Erisi makes an unsettling discovery

“You do realize that this jeopardizes my mission?” Erisi snapped at the thin, balding bureaucrat sitting opposite her at the desk that took up most of the small office in the lower sections of the Imperial embassy on Illium Prime, located in Port Besadii, the largest tourist resort on the planet and its unofficial capital.

“Look, Miss Rendar, clearly there’s been some sort of mix-up, but if you’ll just specify the exact details of your mission, I’ll be more than willing to assign several members of staff to help…” The bureaucrat, Tuka Phaelin, tried to reason with the fuming ISB Agent, only to be brusquely interrupted by her.

“My mission is classified,” Erisi shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Apart from everything else, her black bodysuit was proving much too hot for Illium Prime’s tropical climate, and the fact that she felt **** to keep the zipper pulled all the way up in order not to be taken even less seriously than normal by the members of the Imperial embassy was hardly improving her disposition, “Like I said, your cultural attaché was supposed to have a information package ready for me as soon as I got here.”

“Clearly, there’s been a miscommunication somewhere,” Phaelin tried again, worried that the beautiful but clearly quietly livid brunette was seriously contemplating snapping his neck, “Cultural Attaché Hisklin was called off-planet yesterday on urgent business to Imperial Center only yesterday.”

Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, Erisi struggled once more to control her temper. The information that she was supposed to receive – any potential connections between the prime suspects in the case and denizens of Illium Prime, suspected Rebel terrorists present on-planet and so on – was vital if the Empire wished to keep the wayward **** Star plans from falling in the wrong hands. Even Delvin wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to sabotage her, not when the mission was this important.

“Then can I please see the Ambassador?” Erisi tried again.

“Miss Rendar, I’m sorry, but Ambassador Ylim is also off-planet,” Phaelin replied.

“Of course he is,” Closing her eyes and rubbing the bridge of her nose, Erisi took another deep breath, unwittingly causing Phaelin to ogle her chest for a moment before catching himself and having his gaze dart towards the table in time before she reopened her eyes, “And why is that?”

“Uh, a personal emergency, I’m afraid,” Phaelin tried to explain further, and quickly concluded that it wasn’t helping.

“A personal emergency?” Erisi felt as if her temples were about to start throbbing. Even by Imperial standards, this entire situation was turning out to be one massive clusterfuck. Not for the first time in recent months, she wondered quietly whether or not Rebel terrorists too had to deal with bureaucratic fuck-ups and a never-ending stream of orders and counter orders.

“I understand your frustration, I really do, Miss Rendar,” Phaelin said, then dared to offer her a friendly smile as he added, “Perhaps you should take this up with your colleagues?”

Erisi stifled a gasp as the implications of Phaelin’s suggestion sank in. Other ISB agents had been dispatched to Illium? What exactly was their mission, and why hadn't Erisi been told about their presence? Of course, Delvin might not even be aware of it. Erisi wondered to herself whether Rebels had to deal with internal intrigues and power plays to, or if those were Imperial specialities.

“Thank you, perhaps I will,” Erisi replied after realizing she’d been silent for several seconds, and made sure to speak as pleasantly as she was able to under the circumstances, “First though, I’d like access to a computer console, your databases and some privacy. Could that be arranged?”

“Naturally,” Happy that the Agent opposite him now appeared much less ferocious, Phaelin rose to his feet and motioned for her to follow him, “Come with me, please.”

Ten minutes later, Erisi was seated in front of a console deep in the bowels of the Imperial embassy, alone and with the zipper of her bodysuit pulled down to help her cope with the heat, a good deal of tanned skin and plenty of her deep, narrow cleavage on display as she conducted her search while alone with her own thoughts. The vow that she’d given to herself aboard the Jewel of Coruscant was coming back to haunt her as she found herself unable to shake the thought that if you’d already killed billions of people and destroyed a planet, it was only logical to be willing to kill thousands or millions more to prevent your culpability from becoming public knowledge. And now, not only were the two top members of the embassy staff off-planet, but a team of ISB Agents were on Illium conducting a mission separate from her own.

She hated that she had to do so, but while the console in front of her was going through the data files on the four main suspects – all of them officers in the Imperial Navy with knowledge of the **** Star and all currently unaccounted for – Erisi turned towards another console and accessed the embassy’s administrative archive, beginning a search of its most recent logs. As she had been informed by that nervous communications officer, both Ambassador Ylim and “Cultural Attaché” Hisklin had departed from Illium Prime in just the last couple of days, and from what she read in the logs, it seemed as though they would remain off-planet for days at the very least. Digging deeper, she found that someone, named Lanor Telwyn, had requisitioned a shipment of dual-linked analyzer circuits only yesterday. Going through the personnel files, Erisi could find no Lanor Telwyn listed among the embassy’s staff, and the logistics files revealed that the analyzer circuits arrived two days ago. Piggybacking sensitive shipments to the Imperial embassies to get them past prying customs officials was standard operating procedure for the ISB field teams when acting outside of Imperial space, and Erisi was in no doubt that was what had happened in this case. The question then was what exactly had been brought in, and Erisi felt certain that the answer to that wouldn’t be found in the administrative archive.

Instead, she used her deductive abilities, and didn’t like what she came up with. What constituted a sensitive shipment differed substantially from system from system. Under an overbearing, authoritarian regime such as the Hapans, just about anything could be considered sensitive on days when they were feeling especially dickish, but Illium was controlled by the Hutts, and they would gladly accept anything from conventional and unconventional weapons to massive shipments of spice as long as they got paid for the privilege of importing it into systems under their control. So whatever had been shipped to Illium via Imperial diplomatic channels, which was the only way to be completely sure that it avoid going through a customs inspection, it was something that Durga the Hutt and the Black Sun must not know anything about. And all of this was being conducted with the utmost secrecy by parts of the ISB, without the rest of the organization knowing about it.

“And if you want to discredit your competition inside the ISB…” Erisi muttered, and despite the heat and the lack of air condition in the small, dreary room, a chill ran up her spine at the prospect of having to conduct her mission while constantly looking over her shoulder to see if she was being monitored by rogue members of her own organization.

Unsure if she’d been sent straight into a complete and utter mess that might involve her ending up scapegoated by someone making a grab for control over the ISB or if she was just getting paranoid, Erisi shook her head and turned her attention back to the first console and the job at hand as she saw that the data compilation had been completed.

Out of the four main suspects, three had no obvious connection to Illium. At a first glance, the same seemed to be through of the fourth suspect as well, a Captain Talar Arwin of the Imperial Navy’s Fleet Support Branch, but as Erisi read through his file she spotted something potentially interesting: while a Lieutenant serving on Brentaal IV, a superior officer had added a note to Arwin’s file, regarding reports that he’d been associating with a Zeltron woman of ‘loose moral character’, one Deia Mirax. The note stated that inquiries had not resulted in no definitive verdict on Arwin’s behaviour, and that he should be allowed to remain in service. After that, Arwin had primarily served on Ando, carrying out several tours of duty there.

On a hunch, Erisi returned to the second console and searched through the Embassy’s database over persons of interest, her lips curling up into a grim smile when the name Deia Mirax popped up, with her file stating that she was the owner of an exclusive bathhouse and was suspected of Rebel sympathies.

“Looks like I’m going for a swim,” Erisi said to herself.