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Working in silence, Johun helped load the last few supplies into the shuttle: field kits filled with rations and water capsules; medpacs in case they came across any wounded; electrobinoculars and a sensor pack for scouting and recon; glow rods for when night fell. And, of course, spare power packs for the blasters Irtanna and the others carried in case they encountered any surviving minions from Kaan’s army.

“Thank you,” Irtanna said once they were done.

Trying to appear casual, Johun took a quick look around. Farfalla was nowhere to be seen.

“Did you want to fly us down, or should I?” he asked her. The words were easy, but as he said them he reached out with the Force to touch her mind. He did it gently, being careful not to cause her any harm as he planted the seed of a suggestion.

Her eyes glazed over momentarily and a look of blank confusion crossed her face. “Uh … I’ll fly us down, I guess. You can take the copilot’s chair.”

“You’re coming with us?” Bordon, the middle-aged father, asked. From his tone, it was obvious he had doubts.

“Of course,” Johun replied amicably. “You all heard him say I should help you load up the supplies, right? Why else would he say that if I wasn’t going with you?”

As he had done with Irtanna, he gave another slight push, adding the mind-altering power of the Force to the half-truth. Normally he would have abhorred the idea of manipulating friends or allies in this fashion, but in this case he knew the ragtag rescue team would fare better if he accompanied them.

“Yeah. Right,” Bordon agreed after a moment. “Good to have you along.”

“Makes sense to have a Jedi with us,” Irtanna added. “Just in case.”

Persuading someone through the Force was always easier when it was something they wanted to be convinced of, Johun noted. Still, he felt a slight twinge of guilt as he climbed into the small ship-to-surface shuttle.

That’s only because you’re disobeying Farfalla, he reassured himself. You’re doing the right thing.

“Everyone strap in,” Irtanna ordered, speaking over the pressurized hiss as the air locks sealed.

The shuttle’s engines flared to life, lifting them off the docking platform.

“Back home to Ruusan. Or at least what’s left of it,” Bordon muttered glumly as they drifted through the cargo hold doors and out into the upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere.

THE OLD REPUBLIC

(5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

Long—long—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: A New Hope … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.

But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.

The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s