It seems silly, doesn’t it? I mean, an Admiral doing an execution? “You’re an admiral,” they say, “you should have people to do your dirty work for you!”

But they don’t understand what it’s like. Sometimes if you want something done right, you just have to do it yourself. And there’s something to be said for that look of sheer terror on your target’s face when the last person in the galaxy they expected to be an assassin finally ends the target’s life.

Some people prefer to shoot from the shadows in the distance. Others prefer to stare straight into the eyes of their targets and attack with melee weapons. Personally I prefer that option, but it’s not an absolute. Sometimes all you can do is shoot from the shadows.

I was taught as a child that it was rather dishonourable to kill your enemy without looking him in the eye. But any ideology followed to its logical end leads precisely to your own destruction. So you do what you must.

I personally like the method of affixing a bomb to the target’s vehicle and letting him blow himself up when he goes to start it. It makes it painfully obvious that it was an assassination. Not an accident, not a mugging gone wrong, not a death of natural causes. A plain, old-fashioned assassination.

And so my target’s personal landspeeder was the method of choice today. All it takes is about a hundred grams of explosive, and a small detonator. The fuel in the vehicle does the rest.

The target gets in the vehicle. Click. Fireball. Target eliminated.

Some might consider the killing revenge. Revenge is not justice. Perhaps revenge is the best way of putting it. So be it. Revenge was swift for Rebel assassins.

They had no honour at all. They killed indiscriminately. Look at the exploits of such famous Rebel agents as Kyle Katarn. Nevermind the objectives – he just blows everything up. Rebels doing what they do best: causing disorder and destruction. Anarchy in every sense of the word.

Time to make my getaway. Emergency services and investigators will be here soon. It is always best not to be found when they make their appearance. But in any event, I had a more pressing problem: Witnesses.

Witnesses were always troublesome for assassins. A good assassin is never really seen at all, and if he is, he makes sure everybody who sees is incapable of talking. One way or another.

It’s especially important for an assassin within the admiralty to conceal this fact. If he develops too much of a reputation, well, he will no longer be the last person in the world people expect to be the walking equivalent of a thermal detonator.

Perhaps something that most people would overlook – and I did the first time, too. A droid that was cleaning the street. Investigators would review the records to determine whether or not any had been nearby, and then they would review the optical records of the droid. And, well, it wouldn’t be conclusive evidence. But it would be a start. And a start is far, far too much to allow.

New target acquired: 1 model SVT-487 street cleaning droid. Last spotted heading towards the city centre. A quick look at my PDA told me that these were the newest models and deployed nearly everywhere in this area. Wouldn’t be easy to track down.

Droids are nice, easy targets. They are typically unintelligent, predictable, and cannot bring themselves to harm organics. Though... that describes most civilian targets pretty well, too. Droids are at least slow runners.

But, like all machines, they need to refuel at some point. Time for a little intelligence gathering, then.

Three days later, I’ve talked a junior staff member into believing me to be the new vice president of his department. I have got remote access to the facility authorized via holoterminal. 

Like many bureaucracies, those that are lowest in the ranks consider the bureaucracy completely inscrutable. The worker at the bottom considers himself a peon, and he does what he is told, especially when the voice of command is used.

My IDMR-issued password slicing tool did its job well. It’s a very nice tool, in fact, and tremendously useful: Administrative access to the entire city maintenance system. It helped that they stupidly picked a password of “Rancor”.

A quick review of the procedure revealed that the records were downloaded every night and stored centrally. No record of accesses to records in the preceding two days. And each bot records its work over the preceding day. 

Excellent news. Computer skills are the most useful thing I’ve ever learned. They’re wonderful in situations like these.

I wrote a quick script to download and erase another record onto the memory of the bot I had spotted that day – 100 000 times. That should prevent any chances of data recovery. And I deleted the original record from the system and replaced it with the previous week’s sweep of the same spot – also overwriting 100 000 times. A quick edit changed the datestamp on the data and the access records for both files.

Job cleaned up. Time to get off this blasted rock. The navy needs its division commander. And, after all, long, unexplained absences by an admiral are not looked upon well in the modern-day Empire...