I don't know how to stop it.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace went after him.

 

 

He needed a direction. This one looked promising.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Predatory?

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

One of them spat near his feet as he passed.

 

 

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

 

 

Repulsorlift engine. Maybe more than one.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

This was starting to come into focus.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

A perfect place for a trap.

 

 

Mace thought, Finally.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

In the Force, they felt like energy fields.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

This was about to get interesting.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And Mace was an especially dangerous Jedi.

 

 

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

 

 

Instead of beating it out of them.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

His lightsaber was out of charge.

 

 

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

 

 

Geptun.

 

 

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

 

 

'T J'I" Jedi!

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Shot. Concussed. Cut. Battered. Bladeless.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Or even likely.

 

 

He took one deep breath to compose himself.

 

 

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

 

 

'Now the lightsaber," the talker said.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Because none of them understood what a lightsaber was.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

His lightsaber reflected all he knew. All he believed.

 

 

All he was.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

So he sprang toward it.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

It was a lightsaber.

 

 

It was Depa's lightsaber.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The rest of the fight lasted less than five seconds.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Smiley waved a hand, and the Korunnai stopped firing.

 

 

The sudden silence rang in Mace's ears.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

JUNGLE TO JUNGLE M

 

 

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

 

 

At least, he thought he did.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Someone had cut his throat.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

But he could not simply let this pass.

 

 

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

 

 

Mace slid down the rope.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Smoldering threat burned the calm from his dark eyes.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

But not much like Mace.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Like Depa.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace managed not to flinch. Barely.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And those buried emotions were already stirring to answer.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Nick showed him those gleaming teeth of his.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And many things suddenly fell into place.

 

 

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

 

 

Mace stood in the road and watched it go.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And: things are different, here.

 

 

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

 

 

Out here with the jungle.

 

 

He could smell it.

 

 

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

 

 

He could smell himself sweat.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Outlined against the green.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

It was too late to change his mind after all.

 

 

He was in the jungle already.

 

 

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

 

 

Welcome to Haruun Kal.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

THE SUMMERTIME WAR S

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And he got an answer.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The akk dogs of Haruun Kal.

 

 

Three of them.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Was that their last mission together? Could it be?

 

 

It seemed so long ago.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

She made me so very proud.

 

 

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

 

 

Or have we lost everything?

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Nick said something about dipping himself in tusker poop.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace could see that he cared all too much.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And released.

 

 

Naked. In the jungle.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

That is: not very.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

He hoped he was wrong. Symbols are slippery.

 

 

Uncertain.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

To get ready for next year.

 

 

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

 

 

Blooded and hungry.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And then you die.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

So far, I have only impressions.

 

 

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

 

 

And my guide cannot be trusted.

 

 

Day.

 

 

Mace stood in a universe of rain.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace counted seven bodies.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

This place stank of the dark side.

 

 

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

 

 

Asking him: What will you do about us?

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace woke from evil dreams without opening his eyes.

 

 

He wasn't alone.

 

 

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

 

 

Lesh.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Now Mace smelled machine oil and portaak amber.

 

 

He was armed.

 

 

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

 

 

A less-than-ideal combat position.

 

 

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

 

 

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