"Blade! Hoy, Blade!"

Heads turned in his direction. Sandor twitched his lip so he smiled convincingly and slipped easily through the parting crowd, answering the shouted summons to the crowded table. Larger than life holograms – Twi'lek and Human – writhed erotically as he passed by them. Cameras floated over their fleshly counterparts in the hovering skybox above; the women's performance was not simply titillation but a promise to anyone with the credit balance to join them. A quick upward glance confirmed it, as one of the holograms bent over, her mouth a wide 'O' of inaudible pleasure. He dampened the range of his visual spectrum and the images flickered out of existence. Not so for the other patrons, as a chorus of frustrated groans told him what he'd callously walked through – disrupting another, similar performance.

He reached the corner. Mandelorians had it cordoned off, claiming it for their own and were animatedly wagering on the outcome of an arm-wrestling match between a man and a woman. The blue-skinned woman – a Chiss, the one who had hailed him – grinned fiercely as her competitor gained another inch's worth of leverage.

Sandor shoved his way to the front, until he stood beside the alien. She lost ground by slow degrees, overmatched against a stronger opponent and the onlookers knew it – heated speculation on how long it would take before her strength failed was backed with the plasticky clink of credit chips. His own wager caught a lull in the debate over the inevitable outcome.

"A kiss to the winner."

The man's head whipped around; his expression strobed *surprise* *anger* *disgust* while a scrolling overlay on Sandor's left pupil simultaneously recorded and regurgitated meaningless data slated for permanent storage in his augmented memory.

01001110011000010110110101100101001110100010000001 00101101101110011010010110110001100101001000000100 01110111010101100101011101100110000101110010011000 01001000000100100001100101011010010110011101101000 01110100001110100010000000110001001011100011100000 11010100100000011011010110010101110100011001010111 00100111001100100000010101110110010101101001011001 11011010000111010000111010001000000111010101110000 01100100011000010111010001100101001000000111010001 10111100100000001110010011011100100000011010110110 10010110110001101111011001110111001001100001011011 01011100110010000001000010011011110111001001101110 00100000011011110110111000100000010101010110101101 1010010110111100100000011101000110111100101101

The woman took advantage of the lapse. Her bicep straining, she pushed the back of the man's hand against the Plexiglas tabletop.

The man released the Chiss' hand with a snarl and stepped backward, colliding with a roving WA-7 service unit's tray of short shot glasses full of cherry red liquid. The droid shrilled a demand for payment; the man's hand went to his blaster.

"Knile." The woman interposed herself between man and machine and soothed his agitation with a touch. Her hand traced the water ring pattern on the arm of his plated colo claw jacket. The rubbery material drew the eye like the dangling lure of its namesake, giving off a hypnotizing phosphorescence even under the club's erratic lighting. "He didn't say who'd be doing the kissing."

It took a moment for her words – her invitation – to push past his wounded pride and register. Uneasy conversation resumed as a cocky grin split his face and he grabbed her possessively. Amidst catcalls and whistles, they shared a heated kiss as steamy as any of the club's paid performances.

"Gev!" The Chiss laughed as the two came up for air. She gave him a gentle push and they separated.

"Nu yaiyai'yc." The man thrust his hips, clutching at his crotch for emphasis.

"Later." He caught the quick flicker of her red eyes and frowned, but she recaptured him with a brilliant white smile. "He's business. And that makes you…"

'Gullible.' Sandor thought. The bearded man seemed satisfied with the exchange, however, and he and his friends wandered over to another table where a game of dejarik was starting, giving them the requested privacy.

"Stars, you make friends wherever you go, don't you." The woman scooped a pile of chips off the table. A few credits spilled off, onto the floor, and she dove after them rather than leaving them where they lay.

He didn't need the facial recognition to provide information about the woman but it appeared anyway.

01001110011000010110110101100101001110100010000001 00110101101001011100100110010101101011001001110110 10100110000101110010001001110110000101101100011101 01011011110111001001101001

He dismissed it with a blink.

"Mako's over there."

The corners of the club were artful pools of darkness. The bounty hunter's slicer had ensconced herself with a data cable that snaked around her wrist and up to the plug in her temple, furiously tapping on an unseen keyboard; she occasionally glanced up at a screen Sandor couldn't see but knew must be hovering at eye level. As they approached, she held out her hand, palm up. The Chiss dribbled credits into it until they overflowed onto the table. "That should pay for a lead or two on Nar Shaddaa if we need them."

"Maybe…" The slicer sounded doubtful. "Would be better if we had a favor or three to call in."

"We'll be fine."

"Braden would know someone." Mako's expression turned sour, like she was sucking on an Arrakan quenchfruit. "Maybe," her voice dropped to a contemptuous mutter, "this sleemo can be useful for a change."

'Slime-ball.' He almost smiled. She made it easy to dislike her. By now, he was used to the slicer's scorn. She sold small parts of her humanity for artificial upgrades. It showed with gangbanger mentality: all visible, grafted to her face, neck and hands, replacing one of her ring fingers. Enough so she considered herself something else now. Cyborg. Part machine.

She had no idea.

Because he had been sent – interrupted – by Keeper and ordered to come to the Nexus Room and continue to play space pirate until a better alias presented itself, he ignored the petty name-calling. To the bounty hunter, he remained aloofly polite. Keeper was paying her to watch him and ensure his past mistakes weren't repeated. Keeper shouldn't have worried – not about that, anyway.

"Here." He pulled out and shoved the printout across the table. "An Action IV transport, designation Mario's Cat, was abandoned by all hands due to life support failure. Its final destination was Korriz but it's currently adrift in the Morshdine sector, near Tangrene. Her captain is still in negotiation with the Temolak Salvage Consortium for its recovery. Until then," he spread his hands, "Mario's Cat is a derelict."

"And just what is this information going to cost us?"

He shrugged.

"Gift nerf," Kjara argued. "This is free money if we move fast."

The slicer leaned close and the Chiss bent to listen. "I don't trust this guy, Kay Jay and I don't like working so closely with the Imps. Braden kept his toe right on the line. This crosses over. We'll owe him."

"He already owes us, as I understand it. Right place, right time – we know everything. We could put his face on the HoloNet and his boss knows it. Out what happened. The Nem'ro clan wouldn't be happy–"

"Understatement of the year."

"–and I don't want to be on a Hutt hit list, do you? So instead, we're paid for our silence. Otherwise, they'd have to permanently pull him from fieldwork – or give him a brand new face." Kjara stirred the remaining puddle of credits on the table with a fingertip.

Mako didn't disguise her glee. "Is that painful?"

The two women continued to whisper, although they were perfectly audible to Sandor. He kept his face impassive. The Chiss' threat was an empty one and the reason Keeper chose her out of all the others the job might have been assigned to, even if she didn't truly realize her place on the galactic chessboard. Mirek'jar'aluori – Kjara in Galactic Standard – was not the type of bounty hunter who shot first.

Even if either followed through, any picture they posted would be detected in a matter of seconds; in the unlikely case his own worms didn't catch it the Watchers would. The last three centuries taught him the most important thing about technology: its behavior was predictable. His own programs were well beyond anything that street rat of a slicer could imagine, or code, in her short span.

'Street rat…' It was such an Imperial thought. He'd never been that low, but a starving student working impossible hours was so far below a true citizen's notice that there were droids who got better tips and were treated with more respect. Those memories were – literally – a lifetime ago and best examined in private. Sandor focused again on the women. He covered his inattention with a bored yawn, but they hadn't noticed his lapse.

The money convinced the slicer, enough to coerce her into checking the information. Her eyes roved over the air in front of her, her fingers twitching across phantom keys. "I've got the manifest… I don't know… most of this is going to be tough to move… the profit margin… Wait." The corner of her mouth quirked up, "If I didn't know better, Blade–"

She didn't know his name. She thought she did. He wouldn't have trusted the two women with his real name anyway, covert operations or no; he was content to let them believe they already knew it.

"–I'd say you had a sense of humor."

"What?"

Mako waved off Kjara's question. "Sooner would be better. But not too soon…" She scrubbed the space in front of her, brought her fingertips to her lips, kissed them then pressed them to the invisible screen. "Tomorrow, oh four hundred?" The Chiss nodded. "Syncing…" The slicer held up her hand, counting down from five. "Done. You need me to stick around?"

She was out of her seat before her partner could answer. Mako threaded her way through the crush of people, arms raised and twisting to the bass thrum of a tympanic pulser which drowned out its accompanying synthesizer. Her white jumpsuit changed colors as the club's lighting rotated over her – red, yellow, blue and green – with each splash of color stripping away her individuality, until it was impossible to pick her out of the crowd.

The Chiss' gaze wandered over to the table where the dark-haired man, Knile, had migrated to. The clustered forms parted and Sandor heard the tinny roar of a rancor. He stuck his hand back in his pocket; his fingers brushed over the three silvery canisters he'd purchased from the jittery dealer ensconced near the cantina's entrance, just out of the Weequay bouncer's line of sight. The drugs were what spurred him to deliver Keeper's message; his superior's missive was entirely coincidental but served as a welcome cover. The Phantom was superbly supplied and however he had managed to gain their trust in granting him use of the ship, he didn't plan to waste another moment before he abused it. 'One for the money and two for the show, three to make ready and four–' He stood to leave.

It might have been the abruptness of his implied departure, which would have left her alone when she would rather not be, a choice which Mako hadn't truly given her. Guevara and the rest were thugs – Clan Varad's brutal reputation didn't leave room for the shades of gray Kjara had been using to manipulate the man. It could just have easily been the desire to annul any implication of owing Imperial Intelligence; if she and the slicer could lay claim to the freighter's cargo, even selling it back to the original owners would net the pair a sizeable profit. The words tumbled out, ""Let me buy you a–" and she reached out to touch his arm, a gesture which continued past the ivory fabric of his sleeve to close around the exposed ulna and radius, the metal bones of his forearm surgically stripped bare of pseudo-flesh and vat-grown muscle hours before when he was tending to a saber burn his self-preservation programming demanded he excise. The regeneration process would be complete by morning and Sandor was so used to peeling off his own skin, he hadn't given it a second thought, outside the conventional covering so his true nature remained a secret.

They both froze and then the woman released him, her entire body jerking backwards and away from him as if electrocuted. "What are you?!" she hissed.

He scanned her then, making sure the red beam displayed a visual output. Even if the bounty hunter couldn't feel it, she could see it crawl across her skin; where she was clothed, it rendered an outline of her nudity underneath with a second sweep. A pale blue flash over her left breast pulsed along with her heartbeat, another flash at her neck, wrist and inner thigh. Sandor smiled in a genuine expression of pleasure; it would be so easy – and satisfying – to kill her.

He did not like to be touched.

"Ch'ah ma ch'usci, bah esruoc. Era nah ch'at cart ror ch'a in'a nuhn k'on'bican't non, Mirek'jar'aluori? Csarcican't ven can'vun'bovah ch'en ch'at rouy ticsen'i? Rouy ticsi? Rab ch'ah rsah etah mihn. Ch'ah rsah veah etah vez. Vim ch'ah rsah Mako oot k'ir ch'ah nah? Titt'i ch'en csaah vim ch'ah csarcican't, ch'ah kniht, tihn etah lla ch'a rt'aseit vepet. Ch'ah csarcican't k'ir sasco etah rsah etah viz ven ch'at bin'vah."

The dense, complex tongue was comprised of a few core words which relied heavily upon syntax but Sandor spoke the Cheunh fluently, like he'd been born to it. No longer inhibited by human vocal abilities, it was his peculiar gift with languages which had brought him to this very point. The threats were beautiful – a joy to speak.

"Ven csarcican't ber nah in'a. Ch'ah csarcican't rsah rah ven k'ir."

She radiated anger, but her instinct for survival was stronger and she contained her rage with a curt nod.

His final insult was to turn his back on her and walk away. There was work to do, after all.

I don't have a limitless supply of creativity. Sandor is transplanted from my Dragon Age: Origins story and his personality and motivation/drive in Star Wars: The Old Republic has been shaped by the lack of Zevran in his life. There is a back story for this Sandor, of course, which explains why there's no Zevran, but Zevran being who he is doesn't especially like me going off on tangent stories where he's not involved and I'm overdue to get back to DA:O. I've got two or three short vignettes somewhere on my back burner which involve this Sandor and Vector, one with Hunter (who is the ultimate foemance) and another featuring Cerran, my Scoundrel, and his boy-toy Corso Riggs.

The story's title doesn't have much to do with anything at all. For the longest time, this story was just called SWTOR on my hard drive (as opposed to the one called SWTORKMEME [wut?!]) and then one day, boom. It seems like a good title for a one-of story collection so I think I'll keep it.

While I don't really touch on it much here, thank you to Alexander Freed and Bioware for the Imperial Agent storyline - I can't praise it highly enough. I actually confessed to Alex when I met him at ECCC that I was writing an IA fan fiction and I hope now that I haven't mangled the thing too badly. Also thanks to Spider Jerusalem and Tiali for their Cheunh dictionary and translator, Karen Travis for her Mando'a dictionary and the Wermo guide for the Huttese.

The universe belongs to George Lucas, Mako to Bioware, Sandor to me and Kjara (or Mirek'jar'aluori if you'd rather) to my best friend jenovan who has some amazing Old Republic stories as well as Dragon Age: Origins ones which will make you weep - they're that good. Read them; you don't even need to thank me later. We leveled up together and it only seemed right she becomes one of Sandor's many targets, filed under 'Of the day's annoyances'.