Private Worth a Closer Look

[Zesiro]

Zesiro had decided within her first few days that there was something fundamentally wrong with an office that looked exactly the same at the end of the day as it had at the beginning. Perhaps that wasn't the most Imperial sentiment for the new Head of Internal Affairs to possess, but Mahporeem would simply have to survive it.

The office itself remained unmistakably Imperial. Black, white, and red dominated the room, carried through clean architectural lines and restrained accents rather than overwhelming every surface. The emblem of the Mahporeem Imperial Remnant occupied the wall behind her desk, prominent enough that nobody entering could mistake whose government they were dealing with. Secure terminals and communications equipment had been neatly integrated into the workspace, while the windows offered a view of Mahporeem beyond, rather than the endless black of space. Zesiro had spent enough of her life aboard ships and stations. If she was going to have an office, she was rather pleased that this one had an actual planet outside it.

Little pieces of her had already begun appearing among the government-issued furnishings. A comfortable chair had replaced the one originally provided behind her desk after she'd decided that suffering for appearances was ridiculous. Datapads occupied one corner in an organized stack that had gradually become less organized throughout the day, while a half-finished drink rested within easy reach of her hand. There were a few personal belongings as well, including a small reminder of Hannah, placed where Zes could see it without exposing her daughter to every stranger who entered the room. Given enough time, she suspected more would appear. The office was professional because it needed to be, but Zes had no intention of pretending she stopped having a life whenever she walked through its door.

Taking the position hadn't convinced her that she needed a uniform either. Black fitted pants and a white blouse provided most of the concession she was willing to make to Imperial colors, complemented by a tailored black vest with restrained red detailing. The clothing was professional without disguising the woman wearing it. Zesiro had never felt obligated to hide the fact that she was a woman merely because she occupied a position of authority. She knew her own body, knew what suited it, and had long ago stopped feeling any need to apologize for either fact. There had been years when beauty, charm, and carefully measured intimacy were weapons someone else had taught her to use. Later, she'd used those same abilities because she chose to. She had little reason to employ them that way anymore, but the confidence they had left behind belonged entirely to her. Zes knew what she wanted, and experience had taught her there was usually more than one way to get it.

At the moment, what she wanted was an explanation for the personnel file open on the display in front of her. Mauloch Reid wasn't inherently alarming. Mercenaries became soldiers often enough, particularly when a growing power offered something more reliable than chasing one contract after another across the galaxy. His history warranted attention, certainly, but Internal Affairs would become useless remarkably quickly if Zesiro treated every person with an imperfect past as a criminal waiting to happen. Hers would hardly survive that standard.

What interested her were the reports that had accumulated since his acceptance into Mahporeem's ranks. Zes leaned back in her chair and read through one of them again, blue eyes moving across the details with considerably more interest than the expression on her face revealed. Reid was experienced, and his history explained competence, discipline, fieldcraft, and much of what his evaluators had recorded. It did not quite explain everything. There were moments scattered throughout the reports where his reactions seemed a fraction too timely, decisions made from information that shouldn't quite have been sufficient yet, and instincts that repeatedly placed him ahead of where circumstances suggested he ought to be. Once could be luck and twice could be unusually good instincts, but enough repetitions became a pattern, and patterns were exactly the sort of thing Zesiro had spent much of her life noticing.

That didn't mean Reid had lied about his background, nor did it mean there was necessarily anything wrong. Zes had learned long ago that beginning an investigation with the answer already decided was an excellent way to find exactly what one expected while completely missing the truth. She wanted to meet the man instead. His file could tell her where he'd been and what he'd done, but files were written by other people. Zesiro preferred forming her own conclusions, which was why Mauloch Reid had received a summons to report directly to her office.

She closed one report while leaving his general file displayed beside it and glanced toward the time. He should be arriving soon. Rather than sit behind her desk waiting for the door to open, Zes rose with her drink and crossed toward the window. Mahporeem stretched beyond the glass, offering a view considerably different from the worlds that had defined earlier portions of her life. There had been a time when she stood beside Darlyn and watched people approach the President, quietly deciding whether any of them posed a danger. Before that, she'd survived by learning to read intentions before they became actions. She had been an assassin, a protector, a High Lady, a wife, and a mother. None of those things made her an obvious choice to oversee Internal Affairs for an Imperial government, but perhaps being an obvious choice had never been particularly important to her.

The notification from her desk announced that someone had arrived outside the office. Zesiro took another drink before returning to her chair and setting the glass down beside her terminal. She made no effort to arrange herself into the severe posture someone summoned before Internal Affairs might expect. There would be plenty of time to decide what she thought of Reid after she'd actually spoken with him, and intimidating the man before he'd said a word would accomplish very little. If anything, experience had taught her that people tended to reveal considerably more when they didn't feel as though every word was being dragged from them.

When the door opened, Zes looked up from the file and regarded the man she'd summoned with calm interest. One hand rested loosely beside the terminal while she gestured toward the chair opposite her with the other.

"Come in, Mr. Reid. Have a seat."

Mauloch Reid

 

[Mauloch Reid]

The day had been longer than most. The last few months had been longer than most. After serving as a contract mercenary in a security company for over half a decade, he decided that the galaxy was ripe enough with opportunities that he didn't need to force them open on his own. The orders of old had changed once again and had begun to consolidate around several rising powers. The most beneficial of which was, in his line of thinking,The Mahporeem Imperial Remnant. To him, politics meant very little. Every republic that had ever preached freedom, peace, prosperity, and liberation had turned out the same. As councils of representatives from already entrenched powers across their various constituent territories. They weren't real democracies. They were representative oligarchies with diplomatic naming conventions. So in the end, when it came down to ordinary people, the government that provided the most security was usually the better deal, so long as it also tended to keep to itself. The various successor states to the old ideals of the old Galactic Empire tended to do that very well. Most of the time, they had no dogmatic or megalomanic Force Orders living in the clouds or living in the shadows trying to impose their wills over the common people that were gearing their entire society towards philosophical wars that mattered only to the wealthy. They were simply a series of governments with centralized administration and military industrial complexes to back them up, with Force Orders that existed to serve it rather than dominate or mediate it. The Mahporeem Imperial Remnant simply happened to be the next regime in line, and it was still green enough around the gills despite being highly disciplined to get in on the action and secure some kind of power in the process, whether that be wealth, influence, assets, experience, or even some kind of future stability in a retired civilian lifestyle, though he mostly wanted everything on that list but the last. To him, rest was for the dead, and he wasn't there just yet. If he was going to get into a relationship, which he had several times in the past, it would be purely casual.

He wanted nothing more than to secure a legacy, and to secure a legacy he had to make a name for himself, and in such a violent galaxy, he wasn't gonna do it by sipping cocktails in a beach house, though he wasn't exactly opposed to that scenario in particular on a vacation. Regardless, that's what led him to join The Mahporeem Imperial Remnant barely even two years ago. After taking a paid vacation from his old security company to go back home to live out of a relatively cheap hotel, he got into contact with a recruiter that landed him a position in their armed forces using a disposable datapad with an anonymity setup that he subsequently wiped and meticulously pulled apart piece by piece before melting it and dumping the remains in a neighbor’s disposal can, after which he left on the absolute cheapest possible private transportation from his homeworld of Denon to the capital of Mahporeem, ensuring the pilot changed the records in the ledgers both for his identity and for his destination to a generic but false identity and an independent planet populated enough to get reasonably lost in with an almost insensible amount of credits for what he used to get paid before he even took the ride. That entire process had taken much longer than expected, and before he left he went through with the resigning process for his old security company and had practically cut all his old ties as politely as possible. In total, the process took about half an entire year, and when he got to his destination, they waived him through, and he was assigned a training program for an infantry position. He spent about a year in it, learning things he mostly already knew combined with the protocol he needed to know specifically for his position serving in his new government, and when he had graduated, he was assigned to mostly garrison duty guarding installations across the capital planet, and had served in that role for nearly half a year.

It was interesting to him how things had worked out. He spent eighteen years growing up on Denon, obviously, then he spent two years training for a security company, then he spent six years serving that security company, then he spent two years acclimating to service in The Mahporeem Imperial Remnant through the convoluted recruitment process he had to go through, his initial basic training, his later advanced training, and his garrison duty. For a rather basic infantry fighter, he had coincidentally given himself a pretty good resume. After all, when he was young he kinda just thought he'd become a contract mercenary for the rest of his life, back when he still believed in media, the stuff that made him think every contact mercenary ever lived to take names and kick ass in slow motion montages all day every day. Real life hadn't been so cinematic. Still though, it turned out alright. Which was why he found it so amusing that he'd been called upon to do something that could either make or end his career, as basically everything else had already fallen into place. He'd been informed that he was to speak with one of the big dogs of the security apparatus, a lady by the name of Zesiro. He hadn't been given any prior explanation, and he wasn't about to stand around and ask for it. The person who sent him to the security building probably didn't know what was going on either, and it would probably just make the woman angry. Though he did have a good idea of what it was about, his obviously limited history he's given about himself while simultaneously having been an experienced contract mercenary, and though it could've been just about anything, he doubted there was much else for them to question, though he knew better than to assume either the worst or the best, because there was always something worse out there than what one thinks is bad, and he didn't want to jinx anything.

Walking down the halls of the security building, as all buildings did across this planet, the architecture immediately felt like a breath of fresh air compared to the surrounding junk wastelands. On any other planet the architecture might’ve felt oppressive, as all good military infrastructure did, but out here there was no freeing feeling in the landscape. He guessed he couldn't say The Mahporeem Imperial Remnant was ruling from a place of privilege, at least in that sense, anyways. When he got to the very end of the mail hall on the top floor of the building, he reached an otherwise generic door to the most important room of the entire building, at least in that it housed the most important figure of the nation’s security apparatus. After a short buzz coming from the door indicating it had been unlocked, the door slid right open. When she politely but relaxedly gestured for and told him to come in, he walked into the room in his full gear, in a manner somewhat relaxed and somewhat rigid, then he removed his helmet and held it under his shoulder, saluted her, and held his position. He noticed something strange in her, a feeling he couldn't quite place. She looked comfortable but formal, with a uniform that was hardly considered a proper uniform for the position. Not that he really cared, but it was a surprising thing, nonetheless. But it wasn't just her demeanor that felt off to him, it was an instinct he felt that made her seem to radiate some kind of feeling. Surely he was just tired and it was nothing more than that, but something still felt slightly off to him. Regardless of what felt off though, he only said one phrase as he crossed halfway from the door to the desk.
“I’m answering your summons, ma’am.”

 

[Zesiro]

The salute was perhaps more formal than Zesiro personally required, but she had spent enough time around soldiers to understand what it represented. More importantly, Reid had arrived when summoned and presented himself exactly as someone with his training probably should. Her blue eyes moved briefly over the gear he had chosen to wear before returning to his face, taking in the man standing before her rather than comparing every detail against the image and description contained in the file still open on her terminal.

"At ease, Mr. Reid. And Zes is fine, unless someone happens to be around who cares considerably more about titles than I do." There was a faint trace of amusement in her voice as she gestured again toward the chair across from her desk. "Have a seat. You aren't in trouble."

That might not entirely remove whatever concern came with being unexpectedly summoned by the Head of Internal Affairs, but Zes wasn't interested in manufacturing tension simply because her position allowed her to. She had spent too much of her life around people who used authority as a weapon, and there were considerably better ways of learning what she wanted to know. Besides, if the reports were accurate, Reid had been serving Mahporeem without incident for long enough that treating him like a suspect would be both unnecessary and insulting.

Zesiro reached for her own half-finished drink before nodding toward a small refreshment station along one side of the office. "Would you like something to drink? Water, caf, something stronger if you're off duty. I haven't been in this office long enough to discover everything they've decided I need in here, but I'm fairly certain we can find something." The casual offer wasn't calculated so much as habitual. Whatever title Mahporeem had placed in front of her name, Zes had no intention of turning every conversation into an interrogation simply because Internal Affairs happened to be printed on the door.

She gave him time to settle before turning her attention toward the personnel file displayed beside her. "I've been looking through your record. Six years working in contract security before coming here, followed by training and garrison duty with us. You've certainly taken an interesting route into the Remnant." There was no accusation attached to the observation. If anything, Zesiro understood unconventional histories better than most people who might have occupied her chair. Her own past would have made Reid's look remarkably straightforward by comparison.

Her attention returned fully to him, studying him for a moment before a small smile touched her features. She could simply tell him what had brought his file to her attention, but doing so would surrender an opportunity that might prove considerably more interesting. People revealed quite a bit through the questions they expected to be asked, particularly when they had been given enough time to wonder about them beforehand.

"So before I tell you why I asked you here, I'm curious about something." Zes leaned back comfortably in her chair rather than assuming anything resembling an interrogator's posture. "Why do you think I summoned you?"

There was genuine curiosity behind the question. She wasn't looking to catch him in a lie, nor did she expect some hidden confession to tumble out merely because she'd asked. Reid had walked through the halls of Internal Affairs knowing that someone considerably higher in the security apparatus wanted to speak with him, and without being told why. Unless he possessed absolutely no imagination, he had considered the possibilities.

Zesiro wanted to know which possibility had occurred to him first.

Mauloch Reid

 

[Mauloch Reid]

When she told him that he'd be fine to relax from his rigid posture and to refer to her by her own name, he knew better than to start talking casually and to start treating it like a living room. When someone in any military apparatus with even a theoretical cross branch higher authority told one to be at ease, it usually just meant one should take a less extreme posture, it didn't usually mean one should actually lose their posture. So he did just that, he relaxed his frame slightly while he held himself up as he’d been taught a man in his position ought to. As for the other side of it, the speaking informally side of it, all it really meant when a commanding officer told one to call them by their name was to maintain the formalities but change the title, so he did just that. He said clearly and calmly, “Understood, Zes.” before acknowledging the next thing she said. When she offered him a drink from the station over at the other side of the room to him, he simply responded to her with “I have no need, Zes.”

He was used to the whole schtick of formalities being presented as informalities. He'd learned to respond with nearly mechanical precision to all of it. It was too exhausting to him to think any harder than that about it. He'd take things as they came with the same rigidness he handled everything else, because, to him, it was easier to memorize the answers than to formulate them, especially in the moment. Besides, he had no need for refreshments at the time, as he'd been maintaining his own energy intake that day as he always had, both in terms of drink and in terms of food, though he mostly just drank purified water and ate nutrition cubes, almost like a robot who'd drilled himself to not care about taste because service did enough to wear him down cosmetically that he wasn't about to let bad nutrition wear him down internally.

Not that he'd been worn down that much or that if he continued down that path he’d just drop dead, just that he had a few bad engagements spread nicely throughout his early years as a contract mercenary, and there'd probably be a few more of those in his service going forward, to put it lightly. The next thing she said, in regards to his interesting route to the Remnant, as she put it, was exactly what he expected her to bring up. The sketchy scenario that led to his recruitment, the silently leaving his old security company, the disappearing from the territory of the High Republic, the slow and deliberate burning of the trail that led to it that was completed before he came out, the methodical engineering of the situation. He expected as much, of course that was the issue, or so he perceived it that way, anyways.

After her eyes pierced him for a short amount of time she visibly relaxed, and when she asked the next question of him he was actually caught off guard. The question was presented as if her earlier statement wasn't the issue. He didn't even know what another issue would be. His mind began to race with the possibilities of why this meeting was taking place, and his heart rate increased, but he shoved those thoughts down, because fear was useless when the enemy was unknown. One didn't bring down an insurgent by firing wildly into dark grass, one did what they came to do and didn't let the terror get to them, if they were to die then they would've died regardless, and it's better to die fighting like lions than fighting like rats.

Legacy, over anything, won in the end, even how one died would dictate that, and if all were to die in the end, then none should face it with anything but righteous indignation. But he soon pulled himself out of the existential crisis he responded with in his head to a simple question, and he responded in the most simple way possible that he was the least likely to regret. “I honestly thought I'd been brought in today to talk about exactly what you mentioned before asking your final question, the circumstances of my recruitment.” He then remembered what she said earlier about him not being in trouble. He'd glossed over it before while looking for things to be worried about. That was just like him, to assume the worst in everything from everyone, no matter the circumstances or situation.

Of course he still didn't believe that he wasn't in trouble. There was a very strong possibility that her earlier statement was just used to get him to be more malleable during her interrogation. One thing he was good at with people was realizing when people were out to get him, especially since he assumed that so often of people. But it wasn't really that much of a strength. It was like an empire glassing every military industrial complex they could've conquered in a series of wars, just because they thought someone could set a few of them to self-destruct as a contingency. Technically helpful when they were right, catastrophically useless in every other situation. Just like his tendency to use almost insane allegories to describe relatively mundane things. It also wasn't really a strength.

It could make it easier for him to persuade people to believe in a cause, that is until people realized he was just using it as a method of making himself more grandiose than he really was. He couldn't be wrong. He had to have a cinematic failure that he couldn't stop. He couldn't be immoral. He had to have been catastrophically misled to commit atrocities that were still undoubtedly badass. So on and so forth. But there he was again, falling into existentialism over things that absolutely didn't warrant it. It was kind of ironic that a man with as much experience and firepower as him could be so insecure.

So despite wanting to say something else, anything else, he had to hold himself back, because the friend of the interrogator and the enemy of the interrogated was saying literally anything of remote value to anyone. What he said was practically useless to her, he just told her what she already stated wasn't the issue, revealed no other insecurities in the process, and revealed no information to her that she didn't already know. There wasn't even a tone which she could use against him, with how short his statements were. At least he thought he made himself impenetrable, anyway. Whether there was any penetration into his psyche that needed to be stopped remained to be seen.

 

[Zesiro]

The answer itself was reasonable. In fact, it was probably the answer Zesiro would have expected from anyone who knew what their own file looked like. Reid had gone to considerable lengths before entering Mahporeem service, and an unexpected summons from Internal Affairs provided plenty of reason to assume someone had finally decided to ask about it. What interested her more was the man delivering the answer.

He had relaxed because she'd told him to, but only as much as military discipline permitted. Even her invitation to use her name had been incorporated into the same rigid formality rather than taken as permission to treat the conversation casually. His refusal of a drink had been similarly precise. There was nothing wrong with any of it, and Zes wasn't going to fault a soldier for behaving like a soldier, but she had spent too many years studying people not to recognize someone being exceedingly careful about what he gave her.

Apparently, telling him he wasn't in trouble hadn't been particularly convincing.

A hint of amusement touched her expression at the realization, though she didn't call attention to it. If Reid wanted to approach the conversation as though every word might eventually appear in a report, telling him to relax again would accomplish little. Comfort couldn't be ordered into existence, and Zes had no intention of turning his reluctance to provide anything unnecessary into evidence against him.

"Well, we can get that concern out of the way first." She turned the display slightly, glancing toward the portion of his record dealing with his recruitment before looking back at him. "The circumstances were unusual, but unusual isn't the same thing as wrong. You left your previous employer, came here, went through our recruitment process, completed your training, and you've been serving without any apparent problems since. If I thought you were secretly working for someone else, we would be having a very different conversation."

There was no teasing in the last statement. Zesiro simply preferred clarity when clarity was possible. Reid's efforts to disappear from his previous life were certainly interesting, and perhaps someday she would want to understand exactly what had motivated all of them, but that wasn't why she'd brought him into her office today.

She shifted the file again and brought up several of the reports that had originally caught her attention. "What interested me is what happened after you joined us. Your previous experience explains why you came through training as a competent soldier. Frankly, I'd have been more concerned if someone with six years of mercenary work couldn't outperform a fresh recruit in a few areas." A slight smile accompanied the observation before her expression became thoughtful again. "But there are a few things your experience doesn't explain quite as neatly."

Zesiro selected one of the reports, although she kept her attention primarily on Reid rather than the words displayed before her. "Your reactions have been unusually consistent. There are exercises where you responded before the situation should have been completely clear, others where you chose the correct course with less information than the people around you, and enough instances of you anticipating what came next that somebody eventually started making notes about it." She paused briefly. "None of those things is particularly remarkable by itself. Put enough of them together, though, and they become worth a closer look."

That was why he was sitting in her office. Not because Zesiro had already decided what those reports meant, but because she hadn't. There were explanations that required nothing more mysterious than experience and good instincts, and she wasn't about to manufacture something extraordinary when something ordinary would suffice. Still, something about the pattern had bothered her enough that she'd wanted to see the man attached to it for herself.

She leaned back again, giving him the same comfortable distance she had before. "You've been doing this considerably longer than the people who wrote most of these evaluations, so maybe the explanation really is that simple. Experience, good instincts, knowing what trouble looks like before someone else recognizes it." Her gaze remained calmly upon him. "But you've had nearly two years here to compare yourself against the people you're serving beside now."

"So tell me, Reid. Have you noticed it too?"

Mauloch Reid

 

[Mauloch Reid]

He was somewhat pleasantly surprised to hear that what he'd been concerned about wasn't the real issue, and that the issue was more along the lines of his experience giving him instincts that normal experience normally didn't give. Still though, he didn't let up on his orderly demeanor and cold persona he was putting on a show of. He still needed to be on his guard, whether or not he was in trouble or whether or not this would end up in a negative report. Regardless though, the question she brought up at the end of her statement did catch his attention well, and he knew he had little time before he had to answer, lest she think he was withholding something. Still though, this was something he had to think through, because there was a lot of ground to cover, to put it lightly. He'd been to a lot of places, he'd done a lot of jobs, he'd nearly gotten himself killed more than once, and he'd had to kill others more than once. He'd been in boarding actions aboard pirate vessels, he'd had to clear buildings of organized criminals, he'd had to clear homes of terrorists planning attacks, he'd had to handle hostage situations, and he'd protected important people and groups between all of it. In a galaxy with regularly changing regimes and unstable fringes, security companies had been called upon to do the jobs that normal law enforcement and local militia groups would rather not die in, and he was just one of many contract mercenaries who got lucky enough to make it into a career, rather than getting ground up and spat back out by the machine.

Still though, he knew better than to simply chalk it all up to talent, training, skill, and experience. Even the best soldiers were still mortal, and one wrong move could send them to the same plane of existence that all the opposition’s souls went to after they sent them there. There'd certainly been a surprising amount of good intuition, instincts, luck, and timing involved in his long term survival, and he wasn't about to pretend it was anything but. Still though, he hadn't really experienced large scale warfare, and most of his work had either been skirmishing violence that was planned, prepped, staged, and short lived overall, or it was in the line of protection and was long, dull, orderly, and boring if it was done right, so he had also partially chalked up his long term survival to the fact that he’d never really seen war in a sense. But still, lethal violence is lethal violence, and when done that much, either something has to give, or something has to prevent it from giving, so maybe the answer really was deeper than that. Regardless though, he wasn't here to decipher the deeper meaning behind him not having gotten domed by any blaster bolts yet, he was here to answer a question, and that was what he intended to do, before her patience began to give. “I have noticed it. It's been a thing ever since I got into this line of work. Both when I was a mercenary and now that I'm a soldier. I've always chalked it up to talent, training, skill, experience, intuition, instincts, luck, and timing, but I don't know if that's the real answer. It may just be the most convenient one. Maybe something out there is looking out for me, maybe nothing is looking out for me and what I've come to believe so far is true. Who knows?”

He felt that answer was simple enough that it couldn't be used against him, but he never knew with security apparatuses. It seemed that if they didn't like you, they could use anything against you really. Regardless though, it didn't tell her anything she didn't already expect to hear. He spent a lot of time dealing with military institutions throughout his life, so he knew better than to assume most of them had his best interests at heart unless they proved otherwise, but he also knew not to bring any of those concerns up with them, because it would make him suspect, or worse, a target. He'd been trained for two years in a security company in all he needed to know for soldiering. Advanced marksmanship, blaster smithing, equipment maintenance, some basic martial arts, room clearing, room defense, ambush prepping, ambush reaction, proper formations for active assault, proper formations for standing defense, basic decorum, basic protocol, so on and so forth. Even when he was in the field he completed training courses when he could for basic and advanced survival techniques and strategies in the wild for various environments. Then before all of that, when he was growing up on Denon, he had been in the upper middle class, and had received a private general education from as early as he could have, keeping above average grades throughout it all, and his parents had been very supportive of what he wanted to do with his life, so all in all he never had to worry that much growing up. Then after all of that he'd been trained to serve in and was fully integrated into The Mahporeem Imperial Remnant Army, giving him a well rounded upbringing, even if it was a generic upbringing, for a soldiering man, and now he was twenty eight years of age, two years after his body fully matured, settled into his peak year, ready to take life by the reigns, whatever that would mean for him.

Which was exactly why he wasn't gonna let his guard down. He couldn't afford to make a mistake that would throw away the life and career he'd built for himself. But even if he didn't trust most military institutions to have his best interests at heart, that didn't mean he didn't believe in their causes. He just recognized that institutions were usually pragmatic, and he didn't want to be seen as an unknown variable or as a problem that needed to be solved. Besides, that's what he felt a nation should be like, one that prioritized protecting its interests and providing public services over propping up a few favored individuals or letting corruption in any form slide through the cracks. The institutions of a nation should be ruled like a military society, as opposed to the institutions of a nation being democratically run and bogged down in bureaucratic waste, though he still felt the normal citizens of a nation should be left generally to their own devices, as much as possible anyways. Of course, he'd believed in all of that for a very long time, which was exactly why he had joined The Mahporeem Imperial Remnant Army when it came to their political agenda in the first place. Even if he didn't care much for politics otherwise, he was still the type of man to make up his mind when it came to what he believed in and move forward with it, rather than dwelling on it endlessly.

 

[Zesiro]

Zesiro let him answer without interruption. The silence that preceded it didn't bother her. If anything, she preferred that Reid actually considered the question rather than reaching for whatever explanation he thought Internal Affairs wanted to hear. When the answer finally came, it was considerably more useful than a simple denial would have been.

He had noticed it, and that interested her more than anything contained in the reports.

"That's quite a list of possibilities," Zes said, a small smile appearing at the mention of talent, training, skill, experience, intuition, instincts, luck, and timing. There was no mockery in it. Most of those explanations were perfectly reasonable, and several probably contributed. "And I imagine after doing this for as long as you have, experience accounts for quite a bit of it."

She glanced toward the reports again, though only briefly. Six years of surviving mercenary work wasn't something she was inclined to dismiss as luck. People learned patterns without consciously realizing they were learning them. A veteran could notice a shift in someone's posture, a sound that didn't belong, or a hundred other tiny details and react before consciously understanding why. Zesiro herself had survived because of that sort of awareness long before she'd possessed enough experience to give all of it a name.

But experience wasn't the only thing that could produce that feeling.

Reid's comment about something looking out for him lingered in her thoughts. Zes didn't particularly believe some benevolent presence had spent years following one mercenary around the galaxy and nudging him away from blaster bolts. There was, however, something woven throughout the galaxy that could provide warnings considerably more subtle than a voice whispering into someone's ear.

She wasn't ready to tell him that.

"I'm less interested in whether you've been lucky than I am in what happens immediately before one of those moments," Zes continued. "There's a difference between recognizing danger because you've seen the situation a dozen times before and knowing something is wrong before you can explain why."

She leaned forward slightly, resting her forearms comfortably against the edge of her desk. "You've probably walked into a room and known immediately where the exits are, who might be carrying a concealed weapon, where you'd take cover if somebody started shooting. That's training. You might not consciously work through every detail anymore, but somewhere in your head you're still processing information you've learned to recognize."

Zes paused, studying him thoughtfully. "What I'm asking about is when the information isn't there."

It was an important distinction, particularly if the reports were accurately describing what had caught her attention. She wasn't interested in turning every good instinct into something mystical simply because she happened to know the Force existed. Reid deserved more credit than that, and experienced soldiers had been accomplishing apparently impossible things without the Force for thousands of years.

Still, his own uncertainty made the question worth pursuing.

"You said this has been happening since you first became a mercenary. Think back to those moments, especially the ones you couldn't explain afterward." Her blue eyes remained on him. "Have you ever moved before you actually saw the danger? Changed your mind about something without knowing why and discovered later that you were right? Maybe known where someone was going to be a second before they got there?"

There was nothing accusatory in her tone. If anything, Zesiro sounded genuinely curious now. She had an idea forming, but an idea wasn't evidence, and she had no intention of handing Reid an explanation before she knew whether it fit.

"If it's experience, eventually we'll find the thing you're noticing." A faint smile returned to her lips. "If we can't, then perhaps we start considering whether your convenient answer isn't the whole answer."

Mauloch Reid