Chapter 12

"Tweeedlebeep. Blip. Blip. Beeep!"

-R2-D2-

"It never really had an official name early on, and by the time it did, everyone talked of it as Operation Duraplate. No idea where the name came from, but we know it did heavily mislead Imperial Intelligence during the early days."

Senator-in-exile Padmé Skywalker, 19 AJE

Captain Lane looked at the table with some concern. On it was a partly disassembled LEP Servant droid, it's distinctive 'ears' having been removed along with the casings for it's head and most of the body.

"What exactly am I looking at here?"

Grudin, a middle-aged yet exuberant female Rodian spoke flawless yet accented Basic. "It's something I was working on with General Skywalker. Long story short... The idea actually came from his wife, when she saw that we had captured a consignment of those droids when the [I]Second Chance[/I] took down an Imperial supply convoy last month. They had about a dozen of those droids on board ans since we don't really need them, they were meant to be scrapped for their parts. But anyway, she said that these were the most inconspicuous droids she'd ever seen and that they would function well as infiltrators, messengers and so on..."

She trailed off when she noticed Lan's impatience.

"Ehm... anyway, he set to work and since I am the best Droid mechanic on the planet, he asked for my help."

Lane doubted it had gone quite like that, but Skywalker would have indulged the woman to get access to her lab and workspaces.

"So what do you need from me?"

"Well, firs to approve some sort of field test, and after it's successful, manufacture and deployment of more of them."

"How would we deploy them? And what are the computer security measures against tampering?" Lane asked, fully aware of the possibilities such a concept had.

"Well, the second has been taken care of. General Skywalker used that Astromech of his to program the droids. He... was very insistent." Grudin's distaste for the idea that anyone, anything might be a better programmer than herself was obvious, but unlike her, Lane was well aware that R2-D2 was far, far more than a normal Astromech droid. He was about as close to a human as such a machine could be, and that Skywalker, his family and probably the rest of his inner circle considered the small droid as a true friend.

As such, R2-D2 was probably the best for such a job.

"So what exactly are the modifications you made?"

"I can demonstrate on this one." she said and gestured to the disassembled example on the table, "We didn't actually do anything with the ears. The General believed that it would be too obvious. But we entirely rebuilt and reprogrammed its brain. Think of it as a two-layered brain. Normal maintenance, even if it is fully disassembled and each individual component checked, will reveal no software other than the normal programming of a serving droid. You'd have to go disassemble the code itself, because ours is buried within it. To do that, you have to send power to the component, and if the code detects that, it's meant to delete itself, leaving behind only the clean portions."

"Impressive."

"Yes... sure. Anyway, this is about as secure as we could make it before the General left. The software, that is. Hardware is another matter entirely."

Her eyes began to shine with enthusiasm for her work as she continued, and for all her lengths ways of speaking, Lane couldn't help but admire such dedication to one's craft in someone.

"Hardware is less strict, but only because the General insisted that it must be nigh-on untedectable, preferably that if it [I]is[/I] detected it is then dismissed as a anti-tampering device by the original developer that hasn't yet made it into publicly accessible blueprints or that was retrofitted by whoever actually bought the droids for imperial service. Hardware-wise, sensors are in this line limited to the type the model comes equipped with, but since this one's primary function is to eavsdrop and record conversations made in it's presence, that's not an issue. Anything more would be too easy to detect. The really clever part comes with what's done with that data. Here, inside the power core housing," she said, pointing at the component in question, "as well as in the heatsink attached to it we've hidden recording devices with, as the General thinks, enough capacity to record a week's worth of audio, filtered via various pre-programmed keywords. For example, if this model were to fetch food in a kitchen, it wouldn't record food ordetrs or such thrown around in the kitchen, but it would record all conversation and food orders in the meeting room it is bringing the food to."

"Impressive." Lane said, really meaning it this time, even more than the first. "How is the data recovered? Somehow I doubt you managed to hide a HoloNet transmitter in there."

"We didn't, though not for lack of trying. In the end we settled on a short-range burst transmitter hiding the signal in the routing, maintenance and Computer-control traffic that all such droids put out regularly or if necessary any other given Imperial transmission. The bandwith and range are very limited, but if you had an intelligence team in, say, twenty kilometres distance, you'd be nearly indetectible, less so if you need more range. The maximum we think we can reach is about a hundred kilometres, but that would be in emergencies only."

"But what if we can't have an intelligence team there?"

"That's something else the General asked. My idea there is to have a second set of droids, one that hovers undetected nearby and then has one of two possible purposes, one to act as a one-time use hypercom burst transmitter, the two to reach a suitable comm relay nearby and insert the message into any outgoing traffic. Though ideally, the messages would be handed off to a third type of droid that would be recruited from the sort that accompany the imperials on shuttles and the like, who would then hand them off to one of our agents at a time and place to be specified."

"What if the signal is intercepted?"

She smirked. "If someone views it without the proper encryption hard- and software, all they get is the Empire's official travel guide to Coruscant."

Lane couldn't help a childish chuckle. The holo in question was infamous on Weitun, as it was a 'guided tour' of Coruscant's famous sights as narrated by a cutesy version of none other than the Emperor. Debate raged on if he had really done the voice-over as the holo claimed, but it was the source of no end of hilarity in the Republic.

In the end, he was impressed. This could potentially solve a lot of problems. Even though only a few were aware of the Emperor's Force powers, operatives that couldn't be broken with blackmail, drugs and torture would be invaluable. And to be honest, the Republic couldn't afford not to think out of the box. Lane was certain that this sort of thing had been tried before in the long history of the Galaxy, but some ideas just kept coming up again and again.

"Well, if you can make this work, I'll take as many as you can build." Lane said, deciding to sacrifice some of the RNI slush fund he had been building up over the last few months, "But I'll take what you said to me to my team and have them try to poke some holes in the plan first."

"Yes, Sir."

This was one of the days when Padmé really could do without the empathic link she somehow shared with her children. She sensed Luke's distress from a long way away. She didn't know if it was the strength of the emotion or any indication for the bond getting... stronger for lack of a better word, but it was clear enough that both Luke and Leia were in distress.

She knew better than to interfere with Jedi classes even though she wasn't comfortable with some of their teaching methods, never mind the subject matter. She knew that the twins would need those skills one day, but her maternal instincts wanted to protect her children from the evil universe that was out there.

She didn't like it, but was realist enough to know that it was probably inevitable. When they had talked about it, Anakin had admitted that part of him wanted to wrap always keep the kids safe, but since they would one day be extremely powerful force users teaching them the skills they needed to survive was vital. A small part of her resented Anakin for his cavalier attitude to all this and she knew that she was irrational, but she couldn't help herself.

The argument that had sparked had been as long coming as it was pointless, and by the time they had stopped yelling at each other, she had resolved not to bring the matter up again in the near future.

Padmé reached the open training ground where some classes were held when the weather permitted it. As usual there were some spectators, this time watching none other than Master Yoda teaching a large class of younglings the basics of sabre combat. They were still too young to master the construction of actual sabres, so normally they would have been using training sabres, extremely low-powered training weapons unable to do more than create moderate heat on the opponent's skin. But since crystals were in such short supply, electric sabres were used. These were essentially sticks surrounded by an electrified metal grid that were supposed to mimic the balance of a real sabre.

She stopped at the edge of the training grounds and watched with equal parts pride, fascination and horror as her two children 'fought' the other initiates under the watchful eyes of the ancient Jedi Master. The source of their distress was readily apparent. Luke was cornered by an opponent far taller than him and with longer arms. Leia clearly wanted to assist her brother, but she had a sparring partner of her own.

As Padmé watched, Luke parried a downward stroke and put all his strength into his arms to neutralize the downward momentum and raw strength brought against him. He then side-stepped his opponent, removed his sabre and let the other one stumble forward. The other initiate yielded as Luke's 'weapon' was pointed at him in the proscribed manner. Leia either sensed or saw that her brother had persevered. It was obvious that Leia was more talented than her opponent, a Twi'lek male half again her height.

Maternal pride warred with worry about what her children would eventually be asked to do. She knew that Anakin was already bursting with pride and had been since the day the twins had returned home arm in arm and announced that they would start sabre classes the next day.

That had been the cause of the biggest fight she'd had with Anakin since arriving on Weitun, and she was still glad that the rock was fairly soundproof. Her husband hadn't seemed the least bit worried and months upon months of worry had exploded out of her. It had been stupid, as they both knew that almost all of the accusations were without much behind them, but months and years worth of worries had spewed out of both of them in that awful hour. When the fury had burnt out of them, they hadn't really talked for much of the day.

Yet in the end...

"Mom! Mom! Mom!"

While she had thought of the mistakes of the past, Master Yoda had ended the lesson. While most of the younglings returned to their quarters in the underground sections of the base itself, a handful of them returned to their parents waiting nearby. Under normal circumstances they would have sensed that she wasn't her usual self today, but they were still little children, albeit not the usual ones. Because of this they didn't hesitate as they threw themselves into their mother's arms.

"Did you see?" Leia asked, plainly referring to what she had accomplished today.

"Of course I did, Princess!" Padmé exclaimed with a smile and took both her children by their hands. "

tbc

Lord knows why I threw that in right away, but I kind of had an idea for how to do this piece and ran with it. For the guy who had the idea, thanks, you know who you are. :) The particulars are inspired by how Gara's R2 in the (I think) second to last Wraith Squadron novel messed with the systems of the ship she was on. As you might notice, part of what drew me to Star Wars EU to begin with was the very detailed and expansive world-building, to points such as this one. I can't hope to match that in the relatively limited scope of the Heresyverse, but I try to do so anyway when I introduce things I think would be new.

The travel guide thing is based on a very real Star Wars book my public library used to have many years ago, before the Prequels ever came out. IIRC it was 1992-93ish when I saw it. It was great, it showed detailed pictures and descriptions of anything from Endor to the Coruscant orbital mirrors (which is where I hear of them for the first time), basically a best off, all written from the perspective of and narrated by an Imperial travel guide to those locations. I wish I remembered its name, because I would dearly love to lay my hands on a copy for my own collection and just generally read it again. Should anyone be able to assist me, please do so. :)

On a more serious note, I had some serious trepidations over writing Luke and Leia as actual characters. For some reason there are persons, fictional and real, that I find ridiculously difficult to write for. Would you believe me it took me three days to get past that first sentence they said and write that last section?