Shatterpoint

Mace Windu stopped in the doorway and tried to recover his calm. An arc of sweat darkened the cowl of his robe, and his runic clung to his skin: he'd come straight from a training bout at the Temple without taking time to shower. And the brisk pace-almost a jog-he'd maintained through the labyrinth of the Galactic Senate had offered no chance for him to cool off.

Palpatine's private office, in the Supreme Chancellor's suite beneath the Senate's Great Rotunda, opened before him, vast and stark. An expanse of polished ebonite floor; a few simple, soft chairs; a flat trestle desk, also ebonite. No pictures, paintings, or decorations other than two lone statues; only floor-to-ceiling holographic repeaters showing real-time images of Galactic City as seen from the pinnacle of the Senate Dome. Outside, the orbital mirrors would soon turn their faces from Coruscant's sun, bringing twilight to the capital.

Within was only Yoda. Alone. Perched solemnly on his hover-chair, hands folded around the head of his stick. "On time you are," the ancient Master observed, "but barely. Take a chair; composed we must be. Serious, I fear this is." "I wasn't expecting a party." Mace's boot heels clacked on the polished floor. He pulled one of the soft, plain chairs closer to Yoda and sat beside him, facing the desk. Tension made his jaw ache. "The courier said this is about the operation on Haruun Kal." The fact that of all the members of the Jedi Council and the Republic High Command, only the two senior members of the Council had been summoned by the Chancellor, implied that the news was not good.

These two senior members could hardly have appeared more different. Yoda was barely two-thirds of a meter tall, with skin green as Chadian wander-kelp and great bulging eyes that could sometimes seem almost to take on a light of their own; Mace was tall for a human, less than a hand's breadth short of two meters, with shoulders broad and powerful, heavy arms, dark eyes, and a grim set to his jaw. Where Yoda had let his sparse remnants of hair straggle at random, Mace's skull was smooth-shaven, the color of polished lammas.

But their greatest difference perhaps lay in the fee! of the two Jedi Masters. Yoda emanated a sense of mellow wisdom, combined with the impish sense of humor characteristic of the true sage; but his great age and vast experience sometimes made him seem a bit removed, even detached. Nearing nine hundred years of age led him to naturally take the long view. Mace, in contrast, had been elevated to the Jedi Council before his thirtieth birthday. His demeanor was exactly opposite. Lean. Driven. Intense. He radiated incisive intellect and unconquerable will.

As of the Battle of Geonosis, which had opened the Clone Wars, Mace had been on the Council for more than twenty standard years. It had been ten since anyone had last seen him smile.

He sometimes wondered privately if he would ever smile again.

"But it is not the planet Haruun Kal that brings you in a sweat to this office," Yoda said now.

His tone was light and understanding, but his gaze was sharp. "Concerned for Depa, you are." Mace lowered his head. "I know: the Force will bring what it will. But Republic Intelligence has reported that the Separatists have pulled back; their base outside Pelek Baw is abandoned-" "Yet return she has not." Mace knotted his ringers together. A breath brought his voice back to its customary deep, flat dispassion. "Haruun Kal is still nominally a Separatist planet. And she's a wanted woman. It won't be easy for her to get offworld. Or even to signal for extraction-the local militia use all kinds of signal jamming, and whatever they don't jam they triangulate; whole partisan bands have been wiped out by one incautious transmission-" "Your friend she is." Yoda used his stick to poke Mace on the arm. "Care for her, you do." Mace didn't meet his eyes. His feelings for Depa Billaba ran deep.

She had been onworld for four standard months. She couldn't communicate regularly; Mace had tracked her activities by sporadic Republic Intelligence reports of sabotage at the Separatist starfighter base, and the fruitless expeditions of the Balawai militias trying-and failing-to wipe out Depa's guerrillas, or even contain them. More than a month ago, Republic Intelligence had sent word that the Separatists had pulled back to the Gevarno Cluster, because they could no longer maintain and defend their base. Her success could not have been more brilliant.

But he feared to learn at what cost.

"But it can't simply be that she's missing, or." he murmured. A dark flush spread over his bare dome of skull when he realized he'd spoken his thoughts aloud. He felt Yoda's eyes on him still, and gave half an apologetic shrug. "I was only thinking: if she'd been captured or-or killed-there would be no need for such secrecy." The creases on Yoda's face deepened around his mouth, and he made that tchk sound of mild disapproval that any Jedi would instantly recognize. "Frivolous, speculation is, when patience will reveal all." Mace nodded silently. One did not argue with Master Yoda; in the Jedi Temple, this was learned in infancy. No Jedi ever forgot it. "It's. maddening, Master. If only. I mean, ten years ago, we could have simply reached out-" "Cling to the past, a Jedi cannot," Yoda interrupted sternly. His green stare reminded Mace not to speak of the shadow that had darkened Jedi perception of the Force. This was not discussed outside the Temple. Not even here. "Member of the Jedi Council, she is. Powerful Jedi. Brilliant warrior-" "She'd better be." Mace tried to smile. "I trained her." "But worry you do. Too much. Not only for Depa, but for all the Jedi. Ever since Geonosis." The smile wasn't working. He stopped trying. "I don't want to talk about Geonosis." "Known this for months, I have." Yoda poked him again, and Mace looked up. The ancient Master leaned toward him, ears curled forward, and his huge green eyes glimmered softly. "But when, finally, to talk you want. listen, I will." Mace accepted this with a silent inclination of his head. He'd never doubted it. But still, he preferred to discuss something else.

Anything else.

"Look at this place," he murmured, nodding at the expanse of the Supreme Chancellor's office. "Even after ten years, the difference between Palpatine and Valorum. How this office was, in those days-" Yoda lifted his head in that reverse nod of his. "Remember Finis Valorum well, I do. Last of a great line, he was." Some vast distance drifted through his gaae: he might have been looking back along his nine hundred years as a Jedi.

It was unsettling to contemplate that the Republic, seemingly eternal in its millennium-long reign, was not much older than Yoda himself. Sometimes, in the tales Yoda told of his long- vanished younger days, a Jedi might have heard the youth of the Republic itself: brash, confident, bursting with vitality as it expanded across the galaxy, bringing peace and justice to cluster after cluster, system after system, world after world.

For Mace, it was even more unsettling to contemplate the contrast Yoda was seeing.

"Connected with the past, Valorum was. Rooted deep in tradition's soil." In the wave of his hand, Yoda seemed to summon Finis Valorum's dazzling array of antique furniture gleaming with exotic oils, his artworks and sculptures and treasures from a thousand worlds. Legacies of thirty generations of House Valorum had once rilled this office. "Perhaps too deep: a man of history, was Valorum. Palpatine." Yoda's eyes drifted closed. "A man of today, Pal-patine is." "You say that as though it pains you." "Perhaps it does. Or perhaps: my pain is only of this day, not its man.

"I prefer the office like this." Mace half nodded around the sweep of open floor. Austere.

Unpretentious and uncompromising. To Mace, it was a window into Palpatine's character: the Supreme Chancellor lived entirely for the Republic. Simple in dress. Direct in speech.

Unconcerned with ornamentation or physical comfort. "A shame he can't touch the Force. He might have made a fine Jedi." "But then, another Supreme Chancellor would we need." Yoda smiled gently. "Better this way, perhaps it is." Mace acknowledged the point with a slight bow.

"Admire him, you do." Mace frowned. He'd never thought about it. His adult life had been spent at the orders of the Supreme Chancellor. but he served the office, not the man. What did he think of the Supreme Chancellor as a person? What difference coukl that make?

"I suppose I do." Mace vividly recalled what the Force had shown him while he watched Palpatine sworn in as Supreme Chancellor, ten years before: Palpatine was himself a shatterpoint on which the future of the Republic-perhaps even the whole galaxy-depended.

"The only other person I can imagine leading the Republic through this dark hour is. well-" He opened a hand. "-you, Master Yoda." Yoda rocked back on his hover chair and made the rustling snuffle that served him for a laugh. "No politician am I, foolish one." He still occasionally spoke as though Mace were a student. Mace didn't mind. It made him feel young. Everything else these days made him feel old.

Yoda's laughter faded. "And no fit leader for this Republic would I be." He lowered his voice even further, to barely above a whisper. "Clouded by darkness are my eyes; the Force shows me only suffering, and destruction, and the rise of a long, long night. Better off without the Force, leaders perhaps are; able to see well enough, young Palpatine seems." "Young" Palpatine-who had at least ten years on Mace, and looked twice that-chose that moment to enter the room, accompanied by another man. Yoda stepped down from his hoverchair. Mace rose in respect. The Jedi Masters bowed, greeting the Supreme Chancellor with their customary formality. He waved the courtesies aside. Palpatine looked tired: flesh seemed to be dissolving beneath his sagging skin, deepening his already hollowed cheeks.

The man with Palpatine was hardly larger than a boy, though clearly well past forty; lank, thinning brown hair draped a face so thoroughly undistinguished that Mace could forget it the instant he glanced away. His eyes were red-rimmed, he held a cloth handkerchief to his nose, and he looked so much like some minor bureaucratic functionary-a clerk in a dead-end government post, with job security and absolutely nothing else-that Mace automatically assumed he was a spy.

"We have news of Depa Billaba." Despite his earlier reasoning, the simple sadness in the Chancellor's voice sent Mace's stomach plummeting.

"This man has just come from Haruun Kal. I'm afraid-well, perhaps you should simply examine the evidence for yourself." "What is it?" Mace's mouth went dry as ash. "Has she been captured?" The treatment a captured Jedi could expect from Dooku's Separatists had been demonstrated on Geonosis.

"No, Master Windu," Palpatine said. "I'm afraid-I'm afraid it's quite a bit worse." The agent opened a large travelcase and produced an old-fashioned holoprojector. He spent a moment fiddling with controls, and then an image bloomed above the mirror-polished ebonite that served as Palpatine's desk.

Yoda's ears flattened, and his eyes narrowed to slits.

Palpatine looked away. "I have seen too much of this already," he said.

Mace's hands became fists. He couldn't seem to get his breath.

The shimmering corpses were each the size of his finger. He counted nineteen. They looked human, or close to it. There was a scatter of prefabricated huts, blasted and burned and broken.

The ruins of what must have once been a stockade wall made a ring around the scene. The jungle that surrounded them all stood four decimeters high, and covered a meter and a half of Palpatine's desk.

After a moment, the agent sniffled apologetically. "This is-er, seems to be-the work of Loyalist partisans, under the command of Master Billaba." Yoda stared.

Mace stared.

There-those wounds. Mace needed a better view. When he reached into the jungle, his hand crawled with the bright ripples of the holoprojector's scanning-matrix lasers. "These." He passed his hand through a group of three bodies that gaped with ragged wounds.

"Enhance these." The Republic Intelligence agent answered without taking his handkerchief away from his reddened eyes. "Uh, I'm uh-Master Windu, this recording is, er, is quite unsophisticated- almost, uh, primitive-" His voice vanished into a sneeze that jerked him forward as though he'd been slapped on the back of the head. "Sorry-sorry, I can't-my system won't tolerate histamine suppressors. Every time I come to Coruscant-" Mace's hand didn't move. He didn't look up. He waited while the agent's whine trickled to silence. Nineteen corpses. And this man complained about his allergies.

"Enhance these," Mace repeated.

"I, ah-yes. Sir." The agent manipulated the holoprojector's controls with hands that didn't quite tremble. Not quite. The jungle flicked out of existence. It reappeared an instant later, spread across ten meters of the office's floor. The tangled upper branches of the holographic trees had become glimmering scan patterns on the ceiling; the corpses were now almost half life- sized.

The agent ducked his head, scrubbing furiously at his nose with the handkerchief. "Sorry, Master Windu. Sorry. But the system… Its…" "Primitive. Yes." Mace waded through the light-cast images until he could squat beside the bodies. He rested his elbows on his knees, folding his hands together before his face.

Yoda walked closer, then crouched as he leaned in for a better view. After a moment, Mace looked up into his sad green eyes. "See?" "Yes. yes," Yoda croaked. "But from this, no conclusion can be drawn." "That's my point." "For those of us who are not Jedi-" Supreme Chancellor Palpatine's voice had the warm strength of a career politician's. He rounded his desk, on his face the slightly puzzled smile of a good man who faced an ugly situation with hope that everything might still turn out all right. "- perhaps you'll explain?" "Yes, sir. The other bodies don't tell us much, between decomposition and scavenger damage. But some of the mutilation on the soft tissue here-" A curve of Mace's hand traced gaping slashes across a holographic female torso. "-isn't from claws or teeth. And they didn't come from a powered weapon. See the scoring on her ribs? A lightsaber-even a vibroblade- would have slashed right through the bone. This was done with a dead blade, sir." Revulsion tightened the Supreme Chancellor's face. "A-dead blade? You mean just-like a piece of metal? Just a sharp piece of metal?" "A very sharp piece of metal, sir." Mace cocked his head a centimeter to the right. "Or ceramic. Transparisteel. Even carbonite." Palpatine took a deep breath as though suppressing a shudder. "It sounds. dreadfully crude. And painful." "Sometimes it is, sir. Not always." He didn't bother to explain how he knew. "But these slashes are parallel, and all of nearly the same length; it's likely she was dead before the cuts were made. Or at least unconscious." "Or-" The agent sniffled, and coughed apologetically. "-just, er, y'know, tied up." Mace stared at him. Yoda closed his eyes. Palpatine lowered his head as though in pain.

"There is, uh, a history of, uh, I guess you'd say, recreational torture in the Haruun Kal conflict. On both sides." The agent flushed as though he was ashamed to know such things.

"Sometimes, people-people hate so much, that just killing the enemy isn't enough." A fist clenched in Mace's chest: that this soft little man-this civilian-could accuse Depa Billaba of such an atrocity, even by implication, grabbed his heart with sick fury. A long cold stare showed him every place on this soft man's soft body where one sharp blow would kill; the agent blanched as if he could count them all in Mace's eyes.

But Mace had been a Jedi far too long for anger to gain an easy grip. A breath or two opened that fist around his heart, and he stood. "I have seen nothing to indicate Depa was involved." "Master Windu-" Palpatine began.

"What was the military value of this outpost?" "Military value?" The agent looked startled. "Why, none, I suppose. These were Balawai jungle prospectors. Jups, they call 'em. Some jups operate as a kind of irregular militia, but irregulars are nearly always men. There were six women here. And Balawai militia units never, ah, never bring their, ah, children." "Children," Mace echoed.

The agent nodded reluctantly. "Three. Mm, bioscans indicate one girl about twelve, the other two possibly fraternal twins. Boy and a girl. About nine. Had to use bioscans." His sickly eyes asked Mace not to make him finish.

Because a few days in the jungle hadn't left enough of them to be identified any other way.

Mace said, "I understand." "These weren't militia, Master Windu. Just Balawai jungle prospectors in the wrong place at the wrong time." "Jungle prospectors?" Palpatine appeared politely interested. "And what are Balawai?" "Offworlders, sir," Mace said. "The jungles of Haruun Kal are the galaxy's sole source of thyssel bark, as well as portaak leaf, jinsol, tyruun, and lammas. Among others." "Spices and exotic woods? And these are valuable enough to draw offworld emigrants? Into a war zone?" "Have you priced thyssel bark lately?" "I-" Palpatine smiled regretfully. "I don't care for it, actually. I suppose my tastes are pedestrian; you can take a boy out of the Mid Rim, but." Mace shook his head. "Not relevant, sir. My point: these were civilians. Depa wouldn't be involved in something like this. She couldn't." "Hasty, your statement is," Yoda said gravely. "Seen all evidence, I fear we have not." Mace looked at the agent. The agent flushed again.

"Well, er, yes-Master Yoda is correct. This, uh, recording-" He twitched his head around at the ghostly corpses that filled the office. "-was made with the prospectors' own equipment; it's adapted to Haruun Kal work, where more sophisticated electronics-" "I don't need a lesson on Haruun Kal." Mace's voice went sharp. "I need your evidence." "Yes, yes of course, Master Windu." The agent fished in his travelcase for a second or two, then came up with an old-fashioned data wafer of crystal. He handed it over. "It's, uh, audio only, but-we've done voiceprint analysis. It's not exact-and there's some ambient noise, other voices, jungle sounds, that kind of thing-but we put match probability in the ninety percent range." Mace weighed the crystal wafer in his hand. He stared down at it. There. Right there: the flick of a fingernail could crack it in two. I should do it, he thought. Crush this thing. Snap it in half right now. Destroy it unheard.

Because he knew. He could feel it. In the Force, stress lines spidered out from the wafer like frost scaling supercooled transparisteel. He could not read the pattern, but he could feel its power.

This would be ugly.

"Where did you find it?" "It was — uh, at the scene. Of the massacre. It was, well, at the scene." "Where did you find it?" The agent flinched.

Again, Mace took a breath. Then another. With the third, the fist in his chest relaxed. "I am sorry." Sometimes he forgot how intimidating some men found his height and voice. Not to mention his reputation. He did not wish to be feared.

At least, not by those loyal to the Republic.

"Please," he said. "It might be significant." The agent mumbled something.

"I'm sorry?" "I said, it was in her mouth." He waved a hand in the general direction of the holographic corpse at Mace's feet. "Someone had. fixed her jaw shut, so scavengers wouldn't get at it when they. well, y'know, scavengers prefer the, the, er, the tongue." Nausea bloomed below Mace's ribs. His fingertips tingled. He stared down at the woman's image. Those marks on her face-he had thought they were just marks. Or some kind of fungus, or a colony of mold. Now his eyes made sense of them, and he wished they hadn't: dull gold-colored lumps under her chin.

Brassvine thorns.

Someone had used them to nail her jaw shut.

He had to turn away. He realized that he had to sit down, too.

The agent continued, "Our station boss got a tip and sent me to check it out. I hired a steamcrawler from some busted-out jups, rented a handful of townies who can handle heavy weapons, and crawled up there. What we found. well, you can see it. That data wafer-when I found it." Mace stared at the man as though he'd never seen him before. And he hadn't: only now, finally, was he truly seeing him. An undistinguished little man: soft face and uncertain voice, shaky hands and allergies: an undistinguished little man who must have resources of toughness that Mace could barely imagine. To have walked into a scene that Mace could barely stomach even in a bloodless, translu cent laser image; to have had to smell them-touch them-to pry open a dead woman's mouth.

And then to bring the recordings here, so that he could live it all again- Mace could have done it. He thought so. Probably. He'd been some places, and seen some things.

Not like this.

The agent said, "Our sources are pretty sure the tip came from the ULF itself." Palpatine glanced a question. Mace spoke without taking his eyes off the agent. "The Upland Liberation Front, sir. That's Depa's partisan group; 'uplanders' is a rough translation of Korunnai-the name the mountain tribes give themselves." "Korunnai?" Palpatine frowned absently. "Aren't those your people, Master Windu?" "My. kin." He made himself unclench his jaw. "Yes, Chancellor. You have a good memory." "A politician's trick." Palpatine gave a gently self-deprecating smile and waved a dismissive hand. "Please go on." The agent shrugged as though there was little more to tell. "There have been a lot of. disturbing reports. Execution of prisoners. Ambushes of civilians. On both sides. Usually they can't be verified. The jungle. swallows everything. So when we got this tip-" "You found this because somebody wanted you to find it," Mace finished for him. "And now you think-" Mace turned the data wafer over and over through his fingers, watching it catch splinters of light. "You think those people might have been killed just to deliver this message." "What a hideous idea!" Palpatine lowered himself slowly onto the edge of his desk. He appealed to the agent. "This can't be true, can it?" The agent only hung his head.

Yoda's ears curled backward, and his eyes narrowed. "Some messages. most important, is how they are framed. Secondary, their content is." Palpatine shook his head in disbelief. "These ULF partisans-we ally ourselves with them?

The Jedi ally with them? What sort of monsters are they?" "I don't know." Mace handed the wafer back to the agent. "Let's find out." He slotted it into a port on the side of the holoprojector and touched a control.

The holoprojector's phased-wave speakers brought the jungle around them to life with noise: the rush of wind-rattled leaves, skrills and clatters of insect calls, dim dopplered shrieks of passing birds, the howls and coughs of distant predators. Through the eddies and boils of sound drifted a whisper sinuous as a riversnake: a human or near-human whisper, a voice murmuring in Basic, sometimes comprehensible for a word here or phrase there, sometimes twisting below the distorting ripples of the aural surface. Mace caught the words Jedi, and night-or knife- and something about look between the stars.

He frowned at the agent. "You can't clean this up?" "This is cleaned up." The agent produced a datapad from his trav-elcase, keyed it alight, and passed it to Mace. "We made a transcript. It's provisional. Best we can do." The transcript was fragmentary, but enough to draw chills up Mace's arms: Jedi Temple. taught (or possibly taut). dark. an enemy. But. Jedi. under cover of night.

One whisper was entirely clear. He read the words on the data-pad's screen as the whisper seemed to come from just behind his shoulder.

I use the night, and the night uses me.

He forgot to breathe. This was bad.

It got worse.

The whisper strengthened to a voice. A woman's voice.

Depa's voice.

On the datapad in his hand, and murmuring in the air behind his shoulder-,' have become the darkness in the jungle.

The recording went on. And on.

Her murmur drained him: of emotion, of strength, even of thought; the longer she rambled, the emptier he got. Yet her final words still triggered a dull shock inside his chest.

She was talking to him.

I know you will come for me, Mace. You should never have sent me here. And I should never have come. But what's done can never be undone. I knowyou think I've gone mad. I haven't. What's happened to me is worse.

I've gone sane.

That's why you II come, Mace. That's why you'll have to.

Because nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who's finally sane.

Her voice trailed off into the jungle-mutter.

No one moved or spoke. Mace sat with interlocked fingers supporting his chin. Yoda leaned on his cane, eyes shut, mouth pinched with inner pain. Palpatine stared solemnly through the holographic jungle, as though he saw something real beyond its boundary.

"That's-uh, that's all there is." The agent extended a hesitant hand to the holoprojector and flicked a control. The jungle vanished like a bad dream.

They all stirred, rousing themselves, instinctively adjusting their clothing. Palpatine's office now looked unreal: as though the clean carpeted floor and crisp lines of furniture, the pure filtered air, and the view of Coruscant that filled the large windows were the holographic projection, and they all still sat in the jungle.

As though only the jungle were real.

Mace spoke first.

"She's right." He lifted his head from his hands. "I have to go after her. Alone." Palpatine's eyebrows twitched. "That seems. unwise." "Concur with Chancellor Palpatine, I do," Yoda said slowly. "Great risks there would be.

Too valuable you are. Send others, we should." "There is no one else who can do this." "Surely, Master Windu"-Palpatine's smile was respectfully disbelieving-"a Republic Intelligence covert ops team, or even a team of Jedi-" "No." Mace rose, and straightened his shoulders. "It has to be me." "Please, we all understand your concern for your former student, Master Windu, but surely-" "Reasons he must have, Supreme Chancellor," Yoda said. "Listen to them, we should." Even Palpatine found that one did not argue with Master Yoda.

Mace struggled to put his certainty into words. This difficulty was a function of his particular gift of perception. Some things were so obvious to him that they were hard to describe: like explaining how he knew it was raining while he stood in a thunderstorm.

"If Depa has. gone mad-or worse, fallen to the dark side," he began, "it's vital that the Jedi know why. That we discover what did it to her. Until we know this, no more Jedi should be exposed to it than is absolutely necessary. Also, this all might be entirely false: a deliberate attempt to incriminate her. That ambient noise on the recording." He glanced at the agent. "If her voice was faked-say, synthesized by computer-that noise could be there precisely to blur the evidence of trickery, couldn't it?" The agent nodded. "But why would someone want to frame her?" Mace waved this off. "Regardless, she must be brought in. And soon-before rumor of such massacres reaches the wider galaxy. Even if she had nothing to do with them, having a Jedi's name associated with these crimes is a threat to the public trust in the Jedi. She must answer any charges before they are ever publicly made." "Granted, she must be brought in," Palpatine allowed. "But the question remains: why you?' "Because she might not want to come." Palpatine looked thoughtful.

Yoda's head came up, and his eyes opened, gleaming at the Supreme Chancellor. "If rogue she has gone. to find her, difficult it will be. To apprehend her." His voice dropped, as though the words caused him pain. "Dangerous, that will be." "Depa was my Padawan." Mace moved away from the desk and stared out the window at the shimmering twilight that slowly darkened the capital's cityscape. "The bond of Master and Padawan is. intense. No one knows her better-and I have more experi ence in those jungles than any other living Jedi. I'm the only one who can find her if she doesn't want to be found.

And if she must be-" He swallowed, and stared at the moondisk of light scattered from one of the orbital mirrors.

"If she must be. stopped," he said at length, "I may be the only one who can do that, too." Palpatine's eyebrows twitched polite incomprehension.

Mace took a deep breath, finding himself once more looking at his hands, through his hands, seeing only an image in his mind, sharp as a dream: lightsaber against lightsaber in the Temple's training halls, the green flash of Depa's blade seeming to come from everywhere at once.

He could not unmake what he had made.

There were no second chances.

Her voice echoed inside him: Nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who's finally sane, but he said only- "She is a master of Vaapad." In the silence that followed, he studied the folds and wrinkles of his interlaced fingers, focusing his attention into his visual field to hold at bay dark dream-ghosts of Depa's blade flashing toward Jedi necks.

"Vaapad?" Palpatine repeated, eventually. Perhaps he'd grown tired of waiting for someone to explain. "Isn't that some kind of animal?" "A predator of Sarapin," Yoda supplied gravely. "Also the nickname it is, given by students, for the seventh form of lightsaber combat." "Hmp. I've always heard there are only six." "Six there were, for generations of Jedi. The seventh. is not well known. A powerful form it is. Deadliest of all. But dangerous it is-to its master, as well as its opponent. Few have studied. One student alone to mastery has risen." "But if she's the only master-and this style is so deadly-what makes you think-" "She's not the only master, sir." He lifted his head to meet Palpatine's frown. "She is my only student to become a master." "YoRr only student." Palpatine echoed.

"I didn't study Vaapad." Mace let his hands fall to his sides. "I created it." Palpatine's brows drew together thoughtfully. "Yes, I seem to recall now: a reference in your report on the treason of Master Sora Bulq. Didn't you train him as well? Didn't he also claim to be a master of this Vaapad of yours?" "Sora Bulq was not my student." "Your. associate, then?" "And he did not master Vaapad," Mace said grimly. "Vaapad mastered him." "Ah-ah, I see." "With respect, sir, I don't think you do." "I see enough to worry me, just a bit." The warmth of Palpatine's smile robbed insult from his words. "The relationship of Master and Padawan is intense, you said; and I well believe it.

When you faced Dooku on Geonosis." "I prefer," Mace said softly, "not to talk about Geonosis, Chancellor." "Depa Billaba was your Padawan. And she is still perhaps your closest friend, is she not? If she must be slain, are you so certain you can strike her down?" Mace looked at the floor, at Yoda, at the agent, and in the end he had to meet Palpatine's eyes once more. It was not merely Palpatine of Naboo who had asked; this question had come from the Supreme Chancellor. His office demanded an answer.

"May the Force grant, sir," Mace said slowly, "that I will not have to find out." PART ONE THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL T

hrough the curved transparisteel, Haruun Kal was a wall of mountain-punched clouds beside him. It looked close enough to touch. The shuttle's orbit spiraled slowly toward the surface: soon enough he would be able to touch it in truth.

The insystem shuttle was only a twenty-seater, and even so it was three-quarters empty. The shuttle line had bought it used from a tour company; the tubelike passenger fuselage was entirely transparisteel, its exterior scarred and fogged with microbody pits, its interior bare except for strips of gray no-skid laid along the aisles.

Mace Windu was the lone human. His shipmates were two Kubaz who fluted excitedly about the culinary possibilities of pinch beetles and buzzworms, and a mismatched couple who seemed to be some kind of itinerant comedy act, a Kitonak and a Pho Ph'eahian whose canned banter made Mace wish for earplugs. Or hard vacuum. Or plain old-fashioned deafness. They must have been far down on their luck, to be taking a tourist shuttle into Pelek Baw; Haruun Kal's capital city is a place lounge acts go to die. Passenger liners on the Gevarno Loop only stopped there at all because they had to drop into realspace anyway for the system transit.

Mace sat as far from the others as the shuttle's limited space allowed.

The Jedi Master wore clothing appropriate to his cover: a stained vest of Corellian sand panther leather over a loose shirt that used to be white, and skintight black pants with wear patches of gray. His boots carried a hint of polish, but only above the ankle; the uppers were scuffed almost to suede. The only parts of his ensemble that were well maintained were the supple holster belted to his right thigh, and the gleaming Merr-Sonn Power 5 it held. His lightsaber was stuffed into the kitbag beneath his seat, disguised as an old-fashioned glow rod.

The datapad on his lap was also a disguise: though it worked well enough for him to encrypt his journal on it, most of it was actually a miniature subspace transmitter, frequency-locked to the band monitored by the medium cruiser Halleck, onstation in the Ventran system.

The Korunnal Highland swung into view: a vast plateau of every conceivable shade of green, skirted by bottomless swirls of cloud, crisscrossed by interlocking mountain ranges. A few of the tallest peaks were capped with white; many of the shorter mountains plumed billows of smoke and gas. The eastern half of the highland had already rolled through the terminator; when the shuttle passed into the planet's shadow, gleams of dark red and orange specked the world like predators' eyes beyond the ring of a campfire's light: open calderae of the highland's many active volcanoes.

It was beautiful. Mace barely noticed.

He held the recording wand of the fake datapad and spoke very, very softly.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU [Initial Haruun Kal Entry]: Depa's down there. Right now.

I shouldn't be thinking about this. I shouldn't be thinking about her. Not yet. But-She's down there. She's been down there for months.

I can't imagine what might have happened to her. I don't want to imagine.

I'll find out soon enough.

Focus. I have to focus. Concentrate on what I know is true while I wait for the mud to settle and the water to become clear.

A lesson of Yoda's. But sometimes you can't wait.

And sometimes the water never clears.

I can focus on what I know about Haruun Kal. I know a lot.

Here's some of it: HARUUN KAL (Al'har I): sole planet of the AL" HAR system. Haruun Kal is the name given to it in the language of the indigenous human population, the Korunnai (uplanders). It translates to Basic as "above the clouds." From space, the world appears to be oceanic, with only a few green-topped islands rising from a restless multicolored sea. But this is deceptive: the sea that these islands punctuate is not liquid, but an ocean of heavier-than-air toxic gases, which plume endlessly from the planet's innumerable active volcanoes. Only on the mountaintops and the high plateaus can oxygen-breathing life survive-and not on many of these; unless they rise far above the cloudsea, they are vulnerable to Haruun Kal's unpredictable winds. Especially during Haruun Kal's brief winter, when the thakiz baw'kal-the Downstorm-blows, the winds can whip the thick cloudsea high enough to scour lowlands free of oxygen breathers within hours. Its capital, PELEK BAW, is located on the sole inhabited landmass, the plateau known as the KORUNNAL HIGHLAND, and is the largest permanent settlement on this primarily jungle-covered planet. The indigenous humans live in small seminomadic tribal groups called ghosh and avoid the settlements, which are maintained by offworlders of a wide variety of species. The Korunnai lump all offworlders and settled folk under the somewhat contemptuous category of Balawai ("downfolk"). There is a long history of unorganized local conflicts.

L This doesn't help.

I can't fit what I know of Haruun Kal into a guidebook description. Too much of what I know is the color of the sunflash and the smell of the wind off Grandfather's Shoulder, the silken ripple of a grasser's undercoat through my fingers, the hot fierce sting of an akk dog's Force- touch.

I was born on Haruun Kal. Far back in the highland.

I am a full-blooded Korun.

A hundred generations of my ancestors breathed that air and drank that water, ate the fruit of that soil and were buried deep within it. I've returned only once, thirty-five standard years ago-but I have carried that world with me. The feel of it. The power of its storms. The up- swelling tangle of its jungles. The thunder of its peaks.

But it is not home. Home is Coruscant. Home is the Jedi Temple.

I have no recollection of my infancy among the Korunnai; my earliest memory is of Yoda's kindly smile and enormous gentle eyes close above me. It is still vivid. I don't know how old I might have been, but I am certain I could not yet walk. Perhaps I was too young to even stand.

In memory, I can see my plump infant's hands reaching up to tug at the white straggles of hair above Yoda's ears.

I recall squalling-shrieking like a wounded glowbat, as Yoda prefers to describe it-as some kind of toy, a rattle, it might have been, bobbed in the air just beyond my grasp. I recall how no amount of shouting, screaming, howling, or tears could draw that rattle one millimeter closer to my tiny fist. And I recall the instant I first reached for the toy without using my hands: how I could feel it hanging there, and I could feel how Yoda's mind supported it. and a whisper of the Force began to hum in my ears.

My next lesson: Yoda had come to take the rattle away, and I-with my infant's instinctive selfishness-had refused to release it, holding on with both my hands and all I could summon of the Force. The rattle broke-to my infant mind, a tragedy like the end of a world-for that had been Yoda's way of introducing the Jedi law of nonattachment: holding too tightly to what we love will destroy it.

And break our hearts as well.

That's a lesson I don't want to be thinking about right now.

But I can't help myself. Not right now.

Not while I'm up here, and Depa is down there.

Depa Billaba came into my life by accident: one of those joyous coincidences that are sometimes the gift of the galaxy. I found her after I fought and killed the pirates who had murdered her parents; these pirates had kidnapped their victims' lovely infant daughter. I never learned what they wanted to do with her. Or to her. I refuse to speculate.

An advantage of Jedi mental discipline: I can stop myself from imagining such things.

She grew to girlhood in the Temple, and to womanhood as my Padawan. The proudest moment of my life was the day I stood and directed the Jedi Council to welcome its newest member.

She is one of the youngest Jedi ever to be named to the Council. On the day of her elevation, Yoda suggested that it was my teaching that had brought her so far while still so young.

He said this, I think, more from courtesy than from honesty; she came so far while still so young because she is who she is. My teaching had little to do with it. I have never met anyone like her.

Depa is more than a friend to me. She's one of those dangerous attachments. She is the daughter I will never have.

All the Jedi discipline in the galaxy cannot entirely overpower the human heart.

I hear her voice again and again:. you should never have sent me here, and I should never have come.

I can't stop myself from reaching into the Force, though I know it is useless. Since shortly before Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi stood in front of the Council to report the rebirth of the Sith, a mysterious veil of darkness has clouded the Force. Close by-in both space and time-the Force is as it has always been: guide and ally, my invisible eyes and unseen hands.

But when I try to search through the Force for Depa, I find only shadows, indistinct and threatening. The crystal purity of the Force has become a thick fog of menace.

Again:. but what's done can never be undone.

I can shake my head till my brain rattles, but I can't seem to drive away those words. I must clear my mind; Pelek Baw is still Separatist, and I will have to be alert. I must stop thinking about her.

Instead, I think about the war.

The Republic was caught entirely unprepared. After a thousand years of peace, no one- especially not us Jedi-truly believed civil war would ever come. How could we? Not even Yoda could remember the last general war. Peace is more than a tradition. It is the bedrock of civilization itself.

This was the Confederacy's great advantage: the Separatists not only expected war, but counted on it.

By the time the smoldering Clone War burst into Geonosian flame, their ships were already in motion. In the weeks that followed, while we Jedi tended our wounds and mourned our dead, while the Senate scrambled to assemble a fleet-any kind of fleet-to match the power of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, while Supreme Chancellor Palpatine pleaded and bargained and sometimes had to outright threaten wavering Senators to not only stay loyal to the Republic but also support its clone army with their credits and their resources, the Separatists had fanned out across the galaxy, seeding the hyperspace lanes with their forces. The major approaches into Separatist space were picketed by droid starfighters, backed up by newly revealed capital ships: Geonosian Dreadnaughts that lumbered out from secret shipyards.

Strategically, it was a masterpiece. Any thrust into the worlds at the core of the Confederacy would be blunted, and delayed long enough for Separatist reserves to engage it; any attack with sufficient strength to swiftly overwhelm their pickets would leave hundreds or thousands of worlds open to swift Separatist reprisal. Behind their droid-walled frontier, they could gather their forces at leisure, striking out to swallow Republic systems piecemeal.

Even before the Republic was ready to fight, we had lost.

Yoda is the master strategist of the Jedi Council. A life as vast as his predisposes one to see the big picture, and take the long view. He developed our current strategy of limited engagement on multiple fronts; our goal is to harass the Separatists, wear them down in a war of attrition, chip away at them and prevent them from consolidating their po sition. In this way, we hope to gain time for the titanic manufacturing base of the Republic to be converted to the production of ships, weapons, and other war materiel.

And time to train our troops. The Kaminoan clone troopers are not only the best soldiers we have, they are very nearly our only soldiers. We would use them to train civilian volunteers and law-enforcement personnel in weapons and tactics, but the Separatists have managed to keep nearly all 1.2 million of them fully engaged, rushing from system to system and planet to planet to meet probing attacks from the bewildering variety of war droids that the TechnoUnion, with the financial backing of the Trade Federation, turns out in seemingly unlimited quantities.

Since we need all our clones simply to defend Republic systems, we have been forced to find ways to attack without them.

The Separatists don't enjoy unalloyed popularity, even in their core systems; and in any society, there are fringe elements eager to take up arms against authority. Jedi have been covertly inserted on hundreds of worlds, with a common mission: to organize Loyalist resistance, train partisans in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and generally do whatever possible to destabilize the Separatist governments.

This was why Depa Billaba came to Haruun Kal.

I sent her here.

The Al" Har system-of which Haruun Kal is the sole planet-lies on the nexus of several hyperspace lanes: the hub of a wheel called the Gevarno Loop, whose spokes join the Separatist systems of Killisu, Jutrand, Loposi, and the Gevarno Cluster with Opari, Ventran, and Ch'manss-all Loyalist. Due to local stellar configurations and the mass sensitivities of modern hyperdrives, any ship traveling from one of these systems to another can cut several standard days off its journey by coming through Al" Har, even counting the daylong realspace transit of the system itself.

None of these systems has any vast strategic value-but the Republic has lost too many systems to secession to risk losing any to conquest. Control of the Al "Har nexus offers control of the whole region. It was decided that Haruun Kal is worth the Council's attention-and not solely for its military uses.

In the Temple archives are reports of the Jedi anthropologists who studied the Korun tribes. They have a theory that a Jedi spacecraft may have made a forced landing there, perhaps thousands of years ago during the turmoil of the Sith War, when so many Jedi were lost to history. There are several varieties of fungi native to the jungles of Haruun Kal that eat metals and silicates; a ship that could not lift off again immediately would be grounded forever, and comm equipment would be equally vulnerable. The ancestors of the Korunnai, the anthropologists believe, were these shipwrecked Jedi.

This is their best explanation for a curious genetic fact: all Korunnai can touch the Force.

The true explanation may be simpler: we have to. Those who cannot use the Force do not long survive. Humans can't live in those jungles; the Korunnai survive by following their grasser herds. Grassers, great six-limbed behemoths, tear down the jungle with their forehands and massive jaws. Their name comes from the grassy meadows that are left in their wake. It is in those meadows that the Korunnai make their precarious lives. The grassers protect the Korunnai from the jungle; the Korunnai, in turn-with their Force-bonded companions, the fierce akk dogs-protect the grassers.

When the Jedi anthropologists were ready to depart, they had asked the elders of ghosh Windu if they might take with them a child to train in the Jedi arts, thus recovering the Force talents of the Korunnai to serve the peace of the galaxy.

That would be me.

I was an infant, an orphan, called by the name of my ghosh, for my parents had been taken by the jungle before my naming day. I was six months old. The choice was made for me.

I've never minded.

It is the Korunnai that Depa came here to train and use as anti-government partisans. The civil government of Haruun Kal is entirely Balawai: off-worlders and their descendants, beneficiaries of the financial interests behind the thyssel bark trade. Government of the Balawai, by the Balawai, and for the Balawai.

No Korun need apply.

The government-and the planetary militia, their military arm-joined the Confederacy of Independent Systems as a cynical dodge to squelch an ongoing Judicial Department investigation into their treatment of the Korun natives; in exchange for the use of the capital's spaceport as a base to conduct repair and refit for the Al'har fleet of droid starfighters, the Separatists provided arms for the militia and turned a blind eye toward illegal Balawai activities in the Korunnai Highland.

But since Depa arrived, the Separatists have discovered that even the smallest bands of determined guerrillas can have a devastating effect on military operations.

Especially when all these guerrillas can touch the Force.

This was a large part of Depa's argument for coming here in the first place, and why she insisted on handling it personally. Untrained Force users can be exceedingly dangerous; wild talents crop up unpredictably in such populations. Depa's mastery of Vaapad makes her virtually unbeatable in personal combat, and her own cultural training-in the elegant philosophico-mystical disciplines of the Chalactan Adepts-makes her uniquely resistant to all forms of mental manipulation, from Force-powered suggestion to brainwashing by torture.

I believe she may have also nursed a private hope that some of the Korunnai might be persuaded to enlist in the Grand Army of the Republic; a cadre of Force-capable commandos could take a great deal of the pressure off the Jedi and accomplish missions that no clone troopers could hope to survive.

I suspect, too, that part of the reason she insisted on taking this mission was sentimental: I think she came here because Haruun Kal is where I was born.

Though this world has never been my true home, I bear its stamp to this day.

The Korun culture is based on a simple premise, what they call the Four Pillars: Honor, Duty, Family, Herd.

The First Pillar is Honor, your obligation to yourself. Act with integrity. Speak the truth. Fight without fear. Love without reservation.

Greater than this is the Second Pillar, Duty, your obligation to others. Do your job. Work hard. Obey the elders. Stand by your ghosh.

Greater still is the Third Pillar, Family. Care for your parents. Love your spouse. Teach your children. Defend your blood.

Greatest of all is the Fourth Pillar, Herd, for it is on the grasser herds that the life of the ghosh depends. Your family is more important than your duty; your duty outweighs your honor. But nothing is more important than your herd. If the well-being of the herd requires the sacrifice of your honor, you do it. If it requires that you shirk your duty, you do it.

Whatever it takes.

Even your family.

Yoda once observed that-though I left Haruun Kal as an infant, and returned only once, as a youth, to train in the Korun Force-bond with the great akks-he thinks I have the Four Pillars in my veins along with my Korun blood. He said that Honor and Duty are as natural to me as breathing, and that the only real difference my Jedi training has made is that the Jedi have become my Family, and the Republic itself is my Herd.

This is flattering. I hope it might be true, but I don't have an opinion on the subject. I'm not interested in opinions. I'm interested in facts.

This is a fact: I found the shatterpoint of the Gevarno Loop.

Another fact: Depa volunteered to strike it.

And another fact- That she said:,' have become the darkness in the jungle.

The spaceport at Pelek Baw smelled clean. It wasn't. Typical back-world port: filthy, disorganized, half choked with rusted remnants of disabled ships.

Mace stepped off the shuttle ramp and slung his kitbag by its strap. Smothering wet heat pricked sweat across his bare scalp. He raised his eyes from the ocher-scaled junk and discarded crumples of empty nutripacks scattered around the landing bay, up into the misty turquoise sky.

The white crown of Grandfather's Shoulder soared above the city: the tallest mountain on the Korunnal Highland, an active volcano with dozens of open calderae. Mace remembered the taste of the snow at the tree line, the thin cold air and the aromatic resins of the evergreen scrub below the summit.

He had spent far too much of his life on Coruscant.

If only he could have come here for some other reason.

Any other reason.

A straw-colored shimmer in the air around him explained the clean smell: a surgical sterilization field. He'd expected it. The spaceport had always had a powered-up surgical field umbrella, to protect ships and equipment from the various native fungi that fed on metals and silicates; the field also wiped out the bacteria and molds that would otherwise have made the spaceport smell like an overloaded refresher.

The spaceport's pro-biotic showers were still in their long, low blockhouse of mold-stained duracrete, but their entrance had been expanded into a large temporary-looking office of injection-molded plastifoam, with a foam-slab door that hung askew on half-sprung hinges. The door was streaked with rusty stains that had dripped from the fungus-chewed durasteel sign above. The sign said CUSTOMS. Mace went in.

Sunlight leaked green through mold-tracked windows. Climate control wheezed a body- temperature breeze from ceiling vents, and the smell loudly advertised that this place was well beyond the reach of the surgical field.

Inside the customs office, enough flybuzz hummed to get the two Kubaz chuckling and eagerly nudging each other. Mace didn't quite manage to ignore the Pho Ph'eahian broadly explaining to a bored-looking human that he'd just jumped in from Kashyyyk and boy, were his legs tired. The agent seemed to find this about as tolerable as Mace did; he hurriedly passed the comedians along after the pair of Kubaz, and they all disappeared into the shower blockhouse.

Mace found a different customs agent: a Neimoidian female with pink-slitted eyes, cold- bloodedly sleepy in the heat. She looked over his identikit incuriously. "Corellian, hnh? Purpose of your visit?" "Business." She sighed tiredly. "You'll need a better answer than that. Corellia's no friend of the Confederacy." "Which would be why I'm doing business here." "Hnh. I scan you. Open your bag for inspection." Mace thought about the "old-fashioned glow rod" stashed in his bag. He wasn't sure how convincing its shell would be to Neimoidian eyes, which could see deep into the infrared.

"I'd rather not." "Do I care? Open it." She squinted a dark pink eye up at him. "Hey, nice skin job. You could almost pass for a Korun." "Almost?" "You're too tall. And they mostly have hair. And anyway, Korunnai are all Force freaks, yes? They have powers and stuff." "I have powers." "Yeah?" "Sure." Mace hooked his thumbs behind his belt. "I have the power to make ten credits appear in your hand." The Neimoidian looked thoughtful. "That's a pretty good power. Let's see it." He passed his hand over the customs agent's desk, and let fall a coin he'd palmed from his belt's slit pocket. The Neimoidian had powers of her own: she made the coin disappear. "Not bad." She turned up her empty hand. "Let's see it again." "Let's see my identikit validated and my bag passed." The Neimoidian shrugged and complied, and Mace did his trick again. "Power like yours, you'll get along fine in Pelek Baw," she said. "Pleasure doing business with you. Be sure to take your PB tabs. And see me on your way offworld. Ask for Pule." Til do that." Toward the back of the customs office, a large advertiscreen advised everyone entering Pelek Baw to use the probiotic showers before leaving the spaceport. The showers replaced beneficial skin flora that had been killed by the surgical field. This advice was supported with gruesomely graphic holos of the wide variety of fungal infections awaiting unshowered travelers.

A dispenser beneath the screen offered half-credit doses of tablets guaranteed to restore intestinal flora as well. Mace bought a few, took one, then stepped into the shower blockhouse.

The blockhouse had a smell all its own: a dark musky funk, rich and organic. The showers themselves were simple autonozzles spraying bacterium-rich nutrient mist; they lined the walls of a thirty-meter walk-through. Mace stripped off his clothes and stuffed them into his kitbag.

There was a conveyor strip for possessions beside the walk-through entrance, but he held on to the bag. A few germs wouldn't do it any harm.

At the far end of the showers, he walked into a situation.

The dressing station was loud with turbine-driven airjet dryers. The two Kubaz and the comedy team, still naked, milled uncertainly in one corner. A large surly-looking human in sunbleached khakis and a military cap stood facing them, impressive arms folded across his equally impressive chest. He stared at the naked travelers with cold unspecific threat.

A smaller human in identical clothing rummaged through their bags, which were piled behind the large man's legs. The smaller man had a bag of his own, into which he dropped anything small and valuable. Both men had stun batons dangling from belt loops, and blasters secured in snap-flap holsters.

Mace nodded thoughtfully. The situation was clear enough. Based on who he was supposed to be, he should just ignore this. But cover or not, he was still a Jedi.

The big one looked Mace over. Head to toe and back again. His stare had the open insolence that came of being clothed and armed and facing someone who was naked and dripping wet. "Here's another. Smart guy carried his own bag." The other rose and unlooped his stun baton. "Sure, smart guy. Let's have the bag.

Inspection. Come on." Mace went still. Pro-bi mist condensed to rivulets and trickled down his bare skin. "I can read your mind," he said darkly. "You only have three ideas, and all of them are wrong." "Huh?" STAR WARS: SHATTERPOINT Mace nipped up a thumb. "You think being armed and ruthless means you can do whatever you want." He folded his thumb and flipped up his forefinger. "You think nobody will stand up to you when they're naked." He folded that one again and flipped up the next. "And you think you're going to look inside my bag." "Oh, he's a funny one." The smaller man spun his stun baton and stepped toward him. "He's not just smart, he's funny." The big man moved to his flank. "Yeah, regular comedian." "The comedians are over there." Mace inclined his head toward the Pho Ph'eahian and his Kitonak partner, naked and shivering in the corner. "See the difference?" "Yeah?" The big man flexed big hands. "What are you supposed to be, then?" "I'm a prophet." Mace lowered his voice as though sharing a secret. "I can see the future." "Sure you can." He set his stubble-smeared jaw and showed jagged yellow teeth. "What do you see?" "You," Mace said. "Bleeding." His expression might have been a smile if there had been the faintest hint of warmth in his eyes. The big man suddenly looked less confident. In this he could perhaps be excused; like all successful predators, he was interested only in victims. Certainly not in opponents. Which was the purpose of his particular racket, after all: members of any sapient species who were culturally accustomed to wearing clothes would feel hesitant, uncertain, and vulnerable when caught naked. Especially humans. Any normal person would stop to put on pants before throwing a punch.

Mace Windu, in contrast, looked like he might know of uncertainty and vulnerability by reputation, but had never met either of them face-to-face.

One hundred eighty-eight centimeters of muscle and bone. Absolutely still. Absolutely relaxed. From his attitude, the pro-bi mist that trickled down his naked skin might have been carbon-fiber-reinforced ceramic body armor.

"Do you have a move to make?" Mace said. "I'm in a hurry." The big man's gaze twitched sideways, and he said, "Uh-?" Mace felt a pressure in the Force over his left kidney and heard the sizzle of a triggered stun baton. He spun and caught the wrist of the smaller man with both hands, shoving the baton's sparking corona well clear with a twist that levered his face into the path of Mace's rising foot. The impact made a smack as wet and meaty as the snap of bone. The big man bellowed and lunged and Mace stepped to one side and whipcracked the smaller man's arm to spin his slackening body. Mace caught the small man's head in the palm of one hand and shoved it crisply into the big man's nose.

The two men skidded in a tangle on the slippery, damp floor and went down. The baton spat lightning as it skittered into a corner. The smaller man lay limp. The big man's eyes spurted tears and he sat on the floor, trying with both hands to massage his smashed nose into shape. Blood leaked through his fingers.

Mace stood over him. "Told you." The big man didn't seem impressed. Mace shrugged. A prophet, it was said, received no honor on his own world.

Mace dressed silently while the other travelers reclaimed their belongings. The big man made no attempt to stop them, or even to rise. Presently the smaller man stirred, moaned, and opened his eyes. As soon as they focused well enough to see Mace still in the dressing station, he cursed and clawed at his holster flap, struggling to free his blaster.

Mace looked at him.

The man decided his blaster was better off where it was.

"You don't know how much trouble you're in," he muttered sullenly as he settled back down on the floor, words blurred by his smashed mouth. He drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. "People who butch up with capital militia don't live long around-" The big man interrupted him with a cuff on the back of his head. "Shut it." "Capital militia?" Mace understood now. His face settled into a grim mask, and he finished buckling down his holster. "You're the police." The Pho Ph'eahian mimed a pratfall. "You'd think they'd hire cops who weren't so clumsy, eh?" "Oh, I dunno, Phootie," the Kitonak said in a characteristically slow, terminally relaxed voice.

"They bounced real nice." Both Kubaz whirred something about slippery floors, inappropriate footwear, and unfortunate accidents.

The cops scowled.

Mace squatted in front of them. His right hand rested on the Power 5's butt. "It'd be a shame if somebody had a blaster malfunction," he said. "A slip, a fall-sure, it's embarrassing. It hurts.

But you'll get over it in a day or two. If somebody's blaster accidentally went off when you fell-?" He shrugged. "How long will it take you to get over being dead?" The smaller cop started to spit back something venomous. The larger one interrupted him with another cuff. "We scan you," he growled. "Just go." Mace stood. "I remember when this was a nice town." He shouldered his kitbag and walked out into the blazing tropical afternoon. He passed under a dented, rusty sign without looking up.

The sign said: WELCOME TO PELEK BAW.

Faces- Hard faces. Cold faces. Hungry, or drunk. Hopeful. Calculating. Desperate.

Street faces.

Mace walked a pace behind and to the right of the Republic Intelligence station boss, keeping his right hand near the Merr-Sonn's butt. Late at night, the streets were still crowded.

Haruun Kal had no moon; the streets were lit with spill from taverns and outdoor cafes.

Lightpoles-tall hexagonal pillars of duracrete with glowstrips running up each face-stood every twenty meters along both sides of the street. Their pools of yellow glow bordered black shadow; to pass into one of the alley mouths was to be wiped from existence.

The Intel station boss was a bulky, red-cheeked woman about Mace's age. She ran the Highland Green Washeteria, a thriving laundry and public refresher station on the capital's north side. She never stopped talking. Mace hadn't started listening.

The Force nudged him with threat in all directions: from the rumble of wheeled groundcars that careened at random through crowded streets to the fan of death sticks in a teenager's fist.

Uniformed militia swaggered or strutted or sometimes just posed, puffed up with the fake- dangerous attitude of armed amateurs. Holster flaps open. Blaster rifles propped against hipbones. He saw plenty of weapons waved, saw people shoved, saw lots of intimidation and threatening looks and crude street-gang horseplay; he didn't see much actual keeping of the peace. When a burst of blasterfire sang out a few blocks away, no one even looked around.

But nearly everyone looked at Mace.

Militia faces: human, or too close to call. Looking at Mace, seeing only a Korun in offworld clothes, their eyes went dead cold. Blank. Measuring. After a while, hostile eyes all look alike.

Mace kept alert, and concentrated on projecting a powerful aura of Don't Mess With Me.

He would have felt safer in the jungle.

Street faces: drink-bloated moons of bust-outs mooching spare change. A Wookiee gone gray from nose to chest, exhaustedly straining against his harness as he pulled a two-wheeled taxicart, fending off street kids with one hand while the other held on to his money belt. Jungle prospector faces: fungus scars on their cheeks, weapons at their sides. Young faces: children, younger than Depa had been on the day she became his Padawan, offering trinkets to Mace at "special discounts" because they "liked his face." Many of them were Korunnai.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Sure. Come to the city. Life's easy in the city. No vine cats. No driUmites. No brassvines or death hollows. No shoveling grasser ma nure, no hauling water, no tending akk pups. Plenty of money in the city. All you have to do is sell this, or endure that. What you're really selling: your youth. Your hope. Your future.

Anyone with sympathy for the Separatist cause should spend a few days in Pelek Baw. Find out what the Confederacy is really fighting for.

It's good that Jedi do not indulge in hate.

The station boss's chatter somehow wandered onto the subject of the Intel front she managed. Her name was Phloremirlla Tenk, "but call me Flor, sweetie. Everybody does." Mace picked up the thread of her ramble.

"Hey, everybody needs a shower once in a while. Why not get your clothes spiffed at the same time? So everybody comes here. I get jups, kornos, you name it. I get militia and seppie brass-well, used to, till the pullback. I get everybody. I got a pool. I got six different saunas. I got private showers-you can get water, alcohol, probi, son-ics, you name it-maybe a recorder or two to really get the dirt we need. Some of these militia officers, you'd be amazed what they fall to talking about, alone in a steam room. Know what I mean?" She was the chattiest spy he'd ever met. When she eventually stopped for breath, Mace told her so.

"Yeah, funny, huh? How do you think I've survived this game for twenty-three years? Talk as much as I do, it takes people longer to notice you never really say anything." Maybe she was nervous. Maybe she could smell the threat that smoked in those streets.

Some people thought they could hold danger at bay by pretending to be safe.

"I got thirty-seven employees. Only five are Intel. Everybody else just works there. Hah: I make twice the money off the Washeteria as I draw after twenty-three years in the service. Not that it's all that hard to do, if you know what I mean. You know what an RS-Seventeen makes?

Pathetic. Pathetic. What's a Jedi make these days? Do they even pay you? Not enough, I'll bet.

They love that Service is its own reward junk, don't they? Especially when it's other people's service. I'll just bet." She'd already assembled a team to take him upcountry. Six men with heavy weapons and an almost new steamcrawler. "They look a little rough, but they're good boys, all of them.

Freelancers, but solid. Years in the bush. Two are full-blooded kornos. Good with the natives, you know?" For security reasons, she explained, she was taking him to meet them herself. "Sooner you're on your way, happier we'll both be. Right? Am I right? Taxis are hopeless this time of day.

Mind the gutter cookie-that stuff'll chew right through your boots. Hey, watch it, creepo! Ever hear that peds have the right-of-way? Yeah? Well, your mother eats Hutt slime!" She stumped along the street, arms swinging. "Um, you know this Jedi of yours is wanted, right? You got a way to get her offworld?" What Mace had was the Halleck onstation in the Ventran system with twenty armed landers and a regiment of clone troopers. What he said was, "Yes." A new round of blasterfire sang perhaps a block or two away, salted with staccato pops crisper than blaster hits. Flor instantly turned left and dodged away up the street.

"Whoops! This way-you want to keep clear of those little rumbles, you know? Might just be a food riot, but you never know. Those handclaps? Slugthrowers, or I'm a Dug. Could be action by some of these guerrillas your Jedi runs-lots of the kornos carry slugthrow-ers, and slugs bounce. Slugthrowers. I hate 'em. But they're easy to maintain. Day or two in the jungle and your blaster'll never fire again. A good slug rifle, keep 'em wiped and oiled, they last forever. The guerrillas have pretty good luck with them, even though they take a lot of practice-slugs are ballistic, y'know. You have to plot the trajectory in your head. Shee, gimme a blaster anytime." A new note joined the blasterfire: a deeper, throatier thrumm-thrummmthrummthrumm.

Mace scowled over his shoulder. That was some kind of light repeater: a T-21, or maybe a Merr-Sonn Thunderbolt.

Military hardware.

"It would be good," he said, "if we could get off the street." While she assured him, "No, no, no, don't worry, these scuffles never add up to much," he tried to calculate how fast he could dig his lightsaber out of his kitbag.

The firing intensified. Voices joined in: shouts and screams. Anger and pain. It started to sound less like a riot, and more like a firefight. Just beyond the corner ahead, white-hot bolts flared past along the right-of-way. More blasterfire zinged behind them. The firefight was overflowing, becoming a flood that might surround them at any second. Mace looked back: along this street he still could see only crowds and groundcars, but the militia members were starting to take an interest: checking weapons, trotting toward alleys and cross-streets. Flor said behind him, "See? Look at that. They're not even really aiming at anything. Now, we just nip across-" She was interrupted by a splattering thwop. Mace had heard that sound too often: steam, superheated by a high-energy bolt, exploding through living flesh. A deep-tissue blaster hit. He turned back to Flor and found her staggering in a drunken circle, painting the pavement with her blood. Where her left arm should have been was only a fist-sized mass of ragged tissue. Where the rest of her arm was, he couldn't see.

She said: "What? What?" He dived into the street. He rolled, coming up to slam her hip joint with his shoulder. The impact folded her over him; he lifted her, turned, and sprang back for the corner. Bright flares of blaster bolts bracketed invisible sizzles and finger snaps of hypersonic slugs. He reached the meager cover of the corner and laid her flat on the sidewalk, tucked close against the wall.

"This isn't supposed to happen." Her life was flooding out of the shattered stump of her shoulder. Even dying, she kept talking. A blurry murmur: "This isn't happening. It can't be happening. My-my arm-" In the Force, Mace could feel her shredded brachial artery; with the Force, he reached inside her shoulder to pinch it shut. The flood trickled to sluggish welling.

"Take it easy." He propped her legs on his kitbag to help maintain blood pressure to her brain. "Try to stay calm. You can live through this." Boots clattered on permacrete behind him: a militia squad sprinting toward them. "Help is on the way." He leaned closer. "I need the meet point and the recognition code for the team." "What? What are you talking about?" "Listen to me. Try to focus. Before you go into shock. Tell me where I can find the upcountry team, and the recognition code so we'll know each other." "You don't-you don't understand-this isn't happening-" "Yes. It is. Focus. Lives depend on you. I need the meet point and the code." "But-but-you don't understand-" The militia behind him clattered to a stop. "You! Korno! Stand away from that woman!" He glanced back. Six of them. Firing stance. The lightpole at their backs haloed black shadow across their faces. Plasma-charred muzzles stared at him. "This woman is wounded.

Badly. Without medical attention, she will die." "You're no doctor," one said, and shot him.

CAPITAL CRIMES H

e had plenty of time to get familiar with the interrogation room.

Four meters by three. Duracrete blocks flecked with gravel whose shearplanes glinted like mica. The walls from waist-high to ceiling had once been painted the color of aged ivory. The floor and lower walls used to be the green of wander-kelp. What was left of both paint jobs flaked in patches rimmed with mildew.

The binder chair that held him was in better condition. The clamps at his wrists were cold and hard and had no weakness he could touch; those at his ankles sliced pale gouges into the leather of his boots. The chest plate barely let him breathe.

No windows. One glowstrip cast soft yellow from the joining of wall and ceiling. The other one was dead.

The door was behind him. Twisting to watch it hurt too much. The durasteel table in the center of the room was dented and speckled with rust-he thought it was rust. Hoped it was.

On the far side of it was a wooden chair, its bow back stripped from wear.

His vest and shirt were tattered at the shoulder where the first bolt had struck. The skin beneath was scorched and swollen with a black bruise. Set on stun, the bolt had barely penetrated his skin, but the concussive force of the steam-burst still hit like a club. It had picked him up and spun him. The pounding in his skull implied that at least one shot had caught the side of his head. He didn't remember.

He didn't remember anything between that first shot and waking up in this binder chair.

He waited.

He waited a long time.

He was thirsty. Uneasy pressure in his bladder somehow made his head hurt worse.

Studying the room and assessing his injuries could occupy only so much of his time. Much of the rest of it, he spent replaying Flor's death.

He knew she was dead. She had to be. She couldn't have lived more than a minute or two after the militia stunned him; without his Force-hold to pinch off that brachial artery, she would have bled out in seconds. She would have lain on that filthy sidewalk staring up at city-dimmed stars while the last of her consciousness darkened, faded, and finally winked out.

Again and again he heard that wet splattering thwop. Again and again he carried her back under cover. And stopped her bleeding. And tried to speak with her. And was shot by men he'd thought were coming to help.

Her death had gotten inside him, down below his ribs. It ate at him: a tiny pool of infection that grew through the hours in that room until it became a throbbing abscess. Pain and nausea and sweats. Chills.

A fever of the mind.

Not because he was responsible for her death. It ate at him because he wasn't.

He'd had no idea she was about to walk into a blaster bolt. The Force never offered the faintest hint of a clue. No trace of a bad feeling-or rather: no hint that all the bad feelings he'd had were about to add up to something much, much worse. Nothing. Nothing at all. That's what sickened him. What happens to a Jedi when he can no longer trust the Force?

Was this what broke Depa?

He shook that thought out of his skull. He drove his attention into his visual field, focusing on cataloging the smallest detail of his prison. Until he could see for himself, he told himself solidly, he owed her the presumption of innocence. Such doubts were unworthy of her. And of him. But they kept creeping back, no matter how hard he stared at the mildew-eaten paint on the wall.

I know you think I've gone mad. I haven't. What's happened to me is worse.

I've gone sane.

He knew her. He knew her. To the marrow of her bones. Her most secret heart. Her cherished dreams and faintest, foggiest hopes. She could not be involved in massacres of civilians. Of children.

nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who's finally sane.

She couldn't.

But as seconds swelled to hours, the certainty in his head went hollow, then desperate. Like he was trying to talk himself into something he knew was wrong.

He felt the door behind him open. A damp breeze licked the back of his neck. Footsteps entered and clicked to one side, and he twisted to look: they belonged to a smallish human male, comfortably plump, wearing militia khakis that were improbably well starched, considering the heat and the damp. The man carried a snap-rim case covered in tanned animal hide. He brushed a wave of end-dampened hair the color of aluminum away from dark eyes, and offered Mace a pleasant smile. "No, please." He waved a hand toward the door. "Feel free to have a look." Twisting farther, Mace could see down the corridor behind his binder chair. At the far end stood a pair of steady-looking militiamen with blaster rifles aimed at his face.

Mace frowned. An unusual position for guards.

"Is this clear enough?" The man moved around Mace to the table, never crossing their line of fire, and opened his animal-hide bag. "I'm told you have a bit of a concussion. Let's not make it fatal, shall we?" The Force showed him a dozen places on that soft body where a single blow would maim or kill. This man was no warrior. But energy spidered outward from him in all directions: an important man. Mace found no direct threat in him, only a cheery pragmatism.

"Not talkative? Don't blame you. Well. My name's Geptun. I'm chief of security for the capital district. My friends call me Lorz. You can call me Colonel Geptun." He waited, still wearing that indifferently pleasant smile. After a few seconds, he sighed. "Well. We know who I am. And we know who you're not." He flipped open the lid of Mace's identikit. "You're not Kinsal Trappano. I'm guessing not Corellian, either. Interesting history you don't have. Smuggler. Small-time pirate. Gunrunner. Et cetera and so forth." He settled into the wooden chair, laced his fingers together, and propped his hands on his belly. He watched Mace with that pleasant smile. Silently. Waiting for him to say something.

Mace could have kept him waiting for days. Without Jedi training, no human truly understands what patience is. But Depa was out there. Somewhere. Doing something. The longer it took him to reach her, the more of it she might do. He decided to talk.

A small victory for him, Mace thought. No loss for me.

"What am I charged with?" "That depends. What have you done?" "Officially." Geptun shrugged. "Nothing's been filed. Yet." "Then why am I being held?" "We're interrogating you." Mace raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, yes. We are." Geptun winked. "We are indeed. I'm a terrific interrogator." "You haven't even asked me a question." Geptun smiled like a sleepy vine cat. "Questions are inefficient. In your case, futile." "You must be good indeed," Mace said, "to have figured that out without even asking one." By way of reply, Geptun reached into the animal-skin case and pulled out Mace's lightsaber.

The glow rod shell had been stripped away. Traces of adhesive showed black against the metal. He hefted it in his hand, smiling. "And torture would probably be a waste of time, too, yes?" He set the lightsaber on the table and spun it like a bottle. Mace could feel its whirl in the Force: feel exactly how to touch it with his mind, to lift it and trigger it and set it flashing upon Colonel Geptun, to slay or hold hostage, or to slash through the restraints that held him in the binder chair- He let it spin.

The two shooters standing ready at the far end of the corridor made sense to him now.

His lightsaber's spin took on a wobble, slowed, and trickled to a stop, its emitter centered on his breastbone. "I believe that means you're It," Geptun said.

A neat trick. Mace measured him again. The colonel endured his scrutiny blandly. "Geptun," Mace said, "could be a Korun name." "And in fact it is," the colonel admitted cheerily. "My paternal grandfather came out of the jungle some seventy-odd years ago. This, ah, is not discussed. You understand. Not in polite society." "Is that something you still have here? Polite society?" Geptun shrugged. "My name's only a mild handicap. Maybe that trace of Korun blood is what makes me too proud to change it." Mace nodded, more to himself than to the other. If the man had enough Force-touch to control the lightsaber's spin, he might easily have enough to conceal his intentions. Mace revised his threat assessment from Low to Unknown. "What do you want from me?" "Well. That's the real question, isn't it? There are a variety of things you could do for me.

You could, say, be a substantial boost to my career. A Jedi? Even your basic Jedi grunt might be valuable, to the right people. I mean, I've captured an enemy officer here, haven't I? The Confederacy might reward me handsomely for you. In fact, I know they would. And maybe even give me a medal." He tilted his head: a humorous sidelong look. "You don't seem concerned by the possibility." If he were planning to turn Mace over to the Separatists, Geptun wouldn't be here. Mace waited. Silently.

"Ah, it's true," the colonel sighed after a moment. "I'm not political. And there's something else you might be able to do for me." Mace kept waiting.

"Well. I see it like this. Here I have a Jedi. Probably an important Jedi, since we caught him next to the corpse of the planetary chief of Republic Intelligence." He winked at Mace again.

"Oh, yes: Phloremirlla and I were old friends. Friends too long to let political differences come between us, eh?" "I'm sure she'd be gratified by your obvious grief." Geptun took this without a blink. It didn't even dent his smile. "Tragic. After so many years in so many dangerous places, to be cut down by a stray blaster bolt. Collateral damage. Merely a bystander. Hardly innocent, though, was she?" It was possible, Mace reflected, that he might come to profoundly dislike this man. "If your men hadn't shot me, she'd still be alive." He chuckled. "If my men hadn't shot you, I wouldn't have the pleasure of your company tonight." "And has this pleasure been worth your friend's life?" "That remains to be seen." Their gazes locked for a full second. Mace had seen lizards with more expressive eyes. Predatory lizards.

He revised his threat assessment again. Upward.

Geptun shifted his weight like a man getting comfortable after a large meal. "So. Back to this Jedi in question. I'm thinking this Jedi is also someone a little on the capable side. Even, perhaps, actively dangerous. Since he answers the description of a fellow who broke several bones belonging to a pair of my best men." "Those were your best? I'm sorry." "So am I, Master Jedi. So am I. Well. I fell to wondering what business might possibly bring an important, dangerous Jedi like yourself to our little backworld of Haruun Kal. You would hardly have come so far just to commit petty assault upon peace officers. I fell to wondering if your business might possibly have something to do with another Jedi. One who seems to be running around upcoun-try, doing all sorts of un-Jedi-ish kinds of things. Like murdering civilians. Might your business have something to do with her?" "If it does?" Geptun tilted his chair back and looked at Mace over the curves of his plump cheeks.

"We've been hunting this Jedi for some time now. I've even posted a bounty. A big bounty. It's possible that if someone were to, mm-deal with-my existing Jedi problem, I might feel fully compensated. I might not even miss that reward we were talking about earlier." RT w see.

"Maybe you do. And maybe you don't. Here's the thing: I can't quite make up my mind." Mace waited.

Geptun sighed irritably and settled his chair back on the floor. "You're not the easiest man to have a conversation with." This didn't call for a reply, so Mace didn't make one.

"See? That's exactly what I'm talking about. Well. I suppose I just need a way to ease my mind, you understand? I'm right on the bubble, here: I can go either way. I'd like that reward.

Yes, indeed I would. But given the choice, I'd prefer my, er, upcountry]z&i problem taken care of-but I'm not sure that's the best decision I could make right now. For my future. I'm wavering. You see? Teetering. I need a little reassurance. If you know what I mean?" Now Mace finally understood what they were talking about. "How much reassurance do you need?" Geptun's eyes glinted the same flat sheen as the shearplanes of the gravel in the walls. "Ten thousand." "I'll give you four." Geptun scowled at him. Mace stared back; his face might have been carved from stone.

"I can keep you here a very long time-" Mace said, "Thirty-five hundred." "You insult me. What, am I not worth even haggling with?" "We are haggling. Thirty-two fifty." "I'm wounded, Master Jedi-" "You mean: Jedi Master," Mace said. "Three thousand." Geptun's face blackened, but after a moment wasted trying to match uncompromising stares with Mace Windu-a losing proposition-he shook his head and shrugged again. "Three thousand. I suppose one must make allowances." He sighed. "There is a war on, after all." They cut him loose at dawn.

Mace descended the worn stone sweep of the Ministry of Justice's front steps. The high cirrus over Grandfather's Shoulder bled morning. The lightpoles had gone pale. The street below was as restlessly crowded as ever.

He had his kitbag over his shoulder and his blaster strapped to his thigh. His lightsaber was in an inside pocket of his vest, concealed below his left arm.

He slid into the crowd and let its current carry him along.

Endless faces passed him, meeting his eyes incuriously or not at all. Carts clattered. Music trickled from open doorways and leaked from personal players. Once in a while the massive rumble of steam-crawler treads forced the crowds to one side or another; at such times the touch of unfamiliar flesh made his skin crawl. The smell of human sweat mingled with Yuzzem urine and the musky funk of Togorians. He smelled the unmistakable tang of t'landa Til elbow glands, and the smoke of portaak leaf roasting over lammas fires, and he could only marvel dully at how alien it all was. Of course, the alien here was Mace.

He could not guess what he should do next.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU I should have been working my way toward Depa already. I could have headed for the Highland Green Washeteria, to make new contact with the remaining Republic Intelligence agents onworld. I could have hired my own team: though the bribe to Geptun wiped out the credit account of "KinsalTrappano"-it never contains more than a few thousand-that account is monitored by the Jedi Council. New funds would be added as required. A steamcrawler wouldn't be hard to come by, and the streets were filled with dangerous-looking people who might be willing to hire on. I could have done any number of things.

Instead, I drifted with the current of the crowds.

I discovered that I was afraid. Afraid of making another mistake.

It's an unfamiliar feeling. Not until Geonosis did I truly understand that such a thing was even possible.

At the Temple, we teach that the only true mistake a Jedi ever makes is to fail to trust the Force. Jedi do not "figure things out" or "come up with a plan." Such actions are the opposite of what being a Jedi means. We let the Force flow through us, and ride its currents to peace and justice. Most of Jedi training involves learning to trust our instincts, our feelings, as opposed to our intellects. A Jedi must learn to "unthink" a situation, to "unact": to become an empty vessel for the Force to fill with wisdom and action. We feel the truth when we stop analyzing it. The Force acts through us when we surrender all effort. A Jedi does not decide. A Jedi trusts.

To put it another way: we are not trained to think. We are trained to know.

But at Geonosis, our knowing failed us all.

Haruun Kal has already taught me that the tragedy of misjudgment that was Geonosis was not an isolated event. It can happen again.

Will happen again.

I don't know how to stop it.

To have come here alone made sense. but it was intellectual sense, and the intellect is a deceiver. To go after Depa myself feels right. but my feelings can no longer be trusted. The shadow on the Force turns our instincts against us.

I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know how to decide what to do.

There were instincts, though, that had little to do with Jedi training. It was one of these Mace followed when he felt a Hey, buddy nudge on his shoulder, and looked around to find no one there. The nudge had come through the Force.

He scanned a sea of faces and heads and steamcrawler smoke. Limp cafe banners dripping in the moist air. A cart with a ragged mange-patched grasser in the traces. The driver flourished an elec-troprod. "Two creds, anywheres in town. Two creds!" Nearby, a Yuzzem with alcohol- bleared eyes snarled. He was harnessed to one of the two-wheeled taxicarts. He turned in the traces and snatched a human out of the seat, holding him overhead in one enormous hand while the other displayed wickedly hooked claws. His snarl translated: No money? No problem. I'm hungry.

Another nudge- Mace got a glimpse of him this time. The crowd made one of those smoke-random rifts that let him see a hundred meters along the street: a slender Korun half Mace's age or less, darker skin, wearing the brown close-woven tunic and pants of a jungle ghoshin. Mace caught a quick flash of white teeth and a hint of startling blue eyes and then the young Korun turned and moved away up the street.

Those startling eyes-had Mace seen him before? On the street the night before, maybe: around the time of the riot.

Mace went after him.

He needed a direction. This one looked promising.

The young Korun clearly wanted him to follow; each time the crowds would close between them and Mace would lose him, another Force-nudge would draw his eyes.

The crowds had their own pace. The faster Mace tried to move, the more resistance he met: elbows and shoulders and hips and even one or two old-fashioned straight-arms to the chest, accompanied by unfriendly assessments of his walking manners and offers to fill that particular gap in his education. To these, he responded with a simple "You don't want to fight me." He never bothered to emphasize this with the Force; the look in his eyes was enough.

One excitable young man didn't say a word, deciding instead to communicate with a wild overhand aimed at Mace's nose. Mace gravely inclined his head as though offering a polite bow, and the young man's fist shattered against the frontal bone of Mace's shaven skull. He briefly considered passing along some friendly advice to the excitable youth about the virtues of patience, nonviolence, and civilized behavior-or at least a mild critique of the fellow's sloppy punch-but the agony on his face as he knelt, cradling his broken knuckles, put Mace in mind of one of Yoda's maxims, that The most powerful lessons, without words are taught, so he only shrugged apologetically and walked on.

The pressure of the crowds brought his pursuit up against the law of diminishing returns: Mace couldn't gain on the young Korun without attracting even more attention and possibly injuring any number of insufficiently polite people. Sometimes when the Korun flicked a glance back, Mace thought he might detect a hint of a smile, but he was too far away to read it: was that smile enouraging? Friendly? Merely polite? Malicious?

Predatory?

The Korun turned down a narrower, darker street, still shadowed with the lees of night.

Here the crowds had given way to a pair of Yarkora sleeping off their evening's debauchery arm in arm, perilously close to a pool of vomit, and three or four aging Balawai women who had ventured out to sweep the walkstones in front of their respective tenement doorways. Their morning rite of mutual griping broke down as Mace approached. They clutched their brooms possessively, adjusted the kerchiefs that bound whatever thin hair they may have had left, and watched him in silence.

One of them spat near his feet as he passed.

Instead of responding, he stopped. Now off the main streets and away from the constant rumble of voice, foot, and wheel, he could hear a new sound in the morning, faint but crisp: a thin, sharp hum that pulsed irregularly, bobbing like a cup on a lazy sea.

Repulsorlift engine. Maybe more than one.

Echoes along the building-lined street made the sound come from everywhere. But it wasn't getting louder. And when he got another Force-nudge from Smiley up the street and moved on, it didn't get fainter, either.

On the opposite sides of the buildings around, he thought. Pacing me.

Maybe swoops. Maybe speeder bikes. Not a landspeeder: a land-speeder's repulsorlifts hummed a single note. They didn't pulse as the vehicle bobbed.

This was starting to come into focus.

He followed Smiley through a maze of streets that twisted and forked. Some were loud and thronged; most were quiet, giving out no more than muttered conversation and the thutter of polymer cycle tires. Rooftops leaned overhead, upper floors reaching for each other, eclipsing the morning into one thin jag of blue above permanent twilight.

The twisting streets became tangled alleys. One more corner, and Smiley was gone.

Mace found himself in a tiny, enclosed courtyard maybe five meters square. Nothing within but massive trash bins overflowing with garbage. Trash chutes veined the blank faces of buildings around; the lowest windows were ten meters up and webbed with wire. High above on the rim of a rooftop, Mace's keen eyes picked out a scar of cleaner brick: Smiley must have gone fast up a rope, and pulled it up behind him, leaving no way for Mace to follow.

In some languages, a place like this was called a dead end.

A perfect place for a trap.

Mace thought, Finally.

He'd begun to wonder if they'd changed their minds.

He stood in the courtyard, his back to the straight length of alley, and opened his mind.

In the Force, they felt like energy fields.

Four spheres of cautious malice layered with anticipated thrill: expecting a successful hunt, but taking no chances. Two hung back at the far mouth of the alley, to provide cover and reserves. The other two advanced silently with weapons leveled, going for the point-blank shot.

Mace could feel the aim points of their weapons skittering hotly across his skin like Aridusian lava beetles under his clothes.

The repulsorlift hum sharpened and took on a direction: above to either side. Speeder bikes, he guessed. His Force perception ex panded to take them in as well: he felt the heightened threat of powerful weapons overhead, and swoops were rarely armed. One rider each. Out of sight over the rims of the buildings, they circled into position to provide crossing fire.

This was about to get interesting.

Mace felt only a warm anticipation. After a day of uncertainty and pretense, of holding on to his cover and offering bribes and letting thugs walk free, he was looking forward to doing a little straightforward, uncomplicated buttwhipping.

But then he caught the tone of his own thoughts, and he sighed.

No Jedi was perfect. All had flaws against which they struggled every day. Mace's few personal flaws were well known to every Jedi of his close acquaintance; he made no secret of them. On the contrary: it was part of Mace's particular greatness that he could freely acknowledge his weaknesses, and was not afraid to ask for help in dealing with them.

His applicable flaw, here: he liked to fight. This, in a Jedi, was especially dangerous.

And Mace was an especially dangerous Jedi.

With rigorous mental discipline, he squashed his anticipation and decided to parley. Talking them out of attacking might save their lives. And they seemed to be professionals; perhaps he could simply pay for the information he wanted.

Instead of beating it out of them.

As he reached his decision, the men behind him reached their range. Professionals indeed: without a word, they leveled their weapons, and twin packets of galvenned plasma streaked at his spine.

In even the best-trained human shooter there is at least a quarter-second delay between the decision to fire and the squeeze on the trigger. Deep in the Force, Mace could feel their decision even before it was made: an echo from his future.

Before their fingers could so much as twitch, he was moving.

By the time the blaster bolts were a quarter of the way there, Mace had whirled, the speed of his spin opening his vest. By the time the bolts were halfway there, the Force had snapped his lightsaber into his palm. At three-quarters, his blade extended, and when the blaster bolts reached him they met not flesh and bone but a meter-long continuous cascade of vivid purple energy.

Mace reflexively slapped the bolts back at the shooters-but instead of rebounding from his blade, the bolts splattered through it and grazed his ribs and burst against a trash bin behind him so that it boomed and bucked and shivered like a cracked bell.

Mace thought:,' might be in trouble after all.

Before the thought could fully form in his mind, the two shooters (a distant, calculating part of Mace's brain filed that they were both human) had flipped their weapons to autoburst. A blinding spray of bolts filled the alleyway.

Mace threw himself sideways, flipping in the air; a bolt clipped his shin, hammering his leg backward, turning his flip into a tumble, but he still managed to land in a crouch behind the cover of the alleyway's inner corner. He glanced at his leg: the bolt hadn't penetrated his boot leather.

Stun setting, he thought. Professionals who want me alive.

While he was trying to feel his way toward what they might try next, he noticed that his blade cast a peculiarly pale light. Much too pale.

Even as he crouched there, staring drop-jawed into the paling shaft, it faded, flickered, and winked out.

He thought: And this trouble I'm in just might be serious.

His lightsaber was out of charge.

"That's not possible," hz snarled. "It's not-" With a lurch in his gut, he got it.

Geptun.

Mace had underestimated him. Corrupt and greedy, yes. Stupid? Obviously not.

"T J" I" Jedi!

A man's voice, from the alley: one of the shooters. "Let's do this the easy way, huh? Nobody has to get hurt." If only that were true, Mace thought.

"We got all kinds of stuff out here, Jedi. Not just blasters. We got glop. We got Nytinite. We got stun nets." But they hadn't used any yet. Mercenaries, Mace decided. Maybe bounty hunters. Not militia. Glop grenades and sleep gas were expensive; a blaster bolt cost almost nothing. So they were saving a few credits.

They were also giving him time to think. And he was about to make them regret it.

"You want to know what else we got?" Mace could hear his smirk. "Look up, Jedi." Over the roof rims above, the pair of speeder bikes bobbed upward, visored pilots skylining themselves against the blue. Their forward steering vanes scattered mirror flashes of the sunrise across the courtyard floor. Their underslung blaster cannons bracketed Mace with plasma- scorched muzzles. He was completely exposed to their crossfire-but they weren't firing.

Mace nodded to himself. They wanted him alive. A hit from one of those cannons and they'd have to pick up his body with shovels and a mop.

But that didn't mean cannons were useless: a blast from the lead bike shattered a chest-sized hunk of the baked-clay wall two meters above him. Chunks and slivers pounded him and slashed him and battered him to the ground.

Heat trickled down his skin, and he smelled blood: he was cut. The rest was too fresh to know how bad it might be. He scrambled through the rubble and dived behind a trash bin. No help there: the speeder pilot blasted the bin's far side and it slammed Mace hard enough to knock his wind out.

Shot. Concussed. Cut. Battered. Bladeless.

Haruun Kal was pounding him to pieces, and he hadn't been on-world even a standard day.

"All right!" He reached up and splayed his hands above the trash bin so that the speeder pilots could see. He let his decharged lightsaber dangle, thumb through its belt ring. "All right: I'm coming out. Don't shoot." The lead speeder drifted in a little as he worked his way out from behind the bin, hands high.

The other speeder hung back for high cover. Mace picked his way to the alley mouth, took a deep breath, and stepped out from the corner. The two shooters slowly uncovered: one from behind a trash bin and the other stepping out from a recessed doorway. The two backups stayed at the corners of the alley's far mouth.

"You're pretty good," Mace said. "Among the best I've ever seen." "Hey, thanks," one answered. From his voice, this was the one who'd spoken earlier. The leader, then, most likely.

His smile was less friendly than his tone. He and his partner both carried fold-stock blasters in the crooks of their arms. The men at the end of the alley had over-under blaster rifles combined with something large bore: grenade launchers or wide-galvenned riot blasters.

"Coming from a Jedi like you, I imagine that's high praise." "You certainly do come prepared." "Yup. Let's have that blaster, eh? Nice and easy." Slowly-very slowly-Mace switched his lightsaber to his left hand, inching his right down toward the Power 5's butt. "I wish I could tell you how many times teams like yours have come after me. Not just in alleys. On the street. Caves. Cliffs. Freighter holds. Dry washes. You name it." "And now you're caught. Put the blaster on the ground and kick it toward my friend here." "Pirates. Bounty hunters. Tribals. Howlpacks." Mace might have been reminiscing with old friends as he complied. "Armed with everything from thermal detonators to stone axes. And sometimes just claws and teeth." The silent one bent down for the Power 5. His blaster's muzzle dropped out of line. Mace took a step to his left. Now the talker was in the line of fire from the two behind him.

Mace reached into the Force, and the alleyway crystallized around him: a web of shearplanes and stress lines and vectors of motion. It became a gemstone with flaws and fractures that linked the talker and his partner, the two shooters at the far end, the speeder bikes and their pilots, the twenty-meter-high buildings to either side- And Mace.

No shatterpoint that he could see would get him out of this.

Doesn't mean I wont, he thought. Just means it won't be easy. Or certain.

Or even likely.

He took one deep breath to compose himself.

One breath was all it took. If the Force should bring death to him here, he was ready.

"Now the lightsaber," the talker said.

"You are better prepared than most." Mace balanced his lightsaber on his palm. "But like all those others, you've forgotten the only piece of equipment that would actually do you any good." "Yeah? What's that?" Mace's voice went cold, and his eyes went colder. "An ambulance." The leader's smile tried to turn into a chuckle, but instead it faded away: Mace's level stare was a humor-free zone.

The leader hefted his blaster. "The lightsaber. Now." "Sure." Mace tossed it toward him. "Take it." His lightsaber tumbled through a long arc. In the Force he felt them all fractionally relax: the slightest easing of trigger pressure: the tiniest shift of adrenaline-charged concentration. They relaxed because he was now unarmed.

Because none of them understood what a lightsaber was.

Mace had begun the construction of his lightsaber when he was still a Padawan. On the day he first put hand to metal, he had dreamed that lightsaber for three years already: had imagined it so completely that it existed in his mind, perfect in every detail. Its construction was not creation, but actualization: he took mental reality and made it physical. The thing of metal and gemstone, of particle beam and power cell, was only an expression; his real lightsaber was the one that existed only in the part of the Force Mace called his mind.

A lightsaber was not a weapon. Weapons might be taken, or destroyed. Weapons were unitary entities. Many people even gave them names of their own. Mace would no more give a name to his lightsaber than he would to his hand. He was not the boy who first imagined its shape, forty-one years before; nor was his lightsaber identical to that first image in the dreams of a nine-year-old boy. With each new step in his ever-deepening understanding of the Force and his place in it, he had rebuilt his lightsaber. Remade it. It had grown along with him.

His lightsaber reflected all he knew. All he believed.

All he was.

Which was why it required no effort, no thought, to seize his lightsaber's tumbling handgrip through the Force and fire it like a bullet.

It screamed through the air and its butt took the talker between the eyes with a hollow stone-on-wood whack. The impact flipped him off his feet, unconscious or dead before he hit the ground. His hands spasmed on the blaster, and it gushed energy. Through the Force Mace nudged the blaster's muzzle to sweep the talker's partner and blow him spinning to the ground; Mace guided it farther upward, and hammering energy chewed an arc of chunks from the walls before it battered the steering vanes of the speeder bike above and behind him, smacking it into a spin that kept the pilot too busy hanging on to even think about firing a weapon.

The over-unders of the two at the alley mouth now coughed, but Mace was already in motion: he Force-sprang at a slant and met the far wall five meters up, then kicked higher and across to the opposite wall, up and back again, zigzagging toward the rooftops through a storm of blasterfire.

Belated grenades burst below: spit-white glop spewed across the alley, swirling the purple cloud of Nytinite anesthetic gas, but Mace was already well above their effect zone. He sailed up over the lip of the flat baked-tile roof and there were people up there- The roof was cluttered with hods full of tiles and pots of liquid permacite and bundled tarpaulins that might have been keeping the winter rains out-but now had become camouflage for at least two men.

Lying concealed beneath the tarps, the men were invisible to the eye but Mace felt them in the Force: adrenaline shivers and the desperate self-control it took to remain motionless.

Bystanders? Roofers caught in a sudden firefight, hiding for their lives? Reserves for the assault team?

Mace was not certain he'd live to find out.

Before he could touch down, the other speeder pilot cut off his path with a fountain of blasterfire that traversed back to intercept him. A shove with the Force dropped him short, but as he made contact with the roof, the pilot fired an impact-fused grenade at Mace's feet. Mace reached out and the Force slapped the grenade away from himself and the hidden men, but the cannon's blast stream hammered a line of shattered tiles and smoking holes in the rooftop straight at them.

So he sprang toward it.

An upward thrust with the Force lifted him over the blast stream, and he made his spring into a twisting dive-roll that brought him to his feet with his back to the massive communal chimney that rose from the center of the roof. The chimney shuddered with the impact of cannonfire on its far side. Through the Force he felt the other speeder bike circling toward an open shot.

Cannon holes in the roof, he thought. Those cannons left shattered gaps big enough to dive through. If he could drop through one into the building- The chimney was only a meter taller than Mace was. He sprang to the top. Cannonfire blasted into its baked-clay wall, tracking up toward his legs. Before he could spot a roof hole big enough to dive through, the chimney bucked and began to crumble.

He clawed for his balance. A man shouted, "Hey, Windu! Happy name-day!" and Mace got a glimpse of tarpaulins nipping back, and blue eyes and white teeth, and something came tumbling toward him through the air- It was shaped vaguely like a cryoban grenade but when Mace reached into the Force to slap it away, he recognized it: its feel was as familiar as the sound of Yoda's voice.

It was a lightsaber.

It was Depa's lightsaber.

Instead of slapping it away, Mace drew it toward him-and nixo. ouni through the Force hefelf her, felt Depa as though she stood at his side and had taken his hand. Its grip smacked into his palm.

In the green flash of Depa's blade, the situation looked different.

The rest of the fight lasted less than five seconds.

The speeder bike above opened fire again and Mace slipped to one side, letting the Force move the blade. Blaster bolts ricocheted from the energy fountain and smashed the speeder's power cell, sending it flipping toward the ground within the alley's end. The blue-eyed Korun- Smiley, the one who had led him here-and the other man who had lain beneath the tarp held rapid-fire slugthrowers that they slipped over the roof rim to fill the alley below with a lethal swarm of bullets.

Two more Korunnai popped out of cover on the rooftop across the alley. One had a slugthrower: flame leapt from its barrel. The other-a big light-skinned Korun girl with reddish hair-stood upright, wide-legged, a massive Mer-Sonn Thunderbolt tucked into her armpit, showering the alley with howling packets of galvenned particle beam.

The other pilot didn't like the new odds: he power-slewed his speeder and shrieked away above the rooftops. Smiley yanked his barrel around and took aim at the pilot's back-but before he could fire, the speeder bike flipped in the air, tumbled out of control, and crashed through the wall of a distant building at roughly two hundred kilometers an hour.

Smiley waved a hand, and the Korunnai stopped firing.

The sudden silence rang in Mace's ears.

"Was that fun or what?" Smiley grinned at Mace, and winked. "Come on, Windu: tell me that didn't warm your shorts a little." Mace dropped to the rooftop and angled Depa's blade to a neutral position. "Who are you?" "I'm the guy who just slipped your jiffies off the roaster. Let's go, man. Militia'll be here any minute." The two Korunnai across the alley were already sliding down slender ropes toward the ground. Smiley and his friend hooked grapnels that might have been made of polished brassvine over the lip of the roof and paid out rope below. His friend slung his slug rifle and slipped over the edge.

Mace scowled toward the column of smoke that now rose from the gaping hole the second speeder bike had left in the building blocks away. Smiley caught his look and chuckled. "Love that fungus: ate his fly-by-wire. Saved me a shot." Mace muttered, "I'm just hoping nobody was home." "Yeah, think of the mess." Smiley gave him that big white grin. "Forget about identifying bodies, huh? Better to just hose it out." Mace looked at him. "I have a feeling," he said slowly, "that you and I aren't going to be friends." "And that's got my heart pumping pondwater, let me tell you." Smiley took a rope in his hands and beckoned. "On the double, Windu. What do you want, an invitation? Flowers and a box of candy?" The cascade of Depa's lightsaber highlighted both their faces the color of sunlight in the jungle. "What I want," Mace told him, "is for you to tell me what you were doing with this blade." "The lightsaber?" The blue in his eyes sparked with manic fire. "That's my credentials," he said, and disappeared below the rim.

JUNGLE TO JUNGLE M

ace stood on the roof, staring into the emerald gleam of Depa's blade. Either she'd given it to Smiley, or he'd taken it off her corpse. Mace hoped it was the former.

At least, he thought he did.

The Depa he knew-would she lend out her lightsaber? Would she give away part of herself?

Something told him it hadn't exactly been a Concordance of Fealty.

After a few seconds, he released the activation plate. Her blade shrank and vanished, leaving behind only a tang of ions in the air. He slipped the handgrip into the inner pocket of his vest. It didn't go in easily: the grip was tacky with a thin layer of goo that had an herbaceous scent.

Some kind of plant resin. Sticky, but it didn't come off on his hand.

He shook his head, scowling at his palm. Then he sighed. And shrugged. Perhaps it was time he stopped expecting things on this planet to make sense.

He leaned out over the roof rim. Four bodies below in the alley, plus the pilot lying amid the wreckage of his speeder bike in the al ley. Include the one who'd crashed into the building, and that was all of them.

Smiley and the Korunnai were swiftly and efficiently looting the dead.

Mace's jaw tightened. One of the dead-the talker, maybe-had a deep blood-lipped gash from ear to ear.

Someone had cut his throat.

A sick weight gathered in Mace's chest. Some things did make sense after all, and the sense this made turned his stomach.

The Force gave him no sign of guilt from any of them; perhaps the violence here was so recent that its echoes washed away any such subtleties. Or perhaps whichever of them had done this felt no guilt at all.

And these killers were his best hope-perhaps his only hope-of reaching Depa.

But he could not simply let this pass.

Another lesson of Yoda's came to mind: When all choices seem wrong, choose restraint.

Mace slid down the rope.

Smiley nodded him over. "You're a mess, you know that? Take that shirt off." He reached down to pull a medpac off a dead man's belt. "There'll be spray bandage in here-" Mace took Smiley's upper arm with one hand. "You and I," he said, "need to reestablish our relationship." "Hey-ow, huh?" Smiley tried to jerk free, and discovered that Mace's grip would not suffer by comparison with a freighter's docking claw: trying just hurt his arm. "Hey!" "We got off on the wrong foot," Mace said. "We're going to make an adjustment. Do you think we can manage this peacefully?" The other Korunnai looked up from their looting. They stood, faces darkening as they turned toward Mace and Smiley, shifting grips on their weapons. Fingers slipped through trigger guards.

"Bad idea," Mace said. "For everyone concerned." "Hey, easy on the arm, huh? I might need it again someday-" Mace's hand tightened. "Tell them what we're doing." "You want to lay off the bone-crushing grip?" Smiley's voice was going thin. Beads of sweat swelled across his upper lip. "What, you like my arm so much you want to take it home with you?" "This isn't my bone-crushing grip. This is my don't-do-something-stupid grip." Mace tightened it enough to draw a squeak of pain through Smiley's lips. "We'll graduate to bone- crushing in about ten seconds." "Um. when you put it that way." "Tell them what we're doing." Smiley twisted his neck to look over his shoulder at the other Korunnai. "Hey, you kids stand down, huh?" he said weakly. "We're just. uh, reestablishing our relationship." "Peacefully." "Yeah, peacefully." The other three Korunnai let their weapons dangle from their shoulder slings and went back to looting the bodies.

Mace released him. Smiley massaged his arm, looking aggrieved. "What exactly is your malfunction, anyway?" "You didn't lead me into a trap. You used me to lead them into a trap." "Hey, Captain Obvious, news flash: this wasn't a trap." Mace frowned. "Then what would you call it?" "It was an ambush." Smiley smirked. "What, they don't teach Basic in Jedi school?" "Do you know," Mace said, "that I disliked you the instant we met?" "Is that Jedi-speak for thank you so much for saving my lightsaber-waving butt} Shee." He shook his head, mock-sad. "So what is it? What's your fuss?" "I would have liked," Mace told him solidly, "to have taken them alive." "What for?" In Pelek Baw, Mace reflected, that was a fair question. Turn them over to the authorities?

What authorities? Geptun? The cops who ran the strong-arm at the pro-bi showers? He took a deep breath. "For questioning." "Everything needing to know, you?" This came from the big red haired girl with the Thunderbolt. She looked up at Mace, still crouched beside a corpse. Her accent dripped high upland. "Are looking at it, you. Six Balawai scum. Over and done. Never another Korun's home burn. Never another herd slaughter, never another child murder, never another woman-" She didn't finish, but Mace would read the final word in the smoke of hate that clouded her eyes. He could feel it in the anger and violation that pulsed from her into the Force. He could more than guess what she had been through; in the Force, he could feel how it had made her feel: sick with loathing, so wounded inside her heart that she could not allow herself to feel at all.

His face softened for an instant, but he hardened it again. He knew instinctively that she wanted no pity. She was no one's victim.

If she saw how sorry he felt for her, she'd hate him for it.

So, instead, he lowered his voice, speaking gently and respectfully. "I see. My question, though: how are you certain that these men have done such things?" "Balawai, them." She said it as if she were spitting out a hunk of rotten meat.

These were the people Depa had sent for him? The sick weight in his chest gathered mass.

He stepped away from Smiley and opened his fingers toward his lightsaber, where it lay beside the talker's throat-cut corpse. The decharged grip leapt from the ground to his hand.

"Listen to me. All of you." The simple authority in his voice drew their eyes and held them. He said, "You will do no murder while I am in your company. Do you understand this? If you try, I will stop you. Failing that." Muscle bunched along his jaw, and his knuckles whitened on his lightsaber's handgrip.

Smoldering threat burned the calm from his dark eyes.

"Failing that," he said through his teeth, "I will avenge your victims." Smiley shook his head. "Urn, hello, huh? Maybe you haven't noticed, but we're at war here.

You get it?" A thin whistling in the distance swelled to become a shriek. Other whistles joined in, rising in pitch and volume both. Sirens: militia units on their way. Smiley turned to his companions.

"That's the bell, kids. Saddle up." The Korunnai worked faster, stripping the corpses of medpacs, food squares, blaster gas cartridges. Credits. Boots.

"You call it war," Mace said. "But these were not soldiers." "Maybe not. Sure got some nifty gear, though, don't they?" Smiley picked up one of the over-unders and sighted appreciatively along its barrel. " Verrrry nice. How else are we gonna get stuff like this? It's not like your bloody Republic sends us any." "Is it worth their lives?" "Shee. Little judgmental, aren't we? Didn't we just slip your jiffies off the roaster? A thanks wouldn't exactly be out of line-" "It was you," Mace replied grimly, "who put my jiffies' on the roaster. And you took your time about slipping them off." Though the mockery stayed in his tone, Smiley's eyes went remote. "I don't know you, Windu. But I know who you're supposed to be. She talks about you all the time. I know what you're supposed to be able to do. If they could have taken you-" "Yes?" His head flicked a centimeter to the right: a Korun shrug. "I would have let 'em. You coming, or what?" Pelek Baw rolled past the groundcar's tinted windows. The vehicle bumped along on large toroidal balloons made of a native tree resin, and used laminated wooden bow slats as springs.

The driver was local: a middle-aged Korun with a web of cataract across one eye and bad teeth stained red from chewing raw thyssel bark. Mace and the Korunnai sat behind him in the passenger cabin.

Mace kept his head down, pretending to be engrossed in cobbling together an improvised adapter to recharge his lightsaber from looted blasterpacks. It didn't require all that much of his attention; his lightsaber was designed to be easily rechargeable. In an emer gency, he could even use the Force to flip a concealed lock on the inside of its hermetically sealed shell, opening a hatch that would allow him to manually switch out the power cell. Instead, he laboriously wired up leads from the blasterpacks and pretended to study their charge monitors.

Mostly, it was an excuse to keep his head down.

The first thing the Korunnai did once they were on their way was swiftly and efficiently field- strip the captured weapons, despite the cramped compartment and the jouncing ride. Mace guessed they must've had plenty of practice. All exposed parts, they rubbed with chunks of a translucent orange-brown resin that Smiley said was portaak amber: a natural fungicide that the ULF used to protect their weapons. This was the same resin that coated the handgrip of Depa's lightsaber.

Smiley passed Mace a chunk. "Better rub up yours, too. And you might consider getting yourself a knife. Maybe a slug pistol. Even with the amber, powered weapons are unreliable here." He told Mace to keep the chunk, and shrugged off his thanks.

Smiley's name was Nick Rostu. He'd introduced himself in the groundcar while he was spray-bandaging Mace's cuts and treating his bruises by a liberal use of the stolen-captured- medpac. Mace recalled a ghosh Rostu that had been loosely affiliated with ghosh Windu; that Nick had taken the Rostu name meant he must be nidosh: a clan child, an orphan. Like Mace.

But not much like Mace.

Unlike his companions, Nick spoke Basic without an accent. And he knew his way around the city. Probably why he seemed to be in charge. Mace gathered from their conversation that Nick had spent much of his childhood here in Pelek Baw. After what he'd seen of the Korun children in this city, he refused to let himself imagine what Nick's childhood must have been like.

The big, emotionally ravaged girl they called Chalk. The other two looked enough alike to be brothers. The older, whose teeth showed scarlet thyssel stains, was called Lesh. The younger brother, Besh, never spoke. A knurl of scar joined the corner of his mouth to his right ear, and his left hand was missing its last three fingers.

In the groundcar, they spoke to each other in Koruun. Eyes on his lightsaber's handgrip, Mace gave no sign that he understood most of what they said; his Koruun was rusty-learned thirty-five standard years before-but serviceable enough, and the Force offered understanding where his memory might fail. Their chatter was mostly what he would expect from young people after a firefight: a mix of Did you see when I-? and Wow, I really thought I was gonna- while they sorted through the adrenaline-charged chaos of imagery that was inevitably the memory of battle.

Chalk glanced at Mace from time to time. What's with Jedi Rockface? she asked the others generally. I don't like him. He looks the same when he's cleaning his weapons as he did while he was using them. Makes me nervous.

Nick shrugged at her. Would you be happier if he was like Depa? Count your blessings.

And mind your mouth: she said he spent some time upcountry a few years ago. He might still speak some Koruun.

Chalk's only response was a bleak silent scowl that twisted in Mace's stomach like a knife.

Like Depa.

He burned to ask what Nick had meant by that-but he wouldn't. He couldn't. He couldn't ask them about Depa. He was half sick with dread already, which was no state in which to meet his former Padawan and examine her mental and moral health; he would need as clear and open a mind as all his Jedi training and discipline could produce. He couldn't risk contaminating his perceptions with expectations or hopes or fears.

They bounced and swayed through a part of town Mace didn't recognize: a tangle of shabby stone housing blocks that rose from a scree of wood-frame shanties. Though the streets were far less crowded here-the only foot traffic seemed to be surly, ragged-looking men, and furtive women peering from doorways or clustered in nervous groups-the groundcar still spent valuable minutes stopped at this corner and that bend and another angle, waiting in the blare of the steam horn for the way to clear. They'd have made better time in an airspeeder, but Mace didn't suggest it; flying, on this world, struck him as a chancy undertaking.

Though he couldn't say for certain that it would be any more chancy than spending more time with these young Korunnai. They worried him; they had enough Force-touch to be unpredictable, and enough savagery to be dangerously powerful.

And then there was Nick, who was at best marginally sane.

Back in the alley, standing among the corpses with the militia on the way, Mace had asked where their transport was, and why they weren't hurrying to meet it; he didn't want to get caught in another firefight.

"Relax. Neither do they." Nick had smirked at him. "What d'you think those sirens are about? They're letting us know they're com ing." "They don't try to catch you?" "If they did, they'd have to fight us." He'd stroked his long-barreled slugthrower as though it were a pet. "Think they're gonna do that?" "I would." "Yeah, okay. But they're not Jedi." "I've noticed." Several of the weapons the Korunnai had left on the ground. Besh had picked up Mace's Power 5, frowned at it, then shrugged and tossed it back among the bodies. Mace had moved to retrieve it, and Nick had told him not to bother.

"It's mine-" "It's junk," Nick countered. He picked it up. "Here, look." He'd pointed it at Mace's forehead and pulled the trigger.

Mace managed not to flinch. Barely.

A wisp of greenish smoke had trailed downward from the grip.

Nick had shrugged and tossed the blaster back to the ground. "Fungus got it. Just like that second speeder bike. Some of those circuits are only nanometers thick; a few spores can eat right through? em.

"That," Mace had told him, "was not funny." "Not as funny as if I'd been wrong, huh?" Nick chuckled. "What's the matter, Windu? Depa says you got a great sense of humor." Through clenched teeth Mace said, "She must have been joking." In the car, he looked from one to another of the Korunnai. He could trust none of them.

Though he felt no malice from them, he'd felt none from Geptun, either. But he did feel knotted around them a strangling web of anger and fear and pain.

Korunnai were Force-users. But they'd never had Jedi training. These radiated darkness: as though they came from some reversed universe, where light is only a shadow cast by the darkness of the stars. Their anger and pain beat against him in waves that triggered resonance harmonics in his own heart. Without knowing it, they called to emotions that Mace's lifetime of Jedi training was supposed to have buried.

And those buried emotions were already stirring to answer.

He recognized that he was in danger here. In ways deeper than the merely physical.

Now, sitting in the groundcar, waiting for his lightsaber to recharge, Mace decided that he should get some things straight with these four young Korunnai. And there'd never be a better time.

"I think we'll all speak Basic now," Mace said. "Any being will soon enough tire of listening to conversation in a foreign tongue." Which was not even a lie.

Chalk gave him a dark look. "Here, Basic is foreign tongue." "Fair enough," Mace allowed. "Nonetheless: when I am in your company, that is what we will speak." "Shee, pretty free with the orders, aren't we? No murder, no looting, speak Basic." Nick said. "Who said you're in charge? And if we don't feel like doing what we're told? What's it gonna be, Mister There-Is-No-Emotion? Harsh language?" "I am in charge," Mace said quietly.

This was greeted with a round of half-pitying sneers and snorts and shaken heads.

Mace looked at Nick. "Do you doubt my ability to maintain a grip on the situation?" "Oh, very funny," Nick said, massaging his arm.

"I won't bore you with the complexities of chain of command," Mace said. "I'll stick to facts.

Simple facts. Straightforward. Easy to understand. Like this one: Master Billaba sent you here to bring me to her." "Says who?" "If she wanted me dead, you'd have left me in that alley. She wouldn't have sent you to divert or ditch me. She knows you're not good enough for that." "Says you." "You're under orders to deliver me." "Depa doesn't exactly give orders," Nick said. "It's more like, she just lets you know what she thinks you should do. And then you do it." Mace shrugged. "Do you intend to disappoint her?" The uncertain looks they now exchanged drove that sick knife deeper into Mace's gut. They feared her-or something to do with her-in a way that they did not fear him. Nick said, "So?" "So you need my cooperation." Mace checked the meter on the blasterpack: this one was depleted. He pulled the adapter out of his lightsaber's charge port.

Nick sat forward, a dangerous glint sparking in his blue eyes. "Who says we need your cooperation? Who says we can't just pack you up and send you Jedi Free Delivery?" Instead of hooking in the next blasterpack, Mace balanced the lightsaber's handgrip on his palm. "I do." Another glance made the rounds, and Mace felt swift currents ripple the Force back and forth among them. The brothers blanched. Chalk's knuckles whitened on the Thunderbolt.

Nick's face went perfectly blank. Their hands shifted on their rifles. Mace hefted the lightsaber.

"Reconsider." He watched each of them mentally calculate the odds of bringing a weapon to bear in the cramped cabin before he could trigger his blade. "Your chances come in two shapes," he said.

"Slim, and fat." "Okay." Nick carefully lifted empty hands. "Okay, everybody. Stand down.

Relax, huh? Shee, how twitchy are we, huh? Listen, you need us, too, Windu-" "MasterWmdu." Nick blinked. "You're kidding, right?" "I worked very hard to gain that title, and I've worked even harder to deserve it. I prefer that you use it." "Urn, yeah. I was saying you need us, too. I mean, you're not from around here." "I was born on the north slope of Grandfather's Shoulder." "Yeah, okay. Sure. I know: you're from here. But you're still not from here. You're from the galaxy." Nick's hands clutched as though he were trying to pull words from the air. "Depa says-you know what Depa says?" "Master Billaba." "Yeah, okay, sure. Whatever. Master Billaba tries to explain it like this. It's like, you live in the galaxy, y'know? The other galaxy." The other galaxy? Mace frowned. "Go on." "She says. she says that you-all of you, the Jedi, the government, everybody-you're, like, from the Galaxy of Peace. You're from the galaxy where rules are rules, and almost everybody plays along. Haruun Kal, though, we're a whole different place, y'know? It's like the laws of physics are different. Not opposite, not up is down or black is white. Nothing that simple. Just. different. So when you come here, you expect things to work a certain way. But they don't. Because things are different, here. You understand?" "I understand," Mace said heavily, "that you're not my only option for local guides. Republic Intelligence set up a team to take me up-country-" The looks exchanged among the Korunnai stopped Mace in mid-sentence. "You know something about that upcountry team." It wasn't a question.

"Upcountry team," Nick echoed derisively. "See, this is what I'm talking about. You just don't get it." "Don't get what?" Some of that manic glitter snuck back into his bright blue eyes. "Who do you think we left dead in that alley just now?" Mace stared.

Nick showed him those gleaming teeth of his.

Mace looked at Lesh. Lesh spread his hands. His thyssel-stained smile was apologetic.

"Does talk true, Nick: things are different, here." Besh shrugged, nodding.

Mace looked at Chalk: at her eyes, incongruously dark in her fair-skinned face; at the way she cradled the massive Merr-Sonn Thunderbolt on her lap as though it were her child.

And many things suddenly fell into place.

"It was you," he said to her wonderingly. "You shot Phloremirrla Tenk." The blistering afternoon sun dissolved the departing groundcar into heatshimmer and dust.

Mace stood in the road and watched it go.

This far from the capital, the road was little more than a pair of ruts filled with crushed rock snaking through the hills. Green foliage striped its middle: the jungle reclaiming its own from the center out. For this short patch, the road paralleled the silver twist of Grandmother's Tears, a river of snowmelt from Grandfather's Shoulder that joined with the Great Downrush a few klicks from Pelek Baw. They were well above the capital now, on the far side of the great mountain.

Nick and the others were already hiking uphill through an ankle-high litter of bracken and scrub, weapons slung across their shoulders. The living wall of the jungle loomed twenty meters above. In the far distance, Mace could just make out a segmented line of gray blotches: probably tame grassers. The Balawai government used teams of the great beasts to clear the jungle back from the road.

"Master Windu-" Nick had stopped on the hillside above. He beckoned for Mace to follow, and pointed at the sky. "Air patrols. We need to make the tree line." But still Mace stood in the road. Still he watched dust rise and twist in the groundcar's wake.

Nick had said: You're from the Galaxy of Peace.

And: things are different, here.

A deep uneasiness coiled behind his ribs. Were he not a Jedi and immune to such things, he might call it superstitious dread. An unreasoning fear: that he had left the galaxy behind in the groundcar; that civilization itself was bouncing away down the road to Pelek Baw. Leaving him out here.

Out here with the jungle.

He could smell it.

Perfume of heavy blooms, sap from broken branches, dust from the road, sulfur dioxide rolling down from active calderae upslope on Grandfather's Shoulder. Even the sunlight seemed to carry a scent out here: hot iron and rot. And Mace himself.

He could smell himself sweat.

Sweat trickled the length of his arms. Sweat beaded on his scalp and trailed down his neck, across his chest, along his spine. The tatters of his bloodstained shirt lay somewhere along the roadway, klicks behind. The leather of his vest clung to his skin, already showing salt rings.

He had begun to sweat before they'd even left the groundcar. He had begun to sweat while Nick explained why Republic-supported partisans under the command of a Jedi Master had murdered the station boss of Republic Intelligence.

"Tenk's been playing her own game for years now," Nick had said. "Upcountry team, my bloody saddle sores. You, Master Windu, were on your way to a seppie Intel camp in the Gevarno Cluster. It goes like this. One: she turns you over to the'team.' Two: the'team' reports an 'accident in the jungle.' Your body's never recovered-because you're getting what's left of your brains sucked out in a torture cell somewhere in Gevarno. Three: Tenk retires to a resort world in the Confederacy of Independent Systems." Mace had been shaken. Too much of it made too much sense. But when he asked what evidence Nick had of this, the young Korun had only shrugged. "This isn't a court of law, Master Windu. It's a war." "So you murdered her." "You call it murder." Nick shrugged again. "I call it slipping your jiffies-" "Off the roaster. I remember." "We've been waiting for you for days. Depa-Master Billaba-described you to us and told us to watch for you at the spaceport, but we had a little militia trouble and missed you. We didn't pick you up again until you were coming out of the Washeteria with Tenk. And we almost lost you then, too-got a little hung up in a food riot. Then before we could get to you, you managed to get your Jedi butt stunned into next year. Fighting a pitched battle with the militia on an open street in Pelek Baw is not a high-percentage survival tactic, if you know what I mean." "You couldn't have just warned me?" "Sure we could. Which woulda decloaked us to Tenk and her Balawai pals. Gotten us killed for nothing. Because you wouldn't have believed us anyway." "I'm not sure I believe you now." Mace had turned his lightsaber over in his palm, feeling the unpleasant way the portaak amber gripped his skin. "It's not lost on me that I only have your word on this. Everyone who might contradict your story is dead." "Yeah." "That doesn't seem to trouble you." "I'm used to it." Mace frowned. "I don't understand." "That's what war is," Nick said. His voice had lost its mocking edge, and sounded almost kind. "It's like the jungle: by the time the Whatever-It-Is that's moving through the trees out there is close enough that you can see for sure what it is-or who it is-you're already dead. So you make your best guess. Sometimes you're right, and you take out an enemy, or spare an ally.

Sometimes you're wrong. Then you die. Or you have to live with having killed a friend." He showed his teeth, but his smile had no warmth left in it. "And sometimes you're right and you die anyway. Sometimes your friend isn't a friend. You never know. You cant know." "I can. That's part of what being a Jedi is." Nick's smile had turned knowing. "Okay. Take your pick. We're murderers who must be brought to justice. Or we're soldiers doing our duty. Either way, who else is gonna take you to De-uh, Master Billaba?" Mace growled, "This is not lost on me, either." "So what are you gonna do about it?" He and the others watched Mace think it over.

And, in the end, the decision Mace reached surprised none of them. It disappointed only himself.

Nick had winked. "Welcome to Haruun Kal." Now the groundcar's dust plume slipped into a fold of the hills, and was gone.

At the green wall above, Besh and Lesh had already vanished into the canopied shadow.

Chalk and Nick waited for him just below the tree line, crouched in the scrub, watching the sky.

Outlined against the green.

The wall of jungle was green only on the outside: between the leaves and trunks, among the fronds and flowers and vines, was shadow so thick that from out here under the brilliant sun, it looked entirely black.

Mace thought, It's not too late to change my mind.

He could leave Nick here. Could turn his back on Chalk and Besh and Lesh. Hike along the road, catch a ride into Pelek Baw, hop a shuttle for the next liner on the Gevarno Loop.

He knew, somehow, that this was his last chance to walk away. That once he crossed the green wall, the only way out would be through.

He couldn't guess what he might find on the way- Except, possibly, Depa.

you should never have sent me here. And I should never have come.

It was too late to change his mind after all.

He was in the jungle already.

He'd walked into it from the shuttle in the Pelek Baw spaceport. Maybe from the balcony on Geonosis. Or maybe he'd been just standing still, and the jungle had grown around him before he'd noticed.

Welcome to Haruun Kal.

His boots crunched through the husks of bracken as he toiled up the slope. Chalk nodded to him and vanished through the wall. Nick gave him a smile as if he knew what Mace had been thinking.

"Better keep up, Master Windu. Another minute, we woulda left you standing there. You want to be alone out here? I don't think so." He was right about that. "If we should happen to get separated, is there a landmark I should make for?" "Don't worry about it. Just keep up." "But if we do, how will I find you?" "You won't." Nick shook his head, smiling into the jungle. "If we get separated, you won't live long enough to worry about finding us. You get it? Keep up." He walked into the trees and was swallowed by the green twilight.

Mace nodded to himself, and followed Nick into the shadows without looking back.

THE SUMMERTIME WAR S

ingle file through the jungle: Chalk picked their path, parting gleamfronds, tipping gripleaf trailers aside with the muzzle of the Thunderbolt. Mace followed perhaps ten meters back, with Nick close behind his shoulder. Besh and Lesh brought up the rear together, switching positions from time to time, covering each other.

Mace had to look sharp to keep track of Chalk. Once they were well into the jungle, he could no longer easily feel any of the Korunnai in the Force. His gaze had a tendency to slip aside from them, to pass over them without seeing unless he firmly directed his will: a useful talent in a place where humans were just another prey animal.

Occasionally a Force-pulse as unmistakable as an upraised hand came from one or another of the Korunnai, and they would all stop in their tracks. Then seconds or minutes of stillness: listening to wind-rustle and animal cries, eyes searching among green shadow and greener light, reaching into the Force through a riot of lives for-what? Vine cat? Militia patrol? Stobor? Then a wave of relaxation clear as a sigh: some threat Mace could not see or feel had passed, and they walked on.

It was even hotter under the trees than in full sunlight. Any relief due to shade was canceled by the damp smothering stillness of the air. Though Mace heard a constant ruffle of leaves and branches high above, the breeze never seemed to reach down through the canopy.

They broke out into a gap, and Nick called a halt. The jungle canopy layered a roof above them, but the folds of ground here were clear for dozens of meters around, smooth gray-gold trunks of jungle trees becoming cathedral buttresses supporting walls of leaf and vine. Upslope, a spring-fed pond brimmed over into a steamy sulfur-scented stream.

Chalk moved into the middle of the gap, lowered her head, and went entirely still. A Force wave passed out from her and broke across Mace and thirty-five years fell away: for a delicious instant he was once more a boy returned to the company of ghosh Windu after a lifetime in the Jedi Temple, feeling for the first time the silken warmth of a Korun's Force-call to an akk.

Then it passed, and Mace was again a grown man, again a Jedi Master, tired and worried: frightened for his friend, his Order, and his Republic.

Within minutes a crashing outside the gap heralded the arrival of large beasts, and soon the jungle wall parted to admit a grasser. It lumbered into the gap on its hind legs, its four anterior limbs occupied with ripping down greenery and stuffing it into a mouth large enough to swallow Mace whole. It chewed placidly, bovine contentment in all three of its eyes. It turned these eyes toward the humans one at a time: first the right, then the left, then the crown, assuring itself that none of its three eyes spied a threat.

Three more grassers tore their way into the gap. All four were harnessed for riding, the wide saddles cinched above and below their foreshoulders, exactly as Mace remembered. One wore a dual-saddle setup, the secondary saddle slung reversed at the beast's mid-shoulder.

All four grassers were thin, smaller than Mace remembered-the largest of them might not have topped six meters at full stretch-and their gray coats were dull and coarse: a far cry from the sleek, glossy behemoths he'd ridden all those years ago. This was as troubling as anything he'd yet seen. Had these Korunnai abandoned the Fourth Pillar?

Nick reached up to take the knotted mounting rope of the dual-saddled grasser. "Come on, Master Windu. You're riding with me." "Where are your akks?" "Around. Can't you feel them?" And now Mace could: a ring of predatory wariness outside the green walls: savagery and hunger and devotion tangled into a semi-sentient knot of Let's-Find-Something-to-Kill.

Nick rope-walked up the flank of the grasser and slid into the upper saddle. "You'll see them if you need to see them. Let's hope you don't." "Is it no longer customary to introduce a guest to the akks of the ghosh?" "You're not a guest, you're a package." Nick slid a brassvine goad out of its holster beside the saddle. "Mount up. Let's get out of here." Without even understanding why he did it, Mace moved away into the middle of the gap.

One breath composed his mind. The next expressed his nature into the Force around him: Jedi serenity balancing buried temper, devotion to peace tipping the scales against a guilty pleasure in fighting. Nothing was hidden, here. Light and dark, pure and corrupt, hope, fear, pride, and humility: he offered up everything that made him who he was, with a friendly smile, lowered eyes, and hands open at his sides. Then he sent rippling through the Force the call he'd been taught thirty-five years before.

And he got an answer.

Slipping through the walls of the gap: measured tread blending seamlessly with wind-rustle and flybuzz: horned reptoid heads questing, lidless oval eyes of gleaming black- "Windu!" A hiss from Nick. "Don't move!" Triangular fangs scissored along each other as jaws that could crush durasteel worked and chewed. Steaming drool trailed down mouth folds of scaled hide thick enough to stop a lightsaber. Splay-toed feet with shovel-sized claws churned kilos of dirt with every step.

Muscular armored tails as long as their landspeeder-sized bodies whipped sinuously back and forth.

The akk dogs of Haruun Kal.

Three of them.

Nick hissed again. "Back up. Just back up. Straight toward me. Very slowly. Don't show them your back. They're good dogs, but if you trigger their hunt-kill instincts." The beasts circled, switching tails that could break Mace in half. Their eyes, hard-shelled and lidless, glittered without expression. Their breaths all stank of old meat, and their hides gave off a leathery musk, and for an instant Mace was on the sand in the Circus Horrificus in the bowels of Nar Shaddaa, surrounded by thousands of screaming spectators, at the mercy of Gargonn the Hutt- He understood now why he had done this. Why he'd had to.

Because in that instant's vision of a long-ago arena, Depa was at his side.

Was that their last mission together? Could it be?

It seemed so long ago.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU I had come to Nar Shaddaa to track down exotic-animal smugglers who had sold attack- trained akk dogs to the Red laro terrorists of Lannik-and Depa had followed me to the Smugglers' Moon because she had suspected I might need her help. How right she was: even together, we barely survived. It was a terrible fight, against mutated giant akks for the amusement of the Circus Horrificus patrons- But remembering it in the jungle, I found that my eyes filled with tears.

On that day in Nar Shaddaa, she showed me blade work that surpassed my own; she had continued to grow and study and progress in Vaapad as well as the Force.

She made me so very proud.

It had been years since she had passed her Trials of Knighthood; she had long been a Jedi Master, and a member of the Council; but for that one day, we had again been Mace and Depa, Master and Padawan, pitting the lethal efficiency of Vaapad against the worst the galaxy could throw at us. We fought as we had so many times: a perfectly integrated unit, augmenting each other's strengths, countering each other's weaknesses, and on that day it seemed we should have never done anything else. As Jedi Knights, we were unbeatable. As Masters, members of the Council- What have we won? Anything?

Or have we lost everything?

How is it that our generation came to be the first in a thousand years to see our Republic shattered by war?

"Windu!" Nick urgently hissed Mace back to the present.

Mace lifted his head. Nick stared down at him from three meters above the jungle floor.

"Don't just stand there!" "All right." Mace lifted his hands, and all three akk dogs lay down. A touch of the Force and a turn of both palms, and the three dogs rolled onto their backs, black tongues lolling to the side between razor-sharp teeth. They panted happily, gazing at him with absolute trust.

Nick said something about dipping himself in tusker poop.

Mace moved to one dog's head, sliding the palm of his hand between the triangle that six vestigial horns formed on the akk's brow. His other hand he placed just beside the akk's lower lip, so that the creature's huge tongue could flick Mace's scent into the olfactory pits beside his nostrils. He moved from one to the next, and then to the last; they took his scent, and he took their Force-feel. With the severe formality such solemn occasions demanded they respectfully learned each other.

Magnificent creatures. So different from the mutant giants that Depa and he had fought in the Circus Horrificus. In the fetid depths of Nar Shaddaa, Gargonn had taken noble defenders of the herd and twisted them into vicious slaughterers- And Mace could not help but wonder if something on Haruun Kal might have done the same to Depa. "All right," he said, to everyone and no one. "I'm ready to go." Every night, they made a cold camp: no fire, and no need for one. The akks would keep predators at bay, and the Korunnai did not mind the darkness. Though militia gunships did not fly at night, a campfire was sufficiently hotter than the surrounding jungle that it could be detected by satellite sensors; Nick explained dryly that you never knew when the Balawai might decide to drop a DOKAW on your head.

He said that the government still had an unknown number of DOKAW platforms in orbit; the De-Orbiting Kinetic Anti-emplacement Weapons were, basically, just missile-sized rods of solid durasteel with rudimentary guidance and control systems, set in orbit around the planet. Cheap to make and easy to use: a simple command to the DOKAW's thrusters would kick it into the atmosphere on a course to strike any fixed-position coordinates.

Not too accurate, but then it didn't have to be: a meteorite strike on demand.

For the Korunnai, campfires were a thing of the past.

Many of the nocturnal insects signaled each other with light, making the night sparkle like a crowded starfield, and the different kinds of glowvines were mildly phosphorescent in varying colors; they combined into a pale general illumination not unlike faint moonlight.

The grassers always slept standing, all six of their legs locked straight, eyes closed, still reflexively chewing.

The Korunnai had bedrolls lashed to their saddles. Mace used a wallet tent he kept in a side pocket of his kitbag; once he split the pressure seal with his thumbnail, its internally articulated ribs would automatically unfold a transparent skin to make a shelter large enough for two people.

They would sit or kneel on the ground, sharing their meals: once the food squares and candy they'd looted from the dead men ran out, their meals became strips of smoked grasser meat and a hard cave-aged cheese made from raw grasser milk. Their water came from funnel plants, when they could find them: waxy orange leaves that wrapped themselves in a watertight spiral two meters high, trapping rainwater to keep the plants' shallow root system moist. Otherwise, they filled their canteens from warm streams or bubbling springs that Chalk occasionally tasted and pronounced safe to drink; even the ionic autosterilyzer in Mace's canteen couldn't remove the faint rotten-egg taste of sulfur.

After they ate, Lesh would often pull a soft roll of raw thyssel bark from his pack and offer it around. Nick and Mace always refused. Chalk might take a little, Besh a little more. Lesh would use his belt knife to carve off a hunk the size of three doubled fingers and stuff it into his mouth. Roasted and refined for sale, thyssel was a mildly stimulating intoxicant, no more harmful than sweet wine; raw, it was potent enough to cause permanent changes in brain chemistry. A minute of chewing would pop sweat across Lesh's brow and give his eyes a glassy haze, if there was enough vinelight to see it by.

Mace learned a great deal about these young Korunnai-and, by implication, about the ULF-during these nights in camp. Nick was the leader of this little band, but not by any reason of rank. They didn't seem to have ranks. Nick led by force of personality, and by lightning use of his acid wit, like a jester in control of a royal court.

He didn't talk of himself as a soldier, much less a patriot; he claimed his highest ambition was to be a mercenary. He wasn't in this war to save the world for the Korunnai. He was in it, he insisted, for the credits. He constantly talked about how he was getting ready to "blow this bloody jungle. Out there in the galaxy, there's real credits to be made." It was clear to Mace, though, that this was just a pose: a way to keep his companions at arm's length, a way to pretend he didn't really care.

Mace could see that he cared all too much.

Lesh and Besh were in the war from stark hatred of the Balawai. A couple of years before, Besh had been kidnapped by jungle prospectors. His missing fingers had been cut off, one at a time, by the Balawai, to force him to answer questions about the location of a supposed treasure grove of lammas trees. When he could not answer these questions-in fact, the treasure grove was only a myth-they assumed he was just stubborn. "If you won't answer us," one had said, "we'll make sure you never answer anyone else, either." Besh never spoke because he couldn't. The Balawai had cut out his tongue.

He communicated by a combination of simple signs and an extraordinarily expressive Force projection of his emotions and attitudes; in many ways, he was the most eloquent of the group.

Chalk proved a surprise to Mace; guessing what he had of what had happened to her, he'd expected that she would be fighting out of a personal vendetta not unlike Lesh and Besh. On the contrary: even before joining the ULF, she and some members of her ghosh had hunted down the men who'd molested her-a five-man squad of regular militia, and their noncom-and given them the traditional Koran punishment for such crimes. This was called tan pel'trokal, which roughly translated as "jungle justice." The guilty men were kidnapped, spirited away a hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement, then stripped of equipment, clothing, food. Everything.

And released.

Naked. In the jungle.

Very, very few men had ever survived tan pel'trokal. These didn't.

So Chalk did not fight for revenge; in her own words, "Tough girl, me. Big. Strong. Good fighter. Didn't want to be. Had to be. How I lived through what they did, me. Fought, me.

Never stopped fighting. And lived through it. Now I fight so other girls don't have to fight. Get to be girls, them. You follow? Only two ways to stop me: kill me, or show me no girls have to fight." Mace understood. No one should have to be that tough.

"I am impressed by how you move through the jungle," Mace said to her once, in one of these cold camps. "It's not easy to see you even when I know you're there. Even your grasser is hard to track." She grunted, chewing bark. Her dismissive shrug was about as casual as Mace's question.

That is: not very.

"That's an interesting way of using-" He dredged from the depths of thirty-five-year-old memory the Koruun word for the Force. Pelekotan: roughly, "world-power." "-pelekotan. Is this something you've always been able to do?" What Mace was really asking-what he was afraid to ask outright: Did Depa teach you that?

If she was teaching Jedi skills to people who were too old to learn Jedi discipline. people with no defense against the dark side.

"You don't use pelekotan," Chalk said. ""Pelekotan uses you." This was not a comforting answer.

Mace recalled that the strict, literal translation of the word was "jungle-mind." He discovered that he didn't really want to think about it. In his head, he kept hearing:.' have become the darkness in the jungle.

The grasser's lumbering pace was smooth and soothing; to make better time, it walked on both hind and midlimbs. This put its back at such an angle that Mace's rear-facing saddle let him recline somewhat, his shoulders resting on the grasser's broad, smooth spine, while Nick rode the foreshoulder saddle, peering over the top of its head.

These long, rocking rides through the jungle struck Mace with a deep uneasiness. Facing only backward, he could never see what was ahead, only what they had already passed; and even that had meanings he could not penetrate. Much of what he looked at, he could not be wholly sure if it was plant or animal, poisonous, predatory, harmless, beneficial-perhaps even sentient enough to have a moral nature of its own, good or evil.

He had a queasy feeling that these rides were symbolic of the war itself, for him. He was backing into it. Even in the full light of day, he had no clue what was coming, and no real understanding of what had passed. Utterly lost. Darkness would only make it worse.

He hoped he was wrong. Symbols are slippery.

Uncertain.

During the day, he saw the akk dogs in glimpses through the jun gle as they ranged the rugged terrain around. They went before and behind, patrolling to guard the others from jungle predators, of which these jungles hid many that were large enough to kill a grasser. The three akks were bonded to Besh, Lesh, and Chalk. Nick had no akk of his own. "Hey, growing up on the streets of Pelek Baw, what would I do with an akk? What would I feed it, people? Heh, well, actually, now that I think about it-" "You could find one now," Mace said. "You have the power; I've felt it. You could have a Force-bonded companion like your friends do." "Are you kidding? I'm too young for that kind of commitment." "Really?" "Shee. Worse than being married." Mace said distantly, "I wouldn't know." Mace would often get drowsy from the heat and the grasser's smooth gait. What little sleep he got at night was plagued by feverish dreams, indistinctly menacing and violent. The first morning after he'd triggered his wallet tent's autofold and tucked it back into its hand-sized pocket in his kitbag, Nick had heard his sigh and saw him rub his bleary eyes.

"Nobody sleeps well out here," he'd told Mace with a dry chuckle. "You'll get used to it." Day travel was a dreamlike flow from jungle gloom to brilliant sun and back again as they crossed grasser roads: the winding strips of open meadow left behind by grasser herds as they ate their way through the jungle. These were often the only times he'd see Chalk and Besh and Lesh, their grassers, and their akks. Using the akk dogs to keep in contact, they could spread out for safety.

Open air was the only relief they got from the insects: it was the territory of dozens of species of lightning-fast insectivorous birds. The dogflies and pinch beetles and all the varieties of wasp and bee and hornet stuck mostly to the relative safety of shade. Mace's skin was a mass of bites and stings that required considerable exercise of Jedi discipline to avoid scratching.

The Korunnai occasionally used juices from a couple of different kinds of crushed leaves to treat particularly nasty or dangerous stings, but in general they seemed not to really notice them, in the way a person rarely notices the way boots unnaturally constrict toes. They'd had a lifetime to get used to it.

Though they could have moved faster by following the grasser roads, frequent overflights by militia gunships made that too risky: Nick informed him that people riding grassers were shot on sight. Every hour or two, the akks gave warning of approaching gunships; their keen ears could pick up the hum of repulsorlifts from more than a kilometer away, despite the jungle's constant buzz and rustle, whir and screech, and even the distant thunder of the occasional minor volcanic eruption.

Mace got enough glimpses of these gunships to have an idea of their capabilities. They looked to be customized versions of ancient Sienar Turbostorms: blastboats retrofitted for atmospheric close-assault work. Relatively slow but heavily armored, bristling with cannons and missile launchers, large enough to transport a platoon of heavy infantry. They seemed to travel in threes. The militia's ability to maintain air patrols despite the metal-eating fungi and molds was explained by the straw-colored shimmer that haloed them as they flew; each gunship was large enough to carry its own surgical field generator.

From the height of the brush and young trees on the grasser roads, the most recent ones they crossed seemed to be at least two or three standard years old. Mace mentioned this to Nick.

He grunted grimly. "Yeah. They don't only shoot us, y'know. When Balawai gunners get bored, they start blasting grasser herds. Just for fun. It's been a couple of years since we've been stupid enough to gather more than four or five grassers in any one place. And even then we have to use akks to keep them separated enough that they don't make easy targets." Mace frowned. Without constant contact and interaction with others of their kind, grassers could become depressed, sick-sometimes even psychotic. "This is how you care for your herds?" Though he couldn't see Nick's face, he could hear the look on it. "Got a better idea?" Beyond winning the war, Mace had to admit he did not.

Something else bothered him: Nick had said a couple of years-but the war had begun only a few months before. When he mentioned this, Nick replied with a derisive snort.

"Your war began a few months ago. Ours has been going since before I was born." So began Mace's lesson in the Summertime War.

Nick wasn't sure how it started; he seemed to think it was an inevitable collision of lifestyles.

The Korunnai followed their herds. The herds destroyed the hostile jungle. The destruction of the jungle made Korun survival possible: keeping down the drillmites, and the buzzworms and the gripleaf and vine cats and the million other ways the jungle had to kill a being.

The Balawai, by contrast, harvested the jungle: they needed it intact, to promote the growth of all the spices and woods and exotic plant extractives that were the foundation of Haruun Kal's entire civilized economy-and grassers were especially partial to thyssel bark and portaak leaf.

Korun guerrillas had been fighting Balawai militia units in these jungles for almost thirty years.

Nick thought it probably started with some bust-outs-jungle prospectors down on their luck-deciding to blame their bad luck on Korunnai and their grassers. He guessed these jups got liquored up and decided to go on a grasser hunt. And he guessed that after they wiped out the herd of some unlucky ghosh, the men of the ghosh discovered that the Balawai authorities weren't interested in investigating the deaths of mere animals. So the ghosh decided they might go on a hunt themselves: a Balawai hunt.

"Why shouldn't they? They had nothing left to lose," Nick said. "With their herds slaughtered, their ghosh was finished anyway." Sporadic raids had gone back and forth for decades. The Korunnai Highland was a big place. The bloodshed might die down for years at a time, but then a series of provocations from one side or the other would inevitably spark a new flare-up. Korun children were raised to hate the Balawai; Balawai children in the Uplands were raised to shoot Korunnai on sight.

It was a very old-fashioned war, on the Korun side. The metal-eating fungi restricted them mostly to simple weapons-usually based on chemical explosives of one kind or another-and living mounts instead of vehicles. They couldn't even use comm units, because the Balawai government had geosynchronous detector satellites in orbit that could pinpoint comm transmissions instantly. They coordinated their activities through a system of Force communication that was hardly more sophisticated than smoke signals.

By the time Nick was old enough to fight, the Summertime War had become a tradition, almost a sport: late in the spring, when the winter rains were long enough gone that the hills were passable, the more adventurous young men and women of the Korunnai would band together on their grassers for their yearly forays against the Balawai. The Balawai, in turn, would load up their steamcrawlers and grind out to meet them. Each summer would be a fever dream of ambush and counterambush, steamcrawler sabotage and grasser shooting. A month or so before autumn brought the rains again, everyone would go home.

To get ready for next year.

Some of Depa's dazzling success was now explained, Mace realized: she didn't have to create a guerrilla army. She'd found one ready-made.

Blooded and hungry.

"This Clone War of yours? Who cares? You think anybody on Haruun Kal gives a handful of snot who rules on Coruscant? We kill seppies because they give weapons and supplies to the Balawai. The Balawai support the seppies because they get stuff like those gunships. For free, too. They used to have to buy them and ship 'em in from Opari. You follow? This is our war, Master Windu." Nick shook his head with amused contempt. "You guys are just passing through." "You make it sound almost like fun." "Almost?" Nick grinned down at him. "It's the most fun you can have while you're sober.

And you don't really have to be all that sober; look at Lesh." "I admit I don't know a lot about war. But I know it's not a game." "Sure it is. You keep score by body count." "That's revolting." Nick shrugged. "Hey, I've lost friends. People who were as much family to me as anyone can be. But if you let the anger chew you up inside, you're just gonna do something stupid and get yourself killed. Maybe along with other people you care about. And fear is just as bad: too cautious gets people just as dead as too bold." "Your answer is to pretend it's fun?" Nick's grin turned sly. "You don't pretend anything. You have to let it be fun. You have to find the part of yourself that likes it." "The Jedi have a name for that." "Yeah?" Mace nodded. "It's called the dark side." Night.

Mace sat cross-legged before his wallet tent, stitching a tear in his pants left by a brush with a brassvine. He had his fake datapad propped against his thigh; its screen provided enough light that he could do the needlework without drawing blood. Its durasteel casing showed black mildew and the beginning of fungal scarring, but it had been adapted for the Haruun Kal jungles, and it still worked well enough.

They'd finished their cheese and smoked meat. The Korunnai field-stripped their weapons by touch, reapplying portaak amber to vulnerable surfaces. They spoke together in low voices: mostly sharing opinions on the weather and the next day's ride, and whether they might reach Depa's ULF band before they were intercepted by an air patrol.

When Mace finished patching his pants, he put away the stitcher, and silently watched the Korunnai, listening to their conversation. After a time, he picked up the datapad's recording rod and flicked it on, fiddling with it for a moment to adjust its encryption protocol.

When he had it set to his satisfaction, he brought the recording rod near his mouth and spoke very softly.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU I've read war tales in the Temple archives, from the early years of the Republic and before.

According to these tales, soldiers in bivouac are supposed to speak endlessly of their parents or their sweethearts, of the food they would like to eat or wine they wish they were drinking. And of their plans for after the war. The Korunnai mention none of these things.

For the Korunnai, there is no "after the war." The war is all there is. Not one of them is old enough to remember anything else.

They don't allow themselves even a fantasy of peace.

Like that death hollow we passed today- Deep in the jungle, Nick turned our grasser aside from our line of march to skirt a deep fold in the ground that was choked with a riot of impossibly lush foliage. I didn't have to ask why. A death hollow is a low point where the heavier-than-air toxic gases that roll downslope from the volcanoes can pool.

The corpse of a hundred-kilo tusker lay just within its rim, its snout only a meter below the clear air that could have saved it. Other corpses littered the ground around it: rot crows and jacunas and other small scavengers I didn't recognize, lured to their deaths by the jungle's false promise of an easy meal.

I said something along these lines to Nick. He laughed and called me a Balawai fool.

"There's no false promise," he'd said. "There's no promise at all. The jungle doesn't promise.

It exists. That's all. What killed those little ruskakks wasn't a trap. It was just the way things are." Nick says that to talk of the jungle as a person-to give it the metaphoric aspect of a creature, any creature-that's a Balawai thing. That's part of what gets them killed out here.

It's a metaphor that shades the way you think: talk of the jungle as a creature, and you start treating it like a creature. You start thinking you can outsmart the jungle, or trust it, overpower it or befriend it, deceive it or bargain with it.

And then you die.

"Not because the jungle kills you. You get it? Just because it is what it is." These are Nick's words. "The jungle doesn't do anything. It's just a place. It's a place where many, many things live. and all of them die. Fantasizing about it-pretending it's something it's not-is fatal.

That's your free life lesson for the day," he told me. "Keep it in mind." I will.

I have a feeling that his lesson applies equally well to this war. But how can I avoid pretending this war is something it's not? I don't yet know what real war really is.

So far, I have only impressions.

Vast. Unknown, and unknowable. Living darkness. Deadly as this jungle.

And my guide cannot be trusted.

Day.

Mace stood in a universe of rain.

As though the jungle's trees and ferns and flowers had grown at the foot of a towering waterfall, rain pounded through leaf and branch with a roar that made conversation possible only in shouts. No waterproof gear could handle this; in less than a minute, Mace's clothes had soaked through. He dealt with it Korun-style: he ignored it. His clothes would dry, and so would he. He was more concerned with his eyes; he had to shelter them with both hands in order to look up against the rush. Visibility was only a handful of meters.

It was just barely good enough that he could see the corpses.

They hung upside down, elbows bent at a strange angle because their hands were still tied behind them. Living gripleaves twined around their ankles held them six meters above the jungle floor, low enough to bring their heads within an easy jump for a vine cat like the one an akk had chased off as Mace and Nick approached.

Mace counted seven bodies.

Birds and insects had been at them as well as the vine cats. They'd been hanging for a while.

In damp gloom that alternated with thunderous downpours. And metals weren't the only thing that the local molds and fungi fed on. Through the colorless tatters that were all that remained of their clothing, it was impossible to tell even if they had been men or women. Mace was only moderately certain they had been human.

He stood beneath them, looking up into the empty eye sockets of the two that still had heads.

"Is this what you felt?" Nick shouted down from the saddle. His grasser reached for the gripleaves that held the bodies, and Nick jabbed its forelimb with his brassvine goad. The grasser decided to rip up some nearby glass-ferns instead. It never stopped chewing.

Mace nodded. Echoes of these murders howled in the Force around him. He'd been able to feel it from hundreds of meters away.

This place stank of the dark side.

"Well, now you've seen it. Nothing for us to do here. Come on, mount up!" The corpses stared down at Mace without eyes.

Asking him: What will you do about us?

"Are they-" Mace's voice was thick; he had to cough it clear, and enough water ran into his mouth that he passed a few seconds coughing for real. "Are these Balawai?" "How should I know?" Mace stepped out from below the bodies and squinted up at Nick. A blaze of lightning above the canopy haloed the young Korun's black hair with gold. "You mean they could have been Korunnai?" "Sure! What's your point?" He seemed puzzled that Mace would care one way or the other.

Mace wasn't sure why he cared, either. Or even if he cared. People are people. Dead is dead.

Even if these had happened to be the enemy, nothing could make this right.

"We should bury them." "We should get out of here!" "What?" "Mount up! We're leaving." "If we can't bury them, at least we can cut them down. Burn them. Something." Mace caught at the mounting rope as though his merely human strength might hold back the two-ton grasser.

"Sure. Burn 'em." Nick sputtered a mouthful of the drenching rain down the grasser's flank.

"There's that Jedi sense of humor again." "We can't just leave them for the scavengers!" "Sure we can. And we will." Nick leaned down toward him, and on his face was something that might have even been pity. For Mace, that is. For the dead, he seemed to feel nothing at all.

"If those are Korunnai," Nick shouted, not unkindly, "to give them any kind of decent burial will only light a giant We-Were-Here ad-vertiscreen for the next band of irregulars or militia patrol. And give them a pretty good idea of when. If those are Balawai-" He glanced up at them. Everything human left his face.

He lowered his voice, but Mace could read his lips. "If they're Balawai," he muttered, "this is already better than they deserve." Night.

Mace woke from evil dreams without opening his eyes.

He wasn't alone.

He didn't need the Force to tell him this. He could smell him. Rank sweat. Drool and raw thyssel.

Lesh.

Barely a murmur: "Why here, Windu? You come here why?" The wallet tent was pitch black. Lesh shouldn't even have known Mace was awake.

"What want here, you? Come to take her away from us, you? Said you would, she." His voice was blurry with the drug and with a childlike weepy puzzlement, as though he suspected Mace might break his favorite toy.

"Lesh." Mace pitched his voice deep. Calm. Assured as a father. "You have to leave my tent, Lesh. We can talk about this in the morning." "Think you can? Huh? Think you can?" His voice thinned: a shout strangled to a whisper.

Now Mace smelled machine oil and portaak amber.

He was armed.

"Don't understand yet, you. But find out, you will-" Mace reached into the Force. He could feel him: crouched by Mace's ankle. Mace's bedroll was pinned beneath his boots.

A less-than-ideal combat position.

"Lesh." Mace added the Force to his voice. "You want to leave, now. We'll talk in the morning." "What morning? Morning for you? Morning for me?" Mace couldn't tell if he was saying morning, or mourning.

Something was still strong enough even in Lesh's thyssel-addled mind that he could resist Mace's Force-pushed order. "Don't know anything, you." His voice went thicker, hitching, as if he wasn't breathing well. "But teach you, will Kar. What you do, he knows. Teach you, will the akks. Wait, you. Wait and see." Kar? There'd been a Kar Vaster mentioned in several of Depa's reports. His name had come up as a particularly capable leader of a commando squad, independent or semi- independent; Mace was unclear on the ULF's command structure. But Lesh breathed the name with a sort of superstitious awe.

And had he said akks? or ax?

"Lesh. You have to go. Now." Questions notwithstanding, Mace was not so foolish as to engage a bark-drunk man in conversation.

"Think you know her. Think she's yours. Teach you better. Maybe. Live long enough to learn, you? Maybe not." That was enough of a threat for a flick of the Force to bring his lightsaber to his hand. The sizzling flare of its blade cast purple-fringed shadows. But Lesh was not attacking.

He hadn't moved. His rifle was tucked crosswise into his lap.

Tears streamed down his face.

That was the blur in his voice. That was the thick hitch.

He was crying. Silently.

"Lesh," Mace began in astonishment, "what's the ma-" He stopped himself because Lesh was still bark-drunk, and Mace was still not a fool. Instead, he offered a hand towel from his kitbag. "Here. Wipe your face." Lesh took it and smeared the streaks below his eyes. He stared down at the towel and knotted it between his fists. "Windu-" "No." Mace held out his hand for the towel. "We'll talk in the morning. After you sober up." Lesh nodded and sniffled against the back of his fist. With one last beseeching look at Mace, he was gone.

The night rolled on, slow and sleepless. Meditation offered less rest than sleep would, but no dreams.

Not a bad bargain.

In the morning, when he asked Lesh if he still wanted to talk, Lesh pretended he didn't know what Mace meant. Mace watched his back as he walked away, and a flash of Force intuition took him and shook him and he knew: By nightfall, Lesh would be dead.

Day.

The akks' Force yammer was almost painful. They'd given this call often enough that Mace knew it now.

Gunships. More than one.

Mace could feel that Nick was worried. In the Force, dry-ice tension rolled off him. It was starting to affect Mace, too: breathing it in off Nick tied knots in Mace's stomach.

Air patrols had been dogging them all day long. Spiral routes and quarter-cutting: search pattern. It wasn't safe to assume they were looking for anything but the four Korunnai and Mace.

Tension twisted those knots in Mace's guts. How could people live their lives under this kind of pressure?

"Bad luck," Nick muttered under his breath. "Bad, bad luck." They were exposed in a notch pass through a razorback ridge: some long-ago groundquake had knocked a gap here. A broad fan of scrub-clutched scree made the ramp they'd climbed up to the pass. They'd been picking their way through a jumble of boulders a few dozen meters wide, akks ranging before and behind; the sides of the gap were towering cliff faces hung with flowering vines and epiphytic trees that clung to the rock with root-fingered grips. The spine of the ridge was shrouded in low clouds. Only two or three hundred meters away, the slope on the far side led down into dark jungle beyond. They might be able to reach the trees before the air patrol overflew them- But Nick reined in their grasser. "Lesh is in trouble." Mace didn't have to ask how he knew: these young folk shared a bond almost as profound as the one they had with their akks.

Mace thought of his Force-flash from the morning. He said, "Go." Nick wheeled the grasser and they galloped back through the notch. From Mace's rear- facing saddle, he watched Chalk overtaking them on her way back from her position on point.

Her grasser was the fastest of the four, and it carried only half the load of Nick's.

As they cleared the crest of the pass, Mace used the Force to lift himself up so that he could stand on the saddle facing forward, his hands on Nick's back, leaning to see past his shoulder.

On the descending curve of the pass, someone was down. An akk dog nosed him nervously.

Lesh. His grasser stood placidly a dozen meters away, ripping small trees from the cliff wall to fill its ever-chewing maw. Besh got there first; he swung down from his grasser and sprinted to his brother's side.

"Get up!" Nick shouted. "Mount up and move!" Nick gestured, and in the Force Mace felt a tug as though an unseen hand had taken hold of his line of sight and dragged it out toward the jungle below: a pair of matte-dull specks of metal skimmed the canopy, trailing a shock wake of roiling leaves.

Gunships. Coming straight for the notch.

"Might not have seen us yet," Nick muttered to himself. "Might just be checking the pass-" "They've seen us." Nick looked down at Mace past his shoulder. "How do you know?" "Because they travel in threes." His last word was swallowed by howls of repulsorlifts and snarling turbojets that brought a gunship slewing into the gap from the other side of the ridge. Mace expected it to swoop in for a strafing run, but instead it hovered, cycling its turbojets. "What are they doing?" Nick scowled back at the gunship. "You've heard the expression, We're cooked?' "Yes." Ventral bays swung open in the gunship's belly, and nozzles shaped like a chemical rocket's reaction chamber deployed in a wide-angled array. They belched jets of flame that hit the ground and splashed and ran like rivers of fire, coating rocks and filling crevices. In just over a second the whole end of the pass had become an inferno so intense Mace had to shield his face with his arm. The gunship swept toward them, burying the gap in fire.

"In this case," Nick said grimly, "it's not just an expression." BLOOD FEVER T

he gunship bore down on them, riding a towering fan of flame.

The grasser unleashed an earsplitting honk and threw itself into a shockingly fast sprint, bounding from rock to rock, bucking and twisting in the air. Nick unleashed an equally earsplitting stream of profanity as he wrapped his arms around its neck to hang on. Its forebody whipped back and forth, and all four of its arms windmilled in panic.

Mace gathered himself, feeling the flow of the Force, letting his mind link the path of the bucking grasser to the jets of the gunship's flame projectors. As the gunship sailed overhead, Mace stiffened his hand into a blade and jabbed the grasser in the nerve plexus below its midshoulder.

The grasser blared a yelp like the horn of an air taxi in heavy traffic and leapt five meters sideways-into the gap between the fringes of two flame streams, so that they roared around Nick and Mace, only a few splashes igniting patches of fur on the grasser's legs. Mace gestured, and the Force pushed air away from the burning fur, snuffing it within a bubble of vacuum.

The gunship thundered past, gouts of flame clawing toward Chalk. She slipped around to the chest of her grasser, and it cradled her in its forelimbs as it ran, shielding her with its body.

Nick's curses strangled to coughs on the thick black petrochemical smoke.

The smoke burned Mace's eyes like acid, blinding him with tears. He used the Force to nail himself to the saddle, then by feel he flipped open the stolen medpac that hung from Nick's belt, and let the Force tell him which spray hypo to use. He jabbed it into Nick's back beside his spine, then triggered it against his own chest.

Nick twisted at the sting. "What the^ra^-?" "Gas binder," Mace said. Intended for emergency use during fires on shipboard, the gas binder selectively scrubbed a user's bloodstream of a variety of toxins, from carbon monoxide to hydrogen cyanide. "Not as good as a breath mask, but it'll keep us conscious for a few minutes-" "We get to be wide awake while we burn to death? Great! How can I ever thank you?" The gunship heeled over as it slewed into a curve that would bring it around for another run.

Flame raked the haunches of Chalk's grasser, and its whole flank caught fire. It screamed and threw up its hands as it pitched forward, thrashing on the burning rocks, sending Chalk tumbling hard into a boulder. Her Force-bonded akk, Galthra, bounded from crag to crag, howling fury, clawing at the air as though she wanted to reach up and drag the gunship down on top of her.

Mace felt no fear from her: akks were bred on the slopes of active volcanoes, and their armored hide was tough enough to stop a lightsaber.

The gunship rounded its turn and streaked back toward Mace and Nick.

Mace reached deeper into the Force, opening himself, seeking a shatterpoint. The fluid situation in the notch pass gelled, then splintered into crystal: grassers and akks and people and gunships became nodes of stress, vectors of intersecting energy joined by flaws and fault lines.

Mace's mouth set in a grim slit.

He saw one bare chance.

The gunship could pass above them and rain fire all day long; no lightsaber was going to deflect a wash of flame-fuel. But: if the militia in the gunship wanted to take out the akks as well.

The gunship's aft launchers coughed and concussion missiles streaked back down the pass toward Besh and Lesh. The shock of explosions made the inferno around Mace and Nick whip and jump and spit, and was answered by smaller detonations on all sides, as heat-stressed stone began to shatter. Red-hot shards of half-molten rock slashed through the flames. Wherever they landed they stuck, sizzling. Mace's vest smoldered, and Nick was kept too busy smacking flames off his tunic and pants to even remember to curse.

Mace used the Force to unclip the grenade pack Nick had taken off the mercenaries in Pelek Baw, then he snatched the captured over-under out of its scabbard on the grassers harness.

Nick twisted again, eyes wild, barely hanging on. "What are you doing now?" "Jump." "What-?" With a surge of the Force Mace yanked him out of the saddle an instant before a missile took their grasser full in the chest. The explosion blasted them tumbling through the air in a cloud of vaporized flesh and bone.

Through the Force Mace felt Nick's consciousness fuzz from the shock wave; he turned his tumble into a forward flip that landed him on his feet among the rocks. The Force whipped the over-under's sling up his arm to his shoulder to free his hands, then caught Nick's limp body and delivered him lightly to Mace's arms.

Nick looked up at him with eyes that didn't quite focus. "Wha-? Wha' happen-?" "Stay here," Mace said. He tucked Nick into a gap between two house-sized boulders; their mass would take a long time to heat, even in the raging inferno. Meanwhile they'd offer shelter from the fire.

"Are you crazy?" Nick asked blurrily. "You know what kind of firepower those ruskakks pack?" "Two Taim and Bak dual KX-Four ball turrets, port and starboard," Mace said absently as he crouched behind the rock, slapping a Nytinite grenade into the over-under while he waited for the gunship to finish its sweep. "Twin fixed-position Krupx MG-Three mini missile tubes fore and aft, a belly-mounted Merr-Sonn Sunfire One Thousand flame projector-" "And their armor!" Nick said. His eyes were only now starting to clear. "What do we have that can punch through that armor?" "Nothing." "So what exactly do you think you're gonna do?" Mace said, "Win." The gunship hurtled past. In the bare second that Mace was in the gunners' blind zone he stood up and launched a Nytinite grenade in a high arc. In the Force he felt its path; as it overtook the gunship, only the subtlest of nudges was required to loop it directly in front of the gunship's starboard turbojet intake, which promptly sucked it in like a snapfish taking a bottle bug.

Metal screamed. Nytinite grenades didn't actually detonate; they were canisters that released jets of gas. That this one was a grenade was not pertinent. What was pertinent was that a half- kilo chunk of durasteel had been sucked into turbojet fans that were rotating at roughly one bazillion rpm.

In round numbers.

A wash of purple gusted out the exhaust, followed by white-hot chunks of the turbojet's internal fans. More superheated chunks ripped through the turbojet's housing, and the whole engine blasted itself to shards, sending the gunship slewing wildly sideways to bounce off the face of the cliff wall.

Mace looked down at Nick. "Any questions?" Nick appeared to be in danger of choking on his own tongue.

Mace said, "Excuse me," and was gone.

The Force launched him over the rocks like a torpedo. He stayed low, blasting through flames too fast to get burned, skimming the slag beneath; kicking off from one boulder to another, he ricocheted across the pass toward Chalk and her aak, Galthra.

The two gunships approaching from below swooped up toward the gap. Besh's grasser was down, kicking, on fire, and screaming. Lesh's was already just a pile of ragged meat. A missile took one of their akks in the flank; though akk hide is nearly impenetrable, the hydraulic shock of the missile's detonation made a bloody hash of its internal organs. The akk staggered into the rocks before it fell. Besh dragged his brother through the flames into cover behind its massive armored body. The akk's body bucked and jounced as round after round of cannonfire slammed into it, making it twitch as though still alive.