Star Wars - Shatterpoint

 

 

Author: Mathew Stover

 

 

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU

 

 

In my dreams, I always do it right.

 

 

In my dreams, I'm on the arena balcony. Geonosis. Orange glare slices shadow from my eyes. Below on the sand: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Senator Padme Amidala. On the rough-shaped stone within reach of my arm: Nute Gunray. Within reach of my blade: Jango Fett.

 

 

And Master Dooku.

 

 

No. Master no more. Count Dooku.

 

 

I may never get used to calling him that. Even in dreams.

 

 

Jango Fett bristles with weapons. An instinctive killer: the deadliest man in the galaxy. Jango can kill me in less than a second. I know it. Even if I had never seen Kenobi's report from Kamino, I can feel the violence Jango radiates: in the Force, a pulsar of death.

 

 

But I do it right.

 

 

My blade doesn't light the underside of Fett's square jaw. I don't waste time with words. I don't hesitate.

 

 

I believe.

 

 

In my dreams, the purple flare of my blade sizzles the gray hairs of Dooku's beard, and in the critical semisecond it takes Jango Fett to aim and fire, I twitch that blade and take Dooku with me into death.

 

 

And save the galaxy from civil war.

 

 

I could have done it.

 

 

I could have done it.

 

 

Because I knew. I could feel it.

 

 

In the swirl of the Force around me, I could feel the connections Dooku had forged among Jango and the Trade Federation, the Geonosians, the whole Separatist movement: connections of greed and fear, of deception and bald intimidation. I did not know what they were-I did not know how Dooku had forged them, or why-but I felt their power: the power of what I now know is a web of treason he had woven to catch the galaxy.

 

 

I could feel that without him to maintain its weave, to repair its flaws and double its thinning strands, the web would rot, would shrivel and decay until a mere breath would shred it and scatter its strings into the infinite stellar winds.

 

 

Dooku was the shatterpoint.

 

 

I knew it.

 

 

That is my gift.

 

 

Imagine a Corusca gem: a mineral whose interlocking crystalline structure makes it harder than durasteel. You can strike one with a five-kilo hammer and do no more than dent the hammer's face. Yet the same cystalline structure that gives the Corusca strength also gives it shatterpoints: spots where a precise application of carefully measured force-no more than a gentle tap-will break it into pieces. But to find these shatterpoints, to use them to shape the Corusca gem into beauty and utility, requires years of study, an intimate understanding of crystal structure, and rigorous practice to train the hand in the perfect combination of strength and precision to produce the desired cut.

 

 

Unless you have a talent like mine.

 

 

I can see shatterpoints.

 

 

The sense is not sight, but see is the closest word Basic has for it: it is a perception, a feel of how what I look upon fits into the Force, and how the Force binds it to itself and to everything else. I was six or seven standard years old-well into my training in the Jedi Temple-before I realized that other students, full-grown Jedi Knights, even wise Masters, could sense such connections only with difficulty, and only with concentration and practice. The Force shows me strengths and weaknesses, hidden flaws and unexpected uses. It shows me vectors of stress that squeeze or stretch, torque or shear; it shows me how patterns of these vectors intersect to form the matrix of reality.

 

 

Put simply: when I look at you through the Force, I can see where you break.

 

 

I looked at Jango Fett on the sand in the Geonosian arena. A perfect combination of weapons, skills, and the will to use them: an interlocking crystal of killer. The Force hinted a shatterpoint, and I left a headless corpse on the sand. The deadliest man in the galaxy.

 

 

Now: just dead.

 

 

Situations have shatterpoints, like gems. But those of situations are fluid, ephemeral, appearing for a bare instant, vanishing again to leave no trace of their existence. They are always a function of timing.

 

 

There is no such thing as a second chance.

 

 

If-when-I next encounter Dooku, he will be the war's shatterpoint no longer. I can't stop this war with a single death.

 

 

But on that day in the Geonosian arena, I could have.

 

 

Some days after the battle, Master Yoda had found me in a meditation chamber at the Temple. "Your friend he was," the ancient Master had said, even as he limped through the door.

 

 

It is a peculiar gift of Yoda's that he always seems to know what I'm thinking. "Respect you owed him. Even affection. Cut him down you could not-not for merely a feeling." But I could have.

 

 

I should have.

 

 

Our Order prohibits personal attachments for precisely this reason. Had I not honored him so-even loved him-the galaxy might be at peace right now. Merely a feeling, Yoda said.

 

 

I am a Jedi.

 

 

I have been trained since birth to trust my feelings.

 

 

But which feelings should I trust?

 

 

When I faced the choice to kill a former Jedi Master, or to save Kenobi and young Skywalker and the Senator. I let the Force choose for me. I followed my instincts.

 

 

I made the Jedi choice.

 

 

And so: Dooku escaped. And so: the galaxy is at war. And so: many of my friends have been slaughtered.

 

 

There is no such thing as a second chance.

 

 

Strange: Jedi I am, yet I drown in regret for having spared a life.

 

 

Many survivors of Geonosis suffer from nightmares. I have heard tale after tale from the Jedi healers who have counseled them. Nightmares are inevitable; there has not been such a slaughter of Jedi since the Sith War, four thousand years ago. None of them could have imagined how it would feel to stand in that arena, surrounded by the corpses of their friends, in the blazing orange noon and the stench and the blood-soaked sand. I may be the only veteran of Geonosis who doesn't have nightmares of that place.

 

 

Because in my dreams, I always do it right.

 

 

My nightmare is what I find when I wake up.

 

 

Jedi have shatterpoints, too.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

He sometimes wondered privately if he would ever smile again.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

But he feared to learn at what cost.

 

 

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

 

 

Anything else.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace stared.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

'Enhance these," Mace repeated.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

This would be ugly.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

At least, not by those loyal to the Republic.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Brassvine thorns.

 

 

Someone had used them to nail her jaw shut.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Not like this.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

,' use the night, and the night uses me.

 

 

He forgot to breathe. This was bad.

 

 

It got worse.

 

 

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

 

 

Depa's voice.

 

 

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

 

 

The recording went on. And on.

 

 

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

 

 

She was talking to him.

 

 

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

 

 

I've gone sane.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Her voice trailed off into the jungle-mutter.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

As though only the jungle were real.

 

 

Mace spoke first.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

He could not unmake what he had made.

 

 

There were no second chances.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

It was beautiful. Mace barely noticed.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I'll find out soon enough.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And sometimes the water never clears.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

L This doesn't help.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I am a full-blooded Korun.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And break our hearts as well.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Instead, I think about the war.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

This was why Depa Billaba came to Haruun Kal.

 

 

I sent her here.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

That would be me.

 

 

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

 

 

I've never minded.

 

 

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

 

 

No Korun need apply.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Especially when all these guerrillas can touch the Force.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Whatever it takes.

 

 

Even your family.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Another fact: Depa volunteered to strike it.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Any other reason.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace looked at him.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The cops scowled.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The sign said: WELCOME TO PELEK BAW.

 

 

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

 

 

Street faces.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

But nearly everyone looked at Mace.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

He would have felt safer in the jungle.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Military hardware.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

CAPITAL CRIMES H

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

He waited.

 

 

He waited a long time.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

A fever of the mind.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Was this what broke Depa?

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

. I've gone sane.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

She couldn't.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace frowned. An unusual position for guards.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

He revised his threat assessment again. Upward.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

He could not guess what he should do next.

 

 

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

 

 

Instead, I drifted with the current of the crowds.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

But at Geonosis, our knowing failed us all.

 

 

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

 

 

Will happen again.