Artifact Knights

The prisoner hung fast at the center of the room, suspended by his wrists and ankles with force shackles. At the shadowed corners of the interrogation cell, stormtroopers stood in silent vigil. Two more posted at each side of the only two-panel door that led into the chamber. The room's decor was stark and brutalist, even for Imperial aesthetic. Metal grating for flooring to match grating in the ceiling. The only lights in the room were cool and bright lamps trained on the prisoner, keeping an uncomfortable level of light shining in his face.

Lady Vissica paced the man, a member of a criminal element intercepted at an Imperial checkpoint over Cannithos. Among his many crimes included smuggling, resisting arrest, possession of contraband, and more. It was the more that had piqued attention. It was the more that had brought this man to Coruscant. When the ITO droids and interrogation specialists of the Empire encountered a problem, they deferred such problems to the Imperial Knights. Among their order, few were as capable at ferreting out the truth than Matatek Sel Vissica.

Yet as the interrogation commenced, it became clear that there was more to this matter than wresting secrets from the mind's vault. Secrets contained other secrets still. And as adept as Lady Vissica was at discovering the truth, she began to understand that she would require assistance.

Turning to one of the stormtroopers, Vissica gestured.

"Summon Comrade Jibral."

"Yes, my lady."

The stormtrooper's vox-scrubbed voice clicked in and out, and the trooper departed the chambers. Again, the Selonian was left with this enigma.

It was uncomfortable being here. It wasn't the ruins of the Jedi Order that unnerved Emeric Tallen. He was a Mandalorian, or at least he used to be: standing amid a structure where so many of the Mandalorians' ancient enemies had been slaughtered was practically a tourist destination for someone such as himself.

It was the Imperial Knights that he found unsettling. To most of the galaxy, it seemed as if Empress Tarkin had merely snapped her fingers, and conjured an order of loyal Knights from thin air. As deeply rooted in the Intelligence community as Tallen was, he knew better. He knew some of the secret places from which former Inquisitors and former Operatives had emerged; and like roaches crawling across the floor of a backwater apartment, the real concern was not the vile creatures you could see scurrying about beneath your feet, but rather the larger infestation that remained unseen. Under Palpatine, the Empire's secrets had bred secrets of their own, and even this many years after the Emperor's demise, they weren't even close to disentangling a mere fraction.

At this moment, the Knight opposite seemed intent on accentuating every negative sensation that the Imperial Knights inspired. Though a Deputy Director within the Imperial Intelligence hierarchy, Emeric was not someone who leveraged his status for power or prestige: it merely granted him the authority to do what needed to be done. The nature of his work, overseeing Advanced Weapons Research, even encouraged an aversion to the spotlight, lest attention be drawn to aspects of Imperial development and spending that were best left beyond the scope of casual scrutiny. Even so, the Deputy Director had grown accustomed to a certain level of respect and deference. He was used to being the authority within his scope of interaction, save for crossing paths with the Director herself, of course.

Not here, though. The status of the Imperial Knights made them problematic. They seemed by design to occupy an amorphous position, granted authority by the Empress to oversee anything that she or her chosen surrogates deemed worthy of that attention. Potentially, they had as much overbearing scope as the Jedi Order of old: and as someone who remembered the Jedi at the zenith of their political status, that alone was enough to make his Mandalorian wary.

That lack of clarity made it difficult to understand the proper protocols when the Knights interacted with the upper echelons of the Imperial Hierarchy, and this was something that Knight Lúka Jibral appeared to be embracing fully. The Deputy Director had come here, visiting the Knight on his home territory, and perhaps that was a mistake: but it was a choice he stood by; better to be here than to invite Lúka Jibral to any of his facilities, disclosing their classified locations in the process. Tallen was willing to concede that home field advantage, and defer appropriately to the Knight within the confines of his office. Jibral pushed the limits of that tolerance; he had not moved from behind his desk, nor invited the Deputy Director to sit, interacting with him as he might a peer or a subordinate. Tallen bristled silently at that, a sensation worshipped by the knowledge that the Knight could likely sense every grating prickle of it.

"We have a problem," Tallen uttered at last, finally abandoning any expectation of formality or pleasantry. "There has been an incident with one of the convoys transporting Black Archives artefacts to our new facility. Something dangerous has been -" The Deputy Director grimaced. "- misplaced."

He was fishing. Lúka didn't need the expanded senses of a Jedi to perceive that: his intelligence training made it abundantly clear. His ears detected all of the subtext, filling in the gaps between that modest presentation of words.

The Black Archives had once been the site at which the Empire buried many of it's darker secrets, safely contained within the trecherous and destructive confines of the Maw. Not only did such a venue keep those secrets beyond the reach of the Empire's enemies: the simplest nudge would have sent the Black Archives tumbling into one of the black holes that gave the Maw it's name, erasing those secrets and the dangers they posed entirely from existance.

Since the Treaty between the Empire and Alliance however, borders had been redrawn, and the Black Archives found themselves half a galaxy away from Imperial space. By some small miracle, the Maw had not fallen within the borders of the Alliance of Free Planets, but it teetered alarmingly on the edge of Hutt Space, and without the Imperial forces of neighbouring sectors there to provide potential reinforcements, the Empire was no longer confident in its impregnable spatial vault. A decision had been made by people at far loftier altitudes in the Imperial hierarchy than Lúka Jibral had been, and the process of cataloguing, securing, and transporting the Black Archives - item by item - had begun.

Lúka knew very little about the transport of the Archives, and that was by design. In his day, the Archives had been administered by the Inquisitors, and Imperial Intelligence had been eager to leverage them away from the hands of Imperial Force-wielders. There was some wisdom in that, but Jibral - once the guardian and caretaker of the facility - had been decisively excluded, and it was hard not to take such a thing personally after dedicating so much of his life to the Archives' protection. What he did know is that the transport of the Archives had been done in stages, and that it was taking a considerable amount of time. Deputy Director Tallen and his Advanced Weapons Research division were to take custody of the Archives, and had - as far as Lúka had been able to discern, at least - divided them between an assortment of secure and disparate holding facilities, from which the Archives were being conveyed, piece by piece, across or around the Alliance of Free Planets to their new home.

Jibral knew this, despite Imperial Intelligence's best efforts, because this was not the first time that an item from the Black Archives had been misplaced. It had been some months before a former benefactor of the Archives had contacted Lúka, urging him to covertly reacquire something that had found its way into the hands of Ubrikkian pirates. That item had very deliberately not found its way onward to Advanced Weapons Research, and no doubt the Deputy Director was probing, hoping for some indicator of Jibral's involvement, which he surely suspected. Lúka was too careful for such tells however, and after a moment of carefully chosen micro-expressions that hinted at his genuine amusement and pleasure at this development, he brushed the information aside with a frown.

"And this affects me, how?"

He offered a shrug, before his attention returned to the document he had been pretending to read when the Deputy Director arrived.

"Your people were quite specific about excluding me from the relocation. If you've gone and lost your keys, I'm not the man you should be asking about where to start looking."

It was like talking to a wall: not the kind of wall that didn't listen, but rather the kind of wall that revealed nothing. Emeric was not the sort of intelligence operative who could see through anyone with ease, his skills lay elsewhere; but Jibral was proving especially opaque. The Knight knew something, Emeric could feel it in his gut, but he wasn't about to break in the face of Tallen's amateur tactics.

A leather gloved hand reached out, a finishing touch to Emeric's black-on-black ensemble, and brushed idly across the edge of Lúka's desk, fingertips loitering at the edge of Lúka's downturned field of view. He waited, just long enough for a mildly irritated upward glance. The smallest of victories, but he readily added it to the lopsided mental tally.

"It affects you -"

Tallen loitered on the specifics with a shred of satisfaction, waiting in anticipation of Jibral's reaction.

"- because the item managed to get itself noticed."

Emeric's eyes flashed with unspoken meaning, the gravity of the situation swelling behind him like a wave. That these items even existed was a dangerous revelation on it's own, but the potential labyrinth of secrets that this might lead down, exposing classified research, the Archives themselves, or the precarious vulnerability of their transitory state, was not a scenario to be taken lightly.

"As is your omni-jurisdictional prerogative, the Imperial Knights have imposed themselves upon the investigation. To attempt to resolve the situation myself might lead to military action from one branch of the Empire against another; and I think we can both agree that an Imperial Knight carving through Storm Commandos is not the kind of visual we want broadcast on the Holonet News."

Whether it was Lúka's own calculations, or the weight that Tallen's own emotional reaction added behind his words, Jibral didn't fail to comprehend the severity and sincerity, but did fail to conceal his surprise; at least, not entirely. He remained silent for a moment, letting his mind process through the possibilities and options. A snippet of overheard conversation a few hours earlier connected with something he'd half-consciously noticed that morning. His fingers rose to his face, pinching at the bridge of his nose.

"Let me guess," he muttered, with a flicker of an exasperated sigh. "They assigned Lady Vissica."

It wasn't a question. Even if it had been, the Deputy Director might not have been able to answer. The Imperial Knights maintained a certain privacy surrounding their actions and operations, and while Lúka respected the resourcefulness of Imperial Intelligence, he had to wonder just how effective their information gathering was within the walls of the Citadel. Had they somehow found their way inside? Assets within the support staff? Knights whose loyalties were divided? Operatives committed to one of the most daring and dangerous acts of deception that their careers would ever see? It was a notion that was potentially both intriguing and frighting, but not one that Lúka could spare time for at the moment.

"Do you at least know what was taken?"

That Tallen had apparently secured Jibral's participation in resolving this crisis was marked down as a second victory for the day. He wasn't sure exactly what the Knight could accomplish, but he knew enough from his records to understand the kind of asset that Inquisition training had programmed him to be. It certainly was not the only angle that Tallen was pursuing - his worst case contingency was already en route via hyperspace, ready to bring things to an unfortunate decisive end - but for now Jibral had become the primary solution.

"I do not. Not specifically, at least."

The answer was provided slowly, and a hand was immediately raised to forestall any outburst of interjection.

"Secrecy is the objective here, Mister Jibral." Tallen made a deliberate point to demote Lúka within the conversational context by his choice of prefix. A third minor victory. "I know the facility where the ambushed convoy originated. I know the intended manifest for that transport. I have operatives running inventory to confirm what was on that shuttle. What I don't have is the wreckage that was left behind. I don't have information about which crates were retrieved, and which were destroyed, or set adrift. Space is very big, and we don't have the coordinates of where the transport was lost: we just know that it popped up somewhere, and the Imperial Knights noticed."

Tallen fell silent for a moment, guessing at the thoughts that must be going on behind Lúka's piercing gaze. He clasped his hands defiantly behind his back. The Knight knew better to ask for the information that Tallen alluded to, because of what was being left unsaid. There had been more than one item aboard that transport: more than one artefact from the Archives was unaccounted for. Providing Lúka with a list of potentials might make this single recovery easier, but it might in turn compromise other operations that Tallen was keen to keep firmly under Imperial Intelligence control. Worse, there was the fact that somehow, highly secret Imperial convoys were being struck. Thus far the infrequency was such that blind luck was the leading explanation: after all, this exact eventuality was why the Archives were being moved covertly and in fragments. The plan had always been that, in the possible event that a convoy was ambushed, AWR's contingencies would be enough to retrieve the item before anyone noticed. This incident was an anomaly, complicated by the Imperial Knights: the plan itself was still sound, Tallen was certain of that.

And of course, there was the matter of the notorious Lady Vissica as well. However opaque Lúka might have seemed to the Deputy Director, it was probably safer to provide the Knight with as little specific information as possible.

A flicker of a smug smirk tugged at the corner of Tallen's mouth.

"I don't need to provide you with a list though, do I? No one knows the Archives the way you do. Whatever artefact this happens to be, I'm sure you'll figure it out."

Emeric held Lúka's gaze unflinching. Whether it was seconds or minutes that passed, he couldn't be sure. Tallen was determined not to be the one who broke away, but the opportunity that presented itself was too tempting to ignore. A solitary light blinked on the intercom resting atop Lúka's desk. Tallen allowed himself to smile.

"You might want to get that. It could be important."

* * *

Lúka bristled; more at the summons from Lady Vissica than the encounter with the Deputy Director. Most people might have been riddled with worry as they stalked through the corridors of the Citadel, following the Stormtrooper who had been sent to fetch them; but Lúka's mind didn't work that way. His thoughts were calm and calculated, systematically evaluating the possibilities. Something small enough to steal; something inanimate rather than a living test subject; something that could attract the attention of the Imperial Knights, but in such a way that it wasn't explicit, and didn't constitute a planetary emergency. That certainly narrowed things down, and ruled out some of the more devastating options; but the count still remained at many, ranging from technological to biological to mystical, and beyond.

The Knight nodded his head as the Stormtrooper indicated the room where Vissica waited, and steeled himself before he stepped inside. His encounters with the Selonian Knight had been rare thus far. They moved in different circles: Lúka's skills were deemed to be of more value instructing and nurturing the Cadets and Recruits who passed through the Citadel, while Matatek Sel Vissica often found herself deployed across the stars on Imperial business. Lúka knew of her as much by reputation via his students as he did first-hand: stories of her education into interrogation, her vicious approach to combat, and her ruthless pursuit of truth.

Lúka allowed his mind to fill with thoughts and calculations. Many tried to conceal their thoughts by emptying their mind; Jibral's approach was to flood it, a cacophony of minutiae and irrelevance blanketing over anything he might wish to keep concealed. He was confident in his abilities to keep things from the Selonian, though not to the point of arrogance or error. His mind had been trained and secured under the rigorous scrutiny of the Inquisitors: enough to withstand a passing encounter with the truth-seeker, at the very least.

He kept his stance relaxed and casual as he entered the room: not formal, but not disrespectful either.

"You sent for me, Lady Vissica," he stated calmly, a slight smile added to his expression to inject a pleasant lilt into his words. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Lady Vissica's small ears flicked at the sound of Lúka's approach. She pivoted from the waist and shoulders, nearly 180 degrees from her squared stance between Knight Jibral's approach and the prisoner. Ermine eyes followed the motion, taking a moment to pick her visitor out in the changing light.

"A poor choice of phrase, Comrade. Our meeting is over unpleasant matters."

Lúka's emotional state was unclear. There was a great deal of ambivalence to him. Without truthspeaking, the Selonian Knight rarely divined more than emotional state from those around her, unless there was a focus nearby pregnant with intent. Lúka Jibral was noise. Chaff. He either lacked focus in the moment, or intentionally kept his faculties in a state of guard. Considering the reputation she'd earned, Vissica assumed the latter, and did not fault his wariness.

She beckoned him forward with a paw as she pivoted back to the room's center.

"Come."

The prisoner struggled in his restraints, succeeding only in incrementally increasing his own discomfort. The force shackles flared here and there as he pulled at them, but eventually he relented. Vissica extended a dataslip to her guest.

"Jurgyn Daloss. He traveled under an alias before we discovered him, but one he was arrested it was simple enough to match his biometrics. A mid-tier criminal with a preference for smuggling high value cargo."

Detailed on the slip was a summary of Jurgyn's greatest hits, as they were. He was far from a novice, though not quite some kind of mastermind.

Lúka was not a bigot. The prejudice and sense of superiority held by so many of his fellow human Imperials was something that being born and schooled before the Clone Wars had spared him from. He understood where it came from, both historically and recently; and he understood the value of it, the reassurance of being part of an us as opposed to a them, and the unity and cohesion the Empire gained from embracing those ideas; but it was not a mindset that Lúka himself shared. On the contrary, non-humans were fascinating. Evolution had graced some species with remarkable gifts, and by comparison humanity was bland and boring, significant in the galaxy only because of their versatility and their proclivity for breeding en masse.

Despite this, Matatek Sel Vissica pushed the limits of that attitude. Lúka hated the term near-human, but in a situation such as this, he found it hard to think of any alternative. The Selonian was so far removed from humanity, not just in appearance but in the way she moved. It was like being in the presence of a sentient beast, a notion not helped by the addition of armour and adornments that somehow made her seem even less like the definition of person that Lúka felt comfortable with.

Whatever aversion Lúka felt however, he kept it buried and at bay as he accepted the dataslip that Vissica handed - pawed? - to him, his eyes beginning to sweep across the information provided, rapidly extracting relevant facts from the captive smuggler's past.

"Interrogating a smuggler seems a little trivial for someone of your standing," he offered, the statement casual and disinterested. He flipped the data device into idle, clasping it behind his back. "Let alone something worth the time and attention of two Knights. Is there more to it, or did you simply have a yearning for an audience?"

Something that Lúka said elicited genuine confusion in Vissica's demeanor. Though lacking humanoid expressiveness, the Selonian's whiskers quavered asymmetrically before framing her muzzle evenly.

"You are appealing to my ego." She commented evenly, "There is no need. This will explain our prisoner's worth."

A paw dropped to the utility storage pouch at the side of her armor, and Vissica removed a code cylinder. She held the device up for Lúka to inspect.

"You may scan this if you wish. It contains a secret level clearance code for the Advanced Weapons Research group."

A code cylinder from Advanced Weapons Research. That certainly answered the question of Tallen's security leak, though whether it indicated an infiltrator or disloyalty in the ranks, Lúka couldn't be sure - though their prisoner was certainly in the right room if the Knights wanted to find that out.

Lúka's brow furrowed as he contemplated the suspended prisoner. Jurgyn Daloss. By all accounts he seemed unremarkable and unexceptional. A middling smuggler. An interstellar opportunist. Yet the code cylinder in his possession was an item of exceptional value; and there was something about him that had piqued Lady Vissica's interest, something that compelled her to reach out to him for assistance. Lúka knew the obvious connection, of course, but a nagging impression pressed on his mind, an urging that there was more. Something felt off, about the situation, or about the man - Lúka couldn't quite place it, and that tightened into a modest knot of frustration in his mind.

His attention turned back to Lady Vissica.

"I presume this is about the Archives."

It was more open than Lúka was known for being, and more open than he was particularly comfortable being, force of habit and other factors considered. Among the Cadets, Lúka strove to create a reputation as someone who only provided answers that were earned, and saw no reason to apply a different policy to his fellow Knights. A career of secrecy aside, the speed with which the Knights had been established left him wary, and wondering if his appointed peers had been subjected to anything even close to the rigorous training and testing that was expected of the Cadets. Lúka understood his own qualifications, but their comparison to those of Vissica or Iscandar was difficult to quantify. He could trust in the structures and metrics of the Citadel's programs, but his fellow Knights were not automatically afforded the same trust.

The free admission was carefully calculated. It relied upon the assumption that he was revealing information that Lady Vissica already knew, and sought to exploit the subversion of expectation it presented to alter the terrain of this conversation. He presented himself as amiable, willing to help; a valuable asset to be incorporated into this investigation, as the Deputy Director requested he be.

"It isn't much of a leap. If you have a list that includes my name and Advanced Weapons Research, there aren't likely to be many other entries on it."

He took a step closer to the prisoner, positioning himself side by side with Vissica, visibly volunteering his assistance.

"Much of the information regarding the Black Archives is classified well above my authority to divulge, but I will provide whatever aid and answers I can."

"You presume correctly."

The Selonian rumbled thoughtfully as her tail slid along the grated floor.

"I learn what I can of all my comrade Knights. Warriors fight best when they share of themselves. There was very little to learn of your past, save for your prior affiliation."

Nothing changed in Lúka's emotional demeanor. Not a thing. He was still a rat's nest of tangential feelings. There was no uniformity to it, and that spoke to a purposeful obfuscation. Vissica's eyes closed and opened laconically. She gestured to the cylinder.

"The cylinder's identifier key shows that it belongs to a Lieutenant Ryden. Do you know this name?"

It was a premise that Lúka rejected entirely: that warriors needed disclosure to act at their best. It was a naive and sheltered view, tailored to propagate the myth that Truth was some ultimate commodity that everyone was entitled to. Inquisitors had thrived on secrecy and privacy, and they had been some of the Empire's most potent warriors. Some aspects of Imperial special forces specifically brought together operatives who did not know each other for certain missions, avoiding any complications that might arise from personal knowledge and sentiment. There were orders of warriors who took vows of silence and seclusion. Even among the Jedi, where secrecy was far from a priority, Knights often kept to themselves, and certainly did not know all the intricacies and personal details of their fellows and Masters, but that did not stop them from being formidable warriors during the Clone Wars, nor did it stop them from leading armies of near-identical clones without any detriment from not knowing the details of every soldier's lives.

It stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of the universe: that trust could only be built on a foundation of honesty. On the contrary, some of the strongest trust - faith - was built on the understanding that you did not need to know in order to believe. Warriors who fought for their faith, be it in the divine, the Force, their cause, or in others, could be the most formidable and dangerous of all.

That was not to say that Lúka did not understand the value of knowledge. On the contrary, the collection of secrets and understanding was the basis on which Lúka functioned. He constructed an understanding of the world, of what factors influenced people, and he built his own actions from that foundation upwards. But the knowledge that Lúka relied upon was not personal, nor Truth in the broad sense that Lady Vissica endorsed. To know the facts of a person was not to understand them, nor was it to know the useful truth about them. As most warriors understood, you learned what you needed to by exposure, by what they did at your side and what acts you could witness. That was the only kind of truth that mattered: the instinctive truth that countless species had honed over the course of countless generations; and it was worth far more than the kind of truth you could learn by studying the world around you as if it were facts stamped into a book.

The greater truth here of course was that it simply did not matter. Whether Vissica trusted him and his secrets or not was of no consequence to Lúka; nor of any relevance to the task at hand.

"I'm not familiar with anyone of that name," he confirmed slowly, keeping his tone matter of fact. "Though I would not expect to be. Advanced Weapons Research is a facet of Imperial Intelligence, whereas the Black Archives were under the stewardship of Inquisitors such as myself. The only point of overlap is that Advanced Weapons Research are now the custodians of what was once Archived."

There was a great deal of care in Comrade Lúka's voice and words. Again, Vissica felt no determinable change in his emotional state or intent, but the Selonian grew to suspect that there was more unsaid than not.

"Lieutenant Ryden is a clerk with AWR. He maintains a security clearance, or at least he did until two days ago. That is also when interdiction patrols arrested this smuggler. I do not believe the timing is a coincidence."

Vissica cast her severe countenance to the man in custody, then fluidly turned back to Lúka.

"This has the appearance of a conspiracy."

Conspiracy. Lúka loathed that word. It meant both more and less than most people understood. Two people could plot to steal a speeder, and the law would consider that a conspiracy. Society on the other hand expected corruption, cloak and dagger, and déception at the highest levels. Lady Vissica's usage almost certainly aligned with the latter definition, and Lúka was disappointed in such a conclusion so eagerly reached. Perhaps she had more information than the piecemeal scraps she had provided thus far, but in Lúka's experience, the truth - or rather, the reality of a situation - was seldom something uncovered so swiftly.

"Based on what?" Lúka challenged. His voice was not confrontational, but carried the mix of curiosity and scepticism that he aimed at students who let to conclusions similarly in his classes. "Imperial Intelligence has misplaced one of it's officers, and a corresponding code cylinder has turned up in the hands of a smuggler notorious for trafficking such sought after items. There could be any number of explainations, the simplest being a sale of opportunity - after all, the clearance codes of the missing or dead do not remain viable for long. By it's very nature, this is an item that would need to be sold and transported within a handful of days. Nothing I've seen so far corroborates the paranoid supposition of conspiracy."

Lúka did not stop there, maintaining the same level and logical tone to his voice, albeit with the faintest hint of a dismissive flavour.

"In fact, what evidence do we even have that supports probable cause for our intervention. We are Imperial Knights, not the Empire's janitors. If Imperial Intelligence has a missing operative, they are both responsible for and capable of cleaning up their own messes. What of this invites our indelicate imposition?"

"A code cylinder by itself would be of little use in an AWR facility."

Was he being purposefully obstinate, or intent on playing counter advocate in order to erase all chance at a mistake? Vissica had to believe the latter.

"All data entry points should be monitored by posted guard and holocam feed. By itself, the key does nothing if the bearer is an outsider. Hence, conspiracy."

As for the why of it? Vissica purred in thought.

"There is something else."

Pivoting, the Selonian singled out a stormtrooper with a glance who was standing apart from the posted guard. Conspicuously, he carried a security case. With a nod, Vissica summoned him to approach. The trooper stood before the two knights, pivoting the case so that it could be opened. With a series of clicks, the clamshell case unlatched, revealing a single, small, and very curious thing.

Nestled within dense black foam, a faintly blue crystal shimmered, catching the faintest light around it so that it appeared to glow.

"A Kyber crystal."

Vissica deftly manipulated the object by way of the force, carefully freeing it from the case so that it floated between her and Comrade Jibral. In the open, the blue glow intensified.

"However, not of the sort used to power a lightsaber. The cutting and faceting are even more precise than that."

The Selonian's black eyes reflected the blue, seemingly capturing saphires in her gaze.

"This is a Jedi data crystal."

The flash of recognition that sparked in Lúka's mind was kept contained, isolated within a mental forcefield that prevented it from registering on his face. Even without his years with the Inquisition and the Black Archives, he would have recognised the significance of the crystal floating before him: any Knight or Padawan who had served in the Clone Wars would have. He reached out with the Force himself, rotating the crystal slowly, examining the different facets. While unlikely to be the same crystal that had once been stolen by bounty hunters and Sith, said to contain the locations of Force-sensitive infants known to the Jedi Order, there was no doubt in Lúka's mind that this crystal was of a similar origin.

That complicated matters somewhat, finally adding credence to Vissica's paranoia. Why the Selonian hadn't simply led with this critical information, choosing instead to rely on cheap theatrics, Lúka did not have the inclination to try and fathom - but regardless of her motives, Lúka now at least understood the reason for their involvement and interest. That this crystal was the item - or among the items - stolen from the Black Archives shipment seemed like a reasonable assumption. The Archives had certainly contained such items, but insight beyond their mere existance was not something that Lúka himself could offer. Crystals such as this - those of Jedi origin, at least, as opposed to the cheap immitations that Imperial scientists had experimented with creating on Eadu and elsewhere - were only useful when combined with a Jedi holocron: something that Lúka had not had access to during his time with the Archives. Some said that Palpatine had ensured the holocron vault in the Jedi Archives had been deliberately destroyed when Palpatine had ascended to Emperor, depriving the trecherous Jedi from ever accessing their former secrets. Others said that Palpatine kept the holocrons for himself, storing them in private vaults and facilities alleged to be scattered across the cosmos, beyond the scope of the Black Archives and their custodians.

That train of thought led to interesting destinations. From what limited information Vissica had provided, this smuggler seemed like exactly the kind of individual that one would expect to find in posession of a rare and exotic artefact such as this: but he was of far less interest than his potential clients. While yes, some might simply be interested in the cystal as nothing more than a decorative piece for their collections, the crystal's mysterious contents would no doubt be of greater appeal. In order to access them however, a holocron would be required; and more than that, someone capable of opening a holocron. That meant a Force Sensitive, or at the very least someone with potential access to Force Sensitives. That was most certainly something worthy of the attention of the Imperial Knights.

As for Vissica's conspiracy however, thoughts nagged at Lúka's mind, preventing him from accepting the supposition easily. Yes, a conspiracy within Advanced Weapons Research was one possible explanation for how this smuggler or his associates could have obtained the flight data that led them to the Archives convoy; but it was one of many. There were all manner of individuals in the cosmos who could have achieved such a heist individually; Lúka Jibral considered himself one of them, assumed that the likes of Imperial Intelligence and the Alliance of Free Planets had access to equivalently capable operatives, and didn't doubt that there would be freelancers in the verse capable of the same. There was even a renewed Jedi Order to contemplate: all manner of potentials and possibilities.

"You assume that whomever used the code cylinder was an outsider," Lúka stated calmly, turning towards the prisoner. "Security guards and holocam feeds are not infallable, especially for those capable of causing a person's eyes or mind to deceive them. Unwise, given the kinds of people who might be interested in a Jedi data crystal."

Lúka reached out, directing his myriad senses and perceptions towards him, searching for clues and details that might thus far have been overlooked.

"Has the prisoner been properly screened? Genetic profile. Morphogentic compounds. Midichlorian count."

"He has not."

Vissica admitted as much with only a pivot and flattening of her ears to betray that she'd been caught off guard by that possibility. The Selonian's gimlet eyes flicked back to Lúka, then to the prisoner.

"That may be warranted. This prisoner's resistance to compulsion is..."

The Knight's look turned. As she averted her eyes to look back to her colleague, one might have considered it a look of nausea.

"...disconcerting."

There were few beings in the galaxy that the Selonian interrogator could not break. She had no power over a Hutt, for one. Exceptionally strong beings in discipline such as the Knight General were out of her reach. But it wasn't simply that she'd been unable to glean anything out of this man. It was disturbing to try it.