Raina Temple was having a good day.

Alright, maybe she'd just found out that the branch of the government she'd been working for for the last few months had been shut down. They'd also arrested Kaliyo, her sort-of friend. All because of a shadowy group of conspirators known as the Star Cabal, which not only wanted to destroy the Sith and Jedi, but also, very specifically, Cipher Nine himself.

Cipher Nine, who probably wasn't Cipher Nine after the dissolution of Imperial Intelligence, was currently leaving for the wasp's nest that was Corellia, one of the most strongly contested planets in the entire war and definitely under the influence of the Star Cabal. Cipher Nine was leaving, alone, to intentionally draw the attention of a secret society that had the power to topple entire nations and had a grudge against him.

It was hard to focus on that, though.

It wasn't that Raina didn't appreciate the enormity of the situation. It was just that she was being sent, with the rest of the Sanguine End's crew, to rescue Kaliyo. Without their leader.

The whole thing would be terrifying, except for a few things.

Raina's father, Darren Temple, was back. She'd found him just before the Empire would have, and she'd gotten him to safety. Now, he'd be joining them in the mission to rescue Kaliyo.

Cipher Nine was unstoppable. He was the most resourceful man Raina had ever heard of. No matter what the mission, the enemy never seemed to slow him down. He'd defeated a member of the Dark Council and won through mind control before ever meeting Raina Temple. He didn't need her for Corellia.

They had a way of tracking Kaliyo. It was hard work, but she and Vector could track her no matter where she went, and the Empire couldn't stop it.

Lastly, most importantly, was what was happening right now.

Cipher Nine, Doctor Lokin, and Darren Temple were conversing in rapid-fire spy-ese, throwing around terms Raina only knew from training documents at a pace she could barely follow. It was all advice. Ways to attract the Star Cabal's attention safely, how Kaliyo would probably react to being rescued, how to hide if things got bad enough, the names of a few contacts each had that the other might use, those sorts of things.

They wrapped up and Cipher Nine walked up to Raina. He was a small man. Raina looked down to see his sharp-featured face, partially hidden by the headgear that covered his ears, chin, and where his eyes should be. He had that smile he often had - not that he smiled often, but it almost always looked the same way - where he wasn't really looking at her, but it was clear she was the only one he was focusing on. It made her feel important. Like she was worth seeing, even without eyes.

"Raina," he said, trying his best to look her in the eye, "I'm proud of you. I didn't get the chance to say that yet, but when you went after Cipher Three alone.. You did good work. I trust you to do the same for Kaliyo. The Doctor is in charge, but… if it comes down to the moral decision, I leave it to you."

Her breath hitched and she blinked away tears, barely keeping herself from reaching up and wiping them away. Maybe he wouldn't notice if she didn't move.

If Cipher Nine did notice, he ignored her emotional break. Seemingly without any signal, Vector came over to the pair of them. Cipher Nine didn't look directly at him, but he wasn't exactlylooking at Raina anymore, either. "One last check," he said. "Then it's all up to you. The Doctor and Darren should be capable of planning around any complications, but don't forget that your abilities make you more suited for certain tasks than they may give you credit for."

"Agent," Vector said gently, "this is not Intelligence. Our skills will not be overlooked. You have nothing to fear."

The other man gave a breathless laugh and nodded. "Alright," he said. Then he reached out and grasped both of their shoulders. An intense feeling overtook Raina, like being in a room surrounded by friends.

"We have it," Vector reported.

Cipher Nine nodded and pulled his hands away. The feeling diminished. It didn't go away completely, though. Whether that was because Vector kept the connection to Kaliyo up, or because Raina actually was in a room surrounded by friends, it was hard to tell.

She smiled. Friends. It was still hard to think of the others that way. Vector was part alien, Doctor Lokin was practically a monster, and Kaliyo was… well, a cutthroat scoundrel. Then there was Scorpio, the droid. Honestly, before she brought her father to the ship, Raina had secretly thought she and Cipher Nine were the only sane people on the ship.

Raina looked around.

Cipher Nine was already gone, without a word. Vector, too, but the Joiner was in the cockpit setting a course for the ship.

A hand dropped gently onto Raina's shoulder. She looked up to see a man with greying hair and electric eyes. They were blue eyes that didn't look anything like Raina's, but she was pretty sure she got her nose from him. She wondered if she got anything from her mother. She'd been too young to pay attention to that sort of thing when she'd been smuggled out of the Empire. Maybe she should ask one day.

"Another rescue mission," Darren Temple said in an exaggeratedly gruff voice. "I hear you're good at those."

Raina smiled and took his hand. "Yes," she said, thinking back to how she'd saved him from the Empire only days ago. "I believe I am."

"... distributed into six blocks, each arranged in concentric pairs ascending the station. That means access from the center is almost the only viable option…"

Darren Temple perked up. "Almost?"

Raina sighed. With a few flicks of her hand, she rotated and zoomed in on a particular section of the holographic blueprint she was examining. With one finger, she traced a thin, almost membranous, webwork along the inside of the station's surface.

"This particular model has a ventilation system designed to be impassable. Technically, these blueprints aren't even correct - they just show a projected possible layout for the system. In each case, the entire infrastructure is left up to a seed code and an algorithm, so even a scout, like a mouse droid, couldn't find its way through."

"But?"

Raina bit her lip and skimmed around the blueprint, trying to find a good example. When she did, she tapped on a nexus of vents, then zoomed out with the nexus centered in the image. "A large enough nexus of vents can, possibly, weaken the station's armour in a given section. A well-placed shaped charge could breach it."

Her father frowned. "Not exactly stealthy."

"No," Raina admitted. "And, while I have some explosives training, Kaliyo Djannis is our expert. I also can't think of how to actually find one of these nexuses in any reasonable time frame."

Darren nodded and beckoned with one hand. "Alright. Pass it over here. You can move onto the next one and I'll tell you if I have any ideas."

Raina did as suggested and moved on to the next potential candidate, a prison satellite embedded in an asteroid. She hoped to the Emperor that this wouldn't be the kind they found. The modular design meant it would be hard to predict the layout except by Imperial regulations, and then there was the matter of even reaching a particular asteroid in an entire field of them.

Asteroid fields. She didn't even want to think of the odds of surviving one.

She inspected the blueprint closely, then ran a calculation of the Sanguine End's trajectory, searching for any asteroid fields in the projected path.

Nothing within Imperial territory. On to the next option.

"Raina."

Raina glanced over at her father, then realized he was putting down his datapad, and actually turned to face him. "Yes, father?"

"I have a concern that we haven't had the chance to discuss, with how busy the past two days have been."

She nodded for her father to continue.

"How much do you trust this crew?"

"Oh." Raina blinked, unable to come up with an immediate response. It seemed a simple question.

It wasn't that she distrusted them, exactly. She'd always felt fairly safe on the ship, even as she'd started figuring out how much was under the surface there.

Vector sometimes seemed barely human, with his black eyes and unnatural movement. Even worse were the little killik fingerlings that infested the ship and talked to him. In their skin and their clothes and the walls.

Kaliyo was a liar and probably unstable. She liked hurting people more than Raina wanted to think about and she'd betrayed more people than Raina had ever befriended.

Doctor Lokin was a monster, a rakghoul in a man's clothing. He watched them all with a predator's eyes. He probably had the whole ship bugged, too.

Bugs which, being mechanical, Scorpio probably used for eyes. The whole crew knew that the only thing keeping that droid from killing them all was Cipher Nine's programming and its fascination with their methods.

Then there was Cipher Nine himself…

"I trust Cipher Nine," she managed with a weak smile. "He's the one who saw the programming I had and helped get rid of it."

"This would be the same man who immediately asked you to betray the Empire and join him in destroying the two superpowers in the galaxy?" Darren glared into the hologram, now showing a facility with enhanced interrogation and scientific capabilities.

"That's not fair," Raina snapped. She took a deep breath and calmed herself. "Have you heard of Eradication Day?"

Darren nodded. "I haven't been completely isolated. Random destruction across the whole Empire tends to get people talking."

"That was Cipher Nine."

Her father widened. "He did that? But how- what kind of- THOSE are the methods he uses?"

"NO." Raina leaned forward in her chair, staring her father down. "I wasn't very precise. Eradication Day was part of his mission to track down a terrorist organization. The Empire ordered him to allow the destruction and rewarded him for completing his mission afterwards. He managed to stop the organization and take its leader prisoner, but he never forgave himself for what happened. The fact that the Empire did is something he can't forgive them for."

Darren scowled, but seemed to calm down. At least, his expression went quiet again and he looked like he was thinking deeply.

The thing was, it wasn't hard to understand what Cipher Nine was doing. There was just a lot to explain.

So, Raina did. She explained about Cipher Nine's time as an Imperial agent, how he'd been treated by the Sith, and how he'd eventually been sent as a double agent into the Republic SIS. She told him about the SIS's plans to wipe out entire planets with the Shadow Arsenal, about Cipher Nine's brainwashing, and about the Star Cabal. Eventually, she reached the present, with Imperial Intelligence shut down, Kaliyo Djannis in custody, Moff Phennir locked up by an ancient droid from Belsavis, and Cipher Nine off to fight a galaxy-spanning secret society on his own.

When she was done, Darren sat back in his chair with an explosive exhalation.

"Wow," he managed after a while. "And I thought my career was eventful." Then he frowned and looked sidelong at Raina. "You really trust this man? After all he's done?"

Raina nodded.

"And the others?"

This time, she hesitated.

"Ensign Temple," called a soft voice, interrupting her thoughts.

Raina spun around to see Vector standing at the entrance to the briefing room. Taking a second to catch her breath, she asked, "yes, Vector?"

"We believe we are approaching our destination. We would like to make another attempt at locating Ms. Djannis."

"Alright." Raina rose and took Vector's hands. With all her strength, she concentrated on Kaliyo, on the moments when the rattataki had been kinder than usual, stuck up for her or even come to her rescue in a fight. Those few moments they'd traded glances that weren't filled with wariness or contempt.

The feeling of connection slowly welled up in her, filling her heart and pouring out to Vector.

The Joiner's head turned, tracking the feeling, then he released Raina's hands. "Yes," he said, "that should be sufficient. We will arrive shortly. Would you like to accompany us? It may help."

"Er… alright." She followed Vector out of the room and to the cockpit, then took up a position beside him as he sat down to pilot the ship.

And waited.

And waited.

"Er, Vector," she asked eventually, "how much longer do you think we'll be?"

"It shan't be long now."

"Do we know which facility we're heading towards?"

Vector considered, then pointed at the seat beside him. "The navigation console may have the information. We are uncertain how meticulous T- Cipher Nine's records are."

"You mean Scorpio's records," Raina said with a smile. She went and sat down, bringing up the galaxy map to extrapolate their destination.

With a nod, Vector admitted, "we suppose we do."

The map resolved itself almost instantly, and Raina quickly added in their coordinates and cut the predictions down to any distance within the next two hours of travel.

There it was. Detention Facility #295, on the moon of Kraan. Low on atmosphere and gravity, with a facility designed to use the tide of the planet's gravity as a power source. In the event of a breakout, artificial gravity could be increased by up to ten times standard, at which point automated turrets would take over dealing with the prisoners.

She'd shared this with her father hours ago.

"Vector," she said, "I think I know where we're going. Can you bring us out of hyperspace a few light-years short of Kraan? We can do another check, then triangulate. If I'm right, we can work on a plan to free Kaliyo without risking exposure."

Vector agreed, and within minutes the Sanguine End had come to a stop. A quick check confirmed they'd been heading in the right direction, and another jump and check confirmed their destination.

Now, it was time to bring the problem to their most experienced spymasters.

They called Doctor Lokin out of his lab and threw up blueprints over the briefing table. 2V brought in refreshments, and everybody sat down to examine the hologram.

It was actually a lot easier to deal with the basics when Cipher Nine wasn't around. Describing the structure of an entire facility for somebody who couldn't see holograms was time-consuming. When they got to the planning, however…

"We can't do that," snapped Darren Temple. "There's no backup plan. If anything goes wrong, you'll be sucking vacuum."

Doctor Lokin returned Darren's criticism with a mild glare. "Colourful metaphors aside, a subtle approach is necessary in this case, and more likely to succeed in reacquiring Kaliyo."

"Also more likely to get you, and all of us, killed." Raina's father practically growled the words, and she could see, or maybe feel, the fear hidden there. Maybe it was for himself, or maybe it was for his daughter, but he didn't like the idea of Doctor Lokin's one-man rescue effort at all. Raina was inclined to agree.

"If we may," Vector said, coughing quietly into his fist, "we are concerned that your plans fail to account for Ms. Djannis' responses. She is quite a disruptive influence, after all."

"Which just proves my point," her father added, tracing a line from the prison entrance to the cell block on the blueprint holo, "if anything unexpected occurs on your way in, a reliable cover story is more use than stealth generators, which have been known to fail under increased gravity."

The argument went back and forth like that for a while, with Raina watching, studying the blueprint and trying not to pay attention to the rising volume in the room.

It made sense that planning things was difficult. Cipher Nine was always the linchpin of their missions, with one or two of the crew acting as his support and backup either nearby or in the Sanguine End. It was easy to imagine him doing the same with the prison, disappearing for a few hours and then turning up, already back inside the ship with Kaliyo beside him.

It wouldn't be helpful to mention that. In truth, Raina doubted she could help much at all. There were protocols in the Imperial Intelligence service. She knew them and could follow them, but she'd been relying on Cipher Nine to show her how to adapt over the last few months. As it was, even Vector's experience far surpassed hers. What would could she even say? Take that route to avoid most of the cameras and any possible turrets? Doctor Lokin knew that; he was an expert at finding those sorts of weaknesses. From this spot, killik fingerlings could infest the walls and, maybe, short-circuit the artificial gravity in the base? Not only would Vector know that, but it would give away everything. Raina herself could easily act as a distraction, but in the event that the guards could resist her, Darren had brought aboard gaseous sedatives from his time on the run? Her father had already mentioned that as part of one of his backup plans.

In short, Raina had nothing to add to the conversation. It had all been said or was all well-known, because the others were experts at being spies.

But, as the volume in the room rose to a crescendo, Raina had a realization: everything had been said. It was just that most of it hadn't been heard. So she took a deep breath, concentrated, and, with all her willpower, said, "I have some suggestions."

The room went silent, and Raina Temple smiled as the three men looked to her.

Calm breaths, thought Raina. Remember your training. Confidence is the easiest way to prevent questions, and the easiest way to lie is to let the target assume a story.

Raina walked, confidently, down the ramp of the Sanguine End, with her father manacled in front of her and Vector leading the way. Somewhere, ahead of them, behind them, or somewhere else entirely, was Doctor Lokin, so silent and invisible that it felt like even Cipher Nine wouldn't know he was there.

Four men in trooper armour waited for them at the hangar exit, but there only response was for two of them to split off and guide Raina and Vector as they passed with their prisoner.

Easy breaths. The cover would hold. SCORPIO and Doctor Lokin had set it up personally.

As long as nobody recognized her.

No chance of them recognizing Vector, at least.

The walls were closer than she'd expected, like her mind had edited the blueprints to match how buildings usually felt. Here, though, the usual two and a half meter width was reduced to just a meter and a half of grey, unforgiving metal with a rounded ceiling. It made sense. The facility had to survive the increased gravity. Still, it was oppressive in a way she'd never experienced before.

One hallway's walk from the hangar, an officer stood at the entrance to the processing room. He was tall, straight-backed, with a nervous air, and the room looked like it had been recently cleaned. That made sense. Doctor Lokin had given Vector a rank of colonel.

There was nothing better for intimidating an Imperial soldier than rank.

The officer saluted as crisply as he could, and Darren Temple was handed over. Vector returned the officer's salute, and it was surprising how intimidating he looked, how his eyes could glint that hard steel-grey that felt just like an officer watching for any mistakes.

Everything was going perfectly. Raina's father would carry a supply of fingerlings down to Kaliyo for their escape, Doctor Lokin would subtly sabotage the turrets, and Vector would wait for the perfect moment to insinuate an inspection so he could sabotage the gravity. With Raina there to push anybody who wasn't helpful enough and the connection they had with Kaliyo, it should be easy to force an evacuation.

Simple is the closest thing to failsafe, Raina thought as she watched another guard wave her father past.

Then the alarms went off.