Liadan Thornbriar, otherwise known as Imperial agent Cipher Nine, ended the holocall and turned to consider her new operative. Until a few moments ago, Vector Hyllus had been an Imperial diplomat to the planet Alderaan. Now he had been reassigned to her as a covert assault agent. Neither of their superiors had involved them in the discussion, as was typical, and the transfer was immediate. Liadan had been left with more questions than answers.

Liadan stood on the grounds of House Cortess, which were eerily silent now after the chaos of the brief battle earlier. House Cortess was in disgrace, and bodies both human and alien littered the grounds. The traitor had been eliminated. The operation had been a success.

Vector had his back to her, his hands clasped behind his back, and appeared to be gazing past the gates of House Cortess at the white-capped mountains in the distance. He had overheard the beginning of the holocall, but had stepped away to give her privacy.

Liadan had only known Vector a few days, but she had already been forced to revise her opinion of him several times. At this point, she was ready to throw out everything she had initially thought and start over. Being a good judge of people and sizing up unpredictable situations was part of her job description, so this changing reassessment unnerved her.

She had been briefed before meeting him, but what she had been told to expect was barely sufficient to prepare her for what she had found. Alderaan was a planet of bickering human aristocratic houses, each just as likely to backstab you as to invite you to tea. Liadan had initially been expecting an equally stuffy diplomat, middle-aged and pompous. Then she was told that Vector had been living with the Killiks, a native, non-humanoid species. The Killiks were not well loved and Vector's loyalty was suspect.

No matter that the Killiks were one of the oldest species in the galaxy and had a stronger claim to the planet than the humans. They were the most alien of aliens, with large insectoid bodies and too many legs. Most of the time, the only thing said about them was how they brainwashed their captives, turning them into mindless drones psychically connected to the species' communal hive mind. These unfortunates were called "Joiners" and they were spoken of with horror, their fate often considered worse than death.

Vector, it turned out, was a human Joiner.

He was also young – attractive even, appeared fully in charge of his intellect, and had surprised her by occasionally being expectedly witty. He wasn't however, by any stretch of the imagination, normal.

For once, Liadan thought, I have met someone in the Imperial ranks who is more alien than I am. She went and stood at the top of the steps next to him.

"So, you are aware of the news? Welcome to my crew."

"Thank you Agent. We hope we can live up to your expectations." All Joiners, Liadan had discovered, spoke of themselves in the plural. Liadan wasn't sure sometimes if she was talking to Vector himself or the entire hive of Killiks. It took some getting used to.

If one didn't know better, Vector could have passed for an Alderaanian noble – finely dressed, perfectly poised, ever polite. But as soon as he looked at you, the illusion ended. He had Joiner eyes; solid black pools with no iris to be found. Liadan had not realized how much she relied on the cues she could read in people's eyes until she met Vector. She couldn't tell what he was thinking, and that bothered her.

"I spoke well of you to Intelligence," she told him. "After today, there should be no doubt as to your loyalty." Liadan shot him a look. "What you did today could not have been easy for you. But you did the right thing."

"We appreciate your faith in us," Vector said. "We could not let the rest of the hive move against the Empire. We still hope for a Killik-Imperial alliance someday."

Liadan nodded. The Killiks had helped expose House Cortess, but in return they wanted to take over the Cortess family lands and buildings for a new hive – and convert the remaining family members into Joiners. Liadan had adamantly refused. House Cortess had already been punished, and the traitor was dead. Liadan wanted to set an example that the Empire could be merciful to those who turned over the guilty. Giving House Cortess to the Killiks would have horrified the rest of Alderaan's noble houses and not made the Empire look good.

The Killiks, however, had not accepted her refusal. There, in the throne room, the group of Killiks that had moments earlier helped her storm the house had turned their weapons on her. When she saw Vector take his staff in hand as well, she thought that she was about to die. She was sorely outnumbered.

Instead Vector had stood at her side, and had fought his own hive. He had dispatched the Killik warriors in that room with shocking efficiency, using combat maneuvers Liadan had never seen. She had noticed his electrostaff earlier of course - it was a primitive-looking weapon that appeared of Killik make -but had assumed it to be ceremonial rather than functional. Once again she had been proven wrong. In the aftermath of the fight she was considerably shaken. And thankful to be alive.

Vector did not seem bothered by the recent battle. Was there anything that unruffled him? He displayed a perpetual calmness that was slightly uncanny. Sometimes, just when she thought he was far off in his head, he would say something surprisingly insightful, proving that he had been paying attention all along. This thoughtfulness carried over into other mannerisms as well. Vector applied a kind of deliberate care to each word he spoke, giving his speech a strange, measured cadence that was almost mesmerizing.

No, Vector was not the mindless drone as Liadan had been led to believe. Watching him though was like trying to make out a reflection in the water. If she searched hard enough, she suspected that there was indeed a human still there, somewhere, buried deep behind the Joiner facade.

oo0oo

Intelligence wasted no time. Almost immediately, Liadan and Vector were sent on a mission of critical importance. Liadan didn't like being forced to rely on a new and untested agent, but the mission was a sensitive one, requiring a delicate touch. Her superior, Watcher Two, had specifically asked her not to bring Kaliyo, her other partner.

It ended up being one of the hardest missions Liadan had attempted to date, and the mere fact that Vector made it out alive with her was enough to leave her considerably impressed. He had done more than just survive, even. Had had performed admirably under pressure, in conditions that would have broken other agents. Liadan had been forced to make some difficult decisions, ones that could have cost them their lives. Yet Vector had never questioned her judgment, had followed her instructions to the letter, and had displayed an unshakable bravery throughout. He had fought well, and together they kept each other alive. Liadan was pleased and decided that Vector made a good addition to her crew.

When it was all over, they were all put on one month's leave. Liadan told Kaliyo and Vector that they were free to spend that time as they wished, as long as they stayed in Dromund Kaas and agreed to meet once a week to check in. Liadan intended to keep these meetings casual, with the one rule that no one was allowed to discuss business. She enjoyed the rare chance to get to see her crew as people once in a while, and not as agents.

The first time, they met at a cantina. It became quickly obvious that Kaliyo and Vector were like oil and water. Kaliyo did not try to disguise her discomfort with Vector. Vector, thankfully, tolerated her disparaging comments with nearly endless patience. He only rarely bit back with a retort and when he did, Kaliyo was usually left muttering at him in apparent incomprehension. Liadan decided that from now on she would meet with them separately.

Finally Kaliyo announced that she was going to "quit this joint" and go find something more entertaining. For Kaliyo that meant prowling a rougher sort of establishment, where she was just as likely to get in a rip-roaring fight with some of the men there as she was to bed them. (And sometimes she even managed to do with both.) Liadan was left alone with Vector.

Liadan started to ask him a few questions about himself – the usual non-intrusive conversational topics – but he deftly maneuvered her away from all that and next thing she knew, she was telling him about herself instead. Liadan was used to dealing with suave talkers and people who knew how to subtly wring information out of you – and Vector was not one of those. He caught her off guard instead with a brutal honesty that disregarded all social rules, and he proved stubbornly hard to deflect. She had already seen him show an intellectual interest in virtually everything around him, and he turned that probing curiosity on her like someone studying her ways and culture for the very first time. He was intently interested in how she managed to live the life of an agent without any visible social network around her. Did she have siblings, a family, a husband? Did she have someone to come home to after a mission? Being part of the hive mind, he explained, one was never truly alone. He seemed to find her solitary life difficult to comprehend.

Liadan was taken back at first. Agents would normally never reveal personal details about themselves and it was taboo to ask. Even her name was something private; her identity as Cipher Nine was all that mattered. But Vector's sincere desire to know and understand had an almost childlike innocence to it. Among Killiks, Liadan learned, the concept of privacy did not exist. Sharing your mind with a multitude of others would do that you, I guess, Liadan thought. She found herself unable to be irritated with him at this breech of etiquette. Vector was such a strange mix of awkwardness and sophistication, and Liadan wondered how he reconciled these two halves of himself – the Killik and the human.

So she told him a bit about her family. Nothing too revealing though. He didn't need to know about how she'd lived her whole life trying to match her older sister's perfection; how even in death her sister continued to cast a long shadow over her; how her mother had told her, "it should have been you" at the funeral. She focused instead on the small kindnesses her father had shown her and how she had secretly loved the gentleness in his eyes. He was the only reason she occasionally went home to visit. Those visits were getting more and more infrequent now. Since entering Intelligence, she'd been forced to hide much of what she did and that didn't encourage familiarity. Intelligence suited her though. She was already used to living a life unobserved and unnoticed.

"As to my having a husband…" she said to Vector. She tried to read some emotion in those black eyes, but could not. "Are you asking me if I'm single?"

"That was part of the question," Vector said simply. He appeared to notice her reticence. "We'd like to know the answer."

Was he saying he was interested in her? Or was she just another subject of his intellectual curiosity?

"No I'm not married," she said. "Being an agent doesn't really allow for intimacy." Or at least not of the emotional kind.

"We understand," Vector said. "It seems a lonely life."

Liadan was reminded then that Vector was now an agent too and was probably thinking of his own future.

"We agents have each other," she said. That wasn't entirely true, but she liked to think of her little crew as a kind of family, eccentric though it may be. It was really all she had.

"We like that way of thinking," Vector said. "We will keep that in mind."

They left the cantina. Liadan was surprised to learn that Vector had a small apartment in Kaas City. With the exception of the last few days, he hadn't lived there since being assigned to Alderaan.

"Is it strange to go back now?" Liadan asked.

"It is," he said. "We are still trying to decide what to bring with us when we leave with you. Actually, our apartment is nearby. Would you like to come inside?"

Liadan had never known a man to invite her to his apartment without it being an invitation to his bed as well. She'd always been confident navigating these waters, but Vector frequently left her on uncertain footing. She decided he wasn't being anything other than polite. She was surprised to find that she felt a bit disappointed. He was handsome enough, but he was so…odd. Was Vector really having that kind of effect on her?

Vector's apartment was on the 134th level. As they rode the elevator up, Liadan decided that she never would have been able to afford a place in this building.

"A few years ago," Vector said, "they almost changed the key entry system into a retina scan. That would have been problematic."

Liadan looked at him to find him smiling. The rest of the galaxy may have thought that becoming a Joiner was a tragedy, but she liked that Vector could find humor in it. She laughed. "I bet. I doubt they have any Joiner residents here."

"We are sure we're the only one."

There was no need for a speeder, since Vector's apartment was a short walk down the building's interior street. He ran his key card across a sensor in the wall and the door slid open.

Inside was a small one room studio with no windows. Windows to the outside were extremely rare and usually only the wealthiest citizens could afford them, so Liadan wasn't surprised. The place Vector had once called home was a perplexing cross between a bachelor pad and a museum. It had a kind of controlled clutter, with pockets of neatness interspersed with haphazard groupings of cultural artifacts from all over the galaxy. She imagined most of them were gifts that he had received in his time as a diplomat. She saw a wooden totem of some unfamiliar animal with a beak and six legs, a colorful woven blanket, and something that might have been an oversized eating utensil – if you had two mouths anyway.

There was a bed, neatly made, a small kitchen with an antiquated teapot on the stove, and a holoterminal in the center of the room. Over in the corner was plant, long since dead, and a desk and chair. Liadan wandered over to it.

On the desk was an odd looking holopad stylus. Liadan picked it up and a smudge came off on her hand. She stared at it a moment uncomprehending. Then the truth came to her. It was ink.

"You have a writing pen?" she asked.

"Several actually," Vector said. "You'd be surprised how many cultures still use them."

"Do you collect them?"

"You could say that."

"You have a lot of fascinating things, Vector," Liadan said. "You should charge admission." She turned to grin at him.

"Most people aren't interested in these things, we're afraid. They are more like mementos to us." For a moment Liadan thought she caught a hint of wistfulness in his voice.

"I'm interested."

"You are not like 'most people', Agent," Vector said. He was studying her from across the room and Liadan felt suddenly self-conscious.

"Perhaps," she said, looking away.

After complimenting Vector on his eccentric collection, and him offering a few interesting facts about some of the more unusual pieces, Liadan left him to sort through his things. As she rode a taxi to back to the spaceport – her ship was her home – she thought about Vector. He had learned more about her in a few hours than Kaliyo had by traveling with her for months. She felt she should be wary about this - such openness with a new agent was dangerous surely - but she didn't care. She indulged herself for the briefest moment imagining that she had a partner at her side who she could truly be herself with; no barriers, no lies, just a peacefulness between them born from the ultimate trust. It was a fantasy of course. But it felt good to dream.