Ganner had laboriously backtracked each link, chasing across what was left of the New Republic, through weeks in hyperspace and day after day after day of playing "Have you seen--?" with bored clerks and hostile freight loaders, suspicious bureaucrats and sarcastic corridor kids. By the time he reached the numbered curtain that passed for an apartment door inside the million-celled honeycomb of the camp ship, he was so tired he couldn't even remember what system he was in.
The number on the curtain was in three parts, giving the coordinates of the chamber's location as measured from the center of the rough globe of the camp ship; in a ship lacking anything that resembled decks--or even straight lines--three-dimensional coordinates were the only practical addresses these chambers could have. This particular chamber was remote, nearly at the hull, on the side opposite that which the tide-locked ship turned toward the world it orbited. It was--as Ganner had wryly reflected when he had learned the chamber's coordinates--on the dark side.
Ganner didn't look much like Ganner these days: gone was the flashy blouse and tight leather trousers, the gleam of gold piping, the tall, immaculately polished boots. Instead, he wore a shapeless tunic of nondescript brown fabric over baggy gray leggings that hid his boots--now scuffed, and bearing the dirt of dozens of worlds. Gone, too, was the devastating smile and the dashing glint in his clear blue eyes; he'd even let a scruffily curling beard muddy the clean sharp lines of his classic jaw. This wasn't exactly a disguise. He'd made no secret of his identity; on the contrary, he wielded his identity as a weapon, to cut through tangled kilometers of bureaucratic red tape that would have kept him off the camp ships. But he was different as he could get from the Ganner he had always been. Being that old Ganner had done him far too much damage.
Here, for example, outside the chamber: the old Ganner would have swept aside the curtain with a flourish and posed, dramatically backlit, in the doorway.
He would have coolly announced himself and asked his questions, counting on his imposing height and intimidating glare, his reputation, and his sheer gutsy dash to bully out the answers he needed. Now, instead, he leaned back against the pebbly wall beside the door and let himself slide down.
He settled in, sitting, as though he were just another refugee, taking a nap at the side of a corridor. He let his head drift forward and his eyes fall closed while he reached into the Force, seeking feelings from the chamber beyond. This could be a trap, and he was done with taking foolish chances.
Caution was his byword, now, and unobtrusiveness his best defense. He felt humans inside the chamber; with enough Force presence that there might have been five of them--as he'd been told there would be, by the harried data clerk who'd accessed their file on the temporary, obsolete, and overloaded central server that held the sketchy records compiled by this camp ship's volunteer administrators--but Ganner couldn't quite resolve the Force sensation into distinct individuals.
He frowned, squeezing his eyes more tightly shut, concentrating. It was almost as though inside this chamber there was one person with five different personalities... or that all five of them participated in some kind of group consciousness. That would be rare in humanity, but hardly impossible. The galaxy had spawned dozens, if not hundreds, of minor variations on the human theme; Ganner knew he hadn't seen them all. And the unknown, he had learned through bitter experience, was always dangerous. Often deadly.
His little half joke about this chamber being on the dark side didn't seem funny anymore. He had a feeling he was about to get himself killed.
He sighed, and got up. From the moment he had begun chasing this rumor, he had sort of, somehow, half known he would end up like this: alone, no backup, no one even knowing enough about where he was to mount a search for him when he did not return. It'd taken him two days just to walk this deeply into the camp ship.
No one would ever know what had happened to him. Well, one person would be able to guess... but he didn't think she'd care. He remembered the dark flame in Jaina's eyes when he'd told her of the rumor.
"Another stupid lie," she'd said. "And you're an idiot for believing it."
He'd tried to explain that he didn't actually believe the tale; he just thought it should be checked out. He'd tried to tell her how important this could be to the morale of the whole New Republic.
"Don't you get it? He's a hero. It'd be like--like he rose from the dead, Jaina! It'd be magical--it'd be a miracle! It'd give us hope again."
"We don't need hope," Jaina had told him. A grim set had hardened the once soft curve of her jaw ever since Myrkr. "We need more ships. We need better weapons. And we need Jedi. We need to keep on fighting. We don't need you wasting everybody's time on fantasies."
Ganner had persisted. "But what if it's not a fantasy? Your mother still claims he's alive..."
"My mother," Jaina had said, a slow, ancient weight on her words, a weight too vast, too old for a teenage girl, "lost both her sons on the same day. She hasn't gotten over it. She probably never will."
"She has a right to know..."
"I'm not arguing with you, Ganner. I'm telling you. Keep your fat yap shut. I don't want anything about this getting back to Mom. To raise her hopes and then crush them again would break her. If you do, I'll break you."
"But, but Jaina..."
She had leaned close to him then, and that dark flame in her eyes had burned so hot that Ganner took a step back.
"Don't think I won't, Ganner. And don't think I can't."
He didn't answer. He believed her.
She said, "The Vong kept Jacen alive after they captured him. For a long time. They kept him alive so they could hurt him. I could feel it. I never even told Mom and Dad what they put him through. What happened to Anakin... that was better. That was clean." Tears had sparked in her eyes, but her voice was hard enough to cut transparisteel. "I felt Jacen die. In one instant, he was... he was just gone. Blasted out of existence like he'd never existed at all. I felt it. If he were alive, I wouldn't need you to come and tell me about it! I'd know!"
Her hands had clenched to fists, white-knuckled, pressed against her sides, and her lips drew back over her teeth. "Don't talk to me about this--this garbage ever again. And don't talk to anyone else, either. Anyone. If I find out you've so much as looked in a mirror and told yourself, I will hurt you. I will teach you things about pain that no one should ever have to learn."
Ganner had stood and stared, gaping, dumbstruck at the hurt and the pure black rage that beat against him through the Force. What had happened to her? There had been some rumors...
"Hey, Jaina, it's okay," he'd said. "I won't tell anybody, I promise. Don't get mad..."
"I'm not mad. You haven't seen mad. You better hope you never do."
She had folded her arms and turned her back to him. "Get out of my sight."
Ganner had walked unsteadily away, shaken. Jaina had always held herself so together, had always been so competent, so in control, that it had been easy to forget that she'd lost both her brothers that day, too.
Had lost her twin: the brother who'd been half of all she was.
Later--much later--he reflected: Well, y'know, I only promised I wouldn't talk about it. I never promised I wouldn't look into it.
That was when he had set out. Alone.
The old Ganner might have done the same, he occasionally thought with a certain melancholy resignation. It would have made a great story, a story about the kind of Jedi Ganner had always wanted to be: the lone hero, searching the vast reaches of the galaxy on a quest he cannot share, braving unimaginable dangers and facing incalculable odds.
That had been Ganner's fantasy self: the cool, calm, dangerous hero, the kind people trade stories about in voices hushed with awe, and all that adolescent crap. Vanity, that's what it was: pure vanity.
Vanity had always been Ganner's fatal weakness. Nothing wrong with being a hero--look at Han Solo, or Corran Horn. Nothing wrong with wanting to be a hero: Luke Skywalker often talked about his youthful dreams of
adventure, and look how he turned out. But when you start trying to be a hero, you're in a whole galaxy of trouble.
Lust for glory can become a sickness: a disease that bacta cannot cure. In its final stages, it's all you can think about. At the end, you don't even care about actually being a hero. You just want people to think you are. The old Ganner Rhysode had suffered from that style-over-substance disease. He'd had as bad a case as any he'd ever seen. It had nearly killed him. Worse: it had nearly driven him dark.
In unguarded moments he still found himself drifting back to those dangerous dreams. Just thinking about it could give him the shudders. He had worked very hard to squeeze his lust for the admiration of others into a small, quiet voice, and he hoped one day to silence it forever.
So he had set about his quest quietly. Inconspicuously. Anonymously. Making sure the tale did not spread. He had to be sure he was doing this for the right reasons. He had to be sure he wasn't suffering a relapse into the glory sickness. He had to be sure he chased this rumor only because it was the right thing to do. Because the New Republic desperately needed any glimmer of hope. Because Jaina did.
Every time he remembered that dark flame in what had once been soft brown eyes, he felt another blow on a spike driving into his chest. Flirting with the dark--sure, lots of the Jedi had, since the war's beginning. Some had even claimed it was the galaxy's only hope. At the Myrkr worldship, the strike team had discussed it seriously, as an option.
But it was one thing for, say, a Kyp Durron to talk about the dark: he was a creature of tangled hostility and self-loathing, always had been--the incredible brutality of his childhood, and the unimaginable crimes it had driven him to commit, had twisted him to where holding on to the light was a struggle for him every single day.
It was another thing for young Jedi, in a desperate situation, to debate using dark side power. For Jaina Solo to look in his eye and threaten his life was something entirely different. It hurt him. Hurt him worse than he would have ever guessed it could. The Solo kids were supposed to be invulnerable.
They were the galaxy's new generation of legends: the clean, pure hope of the Jedi. Doing the right thing came naturally for them. It always had. They had been, were supposed to be, Happy Warriors of the Force: all three of them had already, without even trying, been exactly the kind of heroes Ganner had nearly killed himself trying to imitate. They'd been born for it.
But now Anakin and Jacen were dead, and Jaina--Jaina was making Ganner frighteningly aware that she was the granddaughter of Darth Vader.
What hurt him the worst: there was nothing he could do about it. Well, no, that's not entirely true, Ganner thought as he slowly heaved himself to his feet in the camp ship corridor. There is one thing I can do.
Maybe--just barely possibly--she had lost only one brother. Jacen could be alive. Maybe Ganner could prove it. Maybe he could even find him; it might not save her, but it would have to help. And if he failed...well, no harm done. She had no hopes left to crush. Ganner nodded to himself, then leaned close to the curtain that served as the chamber's door.
"Excuse me?" he called softly. "Hello? Does anybody here speak Basic?"
"Go away." The voice that answered from beyond the curtain sounded oddly--vaguely, just barely--familiar. "There is nothing for you here."
The feeling he'd had, that he was about to get himself killed, swelled into an overwhelming premonition of doom. Ganner's knees went weak, and a very large part of him wanted to bolt down the corridor and get away--but though he hadn't been much of a hero, the one virtue he'd never had to fake was courage. He took another deep breath. The hand he lifted to pull aside the curtain trembled, just a little, and he stared at it until it stilled. Then he gently tugged a gap between the curtain and the wall.
"I'm sorry to intrude," he said. "I won't bother you for long. I just have a question for you. One question, that's all, and then I'll leave you alone."
From inside, a middle-aged, heavyset human stared at him stonily. "Go away."
"In a moment, I will," Ganner said apologetically. "But I understand that someone who lives here claims he saw Jacen Solo alive, on Coruscant, after the invasion. Can I talk to whomever that might be?"
From what little he could see beyond the curtain, there seemed to be only one or two small rooms beyond, and almost no possessions of any kind. The man who blocked his path wore only a long, shapeless white tunic, almost like a loose robe; the others within--all men--wore identical garments.
Some kind of religious thing? Ganner wondered, because they all had some kind of aura in common, a similar way of carrying themselves, similar posture or some such, that you sometimes see among members of fanatic cults. Or maybe it's just poverty and desperation.
"I can pay," he offered.
"There's nothing for you here," the man repeated.
One of the others moved up behind the man's left shoulder, and gestured toward the lightsaber that hung from Ganner's belt. He grumbled something in a guttural tongue that Ganner couldn't understand.
"Not everyone who carries that weapon is a Jedi," the man replied without shifting his blankly hostile stare from Ganner's face. "Be silent."
Again Ganner was struck by some weirdly familiar resonance in the voice, though he knew he'd never seen this man before. Somehow he thought this voice should be higher, fresher, more cheerful. He shook his head. He'd worry about that later. He might not be the best sabacc player in the galaxy, but he knew when to turn his cards face-up.
"I am a Jedi," he said quietly. "My name is Ganner Rhysode. I have come to inquire about Jacen Solo. Which one of you saw him alive?"
"You are mistaken. No one here saw anything. You had better go." One of the others stepped forward and said something that sounded like Shinn'l fekk Jeedai trizmek.
"Silence!" the man snapped over his shoulder. Hairs prickled up the back of Ganner's neck, but his expression remained only politely curious.
"Please," he said, "tell me what you know." He reached out through the Force to nudge a little cooperation out of this man... And awoke to find himself jogging away down the passage, with no memory of having turned aside, no idea how he'd gotten here.
What? he thought blankly. What? Dizzily, blurrily, he worked it out: that guy back there could use the Force--could use it as well as the most powerful of Jedi. That middle-aged, average-looking man had brushed aside Ganner's probe and blasted back with a Force compulsion so strong that even though Ganner knew what it was, it continued to drive his legs in a staggering lope away from the chamber. He wrenched himself to a stop, gasping, leaning on the pebble-textured wall. The dread he'd felt had vanished; it must have been a Force projection as well: subtle, undetectable. Now, too late, he wished he had broken his promise to Jaina and brought along a dozen Jedi for backup--because now he felt from the chamber behind him only one presence in the Force.
One alone. Of the other four in there, he felt nothing at all. His lightsaber appeared in his hand and its blade snapped to life. You're not the only one who can play games with the Force, he thought, grinning, feeling for a moment the old rush, the familiar buzz of happy anticipation with which he'd always faced sudden danger. In the old days.
Leave that Ganner behind, he told himself. He released the activation plate and his blade vanished. I'm not like that. I'm cautious. Cautious and unobtrusive. Slowly, gradually, he began to withdraw from the Force: shutting down his Force presence as though he were still moving away. This left him Force-blind--but also Force-invisible. He crept back toward the chamber, moving silently along the passage wall. A powerful Force-user in the camp ship--along with what were very probably masqued Yuuzhan Vong.
And this Force-user had knowingly blown his cover when he'd put the compulsion on Ganner; in mere minutes, he could disappear forever into the anonymous millions who crowded the immense ship. Ganner had heard the stories from Yavin 4: he knew that the Yuuzhan Vong had been trying to turn Jedi to their service. If they had finally succeeded, the consequences wou
ld be literally incalculable.
He was in over his head. Way over his head. But what else could he do? This guy's stronger than I am. Cold dread prickled up his arms, and this time it wasn't any Force projection. It was the real thing. And there are five of them.
I really am going to get myself killed. But he kept moving, creeping along the wall, silent lightsaber loose in his tingling hand. How could he not? He could imagine all too well trying to explain to Skywalker: Well, um, actually... I didn't do anything about the Jedi traitor and the Yuuzhan Vong infiltrators because of, well, I mean, because of how, uh... well, I'd be really embarrassed if people thought I got killed because I was playing hero again... He choked off the thought; he was at the chamber door, and his Force trick wouldn't fool this guy for more than another second or two.
No time to plan. Barely time to act. No killing, he told himself. Not until I'm sure they're Vong. With a sigh he relaxed the mental tension that had held him outside the Force. Perception flooded him, and in its surge he felt the Force-user within the chamber blaze like a homing beacon in an asteroid belt.
Ganner flowed into action without thinking, just moving, his blade sizzling to life, slashing away the curtain's fastenings, gathering it as it fell, bagging the head of the nearest white-robe while he kicked a second aside. He faked another low-line kick and leapt high, whipping an overhand right to crash the handle of his lightsaber onto the top of a third's head hard enough to drive him to his knees, then used him like a pommel horse, vaulting his legs high for a double kick that flattened the fourth like he'd been shot with a bowcaster. He whirled back to the first just as the white-robe managed to claw the curtain off his head, and dropped him with an elbow across the jaw. He felt motion behind him and sprang into a Force-assisted back flip that spun him high and wide and ended with him in a perfectly balanced stance one arm's length from the middle-aged man, the tip of his lightsaber's blade half a centimeter from the hollow of the man's throat.
Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor Page 18