A cold wind howled through the narrow alleys of Imperial Center, blowing up the side of buildings and blowing away anything not nailed down.  The gusts were common to the people of Imperial Center, so they tended to avoid the edges of the vast network of catwalks that linked the buildings together.

Walking on one of these platforms was Imperial Agent SR-4951, a tall, lean man with a chisled jaw and cold, dead eyes.  His walk was a limp, mostly because of a blaster shot from a previous assaignment, and despite this, it was a steady, calm walk, as he headed for the large building ahead of him.

It was large by any standards on Coruscant, with hundreds of catwalks and landing platforms sticking out of the building like tentacles to the rest of the buildings for support.  The Central Bank of Imperial Center was where the central computer for all the transactions of the thousands of branches scattered across Coruscant linked together to catalog each transaction.

SR-4951, known as Fri on his birth certificate, walked into the main entrance, a stunning one thousand steps to the top.  Many had attempted to scale the vast mountain of steps to make a grand entrance, only to fail and have to be retrieved by hoverdroids in order to make an entrance at one of the smaller side entrances or landings.  Fri, on the other hand, had no problem scalling the steps, and soon stood at the top of them all, and walked calmly through the doors and inside the vast lobby.

The lobby of the CBIC was large, with grand arches supporting huge paintings on the ceilings, most done by some of the greatest artists of the Old Republic.  The lobby was the oldest part of the bank, estimated to have been built nearly ten thousand years ago to celebrate the complete transforming of Imperial Center into a city.

A long line of tables, each with gold pens and ornate datapads, were avalible, but Fri had other things on his mind.  Because of his disability, Fri had been cast out of the Imperial Intelligance Agency, and because of his age, nearly 30, he was unfit for many of the duties his training qualified him for, mainly in the starpilot field.

Luckily for Fri, his training had helped him find others cast out of the IIA, each one for a differant reason.  A Wookie named Varaaraar because of his alien heretige, a man named Ris "Slick Fingers" Celi because of his ability to bypass nearly any lock, a pretty young woman named Dani Warro because of the bias against women, and a young girl named Juli Bucari, who had helped the Empire by relaying intelligence about a military outpost they were planning to raid, but she was thrown out because of her age.

Juli had already been inside the bank, scouting it out and looking for cameras, since no one had expected a child to understand about cameras and such.  Dani was working inside the building itself as a secretary, as a pretty thing for some bureacrat who often spent more time gazing at Dani's rear than at doing any work.  Varaaraar was waiting outside, pretending to be a driver for some important person who had yet to step out of his vehicle, even though in truth both the VIP and the driver were tied up and hidden in a trash compactor somewhere.

Fri was walking casually, waiting for the small squawk in his commlink that would mean Ris had bypassed the security around the cameras.  Two squawks would mean to abort.  Fri waited near the table closest to the security door, the light above it glowing a dark crimson to let anyone who was nearby know it was locked.  The squawk came, and Fri turned to casually glance at the door.

The door turned green, and three stormtroopers filed out the door, responding to an imaginary threat on their monitors as a rowdy customer.  While the stormtroopers maintained the security, Fri slipped inside.  The room he entered was a small security checkpoint for personell walking in to go to work, and there was a technician sitting there watching the monitor when he looked up and saw Fri.  "Hey, you're not supposed to be in here!" the man said, reaching for the alarm.

He wasn't fast enough, as Fri grabbed his arm and snapped it back, breaking the bone with a loud CRACK.  He then punched the man in the face, shattering the delicate bones behind the nose and driving the shards through the man's brain.  The man fell to the floor, dead.  Fri quickly drug the man through the checkpoint and hid him in a closet, then hid inside as well, listening for the stormtroopers to return.

The stormtroopers did indeed return, upset that they'd been called out for a drill, "I'm telling you these drills are unnecessary.  The people are so scared of us, if one of them did cause trouble he'd be quiet and leave before we could arrest him.  It's a waste of time," said one.

"Yeah, but... hey, where'd Bim go?" said another.  Fri held his breath, hoping they didn't go looking.

"He probably went for some caf or something.  He's always doing that," said the third.  Fri let out a sigh.  Normal proceedure was to go looking for missing personel, but these were clearly not regular stormtroopers, but obviously paid security with uniforms that look like stormtroopers.  The man Fri had killed, Bim, had been a risk, but fortunately the security men would probably not raise an alarm until about an hour, more than enough time for Fri.

Fri slipped on the dead technitian's jumpsuit, then walked out of the closet, and continued on.

* * *

Fifteen minutes after entering the building, Fri was near the main computer access.  He was now waiting on Dani to show up with the code she was supposed to steal from the president of the bank, and she was running late.  Fortunately, she soon arrived, a pair of broken high heels in her hands, "Sorry I'm late.  These damn things broke while I was getting down here."

Fri nodded, "Do you have the code?"

Dani nodded, "Yes.  This code should get you inside, and from there, you can enter the program.  I'll see you outside." and with that, she left.

Fri wasted no time by entering the code and hurrying inside.  Ris had worked with mainframe computer systems before, and most ran off the same main operating system.  The Empire, unlike the Old Republic, kept many of the same programs on all government computers, so that civilian computers could be confiscated and used in Imperial warships with relative ease, instead of having to reprogram the entire thing to match the other software already in place.  It was ment to be used only in extreme emergancies, and very few knew the system was in place.

Ris was one of these people who knew, and had the program ready.  The upload was relatively quick, and it went to work very quickly.  Soon Ris gave the squawk that ment it was time to get out of there.

Ris' program, unlike many hacking jobs, was ment to be caught.  It was designed to act as a front, a defense, for another program that worked independantly.  The cover program would steal vast amounts of credits from differant accounts and put them in a dummy account, which would be frozen and closed, and the program purged.  However, the other program would wait until the dummy account was unfrozen, with an estimated four billion credits in it, and act as the watchdog program that would clean up the mess and put the credits back in their respective accounts.

However, instead of returning to their accounts, the credits would be wired through a vast network of satelites in orbit around Imperial Center, bouncing around on secure networks, until it came back to the CBIC as a wire transfer to five seperate accounts for a total of eight hundred million credits each.  That was where Varaaraar came in, since he had worked with spy satelites before.  The entire set of programs would take about five seconds, but Fri wasn't about to stick around to find out.

Quickly leaving the main computer vault, he tapped the commlink twice, telling Ris to send a signal to the fire alarm systems.  Immediately red lights began to flash, and the speakers all over the building began to tell people to evacuate the building.  Soon Fri was standing outside while fire control vehicles crowded around the building, searching for fire with thermal scanners.

Fri walked towards the landing with Varaaraar's car, and was pleased to see him and everyone else already there.  Stepping inside, he took the datapad being offered to him by Ris, and smiled as he saw each of their accounts suddenly grow with over eight hundred million credits.

Today had been a very good day for all of them.

[To be continued in Part 2]

Imperial Intelligence Agent GF-4057 sat at his metal desk deep within the bowels of the Imperial Intelligence Agency, reading over the reports filtered through his staff before finally landing on his desk.  His job was to monitor the agents that the IIA had let go over the years, and now a rather intresting case was sitting on his desk.

Several agents that had worked for the IIA during the opening years of the New Order were reported as together.  Normally this wouldn't surprise him, but there was also notes that they had all been seen in the vicinity of the Central Bank of Imperial Center.  Most intresting.

Reaching out to his desk's inlaid comm panel, he touched the buttons that would summon his favorite agent, CI-294.  "CI-294? I have a job for you"

* * *

Sitting in a rather ornate chair in his office, Fri Birul was reading over reports as well, but reports that had to do with how his new company, Virtual Security in trouble.  After their little success in the Imperial Bank, the five had joined together to form a company that ran security for dozens of organizations, including the CBIC, ironically.

His office was located atop Tower 5 of the new complex they were having built atop what was once an ancient armory.  The five towers all formed a pentagon in shape, with bridges linking them together along the edges and through the center, forming a star in the center by the bridges.

Each of the five partners had decided to head one of the five divisions they had each excelled in, and it was in the Information Gathering Department that Juli Bucari noticed something, and took this information to Fri immediately.

"How do you know he's an Imperial Agent?" asked Fri, unable to make the connection between the holopicture infront of him and what Juli was telling him.

"Imperial Agents have this... air around them.  Creepy almost.  That's how I knew you were once an Imperial Agent," said Juli, now almost 15 years old.  She'd been only 12 when the operation had taken place, but since then she'd matured into a pretty young woman with long brown hair, saphire blue eyes, and a smile that could thaw a planet at absolute zero.

"So you're saying I'm creepy?" asked Fri, feigning shock.

"You're not creepy, you're... ok yes you're creepy.  But anyway... I think he's investigating the break in at the bank," said Juli, shaking her head at Fri's nonsense.

Fri ran a hand through his short brown hair, sighing.  He was 33 now, and his eyes, though still hard from all the hard days of his past, no longer looked dead.  He'd married Dani and they'd had a child together, even adopted Juli, just so she wouldn't be taken away as head of one of the largest security firms in the galaxy.  But now he just felt old.  "Juli... it's been nearly 3 years.  Why would the Imps just now get around to investigating it?"

Juli shrugged, "Why would they throw five perfectly able agents out on the street?  Truth is no one understands how Imperial Intelligence works.  The only thing we can do is make sure that this agent here doesn't find anything, and if he does, that he doesn't report it to his superiors."

Fri looked at Juli, surprise clear on his face, "Juli! Are you saying we should kill this man? Even though he might not even be Imp Intel?"

Juli sighed, "No.  I'm saying we make sure that anything incriminating in the computer network be covered up, or preferably destroyed.  I'm going to talk to Ris, see about possibly talking the IBIC into letting us switch over their computer network as a security concern."

Fri leaned back, rubbing his chin, "Wouldn't that raise suspicion?"

Juli shook her head, "Not really.  Infact, they're scheduled for a complete system turnover in about a month.  The reason I'm concerned about it now is because they're still using the same data processor from the heist three years ago."

Fri blinked, surprised, "What, they haven't changed their computers over? Why not?"

Juli rummaged through the datacards until she found the one she wanted, "Seems like their upper management wasn't content with the security arrangements after our little break in, since they caught the virus themselves, so they jumped from company to company for the past three years."

Fri nodded, "Alright.  Get over to Ris' office, have him get us a new comp, and get on the comm with IBIC and tell them we're jumping the schedule for their computer turnover, since our files show theirs hasn't been changed out in so long.  But don't go too fast, and go through all the necessary paperwork.  We slip up and that Imp is gonna have every reason in the world to come looking for us."

* * *

The President of the Imperial Bank of Imperial City was very upset as Ris' arrival, as well as a team of over 30 specialists from around the galaxy.  He was upset because he didn't want the bank to be disrupted, and Ris was doing everything possible to try and sweet talk him into going ahead and letting them do their job.

The vault the main computer was built into wasn't necessarily designed to avoid breaking in, but instead to keep the computer safe.  Huge data buses carried information via armored cable to and from the network to a large transmitter ontop of the building, which linked it to a satellite network that covered every automated teller, bank branch, and credit machine on the planet.

The computer itself wasn't designed to store information, but rather to process it.  The individual branches handled storage, but the central computer allowed information that happened on one side of the planet to link another bank that actually stored that piece of information.  The actual storage nodes were located in various places around the planet, each shielded just as well as the central computer.

The vault had a large hydrolic elevator on the bottom of the large cylindrical shaft.  It was buried near the surface of Imperial Center, with the bank resting ontop.  The only access to the vault from the outside was a landing pad protected with the best security on the planet, with automated turrets, hourly changing keycodes, guard droids, snipers, the works.  It was here that the new computer was being unloaded from Virtual Security.

The main problem with switching the 100-ton computers was that the armored cable wasn't designed to flex like normal cables.  Instead they came directly down the center of the shaft to link with the top of the computer, which in turn linked to the rest of the computers, because the central computers were actually 6 seperate computers all linked together.

The problem with the program used three years ago was that it was ment for one computer, and so when it had to make copies of itself to handle six differant computers, it left a trace, that even though it evaded professional investigators, Imperial Intelligence would be able to spot it if they understood where to look.  And they had a pretty good idea.

So the six computers would all have to be replaced one at a time, with the load transfered to the other five while one was pulled out and replaced, and then allowed to handle the load from the others.  Each was stacked on top of one another, so it started from the bottom to the top, with the last being the one where the information was directly proccessed.  Huge cables had to be connected to the busses and then diverted from the last  computer to the other five, while it was unhooked, then replaced.  The entire process took almost 3 days.

* * *

Imperial Agent CI-294 wasn't amused.  The security firm for the CBIC had taken out the computer network, so even though he could search for the mysterious program that had been reported at the same time the former agents had been visiting the bank, the telltale ghost signatures left on the harddrives would be gone, and without that, there was no evidence.

It was common practice for the computers to be destroyed at the end of their operational life span, even though the computers at the CBIC could last for years.  It was a tradition held over from the Old Republic, since at one time an old computer had been used to steal information and slice into accounts.  So the information was gone forever.

It was unfortunate, but CI-294 was forced to report nothing amis about the central computers at CBIC.  The mysterious agents had eluded him.

[To be continued in Part III]