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

 

 

Depa's screams are a mercy.

 

 

Because my own nightmares don't wake me.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I have seen the end of civilization.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I burn for it.

 

 

I have discovered that I hate this place.

 

 

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

 

 

I hate the darkness under the trees.

 

 

I hate the war.

 

 

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

 

 

I hate what it's doing to me.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I will take a shower.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

What a fool I was.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I hope he is satisfied by what he found.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Though I suspect the truth is exactly opposite.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

As though our talks are my own hallucination.

 

 

And if so- Does it matter?

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

More than enough.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

But I am more thoroughly Jedi than I am Korun.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I would certainly change Kar's.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Pelekotan traded him power for his humanity.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

It also seems to be a superconductor.

 

 

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

 

 

File the data.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I have not shared this speculation with Depa.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Starship armor.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

So I tried to change the subject.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I asked what are her victory conditions.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I just don't want to believe it.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The target is the enemy's will to fight.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Tomorrow we leave this place.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

FINAL ENTRY T

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Only minutes to go, now.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The Haileck is on its way.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Sacred.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

She is their hope.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The Korunnai are killing her.

 

 

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

 

 

But she is drowning in your anger, Nick.

 

 

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

 

 

The unending violence. without hope, or remedy.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And Depa is headed up to meet us.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

In his hands he held two lightsabers.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

A peace offering.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Depa Billaba was another casualty of his failure at Geonosis.

 

 

She was just taking longer to die.

 

 

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

 

 

That everything would go back to normal.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

She said you would understand.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

He could no longer bear to look at this place.

 

 

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

 

 

You are.

 

 

Mace opened his eyes to meet the lorpeleKs concentrated stare.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Over the edge.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Staring into his blade.

 

 

In the Force, the world had turned to crystal.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

He saw it all.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

But they did not fear it, he knew.

 

 

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

 

 

Because he'd been alone.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Nick swore, and Vaster's growl lost meaning.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

At thirty thousand kilometers per hour, and accelerating.

 

 

Mace Windu said, "Run." They ran.

 

 

PART THREE SHATTERPOIKT SHOCKWAVES A

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The blast transcended sound.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"Stay low but off the floor?

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

You could have killed me. You should have.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace went after him, but stopped in the doorway.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

And losing.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Into the Force.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

An avalanche.

 

 

If he could only find the spot to strike.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mostly children.

 

 

Mostly silent and round-eyed.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

That was all he'd need.

 

 

The rest of the weapons were not relevant.

 

 

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

 

 

The ledges were packed with the dying.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Mace threaded through the chaos.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

It was necessary.