Star Wars 096 - Shatterpoint

by Matthew Stover

  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 howdah 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 WINDU

  Much of the day we spent talking about Kar Vastor. 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 dôshalo, it’s not just an expression. If what he has told Depa is the truth, Kar Vastor and I are the last of the Windu.

  The ghôsh 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 ghôsh 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 dôshallai 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 Vastor was fairly ordinary: more in touch with pelekotan than most, but not in any other way unusual. 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 ghôsh 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 Vastor 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 Korunnal Highland, 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 Geonosis: 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.

  The air above the Lorshan P
ass 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 Jadthu-class 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?”