On the surface, all was peaceful on the multi-landscape world of Marfa, a planet known for its peaceful administration and tourism of its beautiful sites. But beneath this peaceful background was a criminal underworld that Jedi Master Mara Jade Skywalker was out to stop.
Outside of any of Marfa's cities ran a private factory that, as a front, produced new commlinks to the planet's citizens. Inside the factory, however, one could see that completed commlinks had already been shipped in so that they could be sold to Marfa's cities later at gouged prices; the real factory work was being done on a new drug called polisan. Workers sat their bench stools, bent over for hours on end piecing together the drugs that would make the factory's primary source of income.
The routine of the workers was soon interrupted when one of the entrance/exit doors to the factory was kicked down. Everyone on the illegal assembly lines turned to find a redheaded human female standing there with Marfa's sun glaring behind her, silhouetting Mara Jade Skywalker in light.
Guards in various corners of the factory sprung into action, taking out their standard-issue holdout blasters and aimed them at Mara. None of them bothered to tell her to put her hands in the air or anything before they started firing at her; she, however, expertly sent the bolts back to their firers with her blue-bladed lightsaber. Those guards that weren't dead at the end of the quarter-minute confrontation writhed on the floor of the factory in agony from the cauterized wounds that they now suffered.
Even as the firefight proceeded, all of the factory workers immediately abandoned their duties and rushed about to leave their work in a panic via the other exits. Mara paid none of them any mind as she began sprinting through the factory, looking for the office of the one that she had been searching for.
She soon found it marked with the individual's name - Manager Fleron Gamner - up on the second floor that could be accessed by four sets of stairs in the corners of the factory. Mara bypassed any of the staircases by Force-leaping up one level and landed squarely on the catwalk that would bring her to the office. She easily managed to destroy the automated turret that came out of the wall above the manager's door by using the Force to crush it, ending it with a small but satisfying explosion.
From there, nothing stopped Mara from also using the Force to blow the manager's door wide open and jumping in. Behind the desk at the other end of the office was a cowering male Togruta who aimed a small blaster at Mara. She deflected the shot that Fleron Gamner fired at her back to the blaster itself, violently knocking the weapon out of his hand and causing him to vainly nurse his now-injured hand.
Mara didn't give Gamner anytime to massage his hand as she leaped upon his desk, landed in a crouch, and grabbed the collar of his tunic with her free hand while leveling the tip of her lightsaber near his profusely-sweating head.
"Where is Nom Anor?" Mara asked hostilely.
"I don't know, I swear by the lives of my wife and children!" Gamner pleaded.
"You don't have any family, Gamner," Mara pointed out angrily. "I looked you up." She let her blade get slightly closer to the Togruta's head. "Don't lie to me again."
"But I don't know where he is, though!" Gamner cried. "I just run this factory for him, I swear! I only get untraceable comm messages from him once every month or so telling me what to do!"
"That's not what I wanted to hear," Mara growled.
She then raised her lightsaber, prompting Gamner to quickly shut his eyes and turn away from an unexpected death blow. But instead, he was simply thrown back to his seat, where he and his chair collapsed to the floor. Meanwhile, Mara leaped off his desk in a graceful back-flip and sliced his desk down the middle, rendering it in two.
Gamner looked up and stared back at Mara in scared confusion.
"You're the first guy I came across who Nom Anor personally contacts on a regular basis, even if it is a month or so," Mara said. "So that makes you more useful than any of the other informants I've come across."
She then reached a hand out and used the Force to pull Gamner's commlink from his belt and sending it right into her outstretched hand.
"Untraceable, eh?" Mara asked as she looked at the commlink. She then looked back down at the cowering Togruta. "All the other informants told me the same thing, Gamner. I've been able to decrypt them easily; that's how I've been able to find Nom Anor's lieutenants in the past month now, for your information. Pass that on to Nom Anor after you get a new commlink and when he contacts you again; if he contacts you again, I should say."
She then turned away and briskly walked out of the office to leave the factory. Gamner warily stood back up to straighten himself out and began wondering how expensive the costs that this stoppage, combined with the damages that Skywalker just doled out against his property, would be.
.
After Mara returned to the airspeeder that she hid in the decorative forest that was near the polisan factory, she took it back to the city of Jalik a few miles away. Once there, she returned the speeder to the rental building that she picked it up from and walked back to the nearby public docking bay to return to the Jade Shadow.
After that, she launched the Shadow into orbit, filed a flight plan with Marfa's Orbital Control, and then launched into hyperspace for a few minutes before dropping right back out into an empty system. With that, she began working on Gamner's commlink and started to do all she could to decrypt the apparently-untraceable connection that Nom Anor sent to his lackeys; she put all the computer knowledge that she learned from Zakarisz Ghent to deprogram the untraceable connection.
Minutes into her work, however, another vessel dropped out of hyperspace, and Mara placed the now-disassembled commlink on the copilot seat to signal the YT-2400 in the distance. But she stopped herself and smiled pleasantly once she sensed who was aboard.
Jacen.
The Shadow's comm console pinged, and Mara answered it with a press of a button.
"Hey, Aunt Mara," Jacen Solo's voice came. "How've you been doing lately?"
"Things could be better, I'd say," Mara said.
"You mean like having Nom Anor in your grasp now?" Jacen inquired.
"Your uncle told you about that, I presume?"
"He did," Jacen confirmed. "I'm here to help in your investigation."
"Sorry, Jacen, but I don't need anymore help here, thanks," Mara said.
"Oh, but, Aunt Mara, I think you do," Jacen said. "I sense great anger and hatred in you for Nom Anor."
"Let me guess," Mara said. "You're here to help relieve my hatred and resentment against Nom Anor when I find him."
"Not only when you find him," Jacen said. "But even before that."
"So I don't do anything like kill him and turn to the dark side?" Mara asked. "Or, as you like to think these days, succumbing to my own inner darkness?"
"I see that, like Uncle Luke," Jacen said, "you, too, have your doubts about the Unifying Force."
"Your uncle is giving it more of the benefit of a doubt than I am," Mara replied. "Believe me, Jacen, while I don't deny that the Unifying Force helped us end the last war, I can tell you that the dark side of the Force is very real. If you had been around Palpatine or Darth Vader at all, never mind the length of time I spent with them, you would know how misguided you really are."
"So why can't I argue that Palpatine was simply embracing his own inner darkness then?" Jacen asked. "Or why Vader had been misled by Palpatine to follow his own?"
"Because here's why, Jacen," Mara said. "The Sith only embrace their dark feelings, which is the dark side. And in order for balance to be maintained in the Force, the Jedi must act purely on their positive inner feelings; the light side of the Force, as it were. If the Jedi have to balance light and dark in themselves, then the darkness will win out because the Sith only embrace that part of the Force. And even if there are no Sith left in the galaxy, Jacen, having the Jedi balance light and darkness in themselves is still a bad idea; not many Jedi can do that. And I have to keep myself firmly in the light after all the years of darkness that I went through serving Palpatine. So what do you have to say to that?"
Jacen was silent for a moment; but before Mara could say, "That's what I thought," her nephew spoke up.
"Well, Aunt Mara, let me ask you this," Jacen said. "In the years following the downfall of the Sith by Lord Kaan in One Thousand BBY, how many Jedi were there in the generations from then to Nineteen BBY? And I mean once per generation, not altogether."
"I don't think even your uncle would know that, Jacen," Mara said.
"Fine, fair enough," Jacen replied. "But how many Sith would there be in a generation?"
"Only two," Mara answered.
"And yet generations of two Sith hiding in the galaxy were able to bring down an entire Order of countless Jedi, hundreds at the least, by the time Palpatine became Emperor," Jacen said. "If what you say about the balance of the light and dark side is true, Aunt Mara, then the light side of the Force should have won out over the dark side."
"So, what, are you saying that if Yoda's Order had adopted the ideals of the Unifying Force, and had to balance out the light and darkness within them," Mara said, "that they could have seen Palpatine's reign coming and stopped him earlier?"
"Well, keep in mind," Jacen said, "the dark side - or rather the accumulation of the inner darkness of countless Sith from Darth Bane to Palpatine, as I see it - was able to blind Yoda and his Jedi from the latter's machinations until it was too late to stop him. Now while I can't speak for what could have been, I believe that if Yoda and his Order had adopted the Unifying Force, and balanced out their own inner light and darkness in the Force, they may have been immunized, as it were, to the dark side itself so that they wouldn't have been so blinded. Hence, Palpatine may have never been Emperor, Anakin Skywalker may have never become Darth Vader, and the decades of violence that Palpatine's reign entailed may have never happened.
"But, again, this is all just a theory," Jacen concluded.
Mara was silent for a moment before she asked, "So you think that if the Jedi continue to embrace the Unifying Force, we may know of whatever Sith threat is out there, waiting to destroy the Jedi, if there are still even Sith out there?"
"I think it's possible," Jacen stated. "I'm not entirely certain, but I think it might be."
"You think it might be," Mara echoed.
"We can't know everything, Aunt Mara," Jacen said. "We can only strive to know as much as we can in the time we have in life."
"I can agree with that," Mara said. "But, tell me, Jacen: do you see anyone in the Order today who might be too conflicted with the Unifying Force that they would be unable to balance out their own 'inner light and darkness?'"
"I think so," Jacen confirmed. "But then again, the Living Force philosophy wouldn't suit everyone. As I said to Uncle Luke, just look at his father, my grandfather, Anakin. And I doubt he was the only Jedi in galactic history who wasn't able to conform to the Living Force ideals."
"Okay, but did your uncle ask you this?" Mara asked before inquiring: "Do you think that there may be more Jedi who would be more conflicted with the Unifying Force than the Living Force?"
"Again, it's possible," Jacen said. "Has any Jedi been so conflicted that they just couldn't handle dealing with the Unifying Force since the war ended?"
"None so far, to the best of my memory," Mara said. "But it's only been a few years. The culmination of Palpatine's rule took a lot longer than that. And you know what they say, Jacen: the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
"And Yoda's Order didn't suffer the same thing?" Jacen countered.
Again, Mara was silent for a few seconds before she said, "You know, something just occurred to me. As Jedi, we often find ourselves killing for the greater good, something that the Sith do for their own diabolical purposes. And yet we rarely ever fall to the dark side, or to our own inner darkness, as you say. Do you think that with the Living Force, the Jedi have already, in some way, balance out their light and darkness, Jacen?"
"In some way, yes," Jacen confirmed. "Yet it is still too steeped in the light. Without darkness to temper that, a Jedi can possibly become delusional and start killing innocent beings, for whatever reason, under the notion that they are killing for the greater good."
"I suppose that's true," Mara replied. "But then they wouldn't be Jedi anymore, would they?"
"Not proper Jedi, at any rate," Jacen said. "At least not the way you or I view it, even with our differing views."
Mara looked down at her feet for a moment before asking, "Jacen, do you really think I'm in danger of falling to the dar- To my own inner darkness when I confront Nom Anor?"
"The possibility is always there," Jacen admitted. "I'm here to make sure that won't happen."
"And if it does?" Mara asked.
"If it does, well... we will see if it will be necessary for me to defeat you if your darkness becomes too destructive."
Mara grimaced. "Maybe you will have to kill me, if you can. That monster has done too much to me and our family; oh, sure, I was able to restrain myself from killing him when he surrendered at the Battle of Yuuzhan'tar, but now, I don't know if I can, this time."
"Let's hope it doesn't come to that," Jacen said. "Nom Anor won't face real justice if you kill him in vengeance."
"I know," Mara said. "But I don't know if I'll care in the future."