I wrote a thing.
At the Core of the Web.
In the shadows of her large office on the Oracle, Ciaran slowly swiveled on her expensive office chair, carefully manicured fingers drumming against each other as she reclined lost in thought. A dozen schemes and strategies were evalued and discarded, the fate of planets and desperate sentients decided solely upon the risks and opportunities they offered in the shadow war between her and her opponent.
A soft alarm sounded in the room and brought her back to reality. A rapid glance at a hidden screen showed her next appointment a few corridors over. Sorma Maal, veteran officer and trusted hand to call upon when a stain on the Watchers' reputation had to be washed away.
One of the many problems inherent to directing a spy network, she had discovered early, was keeping the appropriate level of surveillance on her own men. Sources and assets came in all forms, but to work in the intelligence field it took a particular kind of person; unfortunately, it often was also the kind that kept dangerous secrets and held hidden agendas. On Coruscant, she had made sure to run a tight ship, but as the Watchers grew, so did her distance from the mass of agents in her service and problems started to pop up beyond her sight. Sorma and a few others were her solution to the small problem of disloyalty in the Watchers and everyone had learned to keep major personal matters away from the organization, unless it stood to profit from them.
It was just one of the many ways she kept her finger directly on the pulse of the Abyss Watchers, and a hand on their short hairs.
The latest mishap was also the worst to appear in quite some time. Whispers from the lower ranks came to her ear almost unobstructed, yes, but it took her months to piece them together with the information from the Galaxy at large. A few false identities. A mercenary contract to hunt down a few pirates. An unimportant planet in the Outer Rim put on its knees by crop failures. Minor shuffling of personnel among Silver Cross bases. A Watcher team KIA during a mission. A temporary upturn of unsanctioned piracy in an otherwise calm area of the Expansion Region. Relatively small transactions between between manufacturers and a few shell companies. A few errors in the Karada production schedules. A group of new recruits kept united because of their effectiveness.
None of these were remarkable by themselves, but put together painted a grim picture. A maggot had been left to worm its way in her garden and she didn't like it. Not one bit.
As her headsman of choice came nearer step by step, Ciaran reviewed again the story as it had unfolded.
Burdin IX was a remarkable planet, in that it was utterly devoid of anything worthwhile; it wasn't even a particularly hard place to live in, just miserably monotonous and inconsequential. When the blight struck its grain monocolture, the Silver Cross may even have intervened, using the situation to paint itself ever more as the sole befactor of the downtrodden, but nine other planets, more populated and with worse ongoing famines, were brought to her attention and in the end Ciaran had chosen one of them instead. The planet wasn't ever part of the Republic and the CIS had nothing to gain by aiding it, so Burdin was left to rot.
What was a good Burdinoan to do, after even his boss had declined to help, you ask? Why, wire his own substantial savings to help his homeworld, of course. And, when they didn't suffice anymore? Start using the funds secretly squirrelled in many years of service to order necessary products wholesale from the producers. And when that wasn't enough? Maybe set up a piracy operation somewhere quiet and feed it juicy morsels with his inside informations.
Pirates are unreliable, though, how to keep them under control? How about putting his own sister in charge? She had turned to piracy after her smuggling business was strangled by the crisis. Ciaran wondered what the man's thoughts had been when a greedy crew had finally acted on its own and irritated someone close enough to her interests to know who to contact, or when one of the Watchers' many mercenary facades had accepted the contract to exterminate his sister's operation.
All in all, extracting her and her crew while the rest of the pirates was brought down was a sign of his skill in the field, if nothing else. Setting them up with new identities was sensible, of course, but their options from then on would have been to either go legit or disappear and hope the Watchers never caught wind of them again. Inducting them in the very organisation hunting them, though? That took courage.
Too bad he never came clean with it, she may have decided to spin the whole thing in her favour and gain some more unquestionably loyal agents.
Obviously, the obliteration of his pirate ring left the problem of Burdin's ongoing collapse without a solution, again, but this time our well-meaning Burdinoan had no assets, no useful contacts, no money and no plans. Time for desperate solutions, then. From inside the Watchers, slotting in a few more hours of production here and there at some Karada facilities wasn't that difficult, and with all the traffic in and out of refugee camps a few containers more or less aren't even noticeable.
With the Galaxy at war with itself, Ciaran herself had made much greater things disappear with ease. And if someone suspected something? Well, it's not like exchanges of favours didn't happen in the Abyss Watchers: a few promises, a few transfers going through and the problem went away. One of the many advantages of seniority.
Things seemed to have worked themselves out, hadn't they? Nobody got hurt, everybody was happy. Wasn't that what we were all about? Well, yes.
Until someone under our man's command started putting things together like the trained agent she was, discovered his sister's identity, the piracy, the embezzlement and suddently he realised he was way too deep in it and the only way out was to silence the agent or lose his career, his clout and thus have his secrets be discovered anyway.
He set the nosy Watcher's whole team up, sent them on a high risk mission and secretly put his sister's squad as backup; one slight act of sabotage, and the Watchers were reported killed during extraction.
Once Ciaran unearthed the truth, obviously the story could only end one way, which was why Sorma Maal was just outside her door.
Still, she would have handled it quietly, made the guilty disappear and written off the whole debacle as just another skeleton in her closet. The only problem was that Uxa, that noisy, wonderful Watcher, survived the betrayal of her team and was just a few hours away from meeting Gulan in a secure place, blowing the whole thing wide open. The Bothan had been already following the trail, the agent would only need to say the name of the traitor's sister and then, like magic, Ciaran would lose some of her advisor's respect and probably some of the Watchers' too. Her fame of near omniscience would be broken and so would the pristine faith of the Watchers in their own organization.
So, she would do as she always did: catch the crisis by the horns and twist it around until she ended up on top. When Uxa made the name of Cerima Maal, Kygeetu would be there to lead the Watcher to the ones who had betrayed her team. Everyone on the Oracle would know Sorma Maal had entered her office, hours before any of that happened, and then never came out. This betrayal asked for a personal touch anyway.
The door opened a second after the lights in the room had brightened and Ciaran welcomed the man as he stepped inside.
"I'm glad you could arrive so quickly, Sorma. Shall we adjourn to my parlour?"
The door closed behind him.
