Traitor, Matthew Stover [spicy books to read .txt] 📗

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