Star Wars 096 - Shatterpoint Page 15

  Dead either way.

  If, as some philosophers argued, there was a deeper purpose in the universe that the Jedi served, beyond their surface social function of preserving the peace of the Republic—if there was, in fact, a cosmic reason why Jedi existed, a reason why they were granted powers so far beyond the reach of other mortals—it must have had something to do with situations like this.

  Mace opened himself to the Force. He could hear Yoda’s voice: Size matters not—which, Mace had always privately considered, was more true for Yoda than it was for any of his students. Yoda would probably just reach out, lift the steamcrawler from the gully, and casually float it up the mountain to the outpost while croaking some enigmatic maxim about how Even a volcano is as nothing, compared to the power of the Force… Mace was much less confident in his own raw power.

  But he had other talents.

  A new tremor from the eruption shook the dirt cliff under his feet. He felt it sag: undercut by the river of lava, the shaking was rapidly destroying the cliff’s structural integrity. Any second now it would collapse, sending Mace down into the river, unless he did something first.

  The something he did was to reach deep through the Force until he could feel a structure of broken rock ten meters below him and five meters in from the face. He thought, Why wait? and shoved.

  The dirt cliff shook, buckled, and collapsed.

  With a subterranean roar that buried even the thunder of the eruption and the clamor of the steamcrawler’s laboring engine, hundreds of tons of dirt and rock poured into the river of lava, organics bursting into flames that the growing landslide instantly smothered as it built itself into a huge wedge-shaped berm of raw dirt across the gully; as lava slowly bulged and climbed the upstream face, the downstream side of the cliff continued to collapse, piling over cooler lava that hardened beneath it, pushing the hotter, more liquid lava into a wave that washed around the steamcrawler’s side, welled to the lip of the precipice, then plunged in a rain of fire upon the black jungle far below.

  The landslide built into a wave of its own that filled in the gully as it rolled down toward the steamcrawler and the screaming, sobbing children—and on the very crest of that wave of dirt and rock, backpedaling furiously to keep from being sucked under by the landslide’s roll, came Mace Windu.

  Mace rode that crest while the wave sank and flattened and finally lurched to a halt, its last remnants trickling into a ridge that joined Mace’s position with the corner of the steamcrawler’s cabin. Nearly all his concentration stayed submerged in the Force, spread throughout the slide, using a wide-focus Force grip to stabilize the rubble while he scrambled down to the steamcrawler’s roof.

  On the roof were two young boys, both about six, and a girl of perhaps eight standard years. They clung to each other, sobbing, terror-filled eyes staring through their tears.

  Mace squatted beside them and touched the girl’s arm. “My name is Mace Windu. I need your help.”

  The girl sniffled in astonishment. “You—you—my help?”

  Mace nodded gravely. “I need you to help me get these boys to safety. Can you do that? Can you take the boys up the same way I came down? Climb right up the crest. It’s not steep.”

  “I—I—I don’t—I’m afraid—”

  Mace leaned close and spoke in her ear only a little louder than the hush of the rain. “Me, too. But you have to act brave. Pretend. So you don’t scare the little boys. Okay?”

  The girl scrubbed her runny nose with the back of her hand, blinking back tears. “I—I—you’re scared, too?”

  “Shh. That’s a secret. Just between us. Come on, up you go.”

  “Okay…,” she said dubiously, but she wiped her eyes and took a deep breath and when she turned to the other two children her voice had the bossy edge that seems to be the exclusive weapon of eight-year-old girls. “Urno, Nykl, come on! Quit crying, you big babies! I’m going to save us.”

  As the girl bullied the two boys up onto the face of the slide, Mace moved on to the hatchway. Though it was a side hatch, the angle of the steamcrawler aimed it at the sky. Inside, the ’crawler’s floor was sharply tilted, and the rain pounding through the open hatchway slicked the floor until it was impossible to climb.

  Down at the lowermost corner of the rectangular cabin, a boy who seemed to be barely into his teens struggled one-handed to drag a girl not much younger up the steep floor. He had a foamy wad of blood-soaked spray bandage around one upper arm, and he was trying to shove the unconscious girl ahead of him, using the riveted durasteel leg posts of the ’crawler’s seats like a ladder. But his injured arm could take no weight; tears streamed down his face as he begged the girl to wake up, wake up, give him a little help because he couldn’t get her out and he wouldn’t leave her, but if she’d just wake up—

  Her head lolled, limp. Mace saw she wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon: she had an ugly scalp wound above her hairline, and her fine golden hair was black and sticky with blood.

  Mace leaned in through the hatchway and extended his hand. “All right, son. Just take my hand. Once we get you out of here, then I can—”

  When the boy looked up, the tearful appeal on his face twisted into instant wild rage, and his plea became a fierce shriek. Mace hadn’t noticed the swing-stock blaster rifle slung around his good arm; the first hint of its existence Mace got was a burst of hot plasma past his face. He threw himself backward out the hatch and flattened against the cabin wall while the hatchway vomited blasterfire.

  The steamcrawler lurched, the hatch going even higher; his sudden movement had been enough to tip its precarious balance, toppling it toward the precipice.

  Mace bared his teeth to the night. With the Force, he seized the steamcrawler and yanked it back into place—but a squeal from above grabbed his attention. In seizing the ’crawler he’d lost his Force-hold on the landslide, and the unstable mound of dirt and rock had begun to shift under the little girl and the two boys, sending them sliding down toward the lava.

  Mace calmed his hammering heart and extended one hand; he had to close his eyes for a moment to reassert his control on the slide and stabilize it—but its shift had left it less solid than before. He could hold it for the minute or two it would take the girl and boys to reach the relative safety of the outcrop above, not much more. And now he could feel the ’crawler slowly tilting beneath him, leaning higher and higher toward the point of no return.

  From inside the cabin he could hear the boy’s terrified curses, and his shrieks about kill all you fragging kornos. Mace’s eyes drifted closed.

  This filthy war—

  The boy and the girl in the steamcrawler were about to become casualties of the Summertime War…because when the boy had looked up, he could not see that a Jedi Master had come to his rescue.

  He could see only a Korun.

  To use the Force to disarm the boy, or persuade him, would break the hold he kept upon the landslide, which might cost the lives of the three children scrambling up its face. To reason with the boy seemed impossible—the boy would know too much about what Balawai can expect at the hands of Korunnai—and it would certainly take longer than they had. To abandon them was not an option.

  Once he got the boy moving up the face of the landslide toward the others, he’d be able to bring the girl himself. But how to get the boy out?

  Mace spun the situation in his mind: he framed it as a fight for the lives of these five children. All of them. A fundamental principle of combat: Use what you’re given. How you fight depends on whom you fight. His first opponent had been the volcano itself. He’d used the power of the volcano’s weapon—the lava, where it had undercut the cliff—to hold that power at bay.

  His current opponent was not the boy, but rather the boy’s experience of the Summertime War.

  Use what you’re given.

  “Kid?” Mace called, roughening his voice. Making himself sound the way the boy would expect a Korun to sound, adopting a thick upland accent like Chalk’s.
“Kid: five seconds to toss that blaster out the hatch and come after it, you got.”

  “Never!” the boy screamed from inside. “Never!”

  “Don’t come out, you, and the next thing you see—the last thing you see, ever—is a grenade coming in. Hear me, you?”

  “Go ahead! I know what happens if we get taken alive!”

  “Kid—already got the others, don’t I? The girl. Urno and Nykl. Gonna leave them all alone, you? With me?”

  There came a pause.

  Mace said into the silence, “Sure, go ahead and die. Any coward can do that. Guts enough to live for a while, you got?”

  He was moderately sure that a thirteen-year-old boy who’d load up four other children and set out in a steamcrawler across the Korunnal Highland at night—a boy who’d rather die than leave an unconscious girl behind—had guts enough for just about anything.

  A second later, he was proven right.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  From this doorway, I can see a spray of brilliant white flares—headlamps of three, no, wait, four steamcrawlers—climbing the spine of the fold, heading for the broken track.

  Heading for us.

  Dawn will come in an hour. I hope we’ll all live that long.

  The eruptions have subsided, and the rain has trailed off to an intermittent patter. We’ve shifted some things around in the bunker. The three younger children are curled up on scavenged blankets in the back, asleep. Besh and Chalk now lie near the Thunderbolt, where I can keep an eye on them; I’m not at all sure that one of these children might not try to do them some harm. Terrel, a boy of thirteen who seems to be their natural leader, is remarkably fierce, and he still does not entirely believe that I’m not planning to torture all five of them to death. Yet even on Haruun Kal, boys are still boys: every time he stops worrying about being tortured to death, he starts pestering me to let him fire the Thunderbolt.

  I wonder what Nick would say about these civilians. Are they a myth, too? Now all my work in cleaning up this compound does not seem pointless; the children have been through enough tonight without having to see what had been done to the people who’d lived here. Without having to see the kind of thing that has probably been done to people they know, at their outpost.

  Possibly even to their parents.

  I can’t consider such questions right now. Right now, all I seem to be able to do is stare past the twisted jags of durasteel that once had been this bunker’s door, watching the steamcrawlers’ upward creep.

  I don’t need any hints from the Force to have a bad feeling about this.

  In dejarik, there is a classic maneuver called the fork, where a player moves a single holomonster into position to attack two or more of his opponent’s, so that no matter which ’monster the opponent moves to safety, the other will be eaten. Caught in the fork, one’s only choice is which piece to lose. The word has come to symbolize situations where the only choice to be made is a choice of disasters.

  We are well and truly forked.

  I know who these steamcrawlers are bringing: jungle prospectors from the same outpost as the children, fleeing the same ULF guerrillas whose attack had forced the children away—probably the same band that destroyed this outpost. I got the story from Terrel, while I was tending to his broken arm and the girl’s scalp wound.

  Their outpost had been the next one on this track, some seventy klicks to the north and east. They had come under attack by the ULF at dusk; Terrel’s father had given him the task of gathering the other children and driving them to safety.

  They’d had no way to know that the ULF had been to this outpost first.

  Terrel’s arm had been broken by either a bullet or a grenade fragment; he wasn’t sure which. He told me proudly how he managed the dual-stick controls of the steamcrawler with only one hand, and how he had crashed into grassers as he broke through the Korun skirmish line, and how he was pretty sure he’d managed to run down “at least five or six fragging kornos.”

  He says such things defiantly, as if daring me to hurt him for it.

  As if I ever would.

  The older girl, Keela, has the most serious injury. In the steamcrawler’s tumble down the gully, she was thrown from her seat. She has a skull fracture and a severe concussion. I was able to salvage a spare medpac from the ’crawler before it went over the precipice. She’s in no grave danger, now, so long as she remains quiet and gets a few days’ rest. The medpac had a new bone stabilizer, so Terrel’s arm should heal nicely. The younger children—Urno and Nykl and the brave little girl Pell—have nothing worse than a few bruises, and scraped hands and knees from scrambling up the landslide.

  So far.

  I have not bothered to maintain my pretense of belonging to the guerrillas, though I have also avoided explaining who I really am. The children seem to have decided that I’m a bounty hunter, since I don’t “act like a korno”—which is to say, I haven’t tortured and killed them, as they were all half expecting, based on the tales they’ve heard from their parents. As they were all half expecting despite being alive right now only because I saved them. They have decided, based on their vast experience of bounty hunters—courtesy of countless half-cred holodramas—that Besh and Chalk are my prisoners, and that I’m going to deliver them to Pelek Baw for a big reward.

  I have not disabused them of this notion. It’s easier to believe than the truth.

  But what should be merely a childish fancy has become unexpectedly complicated and painful; even the kindest illusion will often cut deeper than any truth. One of the younger boys—rather arbitrarily—decided that I must be “just about the greatest bounty hunter there is.” A six-year-old’s instinctive reaction, I suppose. Soon, he got into a heated discussion with his brother, who insisted that “everybody knows” Jango Fett is the greatest living bounty hunter. Which led the first boy to ask me if I am Jango Fett.

  I cannot help but wonder: if I had told them I’m a Jedi, who might this boy assume I am?

  I was saved from answering by a scornful declaration from Terrel. “He ain’t Jango Fett, stupid. Jango Fett’s dead. Everybody knows that!”

  “Jango Fett is not dead! He is not!” Tears began to well in the little boy’s eyes, and he appealed to me. “Jango Fett ain’t dead, is he? Tell him. Tell him he ain’t dead.”

  At first, all I could think to say was “I’m sorry.” And I was. I am. But the truth is the truth. “I’m sorry, but yes,” I told them. “Jango Fett is dead.”

  “See?” Terrel said with terrible thirteen-year-old scorn. “’Course he is, stupid. Some stinkin’ Jedi snuck up behind him and stabbed him in the back with one of them laser swords.”

  Somehow this hurt even more. “It didn’t happen that way. Fett was…killed in a fight.”

  “Tusker poop,” Terrel declared. “No stinkin’ Jedi could’ve took Jango Fett face to face! He was the best.”

  With this I could not argue; I could only contend that Fett had not been stabbed in the back.

  “What d’you know about it? Was you there?”

  I could not—still cannot—bring myself to tell them just how there I had been.

  And I cannot properly describe the wound Terrel’s tone has opened within me: the way he says stinking Jedi tells me more than I want to know about what Depa has done to our Order’s name on this planet. It was not so long ago that every adventurous boy and girl would have dreamed of being a Jedi.

  Now their heroes are bounty hunters.

  The line of steamcrawlers has halted half a kilometer below us—where the lava wash took out the track. This won’t stop them for long; when the cliff collapsed, it made a natural dam across the break. In the hours since the eruption, I would guess that the lava has penetrated the rocks and dirt, and cooled enough to stabilize the slide. Intelligently cautious, they’re testing its integrity before attempting to cross.

  But I know they’ll make it.

  Then what will I do?

  It seems I have no
choices left. Surrender is not an option. To save Besh and Chalk—not to mention myself—I’ll have to hold the children hostage.

  This is how far I have fallen, even I, a Jedi Master. This is what a few days in this war has brought me to: threatening the lives of children I would give my own to save.

  And if these Balawai call my bluff?

  The best outcome I can then foresee: these children will have to watch as their parents, or their parents’ friends, are killed by a Jedi.

  Best outcome—the phrase is itself a mockery. On Haruun Kal, there seems to be no such thing.

  Forked.

  And yet, in dejarik, one doesn’t get forked by accident. It’s the result of a mistake in play. But where was my mistake that left us here?

  Glow rods below. They’ve left the steamcrawlers and are advancing on foot. No one has called out. They will have tried to raise this outpost on comm; getting no answer, they’ll approach with caution. I wouldn’t be surprised if those glow rods are lashed to long sticks, to see if they draw sniper fire.

  There are a lot of them.

  Now, in desperation, I can only do as I always have, when I have faced impossible situations: I turn to Yoda’s teachings for advice and inspiration. I can summon in my mind his wise green eyes, and imagine the tilt of his wrinkled head. I can hear his voice:

  If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are…a different game you should play.

  Yes. A different game. I need a different game. New rules. New objectives. And I need it in about thirty seconds.

  Terrel? Terrel, come up here. All of you. Pell, wake up the boys. We’re going to play a game.

  [the voice of a boy, faintly]: “What kind of game?”

  A new game. I just made it up. It’s called Nobody Else Dies Today.

  [another boy’s voice, faintly]: “I was ’sleep. ’S this gonna be a fun game?”

  Only if we win.

  These Balawai may have been irregulars, but they were both experienced and disciplined. Their recon squad entered the ruined compound in three teams of two, spread over 120 degrees of arc to give them overlapping fields of fire. While glow rods still waved halfway along the slope below, these six entered in total silence and deep shadow. They must have had some kind of night-vision equipment; if the Force hadn’t let Mace feel the stark threat of their weapons’ points of aim, he wouldn’t have known they were there.