“Oh.”
“Yes.”
Mace lowered his head.
“She’s trying to tell you—”
“Yes.”
Mace closed his eyes.
He could no longer bear to look at this place.
“It’s killing her,” he said faintly. “Being here. Doing these things. If she stays, she will die.”
Everyone dies, dôshalo. But Haruun Kal is her problem. This is her place. She knows it now. She belongs here. The jungle isn’t killing her.
You are.
Mace opened his eyes to meet the lor pelek’s concentrated stare.
She never stops thinking of you, Vastor rumbled. What is killing her is imagining what you must think of her. What she knows you think of what she has done, and will do. She measures herself by your standards; that your standards are fatally wrong doesn’t make her failure to live up to them any less painful.
You are her sire, Mace Windu. Do you not understand how much she loves you?
“Yes.” He wished she could understand how much he loved her… But if she did, would she have done anything differently? Or would she only be in even greater pain? “Yes, I do.”
This is why she sent me to deliver these weapons, and her good-byes. She could not face you.
Mace breathed a heavy sigh, then straightened his shoulders. “She,” he said slowly, sadly, reluctantly, “will have to get over that.”
Eh?
“I’m sorry this is painful for her. It’s not fun for me either; the closest thing to fun I’ve had on this planet was being beaten into unconsciousness,” he said. “I told her I would not leave this world without her. And I won’t. Nothing has changed.”
You think not? Step out here, dôshalo. The lor pelek walked out of the cave shadow into the brilliant red-smeared afternoon on the cliffside meadow. This is not the only cave on this mountain.
Mace followed him, and Kar waved a lightsaber at the vast mountainside, pocked with shadows. In one of them waits one of my men. Over the past months, we have captured some heavy infantry weapons from the Balawai. One of those weapons is a shoulder-fired proton torpedo launcher.
“Threats will not move me, Kar. I have told her that I will die here rather than leave her behind.”
You misunderstand. The torpedo is not for you; if I want you dead, I can kill you myself.
“That,” said Mace Windu, “remains to be seen.”
Soon the lander will arrive to take you away from here. If you do not leave on it, my man will destroy it. Your pilots, and gunners, and soldiers, and whoever else who has come to bring you away: they will all die.
Now Mace did, finally, look into the sky. Limitless turquoise: the only clouds to be seen were vapor trails along the horizon.
You see? You are not the only one here who can take hostages.
“Do you know,” Mace said wonderingly, “that I am almost grateful to you for this?”
I understand: it makes what you must do much easier.
“Yes. Exactly. You have made my choice for me.”
“What’s wrong?” Nick asked from the shadows. “What’s he saying to you? We’re still leaving, aren’t we?”
“A great deal is wrong,” Mace replied. “He has said nothing of consequence, and no, we are not leaving. Not without Depa.”
Vastor’s head drew down, and his eyes flickered danger. I do not make idle threats.
“That you are here means I did not know Depa as well as I thought I did. That the two of you would expect me to bow to this threat means that she knows me even less.”
The lander will be destroyed. It will be as though you have killed them yourself.
“There is no as though.” Mace turned and lifted his head to look Kar Vastor in the eye. “What it will be is you, Kar Vastor, taking up arms against the Republic.”
The Republic has nothing to do with this. This is personal. You cannot pretend—
“I placed Depa under formal arrest three days ago. She gave me her parole—that is to say, her word of honor as a Jedi that she would not attempt to escape, or otherwise avoid returning to answer for her actions before the Jedi Council. She has violated her word, and her honor. I must now take her into custody. And you, as well.”
Me? You are mad.
“Kar Vastor,” Mace said flatly, “you are charged with the murder of Terrel Nakay.”
“Uh, Master, mm, General—? Sir? You sure you know what you’re doing?”
Vastor stared in blank disbelief. Your men will die.
“They are soldiers, and this is a war. They understand the risks they face,” Mace said. “Do you?”
What risks?
“When your man fires upon the lander, you will have committed treason. Implicated in your crime, Depa will face the same charge. You are placing her in capital jeopardy: that is, she will be executed along with you.”
Vastor’s growl did not now carry words. Only contempt and anger.
“Perhaps you should order your man to stand down. While you still can.”
Depa is right: Jedi are insane.
“Ever since I came to this planet, people have been telling me how crazy I am. They’ve told me this so many times that I had started to wonder if it might be true. Now, though, I understand: you don’t say this because it’s true. Not even because you think it’s true. You say it because you hope it’s true. Because if I am insane, you aren’t really the revolting slime-hearted vermin that, down deep, you know you are.”
But Vastor no longer seemed to be listening. He had folded his massive arms so that the lightsabers in his hands disappeared behind his ultrachrome-shielded biceps. He paced meditatively away from Mace, strolling toward the meadow’s cliff lip, and stared out over the vast roll of jungle below. The vista was alive with gunmetal specks and distant flashes of cannonfire.
Many gunships patrol today, he hummed. More than I have ever seen.
“Mace—” Nick hissed from the cave behind. “You know that bad feeling I was talking about? It’s getting worse.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you better get back in here where it’s safe.”
“Nowhere is safe,” Mace said, and walked out to join Vastor at the edge of the cliff.
I have tried, Vastor purred when Mace reached his side. I have done all that can be asked of me. Not even Depa can say I did not try to spare your life. But you will not be reasonable.
“It is not in my nature.”
It is as you said earlier: you have made my choice for me. There is only one way to protect her from you.
“That is true.”
Mace reached down inside himself until he found the calm center within his exhaustion and his pain. He breathed himself into that center until he was fully within it, and all pain and fatigue and doubt were left behind outside.
“Do we fight, now?”
We must.
It is bitter, that we last men of ghôsh Windu must be enemies. I wish this could have turned out differently, but I did not expect it would. Depa has told me that you do not lose well.
“I haven’t had much practice.”
Vastor bent his head in a regretful nod of respect. Good-bye, Mace, Jedi of the Windu.
A tiny surge of the Force—
Just a twitch. A shrug. The slightest nudge, not even directed at Mace; sent off somewhere into the trees below the pass—
A signal.
The scene, frozen in time, locked in the amber of Mace’s Force-sense: Vastor standing with arms folded, not the slightest hint of threat, his shields pushed high on his arms, those arms still crossed to bury the lightsabers that he held under his massive biceps—
Mace beside him, exposed on the lip of the cliff, unarmed—
Gunships rippling the jungle canopy far below in shock wakes, silent with distance—
Nick behind in the cave, rifle leaning against the rock, one hand yanking the butt of his holstered pistol in a draw that to ordinary eyes would be blinding—
A
nd a man hidden in the shadows of the jungle a kilometer away, smoothly squeezing the trigger of a high-powered sniper’s blaster rifle to send one single packet of murderous scarlet energy clawing up toward the meadow from the jungle below—
Centered on Mace Windu’s heart.
All this Mace kenned in a single instant, effortlessly, and the shatterpoint he found and struck by instinct was Vastor’s balance at the lip of the cliff.
Calmly, without any particular haste, Mace put his hand on Vastor’s shoulder and gave the lor pelek a shove.
Over the edge.
Vastor’s eyes bulged astonishment as he toppled forward and his arms uncrossed to windmill for his balance. His teetering swung his head just far enough in the right direction that the bullet from Nick’s slug pistol scorched Vastor’s temple instead of blowing his brains out through his eyes; as his arms whirled, his grip on the lightsabers loosened. Mace reached into the Force, snatching them both, triggering them to flaring life and bringing them to his hands with an easy six or seven milliseconds to spare before he needed them to splatter aside the bolt from the jungle below.
Vastor’s vine cat reflexes whirled him in the air and latched his hands onto the rock face a meter below the lip of the cliff. His confederate in the jungle poured fire up at Mace to drive him back, while Nick ran out of the cave behind him, shouting “Did I get him? Is he dead? Is he dead?” until Vastor threw himself back up into the meadow, bringing his vibroshields into fighting position with a surge of the Force.
Nick fired as fast as his finger could jerk the pistol’s trigger and bullets clanged off Vastor’s flashing shields—
And Mace just stood there.
Staring into his blade.
In the Force, the world had turned to crystal.
The purple flame of his blade splintered flaws throughout the planet. Stress fractures spidered from his blade to Vastor, to Nick, into the mountain behind, into the pass below, and to space above, racing in outrippling waves that joined him with what was, but also with what had been, and what would be.
Triggering his blade here, now: it was a shatterpoint of the Summertime War.
His consciousness splintered along with the world, flashing instantly along the fault lines and vectors of effect: for a single instant, he was in direct and intimate contact with many different times and places.
He saw it all.
As though from some impossible distance, he saw the Balawai prisoners kneeling on the promontory, and how gunships had arrived almost before he’d even lit the wood he’d piled up to make a signal fire.
He saw the gunships arrive at the outpost, only minutes after he had ignited this weapon to defend the children in the bunker from the hasty fire of their own people’s weapons.
He saw Vastor below the outpost’s ruins, and heard again his growled meaning: My men say you drove them off single-handed, though they did not seem to be damaged. Perhaps you have taught Balawai to fear the Jedi blade.
But they did not fear it, he knew.
He saw the gunships at the notch pass: flying away only seconds after he first flashed his blades. They had been ordered to withdraw.
Because he’d been alone.
Because if he was killed before he reached Depa and her guerrillas, it wouldn’t solve the militia’s Jedi problem.
He saw himself in the Pelek Baw alley, staring in disbelief at his depowered lightsaber.
He saw the hours he’d spent in the binder chair in that dirty room in the Ministry of Justice, waiting; that long wait hadn’t been an interrogation technique. Geptun had never intended to interrogate him in the first place.
Following that stress fault back in time, he saw a shielded room in the Ministry of Justice, where technicians made cut after cut with his lightsaber. Where they had shot the blade with blaster bolts and bullets, and used it to cut thyssel, and lammas, and portaak leaves, duracrete, transparisteel.
So that they could measure and record the emission signature of this blade.
So that their satellites would recognize it whenever it was used. No matter what it might be used for.
That’s why his blade had been out of charge. Geptun had probably had no idea about that upcountry team; he’d wanted Mace to get out of Pelek Baw.
Wanted him to make contact with Depa and the “ULF.”
Wanted to find where all the missing Korunnai had been hiding.
Now in the meadow, other stress faults connected his mind to dozens of gunships that converged on the Lorshan Pass. Gunships packed with eager troops, trailing billows of hate and fear and fierce anticipation like the ash plume from an erupting volcano.
One fracture terminated at an orbiting satellite that whizzed across the face of the planet at almost twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour, and through the fracture he could feel a silicon brain make an electronic connection. He could feel the execution of a simple command program, and he could feel automated clamps releasing huge durasteel bars layered in ablative shielding, and he could feel primitive guidance jets driving them into the atmosphere at an angle too steep for any spacecraft to survive.
But these were not spacecraft, and they were not intended to survive.
Vastor was still in the air, and Nick was still twisting to track him with his blazing pistol, when Mace Windu whipped his arms straight and shouted, “Stop!”
The Force blasts that accompanied the Jedi Master’s command clubbed Nick to the ground and sent Vastor spinning against the mountain’s face above the cave.
“What are you doing?” Nick rolled to his feet and snapped the pistol back into line. “He just tried to frag you—kill him!”
Vastor crouched above, clinging to the rock like a krayt dragon. No more talking. It is time to fight.
“Yes,” Mace Windu said. “But not each other. Look around you!”
He swung his arm toward the jungle below the pass.
All the patrolling gunships, the dozens that had leisurely crisscrossed the jungle all these past days, now traced converging streaks that would intersect at the Lorshan Pass.
Nick swore, and Vastor’s growl lost meaning.
“And there,” Mace said, pointing to what seemed to be a slowly developing dark cloud, high above the mountains, but was in fact the smoke from ablative shielding burning off in the atmosphere.
The center of the cloud grew red, then orange, then pale as a blue-white star: ion thrusters kicking in.
Nick frowned. “That can’t be the lander—the angle’s all wrong, and it’s coming in way too fast.”
“It isn’t,” Mace said. “I should say, they aren’t.”
“I’m not gonna like this, am I?” Nick passed a hand over his eyes. “Oh, nuts. Ohhh, nuts nuts nuts. You’re about to tell me those are DOKAWs.”
“At least five. More to follow.”
YOU! Vastor’s explosive roar seemed to yank him off the rock face and carry him raging to the meadow. He shook a sizzling shield at Mace. This is YOUR fault! YOU have brought them here!
“There will be time later to argue blame.” Mace let the lightsabers’ blades shrink to nonexistence. “There’s something we need to do right now.”
“What’s that?”
The Jedi Master looked from the lor pelek to the young Korun officer, then into a sky at the durasteel missiles streaking through the atmosphere.
At thirty thousand kilometers per hour, and accelerating.
Mace Windu said, “Run.”
They ran.
Part III
Shatterpoint
Chapter 16: Shockwaves
A fully-assembled De-Orbiting Kinetic Anti-emplacement Weapon (DOKAW)—hardened durasteel spear, ablative shielding, miniature ion drive, and tiny attitude thrusters—massed slightly more than two hundred kilograms. By the time the spear impacted a target at ground level, the shielding, the drive, and the attitude thrusters, as well as a fair bit of the hardened durasteel itself, would have all burned away; the final warhead massed in the general neighborhood
of one hundred kilograms, slightly more or less depending on angle of entry, atmospheric density, and other minor concerns.
These concerns were minor because the DOKAW was not, in itself, a particularly sensitive or sophisticated weapon; its virtues lay more in the realm of being inexpensive to produce and simple to operate, which is why it was found mostly in more primitive backworld areas of the galaxy. It was vulnerable to counterfire from turbolaser batteries, for example. It was also largely useless against a target capable of even rudimentary evasive action, and once its attitude thrusters had burned away, mere atmospheric disturbances would be sufficient to push it off course, making it less than ideally accurate against stationary targets smaller than a medium-sized town. Because, after all, it was basically just a hundred-kilo hunk of durasteel.
Ideal accuracy, though, was also a minor concern, because at the point of impact, this hundred-kilo spear of hardened durasteel was traveling at well over ten kilometers per second.
In a word:
WHAM.
Mace, Nick, and Kar had reached the widening throat of the first of the major caverns when the floor dropped out from under them for one astonishing second, then jumped back up and smacked them tumbling through the air toward the jagged rock roof overhead.
The blast transcended sound.
Mace controlled his spin instinctively so that he could absorb the impact against the roof with bent legs. His Force-hold caught Nick a meter short of severe head trauma; then as they both fell back toward the floor, the pressure-wave of superheated air that shrieked in through the fissure from the meadow cave sent them skidding and bouncing and rolling over the rough-cut floor in a hailstorm of rock shards and burning dirt.
Mace kept his Force-hold on Nick; as they skidded to a stop in the nightmare of dust and smoke and screaming, he set Nick on his feet and crouched beside him. “Stay up!” he shouted. “Stay low but off the floor!”
He huddled there, hands jammed against his ears, bounced by another blast—lesser—and another lesser still, the natural inaccuracy of the DOKAWs causing some scatter. A final convulsion of the mountain cracked the roof of the cavern and rained boulders at random. Some screams were crushed to gurgles; others scaled up to shrieks of agony.
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