There had never been light bright enough to drive back darkness like this; Mace could only hope to make of himself a light bright enough to cut through it.
I am the blade, he told himself silently. I will have to be; there is no other.
“Terrel,” he said softly. “They’re here. Go ahead, son.”
“You’re sure? I can’t see anything,” Terrel said from beside him. He wiped his nose, then made fists as though he were holding on to his courage with both hands. “I can’t see anything at all.”
“They will be able to see you,” Mace said. “Call out.”
“Okay.” Staying in the shadows, he repeated, “Okay,” but this time in a loud call. “Okay, hey, don’t shoot, okay? Don’t shoot! It’s me!”
The night went silent. Mace felt six weapons trained on the bunker door. He murmured, “Tell them who you are.”
“Yeah, uh, hey listen, it’s Terrel, huh? Terrel Nakay. Is my dad out there?”
A woman’s voice came out of the darkness to Mace’s left, shrill with hope. “Terrel? Oh, Terrel! Is Keela with you—?”
The girl with the head wound held Pell and the two boys well back from the doorway, but when she heard the woman’s voice she started unsteadily to her feet. “Don’t go out there,” Mace said. “And keep the smaller children still. We don’t want anyone shot by accident.”
She nodded and sank back to her knees, calling out, “Mom, I’m here! I’m okay!”
“Keela! Keela—Keela—is Pell with you?”
A man shouted from the center, “Quiet!”
“Rankin, it’s Terrel and Keela! Didn’t you hear them? Keela, what about Pell—”
“Hold your position, you stupid nerf! And shut up!” the man snarled. His voice was ragged: angry, exhausted, and desperate. “We don’t know who else is here! This place is completely fragged.”
“Rankin—”
“They could be bait. Shut your mouth before I shoot you myself.”
Mace nodded to himself. He would have suspected the same thing.
“Terrel?” The man called out in a much softer tone: warily calm. “Terrel, it’s Pek Rankin. Come on out where we can see you.”
Terrel looked at Mace. Mace said, “You know him?”
The boy nodded. “He’s—sort of a friend of my dad’s. Sort of.”
“Go on, then,” Mace said gently. “Move slowly. Keep your hands in plain sight, away from your body.”
Terrel did. Out from the bunker door, feeling his way down the grade toward the shattered huts. “Can somebody put on a light? I can’t see.”
“In a minute,” Rankin’s voice replied from the darkness. “Keep on coming this way, Terrel. You’ll be all right. What happened to your ’crawler? How come you don’t answer comm? Where are the other kids?”
“We had an accident. But we’re okay. We’re all okay. Okay?” Terrel caught his foot on a rock and stumbled. “Ow! Hey, the light, huh? I got one broken arm already.”
“Just keep walking toward my voice. Are you alone? Where are the other kids?”
“In the bunker. But they can’t come out,” Terrel said. “And you can’t go in.”
“Why’s that?”
Mace said, “Because I’m in here.”
In the Force he felt their tension ratchet up, sharp as an indrawn breath. After a moment, Rankin’s voice came out of the darkness. “And who might you be?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Is that so? Why don’t you step out where we can get a look at you?”
“Because the temptation to take a shot at me might prove overwhelming,” Mace said. “Any bolts that miss will be bouncing around the inside of this bunker. Where there are four more innocent children.”
A new man’s voice rang out from the right, thin with fear and anger. “Two of those kids are my sons—if you hurt them—”
“All I have done,” Mace said, “is tend their injuries and keep them sheltered. What happens to them now depends on you.”
“He’s telling the truth!” Terrel called. “He didn’t hurt us—he saved us. He’s okay. Really. He’s just afraid you’ll shoot him ’cause he’s a korno!”
A burst of low, half-strangled profanity came from the right.
Terrel called hastily, “But he’s not a real korno. He just looks like one. He talks almost like a regular person—and he’s like, like a, a bounty hunter, or something…”
His voice trickled off, leaving a silence empty and ominous. Mace felt currents of intention shifting and winding through the Force; the Balawai must have been consulting in whispers on comm.
Finally, Rankin called out once more. “So? What do you want?”
“I want you to take these children and go away from here.”
“Huh? What else?”
“That’s all. Just take the children and go.”
“Well. Aren’t you generous,” Rankin said, dry. Bitter. “Listen, I’m gonna make a light. Nobody get twitchy. I don’t want to get fragged, okay?”
Mace said, “Light will be welcome.”
Yellow-white glow flared behind a slab of tumbled wall, and a cell-powered glow rod came flipping through the air to land not far from Terrel’s feet. It bounced, and rolled to a stop. Its half globe of up-angled light stretched the surrounding shadows toward the sky, painting them even darker.
Terrel held a hand at his chin to shade his eyes. “Hey, don’t make me stand around alone out here, huh?”
“Come on over here, boy.” A man stepped into view, moving slowly into the light. He held a blaster rifle in one hand, its barrel slanting down, carefully directed at the ground beside him. His other hand was up and forward, palm out. His clothing was scorched and stained, and one whole side of his head bore a clotted mass of spray bandage, the foam covering one eye. From his voice, this was Rankin. “Get yourself under cover.”
Terrel looked back up at the bunker. Mace said, “Go ahead, son.”
The voice of the man who’d claimed to be the boys’ father snarled from the darkness. “Don’t call him son, korno! You’re not his father! Your stinkin’ kind killed his father—”
“Stow that garbage!” Rankin barked, but too late: Terrel’s face crumpled in tragic disbelief.
“Dad?” he said, sounding stunned and lost. “My dad?”
If eyes could shoot blaster bolts, Rankin’s would have killed the man. “Get him out of here,” he said. Another man, also wounded, stepped far enough into the light to fold Terrel in his arms and draw him away into the ring of darkness.
“Listen,” Rankin said, looking up at the dark jagged mouth of the bunker. “I guess you don’t want the children hurt. Neither do we. But we’ve got a serious problem here, okay? We got our butts shot off tonight. Our homes are destroyed. Half the people I know on this whole planet are dead. Those ’crawlers are stuffed with wounded, and we’ve got a load of kornos on our tails. We can’t just go, get it? We can’t. We need a place to hole up till dawn, that’s all.”
“You can’t stay here,” Mace said. “There are ULF guerrillas on their way here right now. Look at where you are. This place couldn’t stand against them when it was intact.”
“It doesn’t have to. Gunships fly at dawn. We can hold out till then.”
“You don’t understand—”
“Maybe I don’t. So? Not your problem, is it?”
“I have made it my problem,” Mace said grimly. “You have no idea what this place is. What it has become.”
“You know what happened here?” Rankin waved his rifle at the shattered huts. “Where is everybody?”
“Dead,” Mace said. “Killed by the ULF. All of them.”
“I don’t think so. Where are the bodies? Think I’ve never seen a ULF action? I know the kind of things they do to our dead.”
“Forget the bodies.” Mace tried to massage the pain from his temple with the heel of one hand. How could the simple decency of burying the dead turn against him? “If you’re here when the guerrillas ar
rive, they’ll kill all of you, too. You care about your children’s lives? Get them out of here.”
“Hey, he didn’t say us,” said the father’s voice from the darkness. “You catch that, Pek? ‘Kill all of you,’ he says. You catch that?”
“Shut up.” Rankin didn’t even glance in the father’s direction. “Then why haven’t you sent out the other kids already?”
“Because I don’t know when the ULF will get here,” Mace said impatiently. “This is the only place I can defend them. And if I had sent them out already, you’d have no reason to listen to me, would you? I’d be just another korno. One of you would have opened fire, and by now people would be dead. That’s what I’m trying to avoid. Don’t you understand? We don’t have time to argue. On grassers, they can move as fast as a steamcrawler. Faster. They could be here right now, watching you from the jungle—”
Rankin shook his head. “That’s why we need that bunker, you follow? We gotta get our wounded where we can protect them—”
“You can’t protect them!” Mace’s fists clenched until his fingernails drew blood from his palms. Why wouldn’t they understand? He could feel the dark closing in upon them all like a strangler’s noose. “Listen to me. This bunker couldn’t help the people who lived here, and it can’t help you. Your only hope is to take your kids and your wounded and run. All of you: run.”
“Some kinda stinkin’ funny korno,” the father’s voice said from the shadows. “What’s he so worried about us for?”
“That’s not your business,” Mace said. “Your business is to get yourself, your people, and these five children out of this place without anyone dying.”
“Maybe he’s just tryin’ to keep us out here where the stinkin’ kornos can get us—”
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” Rankin angled his good eye up toward the bunker. “You’re askin’ us to take a lot on faith, from some guy we can’t even see.”
“You don’t need to see me. All you need to see is this.” With a twitch of the Force, Mace squeezed the Thunderbolt’s trigger. A single packet of energy screamed into the sky and burst in a spherical flash of scarlet as it entered a low cloud. “That could as easily have been your head. I know exactly where you are. All six of you.”
He paused for a second to let that sink in. “If I wanted you hurt, we wouldn’t be talking. You’d already be dead.”
The truth of this wiped Rankin’s face clean of expression. Mace watched it hit home, and had just enough time to think that this might actually work—
Then streaks of blasterfire lit up the slope below.
The jungle thundered with scarlet explosions, multiple bolts flashing from the cover of steamcrawlers to shatter branches and blow rocks to splinters. The bursts were instantly echoed by smaller, whiter flares under the trees, crackling like a bonfire built of green logs: muzzle flashes.
Slugthrowers.
Shouts and screams from human throats underscored the whine of blasters and the shrieks of slugs hurtling in ricochets off steamcrawler armor.
“What did I tell you?” the father shrieked from the darkness. “What did I tell you? He kept us yapping and now we’re getting killed down there—!”
“Don’t do nothing stupid!” Rankin shouted. He hunched over in the glow rod’s spill, his face desperate and frightened: a jacklighted ur-stag. “Look, nobody do nothing—”
“Rankin!” The Force gave Mace’s voice the thunder of a signal cannon. “Pull your people back. A fighting retreat. Have them pull back here to the compound.”
Below, a steamcrawler’s turret gun spewed a stream of flame across an arc of jungle. Blood-colored light licked the bunker’s ceiling.
“You said coming up here can’t help us—”
“It can’t. I can. Do it. It’s your only chance.”
Behind Mace, one of the boys had started to cry, and now the other one joined him. Pell said, “Mister? That’s my mom out there.” Her underlip twitched and her eyes welled. “Don’t let them hurt her, okay? Don’t let nobody hurt her.”
Keela gathered Pell into her arms. “She’ll be okay. Don’t worry. She’ll be okay.” Her eyes begged Mace to make this true.
Mace stared down at them, thinking that if it were up to him, no one would hurt anyone. Anywhere. Ever. He said only, “Hang on. Be brave.”
Pell sniffled and nodded solemnly.
Outside, Rankin was shouting into his comlink. “—no, blast it! Up here. Flares and flame projectors. Light ’em up and slow ’em down—and get those ’crawlers in gear!”
“Rankin, don’t!” the father shouted. “Don’t you get it? Once we’re up here, he can crossfire our butts from the bunker!”
“Don’t be stupid—”
“Space your don’t-be-stupid talk! You know what’s stupid? Talking to that korno like he’s a human being! Believing one fraggin’ word he says, that’s stupid! Want to talk to the kornos? Talk with your gun.”
A star burst to life below and shot high into the air: a flare. It hung below the clouds, lighting the steamcrawlers, the jungle, and the outpost stark actinic white. Mace had to shield his eyes against the sudden glare, and he heard the father’s harsh cry of triumph, and the Force snapped his lightsaber to his hand and brought the blade to life as a blaster rifle sang a rhythm fast as a hand could squeeze.
The father was no marksman; no bolt would have come within arm’s length of Mace—but they would have bounced into the bunker. Amethyst light flashed to meet the red, and instead every bolt screamed away into the sky.
Mace stood in the doorway, looking down at Rankin’s awestruck face past the guard angle of his lightsaber’s blade. Rankin’s mouth moved in breathless silence: Jedi…
Mace thought: Looks like we lose.
“Keela,” Mace said without turning, his voice tight but dead level. “Get the children to the back. Lie down behind the bodies of the Korunnai: they are your best cover.”
“What?” Keela stared at him blankly. “What? Who are you?”
From outside, the father’s voice roared, “That’s a Jedi!” An instant later, it was joined by another voice: higher, half broken, hoarse with grief, betrayal, and wild rage.
“A stinkin’ Jedi! He’s a stinkin’ Jedi! Kill him! Kill him!” The voice was Terrel’s.
The Force moved Mace’s hands faster than thought. Depa’s lightsaber went to his left hand, to mirror his own in his right, and together they wove a wall across the mouth of the bunker, catching and scattering a flood of blasterfire.
Bolts splintered off in all directions; the erratic staccato of badly aimed shots took all his concentration and skill to intercept. Mace sank deeper and deeper into the Force, surrendering more and more of his conscious thought to the instinctive whirl of Vaapad, and even so some bolts slipped past him and whanged randomly around the inside of the bunker.
He was too deep in Vaapad to make a plan, too deep even to think, but he was a Jedi Master: he didn’t have to think.
He knew.
If he stayed in this doorway, the children would die.
One step at a time, to give the shooters time to adjust their aim, Mace leaned into the gale of blasterfire and started down the exposed slope below the door. His blades flashing in blinding whirls of jungle green and sundown purple, spraying a spiked fan of deflected bolts toward the smoke-shrouded stars, he drew their fire down, away from the bunker’s door. Away from their own children.
One step, then another.
He was aware, in an abstract, disconnected way, of an ache in his arms and the salt sting of sweat trickling into his eyes. He was aware of hot slashes of blaster grazes along his flanks, and of a chunk that had been torn from one thigh by a glancing hit. All these meant less to him than the new vectors of fire as he continued his relentless march and the jups broke from cover. He was also aware that not all the jups were shooting; he heard Rankin’s desperate orders to cease fire, and felt in the Force an irrational blood hunger that kept the others squeezing triggers until
their weapons began to smoke.
A blood hunger fed by the dark.
No. Not blood hunger.
Blood fever.
He felt people moving on all sides of him, new people, shooting and shouting and stumbling among the shattered huts. He felt their panic and fierce rage and the breathless desperation of their retreat. Massive shadows loomed in the Force, lumbering behemoths that roared with voices of fire: steamcrawlers backing into the ruined compound, treads crushing tumbled slabs of prefab walls, grinding the dirt over graves that Mace had dug only hours before.
The compound flooded with smoke and flame, with flashes of blaster bolts and snarls of hypersonic slugs. Mace paced through it all with relentless calm, his only expression a slight frown of concentration, his blades weaving an impenetrable web of lightning. He gave more and more of himself over to the Force, letting it move his hands, his feet, letting it guide him through the battle.
The dark power he had felt gather in the Force now rose around him to swallow the stars; it broke over him in a wave that pushed him down and caught him up and when he felt a hostile presence lunge toward his back he whirled with effortless speed and amethyst light splashed fire through the long durasteel blade of a knife held in a small hand. A sliced-off piece skittered across the ground and green energy dropped like an ax for the kill—
And stopped, trembling—
One centimeter above a brown-haired head.
Brown hairs curled, crisped, and blackened in green fire. A stub of knife, its new-cut edge still glowing hot, dropped from a nerveless hand. Stunned brown eyes, streaming tears that sparkled with brilliant green highlights, stared up at him from either side of Depa’s blade.
“Stinkin’ Jedi,” Terrel sobbed. “Go on an’ kill me. Go on an’ kill everybody—”
“You’re not safe out here,” Mace said. He threw himself backward and with a shove of the Force sent Terrel skidding toward the door of the bunker. A jet of flame howled through the space where they had stood.
Mace rolled to his feet, blades angled defensively before him, looking up at the looming turret gun of a steamcrawler as it traversed to track him. Someone inside had decided it would be worth Terrel’s life to take out Mace. Mace didn’t much care for that kind of math. He had a different equation in mind.
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