Chapter Three

One of these days, Ahsoka was going to figure out what was so damn important about Felucia.

Not that the world didn't have its appeal, if you could get past the heat, humidity, and hostile fauna. She'd even go far enough to say that, under certain circumstances and to certain people, it could be downright pleasant. But that didn't do anything to explain why the war kept finding its way back here, or why it always seemed to drag her along with it.

"Hyperspace routes." Marczak had said when she'd asked him about it "Perlemian runs close enough by here that the Commerce Guild thinks it's worth their time. Chancellor must be thinking along the same lines."

And that made a lot of strategic sense, but she could never shake the feeling that it had a little to do with ego. Ahsoka vaguely remembered reports from early in the war about a blockade Grievous had put around Felucia, and the subsequent defeat of the Republic flotilla that had been sent against it. Ever since then, the war on Felucia had amounted to GAR troopers fighting tooth and nail to seize one Sep fortress only to have another pop up a stone's throw away. She had participated in two of those battles, one disastrous attempt to gain a foothold on the planet, and a more successful second attempt that had apparently been just as futile. In the end, nothing had really been lost or gained beyond the deaths of a few thousand clones and other Republic personnel, and the few credits any destroyed B-1 droids were worth to the Seps. So, at this point, it looked like the conflict over this little slice of hell was as much about neither the Republic or the CIS being willing to back down as about any strategic value Felucia had.

If the effort they'd gone through to retrieve the intel that had led to this little expedition was testament to how committed the Republic was to taking Felucia, Col. Marczak's response to that intel was testament to how much he didn't want to be part of that campaign.

"Heads on a swivel when we hit the ground." Marczak said to the occupants of the shuttle's passenger bay, twenty-eight troopers and Ahsoka. "I don't want any surprises this time."

He was answered by a chorus of grunts over the open com channel and the slapping of power packs into blaster rifles by the men around her. It was times like this when Ahsoka wished she had more equipment to check, not that she really needed anything else, but she felt awkward just sitting there listening to clones go through their pre-mission checklists.

"Command channel check…" The colonel's voice came from a device on her wrist.

"Acknowledged." She said, realizing that was the last thing she'd be expected to do before they landed. Absentmindedly, she fingered the equipment on her belt; lightsabers, macrobinoculars, grapple line, the small emergency survival kit that contained a fire starter, emergency beacon, and flare, all still in the same place they had been five minutes earlier.

The shuttle compartment vibrated subtly, indicating that they'd entered Felucia's atmosphere, and the troopers stopped their preparations. They were on edge, Ahsoka could tell, knowing that they were now in enemy territory, sealed inside an awkward and relatively slow-moving metal can. This quiet anticipation lasted until the pilot's voice came over the ship's intercom.

"Jammer active. Negative sensor contacts. We're clear."

The tension that had permeated the compartment quickly faded, and the men around Ahsoka returned to their tasks. Ahsoka relaxed as well, releasing tension she hadn't even noticed building, when she felt an armored elbow poke her in the side. She turned to look at Marczak strapped into the seat next to her.

"Looks like we finally got a piece of equipment that does what it says on the tin." He said with the dry humor soldiers used when they felt like they'd narrowly avoided death.

Ahsoka nodded and smiled thinly, all too aware of what happened to unescorted gunships and shuttles caught out by fighters. "Let's hope no one made visual contact, then."

Before the colonel could answer, the lights in the compartment cut out and where replaced by a dim red glow. Ahsoka, along with everyone else on board, tensed again.

"Drop zone in one mike." The pilots voice came out over the intercom. "Initiating landing sequence."

A final chorus of com checks rang out as the shuttle descended toward a small clearing in the middle of Felucia's vast jungle. The hull shuttered again, accompanied by the sound of hydraulics in the landing gear and wings shortly before the shuttle hit the ground slightly harder than was comfortable. The red lighting changed to green and restraints unlatched as the forward ramp dropped fast enough that Ahsoka knew it must have been modified for quick deployments. She rose from her seat along with the troopers and Marczak as they ran in two files out into the clearing. They spread out quickly in a half-circle around the front of the shuttle, scanning the tree line for a few tense moments before the colonel spoke.

"Report?" He said from his position, crouched in the center of the circle.

Knelt next to him, Ahsoka heard the proclamations of "all clear" over the com channel. Oddly enough though, despite her close proximity to Marczak and the fact that she could see the tension go out from his shoulders as he stood, Ahsoka didn't feel any change in him through the force. It was a trend she'd noticed increasingly often during the few weeks she'd been with ARF battalion, that there was something consistently off about the colonel's presence in the force. Not that there was anything dark about it, she'd had enough experience with the likes of Ventress to know Sith influence when she felt it. There just wasn't really anything about it, it was completely blank, like looking at a durasteel bulkhead. Ahsoka didn't really know what to make of it, she'd always been able to feel people's emotions in the force, it was her talent, and not being able to feel anything from someone was… different.

"Commander?"

The sound of Marczak's voice made Ahsoka jump. Silently cursing herself for spacing out in the middle of a mission, she turned towards him. He'd crouched down again about two meters away in a circle with what appeared to be Vor and three sergeants, and had placed his helmet on the ground beside him. He was waving her over to them, smirking slightly now that he'd realized he'd startled her. Grimacing in what she hoped was an apologetic manner, Ahsoka moved over to them.

"Everything all right, ma'am?" One of the troopers asked.

"Yes. I was just thinking." She replied

"About what?" Marczak asked, raising one eyebrow quizzically.

"Nothing important." She said. "Now what were you talking about over here?"

The colonel didn't seem particularly satisfied with her answer, but shrugged it off and pointed to the ground in the center of the circle, where he'd laid out a map. Not a holo-map, an old style, two-dimensional topographical map printed on flimsiplast.

"We're here." He said, putting his finger down on a grid square marked with a red x, then dragged his finger across the map to another marking. "Our objective is here, around eighty klicks away through dense jungle. On foot, that'd normally take us around four local days, but there's a shallow gorge that runs almost forty klicks in the direction we need to go. If we head down through there, we should be able to make it in two, maybe two and a half days at most."

Ahsoka looked at the part of the map Marczak had indicated skeptically. She wasn't particularly familiar with this kind of map, but, from what he'd said, this sounded risky.

"Won't something like a gorge leave us a little exposed?" She asked.

"No," Marczak responded quickly. "Look, it's narrow enough that the canopy will have grown over the top and cover us from aerial surveillance, and it branches off far enough away that they won't bother sending ground patrols through there."

"Okay then," Ahsoka said, starting to understand that he'd probably used this sort of approach before. "So we just throw a camo net over the shuttle and hope no one trips over it while we're out?"

Marczak grinned. "Essentially. Except if anyone does trip over it, Cell will put a blaster bolt neatly between their eyes. Right, sergeant?"

"It'll be here when you get back, colonel." Sergeant Cell said confidently. "You can bet your pension on it."

"Didn't know I had a pension," Marczak said, drawing a few chuckles from the troopers. "but I'll hold you to your word on that."

He stood with a grunt, donning his helmet as he did, and started moving towards the fungal trees.

"Form it up," The colonel said, making a circle in the air above his head with a finger. "about time we got this show on the road."

….

It was around six hours after they'd set out that they found the gorge, and Ahsoka immediately regretted her earlier skepticism. The going along the bottom of the gorge was much easier than picking their way along game trails in the jungle proper, especially since the river that had carved the passage over centuries had since dried to a mere trickle.

What worried her, though, was the canopy that, much like Marczak had predicted, had formed a roof over the gorge, giving it the feel of a tunnel. It shifted in the wind and with the movement of small animals, and Ahsoka was reminded of stories about attacks by the more savage of Felucia's two native sentient races.

"Let's hope none of the tribes have laid claim to this area." Marczak said, as if he'd been reading her mind. "They don't take to kindly to intruders."

That was an understatement if anything Ahsoka had ever heard about strange, bipedal amphibians was true.

"You ever seen them?" She asked.

"Once, while we were scouting for the first ground assault." He said. "It wasn't what I'd call a 'diplomatic' exchange."

"Well it might be too dry for them around here, don't they prefer…" She trailed off as the Colonel stopped in front of her, hand tensing on the grip of his rifle as he looked slowly around at the gorge walls and canopy.

"What's wrong?" Ahsoka asked urgently as she pulled the lightsabers off her belt. Behind her, she could hear the troopers spreading out from the single line they'd been marching in to take cover, though she was pretty sure they didn't know why Marczak had stopped either.

"Listen." Marczak said, softly enough that she could barely hear him. "Do you hear that?"

She crept up next to him and stretched out with the force, as well as her other senses. Nothing felt unusual, and, even with her sharper hearing, the jungle was completely silent.

Completely silent.

The realization came to her a half-second before Marczak slammed into her side, sending her stumbling almost three meters, where she turned back toward him just in time to see the blue-skinned, mask-clad warrior land square on his shoulders, flattening him. Before she could move to help the colonel, another warrior appeared to her left, charging with its weapon raised. She sidestepped the creatures charge, nudging it along with the Force, and quickly drew her lightsabers while her opponent stumbled trying to defeat its own momentum. Ahsoka leaped at the off-balance warrior, swinging her sabers down toward its head. The creature raised its weapon to catch the blow, and did, but was forced to a knee by the strength of the impact. Momentarily caught off guard by the warrior's stopping of her sabers with what appeared to be a jawbone, Ahsoka hesitated, allowing the creature to push her back. She recovered quickly, sidestepping another aggressive yet overly telegraphed strike and slashing her opponent across the midsection. The creature shrieked and collapsed, if not dead at least out of the fight for good.

Ahsoka used the brief respite afforded to her by the victory to take stock of the situation. The Jungle Felucians, as she now realized the creatures were, had dropped directly on top of the trooper's formation from the canopy over the gorge and were engaging the clones in melee. From what Ahsoka could see, the troopers were starting to recover from the initial shock of ambush and were fighting back, though they were struggling to hold their own against the more physically powerful Felucians. Marczak was faring better, having already dispatched the warrior that had landed on him and moved on to help Vor and Rip.

Following the colonel's lead, Ahsoka took a Force-assisted leap toward the nearest group of Felucians and troopers, landing directly behind one warrior and cutting across its knees before it had a chance to react. The second warrior managed to turn its head towards her before losing half its arm and the right side of its torso, while a third was taken down by a trooper when it moved to defend itself from the new threat. Finding itself alone against a Jedi and two clones, the last warrior turned and ran up the side of the gorge, disappearing into the jungle.

It quickly became apparent that that Felucian hadn't been alone in feeling that the odds had turned against the ambushing warriors, as those who were still able fled back out of the gorge as well. Ahsoka deactivated her lightsabers and smiled, allowing herself the grim satisfaction of having survived another engagement, even if it had only been a small skirmish. Again, she looked around and was relieved that none of the clones appeared to be seriously injured, though one or two had to be supported by their comrades as they walked.

"Commander."

She turned toward the sound of Marczak's voice to see him making his way toward her through the remnants of the skirmish, pausing briefly to pull a vibroknife from the corpse of a fallen warrior. He wiped the blood from the weapon on his kama while he went, finally slipping the blade back into its shoulder-mounted sheath as he stopped in front of her.

"You hurt?" The colonel asked, helmet bobbing in a way that suggested he was looking her over.

"No." She said, shaking her head. "I'm fine."

"Good." He said. "No serious casualties, but we've got three minor concussions, two sprained ankles, and a dozen contusions." He'd turned towards the troopers as he was talking, reading each man's diagnostic report as his eyes passed over them.

That was the one thing that made Ahsoka wish she could wear a helmet. The protection she could take or leave, and it would probably hinder her hearing more than a human's, but the heads-up display was something she'd always envied.

"Can the medics handle it?"

"Medic, we only have one." Marczak said. "But Rach should be able to handle it if we give him some time."

"How much time?"

"A few hours."

"So, we should make camp here then?"

"Might as well, rest will do 'em about as good as anything else we got."

Camp in the GAR usually meant bedding down wherever there was cover and, if possible, a water source, but this was where Felucia's bioluminescent jungles yielded one advantage. Fire, usually avoided by troops in the field, was hidden from possible enemy observers by the light of the surrounding foliage. Small fires, fires big enough to heat a ration pack and possibly a pot of GAR-issue caf. In Ahsoka's opinion, this didn't make either more bearable.

The troopers ate quickly without saying much, a habit Ahsoka had noticed aboard Retaliation that all of Marczak's men seemed to share, and that left her sitting alone with the Colonel as his men had moved off to find comfortable places to bed down or stand watch. They were odd, these clones, but Rex and a lot of the other infantry troopers had always told her that special units tended to breed behavior that seemed a bit off to outsiders. She also considered that it might have something to do with their commanding officer. After all, who was more out of place in an army of clones led by Jedi then a non-Force user born, she assumed, in the same way as most beings in the galaxy?

Marczak didn't look out of place though. He looked like he'd been born to wear that armor, just like his men, and he interacted with them as naturally as any clone officer would have. Maybe he was living proof that regular men and women could serve the Republic just as well as clone soldiers and Jedi knights, maybe it was his Mandalorian heritage, maybe it was something else, Ahsoka didn't know. What she did know was that he'd very recently pushed her out of the way of a Felucian warrior which would have landed directly on top of her, but had instead landed square on his shoulders.

"Thanks for the save earlier." Ahsoka said after she'd finished her ration pack.

"Don't mention it." Marczak said before scooping the last bite of his own meal into his mouth and tossing the wrapper down next to his helmet.

"I don't get it." She sighed. "I shouldn't have been caught off guard like that, I should've felt them coming."

This had been bothering her ever since they'd driven off the Felucians. The war party that had ambushed them was at least twenty strong, that many beings should've made a huge impression in the Force for her to pick up on.

"The problem is," Marczak said as he finished chewing. "you're relying too much on the Force. You're Togruta, a born hunter, use that."

"How'd you know they were there?" She asked, though she was pretty sure she knew the answer.

"All the other ambient noise; insects, birds, stopped." He said, gesturing up at the canopy as he did. "That's the only way you can tell, really. Felucians have a camouflage reflex that makes them as hard to pick out with your eyes as it is with the Force."

Ahsoka opened her mouth to say that she'd noticed the silence a few seconds too late, but something about what he'd said made her stop. It was rare for a non-Force sensitive to talk about the Force at all, let alone to talk about it as if they understood how it worked. She could've dismissed it as Marczak having picked up a few things from working with Jedi during the war, but then there was that weird sense she got when trying to read him… it was sort of like another Jedi trying to hide their thoughts.

She had to be sure though.

Marczak had started talking about common trends in similar environments on different planets, but Ahsoka wasn't listening. Instead, she slowly reached her hand down and grabbed a decent size stone out of the dirt. In her mind, she pictured, as clearly as possible, throwing the stone at the colonel's chest. She did this for around thirty seconds, focusing on the path the stone would take form her hand to his breastplate, before, in a split second, she raised her arm and threw the stone along the previously imagined path.

It never impacted.

Instead, Marczak's arm came up almost as fast as hers had and intercepted the stone half a meter away from his chest. She stared as he took a few seconds to look down at the stone in his hand, realize what he had done, and drop the intercepted projectile like it was searing his palm.

"What was that for?!" He yelled incredulously.

Ahsoka just smiled back, smugly self-satisfied that she'd figured out his secret.

"You're Force sensitive!" She said. "That's why I can never read you, because you're blocking me!"

Marczak sighed heavily, dragging his hand down the side of his face as he did.

"Fine," He admitted. "I'm Force-sensitive. And you probably can't read me, since that's the only trick I can pull."

"What do you mean by that?" She asked.

"I'm not very strong." He said, shrugging. "My reflexes are quick, but I can't do any Jedi tricks."

That makes sense, Ahsoka thought, If he was strong enough to be capable of, say, telekinesis, he would've been taken in by the Order when he was a baby. But then again, Marczak could do something she'd never seen a Jedi do, he could hide his thoughts and feelings from her without any apparent effort indefinitely.

"Except for the mental shield." She said, both curious and suspicious about his ability.

"Well, yea." He said, running his hand over his scalp. "But that's a bit different."

"How?"

"You don't… It's a long story…"

"We've got all night."

"Fine." He sighed. "If you really have to know. It all started when, about a month after Geonosis, Rep Intel caught wind of a Sep outpost being built on an isolated moon orbiting a gas giant called Yavin. Normally, with the war going how it was at that time, something like that would've slipped under the radar, but something about that system made the Jedi Council take interest. They put in a special request to the Chancellor for troops to back up the Jedi team they were going to send to investigate whatever it was the Seps were doing on that rock and destroy the outpost. I was a major at the time, working with the Coruscant Guard out of the old GAR HQ from back before they finished the compound on Coruscant, and Intel tapped me to lead the clone company going on the raid. The whole mission was blown from the beginning. We lost most of the company when we were forced down a hundred klicks short of our LZ by droid fighters. The jungle was too thick for them to pick us off from the air, but the going was slow, and we had no idea how to find the target. After three days, the Jedi disappeared without a trace."

He paused for a moment, staring, unfocused into the fire as if losing himself in the memory.

"That's when the dreams started. I'd never known, never even suspected, that I was force sensitive, but the dreams kept getting more vivid and there was this voice that kept calling out to me even when I was awake. Something dark lives on that moon, it clawed at my mind, whispered in my ear. It showed me terrible things, the worst atrocities of wars going back millennia. After a while, it led me to the Jedi, wanted to show me how it had broken them. The younger one, a Twi'lek, had killed his master, and…"

His voice caught in his throught.

"He ate him… gnawed the flesh from his bones. I didn't know what to do, so I just put one in the back of his head and burned the bodies. I realized then that the same thing was going to happen to me if I didn't figure out how to shut out the voice. It took a few days, but, gradually I was able to put up walls around my mind that blocked whatever it was out. After that, it wasn't too hard to find what was left of the Sep base. From what I could gather, they pulled most of their equipment out after we were shot down and only left a few dozen droids behind to deal with any survivors that might show up. I never found out what they were doing there, but command gave me a commendation and a promotion for my trouble."

When he had finished, Ahsoka had no idea what to say. What could she say to that? What did you say when someone opened up to you about such a traumatic experience? The silence stretched for what felt like an eternity as she searched for the right words. Finally, Ahsoka decided that there just weren't any. So she just said the first thing that came to mind.

"Wow…, just wow." She said. "How have I never heard about this. The Jedi Council…"

"Has no idea what really happened." Marczak said, cutting her off. "I left everything about what happened to those Jedi out of my report. As far as anyone on Coruscant is concerned, two Jedi were KIA as a result of enemy action and their remains were unrecoverable. The troopers who were there are sworn to secrecy. As far as I know, none of them has ever told another soul. And neither have I, until now."

"Then why did you tell me?" She said, asking the obvious question

He paused, looking thoughtful as if he was himself unsure why he'd told her.

"I don't know." He said finally. "I normally don't trust Jedi, but you're different… like Skywalker."

"I don't know what to say…" Ahsoka said, feeling humbled that Marczak would trust her like this so quickly. "Thank you, colonel."

"Ghes." He said, smiling. "Call me Ghes."

She smiled back. "Ghes."

Author's Notes:

I wish I could draw. That doesn't have much to do with anything, I just wish I could draw.

All right, first things first, nonstop19, thank you for the review. I'm glad you consider this well written, that's something I mostly hear from professors about my research papers, and narrative storytelling is obviously quite a different animal. I don't know if you missed this in the prologue Author's notes (maybe you just didn't read them, I don't know), but this story is already finished up to Chapter Nine, and Ten through ~Twenty are in various stages of being drafted, plotted, etc. What I'm trying to say is that I'm definitely continuing it because a lot is already done, I'm just sticking to one chapter a week for various reasons.

On a more humorous note, something I noticed Monday (9/3/18) was that I apparently forgot to add character codes when I created this story. I've since added them, but it brings up a question I've been considering for a while now; how much does a character have to appear to warrant a character code? I ask because, while this story is primarily about Ahsoka and Ghes, more than a few other characters are going to appear. Anakin has already appeared in the Prologue and Chapter One, and he's going to be back before Part I is over, Rex makes an appearance in a few chapters, Padme even plays a small part. Do I add one or more of them to the character codes, or do I just stick with our lead and her love interest?

Now, that was supposed to lead into a discussion about the process behind me creating the character of Ghes Marczak, but when I started writing that, well… let's just say that it was threatening to turn into an essay I know very few people would want to read. Besides, I already kicked the beehive enough shitting on The Last Jedi, I'm not going to further tempt fate by explaining all my problems with Luxsoka.

So the only thing I feel needs to be discussed is Ghes's low-level Force sensitivity that is "revealed" in this chapter, not the mechanics of it, which are explained to a degree in story, but the thought process. The main criticism I've heard from test readers (i.e. Wolf and my other friends) is that, with Ghes already being rather remarkable as a Mandalorian and a non-clone officer in the GAR, it's sort of a "hat on a hat" (which Wolf insists is a common metaphor even though he's the only one that I've ever heard use it). I'll admit that I may have, in trying to make Ghes able to keep up with the characters around him, gone a little overboard in the badass department. This aspect, though, is meant to contribute to the story in a slightly larger way than "helps Ghes not be dead", hence the only unique thing about the character (in universe, alt least, I don't know if anyone else has done this something like this before), his "mental block" that prevents Force Users from reading him. This isn't unprecedented, like I said, Jedi can do a few things like this, though further refined to the point where they nearly vanish from the Force. In Ghes's case, this arose first from the question "what if Anakin or Obi Wan, or any other Jedi just so happened to be around Ahsoka and Ghes at the same time?". Well, they'd probably figure out something was going on between them pretty quick just from reading Ghes, wouldn't they?

Beyond that, it has been postulated (by Wolf) that creating a character who puts up semi-literal walls around his mind and emotions is at least partially me projecting about my own issues opening up to people. This could be true of course, if Stephen King has taught us anything, it's that author's projecting their own issues onto their characters isn't necessarily a bad thing (so long as every character doesn't end up being a recovering alcoholic author). There's other aspects as well, mostly in the spiritual/Force realm, but I want to talk about that when they comes up in story.

Well, that's all for this week. As always, favorite/followed if you're enjoying the story, and feel free to leave a review.

Also, something I just thought of that might be irrelevant but I want to say anyway; I don't read a lot of fanfiction, but I'm aware there are quite a few other places on the internet you can find it outside of . I'm probably not going to go to any of these other sites, mostly cause I don't have the time, but if anybody does and enjoys this story enough to want to spread it around, I'm okay with you doing that as long as I'm still credited as the author.

Just a thought.