Operation Arrakis: Breaking Cover
by scifantasy



Sci put his book down before Cheriss had even managed to enter his cabin. 
"What's up, Cheriss?" he asked.

"I made the call, we'll have to see what happens. Could you come with me, 
please, Major? I have something important that I need to discuss with you." 
Sci shrugged and followed her to one of the cabins that didn't have a 
permanent resident. She tapped the panel and opened the door. "This is Fes. 
He's...here from NRI. He has some connections to your team, so he decided 
to break his cover and help out.." It was close enough to the truth. With 
luck he would just accept the story.

Sci looked at the young man a moment before nodding. "How long have you 
been watching Sylvana?"

The man spoke, a near immediate response - though his eyes showed some 
surprise, "How long have you known?"

Sci shook his head. "Don't get me wrong. You're good. Very good. I didn't 
know, as such, what you were doing until just now."

"How, then?"

"I've had the feeling that I've been being watched for a while now. I'm not 
Force-sensitive, but I'm trained to be observant, so when I felt something 
like that I went with it. It couldn't actually be me who was being watched, 
though, because I'd know. So it meant someone in close proximity to me. 
Hence, Sylvana. And you're not Terran native, any more than she is--" Fes 
did his damndest not to react to that, and it seemed he succeeded. "--and 
it's my job to know of everybody who's not Terran native on this planet, 
especially NRI folks. The rest follows."

Cheriss blinked. "So you didn't know, but you figured it out?" Sci smiled 
at her.

The gaze he turned back on Fes, on the other hand, was colder. "I can only 
assume that you weren't around to see the scrap she got into."

"I wasn't," he admitted with a low growl, angry at his failure. "Where is 
she?"

"Not so fast," Sci said. "Quid pro quo. What's Sylvana to you, anyways?"

Fes eyed the other man slowly. "She's a charge I've had. Major Janson asked 
me to keep track of her."

"Doesn't fly," replied Sci. "I know the rules, and you've gone above and 
beyond the call on this one. Besides, you were watching her before we made 
it to Coruscant. This is specific."

Fes matched Sci's gaze for a second before answering. "Perhaps it is. 
However, that's classified."

Sci snorted. "Don't try to deny it." He glanced at Cheriss, who nodded. He 
considered for a second, then asked her, "Do you know what's going on?" She 
nodded agaain, and he sighed.

"Very well. I can't say I like it, but as long as somebody knows what's 
going on, somebody reasonably trustworthy, I'll accept it. You do realize, 
though, that you won't exactly be taking point in the coming days. I want 
you out of the battles as much as possible--this isn't your fight." Fes and 
Sci shared another staring contest, but both broke off simultaneously.

"Done," said Fes, obviously annoyed.

"What's the next step?" asked Cheriss. "He needs to break cover completely, 
but not everybody will be as trusting as you."

"I know," said Sci. "I have a few ideas on that front."

------

As expected, the initial meeting did not go too well. Sci introduced Fes as 
an NRI agent, someone who had been working deep undercover on Terra, who 
had been forced to break cover recently as a result of the mission's 
progress in Jerusalem. The safest lie was a half-truth, after all.

But if the fact that Sci and Cheriss were vouching for him was the reason 
Fes didn't eat a blaster bolt or lightsaber blade, that didn't mean that 
the team, Josh especially, was ready to trust him in full. If he expected 
to play any role other than guard, he would need to show solid evidence of 
good intentions.

Coincidentally, there was a situation just developing. Sci and Nat had 
taken the component of the shield that the Neris sisters had found and were 
trying to sabotage it, but seemed to be running into a roadblock.

"We can't isolate the circuitry we need without damaging the system," Nat 
said in the small electronics lab of the ship.

"Not even the NR makes its devices foolproof," Sci argued. "Try looking for 
another way, one that doesn't require cutting the entire shieldint circuit. 
It's too obvious anyway."

Josh paced back and forth in front of the lab bench, agitated. "We need 
this to work, Sci. Isn't there a workaround?"

"There might be," replied Fes, who had entered the room almost silently. 
"More recent shield generators have had an anti-overload system--to prevent 
against the shields being overloaded by disfocused energy, they are able to 
cut out for a split-second. If we can get into that subsystem..."

Josh blinked. "Disfocused energy?"

"It's a new concept in countering shields," Cheriss explained. "Shields 
absorb energy, and they do a fine job against focused, coherent beams like 
lasers. But if you take the energy of a laser, or a few lasers, and make it 
disfocused so it attacks the whole shield, it'll overload a lot faster. Of 
course, the energy is useless as a weapon itself, but it's a way to kill 
the shields."

While she talked, Fes, Sci, and Nat pinpointed the subsystem for the anti-
overload protocol. Josh nodded at the work, and logged Fes' cooperation as 
a data point. He wasn't exactly going to trust in the other man's skill 
across the board, but this had helped. It might actually work this time.