Shatterpoint (звёздные войны)

by Matthew Stover

  Mace's free hand lashed out with effortless accuracy and latched around the widescan sensor dish-mount; his other, still locked on Nick's belt, brought the young Korun to a stop facedown over what was still nearly a kilometer drop to the jungle.

  "You. remember. back when we met?" Nick gasped breathlessly into the swirling winds.

  "When you. just about broke my arm. with that fraggin' docking claw you use for a hand?" "Yes?" "I… forgive you." "Thank you." Mace hauled him up onto the gunship's roof. Nick wrapped both arms around the sensor dish mount. "You go on ahead," Nick told him. "I think I'll just lie here and shudder." Using the Force to steady himself on the spinning ship, Mace worked his way forward on hands and knees until he could peer into the cockpit over the rim of the wide lightsaber-cut that opened it to the air.

  Chalk sat in nav; she looked up and swore. Vaster stood behind the cockpit chairs: his stare was cleanly fierce. Depa reached up to him from the pilot's chair with a warm welcoming hand on his. Her eyes were glazed with exhaustion and pain, but no surprise. "I thought you told me I'd only have to save your life once more." He said, "Excuse me." He rolled onto his back and reached behind his shoulders to grab the rim of the cut with both hands, then jackknifed and swung himself smoothly inside feet-first, without waiting to see if Vaster had gotten out of the way.

  He had.

  "Nick is on the roof," Mace said. "Open one of the bay doors for him." The troop bay doors of a Turbostorm swing out and down so they could be used as landing ramps. Depa keyed the starboard door to open halfway, making it into a kind of chute down which Nick could slide, then worked the controls to cancel the gunship's spin.

  Mace nodded to the lorpelek, who now filled the cockpit doorway. "Kar: help him in." Why should I?

  Mace was not interested in debate. He gave his head an irritated shake and waved Vaster aside. "I'll do it my." His voice trailed away, because Vaster had stepped aside, and Mace had moved to the doorway, and now he could see into the troop bay.

  It was crammed with dead bodies.

  Mace sagged sideways; only his shoulder against the jamb seal held him upright.

  Depa had chosen a full ship.

  His numbed brain couldn't count them properly, but he guessed there must have been twenty corpses in the bay: an infantry platoon. The pilot must have been young, excited, confident, sure of a glorious kill-so eager to get into the fight that he had sailed into battle without discharging his passengers. He had paid the price for that confidence; his corpse lay crumpled on top of what must have been the navigator's, just inside the cockpit door.

  Mace's jaw hardened. He found his balance again, and stepped over their tangled lifeless legs to move deeper into the bay.

  All of the corpses in the troop bay wore the militia Graylite body armor; most of the armor had been burned through in several places by close-range blaster bolts. Mace could too easily imagine inexperienced militia men-boys-turning their weapons on Depa as she moved from the cockpit into the bay. The effect of opening fire with energy weapons, point-blank upon a master of Vaapad, was mutely testified to by every charred ring around a finger-sized hole in the armor, and by the burned and lifeless flesh beneath.

  Between surprise, panic, and cramped quarters, half of them had probably shot each other.

  Several of the bodies bore the characteristic blackened gapes of lightsaber wounds, instantly cauterized by the blade that had opened them. Depa's handling of the ball-turret gunners had been more elegant than Mace's; brutally efficient, she had simply stabbed directly through the durasteel of the hatches, killing the men in their chairs.

  The corpses still sat there, dead hands locked around the dual grips of their quads.

  And, of course, the smell: seared flesh and ozone.

  There was no blood. No blood at all.

  Every single one of these men had been dead before she'd ever picked up Chalk and Kar Vaster. Twenty-four men.

  In less than a minute.

  Mace turned around, and found Kar Vastor staring at him, fiercely triumphant.

  He growled simply: She belongs here.

  Mace silently turned away and climbed the half-open door to help Nick into the troop bay.

  Sliding down the door into that compartment full of dead men struck Nick speechless. He could only crouch with his back against the slant of the door, trembling.

  Mace left him there. He brushed past Vastor and reentered the cockpit. "Chalk. Give me your seat." The Korun girl frowned at Depa. Depa nodded. "It's okay, Chalk. Do it." As soon as he could settle into the seat, he leaned over the sensor screens, studying them intently. He felt Depa's eyes upon him, but he did not lift his head.

  "You can say it, if you like," she said after a moment. "I don't mind." Keeping half his attention on the widescan to watch the droid starfighters shoot down gunship after gunship, Mace turned the other half of his attention to the gunship's data logs, calling up flight plans. Control codes.

  Recognition codes.

  "Really, Mace, it's all right," she said sadly. Half-blind with migraine, her breath coming a little short, she blinked dizzily through the remainder of the windscreen. "I know what you're thinking." Mace said quietly, "I don't believe you do." "It's not that my way is the right way. I know it isn't." A soft, bitter laugh. "I do know it. But it's the only way." "The only way to what?" "To win, Mace." "Is that what you call what you have done? Winning?" She nodded exhaustedly out toward the dogfight that still raged above them. "This battle is a masterpiece. Even after everything I have seen you accomplish, I could never have believed something like this if I hadn't seen it myself. You have done a great thing, today." "Today's not over yet." "And yet it's all for nothing. At this day's end, what will you have done? Destroyed most of the militia's airpower? So what?" Her voice was going hoarse, and her words became labored, as though she could not bear the effort to push them out through her pain. "You have bought us days. Perhaps weeks. No more. When you're gone, we'll still be here. We'll still be dying in the jungle. The Balawai will get more gunships. As many as they need. And we'll go back to killing them. We have to make them fear the jungle. Because that fear is our only real weapon." "Not today." "What? I-what do you mean?" "I have decided," Mace said, still studying the sensor screens, "that you have been right all along." Depa blinked in disbelief. "I have?" "Yes. We used these people for our purposes; to abandon them now, when their only choice is to suffer genocide, or to commit it?" Mace shook his head grimly. "That would be as dark as any night in this jungle. Darker. That is no innocent savagery. It would be active evil: the way of the Sith. There is fighting to be done. The Jedi cannot walk away." "You-you're serious? You really mean it?" Disbelief struggled with hope in her pain- wracked eyes. "You're going to walk away from the Clone War? You're going to stay here and fight?" Mace shrugged, still watching the scan. "I will stay here and fight. That doesn't mean walking away from the Clone War." "Mace, the Summertime War isn't something that can be resolved in weeks-or months-" "I know that," he murmured distractedly. "I don't have weeks or months to spare. The Summertime War won't last that long." "What? How can you say that? How long do you think it will last?" "My best guess? About twelve hours. Maybe less." She could only stare.

  And finally, he saw on the widescan screen what he'd been waiting for: the droid starfighters peeling away from the dogfight and streak ing back toward space, and the handful of surviving gunships turning to limp home.

  "See that?" he said, opening his hand toward the screen. "Do you know what that means?" Depa nodded. "It means that someone figured out what we did." "Yes-and that this someone has the control codes for those starfighters." He turned toward her now, and in his eye was a spark that on another man would have been a wide fierce grin. "I told you: I don't have weeks or months to spare." "I don't understand-What are you doing to doT Mace said, "Win." He keyed the command frequency for the Republic landers. "General Windu for CRC- 09,'571. Stand by for verification and orders. Initiate simultaneous data link. Tightbeam." The c
omm crackled. "Seven-One here. Go ahead, General?

  Depa was so astonished by the orders she heard Mace issue that she nearly crashed the Turbostorm into a mountain. When she had finally wrestled the craft back to stability, she flipped on the autopilot and faced her former Master breathlessly. "Are you insaneT "Just the opposite," Mace said. "Haven't you heard? There's nothing more dangerous than a Jedi who has finally gone sane." She sputtered like a droid with a shorted-out motivator.

  "And if you don't mind, I'd like my lightsaber back," he added apologetically. "I think I'll need it." "But-but-but-" Finally the words burst out of her. "We're going to take Pelek Bawl1" "No," said Mace Windu. "We are going to take the whole system. All of it. Right now." DEJARIK I he ic key to the Gevarno Loop was the Al'har system. The key to Al'har was control of the droid starfighter fleet. The fleet was controlled from a secure transmitter below the command bunker of the Pelek Baw spaceport.

  The spaceport did have a chance. But only one.

  Two of the landers and their complements of troopers had been grounded at the Lorshan Pass, to establish a defensive perimeter around the lone open grasser tunnel, and to provide light artillery support. The other ten hopped over the mountains and kept going at their top atmospheric speed, which was not particularly impressive, but was still somewhat better than could be done by the few battered Turbostorms that were limping back to their various bases, scattered among the larger towns close by on the Highland.

  Only one of the gunships went as far as Pelek Baw.

  It crept over Grandfather's Shoulder on one-quarter repulsorlift power, leaking smoke and radiation. The tower officers at the spaceport listened in horror to the pilots gasping message: a reactor breach. Imminent catastrophic failure. The pilot had heroically kept his craft in the air, making for Pelek Baw, because only the spaceport itself was fully equipped for containment and decontamination-to have landed anywhere else might have meant the sacrifice of his crew, and of the infantry platoon on board.

  The news leaped like lightning from the tower to the ground staff, from the anti-rad techs to the bored garrison crews working the spaceport's Confederacy-provided array of modern turbolasers and ion cannons; this was the most exciting thing that had happened since the Separatist pullback. The battle at the Lorshan Pass had been astonishing, even tragic, but that was all the way on the other side of the Highland, and so didn't really count.

  Every eye in the spaceport watched the Turbostorm, either in person or on screen, rooting for it, praising the crew's selfless courage as it swung wide around the city so as not to endanger civilians below, some praying aloud that they would make it, many more secretly hoping to witness a spectacular crash- Instead of tending to their duties, such as monitoring their sensor screens.

  After all, why should they? The spaceport was linked in realtime with the network of detector satellites in orbit around the planet; nothing was in the air right now except the twenty- odd surviving gunships. The last of the droid starnghters had returned to space hours ago, and the Republic landing craft which had caused so much excitement had vanished shortly thereafter.

  No one was worried about those landers. After the staggering 40 percent losses they had suffered, the Republic ships surely would seek no further battle. Without a doubt, they were hiding in the "soup"-the thick oceanic swirl of toxic gases that surrounds the Highland plateau-until a cruiser could sneak in-system to extract them. Without a doubt.

  This was a considerable display of confidence on their part, because those same detector satellites on which they depended were as out of date as the rest of the local government's planetary equipage. Their IR and visual-light detectors were useless to penetrate the thick hot swirl of the "soup," and the satellites' more subtle sensors were defeated by the extremely high metals content of the gases. Once the landers went deep enough, they effectively vanished from the face of the planet.

  Which is why any sensor tech at the Pelek Saw spaceport with the discipline to keep his eyes on his short-range screen might have seen indications of something extraordinary.

  Pelek Baw spread along the western shore of the Great Downrush, the mightiest river on Haruun Kal. The Downrush was fed by tributaries from across the Highland-from as far east as the Lorshan Pass, and as far north as the lands above the impassable cliffs called the Trundur Wall. By the time the great river reached the capital, it was a full kilometer wide. Its dramatic roaring spray-clouded plunge from the terminal cliffs that formed the southern boundary of the city was one of the great natural wonders of the sector: it foamed and misted and spread as it fell kilometer after kilometer, becoming a snowy fan that stirred the roiling "soup" below into wild fractal whirls and blooms of colorfully immiscible gases.

  What the sensor tech would have seen, had he been disciplined and duty-conscious enough to still be looking into his short-range screen, was ten Jadthu-class Republic landers climbing, straight up, within the Downrush Falls-single file, battered by the thundering water, but perfectly cloaked from long-range detection. If the sensor tech had seen that, the outcome might have been different.

  That was the only chance they would have had.

  But the sensor techs' attention was caught up in the drama of waiting to see if the crippled gunship could possibly struggle in for a landing before it blew up.

  Not to mention the fact that a second or two before it would have touched down, it opened fire on the guardhouses surrounding the spaceport's control center, and an instant later seven immense half-naked Korunnai with shaven heads leaped from it, landing on the permacrete like pouncing vine cats, and charged toward the control center with their hands full of blaster rifles spitting fire.

  And that these unexpected Korunnai were followed by a man and a woman bearing what was unquestionably the single most conspicuous and instantly recognizable type of personal weapon in the entire galaxy, and the type least welcome when it appeared on the opposing side.

  The Jedi lightsaber.

  So flustered were the spaceport's crew, that not a being among them even bothered to look up until the very moment the light of Al'har upon their positions was eclipsed by the shadows of hovering Jadfhu-cl&ss landers.

  Then they did look up: in time to see ten durasteel clouds burst in a rain of armored clone soldiers of the Grand Army of the Republic, whose arrival was so swift, efficient, and disciplined-and in such overwhelming force-that the antiship emplacements were taken without the loss of a single trooper.

  The same, however, could not be said of the militia crewmen. The clone troopers, being unsentimental about such things, did not even bother to wipe the blood off the walls and floors before replacing the crews with their own men.

  The fighting at the control center was hotter, and lasted a few seconds longer, but the outcome was the same-because the attackers were Akk Guards and Jedi, and the defenders were, after all, only ordinary beings.

  The capture of the Pelek Baw spaceport took less than seven minutes from the instant the gunship opened fire, and resulted in the capture of 286 military personnel, of whom thirty-five were seriously wounded. Forty-eight were killed. Sixty-one civilian employees of the spaceport were detained unharmed. All of the spaceport's aerospace defense units were captured intact, as were all spacecraft then on site.

  Taken together with the Battle of Lorshan Pass, the capture of the Pelek Baw spaceport would have been considered one of the masterstrokes of General Windu's distinguished career, if only the rest of the operation had gone as planned.

  But it is a truism that no battle plan long survives contact with the enemy. This one was no exception.

  Mace didn't even have to leave the command bunker to watch everything start to go wrong.

  The command bunker was a large, heavily armored hexagon in the middle of the spaceport's control center, filled with angled banks of consoles. The only illumination in the room was spill from the console monitors and the huge rectangular holoprojector views that dominated each of the six walls; the general gloom thicke
ned below console-height so that everyone inside waded hip-deep in shadow. Dead space below the wall screens was currently serving as a holding area for prisoners, as well as a makeshift aid station where wounded men and women sat or lay while clone troopers dispassionately tended their injuries.

  Kar Vaster and his Akk Guards paced the perimeter of the room, restless as the wild animals they so nearly were. The Force swirled around them as they stalked among the terrified prisoners; Mace could feel them drawing on the prisoners' fear and pain and anguish, gathering it into themselves, storing it like living power cells.

  Mace hadn't asked what Kar was planning to do with that power. He had a more pressing problem.

  In the darkest corner of the room stood an armored console, separated from the rest; it wore a codelocked cowl of durasteel to prevent tampering. This console was a late addition to the command center, having been installed by specialists from the Techno Union at the same time they had modernized the spaceport defenses. It was called the mutiny box, and contained individual triggers for each of the destruct charges built into every turbolaser and ion cannon, every strongpoint and anti-starfighter turret.