James Yonnagono spent his early years serving the Galactic Republic with quiet distinction — a transport pilot who kept supply lines breathing during the chaos of the Clone Wars, moving men and materiel to fronts that would have collapsed without him. He was never a hero of the battlefield. He was something rarer: reliable.
When the Republic died and the Empire rose in its place, James rose with it. His logistical mind and clean record made him an attractive recruit for the Imperial Security Bureau, and he accepted — believing, as many did in those early years, that order was preferable to the chaos the war had left behind. He was promoted to Major. He was good at the work.
Then came Corellia.
The mission was framed simply: a local syndicate was funneling supplies to an insurgency resisting Imperial land seizures. The Empire needed the territory — shipyards, the brass said. Star Destroyers didn't build themselves. James was tasked with coordinating Imperial Intelligence assets to shut the supply chain down and neutralize the insurgency at its root.
What he found when he dug deeper was harder to file away. The insurgents weren't ideologues or terrorists. They were families — dock workers, small farmers, people whose homes sat on ground the Empire had decided it needed. They had no other place to go. The syndicate wasn't arming a revolution; it was running food and medicine to people the Empire had simply decided didn't matter.
James gave the order anyway. He told himself it was the only move. He told himself someone else would have done it if he hadn't. He filed the report. He watched the smoke.
He spent three days in his quarters after, and on the fourth he walked into a warehouse, let a planted charge go off close enough to scatter his tags across the rubble, and disappeared.

That guilt is now the thing that quietly drives everything. He sells intelligence to rebel cells and crime syndicates not because he believes in any of them particularly — but because some part of him is still trying to find someone worth believing in, someone who might do what he couldn't.
And somewhere behind him, he suspects, is Agent Revik Shan — a former ISB colleague who was sharp enough and loyal enough that he never fully bought the death. Shan doesn't show up often. But when a lead goes cold in exactly the right way, or when someone who dealt with James turns up quietly arrested, James feels him getting closer. Shan isn't hunting him out of malice. That would almost be easier. He's hunting him because he thinks James broke — and Shan doesn't leave broken things unaccounted for.