The two gunships approaching from below swooped up toward the gap. Besh’s grasser was down, kicking, on fire and screaming. Lesh’s was already just a pile of ragged meat. A missile took one of their akks in the flank; though akk hide is nearly impenetrable, the hydraulic shock of the missile’s detonation made a bloody hash of its internal organs. The akk staggered into the rocks before it fell. Besh dragged his brother through the flames into cover behind its massive armored body. The akk’s body bucked and jounced as round after round of cannonfire slammed into it, making it twitch as though still alive.
Behind Mace, the pilot of the first gunship finally recovered control, shutting down the port turbojet and bringing the craft around on repulsorlifts alone. Mace could feel Chalk recovering consciousness among the burning rocks, but he didn’t have time to do anything for her right now. Instead, he followed the drift of her awakening mind into the Force-bond she shared with Galthra. One second was enough for Mace to sound the depths of that bond: he took its full measure.
Then he just took it.
Galthra’s bond with Chalk was deep and strong, but it was a function of the Force, and Mace was a Jedi Master. Until he released the akk, Galthra’s bond would be with him.
Mace hurled himself flipping through the air as Galthra sprang down to meet him. She hit the ground already gathered for her next leap and Mace finished his flip to land standing on her back. She was not trained to carry a rider in battle, but the flow of the Force through their bond made them a single creature. Mace wedged his left foot behind her cowl spines and she sprang out into the pass, bounding a jagged path through the inferno of flame and bursting stone.
Crouching low to take some cover from Galthra’s massive skull, Mace slipped a grenade from the pack into the over–under’s launcher, then slung the weapon without firing. Behind him, he felt the forward missile ports of the damaged gunship cycle open.
Mace murmured, “Right on time.”
He and Galthra reached the crest of the pass. The two gunships in front of him roared up the slope. The one behind launched a concussion missile at Galthra’s back.
In the shaved semisecond after launch, that eyeblink when the missile seemed to hang in the air as though gathering itself for the full ignition of its main engine and the multiple dozens of standard gravities of acceleration it would pull in its lightning flight, the Force-bond between Mace and Galthra pulsed and the great akk made a sudden leap to the left.
The missile screamed past so close that its exhaust scorched Mace’s scalp.
And one little nudge in the Force—hardly more than an affectionate chuck under the chin—tipped its diamond-shaped warhead up a centimeter or two, altering its angle of attack just enough that the missile skimmed the crest of the pass instead of impacting on the burning ground. It streaked on, punching black smoke into turbulence vortices that trailed its tail fins, until the lead gunship swooped up the far side of the pass and took the missile right up its nose.
A huge white fireball knocked it rearing back like a startled grasser, and black smoke poured from the twisted gap blown in its nose armor. Its turbojets roared, and smoke whipped from its screaming repulsorlifts as its pilot fought for control. The third gunship slewed, yawing wildly as it reversed thrust and dived to avoid ramming the other’s rear end.
Mace and Galthra raced straight toward them.
As they passed the shuddering hulk of Chalk’s grasser, Mace reached for the Thunderbolt. It flipped from the ground into his arms, its power pack nestling between his feet. He cradled the massive weapon at his hip, angled the barrel at the third gunship, and held down the trigger.
Mace surfed through the flames and black stinging smoke, over the slag of melting rock, through the thunder and shrapnel shrieks of bursting stone on the back of three-quarters of a metric ton of armored predator, firing from the hip, hammering out a fountain of packeted energy that ripped its way up the side of the gunship. The Thunderbolt didn’t have the punch to penetrate the gunship’s heavy armor plating, but that didn’t matter; the roaring repeater was merely Mace’s calling card.
Galthra shot down the slope beneath the gunships and Mace turned to face them, riding backward, spraying the air with blasterfire until the Thunderbolt overheated and coughed sparks and Mace cast it aside. The third gunship fired a pair of missiles, but Mace could feel their point of aim before they squeezed the triggers, and Galthra was so fast in response to his Force commands that neither of the missiles came close enough for its detonation to have so much as mussed his hair.
If he’d had any.
Now the gunship’s side-mounted laser turrets rotated to track them, and through the Force Mace felt their targeting computers lock on. The two damaged ships reached firing position, and they also locked on. They were coordinating their fire: he could not hope to dodge. So he didn’t bother. He brought Galthra to a halt beneath him.
He stood motionless, empty-handed, waiting for them to open fire.
Waiting to give them a brief tutorial on the art of Vaapad.
Their cannons belched energy and Mace threw himself into the Force, releasing all but his intention. It was no longer Mace Windu who acted: the Force acted through him. Depa’s lightsaber snapped into his left hand while his own flipped into his right. The green cascade was a jungle-echo of the purple as they both met clawing chains of red.
On Sarapin, a Vaapad was a notoriously dangerous predator, powerful and rapacious. It attacked with its blindingly fast tentacles. Most had at least seven. It was not uncommon for them to have as many as twelve. The largest ever killed had twenty-one. The thing about a Vaapad was that you never knew how many tentacles it had until it was dead: they moved too fast to count. Almost too fast to see.
So did Mace’s.
Energy sprayed around him, but only splatters of it grazed him here and there; the rest went back at the gunship. Though the Thunderbolt hadn’t the power to penetrate their heavy armor, a Taim & Bak laser cannon is a whole different animal.
Ten bolts reached his blades. Two apiece went back at the damaged ships, bursting against their armor and knocking them reeling to break their target lock. The other six hammered the cockpit of the third gunship, blasting a gaping hole in its transparisteel viewport.
Mace dropped the lightsabers, swung the over–under forward on its sling, and fired from the hip. It belched a single grenade that the Force guided right through that hole into the cockpit. The grenade made a dull, wet-sounding whump inside the gunship. A fountain of white goo splashed out the hole.
Mace grunted to himself; he thought he’d loaded Nytinite.
Then he shrugged: Eh. Same difference.
One of the forward turbojets sucked strings of hardening glop through its intake, squealed, and chewed itself to shrapnel. The gunship lurched wildly; with the crew glued fast in the grenade’s glop, there was nothing they could do except watch in horror as their ship careened into the face of the ridge and detonated in an impressive explosion that splashed flame three hundred meters down the slope.
Mace thought, And now, for my next trick…
He released the over–under and extended his hands and both lightsabers hurtled back to his grip—
But the two damaged gunships had peeled off and were already limping away into the smoke-stained sky.
He watched them go, frowning.
He felt oddly distressed.
Unhappy.
This had been… strange. Uncomfortable.
His rigorous self-honesty wouldn’t allow him to deny the actual word that described the feeling.
It had been unsatisfying.
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU
I don’t know how long I stood there, frowning into the sky. Eventually, I recovered enough of my equanimity to slide off Galthra’s back and release my hold on her Force-bond. She bounded off, searching for Chalk upslope among the burning rocks.
Nick came stumbling down the slope, picking his way through the dying flames, avoiding the
half-slagged rocks that still glowed a dull red. He seemed most impressed by the fight. Adrenaline drunk and childishly giggly, he seemed deliriously happy, bubbling over with jittery enthusiasm. I don’t recall much of what he said beyond some nonsense about me being a “walking one-man war machine.”
Something like that. I’m not sure the word he used was walking.
Most of what he said was lost in the roar that lived inside my head: a hurricane-whirl of the thunder of my heart, echoes of the battle’s explosions, and the tidal surge of the Force itself.
When he reached me, I saw that he was wounded: blood washed down his face and neck from a deep gash along the side of his head—probably a graze from a rock splinter. But he just kept on about how he’d never seen anything like me until I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“You’re bleeding,” I told him, but that dark gleam in his bright blue eyes never wavered. He kept going on about “Alone against three gunships. Three. Alone.”
I told him that I hadn’t been alone. I quoted Yoda: “‘My ally is the Force.’” He didn’t seem to understand, so I explained: “I had them outnumbered.”
What happened next I remember vividly, no matter how much I wish I could wipe it from my mind. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the two damaged gunships that by then were mere specks of durasteel soaring into the limitless sky.
Nick followed my gaze, and said, “Yeah, I know how you feel. Shame you couldn’t roast all three, huh?”
“How I feel?” I rounded on him. “How I feel?”
I had a sudden urge to punch him: an urge so powerful the effort to restrain it left me gasping. I wanted—I needed—to punch him. To punch him in the face. To feel my fist shatter his jaw.
To make him shut up.
To make him not look at me.
The understanding in his voice—the knowledge in his cold blue eyes—
I wanted to hit him because he was right. He did know how I felt.
It was an ugly shock.
As he said: I’d wanted to destroy those other gunships, too. I wanted to rip them out of the sky and watch them burn. No thought of the lives I’d already taken in the first gunship. No thought of the lives I would take in the other two. In the Force, I reached out toward the burning wreckage on the ridge face above, searching among the flames; for what, I can’t say.
I’d like to think I was feeling for survivors. Checking to see if there were any people, merely wounded, who might be saved from the wreckage. But I cannot honestly say that is true.
I might have just wanted to feel them burn.
I also cannot honestly say I’m sorry for the way the fight turned out.
Though I took their lives in self-defense, and the defense of others, neither I nor those I defended are innocents. I cannot honestly claim that my Korun companions are any more deserving of life than were the people in the gunship. What I did in the pass, I cannot call my duty as a Jedi.
What I did there had nothing to do with peace.
One might call it an accident of war: it happened that this small band of murderous guerrillas accompanied a Jedi Master, and so the spouses and children of a gunship crew have suffered a horrible loss. One might call it an accident of war… even I might call it that—
If it had been anything resembling an accident.
If I hadn’t been trying to bring that ship down. If I hadn’t felt the fever in my blood: blood fever.
The lust for victory. To win, at any cost.
Blood fever.
I feel it even now.
It’s not overpowering; I haven’t fallen that far. Yet. It’s more a preference. An expectation. An anticipation that has been disappointed.
This is bad. Not the worst it can be, but bad enough.
I have long known that I am in danger here. But only now am I beginning to understand how dark and near that danger is; I never guessed how close Haruun Kal has already brought me to that fatal brink.
It is a side effect of the Force immersion of Vaapad. My style grants great power, but at a terrible risk. Blood fever is a disease that can kill anyone it touches. To use Vaapad, you must allow yourself to enjoy the fight. You give yourself to the thrill of battle. The rush of winning. This is why so few students even attempt the style.
Vaapad is a path that leads through the penumbra of the dark side.
Here in the jungle, that shadow fringe is unexpectedly shallow. Full night is only a step away. I must be very, very careful here.
Or I may come to understand what’s happened to Depa all too well.
Mace lowered his head. The electric sizzle of combat drained from his limbs, leaving them heavy and hurting: he had a variety of superficial burns from plasma splatter and splinters of half-molten rock.
He made himself look back up the slope into the pass, through the dying flames and the black twists of fading smoke. In the pass above were dead akks, dead or wounded grassers, and Chalk and Besh and Lesh.
He recalled his Force-flash of this morning.
“Come on, settle down,” he told Nick. It was astonishing how tired he’d suddenly become. “I think we have casualties.”
They worked their way up the ramp of scree. Above, Chalk limped over to her wounded grasser and shook her head: it had been terribly burned. One whole flank was only a mass of char. She walked back up the six-meter length of its body, dropped to one knee, and stroked its head. It made a faint honk of pain and distress, and nuzzled her hand as Chalk drew her slug pistol and shot it just below its crown eye.
The pistol’s single sharp pop echoed from the cliff walls that bound the notch. To Mace, it sounded like a punctuation mark: a period for the end of the battle. The echoes made it into sardonic applause.
Besh and Lesh still huddled in the shadow of the dead akk. With the akk on one side and a huge crag on the other to shelter them from the flames, Mace thought they might have made it through.
Chalk got there before Nick and Mace. All the way down from the corpse of her grasser, her eyes stayed locked on where the brothers must have been, and from her face Mace could tell that what she saw was bad. She glanced over at Nick as he and Mace came up, and she gave that same slow expressionless shake of the head.
Besh sat on the ground by the dead akk’s head. Hugging his knees. Rocking back and forth. Scattered on the ground around him were contents of a standard medpac: hand scanner, spray hypos and bandages, bone stabilizers. He didn’t seem to be injured, but he was pale as a dead man, and his eyes were round and blankly staring.
Lesh was in convulsions.
His face had twisted into a rigid mask, a blind gape at the empty afternoon sky. He bucked and writhed, hands clutching spastically, heels drumming the rocks. Mace’s first thought was head wound—shrapnel or rock splinters in the skull could trigger such seizures—and he couldn’t understand why Nick and Chalk and his own brother just stood as though they were helpless to do anything but watch him suffer. Dropping to a knee, Mace reached for the medpac scanner. Chalk said, “Leave it.”
Mace looked up at her. She gave him the head shake. “Dead already.”
Mace picked up the scanner anyway, and slid the medpac cover open to activate the display. The readout said Lesh wasn’t wounded.
He was infected.
Unidentified bloodborne parasites had collected in his central nervous system. They had now entered a new stage in their life cycle.
They were eating his brain.
The previous night in the wallet tent made sense to Mace now: Lesh must have been sick with these parasites already. And Mace had thought it was nothing but stress and thyssel intoxication.
“Fever wasps,” Nick said hoarsely. He was almost as pale as Besh. He could face violent death with a wink and a sarcastic one-liner, but this had his face shining with pale sweat. He stank of fear. “No telling when he might have been stung. Thyssel chewers go faster. The larvae like the bark. When they hatch—”
He swallowed and his eyes went thin. He had to look away. “The
y’ll hatch from his skull. Through his skull. Like an, an, an eggshell…”
The pure uncomplicated horror on his face told Mace this wouldn’t be the first time he’d seen it happen.
Mace set the medpac on a cool spot by the dead akk. “It says here he can still be saved.” It took only a second to charge a spray hypo with thanatizine. “We can put him in suspended animation. Slow down the… wasp larvae… until we can get him to Pelek Baw and a full hospital. Even if he’s identified—”
Besh looked up at him, and shook his head in a mute No.
Mace brushed past him and knelt at Lesh’s side. “We can save him, Besh. Maybe it’ll mean giving him up to the militia, but at least he’ll be alive.”
Besh caught Mace’s arm. His eyes were raw, spidered with blood. Again, he shook his head.
“Master Windu.” Nick picked up the medpac case and glanced at the readout. “Lesh is way more advanced than this thing says.”
“Medpac scanners are extremely reliable. I can’t imagine it’s wrong.”
“It’s not wrong,” Nick said softly. He turned the case so that Mace could check the screen again. “These aren’t Lesh’s readings.”
“What?”
Besh, looking at the ground, touched his own chest with the tips of his fingers, then sagged; he seemed to crumple in on himself, breath leaving him along with hope and fear. His Force aura shaded into black despair.
Mace looked from Besh to Nick and back again, and then at Lesh spasming on the rocks, and then at the spray hypo still clutched nervelessly in his hand. Not because the jungle kills you, Nick had said. Just because it is what it is.
Nick retrieved the medpac’s scanner and waved it near Mace’s head. “You’re okay,” he said thinly, licking pale sweat from his upper lip. “No sign of infestation.” He turned to Chalk, frowning down at the medpac’s readout.
His shoulders slumped and his hand started to shake.
He had no words, but he didn’t need any. She read her fate on his face.
She stiffened and her mouth went thin and hard. Then she turned away and marched downslope.
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