Shatterpoint

by Matthew W. Stover

  It was just barely good enough that he could see the corpses.

  They hung upside down, elbows bent at a strange angle because their hands were still tied behind them. Living gripleaves twined around their ankles held them six meters above the jungle floor, low enough to bring their heads within an easy jump for a vine cat like the one an akk had chased off as Mace and Nick approached.

  Mace counted seven bodies.

  Birds and insects had been at them as well as the vine cats. They’d been hanging for a while. In damp gloom that alternated with thunderous downpours. And metals weren’t the only thing that the local molds and fungi fed on. Through the colorless tatters that were all that remained of their clothing, it was impossible to tell even if they had been men or women. Mace was only moderately certain they had been human.

  He stood beneath them, looking up into the empty eye sockets of the two that still had heads.

  “Is this what you felt?” Nick shouted down from the saddle. His grasser reached for the gripleaves that held the bodies, and Nick jabbed its forelimb with his brassvine goad. The grasser decided to rip up some nearby glass-ferns instead. It never stopped chewing.

  Mace nodded. Echoes of these murders howled in the Force around him. He’d been able to feel it from hundreds of meters away.

  This place stank of the dark side.

  “Well, now you’ve seen it. Nothing for us to do here. Come on, mount up!”

  The corpses stared down at Mace without eyes.

  Asking him: What will you do about us?

  “Are they—” Mace’s voice was thick; he had to cough it clear, and enough water ran into his mouth that he passed a few seconds coughing for real. “Are these Balawai?”

  “How should I know?”

  Mace stepped out from below the bodies and squinted up at Nick. A blaze of lightning above the canopy haloed the young Korun’s black hair with gold. “You mean they could have been Korunnai?”

  “Sure! What’s your point?” He seemed puzzled that Mace would care one way or the other.

  Mace wasn’t sure why he cared, either. Or even if he cared. People are people. Dead is dead.

  Even if these had happened to be the enemy, nothing could make this right.

  “We should bury them.”

  “We should get out of here!”

  “What?”

  “Mount up! We’re leaving.”

  “If we can’t bury them, at least we can cut them down. Burn them. Something.” Mace caught at the mounting rope as though his merely human strength might hold back the two-ton grasser.

  “Sure. Burn ’em.” Nick sputtered a mouthful of the drenching rain down the grasser’s flank. “There’s that Jedi sense of humor again…”

  “We can’t just leave them for the scavengers!”

  “Sure we can. And we will.” Nick leaned down toward him, and on his face was something that might have even been pity. For Mace, that is. For the dead, he seemed to feel nothing at all.

  “If those are Korunnai,” Nick shouted, not unkindly, “to give them any kind of decent burial will only light a giant We-Were-Here advertiscreen for the next band of irregulars or militia patrol. And give them a pretty good idea of when. If those are Balawai—”

  He glanced up at them. Everything human left his face.

  He lowered his voice, but Mace could read his lips. “If they’re Balawai,” he muttered, “this is already better than they deserve.”

  Night.

  Mace woke from evil dreams without opening his eyes.

  He wasn’t alone.

  He didn’t need the Force to tell him this. He could smell him. Rank sweat. Drool and raw thyssel.

  Lesh.

  Barely a murmur: “Why here, Windu? You come here why?”

  The wallet tent was pitch black. Lesh shouldn’t even have known Mace was awake.

  “What want here, you? Come to take her away from us, you? Said you would, she.” His voice was blurry with the drug and with a childlike weepy puzzlement, as though he suspected Mace might break his favorite toy.

  “Lesh.” Mace pitched his voice deep. Calm. Assured as a father. “You have to leave my tent, Lesh. We can talk about this in the morning.”

  “Think you can? Huh? Think you can?” His voice thinned: a shout strangled to a whisper. Now Mace smelled machine oil and portaak amber.

  He was armed.

  “Don’t understand yet, you. But find out, you will—”

  Mace reached into the Force. He could feel him: crouched by Mace’s ankle. Mace’s bedroll was pinned beneath his boots.

  A less-than-ideal combat position.

  “Lesh.” Mace added the Force to his voice. “You want to leave, now. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “What morning? Morning for you? Morning for me?”

  Mace couldn’t tell if he was saying morning, or mourning.

  Something was still strong enough even in Lesh’s thysseladdled mind that he could resist Mace’s Force-pushed order. “Don’t know anything, you.” His voice went thicker, hitching, as if he wasn’t breathing well. “But teach you, will Kar. What you do, he knows. Teach you, will the akks. Wait, you. Wait and see.”

  Kar? There’d been a Kar Vastor mentioned in several of Depa’s reports. His name had come up as a particularly capable leader of a commando squad, independent or semi-independent; Mace was unclear on the ULF’s command structure. But Lesh breathed the name with a sort of superstitious awe…

  And had he said akks? or ax?

  “Lesh. You have to go. Now.” Questions notwithstanding, Mace was not so foolish as to engage a bark-drunk man in conversation.

  “Think you know her. Think she’s yours. Teach you better. Maybe. Live long enough to learn, you? Maybe not.”

  That was enough of a threat for a flick of the Force to bring his lightsaber to his hand. The sizzling flare of its blade cast purple-fringed shadows. But Lesh was not attacking.

  He hadn’t moved. His rifle was tucked crosswise into his lap.

  Tears streamed down his face.

  That was the blur in his voice. That was the thick hitch.

  He was crying. Silently.

  “Lesh,” Mace began in astonishment, “what’s the ma—” He stopped himself because Lesh was still bark-drunk, and Mace was still not a fool. Instead, he offered a hand towel from his kitbag. “Here. Wipe your face.”

  Lesh took it and smeared the streaks below his eyes. He stared down at the towel and knotted it between his fists. “Windu—”

  “No.” Mace held out his hand for the towel. “We’ll talk in the morning. After you sober up.”

  Lesh nodded and sniffled against the back of his fist. With one last beseeching look at Mace, he was gone.

  The night rolled on, slow and sleepless. Meditation offered less rest than sleep would, but no dreams.

  Not a bad bargain.

  In the morning, when he asked Lesh if he still wanted to talk, Lesh pretended he didn’t know what Mace meant. Mace watched his back as he walked away, and a flash of Force intuition took him and shook him and he knew:

  By nightfall, Lesh would be dead.

  Day.

  The akks’ Force yammer was almost painful. They’d given this call often enough that Mace knew it now.

  Gunships. More than one.

  Mace could feel that Nick was worried. In the Force, dry-ice tension rolled off him. It was starting to affect Mace, too: breathing it in off Nick tied knots in Mace’s stomach.

  Air patrols had been dogging them all day long. Spiral routes and quarter-cutting: search pattern. It wasn’t safe to assume they were looking for anything but the four Korunnai and Mace.

  Tension twisted those knots in Mace’s guts. How could people live their lives under this kind of pressure?

  “Bad luck,” Nick muttered under his breath. “Bad, bad luck.”

  They were exposed in a notch pass through a razorback ridge: some long-ago groundquake had knocked a gap here. A broad fan of scrub-clutched scree
made the ramp they’d climbed up to the pass. They’d been picking their way through a jumble of boulders a few dozen meters wide, akks ranging before and behind; the sides of the gap were towering cliff faces hung with flowering vines and epiphytic trees that clung to the rock with root-fingered grips. The spine of the ridge was shrouded in low clouds. Only two or three hundred meters away, the slope on the far side led down into dark jungle beyond. They might be able to reach the trees before the air patrol overflew them—

  But Nick reined in their grasser. “Lesh is in trouble.”

  Mace didn’t have to ask how he knew: these young folk shared a bond almost as profound as the one they had with their akks.

  Mace thought of his Force-flash from the morning. He said, “Go.”

  Nick wheeled the grasser and they galloped back through the notch. From Mace’s rear-facing saddle, he watched Chalk overtaking them on her way back from her position on point. Her grasser was the fastest of the four, and it carried only half the load of Nick’s.

  As they cleared the crest of the pass, Mace used the Force to lift himself up so that he could stand on the saddle facing forward, his hands on Nick’s back, leaning to see past his shoulder.

  On the descending curve of the pass, someone was down. An akk dog nosed him nervously. Lesh. His grasser stood placidly a dozen meters away, ripping small trees from the cliff wall to fill its ever-chewing maw. Besh got there first; he swung down from his grasser and sprinted to his brother’s side.

  “Get up!” Nick shouted. “Mount up and move!”

  Nick gestured, and in the Force Mace felt a tug as though an unseen hand had taken hold of his line of sight and dragged it out toward the jungle below: a pair of matte-dull specks of metal skimmed the canopy, trailing a shock wake of roiling leaves.

  Gunships. Coming straight for the notch.

  “Might not have seen us yet,” Nick muttered to himself. “Might just be checking the pass—”

  “They’ve seen us.”

  Nick looked down at Mace past his shoulder. “How do you know?”

  “Because they travel in threes.”

  His last word was swallowed by howls of repulsorlifts and snarling turbojets that brought a gunship slewing into the gap from the other side of the ridge. Mace expected it to swoop in for a strafing run, but instead it hovered, cycling its turbojets. “What are they doing?”

  Nick scowled back at the gunship. “You’ve heard the expression, We’re cooked?”

  “Yes…”

  Ventral bays swung open in the gunship’s belly, and nozzles shaped like a chemical rocket’s reaction chamber deployed in a wide-angled array. They belched jets of flame that hit the ground and splashed and ran like rivers of fire, coating rocks and filling crevices. In just over a second the whole end of the pass had become an inferno so intense Mace had to shield his face with his arm. The gunship swept toward them, burying the gap in fire.

  “In this case,” Nick said grimly, “it’s not just an expression.”

  Chapter 5: Blood Fever

  The gunship bore down on them, riding a towering fan of flame.

  The grasser unleashed an earsplitting honk and threw itself into a shockingly fast sprint, bounding from rock to rock, bucking and twisting in the air. Nick unleashed an equally earsplitting stream of profanity as he wrapped his arms around its neck to hang on. Its forebody whipped back and forth, and all four of its arms windmilled in panic.

  Mace gathered himself, feeling the flow of the Force, letting his mind link the path of the bucking grasser to the jets of the gunship’s flame projectors. As the gunship sailed overhead, Mace stiffened his hand into a blade and jabbed the grasser in the nerve plexus below its midshoulder.

  The grasser blared a yelp like the horn of an air taxi in heavy traffic and leapt five meters sideways—into the gap between the fringes of two flame streams, so that they roared around Nick and Mace, only a few splashes igniting patches of fur on the grasser’s legs. Mace gestured, and the Force pushed air away from the burning fur, snuffing it within a bubble of vacuum.

  The gunship thundered past, gouts of flame clawing toward Chalk. She slipped around to the chest of her grasser, and it cradled her in its forelimbs as it ran, shielding her with its body. Nick’s curses strangled to coughs on the thick black petrochemical smoke.

  The smoke burned Mace’s eyes like acid, blinding him with tears. He used the Force to nail himself to the saddle, then by feel he flipped open the stolen medpac that hung from Nick’s belt, and let the Force tell him which spray hypo to use. He jabbed it into Nick’s back beside his spine, then triggered it against his own chest.

  Nick twisted at the sting. “What the frag—?”

  “Gas binder,” Mace said. Intended for emergency use during fires on shipboard, the gas binder selectively scrubbed a user’s bloodstream of a variety of toxins, from carbon monoxide to hydrogen cyanide. “Not as good as a breath mask, but it’ll keep us conscious for a few minutes—”

  “We get to be wide awake while we burn to death? Great! How can I ever thank you?”

  The gunship heeled over as it slewed into a curve that would bring it around for another run. Flame raked the haunches of Chalk’s grasser, and its whole flank caught fire. It screamed and threw up its hands as it pitched forward, thrashing on the burning rocks, sending Chalk tumbling hard into a boulder. Her Force-bonded akk, Galthra, bounded from crag to crag, howling fury, clawing at the air as though she wanted to reach up and drag the gunship down on top of her. Mace felt no fear from her: akks were bred on the slopes of active volcanoes, and their armored hide was tough enough to stop a lightsaber.

  The gunship rounded its turn and streaked back toward Mace and Nick.

  Mace reached deeper into the Force, opening himself, seeking a shatterpoint. The fluid situation in the notch pass gelled, then splintered into crystal: grassers and akks and people and gunships became nodes of stress, vectors of intersecting energy joined by flaws and fault lines. Mace’s mouth set in a grim slit.

  He saw one bare chance.

  The gunship could pass above them and rain fire all day long; no lightsaber was going to deflect a wash of flame-fuel. But: if the militia in the gunship wanted to take out the akks as well…

  The gunship’s aft launchers coughed and concussion missiles streaked back down the pass toward Besh and Lesh. The shock of explosions made the inferno around Mace and Nick whip and jump and spit, and was answered by smaller detonations on all sides, as heat-stressed stone began to shatter. Red-hot shards of half-molten rock slashed through the flames. Wherever they landed they stuck, sizzling. Mace’s vest smoldered, and Nick was kept too busy smacking flames off his tunic and pants to even remember to curse.

  Mace used the Force to unclip the grenade pack Nick had taken off the mercenaries in Pelek Baw, then he snatched the captured over–under out of its scabbard on the grasser’s harness.

  Nick twisted again, eyes wild, barely hanging on. “What are you doing now?”

  “Jump.”

  “What—?”

  With a surge of the Force Mace yanked him out of the saddle an instant before a missile took their grasser full in the chest. The explosion blasted them tumbling through the air in a cloud of vaporized flesh and bone.

  Through the Force Mace felt Nick’s consciousness fuzz from the shock wave; he turned his tumble into a forward flip that landed him on his feet among the rocks. The Force whipped the over–under’s sling up his arm to his shoulder to free his hands, then caught Nick’s limp body and delivered him lightly to Mace’s arms.

  Nick looked up at him with eyes that didn’t quite focus. “Wha—? Wha’ happen—?”

  “Stay here,” Mace said. He tucked Nick into a gap between two house-sized boulders; their mass would take a long time to heat, even in the raging inferno. Meanwhile they’d offer shelter from the fire.

  “Are you crazy?” Nick asked blurrily. “You know what kind of firepower those ruskakks pack?”

  “Two Taim and Bak dual KX
-Four ball turrets, port and starboard,” Mace said absently as he crouched behind the rock, slapping a Nytinite grenade into the over–under while he waited for the gunship to finish its sweep. “Twin fixed-position Krupx MG-Three mini missile tubes fore and aft, a belly-mounted Merr-Sonn Sunfire One Thousand flame projector—”

  “And their armor!” Nick said. His eyes were only now starting to clear. “What do we have that can punch through that armor?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So what exactly do you think you’re gonna do?”

  Mace said, “Win.”

  The gunship hurtled past. In the bare second that Mace was in the gunners’ blind zone he stood up and launched a Nytinite grenade in a high arc. In the Force he felt its path; as it overtook the gunship, only the subtlest of nudges was required to loop it directly in front of the gunship’s starboard turbojet intake, which promptly sucked it in like a snapfish taking a bottle bug.

  Metal screamed. Nytinite grenades didn’t actually detonate; they were canisters that released jets of gas. That this one was a grenade was not pertinent. What was pertinent was that a half-kilo chunk of durasteel had been sucked into turbojet fans that were rotating at roughly one bazillion rpm.

  In round numbers.

  A wash of purple gusted out the exhaust, followed by white-hot chunks of the turbojet’s internal fans. More superheated chunks ripped through the turbojet’s housing, and the whole engine blasted itself to shards, sending the gunship slewing wildly sideways to bounce off the face of the cliff wall.

  Mace looked down at Nick. “Any questions?”

  Nick appeared to be in danger of choking on his own tongue.

  Mace said, “Excuse me,” and was gone.

  The Force launched him over the rocks like a torpedo. He stayed low, blasting through flames too fast to get burned, skimming the slag beneath; kicking off from one boulder to another, he ricocheted across the pass toward Chalk and her akk, Galthra.