This is all just a misunderstanding," the man insisted from inside his cell.
"You're making a mistake," the woman with him agreed.
Johun took a deep breath, then let it out in a long, weary sigh. He'd arrived back on the Fairwind with his two prisoners over an hour earlier. His request for an immediate audience with Farfalla had been denied, as the acting general had been otherwise preoccupied with the cleanup efforts on Ruusan. So Johun had taken his prisoners down to the flagship's lower deck and placed them in a holding cell to wait. With nothing better to do, he'd decided to take a seat in a nearby chair and wait with them.
The young Jedi was now strongly regretting that decision.
"We were never part of Kaan's army," the woman called out to him from behind the bars of their cell. "We're just farmers."
"Farmers don't wear battle armor and carry weapons," Johun said, pointing to the corner of the room where the clothing and equip-ment confiscated from the mercenaries had been piled atop a small table.
"That stuff's not ours" the man explained. "We… we just found it. We were out for a walk this morning and… we came across this deserted camp. We saw all this equipment lying around and, uh, we thought it would be fun to dress up like soldiers."
The Republic guard standing watch over the prisoners with Johun barked out a laugh at the pathetic lie. Johun just closed his eyes and reached up to rub his temples. Back on Ruusan the prisoners had been all too eager to confess to their crimes. Fresh from their encounter with the unnamed Sith Lord, they had been temporarily scared straight. Now that they were safely away from the planet's surface, however, the sobering reality of a rive-to-ten-year sentence on a Republic prison world was making them recant their earlier testimony.
"What about the others?" Johun asked, hoping to catch them in their own web of lies. "Your friends who died in the attack. Were they farmers, too?"
"Yes," the man replied, even as the woman said, "We didn't really know them."
"Well," the young Jedi asked coolly, "which is it?"
The two mercenaries gave each other a long, sour look, but it was the woman who finally answered. "We just met them this morning. At the Sith camp. They said they were farmers like us, but they might have been lying."
"Lying? Really?" Johun asked sarcastically. "Hard to imagine why anyone would do that."
The guard gave another short laugh. "You two should take this act on tour" he said. "You know… if you survive prison."
The man in the cell seemed about to say something biting in reply, but he held his tongue when his companion gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs. At that moment one of Farfalla's envoys poked her head into the room.
"The general can see you now," she said to Johun.
Johun leapt from his chair to follow her.
"Hey, tell him to let us out of here," the man called out after him. "Don't forget about us!"
No chance of that, Johun thought. To the guard he said, "Keep an eye on them. And don't believe anything they say."
The envoy led him on a long, winding journey through the various levels of the Fairwind. The holding cells were located in the bottommost depths of the great ship's hull; he was meeting Farfalla on the command deck at the top. Along the way they passed hundreds of faces Johun recognized, fellow Jedi and soldiers who had fought by his side during the campaign. Most gave a curt nod or a quick wave as they went by, too busy with their own duties to engage in any kind of conversation.
There were also many faces Johun didn't recognize: refugees from Ruusan. Many were evacuees brought here in the mad rush to escape the thought bomb, preparing to head back down to the surface to try to rebuild their lives. Others were men and women whose homes or families had been completely destroyed by the war; for them there was nothing to go back to but the painful memories of what they had lost. Farfalla had arranged for those people who didn't wish to return to Ruusan to be given transport back to the Core Worlds of the Republic, where they could find a fresh start away from the horrors they had witnessed.
So many people, Johun thought as he silently followed his guide. So much suffering. And it will all be for nothing if any of the Sith manage to escape.
When they reached the command deck, the envoy led him to Farfalla's personal quarters. She knocked once on the closed door, and a voice from the ether side said, "Come in."
She placed a hand on the console and the door slid open, then she nodded at Johun. He stepped forward and into the room, and he heard the door whoosh closed behind him.
The room was larger than he had expected, and decorated in the lavish style for which Valenthyne Farfalla was famous. A brightly colored rug of crimson and gold lay spread across the floor, and the walls were hung with works that would not have seemed out of place in the finest art galleries of Alderaan. On the far side of the room was an enormous four-poster bed, the frame fashioned from the timber of a wroshyr tree-a gift from Wookiee tribal leaders on Kashyyyk. The covers and pillows were woven from shimmering silks of yellow and red, and each of the massive bedposts was emblazoned with a hand-painted mural depicting a major event from Farfalla's life: his royal birth, his acceptance into the Jedi Order, his ascension to the rank of Master, his famous triumph over the Sith forces on Kashyyyk. The general was sitting at an oversized desk in the corner, reviewing reports on a monitor built into the surface. "You disappoint me, young Padawan," he said as he flicked off the screen and turned in his seat to face Johun.
"I am sorry I disobeyed you, Master Valenthyne," he replied.
Farfalla stood up and crossed the room, his feet padding softly on the luxurious carpet. "That is the least of my concerns," he said, placing a heavy hand on the young man's shoulder. His eyes were dark and sunken, and his normally joyful expression was hidden under a mask of worry and fatigue.
'Trtanna," Johun said, hanging his head in shame at the memory of how he had used the Force to trick the pilot into allowing him to
join her crew.
"A Jedi does not use his powers to manipulate the rninds of his friends. Even if your motives are pure, it is an abuse of your position and a betrayal of the trust others put in us."
"I know what I did was wrong," Johun admitted. "And I will accept whatever punishment you feel is necessary to atone for what I did. But there is something more important that we need to talk about first."
Farfalla gazed into Johun's eyes, then let his hand drop. The Padawan thought he saw a flicker of disappointment cross the Master's face as he did so.
"Yes, of course," Farfalla said, turning and walking back to his desk. He reached down and flicked the monitor back on. "The report from those prisoners you captured."
"You've seen it?" Johun asked in surprise.
"I read all the reports," he answered. "It is a leader's responsibility to know what his followers are doing. More important, he must stop them from making rash or misguided decisions."
"You still don't believe any of the Sith survived the thought bomb," Johun guessed.
"I lack faith in the credibility of your sources," Valenthyne replied. "These mercenaries are, to put it bluntly, the scum of the galaxy. How do you know they aren't just telling you what you want to hear?"
"Why would they do that?"
Farfalla shrugged. "Maybe they think you will stand up for them. Get them better treatment as prisoners. A lesser sentence for their crimes. These people are opportunists. They will seek every advantage they can find. Lying is second nature to them."
"I don't think they were lying, Master," Johun said with a shake of his head. "If you saw them on the surface… they were terrified! Something terrible happened to them."
"This is war. Terrible things are a matter of course."
"What about the details of their account?" Johun pressed. "The red-bladed lightsaber? The Force lightning? These are the weapons of the dark side!"
"If they were soldiers in Kaan's army, they would be well versed in the tools the Sith use against their enemies. It would be easy for them to add these elements to any story they wanted to tell."