“Let’s do this the easy way, huh? Nobody has to get hurt.”
If only that were true, Mace thought.
“We got all kinds of stuff out here, Jedi. Not just blasters. We got glop. We got Nytinite. We got stun nets.”
But they hadn’t used any yet. Mercenaries, Mace decided. Maybe bounty hunters. Not militia. Glop grenades and sleep gas were expensive; a blaster bolt cost almost nothing. So they were saving a few credits.
They were also giving him time to think. And he was about to make them regret it.
“You want to know what else we got?” Mace could hear his smirk. “Look up, Jedi…”
Over the roof rims above, the pair of speeder bikes bobbed upward, visored pilots skylining themselves against the blue. Their forward steering vanes scattered mirror flashes of the sunrise across the courtyard floor. Their underslung blaster cannons bracketed Mace with plasma-scorched muzzles. He was completely exposed to their crossfire—but they weren’t firing.
Mace nodded to himself. They wanted him alive. A hit from one of those cannons and they’d have to pick up his body with shovels and a mop.
But that didn’t mean cannons were useless: a blast from the lead bike shattered a chest-sized hunk of the baked-clay wall two meters above him. Chunks and slivers pounded him and slashed him and battered him to the ground.
Heat trickled down his skin, and he smelled blood: he was cut. The rest was too fresh to know how bad it might be. He scrambled through the rubble and dived behind a trash bin. No help there: the speeder pilot blasted the bin’s far side and it slammed Mace hard enough to knock his wind out.
Shot. Concussed. Cut. Battered. Bladeless.
Haruun Kal was pounding him to pieces, and he hadn’t been onworld even a standard day.
“All right!” He reached up and splayed his hands above the trash bin so that the speeder pilots could see. He let his decharged lightsaber dangle, thumb through its belt ring. “All right: I’m coming out. Don’t shoot.”
The lead speeder drifted in a little as he worked his way out from behind the bin, hands high. The other speeder hung back for high cover. Mace picked his way to the alley mouth, took a deep breath, and stepped out from the corner. The two shooters slowly uncovered: one from behind a trash bin and the other stepping out from a recessed doorway. The two backups stayed at the corners of the alley’s far mouth.
“You’re pretty good,” Mace said. “Among the best I’ve ever seen.”
“Hey, thanks,” one answered. From his voice, this was the one who’d spoken earlier. The leader, then, most likely.
His smile was less friendly than his tone. He and his partner both carried fold-stock blasters in the crooks of their arms. The men at the end of the alley had over–under blaster rifles combined with something large bore: grenade launchers or wide-galvenned riot blasters. “Coming from a Jedi like you, I imagine that’s high praise.”
“You certainly do come prepared.”
“Yup. Let’s have that blaster, eh? Nice and easy.”
Slowly—very slowly—Mace switched his lightsaber to his left hand, inching his right down toward the Power 5’s butt. “I wish I could tell you how many times teams like yours have come after me. Not just in alleys. On the street. Caves. Cliffs. Freighter holds. Dry washes. You name it.”
“And now you’re caught. Put the blaster on the ground and kick it toward my friend here.”
“Pirates. Bounty hunters. Tribals. Howlpacks.” Mace might have been reminiscing with old friends as he complied. “Armed with everything from thermal detonators to stone axes. And sometimes just claws and teeth.”
The silent one bent down for the Power 5. His blaster’s muzzle dropped out of line. Mace took a step to his left. Now the talker was in the line of fire from the two behind him.
Mace reached into the Force, and the alleyway crystallized around him: a web of shearplanes and stress lines and vectors of motion. It became a gemstone with flaws and fractures that linked the talker and his partner, the two shooters at the far end, the speeder bikes and their pilots, the twenty-meter-high buildings to either side—
And Mace.
No shatterpoint that he could see would get him out of this. Doesn’t mean I won’t, he thought. Just means it won’t be easy. Or certain.
Or even likely.
He took one deep breath to compose himself.
One breath was all it took. If the Force should bring death to him here, he was ready.
“Now the lightsaber,” the talker said.
“You are better prepared than most.” Mace balanced his lightsaber on his palm. “But like all those others, you’ve forgotten the only piece of equipment that would actually do you any good.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
Mace’s voice went cold, and his eyes went colder. “An ambulance.”
The leader’s smile tried to turn into a chuckle, but instead it faded away: Mace’s level stare was a humor-free zone.
The leader hefted his blaster. “The lightsaber. Now.”
“Sure.” Mace tossed it toward him. “Take it.”
His lightsaber tumbled through a long arc. In the Force he felt them all fractionally relax: the slightest easing of trigger pressure: the tiniest shift of adrenaline-charged concentration. They relaxed because he was now unarmed.
Because none of them understood what a lightsaber was.
Mace had begun the construction of his lightsaber when he was still a Padawan. On the day he first put hand to metal, he had dreamed that lightsaber for three years already: had imagined it so completely that it existed in his mind, perfect in every detail. Its construction was not creation, but actualization: he took mental reality and made it physical. The thing of metal and gemstone, of particle beam and power cell, was only an expression; his real lightsaber was the one that existed only in the part of the Force Mace called his mind.
A lightsaber was not a weapon. Weapons might be taken, or destroyed. Weapons were unitary entities. Many people even gave them names of their own. Mace would no more give a name to his lightsaber than he would to his hand. He was not the boy who first imagined its shape, forty-one years before; nor was his lightsaber identical to that first image in the dreams of a nine-year-old boy. With each new step in his ever-deepening understanding of the Force and his place in it, he had rebuilt his lightsaber. Remade it. It had grown along with him.
His lightsaber reflected all he knew. All he believed.
All he was.
Which was why it required no effort, no thought, to seize his lightsaber’s tumbling handgrip through the Force and fire it like a bullet.
It screamed through the air and its butt took the talker between the eyes with a hollow stone-on-wood whock. The impact flipped him off his feet, unconscious or dead before he hit the ground. His hands spasmed on the blaster, and it gushed energy. Through the Force Mace nudged the blaster’s muzzle to sweep the talker’s partner and blow him spinning to the ground; Mace guided it farther upward, and hammering energy chewed an arc of chunks from the walls before it battered the steering vanes of the speeder bike above and behind him, smacking it into a spin that kept the pilot too busy hanging on to even think about firing a weapon.
The over–unders of the two at the alley mouth now coughed, but Mace was already in motion: he Force-sprang at a slant and met the far wall five meters up, then kicked higher and across to the opposite wall, up and back again, zigzagging toward the rooftops through a storm of blasterfire.
Belated grenades burst below: spit-white glop spewed across the alley, swirling the purple cloud of Nytinite anesthetic gas, but Mace was already well above their effect zone. He sailed up over the lip of the flat baked-tile roof and there were people up there—
The roof was cluttered with hods full of tiles and pots of liquid permacite and bundled tarpaulins that might have been keeping the winter rains out—but now had become camouflage for at least two men.
Lying concealed beneath the tarps, the men were invisible
to the eye but Mace felt them in the Force: adrenaline shivers and the desperate self-control it took to remain motionless. Bystanders? Roofers caught in a sudden firefight, hiding for their lives? Reserves for the assault team?
Mace was not certain he’d live to find out.
Before he could touch down, the other speeder pilot cut off his path with a fountain of blasterfire that traversed back to intercept him. A shove with the Force dropped him short, but as he made contact with the roof, the pilot fired an impact-fused grenade at Mace’s feet. Mace reached out and the Force slapped the grenade away from himself and the hidden men, but the cannon’s blast stream hammered a line of shattered tiles and smoking holes in the rooftop straight at them.
So he sprang toward it.
An upward thrust with the Force lifted him over the blast stream, and he made his spring into a twisting dive-roll that brought him to his feet with his back to the massive communal chimney that rose from the center of the roof. The chimney shuddered with the impact of cannonfire on its far side. Through the Force he felt the other speeder bike circling toward an open shot.
Cannon holes in the roof, he thought. Those cannons left shattered gaps big enough to dive through. If he could drop through one into the building—
The chimney was only a meter taller than Mace was. He sprang to the top. Cannonfire blasted into its baked-clay wall, tracking up toward his legs. Before he could spot a roof hole big enough to dive through, the chimney bucked and began to crumble.
He clawed for his balance. A man shouted, “Hey, Windu! Happy name-day!” and Mace got a glimpse of tarpaulins flipping back, and blue eyes and white teeth, and something came tumbling toward him through the air—
It was shaped vaguely like a cryoban grenade but when Mace reached into the Force to slap it away, he recognized it: its feel was as familiar as the sound of Yoda’s voice.
It was a lightsaber.
It was Depa’s lightsaber.
Instead of slapping it away, Mace drew it toward him—and through the Force he felt her, felt Depa as though she stood at his side and had taken his hand. Its grip smacked into his palm.
In the green flash of Depa’s blade, the situation looked different.
The rest of the fight lasted less than five seconds.
The speeder bike above opened fire again and Mace slipped to one side, letting the Force move the blade. Blaster bolts ricocheted from the energy fountain and smashed the speeder’s power cell, sending it flipping toward the ground within the alley’s end. The blue-eyed Korun—Smiley, the one who had led him here—and the other man who had lain beneath the tarp held rapid-fire slugthrowers that they slipped over the roof rim to fill the alley below with a lethal swarm of bullets.
Two more Korunnai popped out of cover on the rooftop across the alley. One had a slugthrower: flame leaped from its barrel. The other—a big light-skinned Korun girl with reddish hair—stood upright, wide-legged, a massive Mer-Sonn Thunderbolt tucked into her armpit, showering the alley with howling packets of galvenned particle beam.
The other pilot didn’t like the new odds: he power-slewed his speeder and shrieked away above the rooftops. Smiley yanked his barrel around and took aim at the pilot’s back—but before he could fire, the speeder bike flipped in the air, tumbled out of control, and crashed through the wall of a distant building at roughly two hundred kilometers an hour.
Smiley waved a hand, and the Korunnai stopped firing.
The sudden silence rang in Mace’s ears.
“Was that fun or what?” Smiley grinned at Mace, and winked. “Come on, Windu: tell me that didn’t warm your shorts a little.”
Mace dropped to the rooftop and angled Depa’s blade to a neutral position. “Who are you?”
“I’m the guy who just slipped your jiffies off the roaster. Let’s go, man. Militia’ll be here any minute.”
The two Korunnai across the alley were already sliding down slender ropes toward the ground. Smiley and his friend hooked grapnels that might have been made of polished brassvine over the lip of the roof and paid out rope below. His friend slung his slug rifle and slipped over the edge.
Mace scowled toward the column of smoke that now rose from the gaping hole the second speeder bike had left in the building blocks away. Smiley caught his look and chuckled. “Love that fungus: ate his fly-by-wire. Saved me a shot.”
Mace muttered, “I’m just hoping nobody was home.”
“Yeah, think of the mess.” Smiley gave him that big white grin. “Forget about identifying bodies, huh? Better to just hose it out.”
Mace looked at him. “I have a feeling,” he said slowly, “that you and I aren’t going to be friends.”
“And that’s got my heart pumping pondwater, let me tell you.” Smiley took a rope in his hands and beckoned. “On the double, Windu. What do you want, an invitation? Flowers and a box of candy?”
The cascade of Depa’s lightsaber highlighted both their faces the color of sunlight in the jungle. “What I want,” Mace told him, “is for you to tell me what you were doing with this blade.”
“The lightsaber?” The blue in his eyes sparked with manic fire. “That’s my credentials,” he said, and disappeared below the rim.
Chapter 3: Jungle to Jungle
Mace stood on the roof, staring into the emerald gleam of Depa’s blade. Either she’d given it to Smiley, or he’d taken it off her corpse. Mace hoped it was the former.
At least, he thought he did.
The Depa he knew—would she lend out her lightsaber? Would she give away part of herself?
Something told him it hadn’t exactly been a Concordance of Fealty.
After a few seconds, he released the activation plate. Her blade shrank and vanished, leaving behind only a tang of ions in the air. He slipped the handgrip into the inner pocket of his vest. It didn’t go in easily: the grip was tacky with a thin layer of goo that had an herbaceous scent.
Some kind of plant resin. Sticky, but it didn’t come off on his hand.
He shook his head, scowling at his palm. Then he sighed. And shrugged. Perhaps it was time he stopped expecting things on this planet to make sense.
He leaned out over the roof rim. Four bodies below in the alley, plus the pilot lying amid the wreckage of his speeder bike in the alley. Include the one who’d crashed into the building, and that was all of them.
Smiley and the Korunnai were swiftly and efficiently looting the dead.
Mace’s jaw tightened. One of the dead—the talker, maybe—had a deep blood-lipped gash from ear to ear.
Someone had cut his throat.
A sick weight gathered in Mace’s chest. Some things did make sense after all, and the sense this made turned his stomach.
The Force gave him no sign of guilt from any of them; perhaps the violence here was so recent that its echoes washed away any such subtleties. Or perhaps whichever of them had done this felt no guilt at all.
And these killers were his best hope—perhaps his only hope—of reaching Depa.
But he could not simply let this pass.
Another lesson of Yoda’s came to mind: When all choices seem wrong, choose restraint.
Mace slid down the rope.
Smiley nodded him over. “You’re a mess, you know that? Take that shirt off.” He reached down to pull a medpac off a dead man’s belt. “There’ll be spray bandage in here—”
Mace took Smiley’s upper arm with one hand. “You and I,” he said, “need to reestablish our relationship.”
“Hey—ow, huh?” Smiley tried to jerk free, and discovered that Mace’s grip would not suffer by comparison with a freighter’s docking claw: trying just hurt his arm. “Hey!”
“We got off on the wrong foot,” Mace said. “We’re going to make an adjustment. Do you think we can manage this peacefully?”
The other Korunnai looked up from their looting. They stood, faces darkening as they turned toward Mace and Smiley, shifting grips on their weapons. Fingers slipped through trigger guard
s.
“Bad idea,” Mace said. “For everyone concerned.”
“Hey, easy on the arm, huh? I might need it again someday—”
Mace’s hand tightened. “Tell them what we’re doing.”
“You want to lay off the bone-crushing grip?” Smiley’s voice was going thin. Beads of sweat swelled across his upper lip. “What, you like my arm so much you want to take it home with you?”
“This isn’t my bone-crushing grip. This is my don’t-do-something-stupid grip.” Mace tightened it enough to draw a squeak of pain through Smiley’s lips. “We’ll graduate to bone-crushing in about ten seconds.”
“Um… when you put it that way…”
“Tell them what we’re doing.”
Smiley twisted his neck to look over his shoulder at the other Korunnai. “Hey, you kids stand down, huh?” he said weakly. “We’re just… uh, reestablishing our relationship.”
“Peacefully.”
“Yeah, peacefully.”
The other three Korunnai let their weapons dangle from their shoulder slings and went back to looting the bodies.
Mace released him. Smiley massaged his arm, looking aggrieved. “What exactly is your malfunction, anyway?”
“You didn’t lead me into a trap. You used me to lead them into a trap.”
“Hey, Captain Obvious, news flash: this wasn’t a trap.”
Mace frowned. “Then what would you call it?”
“It was an ambush.” Smiley smirked. “What, they don’t teach Basic in Jedi school?”
“Do you know,” Mace said, “that I disliked you the instant we met?”
“Is that Jedi-speak for thank you so much for saving my lightsaber-waving butt? Shee.” He shook his head, mock-sad. “So what is it? What’s your fuss?”
“I would have liked,” Mace told him solidly, “to have taken them alive.”
“What for?”
In Pelek Baw, Mace reflected, that was a fair question. Turn them over to the authorities? What authorities? Geptun? The cops who ran the strong-arm at the pro-bi showers? He took a deep breath. “For questioning.”
“Everything needing to know, you?” This came from the big red-haired girl with the Thunderbolt. She looked up at Mace, still crouched beside a corpse. Her accent dripped high upland. “Are looking at it, you. Six Balawai scum. Over and done. Never another Korun’s home burn. Never another herd slaughter, never another child murder, never another woman—”
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