#dash comentary

She fired twice more. Chest. Head. The holographic target had scarcely finished reconstructing itself when Dallows put another bolt through its chest.

She lowered the pistol and waited for the range computer to cycle. The first depleted power pack had been placed neatly on the workbench behind her. A second was approaching depletion.

The target returned. Dallows fired.

Damian Lannin.

She had never met Lannin, which admittedly rendered the firmness of her opinion concerning his character somewhat difficult to defend. Nevertheless, the available evidence did not encourage generosity. He was wealthy, socially ambitious, twice divorced and apparently given to surrounding himself with important people whose work he could fund, praise or otherwise associate himself with. His generosity towards the military and local law enforcement was widely remarked upon, particularly by Damian Lannin.

Perhaps he was perfectly pleasant.

Dallows hoped his investments depreciated.

There were thousands like him on Coruscant, and the Empire survived perfectly well without their handouts.

Another bolt struck the centre of the target, and she adjusted her stance, before again raising her arm to sight on her artificial adversary.

She hoped every bottle of wine he opened turned out to be corked, every speeder he bought pulled slightly to port, and that every restaurant on Coruscant could find him a table only beside the refresher.

She hoped both of his former wives were extremely happy. More specifically, she hoped they were happier for having divorced him.

She wasn't jealous. She refused to entertain the word. Jealousy was for insecure people guarding things they feared someone else might take from them. She had nothing to fear from Damian Lannin because Damian Lannin possessed nothing she wanted.

She was insulted.

Fordo had one of the foremost authorities on biomechanical augmentation in the Empire sitting scarcely a few metres from his office. If he needed something built, she built it. If he needed something improved, she improved it. If he required materials that officially did not exist, she generally knew where several tonnes had been misplaced.

What, precisely, did Damian Lannin bring to the arrangement? Money?

She had money. Not personally, of course. Personally, Damian Lannin could probably have purchased her childhood neighbourhood on Empress Teta and had demolished it to make way for additional speeder parking. But she had the Empire's money, which was considerably better.

More recently, she had Brienne Guyot. Now, there was someone useful. Lannin could offer Fordo several million credits. Guyot worked every day with sums that would make several million credits disappear into a rounding adjustment.

There were officers in the Imperial military who needed men like Lannin. Ambitious colonels who collected influential acquaintances in the hope of becoming generals. Admirals who spent half their lives cultivating senators, industrialists and governors because the next promotion board might remember who had been seen at whose dinner.

Every sector contained another would-be Moff prepared to spend an evening laughing at a wealthy man's jokes in exchange for introductions and campaign contributions.

Let them have Lannin. That was their world.

The things she worked on did not appear in speeches or recruitment holos. Their budgets did not survive contact with ordinary accounting. Their operations were conducted precisely so that respectable Imperial officials could truthfully deny knowing anything about them afterward.

When Fordo required something, he did not need to charm a rich man into buying it for him. He told her, and she found it him.

That was how things were supposed to work.

The notion of Fordo standing around one of Lannin's parties in that ridiculous white uniform, politely entertaining offers of private sponsorship as though he were some procurement captain trying to scrape together funding for a new officers' mess, offended her on a level she had not previously realised existed.

Considerable effort had gone into establishing Fordo’s position within the Ubiqtorate. Isard had not surrendered jurisdiction graciously, nor had the various competing branches of Imperial Intelligence welcomed another officer with overlapping authority. The red uniform had represented the eventual settlement of arguments Dallows preferred not to remember.

And after all that, Fordo had gone to Lannin’s gala wearing white. He might as well have borrowed a moustache from Yularen.

Ysanne Isard would never have tolerated such nonsense. Ysanne Isard did not spend her evenings fluttering her eyelashes at wealthy men in the hope that one of them might sprinkle some credits into her lap. If she required three million credits, somewhere in the Imperial bureaucracy three million credits ceased to belong to whatever unfortunate department had possessed them that morning.

Her finger tightened on the trigger, but Dallows did not immediately fire.

Perhaps she had been looking at the matter from the wrong direction. If Fordo wished to spend his evenings cultivating acquaintances beyond the comfortable confines of the Ubiqtorate, there was no reason she should begrudge him the indulgence.

Indeed, perhaps she ought to follow his example.

Her thoughts drifted to Guyot, and to how long it had been since their last conversation. There was no particular reason their meetings had to remain quite so infrequent, nor quite so strictly confined to necessity. Relationships, she was reliably informed, required cultivation. Wasn't Lannin due to host one of those ridiculous galas again soon? Perfect.