“Not long.”
“That’s what you said the last three times I asked.”
“I suppose it depends on what you mean by long.”
“You sure she’s coming?”
“Yes,” Mace lied.
“What if they get here before she does? I mean, we’re not gonna have time to lag around waiting for her—not with gunships and who-knows-what-all tracking the lander through the atmosphere. If she’s not here—”
“We’ll worry about that if it happens.”
“Yeah.” Nick started pacing from the back to the front of the cave, instead of side to side. “Yeah.”
“Nick.”
“Yeah?”
“Settle down.”
The young Korun stopped, winced an apology at Mace, adjusted his tunic, and ran his thumbs around the drawstring waistband of his pants as though they were chafing him. “I don’t like waiting.”
“I’ve noticed.”
Nick squatted alongside the Jedi Master and nodded at the datapad. “Got any games on that thing? Shee, I’d even play dejarik. And I hate dejarik.”
Mace shook his head. “It’s my journal.”
“I’ve seen you talking into it. Like a diary?”
“Something like that. It’s a personal log of my experiences on Haruun Kal. For the Temple Archives.”
“Wow. Am I in there?”
“Yes. And Chalk, and Besh, and Lesh. Depa and Kar Vastor, and the children from the outpost—”
“Wow,” Nick repeated. “I mean, wow. That’s really cool. Do all Jedi do that?”
Mace stared out over the rugged terrain below the pass. “I don’t think Depa has.” He sighed, and once more stopped himself from checking the sky. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s just—well, it’s weird, y’know? Thinking about it. I’m gonna be in the Jedi Archives…”
“Yes.”
“Twenty-five thousand years of records. It’s like—like I’ll be part of the history of the whole galaxy!”
“You would be, regardless.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, I know: everybody is. But not everybody’s in the Jedi Archives, are they? I mean, my name’ll be there forever. It’s like being immortal…”
Mace thought of Lesh, and of Phloremirlla Tenk. Of Terrel and Rankin. Of corpses burned to namelessness, left on the ground at the outpost.
“It is,” he said slowly, “as close to immortality as any of us will ever come.”
“Could I listen to some?” Nick tried an encouraging nod. “Not like I’m nosy or anything. But it’d pass the time—”
“Are you certain you want to know what I think of you?”
“Sure I’m—why? Is it bad?” he asked with an anticipatory wince. “It’s really bad, isn’t it.”
“I am teasing you, Nick. I can’t play it for you. It’s encrypted, and only the archive masters at the Temple have the code key.”
“What, you can’t even listen to it yourself?”
Mace hefted the datapad in his hand; it seemed such a small, insubstantial thing, to carry so much doubt and pain.
“Not only does encryption keep its contents secure, it protects me from the temptation to go back and edit entries to make myself look better.”
“You’d do that?”
“The opportunity has not presented itself. If I had the chance… I can’t really say. I hope that I would resist. But Jedi or not, I am still human.” He shrugged. “I should make a last entry, preparatory to my formal report to the Council on our return to Coruscant.”
“Can I listen?”
“I suppose you can. I have nothing to say that you don’t already know.”
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU [FINAL HARUUN KAL ENTRY]
Major Rostu and I wait in a cave at the Korun base in the Lorshan Pass; Depa—
[Male voice identified as NICK ROSTU, major (bvt), GAR]: “Hey, is that on? So they can, like, hear me?”
Yes. It’s—
[Rostu]: “Wow. So some weird alien Jedi a thousand years from now can pull this out and it’ll be like I’m saying Hi to him from a thousand years ago, huh? Hi, you creepy Jedi monkey-hunker, whoever you—”
Major.
[Rostu]: “Yeah, I know: Shut up, Nick.”
[sound of a heavy sigh]
Depa is to meet us here.
She has some strategem to get Kar Vastor and his Akk Guards far enough away for us all to make a clean extraction; she did not offer details, and I did not ask.
I was afraid to hear what she might have told me.
The signal was sent early this morning, using the same technique her sporadic reports had. Instead of a straight subspace transmission—which would be intercepted by the militia’s satellites and allow them to pinpoint our location—she broadcast the coded extraction call on a normal comm channel, using a tight beam that they bounced to the HoloNet satellite off one of the mountains within our line of sight; the comm signal also contains a Jedi priority override code that hijacks part of the local HoloNet capacity, and uses that to send the actual extraction code to the Halleck. It is very safe, though there is always data loss from beam scatter.
I heard the acknowledgment myself, in the base’s comm station.
The Halleck is on its way.
We arrived at this base about a standard hour after sunrise. The Halleck is probably insystem by now. The base itself is… not what I was expecting.
It’s less a military base than an underground refugee camp.
The complex is enormous, a randomly dug hive that honeycombs the whole north wall of the pass; a number of access tunnels extend well downslope, to concealed caves deep in the jungle. Some of the caverns are natural: volcanic bubbles and water channels eroded by drainage from the snowcapped peaks above. The inhabited caverns have been artificially enlarged and smoothed. Though there is no mining industry on Haruun Kal, and thus no excavation equipment to be had, a vibro-ax cuts stone almost as easily as wood; many of the smaller chambers have pallet beds, tables, and benches of stone cut and dressed by such blades.
Which would make it relatively comfortable, were it not so crowded.
Thousands of Korunnai cram these caverns and tunnels and caves, and more trickle in every day. These are the noncombatants: the spouses and the parents, the sick and the wounded. And the children.
The global lack of mining equipment means that ventilation is necessarily rudimentary, and sanitation virtually nonexistent. Pneumonia is rampant; antibiotics are the first thing to run out in the captured medpacs, and there is nowhere in the caverns one can go and not hear people wheezing as they struggle to pull their next breath into wet, clogged lungs. Dysentery claims lives among the elderly and the wounded, and with sanitation basically at the level of buckets, it will only get worse.
The largest caverns have been given over to the grassers. All the arriving Korunnai bring whatever grassers survive the trip; even in wartime, the Fourth Pillar holds them in its grip. These grassers spend their days crowded together with no food and little room to move; they are all sickly, and restive. There have been fights between members of different herds, and I am told several die each day: victims of wounds from fighting, or infectious disease from the close quarters. Some, it seems, simply surrender their will to live; they lie down and refuse to get up, and eventually starve.
The Korunnai tend them as best they can; improvised fences of piled cut rock separate the various herds, and they are driven out the access tunnels in turns to forage in the jungles below the pass, under the watchful eyes of herding akks. But even this half measure is becoming problematic: as more and more grassers arrive, the Korunnai must take the herds farther and farther afield, to avoid thinning the jungle so much that it might reveal the base’s location.
I do understand, now, why Depa doesn’t want to leave.
We rode her ankkox right up one of the concealed tunnels. When we left the gloom of the jungle for the deeper darkness underground, Depa pulled back the curtains of her h
owdah and moved forward to the chair mounted on the beast’s crown armor, and she seemed to inhale serenity with the thick stinking air.
Everyone we passed—everyone we saw—
There was no cheering, or even shouts; the welcome she got was more profound than anything that can be expressed by voice.
A woman, huddled against a sweating stone wall, caught sight of Depa, and pushed herself forward, and her face might have been a flower opening toward the sun. Depa’s mere presence brought light to her eyes, and strength to her legs. The woman struggled to rise, pulling herself up the tunnel wall then leaning upon it for support, and she stretched a hand toward us, and when Depa gave her a nod of acknowledgment, the woman’s hand closed to catch Depa’s gaze from the air; she pressed that closed hand to her breast as though that one simple glance was precious.
Sacred.
As though it was exactly the one thing she needed to keep on living.
And that’s what our welcome here was: that woman, multiplied by thousands. The warriors and the wounded. The aged. The sick and the infirm, the children—
Depa is more than a Jedi to them. Not a goddess—Force-users themselves, they are not easily impressed by Jedi powers. She is, I think, a totem. She is to them what a Jedi should be to everyone, but writ so large upon their hearts that it has become a form of madness.
She is their hope.
[Rostu]: “It’s true, y’know.”
Nick?
[Rostu]: “You think things are bad here? Okay, sure: they’re bad. Not just here here. The whole highland. Bad enough. But you got no idea what it was before Depa—y’know, we’re not the bad guys here.”
No one has suggested that you are. Nor are you the good guys. I haven’t seen any good guys.
[Rostu]: “So far? I’ve seen one. No: two.”
You have?
[Rostu]: “All that good guy, bad guy stuff goes out the air lock pretty fast, doesn’t it? I mean, you know why Pelek Baw withdrew from the Republic? It’s got nothing to do with ‘corruption in the Senate’ and all that political tusker poop, either. The Balawai joined the Confederacy because the seppies promised to respect their sovereignty. Get it? Planetary rights. And the only planetary right the Balawai care about is the right to kill us all. The seppies park their droid starfighters and support staff at the spaceport, and all of a sudden the militia has an unlimited supply of gunships, and the Balawai have made it illegal for a Korun to be outside the city limits of Pelek Baw, and pretty soon they start rounding up Korunnai from inside the city, too—not everybody, you understand, just the criminals. The beggars, and street kids. And troublemakers. For the record, a troublemaker is any Korun who says Word One about the way we’re treated.
“They had a camp for us. I was there. That’s where Depa found us. You think things are ugly here? You should see what she saved us from.
“So maybe we went from living there to dying here. So? You think there’s a difference? You think that was better?
“You go live in a cage if you want. Me? I’ll die a free man. That’s what Depa is to us.
“That’s who you’re taking away.”
She would be leaving you soon, regardless.
[Rostu]: “Says you.”
She is dying, Nick. The war is killing her. This planet is killing her.
The Korunnai are killing her.
[Rostu]: “Nobody here would ever hurt her—”
Not on purpose. But she is drowning in your anger, Nick.
[Rostu]: “Hey, I’m just mildly cranky.”
Not you personally. All of you. This whole place.
The unending violence… without hope, or remedy…
A Jedi’s connection to the Force amplifies everything about us: it invests our smallest actions with the greatest conceivable weight. It makes us more of whatever we already are. If we are calm, it gives us serenity. If we are angry, it fills us with the rage of a god. Anger is a trap. You might think of it as a narcotic, not unlike glitterstim. Even the slightest taste can leave you with an appetite that never fades.
This is why we Jedi must strive always to build peace within ourselves: what is within will be reflected by what is without. The Force is One. We are part of the Force; it will always be, at least partially, whatever we are.
Just as it is too late for Kar Vastor to become a Jedi, it is too late for Depa to become a lor pelek. She is willing to give her life to help your people. Are you willing to take it?
[Rostu]: “Hey, don’t look at me like that. I’m on your side, remember?”
So.
The Halleck must be insystem by now; we should be seeing a lander’s vapor trail any minute.
And Depa is headed up to meet us.
[Rostu]: “She is? What, you can feel her?”
Not directly. But—characteristically—part of her plan to keep Kar and his Akk Guards out of our way included retrieving my lightsaber. In details like this—these little considerations, her automatic kindness—I find my hope that she is not wholly lost.
Though I can rebuild my blade, she—
There was a sadness—
Melancholy resignation: that is the best I can describe her expression, when she promised my lightsaber’s return. Though the weapon is itself no great thing, she seemed near tears.
“I could not bear for your journey here to cost you anything more than it already has,” she told me this morning, as I left her to come up here to wait.
I can feel clearly the approach of my lightsaber; and now I feel hers, as well. Winding toward us through the natural fissures in the rock that make a passageway from this cave to the interior caverns. It is odd—in an apprehensive, premonition-of-dreadful-tragedy sort of way—that I can feel Depa, the Depa I know, only in her weapon.
[Rostu]: “Um, does that appre-pre-whatever of dreadful tragedy by any chance translate into Basic as I have a bad feeling about this? Because, y’know, now that you mention it—”
I feel it too—but I have had only bad feelings ever since I came to this planet.
[Rostu]: “I’ve been wondering—I mean, we’ve been up here a long time. Haven’t you started to wonder if Depa didn’t send us up here so she could get Kar out of the way? If she sent us up here to get us out of the way?”
This has occurred to me. I have refused to allow myself to consider it. Depa is not like that; she is not given to trickery, much less betrayal. She has said she will join us here. That means she will join us. Here.
She’s only steps away—
[Rostu]: “Or maybe, y’know: not.”
You…
[Rostu]: “That’s far enough. Stop! I mean it.”
[The final sound on Master Windu’s Haruun Kal journal is a nonverbal vocalization similar to a large predator’s warning growl.]
[END JOURNAL ]
Chapter 15: The Trap
Nick stood in a classic shooter’s stance, slug pistol in his right hand, left shoulder forward, right arm straight across his body, left hand cupping his right and the pistol’s butt.
His target was a needle-pointed grin just visible within the fissure at the back of the cave.
Mace came to his feet smoothly but deliberately, without any sudden motion. “Don’t do it, Nick.”
“I’d rather not,” Nick admitted. “But I will if I have to.”
“I’ve seen him block blaster bolts. He can do the same with bullets. You won’t have a chance.”
“Says you.” Nick’s voice was uncharacteristically calm and flat, and his hands were as steady as the mountain around them. “You haven’t seen me shoot.”
“This is the wrong time to show me.” Mace put one hand on Nick’s arm and let its tired weight pull the pistol down. “Come on out, Kar.”
The darkness in the fissure gathered itself into the shape of the lor pelek. His vibroshields were pushed back onto his upper arms.
In his hands he held two lightsabers.
Mace sagged as all hope and faith drained out of him. Only exhaustion r
emained.
He had been trying so hard, for so long, to believe in her, and in himself, and in the Force. He had made himself believe: he had ruthlessly disciplined his mind against any dread of failure. After all, this was Depa, his Padawan, almost his child—he had known her all her life—
All but her first few months, and her last few months.
Vastor walked past Nick without a sideways glance, holding the lightsabers on his open palms.
A peace offering.
She asked me to—
“I know,” Mace murmured.
She said she did not want you to lose anything more by coming here than you already have.
“I haven’t.”
And it was true: he had lost nothing real. Not on Haruun Kal. He had lost her before he’d ever set foot on the shuttle’s landing ramp. He had lost her before the massacre and the message on the wafer. He had lost her before he even sent her here.
Depa Billaba was another casualty of his failure at Geonosis.
She was just taking longer to die.
All he had lost on Haruun Kal was an illusion. A dream. A hope so sacred that he had not dared to admit it, even to himself: a fantasy that someday the galaxy would be again at peace.
That everything would go back to normal.
Do you need to sit down, dôshalo? Vastor’s purr was guardedly concerned. You look unwell.
“So this is the kiss-off, huh?” Nick had his gun back in its holster, but he looked like he was shooting at Vastor inside his head. “Pretty scummy trick, if you ask me.”
Tell your boy to mind his tongue when he speaks of Depa.
Mace only shook his head silently. He was out of words.
“I mean, that’s low. And I know something about low, if you know what I mean. The kiss-off’s bad enough, but to send her lightsaber along so you’d think it was her—”
“That’s not why she sent it,” Mace said softly. “Kar’s giving them both to me.”
Vastor’s growl was absolute as a vine cat’s stare: pitiless but somehow not unsympathetic. She said you would understand.
Mace nodded distantly. “She has no use for it anymore.”
Nick frowned at him. “She doesn’t?”
“It is the weapon of a Jedi.”
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