Star Wars 096 - Shatterpoint Read online

  But Nick told the story like it had been just some kind of practical joke.

  Hmm. I find now another word for how I felt. For how I feel.

  Angry.

  This, too, makes meditation difficult. And risky.

  It is as well that Nick left on Galthra some hours ago. Perhaps before he returns—if he returns—I will have found a place in my mind to put these things he shared with me, where they will no longer whisper violence behind my heart.

  The whole massacre was staged.

  Not fake. The bodies were real. The death was real. But it was a setup. It was a practical joke. On me.

  Depa wanted me here.

  That’s what this has been about. From the beginning.

  That data wafer wasn’t a frame, and it wasn’t a confession. It was a lure. She wanted to draw me from Coruscant, bring me to Haruun Kal, and drop me into this nightmare jungle.

  Many of the corpses were indeed jungle prospectors, Nick told me. Jups, when they’re not harvesting the jungle, act as irregulars for the Balawai militia. They are vastly more dangerous than the gunships and the detector satellites and all the DOKAWs and droid starfighters and armies of the Separatists put together. They know the jungle. They live in it. They use it.

  They are more ruthless than the ULF.

  The rest of the corpses in that staged little scene—they were Korun prisoners. Captured by the jups. Captured and tortured and maltreated beyond my ability to describe; when the ULF caught up, the first thing the Balawai did was execute the few prisoners who were still alive. Nick tells me that none of them escaped. None of the prisoners. And none of the jups.

  The children—

  The children were Korunnai.

  This Kar Vastor—what kind of man must he be? Nick told me it was Kar Vastor who nailed that data wafer into the dead woman’s mouth with brassvine thorns. Nick told me it was Kar Vastor who persuaded the ULF to leave the corpses in the jungle. To make the scene so gruesome that I’d be sure to come here to investigate. To leave dead children—their own dead children—to the jacunas and the screw maggots and the black stinking carrion flies so full of blood they can only waddle across rotting flesh—

  Stop. I have to stop. Stop talking about this. Stop thinking about it.

  I can’t—this isn’t—

  Nothing in this world can be trusted. What you see is not related to what you get. I don’t seem to be able to comprehend any of it.

  But I’m learning. In learning, I’m changing. The more I change, the more I understand. That’s what frightens me. I shudder to think what will happen when I really begin to understand this place.

  By the time I finally get it, who will I be?

  I’m afraid that the man I was would despise the man I am becoming. I have a terrible dread that this transformation is exactly what Depa had in mind when she decided to draw me here. She said there was nothing more dangerous than a Jedi who’d finally gone sane.

  I think she is dangerous.

  I’m afraid she wants me to become dangerous, too.

  I should—I need to change the—think about something other than—

  Because I asked Nick about her.

  I couldn’t help myself. Hope blossomed along with my anger—if the holo was a setup, maybe what she’d said was no more than…atmosphere. Local color. Something.

  Despite my determination to hold myself unbiased until I could see her, speak with her, feel her essence in the Force—despite my resolve to ask nothing, and hear nothing—despite all my years of self-discipline and self-control—

  The heart has power that no discipline can answer.

  So I asked him. I told him of Depa’s words on the data wafer: how she called herself the darkness in the jungle, and how she said that she had finally gone sane.

  How I fear that in fact she has fallen to the dark, and is irretrievably mad.

  And Nick—

  And Nick—

  “Crazy?” he said with a laugh. “You’re the one who’s crazy. If she was crazy, nobody’d follow her, would they?”

  But when I asked if he meant she was all right, he responded, “That depends on what you mean by all right.”

  “I need to know if you’ve seen her act from anger, or fear. I need to know if she uses the Force for her personal gratification: for gain, or for revenge. I need to know how much hold the dark side has on her.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” he told me. “I’ve never met someone kinder or more caring than Master Billaba. She’s not evil. I don’t think she could be.”

  “This isn’t about good and evil,” I told him. “This is about the fundamental nature of the Force itself. Jedi are not moralists. That’s a common misperception. We are fundamentally pragmatic. The Jedi is altruistic less because to be so is good, than because to be so is safe: to use the Force for personal ends is dangerous. This is the trap that can snare even the most good, kind, caring Jedi: it leads to what we call the dark side. Power to do good eventually becomes just power. Naked force. An end in itself. It is a form of madness to which Jedi are peculiarly susceptible.”

  Nick answered this with a shrug. “Who knows the real reasons why anybody does anything?”

  This was not a comforting response, and the rest of what he told me was worse.

  He says the words on that crystal are just how Depa talks, now. He says she has nightmares—that screams from her tent tear through the camp. He says no one ever sees her eat—that she’s wasting away as though something inside is instead eating her…He says she has headaches that painkillers cannot touch, and sometimes cannot leave her tent for days at a time. That when she walks outside in daylight, she binds her eyes, for she cannot bear the light of the sun…

  I am sorry I asked. I am sorry that Nick told me.

  I’m sorry that he did not lie.

  It is very un-Jedi to fear the truth.

  I’ll continue the story. Putting experience into words is a gain in perspective. Which I need. And it’s a way to pass the hours of the night, which I also need. Even for a Jedi Master, accustomed to meditation and reflection—trained for it—there is such a thing as spending too much time alone with one’s thoughts.

  Especially out here.

  This outpost settlement was built at the crest of a shoulder sloping down from the ridge. The ridge here isn’t a razorback anymore, but rather a sine-wave wall of volcanic mounds. The settlement stands on a green-splashed outcrop; to either side of this jungle-clutched fist of stone are blackened washes where lava occasionally flows down from a major caldera, which is about six hundred meters above where I sit and record this. If you listen closely, you might hear the rumble. This microphone may not be sensitive enough. There—hear that? It’s ramping up for another eruption.

  These eruptions come regularly enough that the jungle doesn’t have time to reclaim the lava’s path; heat-scorched trees line the washes, with leaves cooked off on the lava side. Eruptions must not be too serious in these parts. Otherwise, why build an outpost here?

  Well—

  I suppose it could have been for the view.

  The bunker itself is slightly elevated above the rest of the compound. From where I sit in the wreckage of the doorway, I can look down over a charred mess of tumbled and broken prefab huts and the shattered perimeter wall. Pale glowvine light shows gray on the steamcrawler track that switchbacks up the side of the shoulder.

  Out across the jungle—

  I can see for kilometers up here: ghost-ripples of canopy spread below, silver and black and veined with glowvines, pocked with winking eyes of scarlet and crimson and some just dull red: open calderas, active and bubbling in this volatile region. It’s breathtaking.

  Or maybe that’s just the smell.

  Another of the ironies that have come crowding into my life: all my worry about civilians, and battles, and massacres, and having to fight and maybe kill men and women who may be only civilians, innocent bystanders, and all my arguing with Nick and everythi
ng he told me—

  All for nothing. Needn’t have worried. When we got here, there was no one left to fight.

  The ULF had been here already.

  There were no survivors.

  I will not describe the condition of the bodies. Seeing what had been done here was bad enough; I feel no urge to share it, even with the Archives.

  I will grant Nick this: the Balawai at this outpost had clearly been no innocent civilians. The Korunnai had left the bodies draped with what must have been the most prized pieces of the jups’ jewelery: necklaces of human ears.

  Korunnai ears.

  Based on the limited scavenger damage and the low decomposition, Nick guessed that the ULF band who’d done this might have passed through here no more than two or three days before. And there were certain, mmmm, signs—things done to the bodies—and echoes in the Force that don’t seem to fade away, a standing wave of power, that suggests this had been the work of Kar Vastor himself.

  The ULF guerrillas had also thoroughly looted this place; there is not a scrap of food to be found, and only useless bits and pieces of technology and equipment. The wreckage of two steamcrawlers lies tumbled downslope. The comm gear is gone as well, of course, which is why I alone am here to watch over Besh and Chalk.

  When we found the comm gear gone, Nick’s spirits collapsed. He seems to alternate despair with that manic cheerfulness of his, and it’s not always easy to guess what will trigger either state. He let himself flop to the bloodstained ground, and gave us up for dead. He returned to his mantra from the pass: “Bad luck,” he muttered under his breath. “Just bad luck.”

  Despair is the herald of the dark side. I touched his shoulder. “Luck,” I told him softly, “does not exist. Luck is only a word we use to describe our blindness to the subtle currents of the Force.”

  His response was bitter. “Yeah? What subtle current killed Lesh? Is this what your Force had planned for you? For Besh and Chalk?”

  “The Jedi say,” I replied, “that there are questions to which we can never have answers; we can only be answers.”

  He asked me angrily what that was supposed to mean. I told him: “I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher. I’m a Jedi. I don’t have to explain reality. I just have to deal with it.”

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “That’s what you’re avoiding.”

  “You have a Jedi power that can get all of us to Depa and Kar in a day? Or three? They’re marching away from us. We can’t catch up. That’s reality. The only one there is.”

  “Is it?” I let a thoughtful gaze rest on Galthra’s broad back. “She moves well through this jungle. I know that akks are not beasts of burden—but one man, alone, she might be able to carry at great speed.”

  “Well, yeah. If I didn’t have to worry about you guys—” He stopped. His eyes narrowed. “Not a chance. Not a chance, Windu! Drop it.”

  “I’ll watch over them until you get back.”

  “I said drop it! I’m not leaving you here.”

  “It’s not up to you.” I stepped close to him. Nick had to bend his neck to look up into my eyes. “I’m not arguing with you, Nick. And I’m not asking you. This is not a discussion. It’s a briefing.”

  Nick is a stubborn young man, but he’s not stupid. It didn’t take him long to understand that until he met me, he didn’t know what stubborn looked like.

  We managed to rig an improvised bareback pad for Galthra; Nick and Chalk and I persuaded Galthra, through the Force, to bear Nick on her back as she had me, and carry him swiftly through the jungle on the trail of the departed Korunnai. The three of us watched them vanish into the living night, then Besh and Chalk arranged themselves as comfortably as possible on the bunker floor, and I injected them with thanatizine.

  We all wait together, in the hope that Nick will win through the jungle, in the hope that he might find and bring back this Kar Vastor—this dangerous lor pelek, this terror of the living and mutilator of the dead—and that this man of no conscience or human feeling might use his power to save two lives.

  I wonder what Kar Vastor will think, when he arrives, and finds what I have done to the scene of his victory.

  I have spent some hours—between the time Nick left and the time I sat down here to record this entry—giving the dead a decent burial. Nick will no doubt laugh, and make some snide remark about how little I understand, how naive and unready I am for a part in this war. He’ll probably ask me if burying these people makes them any less dead. I can only reply to this imagined scorn with a shrug.

  I didn’t do it for them. I did it for me. I did it because this is the only way I have to express my reverence for the life that was torn from them, enemy or no.

  I did it because I don’t want to be the kind of man who would leave someone—like that…

  Anyone.

  I sit here now, knowing that Depa has passed within a few klicks of here; that she stood, perhaps, on this very spot. Within the past forty-eight standard hours. No matter how deeply I reach into the Force—how deeply I reach into the stone beneath and the jungle around—I can feel nothing of her. I have felt nothing of her on this planet.

  All I feel is the jungle, and the dark.

  I think of Lesh a lot. I keep seeing how he writhed on the ground, twitching in convulsions, teeth clenched and eyes rolling, his whole body twisting with furious life—but the life that twisted him was not Lesh’s. It was something that was eating him from the inside out. When I reached into the Force for him, all I felt was the jungle. And the dark.

  And then I think of Depa again.

  Perhaps I should listen more, and think less.

  The eruption seems to be strengthening. The rumbling is loud as a Pelek Baw throughway, and tremors have begun to shake the stone floor. Mmm. And rain has begun, as it often will: triggered by particulates in the smoke plume.

  Speaking of smoke—

  Among the equipment looted by the ULF would have been, no doubt, breath masks; I may miss them more than anything else. I must have a care for my lungs. On this outcrop, I’m in little danger from lava, but the gases that roll downslope from such eruptions can be caustic as well as smothering. Besh and Chalk will be safer than I. Perhaps I should risk a hibernation trance; no predator will reach us through the eruption. Predators need to breathe, too.

  And they—

  That—

  Wait, that sounded like—

  Queer. Some Haruun Kal jungle predators mimic their prey’s mating calls or cries of distress, to lure or to drive them. I wonder what kind of predator that one was: something that preys on humans, it must be. That cry almost got me. Sounded exactly like a child’s scream of terror.

  I mean, exactly.

  And now this one—

  Oh.

  Oh, no.

  That’s Basic. Those are screams.

  There are children out there.

  Mace pelted downslope, running half blind through rain and smoke and steam, navigating by ear: heading for the screams.

  Smoke from the caldera above had smothered the glowvines; his only light was the scarlet hellglow that leaked through cracks in the black crusts floating on lava flows. Rain flashed to steam a meter above the washes. A swirling red-lit cloud turned the night to blood.

  Mace threw himself into the Force, letting it carry him bounding from rock to branch to rock, flipping high over crevices, slipping past black-shadowed tree trunks and under low branches with millimeters to spare. The voices came intermittently; in between, through the downpour and the eruption and the hammering of his own heart, Mace heard a grinding of steel on stone, and the mechanical thunder of an engine pushed to the outer limits of its power.

  It was a steamcrawler.

  It lay canted at a dangerous angle over a precipice, only a lip of rock preventing a fall into bottomless darkness. One track clanked on air; the other was buried in hardening lava. Lava doesn’t behave as a liquid so much as a soft plastic: as it rolls downslope it cools, and
its piecemeal transition into solid rock can produce unpredictable changes in direction: it forms dams and blockages and self-building channels that can twist flows kilometers to either side, or even make them “retreat” and overflow an upstream channel. The immense vehicle must have been trying to climb the track to the outpost when one of the lava washes plugged, dammed itself, then diverted and swept the steamcrawler off the track, down this rainwash gully until it jammed against the lip of rock. The curl and roll of lava broke through black patches of crust around it, scarlet slowly climbing the crawler’s undercarriage.

  Though steamcrawlers were low-tech—to reduce their vulnerability to the metal-eating fungi—they were far from primitive. A kilometer below the caldera, the lava flow didn’t come close to the melting point of the advanced alloys that made up the steamcrawler’s armor and treads. But lava was filling in the gap below its flat undercarriage until the only real question was whether the rising lava would topple the steamcrawler over the lip before enough heat conducted through its armor to roast whoever was inside.

  But not everyone was inside.

  Mace skidded to a stop just a meter upslope of where the flow had cut the track. The lava had slashed through the dirt to bedrock, making the edge of the gully where Mace stood into an unstable cliff, eight meters high, above a sluggish river of molten stone; the steamcrawler was a further ten meters down to his right. Its immense headlamps threw a white glare into the steam and the rain. Mace could just barely make out two small forms huddled together on the highest point: the rear corner of the cabin’s heavily canted roof. Another crawled through the yellow-lit oblong of an open side hatch and joined them.

  Three terrified children sobbed on the cabin roof; in the Force, Mace could feel two more inside—one injured, in pain that was transforming into shock, the other unconscious. Mace could feel the desperate determination of the injured one to get the other out the open hatch before the ’crawler toppled—because the injured one inside couldn’t know that getting out the hatch wouldn’t help any of them at all. They still faced a simple choice of dooms: over the precipice or into the lava.