“Chalk—” Nick called after her helplessly. “Chalk, wait—”
“Getting the Thunderbolt, me.” Her voice was squeezed flat, as unemotional as a navcomp’s vocabulator. “Good weapon. Will need it, you.”
Nick turned his stricken look on Mace. “Master Windu—” He held out the medpac scanner imploringly. “Don’t make me do my own reading, huh?”
Mace quickly scanned Nick’s spine and skull. The readings indicated a clear negative, but Nick didn’t seem much relieved.
“Yeah, well,” he said with understated bitterness, “if I was gonna die in the next day or two, I wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of them.”
“Taking care of them?” Mace said. “Is there a treatment?”
“Yeah.” Nick drew his pistol. “I got their treatment right here.”
“That’s your answer?” Mace stepped in front of him. “Kill your friends?”
“Just Lesh,” he said, his voice grim and hard, even though it trembled a little, like his hand. He didn’t have Chalk’s mental toughness. His eyes watered, and his face twisted, and he could barely make himself look at his friends. “Time enough to take care of Besh and Chalk when they start the twitches.”
Mace still couldn’t believe Nick was serious. “You want to just shoot them? Like Chalk’s grasser?”
“Not like her grasser,” Nick said. His face had gone gray. “Not in the head. Scatters the larvae. Some of them will be developed enough to be dangerous.” He coughed. “To us.”
“So it’s not enough that he dies.” Mace breathed Jedi discipline into a wall around his heart: to lock down his empathic horror at the gray rictus of Lesh’s face. Pink-tinged foam bubbled from Lesh’s lips. “The… infested areas… have to be destroyed. Brain and spinal cord.”
Nick nodded, looking even sicker. “With wasp fever, we usually burn the body, but…”
Mace understood. The escaped gunships would have transmitted their position. No telling what might already be on its way.
He could not believe what he was about to do. He could not even believe what he was about to say. But he was a Jedi. The purpose of his life was to do what must be done. To do what others would not, or could not.
No matter what it was.
He unclipped the lightsabers from his belt. His own and Depa’s both.
Green blade and purple sizzled together in the smoke-hazed air.
Besh looked up from the ground. Chalk went still on the slope, the Thunderbolt cradled in her arms. Nick opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, but didn’t know what it might be.
They all stared at Mace as though they’d never seen him before.
“He’s your friend. Your brother.” Mace took a deep breath, steadying his own fear and revulsion and his dark, dark loathing for what he must do. “You might want to say good-bye.”
Besh shook his head mutely. With an inarticulate sob compounded of grief and terror, he threw himself to his feet and stumbled away upslope.
Chalk only held Mace’s eye for a second, and gave him one slow nod. Then she followed Besh. She put one strong arm around Besh’s shoulders. Besh collapsed against her, sobbing.
Nick was the last. His eyes showed nothing but pain. Finally, he shook his head, and tears spilled onto his cheeks. “He’s already gone.” He touched Mace on the shoulder. “Master Windu—you don’t have to do this—”
“Yes, I do,” Mace said. “Or you’ll have to.”
Nick nodded reluctant understanding.
“Thanks. Windu, uh, Master, I—just—thanks.” He turned and walked after the others. “I won’t forget it.”
Neither would Mace.
He stared down at Lesh between the two shining blades. He reached into the Force, seeking to touch anything of the young man that might remain, to offer what little comfort might be his to give, but it was as Nick said: Lesh was already gone. A long moment passed while Mace composed himself, found an attitude of calm reverence, and consigned whatever might have been left of Lesh’s consciousness or spirit to the Force.
Then he took a deep breath, lifted his blades, and began.
The razorback ridge eclipsed the southern sky behind them. The jungle canopy overhead glowed with early sunset; on the ground it was already twilight. The companions walked along a broad track crushed bare by repeated passages of steamcrawler treads. The canopy had arched over the track, joining above so that their path lay along a jungle-lined tunnel that wound and switchbacked up and down the folds that radiated from the ridge’s north face.
Mace wore bacta patches trimmed to fit the worst of his burns. Nick’s temple was shiny with spray bandage. Chalk wore a sling restraining the shoulder she’d separated when she tumbled into the rocks, and a compression wrap supported her twisted knee. Besh walked in expressionless silence. He might have been in shock.
What was left of Lesh was buried at the tree line.
Their backpacks were heavy with supplies scavenged from the dead grassers. Little of Mace’s gear survived; his wallet tent, his changes of clothing, his own medpac and identikit, all had been destroyed with Nick’s grasser. The war on Haruun Kal was erasing Mace’s connections to life outside the jungle: of all the physical evidence that he had ever been anything other than a Korun, only the two lightsabers remained.
Even the fake datapad that he had carried all this way—its miniature subspace coil must have been damaged in the blast. He’d considered summoning the Halleck to evacuate Besh and Chalk for medical treatment, despite the fact that it would have severely compromised his mission here; the sudden appearance of a Republic cruiser in the Al’Har system would certainly have drawn entirely too much Separatist attention. But the datapad’s holocomm had been unable to even pick up a carrier wave. His last link to what Depa called the Galaxy of Peace was as dead as the Balawai militia Mace had sent crashing into the razorback ridge.
A stroke of irony—the fake datapad’s recording function still worked. Disguise had become reality: the datapad was a fake no longer. Mace had a superstitious hunch that this was somehow symbolic.
Galthra walked among them at Chalk’s side instead of ranging around; she was the last of their akks. With a little luck, her presence alone might keep major predators at a respectful distance.
No gunships had yet come to the pass behind them. Mace found this inexplicable, and disturbing. Once in a while, Galthra gave a Force-twitch that may have meant she heard engines in the distance, but it was hard to tell. Mostly, she mourned her dead packmates: her Force presence was a long moan of grief and loss.
They pushed on. Nick set a killing pace. He had not spoken since they’d buried Lesh’s remains.
Mace guessed that Nick was thinking about Besh and Chalk; he himself certainly was. Thinking about the fever wasp larvae that teemed within their brain and spinal cord tissue. They might have a day or two before dementia would begin. A day or two after that: convulsions and an ugly death. Besh walked with his head down, shivering, as though he could think of nothing else; Chalk marched like a war droid, as though suffering and death were too alien for her to even comprehend, let alone fear.
Mace matched Nick’s pace, close by his side. “Talk to me.”
Nick’s eyes stayed on the jungle ahead. “Why should I?”
“Because I want to know what you have in mind.”
“What makes you think I have anything in mind? What makes you think anything I might have in mind can make a difference?” His voice was angrily bitter. “We have two people about to go into second-stage wasp fever. No grassers. One akk. A handful of weapons, militia on our tail. And you and me.”
His gaze slid sideways to meet Mace’s. His eyes were red and raw. “We’re dead. You get it? Like that tusker in the death hollow: a few meters short of where we needed to be. We didn’t make it. We’re dead.”
“For dead men,” Mace observed, “we’re making good time.”
For an instant he thought Nick might crack a smile. Instead, Nick shook hi
s head. “There’s a lor pelek who travels with Depa’s band. He’s… very powerful. More than powerful. If we can get Besh and Chalk to him before they start the twitches, he might be able to save them.”
Lor pelek: “jungle master.” Shaman. Witch doctor. Wizard. In Korun legend, the lor pelek was a person of great power, and great peril. As unpredictable as the jungle. He brought life or death: a gift or a wound. In some stories, a lor pelek was not a being at all, but was rather pelekotan incarnate: the avatar of the jungle-mind.
Mace made a connection. “Kar Vastor.”
Nick goggled at him. “How’d you know that? How’d you know his name?”
“How long before we reach them?”
Nick trudged on a few paces before he answered. “If we still had grassers, and akks for warding? Maybe two days. Maybe less. On foot? With only one akk?” His shrug was expressive.
“Then why march us so hard?”
“Because I do have something in mind.” He flicked a sidelong glance at Mace. “But you’re not gonna like it.”
“Will I like it less than having to do to Besh and Chalk what I had to do to Lesh?”
“That’s not for me to say.” Nick’s gaze went remote, staring off into the gloom-filled tunnel ahead. “There’s a little outpost settlement about an hour west of here. Ones like it are strung out every hundred klicks or so along these steamcrawler tracks. They’ll have a secure bunker, and a comm unit. Even though we—the ULF—don’t use comms, we still monitor the frequencies. We get in there, we can send a coded signal to them with our position. Then we put Chalk and Besh in thanatizine suspension, sit tight, and hope for the best.”
“A Balawai settlement?”
He nodded. “We don’t have settlements. DOKAWs saw to that.”
“These Balawai—they’ll take us in?”
“Sure.” Nick’s teeth gleamed in the jungle twilight, and that manic spark kindled in his eyes. “You just have to know how to ask.”
Mace’s face darkened. “I won’t let you harm civilians. Not even to save your friends.”
“No need to scorch your scalp over that one,” Nick said, trudging onward. “Out here, civilians are a myth.”
Mace didn’t want to ask what Nick meant by that. He came to a stop on the rugged track. He saw again the holoprojected carnage spread across the Supreme Chancellor’s desk; he saw again images of huts broken and burned, and nineteen corpses in the jungle. “You were right,” he said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”
Nick kept walking. He didn’t even look over his shoulder as he left Mace behind. “Yeah, well, as soon as you come up with a better idea,” he said into the darkness ahead, “you be sure to let me know, huh?”
Chapter 6: Civilians
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU
In this bunker, the air is closer to cool than any I’ve felt since the interrogation room in the Ministry of Justice. The bunker is set into the igneous stone of the hillside—mostly just a durasteel door across the mouth of a bubble some pocket of gas or softer stone once left in the granite here. Though it overlooks the remnants of the outpost compound below, it was clearly never meant to be a combat position: no gun ports. From the way it’s constructed—excavated—I believe it was more along the lines of a panic room: a safe place to hole up in the event of an attack. A safe place to wait for help from the militia.
If so, it didn’t work.
The night air gently curls around the twisted shards that are all that’s left of the door; its whispering passage darkly echoes the violence that still hums in the Force around me.
I dare not meditate. The dark is too deep here. It has a tidal pull: a black hole that I’ve taken up too tight an orbit around, and it’s tearing me in half. Gravity draws the near half of me in toward an event horizon that I’m afraid to even glimpse.
Behind me, lost in the night shadows against the stone, Besh and Chalk lie motionless, nearly as cool as the rock they lie on, in full thanatizine suspension. Only with the Force can I tell that they still live: their hearts beat less than once per minute, and an hour spans no more than ten or twelve shallow breaths. The fever wasp larvae in their bodies are similarly suspended; Besh and Chalk might survive a week or more like this.
Provided nothing eats them in the meantime.
Making sure they’re safe is my job. Right now, it’s my only job. And so I sit among the wreckage of this doorway and stare out into the infinite night.
The Thunderbolt rests on its bipod in the doorway, muzzle canted toward the sky. Chalk maintains her beloved weapon well; she insisted on field-stripping it one last time before she would let me inject her. I have test-fired it at intervals, and it’s still working fine. Though I am trying to learn to feel the action of the metal-eating fungi in the Force, the way the Korunnai do, I prefer to depend on practical experiment.
There is little for me to do right now. I pass the time by recording this—and by thinking about my argument with Nick.
Back on the trail, Nick said that civilians are a myth. He meant, I found, that there are no civilians out here: that to be in the jungle is to be in the war. The Balawai government promulgates a myth of innocent jungle prospectors being massacred by savage Korun partisans. This, Nick says, is only propaganda.
Now, here in the ruins of this Balawai outpost, I find the thought oddly comforting—but earlier this evening I rejected the idea instinctively. It seemed to me nothing more than rationalization. An excuse. A sop to consciences haunted by atrocities. On the hike along the steamcrawler track that led us here, Nick and I went back and forth about it quite a bit.
According to Nick, civilians stay in the cities; the only real civilians on Haruun Kal are the waiters and the janitors, the storekeepers and the taxicart pullers. He said there’s a reason why jungle prospectors carry such heavy weapons, and that reason has more to do with akk dogs than with vine cats. Balawai do not go into the jungle unless they’re ready, willing, and able to kill Korunnai. Nobody on either side waits for the other to attack. In the jungle, if you don’t strike first you’re nothing but prey.
Then I asked him about the dead children.
It’s the only time I’ve yet seen Nick angry. He wheeled on me like he wanted to throw a punch. “What children?” he said. “How old do you have to be to pull a trigger? Kids make great soldiers. They barely know what fear is.”
It is wrong to make war on children—or with them—and I told him so. No matter what. They’re not old enough to understand the consequences of their actions. He replied in staggeringly obscene terms that I should tell that to the Balawai.
“What about our children?” He shook with barely restrained fury. “The jups can leave their kids at home in the city. Where do we leave ours? You’ve seen Pelek Baw. You know what happens to a Korun kid on those streets—I know what happens. I was one of them. Better blown to pieces out here than having to—survive—like I did. So then, out here, how do you tell the gunners in those ships that the Korunnai they’re happily blowing arms and legs off of, are only kids?”
“Does that justify what happens to the Balawai children? The ones who don’t stay in the cities?” I asked him. “The Korunnai aren’t firing down at random from a gunship. What’s your excuse?”
“We don’t need an excuse,” he said. “We don’t murder kids. We’re the good guys.”
“Good guys,” I echoed. I could not keep a bitter edge from my voice: the holographic images shown to Yoda and me in Palpatine’s office are never far beneath the surface of my mind. “I have seen what’s left behind when your good guys are done with a jungle prospector outpost,” I told him. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Sure it is. Hah. Let me share something with you, huh?” Changeable as a summer storm, Nick’s anger had blown away between one eyeblink and the next. He gave me a look of amused pity. “I’ve been waiting for days for you to bring that up.”
“What?”
“You Jedi and your secrets and all that t
usker poop. You think nobody else can keep their chip-cards close to the chest?” He rolled his eyes and waggled his fingers near his face. “Ooo, look out, I’m a Jedi! I know things Too Dangerous for Ordinary Mortals! Careful! If you don’t stand back, I might tell you something Beings Were Not Meant to Know!”
It has occurred to me, on reflection, that Nick Rostu can be regarded as a test of my moral conviction. A Jedi might conceivably fall to the dark from the simple desire to smack the snot out of him.
At the time, I managed to restrain myself, and even to maintain a civil tone, while Nick revealed that he knew all about the jungle massacre and the data wafer.
It wasn’t easy.
He told me that not only had he been there—at the very scene Yoda and I had viewed in Palpatine’s office—he had been in the company of Depa and Kar Vastor when they’d thought the whole scheme up. He had helped them dress the scene, and later it was Nick himself who had tipped off Republic Intelligence.
Even now, hours later, it’s hard for me to put into words how that made me feel. Disoriented, certainly: almost dizzy. Disbelieving.
Betrayed.
I have been carrying those images like a wound. They’ve festered in my mind, so inflamed and painful I’ve had to cushion them in layers of denial. Pain like that makes a wound precious; when the slightest touch is agony, one must keep the wound so protected, so sequestered, that it becomes an object of reverence. Sacred.
But Nick told the story like it had been just some kind of practical joke.
Hmm. I find now another word for how I felt. For how I feel.
Angry.
This, too, makes meditation difficult. And risky.
It is as well that Nick left on Galthra some hours ago. Perhaps before he returns—if he returns—I will have found a place in my mind to put these things he shared with me, where they will no longer whisper violence behind my heart.
The whole massacre was staged.
Not fake. The bodies were real. The death was real. But it was a setup. It was a practical joke. On me.
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