And had he said akks? or ax?

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Tears streamed down his face.

 

 

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

 

 

He was crying. Silently.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Not a bad bargain.

 

 

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

 

 

Day.

 

 

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

 

 

Gunships. More than one.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Gunships. Coming straight for the notch.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace's mouth set in a grim slit.

 

 

He saw one bare chance.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

In round numbers.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Behind Mace, the pilot of the first gunship finally recovered control, shutting down the port turbojet and bringing the craft around on repulsorlifts alone. Mace could feel Chalk recovering consciousness among the burning rocks, but he didn't have time to do anything for her right now. Instead, he followed the drift of her awakening mind into the Force-bond she shared with Galthra. One second was enough for Mace to sound the depths of that bond: he took its full measure.

 

 

Then he just took it.

 

 

Galthra's bond with Chalk was deep and strong, but it was a function of the Force, and Mace was a Jedi Master. Until he released the akk, Galthra's bond would be with him.

 

 

Mace hurled himself flipping through the air as Galthra sprang down to meet him. She hit the ground already gathered for her next leap and Mace finished his flip to land standing on her back. She was not trained to carry a rider in battle, but the flow of the Force through their bond made them a single creature. Mace wedged his left foot behind her cowl spines and she sprang out into the pass, bounding a jagged path through the inferno of flame and bursting stone.

 

 

Crouching low to take some cover from Galthra's massive skull, Mace slipped a grenade from the pack into the over-under's launcher, then slung the weapon without firing. Behind him, he felt the forward missile ports of the damaged gunship cycle open.

 

 

Mace murmured, "Right on time." He and Galthra reached the crest of the pass. The two gunships in front of him roared up the slope. The one behind launched a concussion missile at Galthra's back.

 

 

In the shaved semisecond after launch, that eyeblink when the missile seemed to hang in the air as though gathering itself for the full ignition of its main engine and the multiple dozens of standard gravities of acceleration it would pull in its lightning flight, the Force-bond between Mace and Galthra pulsed and the great akk made a sudden leap to the left.

 

 

The missile screamed past so close that its exhaust scorched Mace's scalp.

 

 

And one little nudge in the Force-hardly more than an affectionate chuck under the chin- tipped its diamond-shaped warhead up a centimeter or two, altering its angle of attack just enough that the missile skimmed the crest of the pass instead of impacting on the burning ground. It streaked on, punching black smoke into turbulence vortices that trailed its tail fins, until the lead gunship swooped up the far side of the pass and took the missile right up its nose.

 

 

A huge white fireball knocked it rearing back like a startled grasser, and black smoke poured from the twisted gap blown in its nose armor. Its turbojets roared, and smoke whipped from its screaming repulsorlifts as its pilot fought for control. The third gun-ship slewed, yawing wildly as it reversed thrust and dived to avoid ramming the other's rear end.

 

 

Mace and Galthra raced straight toward them.

 

 

As they passed the shuddering hulk of Chalk's grasser, Mace reached for the Thunderbolt. It flipped from the ground into his arms, its power pack nestling between his feet. He cradled the massive weapon at his hip, angled the barrel at the third gunship, and held down the trigger.

 

 

Mace surfed through the flames and black stinging smoke, over the slag of melting rock, through the thunder and shrapnel shrieks of bursting stone on the back of three-quarters of a metric ton of armored predator, firing from the hip, hammering out a fountain of packeted energy that ripped its way up the side of the gunship. The Thunderbolt didn't have the punch to penetrate the gunship's heavy armor plating, but that didn't matter; the roaring repeater was merely Mace's calling card, Galthra shot down the slope beneath the gunships and Mace turned to face them, riding backward, spraying the air with blaster-fire until the Thunderbolt overheated and coughed sparks and Mace cast it aside. The third gunship fired a pair of missiles, but Mace could feel their point of aim before they squeezed the triggers, and Galthra was so fast in response to his Force commands that neither of the missiles came close enough for its detonation to have so much as mussed his hair.

 

 

If he'd had any.

 

 

Now the gunship's side-mounted laser turrets rotated to track them, and through the Force Mace felt their targeting computers lock on. The two damaged ships reached firing position, and they also locked on. They were coordinating their fire: he could not hope to dodge. So he didn't bother. He brought Galthra to a halt beneath him.

 

 

He stood motionless, empty-handed, waiting for them to open fire.

 

 

Waiting to give them a brief tutorial on the art of Vaapad.

 

 

Their cannons belched energy and Mace threw himself into the Force, releasing all but his intention. It was no longer Mace Windu who acted: the Force acted through him. Depa's lightsaber snapped into his left hand while his own flipped into his right. The green cascade was a jungle-echo of the purple as they both met clawing chains of red.

 

 

On Sarapin, a Vaapad was a notoriously dangerous predator, powerful and rapacious. It attacked with its blindingly fast tentacles. Most had at least seven. It was not uncommon for them to have as many as twelve. The largest ever killed had twenty-one. The thing about a Vaapad was that you never knew how many tentacles it had until it was dead: they moved too fast to count. Almost too fast to see.

 

 

So did Mace's.

 

 

Energy sprayed around him, but only splatters of it grazed him here and there; the rest went back at the gunship. Though the Thunderbolt hadn't the power to penetrate their heavy armor, aTaim 8c Bak laser cannon is a whole different animal.

 

 

Ten bolts reached his blades. Two apiece went back at the dam aged ships, bursting against their armor and knocking them reeling to break their target lock. The other six hammered the cockpit of the third gunship, blasting a gaping hole in its transparisteel viewport.

 

 

Mace dropped the lightsabers, swung the over-under forward on its sling, and fired from the hip. It belched a single grenade that the Force guided right through that hole into the cockpit.

 

 

The grenade made a dull, wet-sounding whump inside the gunship. A fountain of white goo splashed out the hole.

 

 

Mace grunted to himself; he thought he'd loaded Nytinite.

 

 

Then he shrugged: Eh. Same difference.

 

 

One of the forward turbojets sucked strings of hardening glop through its intake, squealed, and chewed itself to shrapnel. The gun-ship lurched wildly; with the crew glued fast in the grenade's glop, there was nothing they could do except watch in horror as their ship careened into the face of the ridge and detonated in an impressive explosion that splashed flame three hundred meters down the slope.

 

 

Mace thought, And now, for my next trick.

 

 

He released the over-under and extended his hands and both lightsabers hurtled back to his grip- But the two damaged gunships had peeled off and were already limping away into the smoke-stained sky.

 

 

He watched them go, frowning.

 

 

He felt oddly distressed.

 

 

Unhappy.

 

 

This had been. strange. Uncomfortable.

 

 

His rigorous self-honesty wouldn't allow him to deny the actual word that described the feeling.

 

 

It had been unsatisfying.

 

 

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU I don't know how long I stood there, frowning into the sky. Eventually, I recovered enough of my equanimity to slide off Galthra's back and release my hold on her Force-bond. She bounded off, searching for Chalk upslope among the burning rocks.

 

 

Nick came stumbling down the slope, picking his way through the dying flames, avoiding the half-slagged rocks that still glowed a dull red. He seemed most impressed by the fight.

 

 

Adrenaline drunk and childishly giggly, he seemed deliriously happy, bubbling over with jittery enthusiasm. I don't recall much of what he said beyond some nonsense about me being a "walking one-man war machine." Something like that. I'm not sure the word he used was walking.

 

 

Most of what he said was lost in the roar that lived inside my head: a hurricane-whirl of the thunder of my heart, echoes of the battle's explosions, and the tidal surge of the Force itself.

 

 

When he reached me, I saw that he was wounded: blood washed down his face and neck from a deep gash along the side of his head-probably a graze from a rock splinter. But he just kept on about how he'd never seen anything like me until I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

 

 

'You're bleeding," I told him, but that dark gleam in his bright blue eyes never wavered. He kept going on about "Alone against three gun-ships. Three. Alone." I told him that I hadn't been alone. I quoted Yoda:" 'My ally is the Force.'" He didn't seem to understand, so I explained: "I had them outnumbered." What happened next I remember vividly, no matter how much I wish I could wipe it from my mind. I couldn't tear my eyes from the two damaged gunships that by then were mere specks of durasteel soaring into the limitless sky.

 

 

Nick followed my gaze, and said, "Yeah, I know how you feel. Shame you couldn't roast all three, huh?" 'How I feel?" I rounded on him. "How ,' feel?" I had a sudden urge to punch him: an urge so powerful the effort to restrain it left me gasping.

 

 

I wanted-I needed-to punch him. To punch him in the face. To feel my fist shatter his jaw.

 

 

To make him shut up.

 

 

To make him not look at me.

 

 

The understanding in his voice-the knowledge in his cold blue eyes- I wanted to hit him because he was right. He did know how I felt.

 

 

It was an ugly shock.

 

 

As he said: I'd wanted to destroy those other gunships, too. I wanted to rip them out of the sky and watch them burn. No thought of the lives I'd already taken in the first gunship. No thought of the lives I would take in the other two. In the Force, I reached out toward the burning wreckage on the ridge face above, searching among the flames; for what, I can't say.

 

 

I'd like to think I was feeling for survivors. Checking to see if there were any people, merely wounded, who might be saved from the wreckage. But I cannot honestly say that is true.

 

 

I might have just wanted to feel them burn.

 

 

I also cannot honestly say I'm sorry for the way the fight turned out.

 

 

Though I took their lives in self-defense, and the defense of others, neither I nor those I defended are innocents. I cannot honestly claim that my Korun companions are any more deserving of life than were the people in the gunship. What I did in the pass, I cannot call my duty as a Jedi.

 

 

What I did there had nothing to do with peace.

 

 

One might call it an accident of war: it happened that this small band of murderous guerrillas accompanied a Jedi Master, and so the spouses and children of a gunship crew have suffered a horrible loss. One might call it an accident of war. even I might call it that- If it had been anything resembling an accident.

 

 

If I hadn't been trying to bring that ship down. If I hadn't felt the fever in my blood: blood fever.

 

 

The lust for victory. To win, at any cost.

 

 

Blood fever.

 

 

I feel it even now.

 

 

It's not overpowering; I haven't fallen that far. Yet. It's more a preference. An expectation.

 

 

An anticipation that has been disappointed.

 

 

This is bad. Not the worst it can be, but bad enough.

 

 

I have long known that I am in danger here. But only now am I beginning to understand how dark and near that danger is; I never guessed how close Haruun Kal has already brought me to that fatal brink.

 

 

It is a side effect of the Force immersion of Vaapad. My style grants great power, but at a terrible risk. Blood fever is a disease that can kill anyone it touches. To use Vaapad, you must allow yourself to enjoy the fight. You give yourself to the thrill of battle. The rush of winning.

 

 

This is why so few students even attempt the style.

 

 

Vaapad is a path that leads through the penumbra of the dark side.

 

 

Here in the jungle, that shadow fringe is unexpectedly shallow. Full night is only a step away.

 

 

I must be very, very careful here.

 

 

Or I may come to understand what's happened to Depa all too well.

 

 

Mace lowered his head. The electric sizzle of combat drained from his limbs, leaving them heavy and hurting: he had a variety of superficial burns from plasma splatter and splinters of half- molten rock.

 

 

He made himself look back up the slope into the pass, through the dying flames and the black twists of fading smoke. In the pass above were dead akks, dead or wounded grassers, and Chalk and Besh and Lesh.

 

 

He recalled his Force-flash of this morning.

 

 

'Come on, settle down," he told Nick. It was astonishing how tired he'd suddenly become. "I think we have casualties." They worked their way up the ramp of scree. Above, Chalk limped over to her wounded grasser and shook her head: it had been terribly burned. One whole flank was only a mass of char. She walked back up the six-meter length of its body, dropped to one knee, and stroked its head. It made a faint honk of pain and distress, and nuzzled her hand as Chalk drew her slug pistol and shot it just below its crown eye.

 

 

The pistol's single sharp pop echoed from the cliff walls that bound the notch. To Mace, it sounded like a punctuation mark: a period for the end of the battle. The echoes made it into sardonic applause.

 

 

Besh and Lesh still huddled in the shadow of the dead akk. With the akk on one side and a huge crag on the other to shelter them from the flames, Mace thought they might have made it through.

 

 

Chalk got there before Nick and Mace. All the way down from the L

 

 

corpse of her grasser, her eyes stayed locked on where the brothers must have been, and from her face Mace could tell that what she saw was bad. She glanced over at Nick as he and Mace came up, and she gave that same slow expressionless shake of the head.

 

 

Besh sat on the ground by the dead akk's head. Hugging his knees. Rocking back and forth.

 

 

Scattered on the ground around him were contents of a standard medpac: hand scanner, spray hypos and bandages, bone stabilizers. He didn't seem to be injured, but he was pale as a dead man, and his eyes were round and blankly staring.

 

 

Lesh was in convulsions.

 

 

His face had twisted into a rigid mask, a blind gape at the empty afternoon sky. He bucked and writhed, hands clutching spastically, heels drumming the rocks. Mace's first thought was head wound-shrapnel or rock splinters in the skull could trigger such seizures-and he couldn't understand why Nick and Chalk and his own brother just stood as though they were helpless to do anything but watch him suffer. Dropping to a knee, Mace reached for the medpac scanner. Chalk said, "Leave it." Mace looked up at her. She gave him the head shake. "Dead already." Mace picked up the scanner anyway, and slid the medpac cover open to activate the display. The readout said Lesh wasn't wounded.

 

 

He was infected.

 

 

Unidentified bloodborne parasites had collected in his central nervous system. They had now entered a new stage in their life cycle.

 

 

They were eating his brain.

 

 

The previous night in the wallet tent made sense to Mace now: Lesh must have been sick with these parasites already. And Mace had thought it was nothing but stress and thyssel intoxication.

 

 

'Fever wasps," Nick said hoarsely. He was almost as pale as Besh. He could face violent death with a wink and a sarcastic one-liner, but this had his face shining with pale sweat. He stank of fear. "No telling when he might have been stung. Thyssel chewers go faster. The larvae like the bark. When they hatch-" He swallowed and his eyes went thin. He had to look away.

 

 

'They'll hatch from his skull. Through his skull. Like an, an, an eggshell." The pure uncomplicated horror on his face told Mace this wouldn't be the first time he'd seen it happen.

 

 

Mace set the medpac on a cool spot by the dead akk. "It says here he can still be saved." It took only a second to charge a spray hypo with thanatizine. "We can put him in suspended animation. Slow down the. wasp larvae. until we can get him to Pelek Baw and a full hospital. Even if he's identified-" Besh looked up at him, and shook his head in a mute No.

 

 

Mace brushed past him and knelt at Lesh's side. "We can save him, Besh. Maybe it'll mean giving him up to the militia, but at least he'll be alive," Besh caught Mace's arm. His eyes were raw, spidered with blood. Again, he shook his head.

 

 

'Master Windu." Nick picked up the medpac case and glanced at the readout. "Lesh is way more advanced than this thing says." 'Medpac scanners are extremely reliable. I can't imagine it's wrong." 'It's not wrong," Nick said softly. He turned the case so that Mace could check the screen again. "These aren't Lesh's readings." 'What?" Besh, looking at the ground, touched his own chest with the tips of his fingers, then sagged; he seemed to crumple in on himself, breath leaving him along with hope and fear. His Force aura shaded into black despair.

 

 

Mace looked from Besh to Nick and back again, and then at Lesh spasming on the rocks, and then at the spray hypo still clutched nervelessly in his hand. Not because the jungle kills you, Nick had said. Just because it is what it is.

 

 

Nick retrieved the medpac's scanner and waved it near Mace's head. "You're okay," he said thinly, licking pale sweat from his upper lip. "No sign of infestation." He turned to Chalk, frowning down at the medpac's readout.

 

 

His shoulders slumped and his hand started to shake.

 

 

He had no words, but he didn't need any. She read her fate on his face.

 

 

She stiffened and her mouth went thin and hard. Then she turned away and marched downslope.

 

 

'Chalk-" Nick called after her helplessly. "Chalk, wait-" 'Getting the Thunderbolt, me." Her voice was squeezed flat, as unemotional as a navcomp's vocabulator. "Good weapon. Will need it, you." Nick turned his stricken look on Mace. "Master Windu-" He held out the medpac scanner imploringly. "Don't make me do my own reading, huh?" Mace quickly scanned Nick's spine and skull. The readings indicated a clear negative, but Nick didn't seem much relieved.

 

 

'Yeah, well," he said with understated bitterness, "if I was gonna die in the next day or two, I wouldn't have to worry about taking care of them." 'Taking care of them?" Mace said. "Is there a treatment?" 'Yeah." Nick drew his pistol. "I got their treatment right here." 'That's your answer?" Mace stepped in front of him. "Kill your friends?" 'Just Lesh," he said, his voice grim and hard, even though it trembled a little, like his hand. He didn't have Chalk's mental toughness. His eyes watered, and his face twisted, and he could barely make himself look at his friends. "Time enough to take care of Besh and Chalk when they start the twitches." Mace still couldn't believe Nick was serious. "You want to just shoot them? Like Chalk's grasser?" 'Not like her grasser," Nick said. His face had gone gray. "Not in the head. Scatters the larvae. Some of them will be developed enough to be dangerous." He coughed. "To us." 'So it's not enough that he dies." Mace breathed Jedi discipline into a wall around his heart: to lock down his empathic horror at the gray rictus of Lesh's face. Pink-tinged foam bubbled from Lesh's lips. "The. infested areas. have to be destroyed. Brain and spinal cord." Nick nodded, looking even sicker. "With wasp fever, we usually burn the body, but." Mace understood. The escaped gunships would have transmitted their position. No telling what might already be on its way.

 

 

He could not believe what he was about to do. He could not even believe what he was about to say. But he was a Jedi. The purpose of his life was to do what must be done. To do what others would not, or could not.

 

 

No matter what it was.

 

 

He undipped the lightsabers from his belt. His own and Depa's both.

 

 

Green blade and purple sizzled together in the smoke-hazed air.

 

 

Besh looked up from the ground. Chalk went still on the slope, the Thunderbolt cradled in her arms. Nick opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, but didn't know what it might be.

 

 

They all stared at Mace as though they'd never seen him before.

 

 

'He's your friend. Your brother." Mace took a deep breath, steadying his own fear and revulsion and his dark, dark loathing for what he must do. "You might want to say good-bye." Besh shook his head mutely. With an inarticulate sob compounded of grief and terror, he threw himself to his feet and stumbled away upslope.

 

 

Chalk only held Mace's eye for a second, and gave him one slow nod. Then she followed Besh. She put one strong arm around Besh's shoulders. Besh collapsed against her, sobbing.

 

 

Nick was the last. His eyes showed nothing but pain. Finally, he shook his head, and tears spilled onto his cheeks. "He's already gone." He touched Mace on the shoulder. "Master Windu-you don't have to do this-" 'Yes, I do," Mace said. "Or you'll have to." Nick nodded reluctant understanding.

 

 

'Thanks. Windu, uh, Master, I-just-thanks." He turned and walked after the others. "I won't forget it." Neither would Mace.

 

 

He stared down at Lesh between the two shining blades. He reached into the Force, seeking to touch anything of the young man that might remain, to offer what little comfort might be his to give, but it was as Nick said: Lesh was already gone. A long moment passed while Mace composed himself, found an attitude of calm reverence, and consigned whatever might have been left of Lesh's consciousness or spirit to the Force. Then he took a deep breath, lifted his blades, and began.

 

 

The razorback ridge eclipsed the southern sky behind them. The jungle canopy overhead glowed with early sunset; on the ground it was already twilight. The companions walked along a broad track crushed bare by repeated passages of steamcrawler treads. The canopy had arched over the track, joining above so that their path lay along a jungle-lined tunnel that wound and switchbacked up and down the folds that radiated from the ridge's north face.

 

 

Mace wore bacta patches trimmed to fit the worst of his burns. Nick's temple was shiny with spray bandage. Chalk wore a sling restraining the shoulder she'd separated when she tumbled into the rocks, and a compression wrap supported her twisted knee. Besh walked in expressionless silence. He might have been in shock.

 

 

What was left of Lesh was buried at the tree line.

 

 

Their backpacks were heavy with supplies scavenged from the dead grassers. Little of Mace's gear survived; his wallet tent, his changes of clothing, his own medpac and identikit, all had been destroyed with Nick's grasser. The war on Haruun Kal was erasing Mace's connections to life outside the jungle: of all the physical evidence that he had ever been anything other than a Korun, only the two lightsabers remained.

 

 

Even the fake datapad that he had carried all this way-its miniature subspace coil must have been damaged in the blast. He'd considered summoning the Halleck to evacuate Besh and Chalk for medical treatment, despite the fact that it would have severely compromised his mission here; the sudden appearance of a Republic cruiser in the Al'Har system would certainly have drawn entirely too much Separatist attention. But the datapad's holocomm had been unable to even pick up a carrier wave. His last link to what Depa called the Galaxy of Peace was as dead as the Balawai militia Mace had sent crashing into the razorback ridge.

 

 

A stroke of irony-the fake datapad's recording function still worked. Disguise had become reality: the datapad was a fake no longer. Mace had a superstitious hunch that this was somehow symbolic.

 

 

Galthra walked among them at Chalk's side instead of ranging around; she was the last of their akks. With a little luck, her presence alone might keep major predators at a respectful distance.

 

 

No gunships had yet come to the pass behind them. Mace found this inexplicable, and disturbing. Once in a while, Galthra gave a Force-twitch that may have meant she heard engines in the distance, but it was hard to tell. Mostly, she mourned her dead packmates: her Force presence was a long moan of grief and loss.

 

 

They pushed on. Nick set a killing pace. He had not spoken since they'd buried Lesh's remains.

 

 

Mace guessed that Nick was thinking about Besh and Chalk; he himself certainly was.

 

 

Thinking about the fever wasp larvae that teemed within their brain and spinal cord tissue. They might have a day or two before dementia would begin. A day or two after that: convulsions and an ugly death. Besh walked with his head down, shivering, as though he could think of nothing else; Chalk marched like a war droid, as though suffering and death were too alien for her to even comprehend, let alone fear.

 

 

Mace matched Nick's pace, close by his side. "Talk to me." Nick's eyes stayed on the jungle ahead. "Why should I?" 'Because I want to know what you have in mind." 'What makes you think I have anything in mind? What makes you think anything I might have in mind can make a difference?" His voice was angrily bitter. "We have two people about to go into second-stage wasp fever. No grassers. One akk. A handful of weapons, militia on our tail. And you and me." His gaze slid sideways to meet Mace's. His eyes were red and raw.

 

 

'We're dead. You get it? Like that tusker in the death hollow: a few meters short of where we needed to be. We didn't make it. We're dead." 'For dead men," Mace observed, "we're making good time." For an instant he thought Nick might crack a smile. Instead, Nick shook his head. "There's a lor pelek who travels with Depa's band. He's. very powerful. More than powerful. If we can get Besh and Chalk to him before they start the twitches, he might be able to save them." Lor pelek: "jungle master." Shaman. Witch doctor. Wizard. In Korun legend, the lor pelek was a person of great power, and great peril. As unpredictable as the jungle. He brought life or death: a gift or a wound. In some stories, a lor pelek was not a being at all, but was rather pelekotan incarnate: the avatar of the jungle-mind.

 

 

Mace made a connection. "Kar Vaster." Nick goggled at him. "How'd you know that? How'd you know his name?" 'How long before we reach them?" Nick trudged on a few paces before he answered. "If we still had grassers, and akks for warding? Maybe two days. Maybe less. On foot? With only one akk?" His shrug was expressive.

 

 

'Then why march us so hard?" 'Because I do have something in mind." He flicked a sidelong glance at Mace. "But you're not gonna like it." 'Will I like it less than having to do to Besh and Chalk what I had to do to Lesh?" 'That's not for me to say." Nick's gaze went remote, staring off into the gloom-filled tunnel ahead. "There's a little outpost settlement about an hour west of here. Ones like it are strung out every hundred klicks or so along these steamcrawler tracks. They'll have a secure bunker, and a comm unit. Even though we-the ULF-don't use comms, we still monitor the frequencies. We get in there, we can send a coded signal to them with our position. Then we put Chalk and Besh in thanatizine suspension, sit tight, and hope for the best." 'A Balawai settlement?" He nodded. "We don't have settlements. DOKAWs saw to that." 'These Balawai-they'll take us in?" 'Sure." Nick's teeth gleamed in the jungle twilight, and that manic spark kindled in his eyes.

 

 

"You just have to know how to ask." Mace's face darkened. "I won't let you harm civilians. Not even to save your friends." 'No need to scorch your scalp over that one," Nick said, trudging onward. "Out here, civilians are a myth." Mace didn't want to ask what Nick meant by that. He came to a stop on the rugged track.

 

 

He saw again the holoprojected carnage spread across the Supreme Chancellor's desk; he saw again images of huts broken and burned, and nineteen corpses in the jungle. "You were right," he said. "I don't like it. I don't like it at all." Nick kept walking. He didn't even look over his shoulder as he left Mace behind. "Yeah, well, as soon as you come up with a better idea," he said into the darkness ahead, "you be sure to let me know, huh?" CIVILIANS FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU In this bunker, the air is closer to cool than any I've felt since the interrogation room in the Ministry of Justice. The bunker is set into the igneous stone of the hillside-mostly just a durasteel door across the mouth of a bubble some pocket of gas or softer stone once left in the granite here.Though it overlooks the remnants of the outpost compound below, it was clearly never meant to be a combat position: no gun ports. From the way it's constructed- excavated-I believe it was more along the lines of a panic room: a safe place to hole up in the event of an attack. A safe place to wait for help from the militia.

 

 

If so, it didn't work.

 

 

The night air gently curls around the twisted shards that are all that's left of the door; its whispering passage darkly echoes the violence that still hums in the Force around me.

 

 

I dare not meditate. The dark is too deep here. It has a tidal pull: a black hole that I've taken up too tight an orbit around, and it's tearing me in half. Gravity draws the near half of me in toward an event horizon that I'm afraid to even glimpse.

 

 

Behind me, lost in the night shadows against the stone, Besh and Chalk lie motionless, nearly as cool as the rock they lie on, in full tha natizine suspension. Only with the Force can I tell that they still live: their hearts beat less than once per minute, and an hour spans no more than ten or twelve shallow breaths. The fever wasp larvae in their bodies are similarly suspended; Besh and Chalk might survive a week or more like this.

 

 

Provided nothing eats them in the meantime.

 

 

Making sure they're safe is my job. Right now, it's my only job. And so I sit among the wreckage of this doorway and stare out into the infinite night.

 

 

The Thunderbolt rests on its bipod in the doorway, muzzle canted toward the sky. Chalk maintains her beloved weapon well; she insisted on field-stripping it one last time before she would let me inject her. I have test-fired it at intervals, and it's still working fine. Though I am trying to learn to feel the action of the metal-eating fungi in the Force, the way the Korunnai do, I prefer to depend on practical experiment.

 

 

There is little for me to do right now. I pass the time by recording this-and by thinking about my argument with Nick.

 

 

Back on the trail, Nick said that civilians are a myth. He meant, I found, that there are no civilians out here: that to be in the jungle is to be in the war. The Balawai government promulgates a myth of innocent jungle prospectors being massacred by savage Korun partisans.

 

 

This, Nick says, is only propaganda.

 

 

Now, here in the ruins of this Balawai outpost, I find the thought oddly comforting-but earlier this evening I rejected the idea instinctively. It seemed to me nothing more than rationalization. An excuse. A sop to consciences haunted by atrocities. On the hike along the steam-crawler track that led us here, Nick and I went back and forth about it quite a bit.

 

 

According to Nick, civilians stay in the cities; the only real civilians on Haruun Kal are the waiters and the janitors, the storekeepers and the taxicart pullers. He said there's a reason why jungle prospectors carry such heavy weapons, and that reason has more to do with akk dogs than with vine cats. Balawai do not go into the jungle unless they're ready, willing, and able to kill Korunnai. Nobody on either side waits for the other to attack. In the jungle, if you don't strike first you're nothing but prey.

 

 

Then I asked him about the dead children.

 

 

It's the only time I've yet seen Nick angry. He wheeled on me like he wanted to throw a punch. "What children?" he said. "How old do you have to be to pull a trigger? Kids make great soldiers.They barely know what fear is." It is wrong to make war on children-or with them-and I told him so. No matter what.

 

 

They're not old enough to understand the consequences of their actions. He replied in staggeringly obscene terms that I should tell that to the Balawai.

 

 

'What about our children?" He shook with barely restrained fury. "The jups can leave their kids at home in the city. Where do we leave ours? You've seen Pelek Baw.You know what happens to a Korun kid on those streets-,' know what happens. I was one of them. Better blown to pieces out here than having to-survive-like I did. So then, out here, how do you tell the gunners in those ships that the Korunnai they're happily blowing arms and legs off of, are only kids?" 'Does that justify what happens to the Balawai children? The ones who don't stay in the cities?" I asked him. "The Korunnai aren't firing down at random from a gunship. What's your excuse?" 'We don't need an excuse," he said. "We don't murder kids. We're the good guys." 'Good guys," I echoed. I could not keep a bitter edge from my voice: the holographic images shown to Yoda and me in Palpatine's office are never far beneath the surface of my mind. "I have seen what's left behind when your good guys are done with a jungle prospector outpost," I told him. "That's why I'm here." 'Sure it is. Hah. Let me share something with you, huh?" Changeable as a summer storm, Nick's anger had blown away between one eye-blink and the next. He gave me a look of amused pity. "I've been waiting for days for you to bring that up." 'What?" 'You Jedi and your secrets and all that tusker poop. You think nobody else can keep their chip-cards close to the chest?" He rolled his eyes and waggled his fingers near his face. "Ooo, look out, I'm a Jedi! I know things Too Dangerous for Ordinary Mortals! Careful! If you don't stand back, I might tell you something Beings Were Not Meant to Know!" It has occurred to me, on reflection, that Nick Rostu can be regarded as a test of my moral conviction. A Jedi might conceivably fall to the dark from the simple desire to smack the snot out of him.

 

 

At the time, I managed to restrain myself, and even to maintain a civil tone, while Nick revealed that he knew all about the jungle massacre and the data wafer.

 

 

It wasn't easy.

 

 

He told me that not only had he been there-at the very scene Yoda and I had viewed in Palpatine's office-he had been in the company of Depa and Kar Vastor when they'd thought the whole scheme up. He had helped them dress the scene, and later it was Nick himself who had tipped off Republic Intelligence.

 

 

Even now, hours later, it's hard for me to put into words how that made me feel.

 

 

Disoriented, certainly: almost dizzy. Disbelieving.

 

 

Betrayed.

 

 

I have been carrying those images like a wound. They've festered in my mind, so inflamed and painful I've had to cushion them in layers of denial. Pain like that makes a wound precious; when the slightest touch is agony, one must keep the wound so protected, so sequestered, that it becomes an object of reverence. Sacred.

 

 

But Nick told the story like it had been just some kind of practical joke.

 

 

Hmm. I find now another word for how I felt. For how I feel.

 

 

Angry.

 

 

This, too, makes meditation difficult. And risky.

 

 

It is as well that Nick left on Galthra some hours ago. Perhaps before he returns-,'/he returns-I will have found a place in my mind to put these things he shared with me, where they will no longer whisper violence behind my heart.

 

 

The whole massacre was staged.

 

 

Not fake. The bodies were real.The death was real. But it was a setup. It was a practical joke. On me.

 

 

Depa wanted me here.

 

 

That's what this has been about. From the beginning.

 

 

That data wafer wasn't a frame, and it wasn't a confession. It was a lure. She wanted to draw me from Coruscant, bring me to Haruun Kal, and drop me into this nightmare jungle.

 

 

Many of the corpses were indeed jungle prospectors, Nick told me. Jups, when they're not harvesting the jungle, act as irregulars for the Balawai militia. They are vastly more dangerous than the gunships and the detector satellites and all the DOKAWs and droid starfighters and armies of the Separatists put together. They know the jungle. They live in it. They use it.

 

 

They are more ruthless than the ULF.

 

 

The rest of the corpses in that staged little scene-they were Korun prisoners. Captured by the jups. Captured and tortured and maltreated beyond my ability to describe; when the ULF caught up, the first thing the Balawai did was execute the few prisoners who were still alive.

 

 

Nick tells me that none of them escaped. None of the prisoners. And none of the jups.

 

 

The children- The children were Korunnai.

 

 

This Kar Vastor-what kind of man must he be? Nick told me it was Kar Vastor who nailed that data wafer into the dead woman's mouth with brassvine thorns. Nick told me it was Kar Vastor who persuaded the ULF to leave the corpses in the jungle. To make the scene so gruesome that I'd be sure to come here to investigate. To leave dead children-their own dead children-to the jacunas and the screw maggots and the black stinking carrion flies so full of blood they can only waddle across rotting flesh- Stop. I have to stop. Stop talking about this. Stop thinking about it.

 

 

I can't-this isn't- Nothing in this world can be trusted. What you see is not related to what you get. I don't seem to be able to comprehend any of it.

 

 

But I'm learning. In learning, I'm changing. The more I change, the more I understand. That's what frightens me. I shudder to think what will happen when I really begin to understand this place.

 

 

By the time I finally get it, who will I be?

 

 

I'm afraid that the man I was would despise the man I am becoming. I have a terrible dread that this transformation is exactly what Depa had in mind when she decided to draw me here.

 

 

She said there was nothing more dangerous than a Jedi who'd finally gone sane.

 

 

I think she is dangerous.

 

 

I'm afraid she wants me to become dangerous, too.

 

 

I should-I need to change the-think about something other than- Because I asked Nick about her.

 

 

I couldn't help myself. Hope blossomed along with my anger-if the holo was a setup, maybe what she'd said was no more than. atmosphere. Local color. Something.

 

 

Despite my determination to hold myself unbiased until I could see her, speak with her, feel her essence in the Force-despite my resolve to ask nothing, and hear nothing-despite all my years of self-discipline and self-control- The heart has power that no discipline can answer.

 

 

So I asked him. I told him of Depa's words on the data wafer: how she called herself the darkness in the jungle, and how she said that she had finally gone sane.

 

 

How I fear that in fact she has fallen to the dark, and is irretrievably mad.

 

 

And Nick- And Nick- 'Crazy?" he said with a laugh. "You're the one who's crazy. If she was crazy, nobody'd follow her, would they?" But when I asked if he meant she was all right, he responded, "That depends on what you mean by all right." 'I need to know if you've seen her act from anger, or fear. I need to know if she uses the Force for her personal gratification: for gain, or for revenge. I need to know how much hold the dark side has on her." 'You don't have to worry about that," he told me. "I've never met someone kinder or more caring than Master Billaba. She's not evil. I don't think she could be." 'This isn't about good and evil," I told him. "This is about the fundamental nature of the Force itself. Jedi are not moralists. That's a common misperception. We are fundamentally pragmatic.

 

 

The Jedi is I

 

 

altruistic less because to be so is good, than because to be so is safe: to use the Force for personal ends is dangerous. This is the trap that can snare even the most good, kind, caring Jedi: it leads to what we call the dark side. Power to do good eventually becomes just power.

 

 

Naked force. An end in itself. It is a form of madness to which Jedi are peculiarly susceptible." Nick answered this with a shrug. "Who knows the real reasons why anybody does anything?" This was not a comforting response, and the rest of what he told me was worse.

 

 

He says the words on that crystal are just how Depa talks, now. He says she has nightmares-that screams from her tent tear through the camp. He says no one ever sees her eat-that she's wasting away as though something inside is instead eating her. He says she has headaches that painkillers cannot touch, and sometimes cannot leave her tent for days at a time.

 

 

That when she walks outside in daylight, she binds her eyes, for she cannot bear the light of the sun.

 

 

I am sorry I asked. I am sorry that Nick told me.

 

 

I'm sorry that he did not lie.

 

 

It is very un-Jedi to fear the truth.

 

 

I'll continue the story. Putting experience into words is a gain in perspective. Which I need.

 

 

And it's a way to pass the hours of the night, which I also need. Even for a Jedi Master, accustomed to meditation and reflection-trained for it-there is such a thing as spending too much time alone with one's thoughts.

 

 

Especially out here.

 

 

This outpost settlement was built at the crest of a shoulder sloping down from the ridge. The ridge here isn't a razorback anymore, but rather a sine-wave wall of volcanic mounds. The settlement stands on a green-splashed outcrop; to either side of this jungle-clutched fist of stone are blackened washes where lava occasionally flows down from a major caldera, which is about six hundred meters above where I sit and record this. If you listen closely, you might hear the rumble. This microphone may not be sensitive enough. There-hear that? It's ramping up for another eruption. i*m't'tu. juni 11.1't't These eruptions come regularly enough that the jungle doesn't have time to reclaim the lava's path; heat-scorched trees line the washes, with leaves cooked off on the lava side. Eruptions must not be too serious in these parts. Otherwise, why build an outpost here?

 

 

Well- I suppose it could have been for the view.

 

 

The bunker itself is slightly elevated above the rest of the compound. From where I sit in the wreckage of the doorway, I can look down over a charred mess of tumbled and broken prefab huts and the shattered perimeter wall. Pale glowvine light shows gray on the steamcrawler track that switchbacks up the side of the shoulder.

 

 

Out across the jungle- I can see for kilometers up here: ghost-ripples of canopy spread below, silver and black and veined with glowvines, pocked with winking eyes of scarlet and crimson and some just dull red: open calderae, active and bubbling in this volatile region. It's breathtaking.

 

 

Or maybe that's just the smell.

 

 

Another of the ironies that have come crowding into my life: all my worry about civilians, and battles, and massacres, and having to fight and maybe kill men and women who may be only civilians, innocent bystanders, and all my arguing with Nick and everything he told me- All for nothing. Needn't have worried. When we got here, there was no one left to fight.

 

 

The ULF had been here already.

 

 

There were no survivors.

 

 

I will not describe the condition of the bodies. Seeing what had been done here was bad enough; I feel no urge to share it, even with the Archives.

 

 

I will grant Nick this: the Balawai at this outpost had clearly been no innocent civilians. The Korunnai had left the bodies draped with what must have been the most prized pieces of the jups'jewelery: necklaces of human ears.

 

 

Korunnai ears.

 

 

Based on the limited scavenger damage and the low decomposition, Nick guessed that the ULF band who'd done this might have passed through here no more than two or three days before. And there were certain, mmmm, signs-things done to the bodies-and echoes in the Force that don't seem to fade away, a standing wave of power, that suggests this had been the work of Kar Vastor himself.

 

 

The ULF guerrillas had also thoroughly looted this place; there is not a scrap of food to be found, and only useless bits and pieces of technology and equipment. The wreckage of two steamcrawlers lies tumbled downslope.The comm gear is gone as well, of course, which is why I alone am here to watch over Besh and Chalk.

 

 

When we found the comm gear gone, Nick's spirits collapsed. He seems to alternate despair with that manic cheerfulness of his, and it's not always easy to guess what will trigger either state. He let himself flop to the bloodstained ground, and gave us up for dead. He returned to his mantra from the pass: "Bad luck," he muttered under his breath. "Just bad luck." Despair is the herald of the dark side. I touched his shoulder. "Luck," I told him softly, "does not exist. Luck is only a word we use to describe our blindness to the subtle currents of the Force." His response was bitter. "Yeah? What subtle current killed Lesh? Is this what your Force had planned foryou? For Besh and Chalk?" 'The jedi say," I replied, "that there are questions to which we can never have answers; we can only be answers." He asked me angrily what that was supposed to mean. I told him: "I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher. I'm a Jedi. I don't have to explain reality. I just have to deal with it." 'That's what I'm doing." 'That's what you're avoiding." 'You have a Jedi power that can get all of us to Depa and Kar in a day? Or three? They're marching away from us. We can't catch up. That's reality. The only one there is." 'Is it?" I let a thoughtful gaze rest on Galthra's broad back. "She moves well through this jungle. I know that akks are not beasts of burden-but one man, alone, she might be able to carry at great speed." 'Well, yeah. If I didn't have to worry about you guys-" He stopped. His eyes narrowed.

 

 

"Not a chance. Not a chance, Windu! Drop it." 'I'll watch over them until you get back." 'I said drop it! I'm not leaving you here." 'It's not up to you." I stepped close to him. Nick had to bend his neck to look up into my eyes. "I'm not arguing with you, Nick. And I'm not asking you. This is not a discussion. It's a briefing." Nick is a stubborn young man, but he's not stupid. It didn't take him long to understand that until he met me, he didn't know what stubborn looked like.

 

 

We managed to rig an improvised bareback pad for Galthra; Nick and Chalk and I persuaded Galthra, through the Force, to bear Nick on her back as she had me, and carry him swiftly through the jungle on the trail of the departed Korunnai. The three of us watched them vanish into the living night, then Besh and Chalk arranged themselves as comfortably as possible on the bunker floor, and I injected them with tha-natizine.

 

 

We all wait together, in the hope that Nick will win through the jungle, in the hope that he might find and bring back this Kar Vaster-this dangerous lor pelek, this terror of the living and mutilator of the dead-and that this man of no conscience or human feeling might use his power to save two lives.

 

 

I wonder what Kar Vaster will think, when he arrives, and finds what I have done to the scene of his victory.

 

 

I have spent some hours-between the time Nick left and the time I sat down here to record this entry-giving the dead a decent burial. Nick will no doubt laugh, and make some snide remark about how little I understand, how naive and unready I am for a part in this war. He'll probably ask me if burying these people makes them any less dead. I can only reply to this imagined scorn with a shrug.

 

 

I didn't do it for them. I did it for me. I did it because this is the only way I have to express my reverence for the life that was torn from them, enemy or no.

 

 

I did it because I don't want to be the kind of man who would leave someone-like that.

 

 

Anyone.

 

 

I sit here now, knowing that Depa has passed within a few klicks of here; that she stood, perhaps, on this very spot. Within the past forty-eight standard hours. No matter how deeply I reach into the Force-how deeply I reach into the stone beneath and the jungle around-I can feel nothing of her. I have felt nothing of her on this planet.

 

 

All I feel is the jungle, and the dark.

 

 

I think of Lesh a lot. I keep seeing how he writhed on the ground, twitching in convulsions, teeth clenched and eyes rolling, his whole body twisting with furious life-but the life that twisted him was not Lesh's. It was something that was eating him from the inside out. When I reached into the Force for him, all I felt was the jungle. And the dark.

 

 

And then I think of Depa again.

 

 

Perhaps I should listen more, and think less.

 

 

The eruption seems to be strengthening. The rumbling is loud as a Pelek Baw throughway, and tremors have begun to shake the ston? floor. Mmm. And rain has begun, as it often will: triggered by particu-lates in the smoke plume.

 

 

Speaking of smoke- Among the equipment looted by the ULF would have been, no doubt, breath masks; I may miss them more than anything else. I must have a care for my lungs. On this outcrop, I'm in little danger from lava, but the gases that roll downslope from such eruptions can be caustic as well as smothering. Besh and Chalk will be safer than I. Perhaps I should risk a hibernation trance; no predator will reach us through the eruption. Predators need to breathe, too.

 

 

And they- That- Wait, that sounded like- Queer. Some Haruun Kal jungle predators mimic their prey's mating calls or cries of distress, to lure or to drive them. I wonder what kind of predator that one was: something that preys on humans, it must be. That cry almost got me. Sounded exactly like a child's scream of terror.

 

 

I mean, exactly.

 

 

And now this one- Oh.

 

 

Oh, no.

 

 

That's Basic. Those are screams. There are children out there.

 

 

Mace pelted downslope, running half blind through rain and smoke and steam, navigating by ear: heading for the screams.

 

 

Smoke from the caldera above had smothered the glowvines; his only light was the scarlet hellglow that leaked through cracks in the black crusts floating on lava flows. Rain flashed to steam a meter above the washes. A swirling red-lit cloud turned the night to blood.

 

 

Mace threw himself into the Force, letting it carry him bounding from rock to branch to rock, flipping high over crevices, slipping past black-shadowed tree trunks and under low branches with millimeters to spare. The voices came intermittently; in between, through the downpour and the eruption and the hammering of his own heart, Mace heard a grinding of steel on stone, and the mechanical thunder of an engine pushed to the outer limits of its power.

 

 

It was a steamcrawler.

 

 

It lay canted at a dangerous angle over a precipice, only a lip of rock preventing a fall into bottomless darkness. One track clanked on air; the other was buried in hardening lava. Lava doesn't behave as a liquid so much as a soft plastic: as it rolls downslope it cools, and its piecemeal transition into solid rock can produce unpredictable changes in direction: it forms dams and blockages and self-building channels that can twist flows kilometers to either side, or even make them "retreat" and overflow an upstream channel. The immense vehicle must have been trying to climb the track to the outpost when one of the lava washes plugged, dammed itself, then diverted and swept the steamcrawler off the track, down this rainwash gully until it jammed against the lip of rock. The curl and roll of lava broke through black patches of crust around it, scarlet slowly climbing the crawler's undercarriage.

 

 

Though steamcrawlers were low-tech-to reduce their vulnerability to the metal-eating fungi-they were far from primitive. A kilometer below the caldera, the lava flow didn't come close to the melting point of the advanced alloys that made up the steamcrawler's armor and treads. But lava was filling in the gap below its flat undercarriage until the only real question was whether the rising lava would topple the steamcrawler over the lip before enough heat conducted through its armor to roast whoever was inside. But not everyone was inside.

 

 

Mace skidded to a stop just a meter upslope of where the flow had cut the track. The lava had slashed through the dirt to bedrock, making the edge of the gully where Mace stood into an unstable cliff, eight meters high, above a sluggish river of molten stone; the steam-crawler was a further ten meters down to his right. Its immense headlamps threw a white glare into the steam and the rain. Mace could just barely make out two small forms huddled together on the highest point: the rear corner of the cabin's heavily canted roof. Another crawled through the yellow-lit oblong of an open side hatch and joined them.

 

 

Three terrified children sobbed on the cabin roof; in the Force, Mace could feel two more inside-one injured, in pain that was transforming into shock, the other unconscious. Mace could feel the desperate determination of the injured one to get the other out the open hatch before the 'crawler toppled-because the injured one inside couldn't know that getting out the hatch wouldn't help any of them at all. They still faced a simple choice of dooms: over the precipice or into the lava. Dead either way.

 

 

If, as some philosophers argued, there was a deeper purpose in the universe that the Jedi served, beyond their surface social function of preserving the peace of the Republic-if there was, in fact, a cosmic reason why Jedi existed, a reason why they were granted powers so far beyond the reach of other mortals-it must have had something to do with situations like this.

 

 

Mace opened himself to the Force. He could hear Yoda's voice: Size matters not-which, Mace had always privately considered, was more true for Yoda than it was for any of his students. Yoda would probably just reach out, lift the steamcrawler from the gully, and ca sually float it up the mountain to the outpost while croaking some enigmatic maxim about how Even a volcano is as nothing, compared to the power of the Force. Mace was much less confident in his own raw power.

 

 

But he had other talents.

 

 

A new tremor from the eruption shook the dirt cliff under his feet. He felt it sag: undercut by the river of lava, the shaking was rapidly destroying the cliff's structural integrity. Any second now it would collapse, sending Mace down into the river, unless he did something first.

 

 

The something he did was to reach deep through the Force until he could feel a structure of broken rock ten meters below him and five meters in from the face. He thought, Why wait? and shoved.

 

 

The dirt cliff shook, buckled, and collapsed.

 

 

With a subterranean roar that buried even the thunder of the eruption and the clamor of the steamcrawler's laboring engine, hundreds of tons of dirt and rock poured into the river of lava, organics bursting into flames that the growing landslide instantly smothered as it built itself into a huge wedge-shaped berm of raw dirt across the gully; as lava slowly bulged and climbed the upstream face, the downstream side of the cliff continued to collapse, piling over cooler lava that hardened beneath it, pushing the hotter, more liquid lava into a wave that washed around the steamcrawler's side, welled to the lip of the precipice, then plunged in a rain of fire upon the black jungle far below.

 

 

The landslide built into a wave of its own that filled in the gully as it rolled down toward the steamcrawler and the screaming, sobbing children-and on the very crest of that wave of dirt and rock, backpedaling furiously to keep from being sucked under by the landslide's roll, came Mace Windu.

 

 

Mace rode that crest while the wave sank and flattened and finally lurched to a halt, its last remnants trickling into a ridge that joined Mace's position with the corner of the steamcrawler's cabin. Nearly all his concentration stayed submerged in the Force, spread throughout the slide, using a wide-focus Force grip to stabilize the rubble while he scrambled down to the steamcrawler's roof.

 

 

On the roof were two young boys, both about six, and a girl of perhaps eight standard years.

 

 

They clung to each other, sobbing, terror-filled eyes staring through their tears.

 

 

Mace squatted beside them and touched the girl's arm. "My name is Mace Windu. I need your help." The girl sniffled in astonishment. "You-you-my help?" Mace nodded gravely. "I need you to help me get these boys to safety. Can you do that?

 

 

Can you take the boys up the same way I came down? Climb right up the crest. It's not steep." 'I-I-I don't-I'm afraid-" Mace leaned close and spoke in her ear only a little louder than the hush of the rain. "Me, too. But you have to act brave. Pretend. So you don't scare the little boys. Okay?" The girl scrubbed her runny nose with the back of her hand, blinking back tears. "I-I- you're scared, too?" 'Shh. That's a secret. Just between us. Come on, up you go." 'Okay." she said dubiously, but she wiped her eyes and took a deep breath and when she turned to the other two children her voice had the bossy edge that seems to be the exclusive weapon of eight-year-old girls. "Urno, Nykl, come on! Quit crying, you big babies! I'm going to save us." As the girl bullied the two boys up onto the face of the slide, Mace moved on to the hatchway. Though it was a side hatch, the angle of the steamcrawler aimed it at the sky. Inside, the 'crawler's floor was sharply tilted, and the rain pounding through the open hatchway slicked the floor until it was impossible to climb.

 

 

Down at the lowermost corner of the rectangular cabin, a boy who seemed to be barely into his teens struggled one-handed to drag a girl not much younger up the steep floor. He had a foamy wad of blood-soaked spray bandage around one upper arm, and he was trying to shove the unconscious girl ahead of him, using the riveted durasteel leg posts of the 'crawler's seats like a ladder. But his injured arm could take no weight; tears streamed down his face as he begged the girl to wake up, wake up, give him a little help because he couldn't get her out and he wouldn't leave her, but if she'd just wake up- Her head lolled, limp. Mace saw she wouldn't be waking up any time soon: she had an ugly scalp wound above her hairline, and her fine golden hair was black and sticky with blood.

 

 

Mace leaned in through the hatchway and extended his hand. "All right, son. Just take my hand. Once we get you out of here, then I can-" When the boy looked up, the tearful appeal on his face twisted into instant wild rage, and his plea became a fierce shriek. Mace hadn't noticed the swing-stock blaster rifle slung around his good arm; the first hint of its existence Mace got was a burst of hot plasma past his face. He threw himself backward out the hatch and flattened against the cabin wall while the hatchway vomited blasterfire.

 

 

The steamcrawler lurched, the hatch going even higher; his sudden movement had been enough to tip its precarious balance, toppling it toward the precipice.

 

 

Mace bared his teeth to the night. With the Force, he seized the steamcrawler and yanked it back into place-but a squeal from above grabbed his attention. In seizing the 'crawler he'd lost his Force-hold on the landslide, and the unstable mound of dirt and rock had begun to shift under the little girl and the two boys, sending them sliding down toward the lava.

 

 

Mace calmed his hammering heart and extended one hand; he had to close his eyes for a moment to reassert his control on the slide and stabilize it-but its shift had left it less solid than before. He could hold it for the minute or two it would take the girl and boys to reach the relative safety of the outcrop above, not much more. And now he could feel the 'crawler slowly tilting beneath him, leaning higher and higher toward the point of no return.

 

 

From inside the cabin he could hear the boy's terrified curses, and his shrieks about kill all you fragging kornos. Mace's eyes drifted closed.

 

 

This filthy war- The boy and the girl in the steamcrawler were about to become casualties of the Summertime War. because when the boy had looked up, he could not see that a Jedi Master had come to his rescue.

 

 

He could see only a Korun.

 

 

To use the Force to disarm the boy, or persuade him, would break the hold he kept upon the landslide, which might cost the lives of the three children scrambling up its face. To reason with the boy seemed impossible-the boy would know too much about what Balawai can expect at the hands of Korunnai-and it would certainly take longer than they had. To abandon them was not an option.

 

 

Once he got the boy moving up the face of the landslide toward the others, he'd be able to bring the girl himself. But how to get the boy out?

 

 

Mace spun the situation in his mind: he framed it as a fight for the lives of these five children.

 

 

All of them. A fundamental principle of combat: Use what you're given. How you fight depends on whom you fight. His first opponent had been the volcano itself. He'd used the power of the volcano's weapon-the lava, where it had undercut the cliff-to hold that power at bay.

 

 

His current opponent was not the boy, but rather the boy's experience of the Summertime War.

 

 

Use what you're given.

 

 

'Kid?" Mace called, roughening his voice. Making himself sound the way the boy would expect a Korun to sound, adopting a thick upland accent like Chalk's. "Kid: five seconds to toss that blaster out the hatch and come after it, you got." "Never!" the boy screamed from inside. "Never!" 'Don't come out, you, and the next thing you see-the last thing you see, ever-is a grenade coming in. Hear me, you?" 'Go ahead! I know what happens if we get taken alive!" 'Kid-already got the others, don't I? The girl. Urno and Nykl. Gonna leave them all alone, you? With me?" There came a pause.

 

 

Mace said into the silence, "Sure, go ahead and die. Any coward can do that. Guts enough to live for a while, you got?" He was moderately sure that a thirteen-year-old boy who'd load up four other children and set out in a steamcrawler across the Korunnai Highland at night-a boy who'd rather die than leave an unconscious girl behind-had guts enough for just about anything.

 

 

A second later, he was proven right.

 

 

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU From this doorway, I can see a spray of brilliant white flares-headlamps of three, no, wait, four steamcrawlers-climbing the spine of the fold, heading for the broken track.

 

 

Heading for us.

 

 

Dawn will come in an hour. I hope we'll all live that long.

 

 

The eruptions have subsided, and the rain has trailed off to an intermittent patter. We've shifted some things around in the bunker. The three younger children are curled up on scavenged blankets in the back, asleep. Besh and Chalk now lie near the Thunderbolt, where I can keep an eye on them; I'm not at all sure that one of these children might not try to do them some harm. Terrel, a boy of thirteen who seems to be their natural leader, is remarkably fierce, and he still does not entirely believe that I'm not planning to torture all five of them to death. Yet even on Haruun Kal, boys are still boys: every time he stops worrying about being tortured to death, he starts pestering me to let him fire the Thunderbolt.

 

 

I wonder what Nick would say about these civilians. Are they a myth, too? Now all my work in cleaning up this compound does not seem pointless; the children have been through enough tonight without having to see what had been done to the people who'd lived here.

 

 

Without having to see the kind of thing that has probably been done to people they know, at their outpost.

 

 

Possibly even to their parents.

 

 

I can't consider such questions right now. Right now, all I seem to be able to do is stare past the twisted jags of durasteel that once had been this bunker's door, watching the steamcrawlers' upward creep.

 

 

I don't need any hints from the Force to have a bad feeling about this.

 

 

In dejarik, there is a classic manuver called the fork, where a player moves a single holomonster into position to attack two or more of his opponent's, so that no matter which 'monster the opponent moves to safety, the other will be eaten. Caught in the fork, one's only choice is which piece to lose. The word has come to symbolize situations where the only choice to be made is a choice of disasters.

 

 

We are well and truly forked.

 

 

I know who these steamcrawlers are bringing: jungle prospectors from the same outpost as the children, fleeing the same ULF guerrillas whose attack had forced the children away- probably the same band that destroyed this outpost. I got the story from Terrel, while I was tending to his broken arm and the girl's scalp wound.

 

 

Their outpost had been the next one on this track, some seventy klicks to the north and east.They had come under attack by the ULF at dusk;Terrel's father had given him the task of gathering the other children and driving them to safety.

 

 

They'd had no way to know that the ULF had been to this outpost first.

 

 

Terrel's arm had been broken by either a bullet or a grenade fragment; he wasn't sure which.

 

 

He told me proudly how he managed the dual-stick controls of the steamcrawler with only one hand, and how he had crashed into grassers as he broke through the Korun skirmish line, and how he was pretty sure he'd managed to run down "at least five or six fragging kornos." He says such things defiantly, as if daring me to hurt him for it.

 

 

As if I ever would.

 

 

The older girl, Keela, has the most serious injury. In the steam-crawler's tumble down the gully, she was thrown from her seat. She has a skull fracture and a severe concussion. I was able to salvage a spare medpac from the 'crawler before it went over the precipice. She's in no grave danger, now, so long as she remains quiet and gets a few days' rest. The medpac had a new bone stabilizer, so Terrel's arm should heal nicely. The younger children-Urno and Nykl and the brave little girl Pell-have nothing worse than a few bruises, and scraped hands and knees from scrambling up the landslide.

 

 

So far.

 

 

I have not bothered to maintain my pretense of belonging to the guerrillas, though I have also avoided explaining who I really am. The children seem to have decided that I'm a bounty hunter, since I don't "act like a korno"-which is to say, I haven't tortured and killed them, as they were all half expecting, based on the tales they've heard from their parents. As they were all half expecting despite being alive right now only because I saved them. They have decided, based on their vast experience of bounty hunters-courtesy of countless half-cred holo-dramas-that Besh and Chalk are my prisoners, and that I'm going to deliver them to Pelek Baw for a big reward.

 

 

I have not disabused them of this notion. It's easier to believe than the truth.

 

 

But what should be merely a childish fancy has become unexpectedly complicated and painful; even the kindest illusion will often cut deeper than any truth. One of the younger boys- rather arbitrarily-decided that I must be "just about the greatest bounty hunter there is." A six- year-old's instinctive reaction, I suppose. Soon, he got into a heated discussion with his brother, who insisted that "everybody knows" Jango Fett is the greatest living bounty hunter. Which led the first boy to ask me if ,' am Jango Fett.

 

 

I cannot help but wonder: if I had told them I'm a Jedi, who might this boy assume I am?

 

 

I was saved from answering by a scornful declaration fromTerrel."He ain't Jango Fett, stupid. Jango Fett's dead. Everybody knows that!" 'Jango Fett is not dead! He is not!" Tears began to well in the little boy's eyes, and he appealed to me. "Jango Fett ain't dead, is he? Tell him. Tell him he ain't dead." At first, all I could think to say was "I'm sorry." And I was. I am. But the truth is the truth.

 

 

"I'm sorry, but yes," I told them. "Jango Fett is dead." 'See?" Terrel said with terrible thirteen-year-old scorn." 'Course he is, stupid. Some stinkin' Jedi snuck up behind him and stabbed him in the back with one of them laser swords." Somehow this hurt even more. "It didn't happen that way. Fett was. killed in a fight." 'Tusker poop," Terrel declared. "No stinkin' Jedi could've took Jango Fett face to face! He was the best." With this I could not argue; I could only contend that Fett had not been stabbed in the back.

 

 

'What d'you know about it? Was you there?" I could not-still cannot-bring myself to tell them just how there I had been.

 

 

And I cannot properly describe the wound Terrel's tone has opened within me: the way he says stinking Jedi tells me more than I want to know about what Depa has done to our Order's name on this planet. It was not so long ago that every adventurous boy and girl would have dreamed of being a Jedi.

 

 

Now their heroes are bounty hunters.

 

 

The line of steamcrawlers has halted half a kilometer below us-where the lava wash took out the track. This won't stop them for long; when the cliff collapsed, it made a natural dam across the break. In the hours since the eruption, I would guess that the lava has penetrated the rocks and dirt, and cooled enough to stabilize the slide. Intelligently cautious, they're testing its integrity before attempting to cross. But I know they'll make it. Then what will I do?

 

 

It seems I have no choices left. Surrender is not an option. To save Besh and Chalk-not to mention myself-I'll have to hold the children hostage.

 

 

This is how far I have fallen, even I, a Jedi Master. This is what a few days in this war has brought me to: threatening the lives of children I would give my own to save.

 

 

And if these Balawai call my bluff?

 

 

The best outcome I can then foresee: these children will have to watch as their parents, or their parents' friends, are killed by a Jedi.

 

 

Best outcome-the phrase is itself a mockery. On Haruun Kal, there seems to be no such thing.

 

 

Forked.

 

 

And yet, in dejarik, one doesn't get forked by accident. It's the result of a mistake in play.

 

 

But where was my mistake that left us here?

 

 

Glow rods below. They've left the steamcrawlers and are advancing on foot. No one has called out. They will have tried to raise this outpost on comm; getting no answer, they'll approach with caution. I wouldn't be surprised if those glow rods are lashed to long sticks, to see if they draw sniper fire.

 

 

There are a lot of them.

 

 

Now, in desperation, I can only do as I always have, when I have faced impossible situations: I turn to Yoda's teachings for advice and inspiration. I can summon in my mind his wise green eyes, and imagine the tilt of his wrinkled head. I can hear his voice: If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are. a different game you should play.

 

 

Yes. A different game. I need a different game. New rules. New objectives. And I need it in about thirty seconds.

 

 

Terrel? Terrel, come up here. All of you. Pell, wake up the boys. We're going to play a game.

 

 

[the voice of a boy, faintly]: "What kind of game?" A new game. I just made it up. It's called Nobody Else Dies Today.

 

 

[another boy's voice, faintly]: "I was 'sleep. 'S this gonna be a fun game?" Only if we win.

 

 

GAMES IN THE DARK L hese Balawai may have been irregulars, but they were both expe rienced and disciplined.

 

 

Their recon squad entered the ruined com pound in three teams of two, spread over 120 degrees of arc to giv them overlapping fields of fire. While glow rods still waved halfwa along the slope below, these six entered in total silence and dee shadow. They must have had some kind of night-vision equipmem if the Force hadn't let Mace feel the stark threat of their weapon: points of aim, he wouldn't have known they were there.

 

 

He stood in impenetrable shadow, looking out between th twisted jags of durasteel that were the remnants of the bunker's dooi He could feel a darkness deeper than the night gathering upon th compound like fog rising from damp ground. The darkness soakd in through his pores and pounded inside his head like a black mi graine.

 

 

There had never been light bright enough to drive back darknes like this; Mace could only hope to make of himself a light brigh enough to cut through it.

 

 

,' am the blade, he told himself silently. ,' will have to be; there is n other.

 

 

'Terrel," he said softly. "They're here. Go ahead, son." 'You're sure? I can't see anything," Terrel said from beside him. He wiped his nose, then made fists as though he were holding on to his courage with both hands. "I can't see anything at all." 'They will be able to see you," Mace said. "Call out." 'Okay." Staying in the shadows, he repeated, "Okay," but this time in a loud call. "Okay, hey, don't shoot, okay? Don't shoot! It's me!" The night went silent. Mace felt six weapons trained on the bunker door. He murmured, "Tell them who you are." 'Yeah, uh, hey listen, it's Terrel, huh? Terrel Nakay. Is my dad out there?" A woman's voice came out of the darkness to Mace's left, shrill with hope. "Terrel? Oh, Terrel! Is Keela with you-?" The girl with the head wound held Pell and the two boys well back from the doorway, but when she heard the woman's voice she started unsteadily to her feet. "Don't go out there," Mace said. "And keep the smaller children still. We don't want anyone shot by accident." She nodded and sank back to her knees, calling out, "Mom, I'm here! I'm okay!" 'Keela! Keela-Keela-is Pell with you?" A man shouted from the center, "Quiet!" 'Rankin, it's Terrel and Keela! Didn't you hear them? Keela, what about Pell-" 'Hold your position, you stupid nerf! And shut up!" the man snarled. His voice was ragged: angry, exhausted, and desperate. "We don't know who else is here! This place is completely fragged." 'Rankin-" 'They could be bait. Shut your mouth before I shoot you myself." Mace nodded to himself. He would have suspected the same thing.

 

 

'Terrel?" The man called out in a much softer tone: warily calm. "Terrel, it's Pek Rankin.

 

 

Come on out where we can see you." Terrel looked at Mace. Mace said, "You know him?" The boy nodded. "He's-sort of a friend of my dad's. Sort of." 'Go on, then," Mace said gently. "Move slowly. Keep your hands in plain sight, away from your body." Terrel did. Out from the bunker door, feeling his way down the grade toward the shattered huts. "Can somebody put on a light? I can't see." 'In a minute," Rankin's voice replied from the darkness. "Keep on coming this way, Terrel.

 

 

You'll be all right. What happened to your 'crawler? How come you don't answer comm?

 

 

Where are the other kids?" 'We had an accident. But we're okay. We're all okay. Okay?" Terrel caught his foot on a rock and stumbled. "Ow! Hey, the light, huh? I got one broken arm already." 'Just keep walking toward my voice. Are you alone? Where are the other kids?" 'In the bunker. But they can't come out," Terrel said. "And you can't go in." 'Why's that?" Mace said, "Because I'm in here." In the Force he felt their tension ratchet up, sharp as an indrawn breath. After a moment, Rankin's voice came out of the darkness. "And who might you be?" 'You don't need to know." 'Is that so? Why don't you step out where we can get a look at you?" 'Because the temptation to take a shot at me might prove overwhelming," Mace said. "Any bolts that miss will be bouncing around the inside of this bunker. Where there are four more innocent children." A new man's voice rang out from the right, thin with fear and anger. "Two of those kids are my sons-if you hurt them-" 'All I have done," Mace said, "is tend their injuries and keep them sheltered. What happens to them now depends on you." 'He's telling the truth!" Terrel called. "He didn't hurt us-he saved us. He's okay. Really.

 

 

He's just afraid you'll shoot him 'cause he's a korno!" A burst of low, half-strangled profanity came from the right.

 

 

Terrel called hastily, "But he's not a real korno. He just looks like one. He talks almost like a regular person-and he's like, like a, a bounty hunter, or something." His voice trickled off, leaving a silence empty and ominous. Mace felt currents of intention shifting and winding through the Force; the Balawai must have been consulting in whispers on comm.