Shatterpoint

There was a time, before the reopening of Haruun Kal to the civilized galaxy, when a mace taken from a juvenile ankkox was the traditional weapon of Korun herders: dangerous to acquire. Difficult to use. Deadly in effect.

On the central bulge of this ankkox's dorsal shell had been built a howdah: a small curtained cabin framed with lammas wood, two meters by three, barely larger than the long padded chaise within. The draped canopy stood slightly higher than Mace was tall, bounded by a polished rail perhaps a meter above the shell. The curtains, not to mention the fine-worked wood itself, were probably spoils looted from some Balawai's home. Multiple layers of gauzy lace, the curtains were translucent as smoke.

With the sunset behind, Mace could see her silhouette.

The ankkox crunched to a ponderous stop, settling onto its ventral shell with a long hiss through its teeth like gas venting from pneumatic landing jacks. Vastor tucked the goad into its holster bolted to the ankkox's crown shell, then stepped forward over the drover chair and folded his thick-muscled arms.

He stared down into the eyes of the Jedi Master.

The akk dogs started to growl low in their throats, a sound more felt than heard, like the subterranean precursor of a coming groundquake.

The wind died; even the rustle of leaves went silent.

In the hush of fading day, the Force showed Mace a shatterpoint.

The darkness of the jungle, not of the Sith.

Life without the restraints of civilization.

"We're done," Nick said. "You get that, don't you? We're as done as a week-old roast.

What do they call it in the army? Aid and comfort to the enemy?" "Be quiet. Don't draw attention to yourself." "Great idea. Maybe they'll forget I'm here." "This isn't about aid and comfort to the enemy," Mace said. "If this were going to be anything military, they'd put us under arrest. We'd be taken back to have some kind of show trial witnessed by the rest of the ULF. Instead, we're out here in the jungle, and the only witnesses are Kar, Depa, and these akks-human and saurian." "So they're just gonna kill us." "If we're lucky," Mace said, "it's going to be a dogfight." "A ^ogfight? If we're lucky? Okay, sure. Let's not even try to make sense. Just tell me what I'm supposed to do." "You're supposed to remember that you are an officer of the Grand Army of the Republic." "I just took the fraggin' oath three hours ago-" "Three hours or thirty years. It makes no difference. You have sworn to conduct yourself to the credit of the Republic as its commissioned officer." "So that kind of rules out wetting my pants and sobbing like a baby, huh?" "Stay calm. Show no weakness. Think of Vastor as a wild akk: do nothing to trigger his prey drive. And shut up." "Oh, sure. Is that an order, General?" "Will making it an order help you do it?" Above on the ankkox's shell, Vastor had been staring silently while an aurora of rage built in the air around him. Only now did Mace meet the,'orpelek's gaze.

Mace allowed his lip to curl with a hint of contempt.

Nick whispered, "What are you doing?" Mace's gaze never wavered. "Nothing you need concern yourself with." "Urn, maybe I should have told you," the young Korun muttered nervously. "Kar doesn't like to be stared at." "I know." "It gets him mad." "He's already mad." "Yeah. And you're makin' him madder." "That's my intention." "Y'know," Nick said, "I'm gonna give up asking if you're crazy. Let's consider it a standing question, huh? Every time you open your mouth, go ahead and assume I'm wondering if nikkle nuts have started falling out your earholes. "Good morning, Nick.' Are you crazy? "Nice day, isn't it?' Are you crazy?" Mace hissed from the side of his mouth, "Will you be quiet?" "Are you crazy?" Nick ducked his head. "Sorry. Just a reflex." Vastor's jaw worked, and a wordless growl escaped from his tight-drawn lips.

You were sent for.

Mace sighed, looking bored.

Vastor's growl thickened.

Defiance carries a price.

Nick cocked his head, frowning. "This isn't about the prisoners?" Mace looked at him sidelong: Nick had understood. So Vaster was talking to both of them-or rather, to Mace, but at least partially for the benefit of Nick. He glanced up at the howdah.

Likely for the benefit of Depa as well.

"Of course it's about the prisoners," Mace said softly. "He's just warming up. Play along." Mace hooked his thumbs in his belt and walked casually forward. "I told you already: I am not to be sent for. Since you have brought her to me as ordered, I'll see her now." The shimmer around Vaster deepened, but he held himself perfectly still. His growl sharpened into a vine cat's hunting cough.,' don't take orders. Depa is here at her own request.

"Oh?" She came to say good-bye.

"I'm not going anywhere." Vastor's response was a silent grinning gape that showed all his inhumanly sharp teeth. He gestured, and the ring of akks and humans parted before him.

"I told you he's gonna kill us!" Nick hissed. "I toldyo't'ti't't Shee, I hate it when I'm right!" "Like I said before: think of Vaster as a wild akk. He won't kill us unless there's no other way to get what he wants." "Yeah? What does he want?" "Same as any akk dog: to assert his dominance. Defend his territory. And his pack." "And you think he won't kill us for taking those prisoners?" Mace shrugged. "Not you, anyway. You're subordinate: you don't really count." "Oh, sure. Thanks a lot-" Nick stopped in mid-sarcasm and looked thoughtful. "Know what? I think I actually mean that." "You're welcome." Vaster spun the hooked goad, and the ankkox lumbered toward Mace and Nick, its tail mace whipping through threatening arcs around it.

"So, what?" Nick kept on under his breath. "You think he's just gonna throw you out of here? "You got till sundown to get off my planet'?" "Something like that." "What about this hostage you were talkin' about?" "We'll see if we need him." "Urn, it's not me, is it? Because, y'know, to tell you the truth, I don't think Depa likes me all that much-or even, y'know, any. At all." "Hush." The ankkox stopped. The beak-curve of the crown armor on its landspeeder-sized skull lowered to the ground at Mace's feet. The beast's eyes were orange and gold and as large as Mace's head, and they peered up from under the curve of armor with melancholy saurian patience.

Vaster vaulted to the ground. Make your good-byes. Then you are leaving.

"Nice doggy." Nick said with a sickly forced smile. He gave a weak laugh. "Nice-" Vastor's immense left arm flashed at Nick in a blinding palm slap that would have taken his head right off before he could even blink-but that massive arm was intercepted by the heel of Mace's open hand.

Mace's fingers locked momentarily around Vastor's wrist. "He's with me," he said, and before the lor pelek could react, he released Vaster and backhanded Nick off his feet.

Nick lay crumpled on the leaf mold, stunned, staring up at Mace in astonishment. Through their Force-link, Mace sent a pulse of private reassurance: an invisible deadpan wink.

Nick played along. "What was that for?" The Jedi Master jabbed a finger at his face. "You are an officer in the Grand Army of the Republic. Act like one." "How does one act?" Mace turned back to Vastor. "I apologize for him." Vaster grunted. His mother should apologize.

"Any problem you have with him, you bring to me." Mace had to bend his neck back to look up into the lor peleKs eyes. "I struck one of your men, earlier. I apologize for that as well." He met Vastor's glare lazily. "I should have hit you." You are Depa's Master, and my doshalo, and I do not wish you harm. Vastor's rumble went low and silken. Don't touch me again.

Mace sighed, still looking bored. He said to Nick, "Don't get up," and to Vastor, "Excuse me," and he sidestepped the lor pelek to vault onto the dorsal shell of the ankkox.

He had time to wonder if his pretense of confidence was fooling anyone.

Mace looked up at the howdah, now only a step or two away. His mouth had gone entirely dry.

He still couldn't feel her.

Even this close, finally, after all this time, whatever presence she cast in the Force blended invisibly into the jungle night around them.

The sick weight gathered in his chest again: the one that had been born weeks ago in Palpatine's office. The one that had grown heavier in Pelek Baw, and had nearly crushed him last night in the outpost bunker. That weight had lifted somehow through this long afternoon: maybe it was because he'd been so sure he was doing the right thing.

The only thing.

And now he was a meter away from being face to face with her: his Padawan: his protegee: the woman for whose sake he had left behind Coruscant and the Jedi Temple and the simple abstractions of strategic war. For whose sake he had plunged into this jungle. Had subjected himself to the harsh, complicated, intractable reality behind the strategies that had seemed so simple and so clean back in the sterile chambers of the Council.

He discovered that once again, he didn't know what he should do.

Just seeing her shadow on the curtains had loosened his grip on right and wrong.

Palpatine's words echoed inside his head: Depa Billaba was your Padawan. And she is still perhaps your closest friend, is she not?

Is she? Mace thought.,' wish I knew.

If she must be slain, are you so certain you can strike her down?

Right now, he wasn't entirely certain he could look at her.

He was that frightened of what he might see.

.' have become the darkness in the jungle.

A slim brown hand took one edge of the curtains. Long fingers, but strong: nails broken, and black with grime-the shape of the O. Ollttl ILI't'trUII palm, the faint rolling texture of vein and tendon and bone, that he knew as vividly as he did his own-and the curtain was streaked with mold and stained, and hand-patched with dark thread that showed like scars against the lace, and it draped around her hand as she drew it slowly aside, and Mace's heart hammered and he nearly turned away, because he should have known he wouldn't meet her in the dawn, at the beginning of a day, even among a firestorm raining from gunship cannons; he should have known that was only wishful thinking, a solace from the Force; he should have known that they would only meet again in the twilight shadow- But fear, too, leads into the dark.

He thought, I have met the darkness in this jungle already. I've felt it in my own heart. I have fought it hand to hand and mind to mind. Why should I fear to see it on her face?

The knot in his gut untied itself.

All his anxiety drained from him. All his darkness trickled away. He stood empty of everything save for fatigue and the pains of his battered flesh, and a calm Jedi expectation: ready to accept the turn of the Force, no matter what it may bring.

She drew the curtain aside.

She sat on the edge of a long, padded chaise. She wore the tatters of Jedi robes over the rough homespun of a jungle Korun. Her hair was as he had seen at the outpost: ragged, greasy, hacked short as though she'd used a knife to trim it without the benefit of a mirror. Her face was every bit as thin as he had seen it: her cheekbones sharp, and her jaw going prominent. The burn scar was there, from one corner of her hardship-thinned mouth to the point of her jaw- But instead of a blindfold, she wore the strip of dirty rag tied around her forehead, concealing the Greater Mark of Illumination.

Or the scar it had left behind.

The Lesser Mark still glinted gold on the bridge of her nose, and though her eyes were bloodshot and pain-haunted, her gaze was clear, and level, and, after all, she was Depa Billaba.

Whatever had happened to her; whatever she had seen, or done.

She was still Depa.

With an effort that nearly broke Mace's heart, she curved her mouth into a smile, and she extended a hand that trembled, just a little, as Mace reached to take it. It felt fragile in his, as though her bones were as hollow as a bird's, but her grip was strong and warm.

"Mace," she said slowly. A single jewel of a tear welled in one eye. "Mace. Master Windu." "Hello, Depa." He opened his vest and produced her lightsaber. "I have kept this safe for you." As she reached for it her hand trembled even more. "Thank you, Master," she said slowly, with exhausted formality. "I am honored to receive it from your hand." Her smile turned more genuine. She looked down at her light-saber, turning it over and over in her hand as though she didn't quite remember what it was for. She lowered her head until he could no longer see her eyes. "Oh, Mace. How could you?" "Depa?" "How could you be so arrogant? So stupid? So blind?" Though her words were angry, her voice was only tired. "I wish. You should have come to me, Mace. Straight to me. Those people-they're not worth this. Not worth you not knowing. You should have asked me-I could have told you-" "Why innocent children had to die?" Her head hung even lower. "We all have to die, Mace." "I'm not here to argue with you, Depa. I'm here to take you home." "Home." she echoed, and raised her head again. Her eyes were event horizons: infinitely deep, and infinitely dark. "You use that word as though it means something." "It does to me." "But it doesn't. Not anymore. Not even to you. You just haven't realized it yet." She sighed a bleak, bitter chuckle as dark as her eyes and swung her trembling hand at the jungle around them. "This is home. As much home as any place will ever be. For any of us. For all of us.

That's what I brought you here to learn, Mace. But now you've messed everything up. It's falling apart and flying off in all direc tions. It's all wrong, and it's all too late, and I should have known it would happen like this, I should have known because you're just too blasted arrogant to mind your own business!" Her voice had risen to a screech, and a drop of blood seeped from a crack in her lower lip.

"You are my business here." "Exactly. Exactly!" She snatched his wrist and yanked him down toward her with astonishing strength.",' was your business here. Those people had nothing to do with you. Nor you with them. But you can't stop being a Jedi," she said bitterly. "No matter what. With the existence of the whole Jedi Order at stake, you had to play HoloNet hero. Now your business here is ruined. Destroyed. Everything is wasted. It's too late. Too late for all of us. You have to leave here, Mace. You have to leave right now, or Kar will kill you." "I'm planning on it," Mace agreed. "And you're coming with me." "Oh," she said. The fire inside her dwindled, and her strength with it. Her hand went slack on Mace's arm. "Oh. you think-you think I can just leave." "You must leave, Depa. I don't know what you think is holding you here-" "You don't understand. How could you? You haven't seen-I haven't shown you-You can't possibly understand." Mace thought of his hallucination at the outpost. "I understand," he said slowly, "all there is to understand. And now I believe it." "Do you understand that,' am not in command here?" Mace shrugged. "Is anyone?" "Exactly," she said. "Exactly. Master Yoda-Master Yoda would say, You see, but you do not see." "Depa-" "You are alive right now because Kar doesn't want to upset me. That's the only reason.

Not because I can order him. To do anything. Because I ashed him. I asked to give you a chance to run away. Because Kar-because Kar likes me-" Mace turned and looked down at the people and akks in the jungle. Twilight was deepening, and glowvines were beginning to pulse to life. The akks stirred uneasily, muttering deep half growls down in their enormous chests. Nick sat on the ground, knees drawn up and wrapped by his arms. He kept his head down, studiously avoiding looking at Vaster. The lor pelek paced back and forth in front of the ankkox's head, stalking like a hungry vine cat, flicking glances up at Mace and Depa and away again, as though he did not want to be caught looking.

"Vaster commands the ULF-?" "There is no ULF!" Depa hissed. "The ULF is a name, that's all. I made it up! The Upland Liberation Front is a make-believe bogey on which to blame every raid and ambush and theft and petty sabotage and I don't know what all. The militia's going crazy looking for a pattern to our strikes. Trying to figure out our strategy. Because there is no pattern. No strategy. There is no ULF. There is just this clan, and that family, and one gang here and another there. That's all.

Ragged Korun bandits and murderers." "Your reports-" "Reports." She looked like she wanted to grab him and shake him, but was just too tired.

"What should I have told you? You've seen a little of Haruun Kal. What could I have said to make you understand?" "You don't have to make me understand. All you have to do is come with me." "Mace, listen to me: I can't." She sagged, and lowered her face into her hands. "Kar is willing to let you go only because I am staying. To keep you away from me. If I leave with you. Going through the jungle, Mace: think of it. On foot, on grassers. Even in a steam- crawler. All the way back to Pelek Baw? Haven't you seen enough of him today to know that nowhere in the jungle could you ever be safe?" The weight in Mace's chest lightened, just a bit. He swallowed, and found that his breath came more easily.

She was afraid for him. She had not fallen so far that she no longer cared.

That was his victory right there.

"We won't be going through the jungle," he said. "I have a ship on-station with a battalion of troopers. My comm's damaged, or we'd be on our way right now. Nick says you have subspace at the Lorshan Pass caverns. We can be out of the system less than a day after we get there." She lifted her head again, and there was still no hope in her eyes. "It'll take two days to get there. If you're still here in two hours, Kar will kill you. Two minutes." "Leave Vaster to me." Mace leaned forward, resting his forearms on the howdah's polished rail. "I am not leaving without you." "You have to." "Let me put it another way." Mace took a deep breath. "Master Depa Billaba: by my authority as a Senior Member of the Jedi Council, and general of the Grand Army of the Republic, you are hereby relieved of command of Republic forces on Haruun Kal, uniformed and irregular. You are relieved of all duties and responsibilities in the action on this planet. You are suspended from the Jedi Council, pending investigation of your actions on Haruun Kal, and you are ordered to proceed with all due speed to Coruscant, where you will present yourself to the Council for judgment." Depa shook her head. "You can't-you can't-" "Depa," Mace said sadly, "you are under arrest." "This is ridiculous-" "Yes. And absolutely serious. You know me, Depa. How many arrests did we make, all those years? You know I will deliver my prisoner, or die in the attempt." She nodded slowly, and she found a smile once more: a sad, quiet smile, edged with bitter knowledge. "Will you accept my parole? If I give my word not to. attempt escape?" "I will always trust you, Depa." Sudden tears sparkled again in her eyes, and she turned her face away. "How many times are you going to make me save your life?" "Just this once more," he said. "You can come with me, or you can watch me die. Your choice." Her shoulders twitched, and shook, and Mace for a moment thought she might be sobbing, but then her soft dry chuckle reached his ears.

"I have missed you, Mace." Her eyes sparkled with tears. "I can't tell you how I've missed you. Of course you knew exactly the spot where my defenses would crumble. But I'm not your real problem," she said tiredly. "What are you going to do about Kar?" "You're my only problem," Mace told her. "I found your shatter-point; do you think I'd miss his?" "I think he doesn't have one." "That," said Mace Windu, "remains to be seen." "You and your shatterpoints." Her sad smile was dazzling on her tear-stained face. "Who but Mace Windu would think to take him-^hostage?" Mace's head twitched to the right in a Korun shrug. "I was the only one available." Mace leapt lightly down from the ankkox. "Kar Vaster. We need to talk." We do not. Vaster did not meet his eyes. As you said: the next time we meet, there may be a fight.

"What I said was," Mace replied lazily, "the next time we're alone together, there may be a fight. But I gave you too much credit. I mean, that is why you brought all your puppies along, isn't it? You certainly didn't seem interested in standing up to me without them." Vastor's head turned like a steamcrawler's gun turret. What?

"You have a problem with me?" Mace spread his hands. "I'm right here." Tendons in Vastor's neck cranked his head down a centimeter at a time. She doesn't want you hurt.

"Depa? Do you plan to hide behind her forever?" Mace folded his arms. "Always find a reason to back down, don't you? I admire your. creativity." The Akk Guards stared.

All twelve akk dogs hunched and coiled their haunches, tails whipping forward past their shoulder spines: ready to pounce. Vaster snarled and lunged convulsively past Mace. He snatched Nick's arm and hauled the young Korun to his feet, holding him out toward Mace.

"Hey, y'know, ow, huh?" I have grassers saddled and supplied. Take them and the boy and go.

His filed-sharp teeth seemed to glow in the vine-lit gloom. Take them and live.

"You know," Mace said, "I don't much care for your tone." Vastor's eyes widened. His mouth worked silently.

"And take your hand off my aide. Now." Vaster found his voice: a roar of black rage. A violent shove sent Nick stumbling forward.

Only a grab at Mace's shoulders kept him on his feet. He looked up into the Jedi Master's eyes and gave him a sickly grin. "Remember that question I wasn't gonna ask anymore?" GO. Vastor's roar carried tectonic power. Go before I forget my promise to spare you.

Mace turned to one of the Akk Guards. "Does he always yammer like this? He'd quiet down if you got him fixed." The guard went pale. He shook his head urgently. "Really, really don't want to talk to Kar like this, you. Really really really." "Oh, right. Sure. He's not so good with Basic." Mace hooked his thumbs inside his vest.

Tendons stood out like cables in the lor peleKs neck. His shimmering rage went scarlet, glowing in the twilit gloom, as though his skin were lava pouring from a volcano's mouth.

Slowly, deliberately, his left hand tucked behind the shield on his right arm. He pulled it down into fighting position, carefully avoiding its razor edges. Just as slowly and deliberately, he did the same with the other.

Muscle rippled in his arms as he squeezed the handgrips, and the shields whined to life. He brought them together back to back, generating an earsplitting squeal that made even the akk dogs flinch.

From behind Mace's shoulder, Nick whispered, "Are you sure I'm not allowed to wet myself?" Mace walked calmly out of the center of the ring, straight toward Vaster, thumbs still hooked inside his vest. "You do that a lot. No doubt your puppies find it pretty scary." Looking straight up into Vastor's eyes, Mace swung his vest open to display the handgrip of his lightsaber.

Then he shrugged out of the vest, folded it once, and tossed it over his shoulder with effortless accuracy, right into the hands of an astonished Nick Rostu. With his lightsaber still inside it.

"That's how much you scare me." Vastor's shields parted, and the jungle went silent.

"Everybody here knows this has nothing to do with Depa," Mace said. "This has to do with those Balawai you were too stupid and weak to hold." Vastor's legs coiled like the aides' haunches. They were mine! MINE! Mine to kill. Mine to spare. They were MINE to give to the justice of the jungle- "Until you met me. Then they were mine," Mace said. "Mine to let go.",'','/ show you stupid and weak- "You already have." Vaster shifted his weight to throw himself into a leap, but then froze as though an invisible leash had snapped tight around his neck. He glanced back at the shadow behind the curtains of the howdah for a moment. When he turned toward Mace once more, his lips were drawn back in a predator's grin, and his eyes burned like twin calderae.

Depa prefers that you live. But she doesn't mind if you get hurt.

Mace shrugged. "As long as she won't mind when you get hurt." Vaster began to unbuckle his shields. Mace turned his back on the lorpelek contemptuously and strolled toward the center of the ring of akks and people.

There was nothing either slow or deliberate about the way Vastor shook the shields off his arms: a whipping snap of the wrist that flung them down to clatter against the rim of the ankkox's shell.

Nick held the bundle of Mace's vest and weapon uncertainly. "Um, guess I should have told you: that big-dog stuff doesn't work on Kar." "On the contrary," the Jedi Master replied softly. "It's working perfectly." Nick blinked.

Mace said, "As for you, though-" "Don't worry about me. I know exactly what to do." He tucked Mace's vest under one arm and trotted toward the nearest Akk Guard. "A hundred credits says the Jedi makes Kar cry like a baby! Who's in?" The lor pelek crouched and lowered one hand to the ground, digging in the leaf mold, his sweat-glistening chest heaving, breath pumping darkness into him and out again. Gathering rage.

Gathering power.

The shimmer around him had gone from red to black.

Mace shook his arms loose. "Rules?" Vastor's reply was the snort of a hunting akk. Jungle rules. A burst of power launched the lor pelek as a human missile, clawing his way through the twilight toward the Jedi Master.

Jungle rules it is, then, Mace thought, and leapt to meet him in midair.

JUNGLE RULES T, hey collided with a crash that shook the jungle around them. The collision was not just of two human bodies, but of two node-channels of the Force: invisible energy crackled, and vivid blue gap-sparks arced from leaf to leaf in the canopy above. For a moment, they hung in the air, supported by power, grappling, tearing at each other's flesh. The akk dogs lunged and whirled and slashed the air with their tails. The guards clashed together their shields, roaring with ferocious animal exuberance.

Vastor seemed to be all teeth and claws and fierce snarling assault. Arms like girders of durasteel caught Mace in an unbreakable hug, pinning the Jedi's elbows to his creaking ribs.

Mace answered swifter than thought with an instinctive head-butt that split the skin on one of Vastor's cheekbones. The lor pelek lowered his head to Mace's shoulder as though to snuggle in like a lover-then sank his needle teeth deep into Mace's neck, chewing for his carotid artery.

Mace jerked a knee up to slam the inside of Vastor's thigh; Vastor only grunted and bit down harder, twisting his head from side to side like an akk worrying off a tusker's leg. His jaw pressure on the artery was restricting its blood flow; billowing clouds of darkness gathered in Mace's brain-but when Mace fired the knee again, Vaster jerked his legs out of the way.

Mace's knee caught him a decimeter below the navel.

This brought a sharper grunt and a snarl that vibrated in Mace's neck, but instead of withdrawing his knee for another strike, Mace dug it in harder, forcing Vastor's body away from his own. This created just enough space that Mace could slip one arm up between their chests, and could stab his stiffened fingers into the notch of Vastor's collarbone.

And shove.

With a convulsive gasp of astonishment, the lor pelek released Mace's neck. Mace kept on shoving, jamming his fingers into Vastor's windpipe. Vaster gagged, and his massive arms loosened.

They fell together, tumbling, and as Mace finally pushed Vastor off him he managed to sneak in a quick snapping kick to the point of Vastor's chin that sent the lor pelek whirling like a topspun ball.

Mace recovered his Force-touch in time to flip upright and land in a balanced crouch; Vastor landed on all fours, absorbing the shock as effortlessly as a vine cat.

They looked at each other.

Blood ran from the bite wound on Mace's neck, painting his shoulder and part of his chest scarlet, but it was only a trail, not a jet: the artery must have remained intact. A similar trail rolled from Vastor's split cheek and dripped from his jaw.

Neither man appeared to notice.

Vastor's growl resonated in Mace's chest. Not many men can break my grip. You won't do it twice.

Mace didn't answer. Vastor was probably right.

He was suddenly, acutely aware that he hadn't slept since the night before the fight in the notch pass. The night when a bark-drunk Lesh had come to him in tears, to tell him what Kar and the Akk Guards would teach him, if he lived long enough.

It seemed like years ago.

He wondered briefly if the lor pelek would have gone ahead and torn out his throat despite what he claimed Depa had told him, or if he would have settled for the strangle.

He decided he could live without knowing the answer.

That is, if he lived at all.

Vastor stalked toward him on all fours. Was that Jedi fighting? Poking and pinching? A little jab to stop the big dog? I am not impressed.

Mace stood motionless except for the heaving of his chest. He knew already he could not match Vastor for raw power. With each breath, he stripped away another layer of restraint and inhibition. Another layer of serenity. He had to move his inner peace out of the way to let in the joy. The thrill. The sheer okay-why-not-let's-FIGHT. Because Vaapad was more than just a form of lightsaber combat.

It was a state of mind.

Night had deepened upon the jungle, and around them glowvines began to pulse faintly. To use Vaapad now, out here, was incredibly dangerous-almost as dangerous as not using Vaapad.

The ultimate answer for power is skill.

"Want to be impressed?" Mace said. "Let's see the impression my boot makes on your face." Without warning, Vastor's stalk became a lightning lunge, fingers hooked like talons, his arms sweeping wide to close on Mace once more-but Mace wasn't there anymore. A slight sidestep and a weave of his head snuck him to the outside of Vastor's lunge, and his fist whipped backhand to snap Vastor in the base of the skull as he passed: a knockout blow.

But Vastor must have felt it coming; he pitched forward, rolling with the punch so that it flipped him end for end. He landed in perfect balance and sprang again, straight up; the kick Mace had aimed at his kidneys only grazed his calf muscle. He used the impact to whirl in the air so that he could fall upon the Jedi Master like a branch leopard taking a tusker.

But what he fell upon was Mace's fist, driven upward into his solar plexus by the combined power of the Force and nearly fifty years of Jedi combat training.

Mace's hand sank in to the wrist, and Vastor's fighting snarl became an agonized struggle for breath. Mace used the Force to hurl him off and send him tumbling through the air to slam into the flank of an agitated akk dog. Eyes glazing, half stunned, the lor pelek slid bonelessly down the akk's armored ribs, and staggered as his feet skidded over gnarled roots.

Before he could find his balance, Mace was on him. "Impressed yet?" Standing toe to toe, the top of Mace's head barely came to the level of Vastor's chin, and you could have tucked Mace's whole thick-muscled upper body inside Vastor's chest with room to spare. And even hurt, lurching drunkenly, Vaster still could whip his arms in blindingly fast raking slaps at Mace's head and wounded neck. But where Vastor's speed was blinding, Mace's was invisible. Not one of those slaps connected.

Before Vastor could even focus his eyes, Mace had hit him six times: two thundering hooks to his short ribs, a knee slamming hard into the same thigh he'd hit before, an elbow snapping up to the point of his chin, and two devastating palm strikes to either hinge of his jaw.

An ordinary man would have been unconscious. Vastor seemed to be getting stronger.

Vastor fired another of those blinding slaps. This time, instead of ducking, Mace countered with a whirring hook that met the lor peleKs swinging arm directly on the nerve that ran up the inside of the biceps. Vastor threw the other even harder-which only made the inside of that arm connect that much harder with Mace's coun-terhook.

Vastor's mighty arms spasmed and dropped limply to his sides. "This is called Vaapad, Kar." A fierce light burned in Mace's eyes. "How many arms do you see?" Then he hit Vastor twice in the nose before the lor pelek could even blink.

Vastor howled in pain and raging disbelief, falling back against the akk dog's flank once more, twisting and turning to try to find some way to avoid the Jedi's flashing hands.

Mace stayed with him, pinning him to the akk's flank, fists whirling through Vaapad flurries, striking not to disable or to kill, i IILII OIUTLI't't but instead to hurt: stinging flicks to soft tissue, smashing ears and nose, stabbing up under the chin.

The akk dog suddenly lurched away from them, giving Vastor half a meter of clearance. The lor pelek sprang sideways, diving away.

Mace let him go. "Go on and run, Kar. This is over. You lose. I'm the big dog here-" Vastor turned his dive into a roll and spun to face the Jedi Master from one knee, and before Mace had even finished speaking the Force whirled around him and Mace found himself wrenched off the ground, hurtling backward through the air to slam against the smooth-barked gray trunk of a meter-thick lammas tree. The whole tree shivered with the impact, and a spiral galaxy birthed itself inside Mace's head.

He thought, I was wondering when we'd get to this part.

Vastor's face tightened. Strength must have been returning to his nerve-punched arms already, because he managed to raise one and gesture as though throwing a stone; Mace was whirled forward from the tree to crash against the skull of an astonished akk dog.

The impact folded him over the dog's head and blasted the breath from his lungs; the dog's crown spines gashed Mace's abdomen, and when it tossed Mace aside with a twitch of its head like a Nymalian water-ox, his blood ran down the black outer shells of its eyes.

Jedi Padawans learn to counter Force kinesis before they even begin lightsaber training. Still in the air, Mace sensed the flow of power that held Vastor's grip upon him; with a sigh, he allowed his center-Vastor's point of Force contact-to relax and ground Vastor's power back into the jungle around them.

And that jungle came to life.

A gripleaf trailer snaked down from above and seized one of Mace's ankles in its unbreakable clutch. His airborne tumble became a wide-swinging head-down arc.

Gripleaf trailers only grew tighter as their victim struggled, and their fibers were nearly as strong as durasteel cable; they could not be broken by mortal strength. This one squeezed his ankle, drawing blood with the edges of its sharp waxy leaves. Another trailer reached toward his other ankle, and from his upside-down vantage he could see a thick blade-thorned length of brassvine curving toward his neck.

He almost reached into the Force for his lightsaber- But that would be admitting defeat.

Time to be clever.

He used the Force to shove the gripleaf trailer so that the arc of his swing sent him whirling out over the ring of dogs and men. One of the Akk Guards smirked at him as he swung overhead: "Big dog? More like little tusk-pig." When his swing carried him back in, Mace reached down and grabbed the Akk Guard by the arm, yanking him into the air. Drawing upon the Force for a burst of strength, Mace whipped the astonished Guard up and over and used the edge of his razor-sharp shield to slice through the trailer before releasing him to flail helplessly through the air and crash into the jungle darkness.

Mace turned his own fall into a flip that landed him on an akk dog's shoulders. He bounded off into the air- And Vaster's Force grip seized him again.

Vaster was on his feet now, and his arms didn't seem hurt at all. His blood-smeared mouth spread wide in a howl of triumph as he yanked Mace through the multicolored glowvine-shaded night, pulling him in while he opened his arms for that lethal embrace.

Mace thought: Well, if you insist.

Instead of resisting or grounding the power of Vastor's Force grip, Mace added his own strength to it. The speed of his flight suddenly doubled; Vastor had only time to widen his eyes in dismay as Mace flipped headfirst in the air. The top of his head speared into Vastor's gut and drove the lor pelek to the ground as though he'd been hit by a concussion missile.

On the other hand, Vastor's stomach wasn't much softer than that lammas he'd slammed Mace into; the impact didn't do Mace's head a lot of good, either.

Another spiral galaxy blossomed where the first had been as Mace rolled off him, lying on his back while he watched stellar clusters wheel inside his skull. Vastor lay beside him, making faint panting noises while he tried to pull air into his spasming chest.

Vastor's breath began to return in great whooping gasps, and Mace knew his time was running out. He shook the stars out of his head and reached down to his ankle to unwrap the severed gripleaf trailer. Limp now, dying, it was unresisting as an ordinary rope; Mace took one end in each fist, and as Vastor rolled over and gained his hands and knees, Mace slipped a loop of the trailer over the lorpelek's head from behind and tightened it around his throat.

Vastor straightened and his hands went to his throat, clawing at Mace's improvised garrote, but not even he was strong enough to break a gripleaf trailer with his bare hands. His face darkened, swelling with blood; the back of his neck bulged; veins writhed across his temples and forehead.

Ten seconds, Mace thought, hanging on, wedging his knees into Vastor's back. Ten seconds and out.

Vastor got one foot under him.

Mace swallowed, gasping for breath as he tried to tighten the trailer around the lorpeleKs throat.

Pure will powered Vastor to his feet. He didn't even seem to notice the weight of a large Jedi Master hanging down his back.

Mace thought: Here it comes.

In an eyeblink, Vastor's grip shifted from the gripleaf trailer to Mace's wrists. He threw himself forward, bent at the waist, and with a surge of incredible strength yanked the Jedi Master over his head and slammed him bodily to the dirt.

The impact replaced the stars in Mace's head with billowing black nebulae; he'd never gotten his breath back properly after landing on the akk dog, and now he couldn't breathe at all. The jungle above faded into a black haze; through the darkness descending inside his skull, he barely caught a glimpse of Vastor leaping into the air to drop a body-slam that would finish him. With a gasp, he rolled aside, and Vastor landed hard on the ground beside him.

Mace dizzily tried to pull himself up to his hands and knees; Vastor was still down, his hands clawing weakly at Mace's flanks.

Mace pushed him off and made it to his knees. Vaster rolled onto his side, found a tree trunk, and pulled himself up it, leaning on it drunkenly.

Though Mace couldn't breathe-could barely see through the black-and-red haze inside his head-he could draw upon the Force to throw himself upright, and he lunged at Vaster, whirling, hands clasped together to deliver every erg of power at his command into one last thundering punch that lifted Vaster bodily off the ground, flipped him over backward, and dropped him on the back of his neck.

Mace swayed, almost out on his feet. The jungle hazed in and out of focus. All he could clearly see was the lorpelek climbing to his feet.

Vaster was smiling.

Is that the best you have?

"I'm just-" Mace gasped for breath. His arms came up slowly; each one felt like it was made out of collapsium. "Just getting started-" One of those open-handed slaps flashed out of the darkness; the next thing of which Mace was aware was a bell-like ringing in his ears, and the grip of Vastor's huge hand around his neck, holding him up off the jungle floor.

Mace's eyelids fluttered open. Vastor's blood-smeared grin was the only thing in the world.

Vaster growled, How many arms do you see?

Mace didn't answer.

He certainly didn't see the one attached to the hand that snuffed the world like a blown-out candle.

In the darkness, a smell of ammonia and rotten meat: predator breath.

A dry rough tongue the size of his lost kitbag licked him back to consciousness, and Mace opened his eyes.

The Akk Guards were crowded around him, leaning over, their faces in deep shadow, haloed by the pulsing light of the glowvines in the canopy; one now pushed the nose of the akk dog who'd been licking Mace's unconscious body so that the great beast backed up.

Kar Vaster stepped into the gap. He squatted on his haunches at Mace's side. His face was lumped up, and blood still trickled from his split cheek, but his grin was fiercer than ever.

He barked something, and one of the Akk Guards stepped away for a brief moment. Mace heard Nick say, "Hey, cut it out. Hey, ow, huh? Come on, lay off the arm, you know I'm good for it-" The Akk Guard returned, dragging Nick.

Vaster growled.

Nick said, "Hey, why are you telling me-?" Vastor's growl sharpened, and Nick flinched away from him. He looked uncertainly up at the Akk Guard who held his arm, back at Vastor, then down at Mace.

"He, uh-" Nick swallowed hard. "-he wants me to say so everybody hears it: You can get up, if you want." Mace's eyes drifted closed. He didn't answer.

Vastor made a rumbling noise.

"He says, Come on. You wanted to be the big dog. Get up and fight." Nick lowered his voice. "I mean, you can get up, right? If you want to-I mean, I got odds, it's worth jive hundred creds, I'll split it with you-" Mace opened his eyes. "No." Vastor's rumble broadened humorously, as though the lorpelek was a groundquake telling a joke.

"Um, he-he wants to know, No, what? That is-y'know, no to the money?" "No," Mace said. He couldn't find a place on his body that did not hurt. "No more fighting.

I've had enough. You win." Vastor seized Mace's shoulder in one enormous hand and stood, pulling the Jedi Master upright without apparent effort. Now his growl once more became words in Mace's mind.

Tell them. Tell them who is the big dog here.

Mace hung his head, careful not to meet Vastor's eye. "You are." He coughed, and blood bubbled from his smashed mouth. "You're the big dog." Nick looked stricken.

Tell them you were wrong to take my prisoners. Tell them you were wrong to let them go.

Mace kept his eyes on the ground at his feet. Blood from the shallow akk-spine gouges in his belly ran down his legs. "I was wrong to take your prisoners. I was wrong to let them go." Tell them you are sorry that you challenged me, and you will never do it again.

Mace's only motion was to glance up at the howdah on the back of the ankkox. Now after dark, the curtains were opaque. He couldn't tell if Depa was even in there.

He lowered his head once more.

"I am sorry that I challenged you. I will never challenge you again." A twitch of motion in his peripheral vision: Nick had let Mace's vest unroll from his hand.

Now he held it alongside his leg. He gave it another suggestive twitch.

Mace could feel the lightsaber within it.

He met Nick's eye. Nick deliberately looked away, miming a nonchalant whistle, while he twitched the vest one more time.

A twist of the Force-no more effort than Nick expended to wiggle the vest-would bring that lightsaber to Mace's hands.

Mace said slowly, "Kar?" Vaster hummed a yes.

"My weapon is in that vest. May I have it?" He kept his eyes fixed resolutely on the,'orpe,'ek's chest. "Please?" Vaster released his shoulder with a contemptuous shove, and extended a hand for the vest.

Nick looked at Mace with open shock, as though he'd been unexpectedly betrayed.

Mace looked at the ground.

Vaster took the vest, and pulled Mace's lightsaber out of its pocket. This is yours?

"Yes, Kar," Mace said quietly. "May I have it, please?" Vaster gave a sidelong glance at an Akk Guard, and purred something. The guard smirked, nodding.

"Please," Mace repeated humbly. "It's my only weapon. I won't be much good to anyone without it." You're not much good to anyone with it, Vaster grunted. He held it out to Mace, but when the Jedi Master extended a hesitant hand to take it, Vaster flipped it carelessly away from him.

The Akk Guard he'd purred at snatched it from the air.

The guard held it in one hand. The vibroshield on his other arm whined to life.

"Hey, Kar, c'mon, lay off, huh?" Nick's face was twisted in an ongoing wince; it was painful to pity someone previously respected. "You won, didn't you? Isn't that enough? Why do you have to be such a-" Vaster interrupted the young Korun with a backhanded cuff that knocked him to the ground.

He never even looked at him; his gaze was still on Mace Windu.

The Jedi Master seemed not even to notice Nick lying on the ground, cradling his bloodied mouth, cursing continuously into his hand. "Don't," Mace said brokenly. "Don't. You don't understand-a Jedi's lightsaber-" Can be destroyed as easily as a Jedi Master. Vastor flicked his fingers as though brushing off a fly, but before the Akk Guard could bring the lightsaber's handgrip against the edge of his shield- "Kar." Through the gauzy opacity of the curtained howdah above, Depa's voice had an eerie power, and it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

"To send him out into the jungle without his weapon would be murder, Kar. He is not the enemy." Not your enemy. Perhaps.

"Please, Kar. Keep it safe for him, and return it to him when he departs." He is departing now.

"He cannot travel," Depa said. "Can you not feel it? You hurt him, Kar. Hurt him badly. He needs rest, and medical treatment. Let us take him to the base. He can ride the ankkox with me.

Keep his lightsaber yourself. You've shown him he cannot face you without it." Vastor's inhuman stare searched the blank face of the howdah, but now night had fully fallen.

Glowvine light shimmered off the curtains, and nothing could be seen within.

Finally he gave an irritable shrug and extended a hand. The Akk Guard tossed the handgrip back to him, and Vastor tucked it into the waistband of his vine cat leather pants.

He cast Mace's vest to the ground at the Jedi Master's feet.

Did it hurt even more, knowing she was watching?

He no longer sounded mocking; this came in the tone of simple curiosity.

Slowly, painfully, like an old man protecting arthritic knees, Mace bent down to retrieve the vest. He said, "I'm not sure it could have hurt much more." You might remember that this all began because you refused to come when I told you.

This began, Mace thought, when I was summoned to the private office of Chancellor Palpatine. But he said nothing.

Because you refused to do what you were told.

"Yes," Mace said. "Yes, I remember." He picked up the vest and slipped it on. The sting of dirt in open wounds announced that the lammas tree's bark had torn his back.

If there is a next time, doshalo, it will be your last time.

"Yes, Kar. I know." He looked at Nick, who was now sitting on the ground staring balefully at Vastor. "Come on," Mace said softly. "I'll need you to help me up onto the ankkox." FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACEWlNDU Vastor was willing to let Nick help me, and treat my more serious injuries with supplies from a captured medpac. He was willing to believe the battering he'd inflicted on me was nearly crippling.

It wasn't far from the truth.

Nick was still simmering as he helped me to my feet, muttering under his breath a continuous stream of invective, characterizing Vastor as a "lizard-faced frogswallower," and a "demented scab-chewing turtlesacker" and a variety of other names that I don't feel comfortable recording, even in a private journal.

"That's enough," I told him. "I have gone to considerable trouble to keep us both alive, Nick.

I'd prefer we stay that way." I

"Oh, sure. Nice job on that." His voice was bitter, and he didn't want to meet my eyes.

I told him I was sorry about his hundred credits, and pointed out to him gently that no one had told him to bet on me.

He turned on me then, instantly furious, hissing savagely to keep his voice down, as the Akk Guards and the dogs were still milling about. "This isn't about credits! I don't care about the credits-" He stopped himself, blinking, and his familiar smile flickered briefly across his lips.

"Shee. Did I really just say that? Wow. So okay, sure, that was a lie: I care about the creds. I care a lot. But that's not why I'm angry." I nodded, and told him I understood: he was angry at me. He felt like I'd let him down.

"Not me," he said. "I mean, come on: Jedi are supposed to stand for something, aren't you?

You're supposed stand up for what's right. No matter what." Angry at me as he may have been, he still swung his head under one of my arms and held it across his shoulders, so he could help me walk.

It was appreciated. Only as the adrenaline and concussion shock were wearing off did I begin understand what a beating I had taken; later, with access to the medpac's scanner, I would discover two cracked ribs, a severe ankle sprain from the gripleaf trailer, a moderate concussion, and some internal bleeding, not to mention the bite wound on my neck and an astonishing variety of scrapes and bruises.

As Nick helped me up onto the ankkox, I discovered what had made him so angry with me: more than anything else, it was that I'd declared we had been wrong to free the prisoners.

"I don't care what you say," he muttered darkly. "I don't care what Kar says. There were kids there. And wounded. I mean: those Balawai, they weren't evil. They were just people. Like us." "Nearly everyone is." "We did the right thing, and you know it." It dawned on me then that Nick was proud of himself. Proud of what we had done. It may have been an unfamiliar feeling for him: that peculiarly delicious pride that comes from having taken a terrible risk to do something truly admirable. Of overcoming the instinct of self- preservation: of fighting our fears and winning.

It is the pride of discovering that one is not merely a bundle of reflexes and conditioned responses; that instead one is a thinking being, who can choose the right over the easy, and justice over safety. The pride Nick took in this made me proud of him, too-though of course I could not tell him so. It would only have embarrassed him, and made him regret speaking at all.

I hope I never forget the fierce conviction on his face as he helped me climb the extended leg of the ankkox and clambered up onto its dorsal shell. "Just because Kar beat you like a rented gong doesn't mean he was right. Just because he won doesn't mean you were wrong to challenge him. I can't believe you'd ever say those things." His answer came from within the curtained darkness of the howdah at the top of the curved shell.

"If you spend much time around us, Nick, you will learn." Depa's voice was strong and clear and as sane and gentle as it has always been in my heart. "You will learn that Jedi do not always tell the truth." Nick stopped, suddenly scowling as though he found himself unexpectedly deep in thought.

"Don't always-hey." he muttered suspiciously. "Hey, wait one second here-" She pulled back the curtain once more, and pushed open the small swing gate in the rail.

"Come on in. You look like you might want to lie down." "I might," I admitted. "This hasn't been my best couple of days." She took my hand to steady me as I stepped into the howdah, and she made room for me on the chaise. "I have to hand it to you, Mace," she said with a softly ironic smile. "You still take a beating as well as any man in the galaxy." Nick's eyes bulged as though his head might explode. "I knew it!" He shook a fiercely triumphant fist in my face. "I knew it. I knew you could take him!" I told him to keep it down, because Vastor and the Akk Guards were still moving through the trees nearby, and I had no idea how sharp Vastor's ears might be. I didn't tell him to shut up altogether because it wouldn't have done any good.

"I've got you figured. You hear me? I've got your Jedi butt scanned I

to the twelfth decimal point! I shoulda known you were gonna dive when you started in on Kar like that-you were spinning him up to make the confrontation more personal, like. The more you insulted him, the less he was gonna worry about taking anything out on me. And you kept on taunting him so that booting your Jedi can into next week felt so good that he basically forgave you for letting those Balawai go!" I told him he was half wrong.

"Which half?" Depa answered for me. "The part about letting Kar win." She knows me so well.

"You mean he really beat you?" Nick couldn't seem to believe it. "He really, really beat you?" "We share a bond in the Force now, Nick. Did it,'ee,' like I threw the fight?" He shook his head. "It felt like you were a smazzo drummer's trap skin." "As you said earlier: Vastor is a difficult man to lie to. He would have known if I was holding back. Then the beating would have been much worse, and he might very well have killed me.

What I did was pick a fight I knew I couldn't win." "Couldn't?" "Vastor is. very powerful. Half my age and twice my size. Training and experience can compensate only up to a point. And he is naturally ferocious in a way that no Jedi can duplicate." "You're telling me you twisted his nose like that, knowing he was gonna beat you so bad your whole family would bleed?" I shrugged."! didn't have to win. All I had to do was fight." "Kar's shatterpoint," Depa murmured. "You saw it all along." I nodded. Nick wasn't familiar with the term; when I described shatterpoint as a critical weakness, he shook his head. "I didn't see anything weak out there." With a sidelong glance at Depa's thoughtful frown, I quoted Yoda: "You see, but you do not see.

"Kar's great strength is his instinctive connection to pelekotan. The jungle lives in him as much as he lives in it. And like I keep telling you: even in the jungle, there are rules." I explained that a fight between Kar and myself was inevitable: two alpha males in the same pack. I could smell it on him even during the battle at the outpost when we first met. My only hope of a good outcome was to make it personal and immediate.

And unarmed.

If the fight hadn't happened, he and the Akk Guards might very well have killed Nick and me both for setting free the prisoners. If he and I had gone at it blade to shield, I would be dead now-even if I'd killed him, the guards and the dogs would have torn me to shreds-and Depa, too, if she'd tried to save me; we'd only barely survived being attacked by three akks in the Circus Horrificus.

Against a dozen- Well. It didn't happen that way. Because I knew what Kar really wanted, in the grip, as he was, of his alpha-male jungle instincts.

He wanted me to submit.

And like many other pack hunters, once his rival submitted, his instincts led him to allow that rival to peacefully sniff around the fringes of his pack-so long as I did not renew my challenge.

"That's why you gave him your lightsaber? So he wouldn't feel threatened?" I shook my head, and for a moment I was tempted to smile. "No, I would have let him cut it up." "You would?" "If it would make him more comfortable with letting me stay? Of course. A lightsaber can be repaired or rebuilt. But I admit, Depa's idea was a stroke of genius." She smiled at me. "I am a bit proud of myself for that." Nick again expressed his confusion, and I explained. "Even with the Force, I can't pick Kar out from the jungle around us. He is so much a part of it, and it of him, that he is practically invisible. My lightsaber, on the other hand-" "I get it!" Nick breathed. "As long as he carries it-" "Exactly." I could feel it even now: I knew without thinking its precise position relative to my own. "It is a bell collar that Depa managed to buckle onto a singularly ferocious vine cat." "Wow. I mean, wow. Y'know, everybody hears about how scary Jedi are-but those stories aren't the half of it," he said. "Your real powers don't have anything to do with lightsabers or picking up things with your minds." Nick shook his head uncomprehendingly.

"It's not natural-not just taking the beating, but bowing down like that. and being able to come up with stuff like giving Kar the lightsaber-" "It requires a certain detachment of mind. When your emotions are not involved, answers are often obvious." "It's still not natural. Can I just say, here, how much you two creep me out?" "When I was Mace's student," Depa mused, "he would often remind me that nothing about being a Jedi is natural." "I thought you guys were all about going with the flow and using your instincts and stuff." "The difference," I said, "lies in the instincts themselves. It is possible for an untrained Force- user to wield as much power as the greatest of Jedi-look at Kar. But untrained, the instincts he falls back on are those granted him by nature. It is another of the central paradoxes of the Jedi: the 'instincts' we use are not instinctive at all. They are the product of training so intense that they replace our natural ones. That's why Jedi must begin at such an early age. To replace our natural instincts-ter-ritoriality, selfishness, anger, fear, and the like-with the Jedi 'instincts' of service, serenity, selflessness, and compassion. The oldest child ever accepted for training was nine- and there was much debate over that. A debate that has continued, I might add, for more than ten years.

"Being a Jedi is a discipline imposed upon nature, just as civilization is, at its root, a discipline imposed upon the natural impulses of sentient beings.

"Because peace is an unnatural state.

"Peace is a product of civilization. The myth of the peaceful savage is precisely that: a myth.

Without civilization, all existence is only the jungle. Go to your peaceful savage and burn his crops, or slaughter his herds, or kick him off his hunting grounds. You'll find that he will not remain peaceful for long. Isn't that exactly what happened here on Haruun Kal?

"Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are.

Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.

"Kar's power comes from natural instinct-but he is also ruled by instinct, in a way no Jedi ever is. A single Jedi who succumbs to his natural drives for power, for respect, for success or revenge, could do damage that is literally unimaginable." "Mace," Depa interrupted me softly, "are we still talking about Kar? Or is this about Dooku?" Or, I wondered silently, was it about her.

I sighed and lowered my head, suddenly aware of how exhausted I was. But still I finished the thought, less for Nick's benefit than for Depa's.

And my own.

"Our only hope, against beings whose instincts control them, is to absolutely and utterly control our own." -

JEDI OF THE FUTURE N

ight in the jungle.

Korun bedrolls scattered in clumps. Low voices blending into the background mutter of the jungle. Smells of hotpack ration squares and smoke from homemade cigarras of green rashallo leaves.

Mace sat on a borrowed bedroll a few meters from where Depa's wallet tent had been pitched in an abandoned ruskakk nest under a tangled arch of thyssel bushes. While Nick treated his injuries, he had been watching her vague silhouette cast on the tent wall by the light of a captured glow rod.

When the light winked out, it was as though she'd never even been there.

The muddy pastel pulse of glowvine light had Nick squinting at the medpac's scanner.

"Looks like we took care of your internal bleeding," he said. "One more shot of anti- inflammatory, to keep the concussion swelling in your brain under control." Mace leaned his head to one side as Nick pressed the spray hypo against his carotid artery.

The Jedi Master stared sightlessly off through the night; he didn't even feel the brief sting of the injection.

He was tracking his lightsaber.

"He's not settling," Mace said.

IL "Who's not what?" "Vastor. He's pacing. Circling. Like a rancor staked out in the desert." "You surprised?" "I shouldn't be. He probably senses that even though the fight was real, my submission was fake. He's just not sure what to do about it." Nick clipped the spray hypo back into its receptacle. "Unless your idea of fun is quality time with me and a medpac, I'd suggest you stay out of his way." He tapped the bacta patch that covered the bite wound on Mace's trapezius. "You wouldn't believe how many different kinds of lethal bacteria I found in there. I do not want to know what he's been eating." "I am less concerned with what he's eating," Mace said, "than with what's eating him." "One easy guess." Nick nodded toward Depa's tent. "How is she?" Mace shrugged. "As you saw." "No-I mean, that whole dark side crap. Like what we were talking about before I left you at the outpost." "I. can't say." Mace's habitual frown deepened. "I would like to say she's fine. But what I would like has little to do with what is. She seems. unstable." "Well, y'know, a few months in the war could do that to anybody." "That's what I'm afraid of." FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU I am not sure what time it is. After midnight, I suspect, with some hours to go before dawn. I cannot be more accurate, as this datapad's chronometer function has suffered the same fate as its concealed transmitter. There is a time of night here when even the glowvines mute their light, and the prowling predators go quiet, and sleep seems the only activity that has meaning.

Yet here I am awake, though I have slept little in the past three days.

It was Depa's scream that woke me.

A raw shriek of impossible anguish, it yanked me from nightmares of my own. It was not fear, that scream, but suffering so profound that it could have no other expression.

Her scream woke her as well, and her first thought was to open her tent and exhaustedly reassure us that it had been only a dream. That seems always to be her first thought: to reassure the Korunnai, and me. From this I take considerable comfort.

It's the third time this has happened so far tonight.

And yet-injured as I am, and unused to sleeping on a Korun bedroll on the open ground- I find I have slept as well as I have yet managed on this planet.

Depa's screams are a mercy.

Because my own nightmares don't wake me.

My nightmares suck me down, drowning me in a blind gluey chaos of anxiety and pain; they are more than simple anxiety dreams of wounds or suffering or the varieties of gruesome maiming, dismemberment, and death available in the jungle.

In my dreams here, I have seen the destruction of the Jedi. The death of the Republic. I have seen the Temple in ruins, the Senate smashed, and Coruscant itself shattered by orbital bombardment from immense ships of impossible design. I have seen Coruscant, the seat of galactic culture, become a jungle far more hostile and alien than any on Haruun Kal.

I have seen the end of civilization.

Depa's screams bring me back to the jungle and the night.

A week ago, I could not have imagined that to wake up in this jungle would be a relief.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Tomorrow we leave this place.

This is what I've been telling myself all day long, riding cross-legged on the ankkox's shell, talking with Depa. I should say: listening to her, for she seems to hear me only when it suits her.

All day, I left the shell only to stretch my legs or relieve myself. and sometimes as I would climb up the shell to my spot, she'd be talking already, in that same low blurry murmur she used to speak with me-as though our conversation had been going on in her head, and my arrival was only a detail.

When the gunships came and rained fire upon us, or blasted away randomly with their cannons, the guerrillas who were lucky enough to be near the ankkox often ducked beneath it for shelter, but Depa never did, so neither did I. She lay on her chaise within the howdah, and I sometimes leaned my back against its polished rail, so that her soft voice drifted in over my shoulder.

We covered many kilometers today. The ground is rising; as the jungle thins we can move much more swiftly. It is not for nothing that a Korun does not speak of distance in kilometers, but in travel time.

The same thinning of the jungle that increases our speed also leaves us more exposed to the gunships that seem now to be patrolling in an organized search pattern.

I have much to tell of this day that has passed, and yet it's difficult for me to begin. I can only think of tomorrow, of meeting Nick, and finally calling down the Halleck to carry us away.

I burn for it.

I have discovered that I hate this place.

Not very Jedi of me, but I cannot deny it. I hate the damp, and the smell, and the heat, and the sweat that trickles constantly around my eyebrows, trails down my cheeks, and drips from the point of my chin. I hate the stupid bovine complacency of the grassers, and the feral snarls of the half-wild akk dogs. I hate the gripleaves, and the brass-vines, the portaak trees and thyssel bushes.

I hate the darkness under the trees.

I hate the war.

I hate what it's done to these people. To Depa.

I hate what it's doing to me.

The Halleck will be cool. It will be clean. The food will have no mold or rot or insect eggs.

I know already what I will do first, aboard ship. Before I even visit the bridge to salute the captain.

I will take a shower.

The last time I was clean was on the shuttle, in orbit. Now I wonder if I'll ever be clean again.

When I stepped off the shuttle at the Pelek Baw spaceport, I remember looking up at the white peak of Grandfather's Shoulder, and thinking that I had spent far too much time on Coruscant.

What a fool I was.

As Depa described me: Blind, ignorant, arrogant fool.

I was afraid to learn how bad things might be here, and the worst of my fears didn't even approach the truth.

I can't- I feel my lightsaber coming this way. I will continue later.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Kar was ostensibly stopping at Depa's tent to discuss tomorrow's march before she settles in for the night; I suspect that his true aim was to check on me.

I hope he is satisfied by what he found.

This morning, I asked Depa why she hadn't left when the Separatists pulled back to Gevarno and Opari. Why she clearly would stay even now, were I not extorting her cooperation.

"There is fighting to be done. Can a Jedi walk away?" Her voice was muffled, coming through the curtains. She did not invite me inside this morning, and I did not ask why.

I'm afraid that she was in a state that neither of us wanted me to see.

"To fight on after the battle is done-Depa, that is not Jedi," I told her. "That's the dark." "War is not about light or dark. It is about winning. Or dying." "But here you've already won." I thought back to the words of my strange waking dream.

Her words, or the Force's, I did not know.

"Perhaps I have. But look around you: is what you see a victorious army? Or are they ragged fugitives, spending the last of their strength to stay a step ahead of the gallows?" I have enormous sympathy for them: for their suffering and their desperate struggle. It is never far from my thoughts that only chance-a whim of Jedi anthropologists and the choice of some elders of ghosh Windu-separates their fate from my own.

I could too easily have grown to become Kar Vaster myself.

But I said none of this to Depa; my purpose here was not to muse upon the twists in the endless river that is the Force.

"I understand their war," I told her. "It's very clear to me why they fight. My question is: Why are you still fighting?" "Can't you feel it?" And when she spoke, I could: in the Force, a relentless pulse of fear and hatred, like what I had felt from Nick and Chalk and Besh and. Lesh in the groundcar, but here amplified as though the jungle had become a planetwide resonance chamber. It was hate that kept the Korunnai fighting on, as though this whole people shared a single dream: that all Balawai might have a single skull, bent for a Korun mace.

She said: "Yes: our battle is won. Theirs goes on. It will never be over, not while one of them still lives. The Balawai will never stop coming. We used these people for our own purposes- and we got what we wanted. Should I now throw them away? Abandon them to genocide, because they are no longer useful? Is that what the Council orders me to do?" "You prefer to stay and fight a war that is not yours?" Her voice gathered heat. "They need me, Mace. I am their only hope." That heat quickly faded, though, and she went back to her exhausted mumble. "I've done. things. Questionable things. I know. But I have seen. Mace, you cannot imagine what I have seen. As bad as it is-as bad as I am. Search the Force. You can feel how much worse everything could be. How much worse it will be." With this, I could not argue.

"Look around you." Her mumble took on a bitter edge. "Think about everything you've seen.

This is a little war, Mace. A little sputtering on-again, off-again series of inconclusive skirmishes. Until the Republic and the Confederacy mixed into it, it was practically a sporting event. But look at what it's done to these people. Imagine what war will do to those who've never known it. Imagine infantry battles in the fields of Alderaan. DOKAWs striking spacescrapers on Coruscant. Imagine what the galaxy will be if the Clone War turns serious." I told her it was already serious, and she laughed at me. "You haven't seen serious yet." I told her I was looking at it.

And I think, now, of the clone troopers on the Halleck, and how their clean crisp unquestioning bravery and discipline under fire is as far from these ragged murderers as it is possible to be for members of the same species. and I remember that the Grand Army of the Republic numbers 1.2 million clone troopers-just enough to station a single trooper-one lone man-on each planet of the Republic, and have a handful of thousands left over.

If this Clone War escalates the way Depa seems to think it will, it will be fought not by clones and Jedi and battle droids, but by ordinary people. Ordinary people who will face one stark choice: to die, or to become like these Korunnai. Ordinary people who will have to leave forever the Galaxy of Peace.

I can only hope that war is easier on those who cannot touch the Force.

Though I suspect the truth is exactly opposite.

There were hours, too, when we did not speak. I sat beside the how-dah while she dozed in the afternoon heat, drowsy myself with the ankkox's rocking gait and the unchanging flow of the trees and vines and flowers, and I listened to her dream-mumbles, and was shocked, sometimes, by her sudden nightmare shrieks, or the agonized moans that her migraines might pull from her lips.

She seems to suffer from an intermittent fever. Sometimes her speech becomes a disjointed ramble through imaginary conversations that shift from subject to subject with hallucinatory randomness. Sometimes her pronouncements have an eerie sibylline quality, as though she prophesied a future that had no past. I've occasionally tried to record these on this datapad, but somehow her voice never comes through.

As though our talks are my own hallucination.

And if so- Does it matter?

Even a lie of the Force is more true than any reality we can comprehend.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Much of the day we spent talking about Kar Vaster. Depa has spared me many of the less savory details, but she has told me enough.

More than enough.

For example: when he calls me doshalo, it's not just an expression. If what he has told Depa is the truth, Kar Vaster and I are the last of the Windu.

The ghosh into which I was born-and with which I lived for those months in my teens, while I returned to learn some of the Korun Force skills-has apparently been destroyed piecemeal over the past thirty years. Not in any great massacre, or climactic last stand, but by the simple, brutal mathematics of attrition: my ghosh is just another statistical casualty of a simmering guerrilla war against an enemy more numerous, better armed, and equally ruthless.

Depa told me this hesitantly, as though it were horrible news that must be broken gently.

And perhaps it is. I cannot say. She seems to think it should matter a great deal to me. And perhaps it should.

But I am more thoroughly Jedi than I am Korun.

When I think of my doshallai dead and scattered, Windu heritage and traditions perishing in blood and darkness, I feel only abstract sadness.

Any tale of pointless suffering and loss is sad, to me.

I would change them all if I could. Not just my own.

I would certainly change Kar's.

It seems that as a young man, Kar Vaster was fairly ordinary: more in touch with pelekotan than most, but not in any other way unsual. It was the Summertime War that changed him, as it has changed so much on this world.

When he was fourteen, he saw his whole family massacred by jungle prospectors: one of the casual atrocities that characterize this war.

I do not know how it is that he alone escaped; the stories Depa has heard from various Korunnai are contradictory. Kar himself, it seems, will not discuss it.

What we do know is that after witnessing the murders of his entire family, he was left alone in the jungle: without weapons, without grassers, without akks or people, food or supplies of any kind. And that he lived in the jungle-alone-for more than a standard year.

This is what he meant when he said he had survived tan pel'trokal.

The term has an irony that only now do I begin to appreciate.

The tan pel'trokal is a penalty devised by Korun culture, to punish crimes deserving death.

Knowing that human judgment is fallible, the Korunnai leave the final disposition of the sentence to the jungle itself; they consider it a mercy.

I would say: it is a mercy they grant themselves. Thus can they take life without the shame of bloodied hands.

In Kar's case, he faced his tan pel'trokal for the crime of being Korun. He was as innocent-and as guilty-as the Balawai children to whom he was planning to do the same.

Their crimes were identical: they were born into the wrong family.

He was, at the time, perhaps a year older than Keela.

But there was no Jedi nearby to save him, and so he had to save himself.

I believe that his ability to form human speech was part of the price he paid for his survival.

All Jedi know that power must be paid for; the Force maintains a balance that cannot be defied.

Pelekotan traded him power for his humanity.

I sometimes wonder if the Force does the same for Jedi.

He and his Akk Guards clearly have much in common with Jedi: they seem to be our reflections in a dark mirror. They rely on instinct; Jedi rely on training. They use anger and aggression as sources of power; our power is based upon serenity and defense. Even the weapon he and his Akk Guards carry is a twisted mirror image of ours.

I use my sword as a shield. They use their shields as swords.

Depa tells me that these "vibroshields" are Kar's own design. Vibro-axes are common equipment among jungle prospectors, used for harvesting lumber and clearing paths through stands too thick for their steamcrawlers to crush through; since the sonic generators that power vibro-axes are fully sealed, they are remarkably resistant to the metal-eating molds and fungi.

And the metal itself. well, that's an interesting story of its own. It seems to be an alloy that the fungi don't attack. It is extremely hard, and never loses its edge. Nor does it rust, or even tarnish.

It also seems to be a superconductor.

This is why my blade could not cut it: the entire shield is always the same temperature throughout. Even the energy of a lightsaber is instantly conducted away. Hold a blade against it long enough and the whole thing will melt, but it cannot be cut. Not by an energy blade.

File the data.

When Kar accepts a man into his Akk Guards, the man builds his own weapons, not unlike the tradition in the spirit of which Jedi construct our lightsabers.

It strikes me now that Kar may have hit upon this idea from stories of Jedi training I shared with my long-lost friends in ghosh Windu, thirty-five years and more ago: Korunnai have a living oral tradition, and stories are passed through families as treasured possessions.

I have not shared this speculation with Depa.

And Depa swears that she did not teach Kar and his guards the Jedi skill of interception; she says Kar knew this already when she first met him. If what she says is true, he must have taught himself-and he probably got the idea from those same stories that I, in my thoughtless youth, innocently shared with my innocent friends.

And so: in some odd, circuitous way, Kar Vaster may be my fault.

The source of this metal is a mystery; though Kar never speaks of it to anyone, I believe I know what it is.

Starship armor.

Thousands of years ago-before the Sith War-when shield generators were so massive that only the largest capital ships could carry them, smaller starships were armored with a mirrorlike superconducting alloy, which was sufficient to resist the low-fire-rate laser cannons of the day.

I think Kar, somewhere out in the jungle of the Korunnai Highland, I

sometime during his yearlong tan pel'trokal, had stumbled upon the ancient Jedi starship whose crash stranded on this planet his ancestors, and my own.

It was earlier this evening that I learned the real truth of Kar Vastor. Not only who he is, and why he is- But what he means.

Somewhere along our line of march Kar had located a cave that he deemed adequate to shelter a fire from gunship or satellite detection, and that night he set about curing Besh's and Chalk's fever wasp infestation. Besh and Chalk had remained in thanatizine suspension, tied to a grasser's travois like a bundle of cargo. The crude hacking Terrel had done to them had been mostly repaired with tissue binders from a captured medpac, though of course the wounds could not heal; the body's healing processes are suspended by thanatizine as well.

Depa was in attendance, as was I, as well as a select few others. A pair of the Akk Guards had carried her, chaise and all, in from her howdah. She lay back with one slim arm across her eyes; she was having another of her headaches, and the light from the fire of tyruun, the local wood that burns white-hot, was causing her pain. I suspect she might have preferred to skip the whole business.

Even so, when Kar laid the still forms of Besh and Chalk facedown on the mossy floor of the cave and tore open the backs of their tunics, Depa stirred and sat forward. Though she continued to shade her eyes, firelight gave them glitters of silver and red. She watched raptly, her small white teeth fixed in her lower lip, worrying the corner of her mouth near the burn scar.

Kar simply squatted beside the two, humming tunelessly under his breath, while a Korun I did not recognize injected them with the antidote. Vastor's humming deepened, and found a pulsing rhythm like the slow beat of a human heart. He extended his hands, and closed his eyes, and hummed, and I could feel motion in the Force, a swirl of power very unlike any I've felt from a Jedi healer-or anyone else, for that matter.

A streak of red painted itself along their spines, and a moment later this red suddenly blossomed into the glistening wetness of fresh blood oozing through their skin-and details, I suppose, are unnecessary. Suffice it to say that Kar had somehow used the Force-used pelekotan-to persuade the fever wasp larvae that they were in the wrong place to hatch: using the same animal tropism that draws them from the site of the wasp sting to cluster along the victim's central nervous system, Kar induced them to migrate- Out of Besh and Chalk entirely.

And such was his power that the entire wriggling mass of them-nearly a kilo all told- squirmed its way straight into the tyruun blaze, where the larvae popped while they roasted with a stench like burning hair.

In the midst of this extraordinary display, Depa leaned close to me and whispered, "Don't you ever wonder if we might be wrong?" I didn't understand what she was talking about, and she waved her fine-boned hand vaguely toward Vastor. "Such power-and such control-and never a day of training. Because what he does is natural: as natural as the jungle itself. We Jedi train our entire lives: to control our natural emotions, to overcome our natural desires. We give up so much for our power. And what Jedi could have done this?" I could not answer; Vastor has power on the scale of Master Yoda, or young Anakin Skywalker. And I had no desire to debate with Depa on Jedi tradition, and the necessary distinction between dark and light.

So I tried to change the subject.

I told her that Nick had shared with me the truth of the faked massacre and her message on the data wafer, and I reminded her that she had yesterday alluded to having some plan for me: something she wanted to teach me, or to show me. So I asked her.

I asked what she had hoped to accomplish by drawing me here.

I asked what are her victory conditions.

She said that she wanted to tell me something. That's all. It was a message she could have sent on a subspace squawk: a line or two, no more. But I had to be in the war-see the war, eat and drink, breathe and smell the war-or I wouldn't have believed it.

She told me: "The Jedi will lose." There in the cave, as fever wasp larvae snapped and crackled in the tyruun flames, I countered with numbers: there are still ten times as many Loyalist systems as Separatist, the Republic has a titanic manufacturing base, and huge advantages in resources. the beginnings of a whole list of reasons the Republic will inevitably win.

"Oh, I know," was her response. "The Republic may very well win. But the Jedi will lose." I said I did not understand, but I now believe that is not true. The truth, I think, is what the Force said to me in the image of Depa back at the outpost: that I already understand all there is to understand.

I just don't want to believe it.

She said that I had foreshadowed the defeat of the Jedi myself. "The reason you freed the Balawai, Mace," she said, "is the same reason that the Jedi will be destroyed." War is a horror, she said. Her words: "A horror. But what you don't understand is that it must be a horror. That's how wars are won: by inflicting such terrible suffering upon the enemy that they can no longer bear to fight. You cannot treat war like law enforcement, Mace. You can't fight to protect the innocent-because no one is innocent." She said something similar to what Nick had said about the jungle prospectors: that there are no civilians.

"The innocent citizens of the Confederacy are the ones who make it possible for their leaders to wage war on us: they build the ships, they grow the food, mine the metals, purify the water. And only they can stop the war: only their suffering will bring it to a close." "But you can't expect Jedi to stand by while ordinary people are hurt and killed-" I began.

"Exactly. That is why we cannot win: to win this war, we must no longer be Jedi." She speaks of this in the future tense, though I suspect that in her heart-in her conscience-the Jedi are dead already. "Like dropping a bomb into the arena on Ceonosis: we can save the Republic, Mace. We can. But the cost will be our principles. In the end, isn't that what Jedi are for? We sacrifice everything for the Republic: our families, our homeworlds, our wealth, even our lives. Now the Republic needs us to sacrifice our consciences as well. Can we refuse? Are Jedi traditions more important than the lives of billions?" She told me how she and Kar Vastor had managed to drive the Separatists off this world.

The CIS had been using the Pelek Baw spaceport as a base for the repair, refit, and resupply of the droid starfighters they used to picket the Al" Har system. These operations required large numbers of civilian employees. Her strategy was simple: she proved to these civilian employees that the Separatist military and the Balawai militia together were powerless to protect them.

There was no pitched battle. Nothing heroic or colorful. Just an unending series of gruesome killings. One or two at a time. At first, the Separatists had flooded Pelek Baw with their forces-but battle droids are as vulnerable to the metal-eating fungi as are simple blasters, and soldiers of flesh and blood die just as easily as civilians. The essence of guerrilla warfare: the real target is not the enemy's emplacements, or even their lives.

The target is the enemy's will to fight.

Wars are won not by killing enemies, but by terrorizing them until they give up and go home.

"That's why I brought you to Haruun Kal," she said. "I wanted to show you what winning soldiers will look like." She pointed past the fire. "That is the Jedi of the future, Mace. Right there." She was pointing at Kar Vastor.

Which is why at this black hour, long after midnight and long before dawn, as the glowvines weaken and predators go quiet, when only sleep has meaning, I lie upon my bedroll and stare at the black leaves above, and think of tomorrow.

Tomorrow we leave this place.

Back to worlds where showers are just clean water, instead of pro-bi mist. Back to worlds where we sleep indoors, on bedrolls, with clean bleached-fiber sheets.

Back to worlds that still lie, however temporarily, within the Galaxy of Peace.

FINAL ENTRY T

he air above the Lorshan Pass was so clear that the sky-colored peak Mace could barely discern in the distant south might have been Grandfather's Shoulder itself. There was a pall of brown haze down in that direction that he suspected was the smog over Pelek Baw. In the nearer distance, tiny silver flecks of gunships patrolled the jungle canopy below the pass. A lot of gunships: Mace had counted at least six flights, possibly as many as ten, weaving among the hills.

The occasional silent flash of cannonfire, or curling black smoke from flame projectors, he actually found comforting: it meant the militia thought the guerrillas were still down among the trees.

He sat cross-legged on the shadowed dirt of the cave mouth's floor, his datapad slung on his shoulder. Only two meters away, brilliant late-afternoon sunlight slanted across the cliffside meadow: a grassy sward, relatively flat for a few tens of meters before it curled over the lip of the cliff and dropped half a klick to the pass below.

Easily large enough for a Republic Sienar Systems Jadfhu-clzss lander.

Mace determinedly avoided staring up into the sky. It would get there when it got there.

Only minutes to go, now.

He found himself tallying the list of injuries Haruun Kal had inflicted upon him, from the stun- blast bruises through flame burns, cracked ribs, a concussion, and a human bite wound. Not to mention innumerable insect bites and stings, some kind of rash on his right thigh, and blistering around his toes that was probably a persistent fungal infection.

And those were only the physical injuries. They would heal.

The nonphysical injuries-to his confidence, his principles, his moral certainties. to his heart- Those couldn't be treated with spray bandages and a bacta patch.

Behind him, Nick's pacing had scuffed a path through the thin layer of dirt to the stone of the cave floor. He picked up his rifle from where it leaned against the wall, checked the action for the dozenth time, and set it back down again. He did the same with the slug pistol holstered at his thigh, then looked around for something else to do. Not finding anything, he went back to pacing. "How much longer?" "Not long." "That's what you said the last three times I asked." "I suppose it depends on what you mean by long." "You sure she's coming?" "Yes," Mace lied.

"What if they get here before she does? I mean, we're not gonna have time to lag around waiting for her-not with gunships and who-knows-what-all tracking the lander through the atmosphere. If she's not here-" "We'll worry about that if it happens." "Yeah." Nick started pacing from the back to the front of the cave, instead of side to side.

"Yeah." "Nick." "Yeah?" "Settle down." The young Korun stopped, winced an apology at Mace, adjusted his tunic, and ran his thumbs around the drawstring waistband of his pants as though they were chafing him. "I don't like waiting." "I've noticed." Nick squatted alongside the Jedi Master and nodded at the data-pad. "Got any games on that thing? Shee, I'd even play dejarik. And I hate dejarik." Mace shook his head. "It's my journal." "I've seen you talking into it. Like a diary?" "Something like that. It's a personal log of my experiences on Haruun Kal. For the Temple Archives." "Wow. Am I'm there?" "Yes. And Chalk, and Besh, and Lesh. Depa and Kar Vaster, and the children from the outpost-" "Wow," Nick repeated. "I mean, wow. That's really cool. Do all Jedi do that?" Mace stared out over the rugged terrain below the pass. "I don't think Depa has." He sighed, and once more stopped himself from checking the sky. "Why do you ask?" "It's just-well, it's weird, y'know? Thinking about it. I'm gonna be in the Jedi Archives." "Yes." "Twenty-five thousand years of records. It's like-like I'll be part of the history of the whole galaxy!" "You would be, regardless." "Oh, yeah, sure, I know: everybody is. But not everybody's in the Jedi Archives, are they? I mean, my name'll be there forever. It's like being immortal." Mace thought of Lesh, and of Phloremirlla Tenk. Of Terrel and Rankin. Of corpses burned to namelessness, left on the ground at the outpost.

"It is," he said slowly, "as close to immortality as any of us will ever come." "Could I listen to some?" Nick tried an encouraging nod. "Not like I'm nosy or anything. But it'd pass the time-" "Are you certain you want to know what I think of you?" "Sure I'm-why? Is it bad?" he asked with an anticipatory wince. "It's really bad, isn't it." "I am teasing you, Nick. I can't play it for you. It's encrypted, and only the archive masters at the Temple have the code key." "What, you can't even listen to it yourself?" Mace hefted the datapad in his hand; it seemed such a small, insubstantial thing, to carry so much doubt and pain.

"Not only does encryption keep its contents secure, it protects me from the temptation to go back and edit entries to make myself look better." "You'd do that?" "The opportunity has not presented itself. If I had the chance. I can't really say. I hope that I would resist. But Jedi or not, I am still human." He shrugged. "I should make a last entry, preparatory to my formal report to the Council on our return to Coruscant." "Can I listen?" "I suppose you can. I have nothing to say that you don't already know." FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU [FINAL HARUUN KAL ENTRY] Major Rostu and I wait in a cave at the Korun base in the Lorshan Pass; Depa- [Male voice identified as NICK ROSTU, major (bvt), GAR]: "Hey, is that on? So they can, like, hear me?" Yes. It's- [Rostu]: "Wow. So some weird alien Jedi a thousand years from now can pull this out and it'll be like I'm saying Hi to him from a thousand years ago, huh? Hi, you creepy Jedi monkeyhunker, whoever you-" Major.

[Rostu]: "Yeah, I know: Shut up, Nick." [sound of a heavy sigh] Depa is to meet us here.

She has some strategem to get Kar Vaster and his Akk Guards far enough away for us all to make a clean extraction; she did not offer details, and I did not ask.

I was afraid to hear what she might have told me.

The signal was sent early this morning, using the same technique her sporadic reports had.

Instead of a straight subspace transmission-which would be intercepted by the militia's satellites and allow them to pinpoint our location-she broadcast the coded extraction call on a normal comm channel, using a tight beam that they bounced to the HoloNet satellite off one of the mountains within our line of sight; the comm signal also contains a Jedi priority override code that hijacks part of the local HoloNet capacity, and uses that to send the actual extraction code to the Haileck. It is very safe, though there is always data loss from beam scatter.

I heard the acknowledgment myself, in the base's comm station.

The Haileck is on its way.

We arrived at this base about a standard hour after sunrise. The Haileck is probably insystem by now. The base itself is. not what I was expecting.

It's less a military base than an underground refugee camp.

The complex is enormous, a randomly dug hive that honeycombs the whole north wall of the pass; a number of access tunnels extend well downslope, to concealed caves deep in the jungle.

Some of the caverns are natural: volcanic bubbles and water channels eroded by drainage from the snowcapped peaks above. The inhabited caverns have been artificially enlarged and smoothed. Though there is no mining industry on Haruun Kal, and thus no excavation equipment to be had, a vibro-ax cuts stone almost as easily as wood; many of the smaller chambers have pallet beds, tables, and benches of stone cut and dressed by such blades.

Which would make it relatively comfortable, were it not so crowded.

Thousands of Korunnai cram these caverns and tunnels and caves, and more trickle in every day. These are the noncombatants: the spouses and the parents, the sick and the wounded. And the children.

The global lack of mining equipment means that ventilation is necessarily rudimentary, and sanitation virtually nonexistent. Pneumonia is rampant; antibiotics are the first thing to run out in the captured med-pacs, and there is nowhere in the caverns one can go and not hear people wheezing as they struggle to pull their next breath into wet, clogged lungs. Dysentery claims lives among the elderly and the wounded, and with sanitation basically at the level of buckets, it will only get worse.

The largest caverns have been given over to the grassers. All the arriving Korunnai bring whatever grassers survive the trip; even in wartime, the Fourth Pillar holds them in its grip.

These grassers spend their days crowded together with no food and little room to move; they are all sickly, and restive. There have been fights between members of different herds, and I am told several die each day: victims of wounds from fighting, or infectious disease from the close quarters. Some, it seems, simply surrender their will to live; they lie down and refuse to get up, and eventually starve.

The Korunnai tend them as best they can; improvised fences of piled cut rock separate the various herds, and they are driven out the access tunnels in turns to forage in the jungles below the pass, under the watchful eyes of herding akks. But even this half measure is becoming problematic: as more and more grassers arrive, the Korunnai must take the herds farther and farther afield, to avoid thinning the jungle so much that it might reveal the base's location.

I do understand, now, why Depa doesn't want to leave.

We rode her ankkox right up one of the concealed tunnels. When we left the gloom of the jungle for the deeper darkness underground, Depa pulled back the curtains of her howdah and moved forward to the chair mounted on the beast's crown armor, and she seemed to inhale serenity with the thick stinking air.

Everyone we passed-everyone we saw- There was no cheering, or even shouts; the welcome she got was more profound than anything that can be expressed by voice.

A woman, huddled against a sweating stone wall, caught sight of Depa, and pushed herself forward, and her face might have been a flower opening toward the sun. Depa's mere presence brought light to her eyes, and strength to her legs. The woman struggled to rise, pulling herself up the tunnel wall then leaning upon it for support, and she stretched a hand toward us, and when Depa gave her a nod of acknowledgment, the woman's hand closed to catch Depa's gaze from the air; she pressed that closed hand to her breast as though that one simple glance was precious.

Sacred.

As though it was exactly the one thing she needed to keep on living.

And that's what our welcome here was: that woman, multiplied by thousands. The warriors and the wounded. The aged. The sick and the infirm, the children- Depa is more than a Jedi to them. Not a goddess-Force-users themselves, they are not easily impressed by Jedi powers. She is, I think, a totem. She is to them what a Jedi should be to everyone, but writ so large upon their hearts that it has become a form of madness.

She is their hope.

[Rostu]: "It's true, y'know." Nick?

[Rostu]: "You think things are bad here? Okay, sure: they're bad. Not just here here. The whole highland. Bad enough. But you got no idea what it was before Depa-y'know, we're not the bad guys here." No one has suggested that you are. Nor are you the good guys. I haven't seen any good guys.

[Rostu]: "So far? I've seen one. No: two." You have?

[Rostu]: "All that good guy, bad guy stuff goes out the air lock pretty fast, doesn't it? I mean, you know why Pelek Baw withdrew from the Republic? It's got nothing to do with 'corruption in the Senate' and all that political tusker poop, either. The Balawai joined the Confederacy because the seppies promised to respect their sovereignty. Get it? Planetary rights. And the only planetary right the Balawai care about is the right to kill us all. The seppies park their droid starfighters and support staff at the spaceport, and all of a sudden the militia has an unlimited supply of gunships, and the Balawai have made it illegal for a Korun to be outside the city limits of Pelek Baw, and pretty soon they start rounding up Korunnai from inside the city, too-not everybody, you understand, just the criminals. The beggars, and street kids. And troublemakers. For the record, a troublemaker is any Korun who says Word One about the way we're treated.

"They had a camp for us. I was there. That's where Depa found us. You think things are ugly here? You should see what she saved us from.

"So maybe we went from living there to dying here. So? You think there's a difference? You think that was better?

"You go live in a cage if you want. Me? I'll die a free man. That's what Depa is to us.

"That's who you're taking away." She would be leaving you soon, regardless.

[Rostu]: "Says you." She is dying, Nick. The war is killing her. This planet is killing her.

The Korunnai are killing her.

[Rostu]: "Nobody here would ever hurt her-" Not on purpose.

But she is drowning in your anger, Nick.

[Rostu]: "Hey, I'm just mildly cranky." Not you personally. Ail of you. This whole place.

The unending violence. without hope, or remedy.

A Jedi's connection to the Force amplifies everything about us: it invests our smallest actions with the greatest conceivable weight. It makes us more of whatever we already are. If we are calm, it gives us serenity. If we are angry, it fills us with the rage of a god. Anger is a trap. You might think of it as a narcotic, not unlike glitterstim. Even the slightest taste can leave you with an appetite that never fades.

This is why we Jedi must strive always to build peace within ourselves: what is within will be reflected by what is without. The Force is One. We are part of the Force; it will always be, at least partially, whatever we are.

Just as it is too late for Kar Vaster to become a Jedi, it is too late for Depa to become a lorpelek. She is willing to give her life to help your people. Are you willing to take it?

[Rostu]: "Hey, don't look at me like that. I'm onyour side, remember?" So.

The Halleck must be insystem by now; we should be seeing a lander's vapor trail any minute.

And Depa is headed up to meet us.

[Rostu]: "She is? What, you can feel her?" Not directly. But-characteristically-part of her plan to keep Kar and his Akk Guards out of our way included retrieving my lightsaber. In details like this-these little considerations, her automatic kindness-I find my hope that she is not wholly lost.

Though I can rebuild my blade, she- There was a sadness- Melancholy resignation: that is the best I can describe her expression, when she promised my lightsaber's return. Though the weapon is itself no great thing, she seemed near tears.

"I could not bear for your journey here to cost you anything more than it already has," she told me this morning, as I left her to come up here to wait.

I can feel clearly the approach of my lightsaber; and now I feel hers, as well. Winding toward us through the natural fissures in the rock that make a passageway from this cave to the interior caverns. It is odd-in an apprehensive, premonition-of-dreadful-tragedy sort of way-that I can feel Depa, the Depa I know, only in her weapon.

[Rostu]: "Urn, does that appre-pre-whatever of dreadful tragedy by any chance translate into Basic as,' have a bad feeling about this? Because, y'know, now that you mention it-" I feel it too-but I have had only bad feelings ever since I came to this planet.

[Rostu]: "I've been wondering-I mean, we've been up here a long time. Haven't you started to wonder if Depa didn't send us up here so she could get Kar out of the way? If she sent us up here to get us out of the way?" This has occurred to me. I have refused to allow myself to consider it. Depa is not like that; she is not given to trickery, much less betrayal. She has said she will join us here. That means she vv,'7,'join us. Here.

She's only steps away- [Rostu]: "Or maybe, y'know: not." You.

[Rostu]: "That's far enough. Stop! I mean it." [The final sound on Master Windu's Haruun Kal journal is a nonverbal vocalization similar to a large predator's warning growl.] [END JOURNAL] THE TRAP N

ick stood in a classic shooter's stance, slug pistol in his right hand, left shoulder forward, right arm straight across his body, left hand cupping his right and the pistol's butt.

His target was a needle-pointed grin just visible within the fissure at the back of the cave.

Mace came to his feet smoothly but deliberately, without any sudden motion. "Don't do it, Nick." "I'd rather not," Nick admitted. "But I will if I have to." "I've seen him block blaster bolts. He can do the same with bullets. You won't have a chance." "Says you." Nick's voice was uncharacteristically calm and flat, and his hands were as steady as the mountain around them. "You haven't seen me shoot." "This is the wrong time to show me." Mace put one hand on Nick's arm and let its tired weight pull the pistol down. "Come on out, Kar." The darkness in the fissure gathered itself into the shape of the lor pelek. His vibroshields were pushed back onto his upper arms.

In his hands he held two lightsabers.

Mace sagged as all hope and faith drained out of him. Only exhaustion remained.

He had been trying so hard, for so long, to believe in her, and in himself, and in the Force.

He had made himself believe: he had ruthlessly disciplined his mind against any dread of failure.

After all, this was Depa, his Padawan, almost his child-he had known her all her life- All but her first few months, and her last few months.

Vaster walked past Nick without a sideways glance, holding the lightsabers on his open palms.

A peace offering.

She asked me to- "I know," Mace murmured.

She said she did not want you to lose anything more by coming here than you already have.

"I haven't." And it was true: he had lost nothing real. Not on Haruun Kal. He had lost her before he'd ever set foot on the shuttle's landing ramp. He had lost her before the massacre and the message on the wafer. He had lost her before he even sent her here.

Depa Billaba was another casualty of his failure at Geonosis.

She was just taking longer to die.

All he had lost on Haruun Kal was an illusion. A dream. A hope so sacred that he had not dared to admit it, even to himself: a fantasy that someday the galaxy would be again at peace.

That everything would go back to normal.

Do you need to sit down, doshalo? Vaster's purr was guardedly concerned. You look unwell.

"So this is the kiss-off, huh?" Nick had his gun back in its holster, but he looked like he was shooting at Vaster inside his head. "Pretty scummy trick, if you ask me." Tell your boy to mind his tongue when he speaks of Depa.

Mace only shook his head silently. He was out of words.

"I mean, that's low. And I know something about low, if you know what I mean. The kiss- off's bad enough, but to send her lightsaber along so you'd think it was her-" "That's not why she sent it," Mace said softly. "Kar's giving them both to me." Vastor's growl was absolute as a vine cat's stare: pitiless but somehow not unsympathetic.

She said you would understand.

Mace nodded distantly. "She has no use for it anymore." Nick frowned at him. "She doesn't?" "It is the weapon of a Jedi." "Oh." "Yes." Mace lowered his head.

"She's trying to tell you-" "Yes." Mace closed his eyes.

He could no longer bear to look at this place.

"It's killing her," he said faintly. "Being here. Doing these things If she stays, she will die." Everyone dies, doshalo. But Haruun Kal is her problem. This is he't't place. She knows it now. She belongs here. The jungle isn't killing her.

You are.

Mace opened his eyes to meet the lorpeleKs concentrated stare.

She never stops thinking of you, Vaster rumbled. What is killing he; is imagining what you must think of her. What she knows you think o what she has done, and will do. She measures herself by your standards that your standards are fatally wrong doesn't make her failure to live uj to them any less painful.

You are her sire, Mace Windu. Do you not understand how much sht loves you?

"Yes." He wished she could understand how much he loved her.. But if she did, would she have done anything differently? Or woulc she only be in even greater pain? "Yes, I do." This is why she sent me to deliver these weapons, and her good-byes. Sh could not face you.

Mace breathed a heavy sigh, then straightened his shoulders "She," he said slowly, sadly, reluctantly, "will have to get over that." Eh?

"I'm sorry this is painful for her. It's not fun for me either; the closest thing to fun I've had on this planet was being beaten into un consciousness," he said. "I told her I would not leave this world without her. And I won't. Nothing has changed." You think not? Step out here, doshalo. The lorpelek walked out of the cave shadow into the brilliant red-smeared afternoon on the cliffside meadow. This is not the only cave on this mountain.

Mace followed him, and Kar waved a lightsaber at the vast mountainside, pocked with shadows. In one of them waits one of my men. Over the past months, we have captured some heavy infantry weapons from the Balawai. One of those weapons is a shoulder-fired proton torpedo launcher.

"Threats will not move me, Kar. I have told her that I will die here rather than leave her behind." You misunderstand. The torpedo is not for you; if I want you dead, lean kill you myself.

"That," said Mace Windu, "remains to be seen." Soon the lander will arrive to take you away from here. If you do not leave on it, my man will destroy it. Your pilots, and gunners, and soldiers, and whoever else who has come to bring you away: they will all die.

Now Mace did, finally, look into the sky. Limitless turquoise: the only clouds to be seen were vapor trails along the horizon.

You see? You are not the only one here who can take hostages.

"Do you know," Mace said wonderingly, "that I am almost grateful to you for this?" I understand: it makes what you must do much easier.

"Yes. Exactly. You have made my choice for me." "What's wrong?" Nick asked from the shadows. "What's he saying to you? We're still leaving, aren't we?" "A great deal is wrong," Mace replied. "He has said nothing of consequence, and no, we are not leaving. Not without Depa." Vastor's head drew down, and his eyes flickered danger.,' do not make idle threats.

"That you are here means I did not know Depa as well as I thought I did. That the two of you would expect me to bow to this threat means that she knows me even less." The lander will be destroyed. It will be as though you have killed them yourself.

"There is no as though." Mace turned and lifted his head to look Kar Vastor in the eye.

"What it will be is you, Kar Vaster, taking up arms against the Republic." The Republic has nothing to do with this. This is personal. You cannot pretend- "I placed Depa under formal arrest three days ago. She gave me her parole-that is to say, her word of honor as a Jedi that she would not attempt to escape, or otherwise avoid returning to answer for her actions before the Jedi Council. She has violated her word, and her honor. I must now take her into custody. And you, as well." Me? You are mad.

"Kar Vastor," Mace said flatly, "you are charged with the murder of Terrel Nakay." "Uh, Master, mm, General-? Sir? You sure you know what you're doing?" Vastor stared in blank disbelief. Your men will die.

"They are soldiers, and this is a war. They understand the risks they face," Mace said. "Do you?" What risks?

"When your man fires upon the lander, you will have committed treason. Implicated in your crime, Depa will face the same charge. You are placing her in capital jeopardy: that is, she will be executed along with you." Vastor's growl did not now carry words. Only contempt and anger.

"Perhaps you should order your man to stand down. While you still can." Depa is right: Jedi are insane.

"Ever since I came to this planet, people have been telling me how crazy I am. They've told me this so many times that I had started to wonder if it might be true. Now, though, I understand: you don't say this because it's true. Not even because you think it's true. You say it because you hope it's true. Because if I am insane, you aren't really the revolting slime-hearted vermin that, down deep, you know you are." But Vastor no longer seemed to be listening. He had folded his massive arms so that the lightsabers in his hands disappeared behind his ultrachrome-shielded biceps. He paced meditatively away from Mace, strolling toward the meadow's cliff lip, and stared out over the vast roll of jungle below. The vista was alive with gunmetal specks and distant flashes of cannonfire.

Many gunships patrol today, he hummed. More than I have ever seen.

"Mace-" Nick hissed from the cave behind. "You know that bad feeling I was talking about? It's getting worse." "Yes." "Maybe you better get back in here where it's safe." "Nowhere is safe," Mace said, and walked out to join Vaster at the edge of the cliff.

I have tried, Vaster purred when Mace reached his side. I have done all that can be asked of me. Not even Depa can say I did not try to spare your life. But you will not be reasonable. "It is not in my nature.",'/ is as you said earlier: you have made my choice for me. There is only one way to protect her from you. "That is true." Mace reached down inside himself until he found the calm center within his exhaustion and his pain. He breathed himself into that center until he was fully within it, and all pain and fatigue and doubt were left behind outside. "Do we fight, now?" We must.

It is bitter, that we last men ofghosh Windu must be enemies. I wish this could have turned out differently, but I did not expect it would. Depa has told me that you do not lose well. "I haven't had much practice." Vaster bent his head in a regretful nod of respect. Good-bye, Mace, Jedi of the Windu.

A tiny surge of the Force- Just a twitch. A shrug. The slightest nudge, not even directed at Mace; sent off somewhere into the trees below the pass-A signal.

The scene, frozen in time, locked in the amber of Mace's Force-sense: Vaster standing with arms folded, not the slightest hint of threat, his shields pushed high on his arms, those arms still crossed to bury the lightsabers that he held under his massive biceps- Mace beside him, exposed on the lip of the cliff, unarmed- Gunships rippling the jungle canopy far below in shock wakes, silent with distance- Nick behind in the cave, rifle leaning against the rock, one hand yanking the butt of his bolstered pistol in a draw that to ordinary eyes would be blinding- And a man hidden in the shadows of the jungle a kilometer away, smoothly squeezing the trigger of a high-powered sniper's blaster rifle to send one single packet of murderous scarlet energy clawing up toward the meadow from the jungle below- Centered on Mace Windu's heart.

All this Mace kenned in a single instant, effortlessly, and the shat-terpoint he found and struck by instinct was Vastor's balance at the lip of the cliff.

Calmly, without any particular haste, Mace put his hand on Vastor's shoulder and gave the lorpelek a shove.

Over the edge.

Vastor's eyes bulged astonishment as he toppled forward and his arms uncrossed to windmill for his balance. His teetering swung his head just far enough in the right direction that the bullet from Nick's slug pistol scorched Vastor's temple instead of blowing his brains out through his eyes; as his arms whirled, his grip on the lightsabers loosened. Mace reached into the Force, snatching them both, triggering them to flaring life and bringing them to his hands with an easy six or seven milliseconds to spare before he needed them to splatter aside the bolt from the jungle below.

Vastor's vine cat reflexes whirled him in the air and latched his hands onto the rock face a meter below the lip of the cliff. His confederate in the jungle poured fire up at Mace to drive him back, while Nick ran out of the cave behind him, shouting "Did I get him? Is he dead1? Is he dead?" until Vaster threw himself back up into the meadow, bringing his vibroshields into fighting position with a surge of the Force.

Nick fired as fast as his finger could jerk the pistol's trigger and bullets clanged off Vastor's flashing shields- And Mace just stood there.

Staring into his blade.

In the Force, the world had turned to crystal.

The purple flame of his blade splintered flaws throughout the planet. Stress fractures spidered from his blade to Vaster, to Nick, into the mountain behind, into the pass below, and to space above, racing in outrippling waves that joined him with what was, but also with what had been, and what would be.

Triggering his blade here, now: it was a shatterpoint of the Summertime War.

His consciousness splintered along with the world, flashing instantly along the fault lines and vectors of effect: for a single instant, he was in direct and intimate contact with many different times and places.

He saw it all.

As though from some impossible distance, he saw the Balawai prisoners kneeling on the promontory, and how gunships had arrived almost before he'd even lit the wood he'd piled up to make a signal fire.

He saw the gunships arrive at the outpost, only minutes after he had ignited this weapon to defend the children in the bunker from the hasty fire of their own people's weapons.

He saw Vaster below the outpost's ruins, and heard again his growled meaning: My men say you drove them off single-handed, though they did not seem to be damaged. Perhaps you have taught Balawai to fear thejedi blade.

But they did not fear it, he knew.

He saw the gunships at the notch pass: flying away only seconds after he first flashed his blades. They had been ordered to withdraw.

Because he'd been alone.

Because if he was killed before he reached Depa and her guerrilla it wouldn't solve the militia's Jedi problem.

He saw himself in the Pelek Baw alley, staring in disbelief at h depowered lightsaber.

He saw the hours he'd spent in the binder chair in that dirty rooi in the Ministry of Justice, waiting; that long wait hadn't been an ir terrogation technique. Geptun had never intended to interrogai him in the first place.

Following that stress fault back in time, he saw a shielded room i the Ministry of Justice, where technicians made cut after cut with h lightsaber. Where they had shot the blade with blaster bolts and bu lets, and used it to cut thyssel, and lammas, and portaak leave duracrete, transparisteel.

So that they could measure and record the emission signature this blade.

So that their satellites would recognize it whenever it was usei No matter what it might be used for.

That's why his blade had been out of charge. Geptun had prob; bly had no idea about that upcountry team; he'd wanted Mace to g out of Pelek Baw.

Wanted him to make contact with Depa and the "ULF." Wanted to find where all the missing Korunnai had been hiding Now in the meadow, other stress faults connected his mind ' dozens of gunships that converged on the Lorshan Pass. Gunshi] packed with eager troops, trailing billows of hate and fear and fieri anticipation like the ash plume from an erupting volcano.

One fracture terminated at an orbiting satellite that whizzt across the face of the planet at almost twenty-eight thousand kil meters per hour, and through the fracture he could feel a sil con brain make an electronic connection. He could feel tl execution of a simple command program, and he could feel aut mated clamps releasing huge durasteel bars layered in ablati1 shielding, and he could feel primitive guidance jets driving them in the atmosphere at an angle too steep for any spacecraft to survive.

But these were not spacecraft, and they were not intended to survive.

Vaster was still in the air, and Nick was still twisting to track him with his blazing pistol, when Mace Windu whipped his arms straight and shouted, "Stop!" The Force blasts that accompanied the Jedi Master's command clubbed Nick to the ground and sent Vaster spinning against the mountain's face above the cave.

"What are you doing?" Nick rolled to his feet and snapped the pistol back into line. "He just tried to frag you-kill him!" Vaster crouched above, clinging to the rock like a krayt dragon. No more talking. It is time to fight.

"Yes," Mace Windu said. "But not each other. Look around you!" He swung his arm toward the jungle below the pass.

All the patrolling gunships, the dozens that had leisurely crisscrossed the jungle all these past days, now traced converging streaks that would intersect at the Lorshan Pass.

Nick swore, and Vaster's growl lost meaning.

"And there," Mace said, pointing to what seemed to be a slowly developing dark cloud, high above the mountains, but was in fact the smoke from ablative shielding burning off in the atmosphere.

The center of the cloud grew red, then orange, then pale as a blue-white star: ion thrusters kicking in.

Nick frowned. "That can't be the lander-the angle's all wrong, and it's coming in way too fast." "It isn't," Mace said. "I should say, they aren't." "I'm not gonna like this, am I?" Nick passed a hand over his eyes. "Oh, nuts. Ohhh, nuts nuts nuts. You're about to tell me those are DOKAWs." "At least five. More to follow." YOU! Vastor's explosive roar seemed to yank him off the rock face and carry him raging to the meadow. He shook a sizzling shield at Mace. This is YOUR fault! YOU have brought them here!

"There will be time later to argue blame." Mace let the lightsabers' blades shrink to nonexistence. "There's something we need to do right now." "What's that?" The Jedi Master looked from the lorpelek to the young Korun officer, then into a sky at the durasteel missiles streaking through the atmosphere.

At thirty thousand kilometers per hour, and accelerating.

Mace Windu said, "Run." They ran.

PART THREE SHATTERPOIKT SHOCKWAVES A

fully-assembled De-Orbiting Kinetic Anti-emplacement Weapon (DOKAW)-hardened durasteel spear, ablative shielding, miniature ion drive, and tiny attitude thrusters-massed slightly more than two hundred kilograms. By the time the spear impacted a target at ground level, the shielding, the drive, and the attitude thrusters, as well as a fair bit of the hardened durasteel itself, would have all burned away; the final warhead massed in the general neighborhood of one hundred kilograms, slightly more or less depending on angle of entry, atmospheric density, and other minor concerns.

These concerns were minor because the DOKAW was not, in it-serf, a particularly sensitive or sophisticated weapon; its virtues lay more in the the realm of being inexpensive to produce and simple to operate, which is why it was found mostly in more primitive back-world areas of the galaxy. It was vulnerable to counterfire from rur-bolaser batteries, for example. It was also largely useless against a target capable of even rudimentary evasive action, and once its attitude thrusters had burned away, mere atmospheric disturbances would be sufficient to push it off course, making it less than ideally accurate against stationary targets smaller than a medium- sized town. Because, after all, it was basically just a hundred-kilo hunk of durasteel.

Ideal accuracy, though, was also a minor concern, because at the point of impact, this hundred-kilo spear of hardened durasteel was traveling at well over ten kilometers per second, In a word: WHAM.

Mace, Nick, and Kar had reached the widening throat of the first of the major caverns when the floor dropped out from under them for one astonishing second, then jumped back up and smacked them tumbling through the air toward the jagged rock roof overhead.

The blast transcended sound.

Mace controlled his spin instinctively so that he could absorb the impact against the roof with bent legs. His Force-hold caught Nick a meter short of severe head trauma; then as they both fell back toward the floor, the pressure-wave of superheated air that shrieked in through the fissure from the meadow cave sent them skidding and bouncing and rolling over the rough-cut floor in a hailstorm of rock shards and burning dirt.

Mace kept his Force-hold on Nick; as they skidded to a stop in the nightmare of dust and smoke and screaming, he set Nick on his feet and crouched beside him. "Stay up!" he shouted.

"Stay low but off the floor?

He huddled there, hands jammed against his ears, bounced by another blast-lesser-and another lesser still, the natural inaccuracy of the DOKAWs causing some scatter. A final convulsion of the mountain cracked the roof of the cavern and rained boulders at random. Some screams were crushed to gurgles; others scaled up to shrieks of agony.

Two seconds passed-two more-and Mace sprang to his feet. Light from glowglobes made luminous spheres that could not overlap through the thick swirl of dust and smoke that stung tears into his eyes; one incautious breath sent him into a paroxysm of coughing. He yanked Nick to his side-the young Korun had an arm over his streaming eyes and he was hacking into his other hand-and Mace grabbed the hem of his homespun tunic with both hands.

"Hey-hackhagh-hey, what are you-" "We need your shirt." With one twist he ripped the tunic in half up the back; another twist continued the rip from collar to waist in front. He left half in Nick's hands while he tied his own half over his face in a sort of hood. The cloth was coarse enough to see through, and it cut the dust and smoke from intolerable down to merely hellish.

While Nick imitated him, Mace picked his way around the rubble and over dead and wounded Korunnai toward a gleam of ultra-chrome under a huge slab of stone. He dropped to his heels beside it and gestured, clearing smaller rocks away from the lorpelek.

"Kar? Can you hear me?" Even hoarse with dust and pain, Vastor's growl had a sardonic edge. Better stand back.

When you're around, big hard things seem to fall on my head.

Mace breathed himself into his center, and found the slab's shat-terpoint. "Don't move." His blade flared, bit in, and the slab cracked in two over Vastor's back. A shrug of Vastor's huge shoulders shifted the two pieces enough that he could push himself up to his knees between them. He was caked with dust, and blood trickled from an ugly gash over one ear.

You could have killed me. You should have.

"You're no good to me dead," Mace said. "Is there a hardpoint in this base? A hardened bunker, preferably airtight?" The heavy weapon lockup. It can be sealed.

"All right. Get all the non-ambulatory sick and wounded in there and seal it up. When the militia comes, they'll start with gas." Vaster and Nick exchanged grim looks.

Mace glanced over his shoulder. "Nick. You're with me. Let's go." We'll never hold them. Not for a day. Not an hour.

"We don't have to hold them ourselves. I have a medium cruiser in-system that's carrying a regiment of the finest soldiers this galaxy has ever seen." Mace put one hand on Vastor's shoulder, and the other on Nick's, and there was a strange shine to his dark eyes. "We aren't going to hold them. We aren't even going to fight them. With the Halleck for air cover and the troopers holding the ground, those twenty landers can evacuate this entire place within hours." "Grassers and all?" Mace nodded. "We just have to get them here." DOKAWs pounded the mountain. Korunnai ran and screamed and bled. Some tried to help the wounded. Some died. Some huddled shivering against the nearest wall.

Mace kept moving. Nick trotted at his heels. Sometimes shock-waves knocked them down.

Sometimes the dust was so bad that Mace had to light their way with scatter from his and Depa's blades.

"Why do you need me! You were in the comm center this morning," Nick gasped through a mouthful of dust that his spit had turned to mud. "I'm good with a medpac. You go on. I can look after wounded-" "That's why." Bladelight picked up jagged gleams ahead: the corridor was blocked with a sloping wall of tumbled rock.

"This is the only way I know to the comm center," Mace said. "I'm hoping you know another." Nick muttered a curse under his breath as he leaned on the slope of boulders. "How deep is the rubble? Can you cut-" His eyes widened. "Hey, there are people in there! Trapped! I can feel them-we've got to get them out!" "I feel them too. The fall's not stable," Mace said. "Shifting and cutting will take more time than we have: the first mistake would bring tons of stone down on their heads. We need another way to the comm center." "But-we can't just leave them in there-!" "Nick. Try to focus. Will they be safer out here?" "Well, I." Nick frowned. "Well." "Listen to me. There will be cave-ins throughout these caverns. We can dig survivors out later. We have to make sure enough people live through this to do the digging. Yes?" Nick nodded reluctantly. "Then let's go." The comm center was just a small natural cave with rude plank tables, a few homemade chairs, and some equipment. "Probably not much left of the relay antennas," Nick muttered as they trotted toward it.

"It's a little late to worry about concealing our position," Mace reminded him. "And subspace won't have any trouble going through rock." Nick squinted at the doorway, cursed, and broke into a sprint. "The surgical field's down!" He darted inside.

Mace went after him, but stopped in the doorway.

The subspace comm unit lay on the floor, among the splinters of the plank table; its housing looked like someone had rolled it down a mountainside and dropped it off a cliff. The realspace-frequency units, less durable, were crushed. Nick was cursing continuously under his breath as he knelt over the two Korun commtechs, who lay motionless on the floor as though they were simply taking a nap in the ruins of their post.

Mace said, "Nick." "They're dead," the young Korun said thickly. "They're both dead. Not a mark on them.

And-" "Nick, come out of there." Nick prodded one's head with his finger. which gave, deforming spongily, as though the man's skull were soft foam. "And they're squishy…" "We have to leave this place. Now." "What could do that to a man?" "Concussion," Mace said. "Shock transmission. This room must be part of a solid structure that reaches to the surface-" "You're saying." Nick looked at the walls around him with widening eyes. "You saying if another DOKAW hits the same spot, while I'm still in here-" "I'm saying-" Mace urgently extended a hand,"-cover your ears zndjump." Mace took his own advice then drew on the Force to suspend them both, and the air in the comm cave pounded them like they were caught in the palm of a giant's handclap. He let the shock send them whirling back along the passage away from the comm center, them released his Force-hold and rolled to his feet.

Nick was saying something as Mace pulled him upright, but Mace heard only a distant mutter over the high singing whine in his ears. "You'll have to speak up." Nick cupped one hand to his ear. "What?" "Speak upl" "What? You'll have to speak up!" Mace sighed and shoved Nick stumbling along the corridor; he turned, reaching into the Force as he extended a hand, and the sub-space unit floated out the doorway, down the passage and into his arms.

He jogged after Nick while their stunned eardrums recovered, i Three minutes' scramble brought them to a a nexus of intersecting passageways, some cut, some natural. "This will have to do." "Do for what? What's left?" Nick sagged against the wall, panting. "And what are you lugging that fraggin' thing around for?" Mace set the comm unit on the passage floor. He pulled off his improvised dust-mask and frowned at the rear access panel; fasteners unscrewed themselves and floated to a neat little pile in a dimple in the rock, joined shortly by the access panel itself. Mace examined the leads and contacts inside the unit for a moment, then nodded.

He opened his hand and his lightsaber jumped to it from its pocket inside his vest. A flick of the Force tripped the handgrip's secret interior latch; a curved section of the grip popped open, and Mace pulled out the power cell. Another flick of the Force bent a pair of lead-panels inside the comm unit's guts. Mace wedged the powercell between them, and the unit's ready-lights came on.

"Hold this here," Mace said. Nick held the energy cell in place while Mace keyed the HallecKs emergency channel.

"Halleck, this is General Windu. This is a priority clear-call, inti-ation code oh six one five.

Acknowledge." The comm unit crackled to life in a burst of ECM static. A stolid voice came faintly through the buzz: "Response. one nine." "Verification seven seven." "Go a. General." "Captain Trent, I need your status." "Regret to in. Cap. bridge crew. ously wounded. This is Commander Urhal. der heavy. Repeat: We are under heavy DSF attack." Nick frowned. "DSF?" "Droid starfighter." Mace keyed the transmitter. "Can you hold?" '. gative. Too many. sustained heavy. shields and armor, but." Through the bursts of static and washes of white hiss, the acting captain of the Halleck sketched their situation: An unknown number of Trade Federation droid starfighters had been lying in wait, deactivated and drifting outside the system's ecliptic plane amid cometary dust and debris of ancient asteroids. The commander guessed that it was something about the lander itself that had triggered them; they had attacked as soon as the extraction lander un-docked and made for orbit. The lander had been lost with all hands, and the DSFs had quickly overwhelmed the Halleck's escort complement of six starfighters; they were pounding the cruiser with everything they had. The ship Mace had been looking to for rescue was already fighting for its life.

And losing.

Mace balanced on his heels, staring into the rock wall beside him.

The granular surface gleamed with sweat condensed from his breath, and flecks of mineral sparkled within it, but Mace didn't see any of that. He wasn't looking at the stone. He was looking into the stone. Through the stone.

Into the Force.

"So that's it, then, huh?" Nick's words came distantly to Mace's ears, hollow and faint, as though he spoke from the bottom of a well. "There's no way we can evacuate." "That's it, yes. No way." This was a reflexive echo; Mace was barely aware of what Nick had said, and not at all aware that he had answered. "No way." His consciousness was elsewhere.

"Have I mentioned how much I hate this place? Every time I come here it's like being buried alive." Into the Force- Mace wasn't actually looking, not really; the sense he used was not sight. This sense invaded the Force, touching power and letting the power touch it, shading the power then drawing on the shade it created to deepen its own shade, feeding upon the Force and feeding the Force in a regenerative spiral, gathering strength, spidering outward from this specific nowhere-in-particular-right-now to the general ail-where of every time: from a crossroads inside a mountain that stood in a jungle the size of a continent, on a world that whirled through a galaxy that was rapidly becoming a jungle of its own.

This sense brought to his perception the stress-vectors of reality. It was more than the searching of a shatterpoint, it was as though this single moment existed in a crystal shell, and if he could strike it in exactly the right way, the shell enclosing this one would shatter as well- and the shell enclosing that shell, and on, and on, a single stroke whose Shockwaves would propagate outward to crash through the trap that held not only him and Nick, but Depa and Kar and the Korunnai, the world of Haruun Kal, the Republic, perhaps the galaxy itself: more than a chain of shatterpoints, it was a fountain of shatterpoints. A cascade.

An avalanche.

If he could only find the spot to strike.

Faintly, distantly, resonating from the here-and-now to Mace's everywhere-at-once: "We're trapped in here. The whole fraggin' planetary militia is outside, and there's nobody who can get here to help us, and we're all gonna die. This is a stupid place to die. Stupid, stupid, stupid." "Stupid," Mace echoed. "Stupid, yes. Stupid! Exactly. 1" "Are you even listening to me?" "You," Mace said, his gaze slowly returning from the stone depths he had been contemplating, "are brilliant. Not to mention lucky." "Excuse me?" "Some years ago, the Jedi Order contemplated using droid star-fighters for antipirate work-convoying freighters, that sort of thing. Do you know why we decided against it?" "Do I care?" "Because droids are stupid" "Wow, that's a relief! I'd hate to be killed by a genius-" Mace turned back to the comm unit and keyed the transmit once again. "Commander, this is General Windu. All the troops-get them loaded onto the remaining landers, and get those landers on course for the original coordinates.^,'/of them. The original coordinates. Do you copy?" "Yes, sir. But. no match for DSF. casualties. lucky if half of them make atmosphere." "That's not your problem. Once the landers are away, you will withdraw. Do you copy? This is a direct order. When the landers are away, the Halleck will jump for Republic space." '. landers. only sublight. With no hyperdrive, how will you.?" "Commander, is there so little for you to do right now that you can afford the time to argue with me? You have your orders. Windu out." He plucked the powercell out of the back of the comm unit and returned it to the handgrip of his lightsaber. "Who's the best shooter you know?" Nick shrugged. "Me." "Nick." "What, should I lie?" "All right. Second best." "Who's still alive?" Nick thought for a second or two. "Chalk, maybe. She's pretty good.

Especially with the heavy stuff. Or she would be if she could, y'know, walk." "She won't have to. Let's go." Nick stayed against the wall, shrugging hopelessly. "Why bother? It's not like we can get anywhere, right? With the ship gone, there's nowhere to go." "There is. And we will go there." "Where?" "I'm not going to tell you." "You're not?" "I have had enough," Mace said, "of being told I'm insane." Nick rose warily, eyeing Mace as though the Jedi Master might be a worrt in disguise.

"What are you talking about? You just mid there's no way we can evacuate." "We're not going to evacuate. We're going to attack" Nick gaped. "Attack?' he echoed numbly.

"Not just attack. We are going to beat them," said the Jedi Master, "like a rented gong." SEEKER T, he air in the weapons bunker was thick with the ozone tang of a surgical field and the rank pheromonal stink of human fear. The few heavy weapons that the guerrillas had cached were piled haphazardly outside the door to make room for the endless flood of stretchers carried by grim-faced Korunnai, bearing the sick and the wounded. Mostly sick.

Mostly children.

Mostly silent and round-eyed.

The bearers would stumble whenever another DOKAW shook the mountain, and sometimes dump those they carried; many of the invalids bled from fresh scrapes. Nick threaded his way around them to look for Chalk; the Korun girl had not left Besh's side since they both awakened from thanatizine suspension.

Mace had stopped outside the doorway. His defocused stare gathered the inventory of the weapons there, and plugged them into his calculations: new data that made his image of the coming battle shift and flow and remold itself like a stream of hardening lava. A tripod-mounted EWHB-10 with an auxiliary fusion-generator pack. Two shoulder-fired torpedo launchers, with four preloaded launch tubes apiece. A rack of twenty-five proton grenades, still in its factory- sealed case.

That was all he'd need.

The rest of the weapons were not relevant.

Nick came out the doorway, moving hesitantly, as though in pain. "They're not in there." "No?" Nick shook his head toward one of the stretcher-bearers. "They told me-there's not enough room for all the. So Kar-" He swallowed, forcing distress off his face and out of his voice. "All we're putting in here is people who'll live." Mace nodded. "Where are the others?" "We call it the dead room. Follow me." The dead room was a huge cavern hung with night. The only light was soft yellow spill from a scatter of handheld glow rods. Unlike the other inhabited chambers, the floor of this one had not been leveled with vibro-bladed adzes, but had instead been cut into tiered ledges that followed the natural contour of the rock.

The ledges were packed with the dying.

No surgical field here: the air was thick with fecal stench, and the sickly sweet odor of rotten meat, and the indescribable smell of spores released by fungi feeding on human flesh.

Nick halted a few paces in from the entrance and closed his eyes. A moment later, he sighed and pointed up toward a far corner. "Over there. See that light? Something's happening; I think Kar's with them." "Good. We need him, and we're running out of time." They had to tread carefully to climb the levels of ledges without stepping on people in the gloom.

Besh lay stretched out, motionless, barely breathing, on a ledge near the ragged curve of the cavern ceiling. Vaster knelt beside him, eyes closed, one hand above Besh's heart. The medpac tissue-binder that had closed the wounds left by Terrel's knife had lost its glossy transparency, blackening and curling like dead skin, and the wounds had erupted into cruciferous bulbs of fungus that floresced faintly, iridescent green and purple pulsing in the shadows cast by Chalk's glow rod.

Chalk sat cross-legged on Besh's other side, her own chest bulky with spraybandage; head low, she sponged at the growths on Besh's chest with a damp rag. Even from meters away, Mace caught a strong odor of alcohol and portaak amber.

Nick stopped a couple of meters short and gave Mace a significant look, nodding toward the others as if to say, This was your idea. Leave me out of it.

Mace approached slowly, staying on the next ledge down. He stopped when he reached them and spoke softly to Chalk. "How is he?" She wouldn't look at him. "Dying. How are you?" She dipped her rag into the bucket, brought it out again, sponged, and returned it to the bucket with numb mechanical persistence: doing it to be doing something, though she showed no sign of hope that it might help.

"Chalk, we need you to come with us." "Not leaving him, me. Needs me, him." "We need you. Chalk, you have to trust me-" "Did trust you, me. So did Besh." Mace had no answer.

Nick came to Mace's shoulder. "The Archives are starting to look pretty good right now." The Jedi Master squinted at him.

Nick shrugged. "Hey, it's the only immortality any of us can hope for, right?" "And how do you achieve immortality," Mace murmured, "if my journal is buried under a mountain on Haruun Kal?" "Uh. Yeah." Nick looked like his stomach hurt. "That could be a problem." "Forget about immortality. Let's concentrate on not dying today." Vaster's eyes were closed, and the Force shimmered around him. Mace could feel some of what the lor pelek was doing: searching within Besh's chest for the essential aura of the fungus that was killing him, focusing power upon it to burn it out spore by spore.

Another shockwave rattled the cavern. Loose rock clattered from the ceiling.

"Kar," Mace said, "this is not the way. We don't have time." Vastor's eyes stayed closed. His expression did not so much as flicker. Is there something better for me to be doing right now?

"As a matter of fact," Mace said, "yes. There is." Does it involve killing Balawai?

Mace said apologetically, "Probably not more than a thousand. Maybe two." Vaster opened eyes filled with pelekofan's darkness. Chalk lifted her head, rag hanging forgotten from her fist.

"So," said Mace Windu. "Are we on?" Smoke and dust clouded the huge cavern; it reeked of grasser fear-musk, of dung and urine and blood, and with each new DOKAW-shock the smell got worse.

Torchlight flared and blazed and vanished again. The stinking fog swirled with gigantic shapes: grassers bucking and clawing at each other, some with jaws panic-locked on their own or others' limbs. They charged at random, slamming into each other, trampling the injured and their own young. Korunnai darted among them, appearing from the smoke and vanishing again, hands full of sharp goads and blazing torches as they fought to separate the knots of shrieking, honking, fear-crazed beasts.

A swirl opened a gap: a looming akk dog paused to stare into Mace's eyes, measuring him with saurian malice as a thick rope of bloody drool looped from its jaws, then it ponderously turned aside and slipped into the murk, tail tapering so smoothly it might have been dissolving.

Mace threaded through the chaos.

Behind him followed a pair Korunnai, carrying a stretcher that held the EWHB and its generator. Two more brought the shoulder-fired torpedo launchers and the preloaded tubes on another stretcher. Chalk half-walked, her arm looped over Nick's shoulders as he helped her along.

Five more pairs of Korunnai trotted around the circumference of the caverns, sidling past all the confusion and riot; one of each pair carried a homespun sack holding five proton grenades apiece, and the others carried torches. Each pair soon slipped down a different one of the five vast passages along which grassers were daily driven to graze.

Erratic booming shivered the air, sharper and much smaller than the DOKAW-shocks, but still powerful enough to vibrate the floor. Mace pointed toward the source of the booming: a side cave where the great ankkox paced in restless fury. The concussions were its angrily whipping tail mace striking the walls and floor of its pen.

The nearest Korun stretcher bearer saw his gesture, and they moved in that direction, followed by Nick and Chalk.

Mace paused, and looked back over his shoulder. At the mouth of an upper passageway stood Kar Vastor and his Akk Guards. Behind them crouched all twelve of Vastor's Force- bonded akks. The lor pelek met Mace's gaze and nodded.

Mace returned the nod, spreading his hands as though to say, Whenever you're ready.

Vastor and his akks marched grimly down into the grasser cavern. The akks spread out in huge leaping springs, knocking over panicked grassers on all sides, crouching over them to let drool fall from razor teeth and moisten the fur on their necks. The humans stayed together in a flying wedge with Vastor at the point, moving in to manually separate struggling grassers, intimidating the winners and slaughtering any who had been too badly injured to walk.

Mace watched, stonefaced. It was wasteful. It was brutal.

It was necessary.

He turned once again to his own task.

He gestured and the mass of struggling beasts and men parted before him, and the smoke and dust cleared, and he saw her.

She sat on a ledge like a natural gallery that coursed one long-curving wall of the cavern. Her feet hung over the lip, dangling free: a child in a chair too tall for her. Her face was buried in her hands, and even from across the cavern his chest ached with a silent echo of her sobs.

And when he reached her side, he still did not know what to say.

"Depa." She lifted her head and turned to meet his eyes, and knowing what to say would not have helped him because he could not speak.

The rag-the one she had worn across her brow these past days-was gone. On her forehead- On her forehead, where the Chalactan Greater Mark of Illumination should have been- As it had been in his hallucination, days ago at the jungle prospector outpost: on her brow was only an ugly keloid ripple of scar. As though the Greater Mark of Illumination had been carved from the bone of her skull with a blunt knife. As though the wound it left behind had festered, and had not been treated.

As though it festered still.

The Lesser Mark, called the Seeker, still gleamed at the bridge of her nose. The Lesser Mark is fixed between the eyes of one who aspires to become a Chalactan adept: it symbolizes the centered self, the shining vision, the elegant order that seeking illumination creates within the seeker. The Greater Mark is called the Universe; it is an exact replica of the Seeker, writ large.

It is fixed to the frontal bone in a solemn ceremony by the Convocation of Adepts, to welcome another to their company. The two, together, represent the fundamental tenet of Chalactan philosophy: As Without, So Within. The Adepts of Chalacta teach that the celestial order, the natural laws that govern the motion of planets and the wheel of galaxies, regulate as well the life of the Enlightened.

But for Depa, the universe was gone. All that remained was the Seeker.

Alone in the void.

"Mace." Her face twisted once more to tears. "Don't look at me. You can't look at me.

You can't see me like this. Please." He lowered himself to one knee beside her. He reached a tentative hand for her shoulder; she clutched his fingers and pressed his hand in place, but turned her face away.

"I'm so sorry." Her head twitched as though she shook tears out of her eyes. "I'm sorry for everything. I'm sorry things can't be different. Better. I'm sorry,'can't be better." "But you can." He squeezed her shoulder. "You can, Depa. You have to." "I'm so lost, Mace." Her whisper could not be heard in the riot of the cavern, but Mace could feel her meaning, as though the Force itself murmured in his ear. "I'm so lost…" The Depa of his hallucination-what had she told him?

He remembered.

"It is in the darkest night," he said gently, "that the light we are shines brightest." "Yes. Yes. You always say that. But what do you know about dark?" Her head sagged, chin to her chest, as though she could no longer think of a reason to hold it up. "How does a blind man know the stars have gone out?" "But they haven't," Mace said. "They still burn as bright as ever. And as long as people live around them, they will need Jedi. Like I need you now." "I am. I'm not a Jedi anymore. I quit. I resign. I withdraw. I thought you understood that." "I do understand it. I don't accept it." "It's not up to you." He pulled his hand from her shoulder and rose, looming above her. "Get up." She sighed, and once again a smile struggled onto her tearstained lips. "I'm not your Padawan now, Mace. You can't order me-" "Get up?' Reflexes burned into her by more than a decade of unquestioning obedience yanked her instinctively to her feet. She swayed dizzily, and her mouth hung slack.

"Minutes from now, nearly a thousand clone soldiers of the Republic will reach this position." New light kindled in her glazed eyes. "The Halleck-they can save us-" "No," Mace said. "Listen to me: We have to save them." "I–I don't understand-" "They are coming in under fire. This entire system is a trap. It's been a trap all along. The Separatist pullback was bait, do you understand that?" "No. it's not true, it's not truel" But the flash faded from her eyes, and she sagged. "But of course it's true. How could I have thought otherwise? How could I have thought I would win?" "They've caught a medium cruiser. Not to mention two members of the Jedi Council. The Halleck may already be destroyed. The clone soldiers are coming in aboard the surviving landers. They will be pursued by Trade Federation droid starfighters: faster, more maneu- verable, and better-armed than the landers. If our men are pinned between the starfighters and the militia, they won't have a chance. Whatever chance those men will have, we have to give them. You have to give them." "Me? What can,'do?" He opened his vest. Her lightsaber floated out of its inner pocket. It bobbed gently in the air between them.

"You can make a choice." She looked from the lightsaber to his eyes and back again; she stared at the handgrip as though her reflection in its portaak amber-smeared surface might whisper the future. "But you don't understand," she said faintly. "No choice of mine can matter here." "It does to me." "Have you learned nothing on this world? Even if we do save them-it doesn't matter. Not in the jungle. Look around you. This isn't something you can fight, Mace." "Of course it is." "It's not an enemy, Mace. It's just the jungle. You can't do anything about it. It's just the way things are." "I think," Mace said gently, "that you're the one who has failed to learn the lessons of Haruun Kal." She shook her head hopelessly.

"Don't tell me you can't fight the jungle, Depa," he said. "That's what Korunnai do. Don't you understand that? That's what their whole culture is based on. Fighting the jungle. They use grassers to attack it, and akks to defend themselves from its counterattacks. That's what the Summertime War is about. The Balawai want to use the jungle: to live — with it, to profit from it.

The Korunnai want to beat it into submission. To make it into something that is no longer trying to eat them alive. Now, think: Why do Korunnai do that? Why are they enemies of Balawai?

Why are they enemies of the jungle?" "A riddle for your Padawan?" she said bitterly. "A lesson." "I am done with lessons." "We are never done with lessons, Depa. Not while we live. The answer is right before your eyes. Why do Korunnai fight the jungle?" He opened his hand as though offering her the answer on his palm.

Her eyes fixed on the handgrip of her lightsaber, floating between them, and something entered them then: some faint whisper of breeze from a cool clean place, a breath of air to ease her suffocating pain.

"Because." Her voice was hushed. Reverent.

Awed by the truth.

"Because they are descended from Jedi." "Yes." "But. but. you can't fight the way things are." "But we do. Every day. That's what Jedi are." Tears streamed from her reddened eyes. "You can never win-" "We," Mace corrected her gently, "don't have to win. We only have to fight." "You can't. you can't just forgive me." "As a member of the Jedi Council-you're right. I can't. As your Master, I won't. As your friend-" His eyes stung. The smoke, perhaps.

"As your friend, Depa, I can forgive everything. I already have." She shook her head speechlessly, but she lifted a hand.

Her hand shook. She made a fist, and bit her lip.

He said, "Take your weapon, Depa. Let's go save those men." She took it.

UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE L

ie militia landed in waves.

Before the plume of dirt and smoke had subsided from the last impact of a DOKAW into the mountain, gunships swooped over the jungles below the pass, disgorging dozens, then hundreds of arpitroops: airborne soldiers equipped with disposable repulsor packs, which lowered them briskly through the canopy below. They fanned out into the jungle bearing electronic sniffers that could detect certain chemicals in grasser urine in concentrations of only a few parts per billion. They swiftly located the five main tunnels to the partisan base and marked each one with high-powered beacons.

The gunships' laser cannons blasted away the jungle canopy and surrounding trees to create a free-fire zone at the mouth of each tunnel. A kilometer away, a similar technique had been used to clear a landing zone for the troop shuttles, which were waiting onstation to drop five hundred soldiers each before circling back to the embarkation area on the outskirts of the city of Oran Mas, fifty klicks to the northwest.

By the time the grasser tunnels had been marked, at least five thousand militia regulars were on the ground, marching toward the zone of engagement.

Ten thousand more followed close behind.

The militia bore arms that the Grand Army of the Republic itself might envy; provided by the Separatists, which was backed by the financial might and industrial capacity of the Trade Federation and the manufacturing guilds, this armament had been financed by a generous slice of the thyssel bark trade.

Standard combat equipment for the regular militia on Haruun Kal included the Merr-Sonn BC7 medium blaster carbine with the optional rocket-grenade attachment, six antipersonnel fragmentation grenades, and the renowned close-combat trench-style vibroknife, the Merr- Sonn Devastator, as well as Opankro Graylite ceramic-fiber personal combat armor. In addition, every sixth soldier carried a backpack flame projector, and each platoon of twenty was equipped with the experiemental MM(X) dual-operated grenade mortar, also from Merr- Sonn.

Fifteen thousand regulars. Thirty-five GAVs (ground assault vehicles: converted steamcrawlers, retofitted with chemical cannons firing explosive shells in addition to their flame projectors, and high-velocity repeating slug rifles blister-mounted through their side armor).

Seventy-three Sienar Turbostorm close-assault gunships.

All this converged on the cavern base at the Lorshan Pass.

To oppose them, the Korun partisans had roughly four hundred actives, of whom two-thirds were walking wounded, and over two thousand noncombatants, consisting mainly of the elderly and the very young. They were armed with a variety of light slug rifles, a very few light and medium energy weapons, a small stockpile of grenades, two Krupx MiniMag shoulder-fired proton torpedo launchers, and one Merr-Sonn EWHB-10 heavy repeating blaster.

The partisans on Haruun Kal excelled at guerrilla operations, but they were less successful in conventional actions. In fact, in conventional engagements between regular militia and the Korunnai, the militia had crushed the partisans in every encounter. At the Lorshan Pass, they quite understandably expected not only to triumph, but to permanently break the back of the Korun resistance.

Most of the militia regulars at the Lorshan Pass never saw combat. While they were still establishing positions at the mouths of the access tunnels-before they'd so much as fired one blaster or launched a single grenade-the ground shook and the mountain roared, and mighty gusts of dirt and smoke blew out from four of the tunnel mouths.

Scouting parties-a few of the bravest enlisted men, creeping tentatively into the dark- discovered that these tunnels had been entirely sealed with uncountable tons of rock. This left the bemused militia with little to do except break out ration packs and do their best to relax, while taking turns scanning the mountain above with simple nonpowered binoculars for any signs of partisan activity.

Only one tunnel remained open. The regulars at the mouth of this tunnel had a somewhat different experience of the battle.

The detonation of the proton grenades in the other tunnels was taken by the militia unit commander as an opportunity. The tunnel his men faced was intact; he assumed this meant whatever explosives had been used for the local mines had misfired or otherwise failed to activate. He ordered his grenade mortars forward, and launched into that tunnel a number of gas grenades loaded with the nerve agent Tisyn-C.

His men were first astonished, then dismayed, as these same grenades came rocketing back out the tunnel's mouth to land in their own emplacements. Tisyn-C was heavier than air, and though their Opanko Graylite combat armor was rated to protect them from gas exposure, none of the regulars wished to test this capability with a nerve agent known to produce convulsions and dementia, followed by paralytic respiratory failure and death. As the white cloud rolled in to their improvised emplacements, the militia rolled out.

And so they were in the open, more concerned with what was among them than with what might be coming next, when they were hit by the grasser stampede.

Grassers were not bred to fight. Just the opposite, in fact: for seven hundred generations, Korunnai had bred their grassers to be docile and easily led, obedient to commands from their human handlers and their akk dog guardians, and to grow large and fat to provide plenty of milk, meat, and hide.

On the other hand, an adult grasser bull could mass over one and one half metric tons. His gripping limbs-the middle and forward pairs-were powerful enough to uproot small trees.

One of the grassers' favorite treats was brassvine thorns, which had a hardness approaching durasteel; bored grassers had been known to worry off chunks of armor from steamcrawlers.

And seven hundred generations was not all that long a span, on an evolutionary scale.

These grasser bulls had been forced into confined quarters for weeks, under incredible stress and in constant danger from each other. Today they had endured a shattering bombardment that was entirely beyond their comprehension; the most closely analogous event for which their evolutionary instincts had prepared them was a volcanic eruption. The instinctive grasser response to eruption was blind panic.

Honking, hooting grassers flooded from the tunnel mouth. The regulars discovered that a blaster rifle was only of marginal use against a 1,500-kilo monster crazed by an overload of stress hormones. They also discovered that limbs powerful enough to uproot small trees were easily capable of pulling a man's legs off, and that jaws that could dent armor plate could, with a single chomp, make such a bloody mush of a man's head that one couldn't tell fragments of his helmet from fragments of his skull.

The regulars had better luck with their rocket-propelled fragmentation grenades. Fired from point-blank range, one of these grenades could penetrate a grassers torso, and its detonation inside would make a satisfyingly shredded hash of that particular grasser. And with five GAVs at hand-though their turret guns could not traverse swiftly enough to track the leaping, twisting, sprinting grassers, a steady burst from one of their high-velocity slug repeaters was usually enough to drop a grasser in its tracks-the militia would have survived the grasser stampede with only an acceptable number of losses.

Would have, that is, if the grassers had not been followed by dozens of akk dogs.

Where the grassers had been panicked, acting at random, trying only to survive and escape, the akk dogs pounced like the pack-hunting predators they were: organized, intelligent, and lethal. They bounded among the militia, shredding men with their clashing teeth and breaking them with swipes of their tails. Their keen senses could often tell in an instant if a downed man was incapacitated or only faking; those soldiers who tried to play dead were soon no longer playing.

The slug repeaters of the GAVs were useless against the aides' armored hide, and their turret guns were of even less use against the agile akks than they'd been against the blundering grassers. The infantry had nothing that could scratch them; they began to scatter, triggering the akks' herding instincts. The akks overleaped them and slaughtered the leaders, sending the rest retreating in disorder to the killing ground at the tunnel's mouth.

The militia unit commander, who from his post in the turret of a GAV had seen his dream of victory morph into a nightmarish massacre in less than two minutes, did the only thing he could do.

He called in an airstrike.

The gunships in action at the Lorshan Pass were still engaged in shuttling soldiers from the embarkation point at Oran Mas. When they received the unit commander's call, at least one third were already headed in the direction of the pass. The Sienar Turbostorm was not by any means a fast ship-it could barely reach point-five past sound speed in a steep dive-but only seconds later the sky over the pass cracked open with two dozen sonic booms. The gunships shed velocity by heeling over and using their repulsorlift engines like retrothrusters. Their troop bays swung open, disgorging twenty arpitroops at a belch, then the gunships righted themselves and swooped upon the battlefield, spraying missiles from their forward batteries.

The missiles ripped into the battlefield indiscriminately, crushing akks but also shredding the soldiers they fought. The akks' only de fense against concussion missiles was evasive action, and they scattered into the trees. Seeing a chance for a daring stroke, the unit commander ordered a charge by his five GAVs: they would drive right up the tunnel ahead with his own in the lead, crushing grassers and knocking aside akk dogs. More heavily armored than the gun-ships above, he felt they had little to fear-a feeling which he had less than one second to regret as a pair of proton torpedoes streaked from the tunnel's mouth and blew his GAV to scrap.

At this point, finally, the partisans deployed their one and only piece of mobile artillery: Twelve metric tons of ankkox lumbered from the mouth of the tunnel.

The drover who stood on its armored head was a Korun as tall as a Wookiee, with shoulders like a rancor's and a pair of ultrachrome teardrops fastened to his forearms.

The Korun gestured, and the twisted pile of smoking scrap that had been the unit commander's GAV squealed as it flattened beneath the ankkox's massive feet. He swung one arm, and the ankkox's tail mace blurred through the air, knocking the turret gun of the next GAV spinning so that its point-blank shot instead detonated against the armor of the one behind.

Two pairs of Korunnai, nearly as large as the one on the ankkox, and similarly armed, crouched on either curving flank of the beast's dorsal shell; one of each pair wore the bulky, unwieldy shoulder unit of a proton torpedo launcher, while the other tended their supply of disposable loader tubes. They had four apiece, and they seemed to have no interest in conserving them. Torpedo after torpedo streaked from the launchers, first destroying the remaining GAVs, then curving upward to blast gunships from the sky.

A few heroic soldiers of the militia tried to scramble close enough to the ankkox to attack the Akk Guards with small arms, only to be sent spinning through the air, chests crushed with blinding efficiency by blurred blows of the ankkox's tail mace.

At the crest of the ankkox's dorsal shell, where once had stood a howdah of polished lammas, a heavy repeating blaster had been bolted directly to the beast's armor. Its power generator was tended by a young Korun male with vivid blue eyes and a manic grin, and it roared a continuous song of destruction, spraying high-energy particle beam packets across the field of battle.

The gunner on this weapon was a Korun girl with pale skin and startling red hair, whose feel for the weapon was such that she could be seen to fire with her eyes closed, unerringly hammering the cockpits and cannon turrets of even those gunships that screamed past on transsonic strafing runs. Streaking concussion missiles were met tens of meters away with bursts of blasterfire; not one got through.

Nor could the gunships stand off and pound her in a laserfire duel; not only did her every shot rock their ships, spoiling their target locks, but she was defended by a Korun man and a Chalactan woman who handled Jedi energy blades as though they'd been born with them in hand.

Two gunships that tried to attack went down in flames.

Others peeled away, swinging around to take cover behind shoulders of the mountain. An instant later, three gunships appeared in formation straight up the mountain's face, diving, but firing repulsors to slow their dive to not much faster than a man might run. Ventral doors retracted to expose their belly-mounted Sunfire flame projectors.

A wave of unstoppable fire swept down.

The Jadthu-class landing craft carried by the Halleck were modified Incom shuttles not unlike the ones that ferry passengers to and from the liners that ply the Gevarno Loop. With reclining chairs replaced by benches, and transparisteel by armor plate, each was capable of carrying up to sixty fully outfitted troopers. Roughly box shaped, they were rear loading, so that they could be packed in a solid block, four ships by five, and socketed against a cruiser's hull, facing outward.

A simple design, they were easy and inexpensive to build, and were convenient to transport.

Heavily armored, they were also capable of absorbing incredible punishment.

This was a good thing, because they lacked hyperdrives, and they paid for their durability with a maneuverability quotient that had been compared unfavorably to a Hutt on an oil slick.

Their only armament was a pair of dual-laser turrets fore and aft, and an Arkayd Caltrop 5 chaff gun, which could spray a cloud of sensor-distorting durasteel slivers in any direction.

Gunners on the landers had discovered in their very first engagement that at the speeds of starfighter combat, the chaff sprayed by the Caltrop 5 was itself a highly effective weapon: like a miniature asteroid field, it would disastrously perforate any craft unwise or unlucky enough to fly through it, especially droid starfighters which sacrificed armor for greater maneuverability, depending on energy shields for defense-which would not, of course, do them any good at all against chaff.

When the Halleck-fully engaged and heavily damaged by the clouds of droid starfighters that whirled around it-blew the docking clamps and streaked for hyperspace, there were nineteen landers, bearing a total of 977 clone troops, including pilots and gunners.

These landers had no fighter cover: the Hal,'eck's fighter escort had been destroyed in the first minutes of the engagement. Their sole defense beyond their own guns were five Rothana HR LAAT,"I gun-ships. These had been detailed to the mission as antipersonnel cover for the landers, should they be forced to make a pickup in a hostile-fire zone. While these gunships had been retrofitted with sublight drives for orbital use, the LAAT,"I had never been intended to dogfight against the electronic reflexes of droid starfighters.

They were, however, manned by clone troopers, whose reflexes were not much slower.

Which is why sixteen of the landers and three of the gunships reached the atmosphere.

One full wing of droid starfighters-sixty-four units-followed them in.

Fourteen landers reached the Korunnal Highland. Pursued by fifty-eight starfighters.

None of the gunships survived.

By the time they were within sight of the Lorshan Pass there were twelve landers, of which five were heavily damaged. Forty starfighters trailed them with relentless electronic persistence.

And streaking across the curve of the horizon in front of them came three more wings of starfighters, on course to intercept.

The trio of gunships ignited the mountainside. A wall of flame rolled downslope toward the battlefield at the tunnel mouth.

Militia regulars fled in all directions, slipping on blood and skidding through shreds of trees and grasser flesh. Wounded grassers screamed and thrashed, akk dogs snarled and leaped and bit, and the ankkox opened its huge armored throat to unleash a roar that knocked loose rock down the mountain above. Several of the regulars tried to dive for cover under the ankkox's shell, only to be smashed to sprays of pulp by the ankkox's tail mace.

At the crest of the dorsal shell, Chalk growled a continuous stream of curses as she struggled to swing the heavy repeater's barrel in a direction it had never been designed to point: nearly straight up. From his position tending the EWHB's fusion generator, Nick looked at Mace and pointed an accusing finger up at the incinerating flood washing down upon them. "Was this part of yonr plan?" "Of course." Mace tucked his lightsaber back into its holster and looked up, measuring the approach of the gunships. "Everyone down!" he shouted. "Take cover under the shell!" Depa threw herself forward over the ankkox's crown shell, flipping in the air to land beside the creature's immense head, one hand on the nostril flap beside its mouth, on the opposite side from Kar Vaster. The Akk Guards abandoned their expended torpedo launchers and slid down the shell's curve to leap from its rim. Nick said, "This is the part you didn't want to tell me, huh?" Mace said, "Help Chalk." Chalk was still struggling with the heavy repeater, lying on her back with her legs beneath the tripod; Nick had to pry her hands off it and drag her free. "Can I just say I hate your plans? All of them. How did you figure this was a good idea?" Mace nodded to Kar, and the ankkox's tail swung over its back; Mace grabbed it with both hands, just below the huge knot of armor at its end. "Because if I'd tried this during those transsonic strafing runs," he said calmly, "all that would have been left of me is a red smear on a windscreen." At the Force command of Kar Vaster, the ankkox snapped its tail into a wide whirl, yanking Mace into the air and spinning him once around the outer rim of its shell to get the feel for his added weight. Then with a whipcrack that blurred the world, it fired him straight up the side of the mountain as though he'd been shot from a torpedo launcher.

Hurtling into the path of the descending gunships, Mace reached through the Force to seize the support strut that divided the windscreen of the gunship in the middle, and pulled. He twisted in the air, whirling through a whistling arc, and reeled himself in as though he were on a towline.

His boots thumped solidly to either side of the strut and stuck there, cemented by the Force, facing forward and looking down between the toes of his boots at the twin dumbstruck gapes of the gunship's pilot and its navigator.

The navigator just stared, unable to comprehend this inexplicable apparition. The pilot had better reflexes: The gunship lurched as he released the control yoke and clawed at his sidearm, clearly prepared to sell his own life and the lives of his crew for one shot at the Jedi Master through the hole the pilot assumed Mace's lightsaber was about to slice in the windscreen.

But Mace only shook his head as though mildly disappointed. He waggled an admonitory finger, as though they were schoolboys caught playing a naughty game.

The puzzlement this inflicted upon them was cleared up when they heard a pair of crisp clicks, which were the sounds of the safety levers of their seat-ejectors flipping to "armed." They had barely enough time to register what was happening-not nearly enough time to react-as the activator plates on both seats pressed themselves, and explosive bolts blew the transparisteel windscreen up and out a millisecond before their helmets would have done it for them.

Mace caught the barest flashing glimpse of the identically outraged looks on their faces as the repulsorlift pods on their ejection rmi intvv oiuvcn chairs shot them spinning out over the jungle. One of them howled something obscene. The other just howled.

Mace kicked off from the rim of the roof and dropped into the empty cockpit. A gesture toward the nav console deactivated the belly-mounted Sunfire flame projector. A similar gesture toward the pilot's console engaged the soft-touchdown failsafe on the autopilot, then he opened the cockpit door and walked calmly into the troop bay.

The bay was littered with leaves and mud and food wrappers, as well as bits and pieces of miscellaneous equipment forgotten or discarded by departed militia regulars. The access hatches to the port and starboard ball turrets were directly across from each other in front of the turbine mounts, two thirds of the way aft.

Mace passed between them, then turned and folded his arms.

He could hear, faintly through the sealed hatches, the honking of the ejection-alert klaxon, and he didn't need to touch the Force to mentally see the gunners in either turret frantically unbuckling the safety straps that secured them to the turrets' fighting chairs. The manual dogs on the hatches clacked sharply, but the desperate gunners found both hatches unaccountably jammed until they started putting their whole weight behind slamming their shoulders into them.

Which is when Mace's Force-hold went from keeping them shut to yanking them open, so that the two gunners practically flew into the troop bay, collided helmet-to-helmet with a gunshot crack! and collapsed. One of them, tougher than his counterpart, held on to consciousness, struggling dazedly to find his feet until Mace's foot found him.

To be precise: Until the toe of Mace's boot found, crisply, the point of the gunner's chin.

The unconscious man fell on top of the other gunner. Mace took two short lengths of scrap wire from the litter on the floor and bound their hands thumb-to-thumb, then unhurriedly stepped over them and walked back to the cockpit just as the gunship settled on the broad corpse-littered killing zone about ten meters in front of the ankkox.

Outside, the other two gunships from the flight were heeling around, turrets sparking as their laser cannons tracked toward him. Depa and Kar crouched in front of the head of the ankkox, battering away a flood of blaster fire; Chalk and Nick lay flat in the shadow of one of the ankkox's massive side-curved legs, returning fire with chattering assault rifles.

Mace hit the release for the troop bay doors, and as they fell open, he poked his head out the hole left by the missing windscreen. When the others saw him, their mouths fell about as far open as the doors.

"What are you waiting for?" Mace's deadpan was flawless. "Flowers and a box of candy?" Depa sprang into the open, blade flashing faster than the eye could follow, making herself a standing target to draw fire that she splashed back at their attackers while the others scrambled to their feet. Nick sprinted past her, assault rifle chattering from the hip. Kar dived under the ankkox and rolled up and ran with Chalk cradled like a child in his massive arms. Fire from the surrounding trees tracked away from Depa, clawing for the bounding lor pelek.

Mace frowned. "That's about enough of that" he muttered as he reached into the Force to flip a bank of switches and key an initiation sequence that ganged the targeting servomotors for the ball turrets through the nav console, and gave him fire control.

Twin Taim & Bak quad laser cannons roared to life, hammering thunder into the jungle.

Trees exploded like bombs, filling the air with a cloud of flying splinters and wood dust that made an impromptu smoke screen to cover Kar and Chalk's run to the gunship with Depa sprinting hard behind them.

Nick appeared in the cockpit door behind Mace. "We're in!" "Good. The gunners?" "The tied-up guys?" The younger man shrugged. "They're out." Mace nodded. "Hang on." This was the only warning they got before the gunship leaped straight up, rising like a volcano bomb on screaming overdriven re-pulsorlifts. Cannonfire from the other two gunships blasted the ground where it had been and tracked upward to pound the gunship sideways, dents popping up like boils in the side armor.

Mace slewed the gunship through a rising turn, but the other gun-ships had him bracketed, closing in from either side. Through the roar of impacts and shrieking near-misses, he heard Nick shouting, "The door! Close the doori" He twisted to look over his shoulder. He saw Depa on her feet in the middle of the troop bay, swaying, eyes squeezed shut as though the battle had brought on one of her headaches.

Nick huddled in the doorway, arms around his head; Kar had Chalk tucked into a corner, and he crouched in front of her, shields raised to catch stray bolts that shot in through the open bay door and zinged in hot splintering ricochets around the compartment.

Mace said, "Depa." Her eyes opened.

His lightsaber leaped from its pocket within his vest and shot toward her like a bullet.

Her empty hand met it in midair; her pain-glazed eyes lost focus. He felt her in the Force: a sinking surrender like an exhausted swimmer drowning in a rising tide.

Slipping into Vaapad.

Eyes closed once more, she gave one slight nod.

Mace keyed a sequence on the pilot console. The open door stayed open. The troop door on the opposite side dropped open as well.

Particle beams streaked into the troop bay.

Both blades flashed.

The gunships outside bucked under the impact of their own can-nonfire. On one, a turbojet engine blasted loose of its mount and tumbled away, bouncing down the mountainside trailing smoke and white-hot shreds of its cowling, and the gunship spun half out of control. The other gunship took its cannon blasts directly in the cockpit.

The transparisteel windscreen of a Sienar Turbostorm was thick and very durable; most kinds of shrapnel or fragments wouldn't scratch it. Even heavy-caliber bullets would leave only dents. A quad laser bolt could make a hole. One did.

The next five went through that hole.

The gunship spiralled into the jungle, its cockpit full of shredded flesh.

Depa opened her eyes.

They smoked with darkness.

SHIP TO SHIP M

uscle bunched along Mace's jaw as he forced himself to turn away and focus on his flying. A glance at the short-range sensors showed him gunships all over the place: the computer counted fifty-three in the zone of engagement, with more curving toward them over the horizon. He keyed the troop bay doors shut and cut in the turbojets. "Nick. Take nav." "Sure. Er-yes, sir." Nick glanced at the empty sockets left behind by the ejected chairs.

"Urn. where do I sit?" "Monitor sensors. We should be seeing the HallecKs landers any second. Kar! Chalk! The emergency repulsor-packs are next to the turret hatches. You have thirty seconds." Nick wedged his feet under the chair-socket struts and gripped the nav console's split-yoke controls, squinting against the stiffening wind that whistled through the empty gap in front of him.

The gun-ship's aerodynamics shaped the wind blast past the cockpit instead of into it, but even the minimal back-eddy leakage was enough to stagger him. His eyes lit up as he took in the array of screens on the console-especially the twin screens with targeting reticules displayed at their centers.

"Hey, what's this do?" He twisted the split-yoke in opposite directions, and the images on the screens spun wildly to match.

"Don't touch those." Nick hit the thumb switches on both controllers. The screens filled with parallel bursts of cannonfire as the quad lasers roared. "Yow! Fire control? For me} Oh, General, you shouldn't have!" "I realize that." "It's not even my name-day." "Nick." "Yeah, I know: sensors." "And-" '-shut up, Nick. Yeah, whatever. Hrr." The wind whipped wisps of breath-fog from his mouth. "Starting to get cold in here. Out here. Are we inside or outside?" "We're approaching seven thousand meters. Check those sensors: red hits are friendlies, blue are hostiles." "Well, shee," Nick said. "What are you so worried about, then? There's like fifty-some friendlies already here, and another hundred and ninety-two on the way-I mean, they're like everywhere-and there are only thirteen hostiles, and the friendlies are all over them-whoa.

Now there are twelve. oh, wait. I get it. Whoops." "Whoops is one word for it." "Sorry. I'm a little dopey." "Yes." "Uh-there's a flight of o't'tx friendlies trying right now to climb our butts-whoa, what's that?" A lock-on alert flashed; the accompanying buzzer was half-buried in the wind noise.

"They lit us up! Missiles incoming! Six count, closing, dead astern!" "Back-trace the missile lock and feed it to the computers for counter-fire." "Great idea! I'll get right on that,'rtf thing as soon as I graduate from gunnery school" "Fine then," Mace said through his teeth. "You said you can shoot. Let's see it." "Woo-hoo! Now you're talking? The ball-turrets rotated and the quads blazed to life; the gunship was now climbing straight up, shrieking for space like the starship it once had been.

"Yes indeed! Come and get it!" One of the missiles intersected a stream of cannon bolts and detonated in a burst of black smoke and white fire. "How was that?

"Not bad," Mace said. "Try not to shoot our tail off." "Some people are never satisfied-" "Nick. The other five." "Yeah, yeah. If you wanna be that way about it-" He flipped the arming levers on all four aft missile-tubes. "Onetwothree,'owr!" he shouted, triggering them in order, and the gunship bucked as a staggered flight of four concussion missiles kicked to life and spun twisting white ropes of rocket-smoke down to meet the five missiles behind.

The first impact-burst drew the next missile, and the next, expanding into an immense fireball fed by all nine.

"Shee," Nick snorted disgustedly. "That was hardly any fun at all." "It's not supposed to be fun. Save those missiles." "What for?" "Depa!" Mace called, shouting over the wind shriek. "Are you ready?" She appeared in the doorway, leaning on it for support as though the gunship's artificial gravity were too strong for her. "Ready enough," she said. "I can fight. I can always fight. Take your blade." Mace shook his head. "You'll need it," he said, and cut all power to the gunship's engines.

Its momentum kept it climbing, but slowing now with a lazy twisting barrel-roll as the pursuing ships shot past. It hung poised at its apex for a stretching instant.

The pursuers peeled away from each other in matching ellipses, two of them curving down to dive toward them once again while the third held back for high cover.

Mace worked the controls grimly to hold the ship nose-up as it slid backward toward the ground. "Right or left?" Depa said, "Left," and then she dived straight up into the sky through the cockpit's open front, tucking into a ball to tumble through the falling gunship's slipstream turbulence.

"Yow!" Nick said. "Why doesn't somebody warn me about this stuff?" "Lock cannons on the right-hand ship. Continuous fire. No missiles." "I'm on it." The right side quad turret tracked briefly, then roared a chain of energy into the clouds.

Mace twisted the control yoke to angle the falling gunship's nose to the right so that the portside turret could join the fun, then re-ignited the repulsorlifts at full power and kicked on the turbojets' afterburners. "Hang on." "I'm on that too." The ship jounced and fought the controls, and the gunship diving toward it suddenly bloomed with fire that pounded them like giant particle-beam fists. Mace got a glimpse of Depa, straightening her tumble into feet-first plummet with both lightsabers naming at full extension above her head.

Mace slammed the control yoke sideways and the gunship shrieked into a rising corkscrew that lit up stress-warning indicators all over his console; it got them out from under the rain of cannon-fire, but their targeting computers couldn't process the constantly changing vectors, and their own fire went wild as well. Nick looked over the indicators and his eyes went huge. "Hey, is this bucket designed to do this?" "I hope not," Mace said through his teeth as he fought the controls. "Put fire back on that ship." "Who, me? The computer's not fast enough-" "The computer," said Mace, "can't use the Force." "Uh, yeah. Okay. Sure." Just before he overtook them, Mace saw the left-hand gunship spearing downward against the thrust of reversed engines, twisting into a spiral evasive action to avoid colliding with Depa- And he felt the surge in the Force that drove her directly into its path.

Her blades took it just below the windscreen and drove in to the handgrips, and the rushing airstream around the gunship's nose flipped her over and whipped her up across the cockpit, dragging her blades through the transparisteel to slice free a huge gaping arc.

"Woo!" Nick shouted from beside him. "Love them easy-openin' cans: "Kar! Chalk! Time to go!" The Korun girl climbed into the cockpit between Mace and Nick; she looked pale and in pain, but still fierce. The lorpelek shouldered in behind her. They both wore emergency repulsor-packs strapped across their backs. "You know how these work?" Chalk nodded silently in reply; Vaster slapped the graphic instruction card sewn onto his harness and snarled at him.,' can read.

"Urn, are we bailing out?" Nick said. "Because, y'know, somebody forgot to get me one of those-" "Nick." "What?" "Shoot." "Right. Right. Sorry. Here, watch this." Nick let the port turret go silent, while the starboard quad clawed at the militia ship; the battered ship jinked aside to evade the pounding-directly into a stream of fresh fire from the port turret. "See? That's shooting-" "With real shooting," Chalk told him, "wouldn't be shooting back, him." "Shee. What does it take to please you people?" Mace nodded to Vaster and Chalk. "Ready?" Without waiting for an answer he cut power to the turbojets and flicked the repulsorlifts into reverse; overstressed metal squealed in the gunship's every joint as it blasted down toward stall speed. Mace wrenched the yoke and flipped the gunship upside down. Kar Vaster wrapped one arm around Chalk's shoulders and with the other grabbed the empty rim of the windscreen gap, then pulled them both smoothly out onto the roof. With one explosive kick to clear the gunship's artificial gravity, he and Chalk fell away, tumbling toward the jungle thousands of meters below.