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This was far from the hardest assignment she'd ever done.
Some imperial officer, no one really important, but he had the codes they needed to get some friends out of a prison. She could get him drunk, steal the code cylinders, kill him if necessary, but make it look like an accident, so they wouldn't suspect they had been infiltrated.
Nothing new, and nothing that complicated.
But there was something strange about him that gnawed on her insides like a bunch of hungry blurrgs. She'd read the dossier they had on him dozens of times, until she could recite his whole life forward and backwards, but there was still a gaping hole in the middle of it all and she was afraid of what was hiding inside it.
Maybe she should tell Draven to stuff this whole idea where the sun doesn't shine. She'd earned enough goodwill with him to be allowed some attitude.
“What do you think about it?” She asked K-2SO instead. He looked at the frowning, thin face of the officer on the ID picture, and tilted his head like always when he was pondering something.
“Are you going to have sex with him?”
“No!” It came out of her mouth so fast and so disgusted it surprised even her. She did it before - just another tool they all used. There was no reason why it should make her stomach turn. “Not your business, Kaytu. And not what I asked.”
He looked back at the dossier. She could hear the cooling fan in his head clicking a little faster.
“Republican Academy for the Remedial Education is a strange place for a future imperial officer,” he finally said.
That's why she liked to work with Kay - he noticed things like this. She almost smiled.
“Our shuttle is leaving in half an hour. Lets see if you can find something more on our lieutenant.
He looked a little different in real life than in the little picture she’d seen before. Less grey and cold. She watched him coming in night after night, with a group of friends in gray imperial uniforms. He was actually smiling, laughing at the stupid jokes they were telling before coming up with his own. He was drinking - not enough to look like he’s trying to escape something, just enough to loosen up, his uniform opened and his face turning a bit red. He was usually swaying a little when he got up, but it was nothing a good night’s sleep and a pill in the morning could fix. It was normal, ordinary.
“There’s something wrong about it,” she told Kaytu back in the tiny room of the worker’s dorm they rented for a week: “it feels like he’s playing a role. No one can be this normal after…”
“You are,” said Kaytu: “As much as an organic can be.”
She frowned: “I wasn’t tortured for the most of my childhood. My parents actually loved me.”
“His did too,” he said: “that’s why they’ve sent him to the Academy.”
There were documents smuggled from there by people trying to get the place closed down. She already knew how the people in power used pain and hunger to shape you in whatever they wanted you to be, and knew that the Republic wasn’t that different from the Empire in that regard. She’d had to leave pieces of Kenari behind to survive. But she still felt like puking when she remembered the pictures.
“Are you afraid that unless he’s broken, you could, in some other version of history, end up in his place?”
“Shut up,” she growled through her teeth: “or I’m going to open your head and start pulling out wires until you’ll forget how to talk back.”
She would never do it, they both knew it. But at least he had enough decency to listen for once.
She staggered into his flat, arm thrown over his shoulders, legs weak from the alcohol she hadn’t actually drunk. Lieutenant helped her sit down in the kitchen corner - a luxury for this level of Coruscant - while he rummaged through his conservator. A moment later, he emerged with a bottle of something bright green.
“Are you trying to get me drunk?” she asked, slurring her words a little. He grinned and grabbed two glasses from the cupboard, setting them down in front of them with a dull thud of transparyplast. She picked up one, smelling the alcohol. It burned in her nose, but she didn’t catch anything suspicious. “You know that ship has already left the port, lieutenant.”
“I told you, you can call me Cassus.”
“Cassus,” she repeated, the name heavier in her mouth than it had any right to be. It must have shown. “Something wrong?” he asked. “No, just…” she searched desperately for an answer: “It’s just a big, fancy name.”
“It doesn’t fit me.” His smile was crooked: “My face is a little too Outer rim for it.”
“Sorry, I didn’t…”
He shook his head: “Don’t worry. My parents did what they could to help me, but there are things you can’t just get rid off.”
Her own dark hair was covered under a wig, makeup making her skin a shade lighter.
She grabbed his wrist, in a gesture that could be soothing. He flinched away, like she expected, giving her an opportunity to brush over his glass.
“Don’t,” he whispered. She nodded.
He knocked down his drink, his fingers shaking a little.
“My friend brought it from Fest. Ever heard of it?”
“No.”
“Strange little place,” he poured himself another one: “Frozen most of the time, they actually make this from moss.”
She giggled: “You are making it up.” He shook his head, starting some convoluted story about his friend, this bottle, and a runaway tantau. It made little sense, but she managed to laugh at the right places until he managed to twist himself into the tale and stopped, blinking in confusion.
“Maybe…” he stuttered, starting again: “maybe it’s time to call it a night.” He got up. She managed to catch him before he fell to the floor.
When she dragged him to the bed, he was already out cold. She needed to tell their chemist the new formula worked wonders.
It took her another hour to find the code cylinders and copy them to her datapad. Another half an hour to get her prints from anything she’d touched. She checked Cassus was still breathing. She pressed the call button on her comlink.
“I’ll be at the meating point in a couple of minutes. Be ready, Kayto.”
Asleep like that, he looked almost like that little boy she remembered.
“Goodbye, Kassa,” she whispered.