Erisi Speaks to Sherise

Erisi did not consider it a matter of fortune to dance with such a man impertinent enough to exploit his professional authority to be with a woman. Considering all the bureaucratic planning that went into a mission beforehand, she could afford to keep him at bay. Besides, what good would she be as a spy if she didn’t think outside of the box? “Actually, you boys can go help yourselves to drinks. We ladies have some girl talk to get up to.” Erisi turned her back on Vlad and coaxed Sherise to do the same. Vlad appeared incensed, but Erisi felt confident he was the type too bullish to do anything without making a scene, and that would have compromised the task at hand. Just because she skipped this little dance with him didn’t mean he wouldn’t have the opportunity to brief her. Erisi permitted herself a small smirk as Riik jovially led Vlad from their table.

Erisi nodded to Sherise. “He was a bit stern, wasn’t he?”

At first, Sherise wore her loss for words on her face, then smiled and nodded in agreement. “What happened? Did you pick him up from droid dating?” She raised her eyebrows.

Erisi bobbed her head, and the both of them finished speaking in unison: “I’d be better off dating the droid.” They shared a laugh of camaraderie, then both women looked to their drinks.

“My husband was a bit standoffish as well, up until he retired. Then he relaxed. He was practically a different man. The sort of man I fell in love with to begin with.” Sherise waved a hand in a reassuring gesture. “Men let their work get the better of them. Once they can get past that and be themselves, that’s when you’re really communicating with them.”

Erisi wasn’t sure that was the case with Vlad, but she didn’t bother to mention that. She kept her voice low and asked, “You know there’s still an aggression on, right? It’s a bit easy for even an admiral’s wife to be mistaken for someone else by listening to unfashionable music.”

Sherise opened her mouth, but said nothing. She rolled her head about her shoulders while she shrugged, as if to gather her words. “I realize that. There was even a holofilm where the Nautolan saboteurs were delivering coded messages through music. But realistically, it just seems a bit silly to go that overboard about it. I’ve never much noticed who makes the music so much as whether I enjoy it or not. Besides, it could very well have been any planet the rebels destroyed, couldn’t it?”

Erisi didn’t have anything to say. Not right away, at least. She decided to spend the rest of the meal sticking to Sherise like a fly on paper, using whatever easy excuse came to her to avoid Vlad’s blunt advances. Although Sherise was unaware of the full story, she caught on to Erisi’s dislike of the officious Imperial commander and conspired to wedge her way between the pair. Riik unwittingly used the opportunity to talk shop with the fellow officer, but there was just something a touch awkward in the way the Empire conducted its military these days. There was something less sporting in the art of government-sanctified ****, and more surgical, more paranoid and vicious. Getting into too many details didn’t exactly make for palatable dinner conversation, but Vlad did allow himself to be distracted with ruminating on the finer nuances of older space vessels, and Riik had no shortage of stories regaling being stationed on bizarre alien frontiers.

Vlad’s patience ultimately wore thin, and Erisi found herself returning to her room alone. Another correspondence, this time much less formal, had been slipped into her room in the form of a data chip concealed within some gifted cosmetics. She threw out the makeup and browsed the information. An estimation had been made that in the next four days, sensitive data regarding the securities of several Imperial mining moons would transfer hands from a covert courier to a rebel spy. Erisi suspected that there were deeper layers to this she didn’t need to know, not unless she wanted to perform a full job’s worth of work at the risk of her high standing with the Empire, or more importantly, her life. A sub-vessel would be departing from the Jewel of Coruscant and docking at the Hutt pleasure palace on the planet below in the near future.

Erisi was to be on that vessel and assume a suitable identity. She’d have plenty of time to think that over when she arrived, but for the time being, she had another question on her mind. Did she really want to play this by the ISB’s rules? She thought things over. Coming in through the front door might prove a bit too regulatory to find the gritty undercurrent of iniquity such hedonistic establishments rode themselves on. She could probably connive an emergency escape pod and, with a clever enough story, find a lateral shortcut to the object of her pursuit.