Star Wars 096 - Shatterpoint Read online

  After they ate, Lesh would often pull a soft roll of raw thyssel bark from his pack and offer it around. Nick and Mace always refused. Chalk might take a little, Besh a little more. Lesh would use his belt knife to carve off a hunk the size of three doubled fingers and stuff it into his mouth. Roasted and refined for sale, thyssel was a mildly stimulating intoxicant, no more harmful than sweet wine; raw, it was potent enough to cause permanent changes in brain chemistry. A minute of chewing would pop sweat across Lesh’s brow and give his eyes a glassy haze, if there was enough vinelight to see it by.

  Mace learned a great deal about these young Korunnai—and, by implication, about the ULF—during these nights in camp. Nick was the leader of this little band, but not by any reason of rank. They didn’t seem to have ranks. Nick led by force of personality, and by lightning use of his acid wit, like a jester in control of a royal court.

  He didn’t talk of himself as a soldier, much less a patriot; he claimed his highest ambition was to be a mercenary. He wasn’t in this war to save the world for the Korunnai. He was in it, he insisted, for the credits. He constantly talked about how he was getting ready to “blow this bloody jungle. Out there in the galaxy, there’s real credits to be made.” It was clear to Mace, though, that this was just a pose: a way to keep his companions at arm’s length, a way to pretend he didn’t really care.

  Mace could see that he cared all too much.

  Lesh and Besh were in the war from stark hatred of the Balawai. A couple of years before, Besh had been kidnapped by jungle prospectors. His missing fingers had been cut off, one at a time, by the Balawai, to force him to answer questions about the location of a supposed treasure grove of lammas trees. When he could not answer these questions—in fact, the treasure grove was only a myth—they assumed he was just stubborn. “If you won’t answer us,” one had said, “we’ll make sure you never answer anyone else, either.”

  Besh never spoke because he couldn’t. The Balawai had cut out his tongue.

  He communicated by a combination of simple signs and an extraordinarily expressive Force projection of his emotions and attitudes; in many ways, he was the most eloquent of the group.

  Chalk proved a surprise to Mace; guessing what he had of what had happened to her, he’d expected that she would be fighting out of a personal vendetta not unlike Lesh and Besh. On the contrary: even before joining the ULF, she and some members of her ghôsh had hunted down the men who’d molested her—a five-man squad of regular militia, and their noncom—and given them the traditional Korun punishment for such crimes. This was called tan pel’trokal, which roughly translated as “jungle justice.” The guilty men were kidnapped, spirited away a hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement, then stripped of equipment, clothing, food. Everything. And released.

  Naked. In the jungle.

  Very, very few men had ever survived tan pel’trokal. These didn’t.

  So Chalk did not fight for revenge; in her own words, “Tough girl, me. Big. Strong. Good fighter. Didn’t want to be. Had to be. How I lived through what they did, me. Fought, me. Never stopped fighting. And lived through it. Now I fight so other girls don’t have to fight. Get to be girls, them. You follow? Only two ways to stop me: kill me, or show me no girls have to fight.”

  Mace understood. No one should have to be that tough.

  “I am impressed by how you move through the jungle,” Mace said to her once, in one of these cold camps. “It’s not easy to see you even when I know you’re there. Even your grasser is hard to track.”

  She grunted, chewing bark. Her dismissive shrug was about as casual as Mace’s question. That is: not very.

  “That’s an interesting way of using—” He dredged from the depths of thirty-five-year-old memory the Koruun word for the Force. Pelekotan: roughly, “world-power.” “—pelekotan. Is this something you’ve always been able to do?”

  What Mace was really asking—what he was afraid to ask outright: Did Depa teach you that?

  If she was teaching Jedi skills to people who were too old to learn Jedi discipline…people with no defense against the dark side…

  “You don’t use pelekotan,” Chalk said. “Pelekotan uses you.”

  This was not a comforting answer.

  Mace recalled that the strict, literal translation of the word was “jungle-mind.”

  He discovered that he didn’t really want to think about it. In his head, he kept hearing: …I have become the darkness in the jungle…

  The grasser’s lumbering pace was smooth and soothing; to make better time, it walked on both hind and midlimbs. This put its back at such an angle that Mace’s rear-facing saddle let him recline somewhat, his shoulders resting on the grasser’s broad, smooth spine, while Nick rode the foreshoulder saddle, peering over the top of its head.

  These long, rocking rides through the jungle struck Mace with a deep uneasiness. Facing only backward, he could never see what was ahead, only what they had already passed; and even that had meanings he could not penetrate. Much of what he looked at, he could not be wholly sure if it was plant or animal, poisonous, predatory, harmless, beneficial—perhaps even sentient enough to have a moral nature of its own, good or evil…

  He had a queasy feeling that these rides were symbolic of the war itself, for him. He was backing into it. Even in the full light of day, he had no clue what was coming, and no real understanding of what had passed. Utterly lost. Darkness would only make it worse.

  He hoped he was wrong. Symbols are slippery.

  Uncertain…

  During the day, he saw the akk dogs in glimpses through the jungle as they ranged the rugged terrain around. They went before and behind, patrolling to guard the others from jungle predators, of which these jungles hid many that were large enough to kill a grasser. The three akks were bonded to Besh, Lesh, and Chalk. Nick had no akk of his own. “Hey, growing up on the streets of Pelek Baw, what would I do with an akk? What would I feed it, people? Heh, well, actually, now that I think about it—”

  “You could find one now,” Mace said. “You have the power; I’ve felt it. You could have a Force-bonded companion like your friends do.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m too young for that kind of commitment.”

  “Really?”

  “Shee. Worse than being married.”

  Mace said distantly, “I wouldn’t know.”

  Mace would often get drowsy from the heat and the grasser’s smooth gait. What little sleep he got at night was plagued by feverish dreams, indistinctly menacing and violent. The first morning after he’d triggered his wallet tent’s autofold and tucked it back into its hand-sized pocket in his kitbag, Nick had heard his sigh and saw him rub his bleary eyes.

  “Nobody sleeps well out here,” he’d told Mace with a dry chuckle. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Day travel was a dreamlike flow from jungle gloom to brilliant sun and back again as they crossed grasser roads: the winding strips of open meadow left behind by grasser herds as they ate their way through the jungle. These were often the only times he’d see Chalk and Besh and Lesh, their grassers, and their akks. Using the akk dogs to keep in contact, they could spread out for safety.

  Open air was the only relief they got from the insects: it was the territory of dozens of species of lightning-fast insectivorous birds. The dogflies and pinch beetles and all the varieties of wasp and bee and hornet stuck mostly to the relative safety of shade. Mace’s skin was a mass of bites and stings that required considerable exercise of Jedi discipline to avoid scratching.

  The Korunnai occasionally used juices from a couple of different kinds of crushed leaves to treat particularly nasty or dangerous stings, but in general they seemed not to really notice them, in the way a person rarely notices the way boots unnaturally constrict toes. They’d had a lifetime to get used to it.

  Though they could have moved faster by following the grasser roads, frequent overflights by militia gunships made that too risky: Nick informed him that people riding gra
ssers were shot on sight. Every hour or two, the akks gave warning of approaching gunships; their keen ears could pick up the hum of repulsorlifts from more than a kilometer away, despite the jungle’s constant buzz and rustle, whir and screech, and even the distant thunder of the occasional minor volcanic eruption.

  Mace got enough glimpses of these gunships to have an idea of their capabilities. They looked to be customized versions of ancient Sienar Turbostorms: blastboats retrofitted for atmospheric close-assault work. Relatively slow but heavily armored, bristling with cannons and missile launchers, large enough to transport a platoon of heavy infantry. They seemed to travel in threes. The militia’s ability to maintain air patrols despite the metal-eating fungi and molds was explained by the straw-colored shimmer that haloed them as they flew; each gunship was large enough to carry its own surgical field generator.

  From the height of the brush and young trees on the grasser roads, the most recent ones they crossed seemed to be at least two or three standard years old. Mace mentioned this to Nick.

  He grunted grimly. “Yeah. They don’t only shoot us, y’know. When Balawai gunners get bored, they start blasting grasser herds. Just for fun. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve been stupid enough to gather more than four or five grassers in any one place. And even then we have to use akks to keep them separated enough that they don’t make easy targets.”

  Mace frowned. Without constant contact and interaction with others of their kind, grassers could become depressed, sick—sometimes even psychotic. “This is how you care for your herds?”

  Though he couldn’t see Nick’s face, he could hear the look on it. “Got a better idea?”

  Beyond winning the war, Mace had to admit he did not.

  Something else bothered him: Nick had said a couple of years—but the war had begun only a few months before. When he mentioned this, Nick replied with a derisive snort.

  “Your war began a few months ago. Ours has been going since before I was born.”

  So began Mace’s lesson in the Summertime War.

  Nick wasn’t sure how it started; he seemed to think it was an inevitable collision of lifestyles. The Korunnai followed their herds. The herds destroyed the hostile jungle. The destruction of the jungle made Korun survival possible: keeping down the drillmites, and the buzzworms and the gripleaf and vine cats and the million other ways the jungle had to kill a being.

  The Balawai, by contrast, harvested the jungle: they needed it intact, to promote the growth of all the spices and woods and exotic plant extractives that were the foundation of Haruun Kal’s entire civilized economy—and grassers were especially partial to thyssel bark and portaak leaf.

  Korun guerrillas had been fighting Balawai militia units in these jungles for almost thirty years.

  Nick thought it probably started with some bust-outs—jungle prospectors down on their luck—deciding to blame their bad luck on Korunnai and their grassers. He guessed these jups got liquored up and decided to go on a grasser hunt. And he guessed that after they wiped out the herd of some unlucky ghôsh, the men of the ghôsh discovered that the Balawai authorities weren’t interested in investigating the deaths of mere animals. So the ghôsh decided they might go on a hunt themselves: a Balawai hunt.

  “Why shouldn’t they? They had nothing left to lose,” Nick said. “With their herds slaughtered, their ghôsh was finished anyway.”

  Sporadic raids had gone back and forth for decades. The Korunnal Highland was a big place. The bloodshed might die down for years at a time, but then a series of provocations from one side or the other would inevitably spark a new flare-up. Korun children were raised to hate the Balawai; Balawai children in the Uplands were raised to shoot Korunnai on sight.

  It was a very old-fashioned war, on the Korun side. The metal-eating fungi restricted them mostly to simple weapons—usually based on chemical explosives of one kind or another—and living mounts instead of vehicles. They couldn’t even use comm units, because the Balawai government had geosynchronous detector satellites in orbit that could pinpoint comm transmissions instantly. They coordinated their activities through a system of Force communication that was hardly more sophisticated than smoke signals.

  By the time Nick was old enough to fight, the Summertime War had become a tradition, almost a sport: late in the spring, when the winter rains were long enough gone that the hills were passable, the more adventurous young men and women of the Korunnai would band together on their grassers for their yearly forays against the Balawai. The Balawai, in turn, would load up their steamcrawlers and grind out to meet them. Each summer would be a fever dream of ambush and counterambush, steamcrawler sabotage and grasser shooting. A month or so before autumn brought the rains again, everyone would go home.

  To get ready for next year.

  Some of Depa’s dazzling success was now explained, Mace realized: she didn’t have to create a guerrilla army. She’d found one ready-made.

  Blooded and hungry.

  “This Clone War of yours? Who cares? You think anybody on Haruun Kal gives a handful of snot who rules on Coruscant? We kill seppies because they give weapons and supplies to the Balawai. The Balawai support the seppies because they get stuff like those gunships. For free, too. They used to have to buy them and ship ’em in from Opari. You follow? This is our war, Master Windu.” Nick shook his head with amused contempt. “You guys are just passing through.”

  “You make it sound almost like fun.”

  “Almost?” Nick grinned down at him. “It’s the most fun you can have while you’re sober. And you don’t really have to be all that sober; look at Lesh.”

  “I admit I don’t know a lot about war. But I know it’s not a game.”

  “Sure it is. You keep score by body count.”

  “That’s revolting.”

  Nick shrugged. “Hey, I’ve lost friends. People who were as much family to me as anyone can be. But if you let the anger chew you up inside, you’re just gonna do something stupid and get yourself killed. Maybe along with other people you care about. And fear is just as bad: too cautious gets people just as dead as too bold.”

  “Your answer is to pretend it’s fun?”

  Nick’s grin turned sly. “You don’t pretend anything. You have to let it be fun. You have to find the part of yourself that likes it.”

  “The Jedi have a name for that.”

  “Yeah?”

  Mace nodded. “It’s called the dark side.”

  Night.

  Mace sat cross-legged before his wallet tent, stitching a tear in his pants left by a brush with a brassvine. He had his fake datapad propped against his thigh; its screen provided enough light that he could do the needlework without drawing blood. Its durasteel casing showed black mildew and the beginning of fungal scarring, but it had been adapted for the Haruun Kal jungles, and it still worked well enough.

  They’d finished their cheese and smoked meat. The Korunnai field-stripped their weapons by touch, reapplying portaak amber to vulnerable surfaces. They spoke together in low voices: mostly sharing opinions on the weather and the next day’s ride, and whether they might reach Depa’s ULF band before they were intercepted by an air patrol.

  When Mace finished patching his pants, he put away the stitcher, and silently watched the Korunnai, listening to their conversation. After a time, he picked up the datapad’s recording rod and flicked it on, fiddling with it for a moment to adjust its encryption protocol. When he had it set to his satisfaction, he brought the recording rod near his mouth and spoke very softly.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  I’ve read war tales in the Temple archives, from the early years of the Republic and before. According to these tales, soldiers in bivouac are supposed to speak endlessly of their parents or their sweethearts, of the food they would like to eat or wine they wish they were drinking. And of their plans for after the war. The Korunnai mention none of these things.

  For the Korunnai, there is no “after the
war.”

  The war is all there is. Not one of them is old enough to remember anything else.

  They don’t allow themselves even a fantasy of peace.

  Like that death hollow we passed today—

  Deep in the jungle, Nick turned our grasser aside from our line of march to skirt a deep fold in the ground that was choked with a riot of impossibly lush foliage. I didn’t have to ask why. A death hollow is a low point where the heavier-than-air toxic gases that roll downslope from the volcanoes can pool.

  The corpse of a hundred-kilo tusker lay just within its rim, its snout only a meter below the clear air that could have saved it. Other corpses littered the ground around it: rot crows and jacunas and other small scavengers I didn’t recognize, lured to their deaths by the jungle’s false promise of an easy meal.

  I said something along these lines to Nick. He laughed and called me a Balawai fool.

  “There’s no false promise,” he’d said. “There’s no promise at all. The jungle doesn’t promise. It exists. That’s all. What killed those little ruskakks wasn’t a trap. It was just the way things are.”

  Nick says that to talk of the jungle as a person—to give it the metaphoric aspect of a creature, any creature—that’s a Balawai thing. That’s part of what gets them killed out here.

  It’s a metaphor that shades the way you think: talk of the jungle as a creature, and you start treating it like a creature. You start thinking you can outsmart the jungle, or trust it, overpower it or befriend it, deceive it or bargain with it.

  And then you die.

  “Not because the jungle kills you. You get it? Just because it is what it is.” These are Nick’s words. “The jungle doesn’t do anything. It’s just a place. It’s a place where many, many things live…and all of them die. Fantasizing about it—pretending it’s something it’s not—is fatal. That’s your free life lesson for the day,” he told me. “Keep it in mind.”