But the other troopers had not panicked; with polished fire discipline and plain raw courage, the falling troopers had turned upon the starfighters the weapons they carried upon their persons, coordinating their fire for greater effect. Three light repeaters, when turned upon the same starfighter, could break down its shields so that a single shot from a blaster rifle might disable an engine; groups of grenadiers scattered proximity-fused proton grenades in improvised mini-minefields; and when their weapons were exhausted, in desperation, men used their own bodies as weapons, manipulating their repulsorpacks to shove themselves into the path of starfighters whipping past at dogfight speeds. In such collisions, neither could hope to survive.
The troopers had not been fighting to defend themselves; they knew their lives were over. But they had never stopped.
They were fighting for the regiment.
Every starfighter they took down was one less that might attack their brothers. CRC-09/571 was not particularly emotional, even for a clone, but he had watched their sacrifice with a hot swell in his chest. Men such as those made him proud to be one of them. His only drive was to discharge his duty; but he also nursed a secret desire to do something, to achieve something, that would be worthy of his men’s astonishing heroism.
To hit back.
Which is why he felt a sting in his guts—what an ordinary man might call anger and frustration, but which CRC-09/571 only barely noticed, and immediately dismissed—when his comm lit up with orders from General Windu.
Orders that his ships were to immediately cease fire.
Cease fire despite close pursuit by DSFs.
Despite three additional droid starfighter wings—192 units—closing on them from beyond the planetary horizon.
Despite sixty-nine Sienar Turbostorm gunships streaking up from the surface to intercept them.
His anger and frustration showed only in a certain hopeful tone when he demanded General Windu’s verification code—perhaps this was an enemy, impersonating the general—and in the slight reluctance he felt to confirm, when the general’s code came through correct.
General Windu, as far as CRC-09/571 could determine, was ordering the clones to die. But CRC-09/571 could no more disobey a lawful order than he could walk through armor plate.
As they hurtled down from the stratosphere above the Korunnal Highland, the guns on all the Republic ships fell silent.
Droid starfighters swarmed over them, weapons blazing.
As his lander was pounded from all sides by multiple cannon hits, CRC-09/571 noticed an odd thing on his command-scan screen: some of the gunships below seemed to be firing on other gunships.
To be precise: sixty-seven of the gunships below seemed to be firing on the two that were in the lead.
These two did not return fire. They streaked at full power in a steep climb, scissoring side-to-side, heading straight for the mass dogfight so that the cannonfire which missed them—nearly all of it—blasted upward into the cloud of DSFs. Most of it passed harmlessly through, of course, not being aimed at the small agile craft, but several DSFs took blasts squarely, and exploded.
CRC-09/571 frowned. He had a good feeling about this.
Not far below, in the open cockpit of one of the two gunships that were the targets of those behind, Mace Windu said, “All right, Nick. Light them up.”
“Yes, sir!”
Nick Rostu flipped a single switch, and the droid brains of twenty-six different droid starfighters—one for each of the missiles remaining in the Turbostorm’s launchers—felt the sudden internal alarm-buzz of sensors detecting a missile lock.
Coming from a friendly ship.
The droid brains found this puzzling, but not overly distressing; they were still focused on their primary mission, which was to destroy any and all Republic craft attempting to orbit or land on Haruun Kal. But they were programmed to monitor possible hazards, and each of them set some of their spare capacity to searching memory banks for any response programs that might be indicated in the event of missile-locks from friendly craft.
There weren’t any.
This, the droid brains did find distressing.
And there was the issue of those laser blasts…
Only one second later, thirty-two additional droid brains among the swarm of starfighters had exactly the same experience.
Because all four of the Krupx MG3 mini-missile launchers on Depa’s gunship were fully loaded.
As the two gunships penetrated the perimeter of the sprawling dogfight, Mace said, “Fire.”
A Krupx MG3 tube could fire one missile every standard second; each MG3 had two tubes, which carried magazines of four mini-missiles apiece. The Sienar Turbostorm close-assault gunship had four Krupx MG3s: two forward and two aft. On Mace’s command, both ships emptied their magazines. The gunships blossomed with fire and rocket exhaust.
Sixteen missiles per second roared twisting through the sky.
The dogfight became a tangled web of vapor trails.
In the gunship’s open cockpit, Nick watched his widescan, whistling. “Wow. Those starfighters are quick.”
Mace said, “Yes.”
“Two thirds of our missiles are gonna miss altogether. No: three quarters. More. Damn, they’re fast.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? It’s just our butts, that’s all! Not to mention those poor ruskakks in the landers.”
Mace Windu said, “Watch.”
Nick’s estimate proved to be overly optimistic: of the fifty-nine missiles fired, only six found their targets. Three more were accidentally intercepted by DSFs which they were not locked onto. The rest were destroyed by the droids’ inhumanly precise counterfire, or were simply evaded by the nimble craft; dozens flashed away into the sky until their propellant was exhausted and they began the long slow tumble to the surface.
However—as Mace had pointed out, down in the battered cavern base—droids were stupid.
That was not to say that they could not adapt to changing circumstances. They could, and did: often with a speed and decisiveness that no organic brain could match. These droids had comprehended they were under attack by “friendly” vessels before the initial flight of sixteen missiles had fully engaged their engines. An attack from a single friendly vessel might be a mistake, an accident, no more. But two vessels, both of whose transponder codes identified as friendly, had opened fire on them in a coordinated attack.
Without warning.
The droids would not wait for further attacks. They adapted with lightning speed, and remorseless droid logic.
And Nick Rostu, staring down into his widescan screen, didn’t even notice his own jaw dropping farther and farther as first one, then a dozen, then a hundred and more, red scan-hits changed to blue.
“They’re going hostile,” Nick murmured in awe.
“Yes.”
“All of them.”
“Yes.”
Two hundred and twenty-seven DSFs peeled off from the landers—whose silent guns had dropped them below the droid brains’ threat horizon—and fell upon the sixty-nine Turbostorms in a tornado of destruction.
Gunships began to burn, and fall.
“You planned this?”
“There’s more.”
“Yeah? What do we do now?”
A dozen starfighters converged on them.
“Now,” said Mace Windu, “we bail out.”
He took hold of Nick’s belt. Nick stared at him in open horror. “Don’t tell me.”
“All right.”
A Force-pushed leap yanked them both out of the cockpit a full second before the gunship began to crumple under hundreds of cannon-hits; two seconds later it exploded, but by then Mace and Nick were already fifty-eight meters below and gaining speed, hurtling without benefit of repulsor-packs down through the dogfight’s flame and smoke and airbursts.
Nick’s shriek sank unheard under the windrush and explosions.
Mace mouthed, Y
ou told me not to tell you.
Nick spent much of the ensuing fall complaining in a loud—though inaudible—voice about having to end his young life as “some fraggin’ nikkle nut–brained Jedi Master’s straight man.”
Free-falling, one hand keeping a tight grip on Nick’s belt, Mace reached into the Force and felt for his lightsaber.
He found its familiar resonance far below. Nick stayed locked in a fetal ball, hugging his thighs to his chest in a white-knuckled death grip and shouting obscenities between his knees. Though he had a tendency to tumble, his tight “cannonball” made him close enough to aerodynamically neutral that Mace could direct their fall by angling his own body.
They soared toward a target he could barely see: two kilometers below and a quarter-klick to the west, a gunship whirled toward the jungle in a flat spin, spewing thick black smoke. The DSFs were ignoring it, concentrating instead on the gunships that still fired and twisted and dodged in frantic attempts to evade them.
Depa was doing a fine job of appearing crippled and helpless.
Now and again some chunks of smoking durasteel or a hunk of repulsorlift would overtake Mace and Nick on their long, long fall, seeming to drift down past them at variously leisurely paces, according to their individual quotients of wind-resistance. No bodies passed them, though; Mace and Nick fell already at close to the terminal velocity of the human form.
On Haruun Kal, that was slightly less than three hundred kilometers per hour.
The gunship’s rate of fall was considerably slower; it only looked like it was going in out of control. Which was why, when Mace had towed Nick to within a few hundred meters above the gunship, a considerable exertion of his Force-strength was required to slow them enough to avoid a catastrophic splatter.
Nick had lifted his eyes only once, as they plummeted toward the roof armor of the gunship: just long enough to recall vividly what Mace had said about leaving a red smear on a windscreen. His head was tucked back securely between his knees when Mace brought them to a thumpingly unceremonious landing that sent them bruised and bouncing along the top of the spinning ship.
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. Vastor 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 Vastor 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 lor pelek, 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 Vastor aside. “I’ll do it my…”
His voice trailed away, because Vastor 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 Vastor. 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 r
aged 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 streaking back toward space, and the handful of surviving gunships turning to limp home.
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