Shatterpoint

by Matthew W. Stover

  Four steamcrawlers divided by one Jedi equals one huge smoking pile of scrap.

  The shatterpoints of the ’crawlers were obvious: neither the linked treads nor the traverse gears that rotated the turrets would stand against a single swipe of a lightsaber. In less than a second apiece, he could turn these armored behemoths into nothing more than hollow metal rocks—but he didn’t.

  Because that wouldn’t hurt enough.

  He wanted to hurt them worse than this black migraine was hurting him.

  These people had attacked him when all he wanted was to help them. When he had been trying to save them. They had attacked him without regard for their own lives, or the lives of their children. They’d almost made him kill one of their children himself.

  They were stupid. They were evil. They deserved to be punished.

  They deserved to die.

  He saw it all in a single burst of image: a memory of something that hadn’t happened yet. He saw himself dive headfirst under the steamcrawler and flip to his back, his twin blades carving through the ’crawler’s lightly armored undercarriage. He’d come up in the passenger compartment, where one or two armed men might be guarding the wounded; he’d use their own blasterfire to take them out. Then cut his way into the cabin, take out the driver—then he’d wash the compound in flame projected from the steamcrawler’s turret gun; the jups on foot would run and shriek as they burned. Then he would use the Force to flip his lightsabers through the air to carve gaps in the armor of the other steamcrawler, gaps through which his turret gun would pour flame, roasting drivers and passengers and wounded—thick meat-scented smoke would billow out the hatches…

  They’d all die. Every single one of them.

  It wouldn’t take him a full minute.

  And he’d enjoy it.

  He was already running toward the steamcrawler, gathering himself for the headlong dive, when he finally thought, What am I doing?

  He barely managed to turn his dive into a spring instead. He flipped upward through the air to land poised on the steamcrawler’s outer deck beside the flame-gun turret. He let himself fall prone to the deck, using its bulk to cover him against blasterfire from the Balawai on the ground, and his whole body sagged as he tried to pull his mind back out from the Force.

  It was too dark here. Too dark everywhere: thick and blinding, choking like the black smoke plume from the volcano’s mouth above. He could find no light at all except the red flame that burned in his heart. His head pounded as though he were the one with fever wasps hatching inside his brain. As though his skull were cracking open.

  Fatigue and pain rushed him, barreling him toward unconsciousness; drawing upon the Force to sustain himself drew in rage as well. He clung to the ’crawler’s deck, pressing his face into the hot bullet-scarred armor. Every second he could hold himself still was another second for some of these men and women to live.

  A howl welled up inside him: a roar of dark fury raised to the level of exaltation. He locked his teeth against it, but it rang in his ears anyway, echoing across the mountainside like akks calling with the voice of the blood fever itself—

  Mace’s breath caught in his throat. A voice inside him—how could it echo?

  He raised his head.

  That howling was akk voices after all.

  They came up from the jungle, climbing the steep lava-cut sides of the outcrop, massive claws gouging furrows in the stone. Five, eight, a dozen: gigantic, armored, cowl spines bristling in full threat display, white foamy ropes of slaver looping from the corners of their dagger-toothed mouths.

  Heavily armed Balawai fell back before them. The akks moved with the deliberate speed of creatures who had nothing to fear. Steamcrawler turret guns hosed them down with flame; they ignored it. They shrugged aside the minor stings of blaster hits. When they reached the crown of the outcrop, they began to pace around the outpost’s perimeter, circling the shattered huts; their pace became a trot, then a gallop: a ring of armored predator, gradually tightening.

  Mace recognized akk herding behavior: as though the Balawai were unruly grassers, the akks were forcing them into a single crowd in the central common area of the compound like a corral, working by pure intimidation. Any Balawai who tried to escape the ring was slammed back into it by the twitch of a massive shoulder or the sweep of an armored tail. No akk put its teeth on human flesh; even one jup who fired his rifle point blank into an akk’s throat—uselessly—received only a buffet from jaws that could as easily have bitten him in half.

  Mace felt the dark thunder rising in the Force and he knew: the compound hadn’t become a corral. It had become a slaughter pen.

  A killing ground.

  And then he felt the shadow of the butcher.

  Mace looked upslope: there he was, standing on the rock above the bunker’s door.

  A Korun.

  In the Force, he burned with power.

  Huge: his sweat-glistening bare chest could have been fused together from granite boulders. His shaven skull gleamed more than two meters above his bare feet. His pants were crudely sewn from a vine cat’s pelt. He raised arms like a spacescraper’s buttresses over his head.

  To each forearm was strapped some kind of shield: elongated teardrops of a mirror-polished metal. Their wide-curved ends extended around his massive fists, and they tapered to needle points a handspan behind his elbows.

  Veins writhed in his forearms as his fists tightened. The edges of the shields blurred, and a high evil whine resonated in Mace’s teeth.

  The akk dogs turned to the man as though this were some kind of signal. As one, dogs and man together lifted their heads to the smothered stars and unleashed another dark blood-fever howl. It hummed in Mace’s chest, and he felt the echoing answer it drew from his own rage, and he finally understood.

  The rage wasn’t all his.

  His blood fever was an answer his heart gave to the call of the jungle. To the howl of the akks.

  To the power of this man.

  The Balawai had not run here of their own will; they had been driven here, herded to ground that had been soaked in violence and malice and savage blood fever only days before. What had been done in this place had been deliberate, the dark mirror image of a religious sanctification. The massacre here had been only a preparation, to prime the jungle for this dark rite.

  Mace knew him now: this must be the lor pelek.

  This was Kar Vastor.

  His arms swept downward, and from beyond the ring of circling akks leapt six Korunnai, springing as high as Jedi but without Jedi grace. The Force thrust that propelled them felt like a grunt of pain. They flailed as though they clawed their way through the air, but they landed coiled, balanced, crouched to attack. All six were dressed identically to Vastor, and each bore those twin teardrop shields that snarled like overdriven comm speakers.

  The Balawai met them with a storm of blasterfire. Bolts flashed and splattered and splintered upward into the clouds as the twin shields each man bore moved faster than thought.

  The Balawai stopped firing.

  Not a single Korun had fallen. Their flashing shields had intercepted every bolt.

  They could only have learned this from a Jedi.

  From one particular Jedi.

  Oh, no, Mace thought.

  Oh, Depa, no…

  On the rock above, the lor pelek spread his corded arms, leaning out over the drop, toppling as though he thought he could fly—then at the last instant he sprang forward into a dive that carried him toward the center of the crowd of Balawai, where they massed around the steamcrawlers.

  The killing began.

  Chapter 8: Lor Pelek

  The Korunnai waded in without waiting for Vastor to land. They sprang among the mass of Balawai and swung those teardrop shields in short, vicious arcs, angled flat as though to cut with their edges—

  And cut they did.

  Their sizzling edges bit through blasters with tooth-grinding squeals; they slashed through flesh with a m
eaty squelch, and the blood on them shivered to mist. Scarlet clouds trailed them like smoke. Mace saw a man cut in half, and the shield came out his other side still shining like an ultrachrome mirror.

  Shining like a vibro-ax.

  Vastor touched down in the middle of the compound and rolled out of his fall without slowing. He flashed into an inhumanly fast sprint toward the very steamcrawler atop which Mace lay. Vastor’s sprint became a headlong dive that carried him sliding between the treads.

  The steamcrawler’s armor hummed under Mace’s hands, and a harsher squeal joined the chorus of snarling shields; he had to bite back an obscenity he’d learned from Nick.

  Vastor was cutting through the ’crawler’s undercarriage.

  Had he stolen that dark dream right out of Mace’s head?

  Mace popped to his feet and both his lightsabers hummed to life. He felt Vastor in the Force: a torch that flared with darkness. He was almost through the undercarriage; once inside, he’d be loose among the wounded. The Force showed him how the wounded men and women inside the crawler had already pressed themselves away from the shining blades that sliced upward from below.

  Mace decided it was time he introduced himself to this lor pelek.

  He sprang into the air, flipping high over the steamcrawler’s turret to land on its flat mid-deck armor directly above Vastor. A twitch of the Force reversed his grips so that the lightsabers’ blades projected downward from his fists. Then he dropped to his knees, twisting to swing the blades in a circle around him.

  A vibroshield is not the only thing that can cut steamcrawler armor.

  A disk of that armor—edges still glowing from the lightsabers’ cuts, Mace still kneeling in its center—dropped straight down like a free-falling turbolift.

  Mace heard one explosive obscenity from below before he and the disk of armor flattened Kar Vastor like a fusion-powered pile driver.

  The interior of the steamcrawler was crowded with wounded men and women. One of them brandished a heavy blaster; Mace slashed it in two with a flip of his lightsaber. “No shooting,” he said, and the Force made his words into a command that sent several other blasters clattering to the floor.

  Vastor lay pinned facedown to the deck, half stunned.

  Mace leaned close to his ear. “Kar Vastor, I am Mace Windu. Stand down. That’s an order.”

  A twitch of the Force was his only warning, but for Mace it was more than he needed. He threw himself into a back flip a quarter of a second before the disk of armor slammed upward to smash against the ceiling with a deafening clank. Before it could fall again, Vastor was on his feet. Then as the disk dropped, an ultrachrome flame licked through it, slicing it in half.

  The pieces rattled back down through the hole Vastor had cut in the undercarriage.

  Vastor faced Mace across the hole. Darkness pulsed at Mace through the Force, but on the lor pelek’s face was not anger, but instead inhuman focus: a primal ferocity like a krayt dragon surprised over the corpse of a bantha.

  The way he had shrugged Mace off, the slicing of the armor disk: a predator’s dominance display.

  He raised his shield-clad hands in salute and rumbled something in a language that Mace didn’t recognize—it didn’t even sound like language at all: more like the growls and snarls of jungle beasts.

  But as Vastor spoke, some power of the lor pelek’s unfurled his meaning inside Mace’s mind.

  Mace Windu, the lor pelek had said. An honor. Why do you interfere in my kill?

  “There is no kill,” Mace said. “Do you understand me? No kill. No more killing.”

  Vastor’s smile was disbelieving. No? Then what do you propose? Shall we lay down our arms? He beckoned invitingly with one sizzling shield. You first.

  The zings of blaster ricochets and the roar of steamcrawler turret guns came clearly through the gaps in the ’crawler’s armor. “No unnecessary killing,” Mace amended. “No more massacres.”

  Vastor’s response had a quality of animal directness, straightforward and uncomplicated. Massacres are necessary, dôshalo.

  “You and I are not dôshallai.” Mace angled his lightsabers in a defensive X. “You are no clan brother of mine.”

  Vastor shrugged. Where are Besh and Chalk?

  “In the bunker,” Mace answered without thinking, his mind still whirling around the concept of a necessary massacre.

  Vastor swept the wounded men and women in the steamcrawler’s cabin with a contemptuous glare. These will keep, dôshalo. They cannot escape. Follow me. With a rush of the Force, he sprang straight upward through the hole Mace had cut.

  That same rush of the Force tugged at Mace’s will, inclining him to follow without thinking—but he understood now the power of this place, and of Vastor himself.

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” Mace muttered.

  He turned his attention to the terrified Balawai around him. He gestured, and all the discarded blasters flipped from the deck to hang in midair; with a single swift flourish he sliced every one of them in half, then cast their pieces out the hole. “Listen to me, all of you. You must surrender. It is your only hope.”

  “Hope of what?” a man said bitterly. His face was gray; he wore a bacta patch over a chest wound and clutched the stump of his wrist just above a wad of spray bandage that served him for a tourniquet. “We know what happens if we’re captured.”

  “Not this time,” Mace said: “If you fight, they will kill you. If you surrender I can keep you alive. And I will.”

  “We’re supposed to just take your word for it?”

  “I am a Jedi Master.”

  The man spat blood on the deck. “We know what that’s worth.”

  “Obviously you don’t.” In the Force, Mace felt the dark flame that was the lor pelek fighting his way upslope toward the bunker. For an instant he was almost grateful—he’d be happy to leave the defense of Chalk and Besh in Vastor’s hands—but then he remembered the children. The children were still inside.

  Where Vastor was going.

  Massacres are necessary.

  “I won’t argue.” Mace moved to the rim of the hole Vastor had cut, and looked up through the one he’d cut himself, judging his clearance. “Fight to a sure death, or surrender to a hope of life. The choice is yours,” he said, and threw himself upward into the burning night.

  The whole compound was on fire: choking black smoke swirled above blazing lakes of flame-projector fuel. Blaster bolts flashed through every angle, their bursts an arrhythmic drumbeat under the howling chorus of the Korun shield-weapons. Vastor bounded up the slope toward the bunker in erratic zigzagging leaps, his shields flashing: catching stray bolts, carving metal, slashing flesh.

  Mace dived from the top of the steamcrawler, flipped in the air, and hit the ground running. His blades wove a green and purple corona of power that splintered blasterfire into the sky.

  A knot of Balawai huddled on their knees a few meters to the left of Mace’s path, their hands finger-laced on the backs of their heads. Eyes closed against the horror around them, they screamed for mercy to a gore-smeared Korun whose face held nothing human. The Korun raised twin shields shrilling over his head, and with a roar of dark exultation he plunged them toward defenseless necks—

  But before he could land the blow, the sole of a boot slammed his spine so hard that he flipped completely over and landed on his head.

  The Korun sprang to his feet, unhurt and raging. “Kick me? Gonna die, you! Gonna die—”

  He stopped, because to move another centimeter would have brought his nose in contact with the rock-steady purple lightsaber blade poised in front of his face. At the other end of that blade stood Mace Windu.

  “Yes, I will,” he said. “But not today.”

  The Korun’s expression curdled like sour grasser milk. “Must be the Windu Jedi, you,” he said in Koruun. “Depa’s sire.”

  The word gave Mace a twinge; in Koruun, sire could mean either “master” or “father.” Or both. He spoke in
his rusty Koruun. “Don’t kill not-fighters, you. Kill not-fighters and you die.”

  The Korun snorted. “Talk like a Balawai, you,” he spat in Basic. “Don’t take your orders, I.”

  Mace twitched his lightsaber. The Korun’s eyes flickered. Mace returned to Basic as well. “If you want to live, believe what I say: what happens to them will happen to you.”

  “Tell it to Kar Vastor,” the Korun sneered.

  “I intend to.” Before the Korun could reply, Mace whirled and sprang for the bunker’s door.

  Mace didn’t trouble with the distractions that had made Vastor’s path jag like a bolt of lightning; he went straight for the door’s shattered gape as though launched from a cannon. He reached it only steps behind the larger man.

  And froze.

  Froze despite the chilling whine of those teardrop shields, despite Vastor’s rumbling snarl like the hunting-cough of a hungry vine cat. Despite a sound Mace could no more ignore than he could reverse the rotation of the planet: the shrieks of children screaming in terror.

  The burning compound below lit the bunker’s ceiling with shifting light the color of blood, casting Mace’s shadow huge and wavering, indistinct but utterly black: a shadow that shrouded all within. The only light that fell upon the core of his shadow was the unnatural wash of mingled green and purple glare from his lightsabers.

  Vastor stood within, hunched like a gundark, his right arm drawn back to strike. Dangling from hair tangled in Vastor’s left fist, feet kicking above the floor, sobbing uncontrollably about how all you stinkin’ kornos have to die, was Terrel.

  “Vastor, stop!” Mace opened himself to the full flood of the Force, and used it to hammer at the lor pelek’s will. “Don’t do it, Kar. Put the boy down.”

  He might as well have not bothered; Vastor’s answering snarl translated in Mace’s mind as When I am done with him. The shield strapped to Vastor’s left arm made a mirrored halo over Terrel’s head, but now the other angled toward where Besh and Chalk lay. Look there, and see what sort of creature I hold.