Shatterpoint

by Matthew W. Stover

  Faces—

  Hard faces. Cold faces. Hungry, or drunk. Hopeful. Calculating. Desperate.

  Street faces.

  Mace walked a pace behind and to the right of the Republic Intelligence station boss, keeping his right hand near the Merr-Sonn’s butt. Late at night, the streets were still crowded. Haruun Kal had no moon; the streets were lit with spill from taverns and outdoor cafés. Lightpoles—tall hexagonal pillars of duracrete with glowstrips running up each face—stood every twenty meters along both sides of the street. Their pools of yellow glow bordered black shadow; to pass into one of the alley mouths was to be wiped from existence.

  The Intel station boss was a bulky, red-cheeked woman about Mace’s age. She ran the Highland Green Washeteria, a thriving laundry and public refresher station on the capital’s north side. She never stopped talking. Mace hadn’t started listening.

  The Force nudged him with threat in all directions: from the rumble of wheeled groundcars that careened at random through crowded streets to the fan of death sticks in a teenager’s fist. Uniformed militia swaggered or strutted or sometimes just posed, puffed up with the fake-dangerous attitude of armed amateurs. Holster flaps open. Blaster rifles propped against hipbones. He saw plenty of weapons waved, saw people shoved, saw lots of intimidation and threatening looks and crude street-gang horseplay; he didn’t see much actual keeping of the peace. When a burst of blasterfire sang out a few blocks away, no one even looked around.

  But nearly everyone looked at Mace.

  Militia faces: human, or too close to call. Looking at Mace, seeing only a Korun in offworld clothes, their eyes went dead cold. Blank. Measuring. After a while, hostile eyes all look alike.

  Mace kept alert, and concentrated on projecting a powerful aura of Don’t Mess With Me.

  He would have felt safer in the jungle.

  Street faces: drink-bloated moons of bust-outs mooching spare change. A Wookiee gone gray from nose to chest, exhaustedly straining against his harness as he pulled a two-wheeled taxicart, fending off street kids with one hand while the other held on to his money belt. Jungle prospector faces: fungus scars on their cheeks, weapons at their sides. Young faces: children, younger than Depa had been on the day she became his Padawan, offering trinkets to Mace at “special discounts” because they “liked his face.”

  Many of them were Korunnai.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  Sure. Come to the city. Life’s easy in the city. No vine cats. No drillmites. No brassvines or death hollows. No shoveling grasser manure, no hauling water, no tending akk pups. Plenty of money in the city. All you have to do is sell this, or endure that. What you’re really selling: your youth. Your hope. Your future.

  Anyone with sympathy for the Separatist cause should spend a few days in Pelek Baw. Find out what the Confederacy is really fighting for.

  It’s good that Jedi do not indulge in hate.

  The station boss’s chatter somehow wandered onto the subject of the Intel front she managed. Her name was Phloremirlla Tenk, “but call me Flor, sweetie. Everybody does.” Mace picked up the thread of her ramble.

  “Hey, everybody needs a shower once in a while. Why not get your clothes spiffed at the same time? So everybody comes here. I get jups, kornos, you name it. I get militia and seppie brass—well, used to, till the pullback. I get everybody. I got a pool. I got six different saunas. I got private showers—you can get water, alcohol, probi, sonics, you name it—maybe a recorder or two to really get the dirt we need. Some of these militia officers, you’d be amazed what they fall to talking about, alone in a steam room. Know what I mean?”

  She was the chattiest spy he’d ever met. When she eventually stopped for breath, Mace told her so.

  “Yeah, funny, huh? How do you think I’ve survived this game for twenty-three years? Talk as much as I do, it takes people longer to notice you never really say anything.”

  Maybe she was nervous. Maybe she could smell the threat that smoked in those streets. Some people thought they could hold danger at bay by pretending to be safe.

  “I got thirty-seven employees. Only five are Intel. Everybody else just works there. Hah: I make twice the money off the Washeteria as I draw after twenty-three years in the service. Not that it’s all that hard to do, if you know what I mean. You know what an RS-Seventeen makes? Pathetic. Pathetic. What’s a Jedi make these days? Do they even pay you? Not enough, I’ll bet. They love that Service is its own reward junk, don’t they? Especially when it’s other people’s service. I’ll just bet.”

  She’d already assembled a team to take him upcountry. Six men with heavy weapons and an almost new steamcrawler. “They look a little rough, but they’re good boys, all of them. Freelancers, but solid. Years in the bush. Two are full-blooded kornos. Good with the natives, you know?”

  For security reasons, she explained, she was taking him to meet them herself. “Sooner you’re on your way, happier we’ll both be. Right? Am I right? Taxis are hopeless this time of day. Mind the gutter cookie—that stuff’ll chew right through your boots. Hey, watch it, creepo! Ever hear that peds have the right-of-way? Yeah? Well, your mother eats Hutt slime!” She stumped along the street, arms swinging. “Um, you know this Jedi of yours is wanted, right? You got a way to get her offworld?”

  What Mace had was the Halleck onstation in the Ventran system with twenty armed landers and a regiment of clone troopers. What he said was, “Yes.”

  A new round of blasterfire sang perhaps a block or two away, salted with staccato pops crisper than blaster hits. Flor instantly turned left and dodged away up the street.

  “Whoops! This way—you want to keep clear of those little rumbles, you know? Might just be a food riot, but you never know. Those handclaps? Slugthrowers, or I’m a Dug. Could be action by some of these guerrillas your Jedi runs—lots of the kornos carry slugthrowers, and slugs bounce. Slugthrowers. I hate ’em. But they’re easy to maintain. Day or two in the jungle and your blaster’ll never fire again. A good slug rifle, keep ’em wiped and oiled, they last forever. The guerrillas have pretty good luck with them, even though they take a lot of practice—slugs are ballistic, y’know. You have to plot the trajectory in your head. Shee, gimme a blaster anytime.”

  A new note joined the blasterfire: a deeper, throatier thrummthrummmthrummthrumm. Mace scowled over his shoulder. That was some kind of light repeater: a T-21, or maybe a Merr-Sonn Thunderbolt.

  Military hardware.

  “It would be good,” he said, “if we could get off the street.”

  While she assured him, “No, no, no, don’t worry, these scuffles never add up to much,” he tried to calculate how fast he could dig his lightsaber out of his kitbag.

  The firing intensified. Voices joined in: shouts and screams. Anger and pain. It started to sound less like a riot, and more like a firefight.

  Just beyond the corner ahead, white-hot bolts flared past along the right-of-way. More blasterfire zinged behind them. The firefight was overflowing, becoming a flood that might surround them at any second. Mace looked back: along this street he still could see only crowds and groundcars, but the militia members were starting to take an interest: checking weapons, trotting toward alleys and cross-streets. Flor said behind him, “See? Look at that. They’re not even really aiming at anything. Now, we just nip across—”

  She was interrupted by a splattering thwop. Mace had heard that sound too often: steam, superheated by a high-energy bolt, exploding through living flesh. A deep-tissue blaster hit. He turned back to Flor and found her staggering in a drunken circle, painting the pavement with her blood. Where her left arm should have been was only a fist-sized mass of ragged tissue. Where the rest of her arm was, he couldn’t see.

  She said: “What? What?”

  He dived into the street. He rolled, coming up to slam her hip joint with his shoulder. The impact folded her over him; he lifted her, turned, and sprang back for the corner. Bright flares of blaster bolts bracketed invisible sizzl
es and finger snaps of hypersonic slugs. He reached the meager cover of the corner and laid her flat on the sidewalk, tucked close against the wall.

  “This isn’t supposed to happen.” Her life was flooding out of the shattered stump of her shoulder. Even dying, she kept talking. A blurry murmur: “This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening. My—my arm—”

  In the Force, Mace could feel her shredded brachial artery; with the Force, he reached inside her shoulder to pinch it shut. The flood trickled to sluggish welling.

  “Take it easy.” He propped her legs on his kitbag to help maintain blood pressure to her brain. “Try to stay calm. You can live through this.”

  Boots clattered on permacrete behind him: a militia squad sprinting toward them. “Help is on the way.” He leaned closer. “I need the meet point and the recognition code for the team.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Listen to me. Try to focus. Before you go into shock. Tell me where I can find the upcountry team, and the recognition code so we’ll know each other.”

  “You don’t—you don’t understand—this isn’t happening—”

  “Yes. It is. Focus. Lives depend on you. I need the meet point and the code.”

  “But—but—you don’t understand—”

  The militia behind him clattered to a stop. “You! Korno! Stand away from that woman!”

  He glanced back. Six of them. Firing stance. The lightpole at their backs haloed black shadow across their faces. Plasma-charred muzzles stared at him. “This woman is wounded. Badly. Without medical attention, she will die.”

  “You’re no doctor,” one said, and shot him.

  Chapter 2: Capital Crimes

  He had plenty of time to get familiar with the interrogation room.

  Four meters by three. Duracrete blocks flecked with gravel whose shearplanes glinted like mica. The walls from waist-high to ceiling had once been painted the color of aged ivory. The floor and lower walls used to be the green of wander-kelp. What was left of both paint jobs flaked in patches rimmed with mildew.

  The binder chair that held him was in better condition. The clamps at his wrists were cold and hard and had no weakness he could touch; those at his ankles sliced pale gouges into the leather of his boots. The chest plate barely let him breathe.

  No windows. One glowstrip cast soft yellow from the joining of wall and ceiling. The other one was dead.

  The door was behind him. Twisting to watch it hurt too much. The durasteel table in the center of the room was dented and speckled with rust—he thought it was rust. Hoped it was. On the far side of it was a wooden chair, its bow back stripped from wear.

  His vest and shirt were tattered at the shoulder where the first bolt had struck. The skin beneath was scorched and swollen with a black bruise. Set on stun, the bolt had barely penetrated his skin, but the concussive force of the steam-burst still hit like a club. It had picked him up and spun him. The pounding in his skull implied that at least one shot had caught the side of his head. He didn’t remember.

  He didn’t remember anything between that first shot and waking up in this binder chair.

  He waited.

  He waited a long time.

  He was thirsty. Uneasy pressure in his bladder somehow made his head hurt worse.

  Studying the room and assessing his injuries could occupy only so much of his time. Much of the rest of it, he spent replaying Flor’s death.

  He knew she was dead. She had to be. She couldn’t have lived more than a minute or two after the militia stunned him; without his Force-hold to pinch off that brachial artery, she would have bled out in seconds. She would have lain on that filthy sidewalk staring up at city-dimmed stars while the last of her consciousness darkened, faded, and finally winked out.

  Again and again he heard that wet splattering thwop. Again and again he carried her back under cover. And stopped her bleeding. And tried to speak with her. And was shot by men he’d thought were coming to help.

  Her death had gotten inside him, down below his ribs. It ate at him: a tiny pool of infection that grew through the hours in that room until it became a throbbing abscess. Pain and nausea and sweats. Chills.

  A fever of the mind.

  Not because he was responsible for her death. It ate at him because he wasn’t.

  He’d had no idea she was about to walk into a blaster bolt. The Force never offered the faintest hint of a clue. No trace of a bad feeling—or rather: no hint that all the bad feelings he’d had were about to add up to something much, much worse.

  Nothing. Nothing at all. That’s what sickened him.

  What happens to a Jedi when he can no longer trust the Force?

  Was this what broke Depa?

  He shook that thought out of his skull. He drove his attention into his visual field, focusing on cataloging the smallest detail of his prison. Until he could see for himself, he told himself solidly, he owed her the presumption of innocence. Such doubts were unworthy of her. And of him. But they kept creeping back, no matter how hard he stared at the mildew-eaten paint on the wall.

  …I know you think I’ve gone mad. I haven’t. What’s happened to me is worse.

  …I’ve gone sane…

  He knew her. He knew her. To the marrow of her bones. Her most secret heart. Her cherished dreams and faintest, foggiest hopes. She could not be involved in massacres of civilians. Of children.

  …nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who’s finally sane…

  She couldn’t.

  But as seconds swelled to hours, the certainty in his head went hollow, then desperate. Like he was trying to talk himself into something he knew was wrong.

  He felt the door behind him open. A damp breeze licked the back of his neck. Footsteps entered and clicked to one side, and he twisted to look: they belonged to a smallish human male, comfortably plump, wearing militia khakis that were improbably well starched, considering the heat and the damp. The man carried a snap-rim case covered in tanned animal hide. He brushed a wave of end-dampened hair the color of aluminum away from dark eyes, and offered Mace a pleasant smile. “No, please.” He waved a hand toward the door. “Feel free to have a look.”

  Twisting farther, Mace could see down the corridor behind his binder chair. At the far end stood a pair of steady-looking militiamen with blaster rifles aimed at his face.

  Mace frowned. An unusual position for guards.

  “Is this clear enough?” The man moved around Mace to the table, never crossing their line of fire, and opened his animal-hide bag. “I’m told you have a bit of a concussion. Let’s not make it fatal, shall we?”

  The Force showed him a dozen places on that soft body where a single blow would maim or kill. This man was no warrior. But energy spidered outward from him in all directions: an important man. Mace found no direct threat in him, only a cheery pragmatism.

  “Not talkative? Don’t blame you. Well. My name’s Geptun. I’m chief of security for the capital district. My friends call me Lorz. You can call me Colonel Geptun.” He waited, still wearing that indifferently pleasant smile. After a few seconds, he sighed. “Well. We know who I am. And we know who you’re not.”

  He flipped open the lid of Mace’s identikit. “You’re not Kinsal Trappano. I’m guessing not Corellian, either. Interesting history you don’t have. Smuggler. Small-time pirate. Gunrunner. Et cetera and so forth.” He settled into the wooden chair, laced his fingers together, and propped his hands on his belly. He watched Mace with that pleasant smile. Silently. Waiting for him to say something.

  Mace could have kept him waiting for days. Without Jedi training, no human truly understands what patience is. But Depa was out there. Somewhere. Doing something. The longer it took him to reach her, the more of it she might do. He decided to talk.

  A small victory for him, Mace thought. No loss for me.

  “What am I charged with?”

  “That depends. What have you done?”

  “Officially.”

/>   Geptun shrugged. “Nothing’s been filed. Yet.”

  “Then why am I being held?”

  “We’re interrogating you.”

  Mace raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, yes. We are.” Geptun winked. “We are indeed. I’m a terrific interrogator.”

  “You haven’t even asked me a question.”

  Geptun smiled like a sleepy vine cat. “Questions are `inefficient. In your case, futile.”

  “You must be good indeed,” Mace said, “to have figured that out without even asking one.”

  By way of reply, Geptun reached into the animal-skin case and pulled out Mace’s lightsaber.

  The glow rod shell had been stripped away. Traces of adhesive showed black against the metal. He hefted it in his hand, smiling. “And torture would probably be a waste of time, too, yes?”

  He set the lightsaber on the table and spun it like a bottle. Mace could feel its whirl in the Force: feel exactly how to touch it with his mind, to lift it and trigger it and set it flashing upon Colonel Geptun, to slay or hold hostage, or to slash through the restraints that held him in the binder chair—

  He let it spin.

  The two shooters standing ready at the far end of the corridor made sense to him now.

  His lightsaber’s spin took on a wobble, slowed, and trickled to a stop, its emitter centered on his breastbone. “I believe that means you’re It,” Geptun said.

  A neat trick. Mace measured him again. The colonel endured his scrutiny blandly. “Geptun,” Mace said, “could be a Korun name.”

  “And in fact it is,” the colonel admitted cheerily. “My paternal grandfather came out of the jungle some seventy-odd years ago. This, ah, is not discussed. You understand. Not in polite society.”

  “Is that something you still have here? Polite society?”

  Geptun shrugged. “My name’s only a mild handicap. Maybe that trace of Korun blood is what makes me too proud to change it.”

  Mace nodded, more to himself than to the other. If the man had enough Force-touch to control the lightsaber’s spin, he might easily have enough to conceal his intentions. Mace revised his threat assessment from Low to Unknown. “What do you want from me?”