Agents of Imperial Intelligence: One Shot
Rise of an Imperial Sniper
Part One
(Author's Note: This story features Cereen Faye who is introduced in chapter four of Agents of Imperial Intelligence.)
The late afternoon sun shone down through the thin atmosphere of Imperial Center onto the enormous Imperial Senate building, its orange light reflecting off the metallic surface and giving the mushroom shaped building a molten appearance. It was after hours for the Senate, and much of building was empty, except for stormtrooper security personnel and a few late workers.
Deep inside the building, in an office suite devoted to the senator from the heavily populated inner rim world of Denon, a covert meeting was taking place.
Inside his office, but seated on a comfortable divan rather than behind his large desk, Imperial Senator Hiron sipped a hot cup of stimcaf. He had been awake since extremely early the previous morning, working on a military authorization bill to increase funding for the sector fleet defending Denon. It was a non-controversial measure, however he was constantly fighting for funding with the delegation from Eraidu, who had strong backing from Grand Moff Tarkin, Eraidu's most famous native son.
For the life of him Hiron didn't understand why there was no room in the budget. The end of the Clone Wars years prior had not corresponded to a decrease in military funding, yet it was as if there were some huge secret project siphoning funds that should have been available. He knew the Emperor had a number of pet projects, and cared very little for budgetary constraints, but someone had to worry about the numbers. Unfortunately for him, the leadership on Denon didn't care how he got them their funds, just that he did it.
Across from him, on the other side of his caf table, sat Operative Alanna, an Imperial Intelligence Agent. Hiron did not have a huge number of contacts with the Empire's intelligence agencies, but he had instructed his aides to reach out the intelligence community. He hoped to find a good security risk that would justify the increase in funding he sought, and preferred Imperial Intelligence to the more...politically sensitive...Imperial Security Bureau.
"...there a number of migratory species near the sector with large fleets, by civilian terms. They aren't heavily armed, but urban myth likens them to pirates and raiders," Alanna was saying.
Senator Hiron was only half listening to her, his mind already moving on to his next idea. He was about to interject when he heard an odd sound coming from the corridor outside of his office suite. If he had come from a less privileged family, or had seen more action holos, he would have recognized the sound of blaster fire.
"Good lord, what is that ruckus?" Hiron sighed, standing as if he was about to tell off some particularly noisy neighbors.
He made for the door but was stopped by Alanna, who grabbed his hand. "Senator, that's blaster fire," she said, her eyes wide.
"Blaster fire? Here?" he said. "That's impossible, I assure you."
Alanna walked over to the panel of decorative transparisteel next to the entrance to the suite, attempting to see out through the panel's frosted exterior.
Suddenly the cacophony grew much louder, and the sound of small explosions was joined by the shouting of stormtroopers.
"Senator, take cover," Alanna shouted, waving Hiron back, who was making for the door again. She wished she had her side-arm, a small blastech hold-out blaster, but the security at the senate building had confiscated it.
She jumped backwards when she saw movement coming from the main stairwell down the hall. She grabbed Hiron by the shirt, shoving him behind his divan. The sound of blaster bolts smacking against the walls outside of the office became deafening. A shot struck the transparisteel panel, shattering it into a million pieces and scattering razor sharp superheated shards throughout the room.
A man, blood streaming down his forehead, jumped through the broken window. He was tall and lean, with long black hair that clung to his face. The blood on his face contrasted starkly with his pale white skin. He held a heavy blaster pistol in one hand and a datapad in the other. The man, not realizing that he had company inside the office suite, pressed himself against the wall as blaster fire tore apart the ornate wooden door that separated the office from the hall.
He pointed his blaster out the window and returned fire. "Come and get me!" he shouted.
"Good lord man! What are you doing?" Senator Hiron yelled from behind the divan, his face a mixture of rage and shock. Alanna gave the Senator a swift kick to the ribs but was too late in preventing the idiot from giving them away.
She jumped up from her hiding spot and put her hands in the air as the man pointed his blaster pistol at them.
"Who are you?" he asked, his voice betraying a sinister intent.
"Nobody," Alanna answered back calmly.
"I'm the Senator from Denon, and I demand to know what're you doing. What is the manner of this...this...uncouth behavior?" Hiron shouted.
"A Senator huh?" the man responded, moving his blaster over to Alanna. "And who're you? His secretary?" he asked.
"Something like that," she answered back angrily.
"Get over here," the man demanded, waving the hand that held a datapad.
Hiron hugged the wall, in order to avoid taking fire, and stepped over to the man. The Senator was grabbed once more by the shirt.
"Hey, I've got hostages," he shouted out into the hall.
There was a pause in the blaster fire entering the room.
"Elex Path, you've got nowhere to run," a stormtrooper shouted in response, his voice muffled by his helmet. "Come out now with your hands up!"
"I've got hostages," Elex repeated. "Call out to them," he said to Hiron, whom he still had by the shirt. He kept his blaster pointed at Alanna, keeping her at a distance.
"Uh, this is Senator Hiron, Imperial Representative from Denon. Cease your fire, you're ruining my interior!"
Senator Hiron's proclamation was met with more blaster fire. A grenade flew through the broken window, ricocheting against the wall and landing at Alanna's feet. She instantly grabbed it from the floor, chucking back out the window.
An explosion erupted from the hall, followed with the death cries of half a dozen stormtroopers.
"A grenade, good heavens, don't they know who I am?" Senator Hiron frowned.
Elex peered out of the window, confirming the death of the troopers and his relative short term safety. "Nice one," he said, glancing at Alanna and really looking her over for the first time.
Alanna was wearing civilian clothes, albeit formal business wear, with no indication of her military origin. Her brown hair had been put up in a bun but some of her hair had fallen out of place in the commotion.
"Right, both you, out," Elex commanded, pointing his blaster at Alanna. He gave Hiron a shove towards the door.
"You aren't going to get away with this," Alanna told him.
"We'll see pateesa," Elex said with a smile. "Out." Alanna followed the Senator out into the corridor.
Outside was the wreckage of the hall, with bits of stormtrooper here and there. The wall of the office on the other side of the corridor had completely imploded after the grenade had exploded.
Elex steered his hostages down the corridor and towards the stair well. He paused at the corner, glancing up the stairs to make sure there weren't more stormtroopers waiting to mow him down in a barrage of blaster fire.
"Go down," Elex ordered, pushing Hiron down the stairs. The Senator stumbled but recovered. Alanna followed reluctantly.
They went down the stairs for several flights, until they arrived on a landing that led to an open air speeder parking facility. There were several small speeders, including Hiron's very own personal speeder, a luxurious green SoroSuub model.
But Elex steered them towards the far end of the landing pad towards a grey winged air speeder with an enclosed canopy. They were halfway across the pad when the shouts of stormtroopers could be heard behind them.
"Go, go!" Elex shouted, aiming his blaster behind him as he ran. He fired off a couple of wild shots, which succeeded in getting the stormtroopers to duck for cover rather than shoot them down.
Senator Hiron collapsed against the side of the speeder, out of breath, while Alanna ducked behind one of the wings.
"I don't want to sound disloyal, but the troopers don't seem too concerned about our safety," Hiron said to Alanna.
"They think we're expendable," Alanna answered his comment.
"I'm a Senator!" Hiron retorted, affronted.
"Like I said…" Alanna restated.
"Inside the speeder," Elex shouted, punching a number sequence into his datapad and unlocking the canopy door.
Alanna grabbed the Senator and pushed him through the door against his protestations, ducking down to avoid being hit by blaster fire.
Elex shoved the door shut and ran around to the other side of the speeder, firing at the stormtroopers and keeping them at bay. He opened the pilot's canopy and jumped in.
After a few moments, as blaster fire splashed against the hull, they were airborne. The twin repulsor engines screamed to life and Elex steered the speeder away from the Senate building and into the crowded skylanes of Imperial City.
oOoOo
Cereen Faye stared into the holographic mirror. The face staring back at her had blonde hair, blue eyes, and a narrow nose. Slight freckles marked each cheekbone. She tried to remember her mother's face, whom she was constantly compared to by friends of her family. She tried not to think about when she had last seen her mother. The Clone Wars, which had seemed so distant to the child she had once been, had taken her mother. Near the end of the war the Separatists did the impossible, besieging the capital of the entire galaxy. Debris from the battle had struck their monad, instantly killing her mother. Cereen would have died as well, if she had not been at primary school at the time.
Was this what her mother had looked like? The memory of her mother's face had faded, despite how tightly she had clung to it. All of their family holos had been lost in the apartment, and her father hadn't been able to recover anything from the wreckage.
Turning away from the mirror, Cereen grabbed a towel from the bench inside the locker room, wrapping it around her waist. She went to her locker, removing her Imperial City Security uniform. She removed the towel and stretched before getting dressed. She had just finished her afternoon jog and was preparing for the night shift at the security annex building, inside the Hirkenglade Prefecture.
She exited the locker room and entered the common lounge beyond, where a few of her male colleagues sat playing pazaak and eating dried fungus crackers, a snack food that actually tasted much better than it sounded. She was aware of their wandering eyes as she walked past, but payed them no mind. Men had watched her like that, even if they hadn't meant anything offensive by it, ever since she was a teenager. But after she had learned over half a dozen ways of taking a grown humanoid off of their feet during her combat training, she didn't stress about it. If any men ever got grabby she knew how to twist their elbows behind their heads until things that shouldn't pop popped.
She arrived at her destination, a communications control room, where her shift was about to begin.
Cereen exchanged places with another security officer and logged into the computer terminal. She placed a headset onto her forehead and glanced up at the holoscreen showing the afternoon news. Nothing important was happening.
She heard the door open behind her and recognized the loud footsteps of her boss, Domin Kar, the Precinct Chief of her security division.
"Cereen, you're early," he said, placing a cup of caf on the top of the terminal next to hers.
"I'm on time, boss," she shook her head.
"Anything yet?" he asked.
She shook her head again. The security grid was screened by droid intelligences located within the Precinct City Hall. Imperial Center, the planet that had once been called Coruscant, was so big that each of its quadrants were big enough, and populated enough, to function as cities unto themselves. Hirkenglade, which was just a few dozen kilometers from the Imperial Palace District, was home to tens of millions of individuals. It was considered a middle class district, although it had the societal stratification common to Imperial Center, with the wealthy living up in the high rises and the poorer rungs of society living in their literal shadow below. Hirkenglade was almost all residential towers, although it had all of the services common to all districts, including restaurants, schools, theaters, and entertainment corridors. Enormous self contained greenhouses were housed inside the enormous city blocks, helping to grow the enormous food supply the city needed.
The control center inside the annex building functioned as a switchboard. Citizens in distress would first be answered by droid intelligences, who would then direct their calls to the appropriate authority based on the severity of their trouble. Cereen would only end up speaking to a live being if things really were bad.
She switched the holo screen overhead onto an entertainment channel, and began to watch a holodrama featuring the child star Garik Loran. Her boss began playing pazaak on his datapad.
Cereen was a rookie, only in her first year of service with Imperial City Security. Her duties varied, and, despite her colleagues' predisposition against females, an all too common New Order belief, she had earned her place. Currently she was on office duty, for the past week and including the next one, but she also frequently performed patrol duty. She hoped to become a detective one day.
A noise from her boss's terminal yanked her attention away from the holodrama. She expected it to be another complaint about under dwellers intruding on the more well to do concourses, but realized from Domin's expression it was more serious.
"Right, got it," Domin said into his headset. "Yeah, I'll get them together." Domin stood from his seat and ripped off his headset.
"What is it boss?" Cereen asked.
"Armed hostage situation, over in the docks area," he said, referring to the shipping facility at the edge of the district that moved and stored large amounts of goods from offworld and other districts across the city. "A code red, v.i.p hostage situation," he added as he turned to leave the room, grabbing his comlink.
"Wait, hostage situation?" Cereen started, ripping off her own headset. "You're summoning the response teams?"
"That's right," he answered, leaving the room. Cereen followed him out.
"What're you doing?" he asked her.
"I'm on the response team," she reminded him.
"Stay at your post, officer," he shook his head. He spoke into his comlink, informing a lieutenant get the on duty officers ready for armed response.
"Boss," Cereen followed up stubbornly. "I'm on the response team."
"You're on comm duty tonight," he yelled at her, growing angry.
"The calls will get transferred," she answered back. "Or put someone off-duty in there. I've trained and been qualified for armed response, I'm the best sniper in the precinct. I need to be on this."
Clearly growing frustrated at her stubbornness and needing to make sure the team was getting assembled, Domin gave in.
"Fine, go get your gear. Get someone to take your place," he ordered.
Cereen went back into the communications room and grabbed her headset, and then went back into the lounge. She spotted a fellow officer whom she disliked, who was currently bragging about his new girlfriend to a couple of other younger officers, and tossed the headset into his lap.
"You're on, champio," she said, using the Huttese slang word.
"What?" he exclaimed. "I'm off duty."
"Not anymore. Emergency," Cereen shook her head. "Chief's orders."
She turned and ran down the hall and into a nearby turbolift. She took it down a couple of levels until she arrived on their armory level. She exited the lift and walked quickly down the hall and into the armory locker room. She scanned her eye into a biometric security panel, which accepted her and opened the reinforced blast door.
On the other side of the door a dozen men were getting ready, putting on blue security armor that was similar to that of a stormtrooper, except that the helmet was not a full face design.
She went to her locker, shedding her dress shirt and pants. The men in the room didn't give her a spare look, as they were busy donning their own gear. She found it a refreshing change for once.
She put on the form fitting body suit and then the chest plate, followed by her gloves. Despite her late start she was almost done by the time the other officers were getting ready to leave the room. With her armor on she retrieved a padded case from within her locker.
"Ready?" she heard the squad leader ask everyone in the room. She joined the chorus of affirmatives only a little late, just as she shouldered the case and turned away from her locker.
Cereen followed behind the others as they exited the locker room through the back hall, which led directly to the annex building's speeder hangar. A number of armored speeders lay within, many of them based on the atmospheric transports from the Clone Wars era.
Her response team joined a couple of others gathered in the hangar. They waited only a few minutes until a senior officer, joined by her boss, Domin Kar, briefed them. A terrorist had attempted to bomb the Imperial Senate building. Although his plot had been thwarted by security personnel he had escaped with a pair of hostages, a Senator and an unidentified aide.
The terrorist, identified as Elex Path, was an anti-Imperial extremist who felt the Empire was a fascist organization, and the Senate a corrupt vestige supporting an illegal government. He had been pursued by T.I.E fighters from the Senate complex through the skylanes, forced to weave between the skyscrapers and city blocks to avoid being blown apart. He had landed inside a shipping facility at the edge of the precinct, and their orders were to secure the surrounding area while Imperial Security forces stormed the building.
Their briefing concluded, Cereen's team filed into one of the transports. She was the only one not carrying the standard blaster carbine rifle.
The flight to the edge of the district only took a few minutes, during which their superiors filled them in on the details of the operation through the comlinks inside their helmets. Their squad would take to the rooftop of a nearby high rise and provide overwatch, while the other squads would secure the walkways that connected the warehouse building to its neighbors below.
They landed on top of the building and her squad disembarked. They spread out, with two officers securing the lift that lead to the interior of the building.
"Officer Faye," Cereen heard over her headset. "Take the northwest corner of the building. The perpetrator is on the floor below the docks. They parked in an access tunnel."
Cereen hurried over to the corner the lieutenant identified and glanced over at the building. She spotted the docks. Below them were a series walkways and automated machinery, currently deactivated. The access tunnel was a round conduit that allowed maintenance droids and inspection speeders access to the interior of the building, which would probably be mostly empty space filled with shipping containers.
"I see it," Cereen responded. She shifted her case off of her shoulders and placed it on the rooftop. She knelt down and opened it.
Inside was one of her most precious possessions. Usually officers were restricted to standard issue weapons, but a few well placed references from former instructors in her Sub-Adult Group academy, and the reputation of her retired father, had persuaded her superiors.
The SoroSuub X-45 sniper rifle had belonged to her father, who had served in Coruscant Security back in the days of the Republic. He had used it during the battle of Coruscant, when Separatist armies had landed on the surface and attacked the city. It had a thin grey plasteel stock with soft black grips along the bottom. The scope ran the length of the barrel, and had been upgraded to a holographic sight that could be adjust to display infrared or ultraviolet targeting data. Her father had made further adjustments, removing the automatic fire mode and switching from the standard magazine that carried 25 shots to a higher energy receiver that fired more power bolts, with a 10 shot capacity.
The powerful rifle was actually illegal for her to carry although there was a civilian version of the rifle available, which was favored in big game hunting across the galaxy and in shooting competitions. Her status as security officer allowed her to own it, and outside of her Precinct Annex building, she could only carry it inside its case, without ammunition. Of course, it was too valuable and fragile for her to want to carry it about in the first place.
She removed her stand from the case and place it on the edge of the roof, and then laid down on the rooftop on her belly. She placed her rifle onto its stand and began to examine the warehouse building through her scope.
Night was beginning to fall. She heard the distant howl of inbound military transports, which confirmed the arrival of the stormtrooper response team.