CHAPTER TWO

The cockpit of the Sienar-made courier was spacious compared to her normal confines in a ship, Jan Ors thought as she lounged in her pilot's chair. The sleek, rectangular control panels were aligned neatly: a pilot's station in front of the bow viewscreen and a copilot's console to the right. The emptiness of the console was strange to her, as was the silence throughout the entire ship.

She shook the thought out of her head. It wasn't the time for such thoughts, not with such an important mission to be done. She stood from her seat and walked back to her cabin. It was several hours until the ship reached its next waypoint and days before reaching Coruscant. The perfect time to plan.

The transport's small cabin was spartan: a small storage cubicle to her right was crowded against a narrow cot. On the cot were the two small storage cubes containing everything she needed for Jan Ors to become Leessa Shalmohar, a young Imperial Intelligence agent enrolling in the Imperial Academy of Interrogation. It was a deceptively sterile name for what many of her fellow rebels and even some Imperials had named the School of Torturers.

She opened the larger of the two crates and rifled through the white Imperial uniforms and found the circular holoemitter hidden within. She thumbed the emitter on and studied the human male that appeared in the flat image. He stood around 1.8 meters tall, the writing said to the side, and wore a commander's rank insignia upon the left breast of his uniform. He wore his shoulder-length black hair slicked back behind an oval-shaped face whose attractiveness hid the vicious reputation he had acquired. A thin line of black beard followed his jaw line before expanding into a neatly trimmed goatee. Blue eyes shined with a hint of malice and ambition. Leco Daam, she thought, the head of the school and a prized pupil of Director Ysanne Isard. Rumors amongst Alliance intelligence, all from third hand sources at their most verifiable, suggested the two had some sort of romantic connection as well. He was known throughout Intel as a formidable, if cocky, agent and a potentially large threat in the future, especially if the rumors had merit. It was these reasons and more that Alliance intelligence had tasked Jan Ors with infiltrating his academy and killing him.

The Imperial uniforms were removed from the crate and carefully placed onto the cot. She fished her left fingers along the bottom of the crate, quickly finding the five barely noticeable pressure plates. The false bottom came loose, revealing the gear that she believed that she would need to complete her mission: two holdout blaster pistols, a quarter of a kilogram of a low grade explosive and a detonator, a folded up cloth containing five non-metal throwing knives, an electro-garrote and an electric toothbrush. Well, she thought as she double-checked the sensor scrambler that kept all of it hidden from prying eyes, maybe not all of it would be needed...

She replaced all of the gear into the bottom of the crate and put the false bottom back into place, followed by all but one of the Imperial uniforms. She placed the crates on the floor next to the cubicle with the intention of unpacking sometime soon. She removed the orange tie from her silky black hair and let it fall to just past her shoulders. The Alliance uniform was the next to go and was dropped into a lump that was destined for the ship's garbage incinerator, quickly replaced with the Imperial uniform as her real self flowed off of her and Leessa Shalmohar replaced it.

Leessa, she thought, was Kuati and from a middle class family that had died while on a business trip to Alderaan. That part, she thought bitterly, wasn't that far from the truth. She had joined Imperial Intelligence before then and had a middling but promising career stationed in the Outer Rim amongst smugglers before applying for additional training in interrogation.

The door out of her cabin opened in front of her as she walked out into the deserted common room. She took a seat at the small faux wooden table and grabbed a piece of Ithorian fruit from the bowl in the center of it. "He offered to let me use the Crow," she said in a perfect Kuati accent. The gesture shouldn't have surprised her; she was the one who generally flew the ship anyway, but for some reason it had. The offer combined with what his last words to her were-or could have been. Ever since Danuta she had been dreading that he would admit his obvious feelings towards her, and she would have to do the same.

No. The thought sounded so loudly in her head that Jan was momentarily surprised that she hadn't said it out loud. She couldn't allow herself to get so close to him-to anybody-at the moment. Not in that way; not after so many of her comrades and friends had already given their lives for the Alliance. And not for the fact that even after all of this time Mon Mothma still didn't fully trust him. No matter how much she loved him, everything told her that she couldn't.

Leco Daam was always uncomfortable when Ysanne Isard was in his office. Despite their mutual attraction to each other, the woman's reputation always preceded her. He feigned a smile at her. It wasn't each other's attractiveness or personalities that had led them to each other, he knew, but rather their ambitions. He needed a way to ascend higher into the echelons of Imperial Intelligence, and Isard needed someone that could spread loyalty to her throughout the entire organization.

Her eyes bored holes into him, the blue freezing him where he stood while the red burned its way through his defensive layers to stare at his true self. "Your new class arrives tomorrow." A statement, not a question.

"A promising group of students, if I may say so," he said. He retrieved his datapad from the corner of his desk and handed it to her. The director took the datapad and quickly studied its contents. All fourteen of the students, some of the Empire's best and most promising intelligence agents, were listed within, bios full of praise and constructive criticism from Daam's colleagues.

"Very promising," she said. Her face remained expressionless despite the praise of his hand-picked selections. "Yet..." His soul chilled as she looked up from the datapad at him. With the quick movement of a finger she ejected the datapad's card and placed it into a pocket of her crimson uniform.

"You don't approve of one of them?" he said. He braced himself for the stern berating that was bound to come next, or worse. Isard wasn't the kind of person that tolerated failure amongst her subordinates, or even her own family if the rumors about her father were true.

"A hunch, commander," she said. "One involving info that's above your security clearances." She handed the datapad back to him roughly, the thin metal case slapping against his stomach. "Keep an eye on your students, Daam," she said as she turned around. "I'll be looking deeper myself."

"If there's something about one of my students," he said, grinning deeply, "I'll find it. It shouldn't be any problem."

"Leave it to me," Isard said. "You're too close. You might alert them and flush them out before we're ready." Daam's face dropped. It had been one of the first times that her criticisms had stung so badly yet the reasons for it rung true to him. If something were up with one of the students, he would be far too close to the matter to investigate it without raising suspicion.

"I'll just keep my eyes open, then," he said.

"Good." Isard stepped through the open door. Before it hissed shut, Daam heard her parting words. "You're learning quickly."