Shatterpoint

by Matthew W. Stover

  Mace approached slowly, staying on the next ledge down. He stopped when he reached them and spoke softly to Chalk. “How is he?”

  She wouldn’t look at him. “Dying. How are you?”

  She dipped her rag into the bucket, brought it out again, sponged, and returned it to the bucket with numb mechanical persistence: doing it to be doing something, though she showed no sign of hope that it might help.

  “Chalk, we need you to come with us.”

  “Not leaving him, me. Needs me, him.”

  “We need you. Chalk, you have to trust me—”

  “Did trust you, me. So did Besh.”

  Mace had no answer.

  Nick came to Mace’s shoulder. “The Archives are starting to look pretty good right now.”

  The Jedi Master squinted at him.

  Nick shrugged. “Hey, it’s the only immortality any of us can hope for, right?”

  “And how do you achieve immortality,” Mace murmured, “if my journal is buried under a mountain on Haruun Kal?”

  “Uh. Yeah.” Nick looked like his stomach hurt. “That could be a problem.”

  “Forget about immortality. Let’s concentrate on not dying today.”

  Vastor’s eyes were closed, and the Force shimmered around him. Mace could feel some of what the lor pelek was doing: searching within Besh’s chest for the essential aura of the fungus that was killing him, focusing power upon it to burn it out spore by spore.

  Another shockwave rattled the cavern. Loose rock clattered from the ceiling.

  “Kar,” Mace said, “this is not the way. We don’t have time.”

  Vastor’s eyes stayed closed. His expression did not so much as flicker. Is there something better for me to be doing right now?

  “As a matter of fact,” Mace said, “yes. There is.”

  Does it involve killing Balawai?

  Mace said apologetically, “Probably not more than a thousand. Maybe two.”

  Vastor opened eyes filled with pelekotan’s darkness. Chalk lifted her head, rag hanging forgotten from her fist.

  “So,” said Mace Windu. “Are we on?”

  Smoke and dust clouded the huge cavern; it reeked of grasser fear-musk, of dung and urine and blood, and with each new DOKAW-shock the smell got worse.

  Torchlight flared and blazed and vanished again. The stinking fog swirled with gigantic shapes: grassers bucking and clawing at each other, some with jaws panic-locked on their own or others’ limbs. They charged at random, slamming into each other, trampling the injured and their own young. Korunnai darted among them, appearing from the smoke and vanishing again, hands full of sharp goads and blazing torches as they fought to separate the knots of shrieking, honking, fear-crazed beasts.

  A swirl opened a gap: a looming akk dog paused to stare into Mace’s eyes, measuring him with saurian malice as a thick rope of bloody drool looped from its jaws, then it ponderously turned aside and slipped into the murk, tail tapering so smoothly it might have been dissolving.

  Mace threaded through the chaos.

  Behind him followed a pair of Korunnai, carrying a stretcher that held the EWHB and its generator. Two more brought the shoulder-fired torpedo launchers and the preloaded tubes on another stretcher. Chalk half-walked, her arm looped over Nick’s shoulders as he helped her along.

  Five more pairs of Korunnai trotted around the circumference of the caverns, sidling past all the confusion and riot; one of each pair carried a homespun sack holding five proton grenades apiece, and the others carried torches. Each pair soon slipped down a different one of the five vast passages along which grassers were daily driven to graze.

  Erratic booming shivered the air, sharper and much smaller than the DOKAW-shocks, but still powerful enough to vibrate the floor. Mace pointed toward the source of the booming: a side cave where the great ankkox paced in restless fury. The concussions were its angrily whipping tail mace striking the walls and floor of its pen.

  The nearest Korun stretcher bearer saw his gesture, and they moved in that direction, followed by Nick and Chalk.

  Mace paused, and looked back over his shoulder. At the mouth of an upper passageway stood Kar Vastor and his Akk Guards. Behind them crouched all twelve of Vastor’s Force-bonded akks. The lor pelek met Mace’s gaze and nodded.

  Mace returned the nod, spreading his hands as though to say, Whenever you’re ready.

  Vastor and his akks marched grimly down into the grasser cavern. The akks spread out in huge leaping springs, knocking over panicked grassers on all sides, crouching over them to let drool fall from razor teeth and moisten the fur on their necks. The humans stayed together in a flying wedge with Vastor at the point, moving in to manually separate struggling grassers, intimidating the winners and slaughtering any who had been too badly injured to walk.

  Mace watched, stonefaced. It was wasteful. It was brutal.

  It was necessary.

  He turned once again to his own task.

  He gestured and the mass of struggling beasts and men parted before him, and the smoke and dust cleared, and he saw her.

  She sat on a ledge like a natural gallery that coursed one long-curving wall of the cavern. Her feet hung over the lip, dangling free: a child in a chair too tall for her. Her face was buried in her hands, and even from across the cavern his chest ached with a silent echo of her sobs.

  And when he reached her side, he still did not know what to say.

  “Depa…”

  She lifted her head and turned to meet his eyes, and knowing what to say would not have helped him because he could not speak.

  The rag—the one she had worn across her brow these past days—was gone. On her forehead—

  On her forehead, where the Chalactan Greater Mark of Illumination should have been—

  As it had been in his hallucination, days ago at the jungle prospector outpost: on her brow was only an ugly keloid ripple of scar. As though the Greater Mark of Illumination had been carved from the bone of her skull with a blunt knife. As though the wound it left behind had festered, and had not been treated.

  As though it festered still…

  The Lesser Mark, called the Seeker, still gleamed at the bridge of her nose. The Lesser Mark is fixed between the eyes of one who aspires to become a Chalactan adept: it symbolizes the centered self, the shining vision, the elegant order that seeking illumination creates within the seeker. The Greater Mark is called the Universe; it is an exact replica of the Seeker, writ large. It is fixed to the frontal bone in a solemn ceremony by the Convocation of Adepts, to welcome another to their company. The two, together, represent the fundamental tenet of Chalactan philosophy: As Without, So Within. The Adepts of Chalacta teach that the celestial order, the natural laws that govern the motion of planets and the wheel of galaxies, regulate as well the life of the Enlightened.

  But for Depa, the universe was gone. All that remained was the Seeker.

  Alone in the void.

  “Mace…” Her face twisted once more to tears. “Don’t look at me. You can’t look at me. You can’t see me like this. Please…”

  He lowered himself to one knee beside her. He reached a tentative hand for her shoulder; she clutched his fingers and pressed his hand in place, but turned her face away.

  “I’m so sorry…” Her head twitched as though she shook tears out of her eyes. “I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry things can’t be different. Better. I’m sorry I can’t be better…”

  “But you can.” He squeezed her shoulder. “You can, Depa. You have to.”

  “I’m so lost, Mace.” Her whisper could not be heard in the riot of the cavern, but Mace could feel her meaning, as though the Force itself murmured in his ear. “I’m so lost…”

  The Depa of his hallucination—what had she told him?

  He remembered.

  “It is in the darkest night,” he said gently, “that the light we are shines brightest.”

  “Yes. Yes. You always say that. But what do you know about dark?” He
r head sagged, chin to her chest, as though she could no longer think of a reason to hold it up. “How does a blind man know the stars have gone out?”

  “But they haven’t,” Mace said. “They still burn as bright as ever. And as long as people live around them, they will need Jedi. Like I need you now.”

  “I am… I’m not a Jedi anymore. I quit. I resign. I withdraw. I thought you understood that.”

  “I do understand it. I don’t accept it.”

  “It’s not up to you.”

  He pulled his hand from her shoulder and rose, looming above her. “Get up.”

  She sighed, and once again a smile struggled onto her tearstained lips. “I’m not your Padawan now, Mace. You can’t order me—”

  “Get up!”

  Reflexes burned into her by more than a decade of unquestioning obedience yanked her instinctively to her feet. She swayed dizzily, and her mouth hung slack.

  “Minutes from now, nearly a thousand clone soldiers of the Republic will reach this position.”

  New light kindled in her glazed eyes. “The Halleck—they can save us—”

  “No,” Mace said. “Listen to me: We have to save them.”

  “I—I don’t understand—”

  “They are coming in under fire. This entire system is a trap. It’s been a trap all along. The Separatist pullback was bait, do you understand that?”

  “No… it’s not true, it’s not true!” But the flash faded from her eyes, and she sagged. “But of course it’s true. How could I have thought otherwise? How could I have thought I would win?”

  “They’ve caught a medium cruiser. Not to mention two members of the Jedi Council. The Halleck may already be destroyed. The clone soldiers are coming in aboard the surviving landers. They will be pursued by Trade Federation droid starfighters: faster, more maneuverable, and better-armed than the landers. If our men are pinned between the starfighters and the militia, they won’t have a chance. Whatever chance those men will have, we have to give them. You have to give them.”

  “Me? What can I do?”

  He opened his vest. Her lightsaber floated out of its inner pocket. It bobbed gently in the air between them.

  “You can make a choice.”

  She looked from the lightsaber to his eyes and back again; she stared at the handgrip as though her reflection in its portaak amber–smeared surface might whisper the future. “But you don’t understand,” she said faintly. “No choice of mine can matter here…”

  “It does to me.”

  “Have you learned nothing on this world? Even if we do save them—it doesn’t matter. Not in the jungle. Look around you. This isn’t something you can fight, Mace.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “It’s not an enemy, Mace. It’s just the jungle. You can’t do anything about it. It’s just the way things are.”

  “I think,” Mace said gently, “that you’re the one who has failed to learn the lessons of Haruun Kal.”

  She shook her head hopelessly.

  “Don’t tell me you can’t fight the jungle, Depa,” he said. “That’s what Korunnai do. Don’t you understand that? That’s what their whole culture is based on. Fighting the jungle. They use grassers to attack it, and akks to defend themselves from its counterattacks. That’s what the Summertime War is about. The Balawai want to use the jungle: to live with it, to profit from it. The Korunnai want to beat it into submission. To make it into something that is no longer trying to eat them alive. Now, think: Why do Korunnai do that? Why are they enemies of Balawai? Why are they enemies of the jungle?”

  “A riddle for your Padawan?” she said bitterly.

  “A lesson.”

  “I am done with lessons.”

  “We are never done with lessons, Depa. Not while we live. The answer is right before your eyes. Why do Korunnai fight the jungle?”

  He opened his hand as though offering her the answer on his palm.

  Her eyes fixed on the handgrip of her lightsaber, floating between them, and something entered them then: some faint whisper of breeze from a cool clean place, a breath of air to ease her suffocating pain.

  “Because…” Her voice was hushed. Reverent.

  Awed by the truth.

  “Because they are descended from Jedi…”

  “Yes.”

  “But… but… you can’t fight the way things are…”

  “But we do. Every day. That’s what Jedi are.”

  Tears streamed from her reddened eyes. “You can never win—”

  “We,” Mace corrected her gently, “don’t have to win. We only have to fight.”

  “You can’t… you can’t just forgive me…”

  “As a member of the Jedi Council—you’re right. I can’t. As your Master, I won’t. As your friend—”

  His eyes stung. The smoke, perhaps.

  “As your friend, Depa, I can forgive everything. I already have.”

  She shook her head speechlessly, but she lifted a hand.

  Her hand shook. She made a fist, and bit her lip.

  He said, “Take your weapon, Depa. Let’s go save those men.”

  She took it.

  Chapter 18: Unconventional Warfare

  The militia landed in waves.

  Before the plume of dirt and smoke had subsided from the last impact of a DOKAW into the mountain, gunships swooped over the jungles below the pass, disgorging dozens, then hundreds of arpitroops: airborne soldiers equipped with disposable repulsor packs, which lowered them briskly through the canopy below. They fanned out into the jungle bearing electronic sniffers that could detect certain chemicals in grasser urine in concentrations of only a few parts per billion. They swiftly located the five main tunnels to the partisan base and marked each one with high-powered beacons.

  The gunships’ laser cannons blasted away the jungle canopy and surrounding trees to create a free-fire zone at the mouth of each tunnel. A kilometer away, a similar technique had been used to clear a landing zone for the troop shuttles, which were waiting onstation to drop five hundred soldiers each before circling back to the embarkation area on the outskirts of the city of Oran Mas, fifty klicks to the northwest.

  By the time the grasser tunnels had been marked, at least five thousand militia regulars were on the ground, marching toward the zone of engagement.

  Ten thousand more followed close behind.

  The militia bore arms that the Grand Army of the Republic itself might envy; provided by the Separatists, which was backed by the financial might and industrial capacity of the Trade Federation and the manufacturing guilds, this armament had been financed by a generous slice of the thyssel bark trade.

  Standard combat equipment for the regular militia on Haruun Kal included the Merr-Sonn BC7 medium blaster carbine with the optional rocket-grenade attachment, six antipersonnel fragmentation grenades, and the renowned close-combat trench-style vibroknife, the Merr-Sonn Devastator, as well as Opankro Graylite ceramic-fiber personal combat armor. In addition, every sixth soldier carried a backpack flame projector, and each platoon of twenty was equipped with the experimental MM(X) dual-operated grenade mortar, also from Merr-Sonn.

  Fifteen thousand regulars. Thirty-five GAVs (ground assault vehicles: converted steamcrawlers, retofitted with chemical cannons firing explosive shells in addition to their flame projectors, and high-velocity repeating slug rifles blister-mounted through their side armor). Seventy-three Sienar Turbostorm close-assault gunships.

  All this converged on the cavern base at the Lorshan Pass.

  To oppose them, the Korun partisans had roughly four hundred actives, of whom two-thirds were walking wounded, and over two thousand noncombatants, consisting mainly of the elderly and the very young. They were armed with a variety of light slug rifles, a very few light and medium energy weapons, a small stockpile of grenades, two Krupx MiniMag shoulder-fired proton torpedo launchers, and one Merr-Sonn EWHB-10 heavy repeating blaster.

  The partisans on Haruun Kal excelled at guerrill
a operations, but they were less successful in conventional actions. In fact, in conventional engagements between regular militia and the Korunnai, the militia had crushed the partisans in every encounter. At the Lorshan Pass, they quite understandably expected not only to triumph, but to permanently break the back of the Korun resistance.

  Most of the militia regulars at the Lorshan Pass never saw combat. While they were still establishing positions at the mouths of the access tunnels—before they’d so much as fired one blaster or launched a single grenade—the ground shook and the mountain roared, and mighty gusts of dirt and smoke blew out from four of the tunnel mouths.

  Scouting parties—a few of the bravest enlisted men, creeping tentatively into the dark—discovered that these tunnels had been entirely sealed with uncountable tons of rock. This left the bemused militia with little to do except break out ration packs and do their best to relax, while taking turns scanning the mountain above with simple nonpowered binoculars for any signs of partisan activity.

  Only one tunnel remained open. The regulars at the mouth of this tunnel had a somewhat different experience of the battle.

  The detonation of the proton grenades in the other tunnels was taken by the militia unit commander as an opportunity. The tunnel his men faced was intact; he assumed this meant whatever explosives had been used for the local mines had misfired or otherwise failed to activate. He ordered his grenade mortars forward, and launched into that tunnel a number of gas grenades loaded with the nerve agent Tisyn-C.

  His men were first astonished, then dismayed, as these same grenades came rocketing back out the tunnel’s mouth to land in their own emplacements. Tisyn-C was heavier than air, and though their Opanko Graylite combat armor was rated to protect them from gas exposure, none of the regulars wished to test this capability with a nerve agent known to produce convulsions and dementia, followed by paralytic respiratory failure and death. As the white cloud rolled in to their improvised emplacements, the militia rolled out.

  And so they were in the open, more concerned with what was among them than with what might be coming next, when they were hit by the grasser stampede.