Seventeen.

According to the latest intelligence projections, that was how many covert, unsanctioned cargo shipments were believed to have made landfall in the Corellian system in the last month alone. The rest of the sector was a patchwork assortment of customs successes and nightmares. Duro still remained under the Empire's watchful scrutiny, but Nubia and New Plympto still enjoyed relative freedom. The Bureau speculated that shipments of weapons and supplies were being smuggled into the sector's outlying systems, broken into modest and concealable fractions, and waltzed into the waiting arms of the Resistance on public transportation and civilian charters. On paper, distributing their terrorist supplies in such a way should have increased the success rate of CorSec's efforts to apprehend at least some of the Resistance's couriers and sympathisers, but in practice Corellia basked in it's unrestricted freedoms, as cavalier and apart from the grim realities of the wider galaxy as it had ever been.

The Bureau had it's recommendations of course: most of which involved significant increases in the amount of credits flowing into the ISB budget for the sector. Checkpoints. Security measures. An increase in interdiction patrols for interplanetary travel. Deeper background checks on licensed couriers. Sophisticated new data-mining equipment for the ISB field office. New ships. New speeders. Delgado would not be surprised to find a shipment of Hutt loungers hidden amongst the expenses somewhere, so the security agents could sit around on their complacent asses all day in optimum comfort.

A fist clenched out of reflex, and the Moff found it difficult to compel it into relaxing. The Empire was dwindling, faltering on uneven ground, and the likes of these underlings were too busy attempting to carve out a luxurious niche for themselves to realise that their efforts undermined the very foundation of what they had sworn an oath to uphold. That was why Xaanan had ignored their recommendations - burned them in fact, literally. There's been something satisfying at watching their asinine insistences curl and melt beneath the candle flame he exposed them to, the flimsi ghosting away into nothing more than scent and vapour.

He had taken matters into his own hands instead, and the solutions flanked him on either side, like opposite halves of a perfect equation. It had taken all the political sway that he could muster to call in this favour from the Minister of the Interior himself; an all-or-nothing gamble on a single decisive solution. To the Moff's left stood the Brigadier, wrapped in jet black from throat to foot, staring out with a single eye from a gnarled and scarred face. To the right stood the Colonel, dressed in the pristine cream of the Imperial Security Bureau; an agent that the Minister assured him would root out any corruption and complacency from within Corellia's branch of the Bureau. The placement was not accidental: the Brigadier would command Corellia's shield, and the Colonel it's sword; and clad in grey between them, Delgado formed the final piece of a black and white spectrum. That was the kind of plan he sought to enact: clear, clean, and decisive. The bureaucrats would squirm and protest, but such was their role in all this. His was to achieve results, by any acceptable means.

His eyes rose, sweeping across the broad ring-shaped arrangement of tables that filled the briefing chamber before him, where the governmental representatives of Corellia, Selonia, Duro, Nubia, and the other works of the Corellian Sector that the Moff had demanded the presence of would sit, and listen, and accept his plan without significant objection. That was the only permissible outcome of this meeting, and the Imperial Knights flanking the doors were there to discourage anyone from too much foolish dissent. His gaze lingered on the Knights for a moment longer, wondering if they would approve of this lightsaber diplomacy, carving through the bureaucracy to reach a solution in a single decisive stroke.

Delgado drew in a breath and straightened his posture, his hands clasping behind his back. "Send them in," he instructed, and waited for the delegations to arrive.