“Then what are we fraggin’ doing out here? Where is he?”
“A place with electronics sophisticated enough to fake the origination data of a comm signal,” Mace said. “I may not be the dejarik player our colonel is, but there’s nothing wrong with my memory. The one time we met, it was on the occasion of the death of someone he described as an old friend.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed. “Tenk…” he breathed. “You think he’s at the Washeteria.”
“Can you get us there?”
“Sure. Simple. All you gotta do is bear northeast—”
He was interrupted by Chalk’s hand on his arm.
She gave him a sickly smile, and her throat worked as though she were struggling not to retch. “Maybe… maybe better—” She coughed wetly.
Blood spattered from her lips.
“Chalk!”
Her fingers dug into his arm: a spasm. Her other hand was pressed to her side. Her face was gray, and her eyes looked foggy. “Maybe better take nav, you,” she said, and slumped.
Her hand fell away from her ribs, revealing a ragged hole below her breast. She crumpled forward against the nav chair’s safety straps. In her back was an exit wound Nick could have put his fist into. The chair-back had an even bigger hole, and the cockpit wall behind bore a splash of blood and tissue and shreds of black synthleather.
Nick threw his arms around her, holding her head up, pleading with her empty eyes. “Chalk, no, not you, come on, not you too, come on, Chalk, please—”
Mace looked at the windscreen: at the line of rainbow-ringed slug dents from that first GAV: a line punctuated by the lightsaber-cut gap.
She had taken that slug minutes ago. Without a word. Without a sound. She had held on—had fought on—
Because people she loved were in danger.
“The medical center—” Nick’s voice had gone thick. “The medical center’s only a klick or two from here—”
Mace’s decision did not take even a full second. General or not, he was still a Jedi. “Just tell me which way to go.”
“Okay. Okay.” Nick tore himself away from Chalk and pointed toward an intersection ahead. “Okay, go left at the corner, then—”
The street in front of them erupted like a chain of volcanos: explosions at the terminal points of scarlet particle beams that rained upon them from the night sky: aimed not at the street but at a hurtling dark shape that twisted through a barrel roll over the buildings before it took a direct hit and tumbled into a ball of debris-spewing fire that slammed an apartment block only a few dozen meters short of the Turbostorm.
The blast picked up the gunship and spun it down the street.
Of the unarmored groundcars, and the pedestrians, the taxicarts and street vendors, the elderly on their stoops and the children who had darted playfully around the tall lightpoles—
Nothing was left but smoking rubble and twisted metal.
“What in the—” Nick reeled off an impressive string of obscenities. “—was that?”
Mace wrestled the Turbostorm out of its spin and cut the engines; the ship skidded down the street trailing a fountaining tail of sparks. He leaned forward, his knuckles pale on the control yoke, and stared up through the windscreen.
“May the Force give me strength…” he whispered: as close to a curse as he had ever come.
That hurtling dark shape had been one of the Incom Sky-hoppers from the spaceport. The cannonfire that had rained on the street and brought down the skyhopper had come from droid starfighters.
The night sky was full of ships.
Above the city.
“Oh, Depa…” Mace breathed.
More than four hundred thousand people lived in Pelek Baw. Drawing fire from the starfighters down upon it could put the entire capital to the torch.
No: not could.
Had.
The skyhopper wasn’t the first ship to crash into the crowded streets of the capital tonight. And there were over a hundred more, from tiny racing yachts to immense freighters.
He felt the city in the Force: a holocaust of flame and darkness.
Panic. Rage. Grief.
Horror.
There was nothing else left.
But the spaceport had a different feel entirely.
“Depa, what have you done?”
The comm panel chimed to announce an incoming voice-and-visual. Numbly, Mace reached past Nick and Chalk to hit the receive key. Scanning lasers in the comm unit traced a blue-lined image shadow on the windscreen: an electronic pre-echo of the larger-than-life holo-image projected into the burning night outside.
An image of a huge Korun with a shaven head and a smile like a mouthful of bone needles.
He growled, and Mace wondered how Vastor could expect to be understood—his Force-powered semi-telepathy wouldn’t modulate a comm signal—but this little mystery instantly solved itself.
When the lor pelek growled, the dark storm that had swallowed Pelek Baw growled with him.
Thank you for giving us the city, dôshalo. His smile spread like flames on oil. We have decided to redecorate.
Mace opened his mouth to ask for CRC-09/571—and closed it again. The commander had been warned not to take orders from them.
They must have killed him.
“Kar, where’s Depa?” Mace held his desperate horror locked deep inside his chest. “Let me talk to her.”
She doesn’t want to talk to you. She doesn’t want to see you. Ever. I have arranged matters so she won’t have to.
“Kar, stop this. You have to stop this!”
And I will. Vastor’s lips pulled back from those needle teeth, and there was no longer even the pretense of a smile. When everyone is dead.
“You don’t understand what you’re doing—”
Yes, I do. And so do you.
Mace’s stare burned like the city around him.
He did understand. Finally. Too late.
He had no words for what he felt. Perhaps there were no words.
I called to say good-bye, dôshalo. Depa will remember you fondly. As will we all. It is a hero’s death you go to, Mace of the Windu.
Mace showed his own teeth. “I’m not dead yet.”
Vastor’s blue-imaged head tilted a centimeter to the right. What time is it?
Mace froze.
A metallic clank echoed in his memory.
A clank that might have been deactivated vibroshields hitting the nose armor of a Sienar Turbostorm.
Or—
Not.
“Nick!” Mace’s sudden shout shocked the young Korun like a shot from a stun baton. “Hang on!”
“Hang on to what?” The arming levers on the seat ejectors flipped up; Nick swore and threw his arms around Chalk half a second before the triggers pressed themselves and explosive bolts blew the windscreen up and out and her chair shot toward the rooftops, out of balance and tumbling into the night sky as the time fuse on the proton grenade Vastor had mag-clamped to the Turbostorm’s nose precisely where its shaped charge would blow a dozen kilos of shredded armor plate through the cockpit sideways—
Detonated.
Mace found them by following his Force-link with Nick.
Double-loaded and out of balance, Chalk’s ejector chair had carried them only as far as a black rooftop, flat and sticky with tar, before crashing to spill them across it. Flames from other buildings around lit its walls and cast its square shadow toward the stars.
Nick’s silent silhouette knelt with bowed head beside her. His hand gently stroked bloody tangles of hair away from her face; tears from his eyes fell to her cheeks, as though death had finally allowed this tough girl to weep.
Mace stood at the roof’s rim and looked out across the city.
His chair had carried him a dozen blocks away. He had come here on foot.
The streets were a nightmare.
Cannonfire rained at random. Missiles that had lost their targets blasted groundcars and streets vendor stalls. People ran and scr
eamed. Many were armed. More carried bundles of valuables saved—more often looted—from burning buildings. Bodies lay sprawled on the pavement, ignored except for the curse they would get when someone tripped over them in blind panic.
He’d seen a little girl clutching the bloody tatters of a corpse’s dress while she tried to scream life back into its body.
He’d seen a Wookiee and a Yuzzem locked together, clawing and biting and shredding each other, howls of terrified rage muffled by mouthfuls of each other’s flesh and fur.
He’d seen a man not two meters in front of him chopped in half by a blasted-free hull plate that had fallen from the sky like a tabletop-sized cleaver.
From the rooftop, the capital of Haruun Kal looked like a night-shrouded volcanic plain: a vast dark field pocked with calderas that opened on hell. Clone-piloted ships streaked and spun and rolled, desperately dodging starfighters that swooped and dived and spat flame. In those contests it didn’t matter who won; the city lost.
Pelek Baw had always been a jungle, but only in a metaphoric sense. Vastor had brought the real one.
He was the real one.
And he was eating this city alive.
“I always used to…” Nick’s voice was soft. Almost expressionless. Just slow, and faintly puzzled. He still knelt over her. “I used to, y’know, kind of think… y’know, maybe someday, when I leave this fraggin’ planet…”
He shook his head helplessly. “I always kind of thought she’d be coming with me.”
“Nick—”
“Not that I asked her, you understand. No. Not that I ever had the guts to say anything to her. About that. About—” He lifted his face to the cold distant stars. “About us. It just… it was just, y’know, just never the right time. And I kind of thought she knew. I hope she knew.”
“Nick, I’m sorry. I cannot tell you how sorry I am.”
“Yeah.” Nick nodded slowly, pensively, as though each motion of his head welded another layer of armor around his grief. Then he sucked air through his teeth and shoved himself to his feet. “Lots of people are sorry tonight.”
He had her gunbelt in his hands.
He moved to the roof rim to stand beside Mace and look out across the burning city. “They’re all against us now,” he said softly. “Not just the militia and the droids.”
“Yes.”
He buckled Chalk’s gunbelt around his waist, and tied her holster down to his left thigh, to match his own on his right. “They’ve turned on us. All of them. Kar and his Akks. Depa. Even the clones.”
“The clones,” Mace said distantly, “are only following orders.”
“Orders from our enemies.”
Now it was Mace’s turn to lower his head: Mace’s turn to nod layers of armor around his own grief. “Yes.”
“And on our side—it’s us. You and me. Nobody else.” He drew her gun, smooth and fast, checking its heft and balance. He popped the clip and snapped it back in. “Y’know, Kar saved her life.”
He spun the pistol forward, then reversed it so that its own spin slipped it snugly into the holster. “Temporarily.”
Mace murmured, “It’s always temporary.”
He stared down into the pandemonium on the street. An armored groundcar filled with militia swung around a corner. The gunner on the roof-mounted EWHB-10 fired short bursts into the air to clear the road; some of the armed looters returned fire.
Nick said softly, “You got any idea what we’re gonna do?”
Before Mace could speak, Nick smiled tiredly and raised a hand. “Don’t bother. I know what you’re about to say.”
“I don’t think you do.”
Mace gave the militia vehicle below a speculative frown.
“We’re going to surrender.”
Chapter 22: Surrender
The Highland Green Washeteria was an imposing verdigris-domed edifice of gleaming white tile set off by obsidian grout. When the groundcar pulled up to it, its sign was dark and its elaborate array of arched windows were sealed by durasteel blast shutters.
A block away, the streets were choked with burning wreckage; here, all was dark and still.
The squad’s noncom peered dimly through the groundcar’s windscreen. “Dunno why the colonel’d be here,” he said doubtfully.
“Maybe he wants a bath,” Nick said dryly from the rear compartment, where he sat among the other four sweaty, tired-looking regulars. “Which wouldn’t do any of you guys any harm either, I mean, shee…”
“He’s here,” Mace said from the front seat next to the noncom. “Let’s get out.”
“I guess he could be here,” the noncom admitted reluctantly. “Okay, everybody out.”
As the squad piled out onto the walkway, the noncom muttered, “I still think we shoulda tried the Ministry. And I probably oughta put binders on you, too.”
“There’s no reason to go to the Ministry,” Mace said. “And you don’t need the binders.”
“Ahh, frag the binders anyway. Okay, let’s go.” The noncom tried the blast-shuttered door. “Locked.”
Purple energy flared. Durasteel sizzled. White-hot edges dulled to red, then darkened entirely. Mace said, “No, it isn’t.”
The noncom used the barrel of his blaster rifle as a pry bar to swing open the door. “Hey, what are you guys doing here?”
The broad sculpted lobby of the Washeteria had been turned into a heavy-weapons nest. A platoon of militia crouched, squatted, or lay behind temporary barriers of expanded permacrete. Tripod-mounted repeaters were levelled at the open door. The men’s faces were drawn, their eyes round and haunted; here and there a rifle muzzle trembled.
An oddly familiar voice replied, “A guy might want to ask you the same question.”
“Well, I captured that Jedi everybody’s looking for, didn’t I,” the noncom said. “Here, come on in.”
Mace stepped around the open door.
“You!”
It was the big man from the spaceport pro-bi showers, and he didn’t look frightened at all.
Mace said, “How’s your nose?”
The big man went for his sidearm with an impressively swift draw.
Mace’s was faster.
By the time the big man’s blaster cleared his holster, Mace was staring at him past the sizzling purple fountain of his blade. “Don’t.”
Nick said, “You guys know each other?”
The big man held the blaster steady, aimed at Mace’s upper lip. He said sourly, “Captured him, did you?”
“Uh, sure, Lieutenant—” The noncom blinked uncertainly. “Well, okay, they surrendered, but it’s the same thing, right? I mean, he’s here, ain’t he?”
“Stand away from them. All of you. Right now.”
The squad scattered.
Mace said, “I need to see Colonel Geptun.”
“Y’know, that’s a funny thing.” The big lieutenant squinted past his blaster’s sights. “Because he don’t want to see you. He told me specifically. About you. He said you might show up here. He said you’re supposed to be shot on sight.”
“Shooting at Jedi,” Mace said, “is a losing proposition.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that.”
“Lieutenant, do you have a family?”
The officer scowled. “None of your business.”
“Have you looked outside recently?”
The big man’s jaw tightened. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
Mace said, “I can stop it. Those ships your droids are chasing are piloted by men under my command. But if something were to happen to me…”
The big man’s chin drew down stubbornly. His men frowned at each other; some bit their lips or shifted their weight. One of them said doubtfully, “Hey, Lou, y’know—I got two kids, and Gemmy’s up with another—”
“Shut it.”
“Your choice is straightforward,” Mace said. “You can follow orders and open fire. Most of you will die. And your families will be left out there. Without you. And without
any hope other than that their deaths might be quick.
“Or you can bring me to Colonel Geptun. Save hundreds of thousands of lives. Including your own.
“Do your duty. Or do what’s right. It’s up to you.”
The big man ground out his words between clenched teeth. “You know the last time I could breathe okay?” he growled, pointing at his nose. “Guess. Go on. Guess.”
“Yours is not the only nose I’ve broken on this planet,” Mace said evenly. “And you deserved it more than he did.”
The big man’s knuckles whitened on the blaster.
Mace lowered his lightsaber but kept its blade humming. “Why don’t you call the colonel and ask? It is possible,” he said with half a nod back toward the bloody chaos outside, “that he has changed his mind.”
The lieutenant’s scowl thickened until it broke under its own weight. He shook his head disgustedly and let his gun arm fall to his side. “They don’t pay me enough for this.”
He came out from behind the permacrete barrier and went to the house-comm at the hostess desk. A brief conversation went on in undertones. When it was over, he looked even more disgusted. He returned his blaster to its holster and waved his empty hand at his men. “Awright, stand down, everybody. Put ’em away.”
While his men complied, he walked over to Mace. “I’ll need your weapons.”
From behind Mace’s shoulder, Nick said, “You don’t have to take our weapons.”
“Don’t quit your day job, kid.” The lieutenant held out his hand. “Come on: I can’t bring you down there armed.”
Mace silently handed over his lightsaber. Nick flushed while he dangled his pistols from one finger through each trigger guard.
The lieutenant took both pistols in one hand, and weighed Mace’s lightsaber in the palm of the other. He gave it a thoughtful frown. “The colonel said you’re Mace Windu.”
“Did he?”
The officer looked the Jedi Master in the eye. “Is it true? You’re really him? Mace Windu?”
Mace admitted it.
“Then maybe I don’t mind the nose so much.” The big man shook his head ruefully. “I guess I’m lucky to be alive at all, huh?”
“You,” Mace said, “should consider a new line of work.”
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