Two seconds passed—two more—and Mace sprang to his feet. Light from glowglobes made luminous spheres that could not overlap through the thick swirl of dust and smoke that stung tears into his eyes; one incautious breath sent him into a paroxysm of coughing. He yanked Nick to his side—the young Korun had an arm over his streaming eyes and he was hacking into his other hand—and Mace grabbed the hem of his homespun tunic with both hands.
“Hey—hackhagh—hey, what are you—”
“We need your shirt.”
With one twist he ripped the tunic in half up the back; another twist continued the rip from collar to waist in front. He left half in Nick’s hands while he tied his own half over his face in a sort of hood. The cloth was coarse enough to see through, and it cut the dust and smoke from intolerable down to merely hellish.
While Nick imitated him, Mace picked his way around the rubble and over dead and wounded Korunnai toward a gleam of ultrachrome under a huge slab of stone. He dropped to his heels beside it and gestured, clearing smaller rocks away from the lor pelek.
“Kar? Can you hear me?”
Even hoarse with dust and pain, Vastor’s growl had a sardonic edge. Better stand back. When you’re around, big hard things seem to fall on my head.
Mace breathed himself into his center, and found the slab’s shatterpoint. “Don’t move.”
His blade flared, bit in, and the slab cracked in two over Vastor’s back. A shrug of Vastor’s huge shoulders shifted the two pieces enough that he could push himself up to his knees between them. He was caked with dust, and blood trickled from an ugly gash over one ear.
You could have killed me. You should have.
“You’re no good to me dead,” Mace said. “Is there a hard-point in this base? A hardened bunker, preferably airtight?”
The heavy weapon lockup. It can be sealed.
“All right. Get all the non-ambulatory sick and wounded in there and seal it up. When the militia comes, they’ll start with gas.”
Vastor and Nick exchanged grim looks.
Mace glanced over his shoulder. “Nick. You’re with me. Let’s go.”
We’ll never hold them. Not for a day. Not an hour.
“We don’t have to hold them ourselves. I have a medium cruiser in-system that’s carrying a regiment of the finest soldiers this galaxy has ever seen.” Mace put one hand on Vastor’s shoulder, and the other on Nick’s, and there was a strange shine to his dark eyes. “We aren’t going to hold them. We aren’t even going to fight them. With the Halleck for air cover and the troopers holding the ground, those twenty landers can evacuate this entire place within hours.”
“Grassers and all?”
Mace nodded. “We just have to get them here.”
DOKAWs pounded the mountain. Korunnai ran and screamed and bled. Some tried to help the wounded. Some died. Some huddled shivering against the nearest wall.
Mace kept moving. Nick trotted at his heels. Sometimes shockwaves knocked them down. Sometimes the dust was so bad that Mace had to light their way with scatter from his and Depa’s blades.
“Why do you need me? You were in the comm center this morning,” Nick gasped through a mouthful of dust that his spit had turned to mud. “I’m good with a medpac. You go on. I can look after wounded—”
“That’s why.”
Bladelight picked up jagged gleams ahead: the corridor was blocked with a sloping wall of tumbled rock.
“This is the only way I know to the comm center,” Mace said. “I’m hoping you know another.”
Nick muttered a curse under his breath as he leaned on the slope of boulders. “How deep is the rubble? Can you cut—” His eyes widened. “Hey, there are people in there! Trapped! I can feel them—we’ve got to get them out!”
“I feel them too. The fall’s not stable,” Mace said. “Shifting and cutting will take more time than we have: the first mistake would bring tons of stone down on their heads. We need another way to the comm center.”
“But—we can’t just leave them in there—!”
“Nick. Try to focus. Will they be safer out here?”
“Well, I…” Nick frowned. “Well…”
“Listen to me. There will be cave-ins throughout these caverns. We can dig survivors out later. We have to make sure enough people live through this to do the digging. Yes?”
Nick nodded reluctantly.
“Then let’s go.”
The comm center was just a small natural cave with rude plank tables, a few homemade chairs, and some equipment. “Probably not much left of the relay antennas,” Nick muttered as they trotted toward it.
“It’s a little late to worry about concealing our position,” Mace reminded him. “And subspace won’t have any trouble going through rock.”
Nick squinted at the doorway, cursed, and broke into a sprint. “The surgical field’s down!” He darted inside.
Mace went after him, but stopped in the doorway.
The subspace comm unit lay on the floor, among the splinters of the plank table; its housing looked like someone had rolled it down a mountainside and dropped it off a cliff. The realspace-frequency units, less durable, were crushed. Nick was cursing continuously under his breath as he knelt over the two Korun commtechs, who lay motionless on the floor as though they were simply taking a nap in the ruins of their post.
Mace said, “Nick.”
“They’re dead,” the young Korun said thickly. “They’re both dead. Not a mark on them. And—”
“Nick, come out of there.”
Nick prodded one’s head with his finger… which gave, deforming spongily, as though the man’s skull were soft foam. “And they’re squishy…”
“We have to leave this place. Now.”
“What could do that to a man?”
“Concussion,” Mace said. “Shock transmission. This room must be part of a solid structure that reaches to the surface—”
“You’re saying…” Nick looked at the walls around him with widening eyes. “You’re saying if another DOKAW hits the same spot, while I’m still in here—”
“I’m saying—” Mace urgently extended a hand, “—cover your ears and jump.”
Mace took his own advice then drew on the Force to suspend them both, and the air in the comm cave pounded them like they were caught in the palm of a giant’s handclap. He let the shock send them whirling back along the passage away from the comm center, them released his Force-hold and rolled to his feet.
Nick was saying something as Mace pulled him upright, but Mace heard only a distant mutter over the high singing whine in his ears. “You’ll have to speak up.”
Nick cupped one hand to his ear. “What?”
“Speak up!”
“What? You’ll have to speak up!”
Mace sighed and shoved Nick stumbling along the corridor; he turned, reaching into the Force as he extended a hand, and the subspace unit floated out the doorway, down the passage and into his arms.
He jogged after Nick while their stunned eardrums recovered. Three minutes’ scramble brought them to a nexus of intersecting passageways, some cut, some natural. “This will have to do.”
“Do for what? What’s left?” Nick sagged against the wall, panting. “And what are you lugging that fraggin’ thing around for?”
Mace set the comm unit on the passage floor. He pulled off his improvised dust-mask and frowned at the rear access panel; fasteners unscrewed themselves and floated to a neat little pile in a dimple in the rock, joined shortly by the access panel itself. Mace examined the leads and contacts inside the unit for a moment, then nodded.
He opened his hand and his lightsaber jumped to it from its pocket inside his vest. A flick of the Force tripped the handgrip’s secret interior latch; a curved section of the grip popped open, and Mace pulled out the power cell. Another flick of the Force bent a pair of lead-panels inside the comm unit’s guts. Mace wedged the powercell between them, and the unit’s ready-lights came on.
�
�Hold this here,” Mace said. Nick held the energy cell in place while Mace keyed the Halleck’s emergency channel.
“Halleck, this is General Windu. This is a priority clear-call, intiation code oh six one five. Acknowledge.”
The comm unit crackled to life in a burst of ECM static. A stolid voice came faintly through the buzz: “Response… one nine.”
“Verification seven seven.”
“Go a… General.”
“Captain Trent, I need your status.”
“Regret to in… Cap… bridge crew… ously wounded. This is Commander Urhal… der heavy… Repeat: We are under heavy DSF attack.”
Nick frowned. “DSF?”
“Droid starfighter.” Mace keyed the transmitter. “Can you hold?”
“…gative. Too many… sustained heavy… shields and armor, but…”
Through the bursts of static and washes of white hiss, the acting captain of the Halleck sketched their situation: An unknown number of Trade Federation droid starfighters had been lying in wait, deactivated and drifting outside the system’s ecliptic plane amid cometary dust and debris of ancient asteroids. The commander guessed that it was something about the lander itself that had triggered them; they had attacked as soon as the extraction lander undocked and made for orbit. The lander had been lost with all hands, and the DSFs had quickly overwhelmed the Halleck’s escort complement of six starfighters; they were pounding the cruiser with everything they had. The ship Mace had been looking to for rescue was already fighting for its life.
And losing.
Mace balanced on his heels, staring into the rock wall beside him.
The granular surface gleamed with sweat condensed from his breath, and flecks of mineral sparkled within it, but Mace didn’t see any of that. He wasn’t looking at the stone. He was looking into the stone. Through the stone.
Into the Force.
“So that’s it, then, huh?” Nick’s words came distantly to Mace’s ears, hollow and faint, as though he spoke from the bottom of a well. “There’s no way we can evacuate.”
“That’s it, yes. No way.” This was a reflexive echo; Mace was barely aware of what Nick had said, and not at all aware that he had answered. “No way…”
His consciousness was elsewhere.
“Have I mentioned how much I hate this place? Every time I come here it’s like being buried alive…”
Into the Force—
Mace wasn’t actually looking, not really; the sense he used was not sight. This sense invaded the Force, touching power and letting the power touch it, shading the power then drawing on the shade it created to deepen its own shade, feeding upon the Force and feeding the Force in a regenerative spiral, gathering strength, spidering outward from this specific nowhere-in-particular-right-now to the general allwhere of every time: from a crossroads inside a mountain that stood in a jungle the size of a continent, on a world that whirled through a galaxy that was rapidly becoming a jungle of its own.
This sense brought to his perception the stress-vectors of reality. It was more than the searching of a shatterpoint, it was as though this single moment existed in a crystal shell, and if he could strike it in exactly the right way, the shell enclosing this one would shatter as well—and the shell enclosing that shell, and on, and on, a single stroke whose shockwaves would propagate outward to crash through the trap that held not only him and Nick, but Depa and Kar and the Korunnai, the world of Haruun Kal, the Republic, perhaps the galaxy itself: more than a chain of shatterpoints, it was a fountain of shatterpoints. A cascade.
An avalanche.
If he could only find the spot to strike… .
Faintly, distantly, resonating from the here-and-now to Mace’s everywhere-at-once: “We’re trapped in here… The whole fraggin’ planetary militia is outside, and there’s nobody who can get here to help us, and we’re all gonna die. This is a stupid place to die. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
“Stupid,” Mace echoed. “Stupid, yes… Stupid! Exactly!”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“You,” Mace said, his gaze slowly returning from the stone depths he had been contemplating, “are brilliant. Not to mention lucky.”
“Excuse me?”
“Some years ago, the Jedi Order contemplated using droid starfighters for antipirate work—convoying freighters, that sort of thing. Do you know why we decided against it?”
“Do I care?”
“Because droids are stupid.”
“Wow, that’s a relief! I’d hate to be killed by a genius—”
Mace turned back to the comm unit and keyed the transmit once again. “Commander, this is General Windu. All the troops—get them loaded onto the remaining landers, and get those landers on course for the original coordinates. All of them. The original coordinates. Do you copy?”
“Yes, sir. But… no match for DSF… casualties… lucky if half of them make atmosphere…”
“That’s not your problem. Once the landers are away, you will withdraw. Do you copy? This is a direct order. When the landers are away, the Halleck will jump for Republic space.”
“…landers… only sublight. With no hyperdrive, how will you…?”
“Commander, is there so little for you to do right now that you can afford the time to argue with me? You have your orders. Windu out.”
He plucked the powercell out of the back of the comm unit and returned it to the handgrip of his lightsaber. “Who’s the best shooter you know?”
Nick shrugged. “Me.”
“Nick…”
“What, should I lie?”
“All right. Second best.”
“Who’s still alive?” Nick thought for a second or two. “Chalk, maybe. She’s pretty good. Especially with the heavy stuff. Or she would be if she could, y’know, walk…”
“She won’t have to. Let’s go.”
Nick stayed against the wall, shrugging hopelessly. “Why bother? It’s not like we can get anywhere, right? With the ship gone, there’s nowhere to go.”
“There is. And we will go there.”
“Where?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“You’re not?”
“I have had enough,” Mace said, “of being told I’m insane.”
Nick rose warily, eyeing Mace as though the Jedi Master might be a worrt in disguise. “What are you talking about? You just said there’s no way we can evacuate.”
“We’re not going to evacuate. We’re going to attack.”
Nick gaped. “Attack?” he echoed numbly.
“Not just attack. We are going to beat them,” said the Jedi Master, “like a rented gong.”
Chapter 17: Seeker
The air in the weapons bunker was thick with the ozone tang of a surgical field and the rank pheromonal stink of human fear. The few heavy weapons that the guerrillas had cached were piled haphazardly outside the door to make room for the endless flood of stretchers carried by grim-faced Korunnai, bearing the sick and the wounded. Mostly sick.
Mostly children.
Mostly silent and round-eyed.
The bearers would stumble whenever another DOKAW shook the mountain, and sometimes dump those they carried; many of the invalids bled from fresh scrapes. Nick threaded his way around them to look for Chalk; the Korun girl had not left Besh’s side since they both awakened from thanatizine suspension.
Mace had stopped outside the doorway. His defocused stare gathered the inventory of the weapons there, and plugged them into his calculations: new data that made his image of the coming battle shift and flow and remold itself like a stream of hardening lava. A tripod-mounted EWHB-10 with an auxiliary fusion-generator pack. Two shoulder-fired torpedo launchers, with four preloaded launch tubes apiece. A rack of twenty-five proton grenades, still in its factory-sealed case.
That was all he’d need.
The rest of the weapons were not relevant.
Nick came out the doorway, moving hesitantly, as though in pain. “They’r
e not in there.”
“No?”
Nick shook his head toward one of the stretcher-bearers. “They told me—there’s not enough room for all the… So Kar—” He swallowed, forcing distress off his face and out of his voice. “All we’re putting in here is people who’ll live.”
Mace nodded. “Where are the others?”
“We call it the dead room. Follow me.”
The dead room was a huge cavern hung with night. The only light was soft yellow spill from a scatter of handheld glow rods. Unlike the other inhabited chambers, the floor of this one had not been leveled with vibro-bladed adzes, but had instead been cut into tiered ledges that followed the natural contour of the rock.
The ledges were packed with the dying.
No surgical field here: the air was thick with fecal stench, and the sickly sweet odor of rotten meat, and the indescribable smell of spores released by fungi feeding on human flesh.
Nick halted a few paces in from the entrance and closed his eyes. A moment later, he sighed and pointed up toward a far corner. “Over there. See that light? Something’s happening; I think Kar’s with them.”
“Good. We need him, and we’re running out of time.”
They had to tread carefully to climb the levels of ledges without stepping on people in the gloom.
Besh lay stretched out, motionless, barely breathing, on a ledge near the ragged curve of the cavern ceiling. Vastor knelt beside him, eyes closed, one hand above Besh’s heart. The medpac tissue-binder that had closed the wounds left by Terrel’s knife had lost its glossy transparency, blackening and curling like dead skin, and the wounds had erupted into cruciferous bulbs of fungus that floresced faintly, iridescent green and purple pulsing in the shadows cast by Chalk’s glow rod.
Chalk sat cross-legged on Besh’s other side, her own chest bulky with spraybandage; head low, she sponged at the growths on Besh’s chest with a damp rag. Even from meters away, Mace caught a strong odor of alcohol and portaak amber.
Nick stopped a couple of meters short and gave Mace a significant look, nodding toward the others as if to say, This was your idea. Leave me out of it.
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