing the part of a distant daughter, should any Imperials be listening. They were said to be monitoring eighty percent of all communications on Coruscant these days.
“How are you?” Lorna said.
“I’m fine, Mother. What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing. Your father and I…we’ve been discussing your trip. I think you should come home.”
Namyr blinked. “Home? Why?”
“I didn’t want to do this over comms, so…I wrote all my thoughts down and sent them to you. I’m sorry, but your father and I just cannot support you going to school on Coruscant after all. I know you had your heart set on it, and this must come as a disappointment to you, but as I said, I’ve stated my reasons. I hope after you read them you’ll understand. Please don’t hate me.”
Namyr winced. Did I do something wrong? It did not make sense she was being pulled off the mission so soon. Did New Dawn get word that I’ve been made? Namyr had spent three years training in denied-area operations, and she had done well on Denon and Corellia, all the intel commanders said so. So what gives now?
“I’m not mad. Just…confused.” She stood up and walked to her window, parted the curtains, looked out at all the sky traffic humming by her window. She looked down into the pit of Coruscant’s lower levels, then up at the starry sky. Clouds were scattered thin like cotton, and three of the planet’s four moons set the towers all around her aglow. She saw nothing out of sync, no indication that the sky traffic was being cleared for a grab team to come and kidnap her.
Doesn’t mean they’re not already here. This call could be “Mother” warning me. She grabbed the small blaster pistol from the side of the bed and tucked it in her waistline.
“Like I said, just read what I sent you, then you’ll understand. I love you.”
“Love you, too, Mother. Bye.”
Namyr thumbed the commlink off and opened the nightstand drawer and took out the datapad. She connected to the local grid and went to her megablock’s messaging service. The message from “Mother” was waiting for her. It was all in code and Namyr had no trouble deciphering it. Halfway through reading it, she realized she had not been removed from the operation because of anything wrong on her end; she had been reassigned to something else because a sensitive piece of intel had just come down the pipeline, and the upper echelons wanted a set of eyes on it.
Hoth, though? That perplexed her. Not only was it dangerous going back there, since the Empire would surely be waiting near the system, just hoping for some Rebel to make such a mistake, but there could be nothing of value left there.
Then she read the rest of the message, and it clicked. An unspecified Imperial agent codenamed Ageless Void (could be male or female) was potentially stranded on Hoth and IIS had dispatched another agent, codenamed Horizon Lost, to neutralize them.
Assassinate their own agent? Why?
That riddle would only get solved if Namyr was able to make it there ahead of this second agent, and black-bag “Ageless Void” on her own.
The rest of the message told her that, if she was able, to go ahead with the first part of her mission on Coruscant, and after she left, other agents would come in and complete the mission.
She stood up and gathered her gear. It wasn’t much. She was trained to travel light.
When Namyr stepped out of her hotel room, her eyes ranged across the hallway for coverage, anyone tailing her. She watched the cleaning droid, the young lovers kissing by the stairs, the old woman shuffling slowly past.
She took the turbolift down and went to the lounge on the first floor of the hotel, and there she found a private comms room for guests. The comms room had a HoloNet projector, and, after the door shunted closed behind her, she took out her slicer rig and got to work.
Slicer rigs had been around for thousands of years, even longer than hyperdrives. Ever since the invention of such complex computer systems as those that governed starships, standard hacking just didn’t work on most computer systems throughout the galaxy. That’s where slicing came in handy. Slicer rigs came in many shapes and sizes. Namyr’s rig was slightly larger than her palm, and came with a suite of cyberattack modules and programs. Like all slicer rigs, it came with retractable pincer wires and clamps, as well as a small Computer Interface Arm, which mimicked the same kind of tool that astromech droids could use to jack into computer terminals and slice into their systems. Once either the pincers or the interface arm was connected, the rig began a barrage attack on the hotel’s systems.
First, it performed a port scan, the equivalent in computer security of looking for an open window. If it found an exploitable port, the rig began a series of passcode attacks, looking for the common passcodes people used to gain entry to the machine. If that failed, it began a blunt-force coding attack, which waged war on a computer system’s base code.
All of this happened in the span of a thousandth of a second. Once it found the vulnerable port, the rig inserted its own malicious code, or mal-code, sometimes manipulated in real time by the slicer herself.
Once the mal-code was injected, it performed a kind of recon mission, taking note of all applications installed on all devices connected to the infected machine. It then relayed this information back to the slicer, in this case Namyr, who selected the vulnerable devices she thought were most accessible.
As soon as the computer at the other end was taken over, the slicer, if she was fast enough to get in before the computer’s firewalls could detect her, could improvise a subroutine on the spot, not unlike a zinth horn-player picking up the pace of a song if the percussionist suddenly changed tempo. Adaptation was key here. Namyr did this, all while removing any vestige of the mal-code’s delivery system, and in the span of eight seconds she was in.
Days before, she had started uploading the mal-code into the hotel’s network—the Iste Hotel was favored by many Imperial Moffs when they visited Coruscant, and if she could get inside its security systems, then the Rebel Alliance could use the hotel’s security cameras to glean intel from those dignitaries, intel that could potentially help them win the war.
And we need it right now, Namyr knew. Badly.
It had taken Namyr weeks to write this mal-code, but now, finally, she felt she was ready to dump the last part of it in. She could at least get this one small thing done before she went on whatever mission Mother had planned for her.
Minutes crawled by. She heard voices approaching. Someone tried to enter her private comms room and found it locked. They tried opening the door.
“Occupied!” Namyr snapped.
They left.
But Namyr’s pulse had now quickened, and she got to work on the hotel’s firewalls. Her slicer rig gave her options, recommended some of its own built-in mal-code for her to use, and like a composer working out her symphony, she tapped certain pieces of mal-code and waved them over to another line, inserting them and adjusting the attack like easing a new note progression into a song.
It was getting easier to slice Imperial computer networks. The defensive network of Imperial Center was mostly governed by reactive controls—just like when any major government came into power, they would, at first, have an extremely aggressive and proactive system for breaking into their enemy’s computer systems. But after years of being in power, such governments inevitably became complacent, and started building their networks up the same way they built up their planetary defenses: essentially, they became fortresses. Just like most of their money was put into building Golan defense platforms, to place in orbit around planets to defend against invasion, so too did their computer network defense budget focus almost solely on building up their defenses against slicers, creating massive firewalls and labyrinthine code.
But having such a reactive philosophy, instead of a proactive one, often left governments without knowledge of all the cutting-edge tools and techniques available to the everyday computer slicer.
In short, powerful governments were all about defense, and forgot how to play in the dirty, rough-and-tumble tactics of slicers like Namyr, who were all about attack. Not knowing those dirty tactics left their defenses unprepared, and weak.
The modern Imperial cyber police only knew how to reinforce old code and build overly complicated defenses around it. But the subtleties of slicing, the art of it, if you will, soon became lost on them. Their creativity stagnated, they could no longer imagine a truly original cyberattack that used techniques that sometimes defied all logic. And they certainly did not do enough pentesting, or penetration testing, to truly fortify their servers.
Their overconfidence will be their downfall, Namyr thought. It was something Mon Mothma had said to her, upon the first and only time Namyr ever met her.
It was something the Rebel Alliance had exploited, wisely, in Namyr’s opinion, and made a central part of their intelligence and spy infrastructure.
At last, the rig signaled her that it was in, and that the hotel’s security system was open to her.
She placed a datachip into the holo-projector’s port and her mal-code immediately allowed her to interface directly with the security system. It was a tense twenty-three seconds while it uploaded.
It had taken her months, but Namyr had discovered a new vulnerability in one of the Empire’s server components, a vulnerability that, if exploited, could cause damage to a network’s programmable logic circuits. The exploit had revealed itself during pentesting of the network. Once she became aware of the exploit, Namyr opened a crack in the system and inserted her own mal-code, and from there she discovered she could initiate an “upstream attack,” using any government computer to slice into the HoloNet grid and worm her way through the Imperial Defense Network, which was connected to just about all government systems on any civilized world under their control.
The exploit was a subtle one, but Namyr’s mal-code needed help. Somewhere out there, her partner, Ash, was slicing in from a government computer she had infected with her own mal-code and was shutting off any firewalls the hotel’s systems had in place. A two-pronged attack.
Namyr sent a quick message to Ash: Ready?
She got an instant reply: Ready.
Namyr took a deep breath: Initiate.
They both activated their code simultaneously, which compromised the power generators of the Iste Hotel, causing them to go into shutdown mode. The lights went off. Even the emergency generators failed to kick on. People in the lobby outside gasped and shouted. She stood up at once, putting on a pair of goggles that looked merely fashionable but actually gave her low-light vision.
Namyr exited the comms room and walked up two floors, moving past the cameras that Ash had assured her would shut off at the precise time needed. Namyr used a power spike to quickly blow the lock on a hotel room door. When the door slid open, Namyr entered, blaster pistol in hand, and when she found her target stumbling around his hotel room with a torchlight, testing the light switches, she pointed her weapon at him. Her target was Niles Kenjin, a former Alliance spy, now a double agent selling information to the Empire.
Kenjin looked over at her. “Have you come to fix the lights?” Then he saw her pistol, and his face became a mask of terror.
“W-wait!” Kenjin said, staring at her wide-eyed. He knew at once what this was, and his hands came up in useless supplication. “I-I can explain—”
The blaster was set for stun. The ring of blue energy hit him full-force and he went down, dropping to the carpet like a wet sack. Namyr took out a commlink and said, “Uncle is napping. He could use some help.” Within five minutes, the Rebel grab team that had been waiting outside for weeks would come in and make Niles Kenjin disappear. By tomorrow he would be in a holding cell aboard an Alliance cruiser somewhere, answering some questions.
That was only the beginning of the operation. But Namyr’s part in this was over. She had to get out now. Hoth was waiting for her.
Datapad in hand, she purchased a seat for herself on a freighter called Igemon’s Will, currently parked at a local spaceport one megablock away. She would be off the planet in less than an hour.
Namyr signed out of the hotel at the front desk, handed her key over to the droid clerk who was trying to deal with angry guests complaining about the power outage, and stepped out into the cold. The Coruscant WeatherNet was responsible for controlling the planet’s climate, and it had decided that for air purity’s sake, the planet needed to enter into a brief winter. Namyr shoved her hands deep into her pockets. She knew she had to enjoy this relatively light breeze while she could. For the cold of Hoth would be ten times worse, and there was no guarantee that once she got there she would have any way to leave the planet quickly. Or ever.
Her part here was done, and one of the Rebel Alliance’s Zero Souls vanished into the fog congealing around the walkway.