Mace trod with care. Behind him, Nick slipped through the doorway and put his back to the wall.
All was silence and death. A whole different world from the madness outside. Inside was a darker madness.
So dark he might as well be blind.
“Depa,” he said softly. “Kar. Come out. I know you’re watching me.”
His answer was a low, silky predator’s growl that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
We don’t have to be enemies.
Mace brought up his blade. He moved cautiously around the ruins of the monitor bank closest to the doorway.
Aren’t we on the same side? We’ve won the planet for you, haven’t we?
Mace reached into the Force, feeling for the emptiness below that would contain the transceiver. With each step, he worked his feet down, seeking solid footing on the floor before taking the next.
Do you really want to fight us? We are kin, you and I.
We are your own people.
“You were never my people.” Mace spoke without emotion. “A man like you will always be my enemy, no matter whose side you’re on. And I will always fight you.”
Why do they name you a Master? You have mastered only futility. You cannot possibly win.
“I don’t have to win,” Mace said. “All I have to do is fight.”
A low snarl was the only warning he got.
Nick’s guns roared flame at a hurtling dark shape that leaped from nowhere. Sparks clanged in the gloom as Mace whirled instinctively and slashed at the shape and it vanished in a dive that carried it over the console bank. Before he’d even seen what it was.
He’d never felt it coming.
Dark power swirled around him.
He let his blade shrink away and crouched between two console banks, his heart hammering. “Nick!” he called. “Did you get him?”
“Don’t think so.” Nick’s voice came out thin and tight. “Sounded like he took both on the shields. You?”
Mace smelled smoke: charred flesh. “Perhaps. A piece of him, anyway.”
“See where he came from?”
“No. I think—” Mace’s breath hissed through his teeth. “I think they’re hiding among the bodies. Stay ready.”
“You better believe it.”
The low snarling growl became mocking. Your Force can’t help you here. Here there is only pelekotan. And we are only pelekotan’s dream.
Mace crept his way silently along the console bank.
You didn’t feel me coming at you. You can’t.
“That wasn’t you,” Mace said, low.
But it was. One-seventh of me.
Your pardon: one-eighth.
He could feel the transceiver chamber now: two meters away on the far side of this console bank. Its ceiling began a meter and a half below the floor.
You have lost her. Lost her to pelekotan. Lost her to pelekotan’s dream: a world free from Balawai.
Mace muttered, “We are all Balawai here.”
He triggered his blade just long enough to stab into the leg well of the console under which he crouched, and carve an arch out of its back just large enough to crawl through. He pulled the cutaway piece free and laid it flat.
On the far side lay a knot of dead clones. Four. He had to crawl over them.
Someone had taken off their helmets. Their eyes were open.
Jango Fett’s dead face stared at him four times over.
Dead eyes looked into him and saw nothing but his guilt.
He kept moving.
The spot he needed was just ahead. Mace finally tore his attention away from the dead clones, and froze.
Someone had been carving the floor there already. Blackened hunks of the command bunker’s armor plating lay strewn around a human-sized pit already nearly a meter deep. Beside them, a slim form in tattered brown robes lay crumpled on the floor.
Her lightsaber was still in her hand.
For one giddy instant, his heart sang: she had anticipated him. She hadn’t fallen to the dark—it had been an act, all an act! She had been cutting through the floor to help him—
But it was only one instant. He knew better.
Of course she had anticipated him: she knew all there was to know about his style. She’d known exactly what his target had to be, and she hadn’t been cutting into the chamber below in order to help activate the transceiver.
She’d been going there to destroy it.
Looked like the proton grenade blast had caught her just in time. She didn’t seem to be breathing. In the blinding swirl of dark power that filled the bunker, he could not feel if she still lived.
You have gone very quiet, dôshalo. Do you think silence can save you? Do you think that because you cannot feel me, the reverse is also true?
Too much fatigue; too much pain. He had no room left in his heart for more.
He would grieve later. Now, looking at her corpse, he felt only a vague, melancholy relief that he hadn’t had to kill her himself.
Do you think there is anything about you I don’t know?
“I think,” Mace said, “that if you were all you claim, I’d already be dead.”
He pushed himself into a forward roll that brought him up to a crouch, and looked down into the hole. She’d done most of his work for him already. He could cut through with a single stroke.
You are not yet my kill.
“No? Whose kill am I, then?”
The answer to his question was a lightsaber’s emitter jammed against his belly.
Mace had time to think blankly: Oh. Not dead. Faking.
“Depa—?”
She screamed as she triggered her blade. And kept screaming as its green fire chewed a tunnel through Mace’s guts and speared out his back. His hand seized hers instinctively, locking her blade against his body so that she could not kill him by slashing it free. His own blade ignited—
But he could not strike her. Even now. Not here, so close he could kiss her instead; not while her scream spiraled up into a shriek; not while he had to look into her wide staring eyes and see no hate or rage but only stark agony.
He was going to have to do this the hard way.
He struck downward into the pit beside them, his blade slicing out a lopsided ellipse of armor plate that dropped into darkness below and clanged to an unseen floor.
“Geptun!” he roared. “NOW!”
Flashes of battle:
—shadows fleeing the bunker as swarms of screaming electric blue blaster bolts rebounding off walls shoot them to rags—
—a flood of troopers spreading into a wave through the doorway, weapons gouting lightning-colored energy, Geptun in the middle of them, head down and running, datapad cradled like a baby in his arms—
—a buzzing shield of silver flame that sliced through a blaster rifle so that it exploded and took with it the trooper’s hands—
These images burned in Mace’s brain as he fought for his life against the woman who should have been his daughter.
He brought his blade back up from the pit and turned his wrist on the forehand so that his recovery stroke took her in the temple with his lightsaber’s butt. Her fingers slipped off the blade’s activation plate and it shrank back down through his body. She howled and punched his eyesocket with her free hand, but Mace got his foot wedged between them and he shoved her away with a powerful thrust.
At the same instant both of them backflipped into the air, landing on their feet poised in perfect mirror images, their blades whipping in identically curving slashes almost too fast to see.
Blaster bolts howled around them. The air crackled with streaks and splatters of energy. Their blades flickered and whipped and no bolt touched their flesh.
Their eyes never left each other’s.
Something had torn in his guts when he did the backflip. Smoke trickled upward from the hole in his belly. He could smell it, but he felt no pain. Not yet. His blade whirred through the air.
Hers whirred faster. She advance
d.
The slashes never stopped. They would never stop. They flowed one into the next with liquid precision.
This constant near-invisible weave of lethal energy is the ready-stance of Vaapad.
“Depa,” Mace said desperately. “I don’t want to fight you. Depa, please—”
She sprang at him, screaming without words; he couldn’t know if she’d heard him. He couldn’t know if language still had meaning for her.
Then she was on him. His whole world turned to green fire.
Twenty-four troopers entered the bunker in a wedge around Colonel Geptun. Nick Rostu kept his back against the wall while he watched them die.
Akk Guards leaped over and past them, and with every leap another clone fell. The clones never stopped, never faltered, firing blaster carbines from the hip, forcing their way forward over the bodies of their comrades.
And it wasn’t only clones who died.
The Force nudged Nick, and he swung a pistol and fired without thinking. A leaping Akk Guard whirled and the slug banged sparks off his shield, but in the instant his attention was diverted he fell against the muzzle of a trooper’s DC-15 and blue energy exploded out his back.
This Akk Guard had been a man Nick knew, as he knew them all. This one’s name had been Prouk. He’d liked to gamble, and he once lost sixty credits to Nick on a bet, and he’d paid it.
Another nudge from the Force and another shot took out the knee of an Akk Guard. He crumpled on top of a dying trooper, who still had enough life left in him to hold down the trigger of his carbine and blow the akk to rags.
This was the Guard whose nose Mace had broken. His name was Thaffal.
Nick was waiting for his next shot when a massive shadow rose up right in front of him; intent on the Force, Nick hadn’t seen him coming. He said, “Whoops.”
This one’s name was Iolu. He had saved Nick’s life during a firefight, once. A long time ago.
“Hello, Nick,” Iolu said, and drove his shield’s sizzling edge toward Nick’s neck.
Depa’s blade was everywhere.
Mace backpedaled, parrying frantically, absorbing the shock of her attacks with bent arms and a two-handed grip. He was taller than she, with more reach and weight, and vastly more muscle in his upper body, but she drove him backward as though he were a child. Green flame struck through his guard, and only a frantic jerk of his head turned what would have been a brain-burning thrust into a line of char along his cheekbone.
Still he did not strike back.
“I will not kill you,” he said. “Death is not the answer to your pain.”
Her reply was a scream louder and more savage and an onslaught to match. She broke through his guard again and scorched his wrist. Another stroke burned a slice through his pants leg just above the knee.
Power roared around her, a rising storm of darkness.
Mace got it now: as each Akk Guard died, his share of pelekotan backflowed through the bonds Vastor had forged among them.
She was getting stronger.
And with each stroke of her blade, he could feel himself slipping into the shadows. He had to. She was too strong, too fast, too everything. The only way he could survive was to give more of himself to Vaapad. To give all of himself.
To sink into pelekotan’s dream.
He felt it: he had reached his own shatterpoint. And he was breaking.
The vibroshield flashed toward his neck.
Nick’s knees buckled and he bent backward like a drawn bow. Iolu’s fist grazed Nick’s nose as the horizontal vibroshield passed over the young Korun’s upturned face and bit into the wall so smoothly that the Akk Guard’s knuckles hit as well; the unexpected shock loosened his grip on the vibroshield’s activator and its hum died, leaving it stuck fast in the wall.
Before Iolu could pull it back out, Nick flipped his pistol’s muzzle up against the Akk Guard’s extended elbow.
The slug didn’t quite blow his arm off.
Iolu swayed, stunned.
Chalk’s gun in Nick’s other hand came up under Iolu’s chin. “Never liked you anyway,” Nick said, and pulled the trigger.
The corpse fell against him. Its shattered arm slipped free of the shield’s retaining straps. Nick pushed himself sideways out from under, looking for another target, and the dead Guard slid down the wall.
Geptun was nowhere to be seen. He was either dead or down with the transceiver. Either way, there was nothing left to do but fight.
A knot of clone troopers stood back-to-back, firing desperately at one lone Akk Guard who leaped and spun and slaughtered with demonic precision.
No: not an Akk Guard.
It was Kar Vastor.
Nick leveled Chalk’s gun. “This is for her, scum-packer,” he muttered. “Never liked you either.”
But her pistol was too heavy for him to hold steady. His own seemed to have gained a dozen kilos as well. “What the frag—?”
His knees turned to cloth.
He looked over at Iolu’s corpse. The other shield, one that still hung silent along his dead arm, was stained bright red. Dripping.
Nick said, “Oh.”
He looked down. A huge diagonal gash opened his tunic across his abdomen, and his legs were soaked with blood. He sagged back against the wall.
“Oh,” he said again. “Oh, nuts.”
And, in the end, he was just too tired. Too old.
Too wounded.
Through the trace of Force connection he had with Nick, Mace felt the young Korun collapse. Something broke inside his head, and all his own wounds crashed upon him.
Every cut and bruise, every cracked bone and sprained joint, the man-bite on his shoulder and the hole through his guts: all of them blossomed into silent screams.
His lightsaber went heavy, and his arms went slow. She burned a stripe across his chest, and he staggered.
His fighting spirit wasn’t destroyed. It wasn’t even far away. He could feel where it had gone. He could reach out and touch it.
It was waiting for him in the dark.
Lorz Geptun quivered uncontrollably. Crouched in the cramped chamber that was filled with the refresher-sized tranceiver, he tried not to listen to the steady diminuendo of the blaster fire above. Each gun that fell silent was one less man up there to protect his life.
His hands trembled so badly he could barely punch the keys on the codelock that sealed his datapad’s armored shell. When he finally got it open, he had to fumble in the inky shadows for the linkport on the transceiver. His shaking hands made inserting his pad’s datalink resemble threading a needle with his feet, but he got it done.
With a gasp of triumph, he keyed the droid starfighter recall sequence.
Nothing happened.
A moment later, his datapad’s screen announced:
ECM FAULT. UNABLE TO EXECUTE. ECM FAULT.
ECM: Electronic Counter-Measure.
The signal-jamming was still on.
In the Force, Mace felt Geptun’s despair. It felt like a gift.
Another man might even have smiled.
He took one last look at the darkness that called to him—
Darkness within mirroring darkness without—
And turned away.
He let his blade vanish. His arms dropped to his sides.
Depa moved in for the kill.
Mace backed away.
She leaped for him, slashing, and he slipped aside. She pressed her attack and he retreated, over bodies and through blaster-riddled wreckage of console banks, until he came hard up against a console that still had power: indicator lights flashed like droid eyes in the gloom.
The blade of green fire whirled up, poised, and struck.
He let himself collapse.
He fell to the floor at her feet, and instead of cleaving his skull, her blade slashed the console behind him in half. Cables spat blue sparks across the burned gap.
This was the console that controlled the spaceport’s signal-jamming equipment.
&nbs
p; Down in the transceiver chamber, Geptun stared at his datapad’s screen with astonished reverence, conscious of having been unexpectedly granted undeserved grace.
It read: COMMAND EXECUTED.
In the skies over Pelek Baw, as the snowcap on Grandfather’s Shoulder kindled with the first red rays of dawn, droid starfighters disengaged from clone-piloted ships and streaked back into the depths of space.
In the command bunker, the swirl of dark power crested, paused, and began to recede.
Mace lay on the floor. He didn’t think he could get up.
Depa stared down at him, her face lit jungle-green by the glow of her blade, and a single needle of light seemed to pierce the dark madness in her eyes.
“Oh, Mace…”
Her voice was a moan of astonished pain. Her blade vanished, and her arms fell limp and helpless to her sides. “Mace, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry…”
He managed to lift a hand to reach up to her. “Depa—”
“Mace, I’m sorry,” she repeated, and brought her lightsaber up to put its emitter to her own temple. “We shouldn’t have come.”
“Depa, no!”
Mace found he did have the strength to rise, to stand, even to leap for her, but he was exhausted, and wounded, and far, far too slow.
She squeezed the activator plate.
A single sharp report—like a handclap—rang out behind him, and a spark flew from the metal of her blade as it was smacked spinning from her hand.
It twisted lazily through the air and clattered among the wreckage.
She blinked dizzily, as though she couldn’t quite understand why she was still alive, then crumpled to the floor.
Mace turned toward where the sound had come from.
Sitting next to the corpse of a dead Akk Guard, his back propped against the wall, one hand pressed to his chest to hold closed a horrible wound, Nick Rostu grinned past the smoking barrel of the pistol in his other hand. “Told you…”
“Nick—”
“Told you I can shoot…” he said. His fingers opened and the gun fell to the floor; his hand dropped on top of it and his eyes drifted shut.
“Nick, I—”
The young Korun was beyond hearing.
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