Free Rule of Two by Drew Karpyshyn Page B

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 equipment 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 allthis 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 five-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