Star Wars 096 - Shatterpoint Read online

  Because nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who’s finally sane.

  Her voice trailed off into the jungle-mutter.

  No one moved or spoke. Mace sat with interlocked fingers supporting his chin. Yoda leaned on his cane, eyes shut, mouth pinched with inner pain. Palpatine stared solemnly through the holographic jungle, as though he saw something real beyond its boundary.

  “That’s—uh, that’s all there is.” The agent extended a hesitant hand to the holoprojector and flicked a control. The jungle vanished like a bad dream.

  They all stirred, rousing themselves, instinctively adjusting their clothing. Palpatine’s office now looked unreal: as though the clean carpeted floor and crisp lines of furniture, the pure filtered air, and the view of Coruscant that filled the large windows were the holographic projection, and they all still sat in the jungle.

  As though only the jungle were real.

  Mace spoke first.

  “She’s right.” He lifted his head from his hands. “I have to go after her. Alone.”

  Palpatine’s eyebrows twitched. “That seems…unwise.”

  “Concur with Chancellor Palpatine, I do,” Yoda said slowly. “Great risks there would be. Too valuable you are. Send others, we should.”

  “There is no one else who can do this.”

  “Surely, Master Windu”—Palpatine’s smile was respectfully disbelieving—“a Republic Intelligence covert ops team, or even a team of Jedi—”

  “No.” Mace rose, and straightened his shoulders. “It has to be me.”

  “Please, we all understand your concern for your former student, Master Windu, but surely—”

  “Reasons he must have, Supreme Chancellor,” Yoda said. “Listen to them, we should.”

  Even Palpatine found that one did not argue with Master Yoda.

  Mace struggled to put his certainty into words. This difficulty was a function of his particular gift of perception. Some things were so obvious to him that they were hard to describe: like explaining how he knew it was raining while he stood in a thunderstorm.

  “If Depa has…gone mad—or worse, fallen to the dark side,” he began, “it’s vital that the Jedi know why. That we discover what did it to her. Until we know this, no more Jedi should be exposed to it than is absolutely necessary. Also, this all might be entirely false: a deliberate attempt to incriminate her. That ambient noise on the recording…” He glanced at the agent. “If her voice was faked—say, synthesized by computer—that noise could be there precisely to blur the evidence of trickery, couldn’t it?”

  The agent nodded. “But why would someone want to frame her?”

  Mace waved this off. “Regardless, she must be brought in. And soon—before rumor of such massacres reaches the wider galaxy. Even if she had nothing to do with them, having a Jedi’s name associated with these crimes is a threat to the public trust in the Jedi. She must answer any charges before they are ever publicly made.”

  “Granted, she must be brought in,” Palpatine allowed. “But the question remains: why you?”

  “Because she might not want to come.”

  Palpatine looked thoughtful.

  Yoda’s head came up, and his eyes opened, gleaming at the Supreme Chancellor. “If rogue she has gone…to find her, difficult it will be. To apprehend her…” His voice dropped, as though the words caused him pain. “Dangerous, that will be.”

  “Depa was my Padawan.” Mace moved away from the desk and stared out the window at the shimmering twilight that slowly darkened the capital’s cityscape. “The bond of Master and Padawan is…intense. No one knows her better—and I have more experience in those jungles than any other living Jedi. I’m the only one who can find her if she doesn’t want to be found. And if she must be—”

  He swallowed, and stared at the moondisk of light scattered from one of the orbital mirrors. “If she must be…stopped,” he said at length, “I may be the only one who can do that, too.”

  Palpatine’s eyebrows twitched polite incomprehension.

  Mace took a deep breath, finding himself once more looking at his hands, through his hands, seeing only an image in his mind, sharp as a dream: lightsaber against lightsaber in the Temple’s training halls, the green flash of Depa’s blade seeming to come from everywhere at once.

  He could not unmake what he had made.

  There were no second chances.

  Her voice echoed inside him: Nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who’s finally sane, but he said only—

  “She is a master of Vaapad.”

  In the silence that followed, he studied the folds and wrinkles of his interlaced fingers, focusing his attention into his visual field to hold at bay dark dream-ghosts of Depa’s blade flashing toward Jedi necks.

  “Vaapad?” Palpatine repeated, eventually. Perhaps he’d grown tired of waiting for someone to explain. “Isn’t that some kind of animal?”

  “A predator of Sarapin,” Yoda supplied gravely. “Also the nickname it is, given by students, for the seventh form of lightsaber combat.”

  “Hmp. I’ve always heard there are only six.”

  “Six there were, for generations of Jedi. The seventh…is not well known. A powerful form it is. Deadliest of all…But dangerous it is—to its master, as well as its opponent. Few have studied. One student alone to mastery has risen.”

  “But if she’s the only master—and this style is so deadly—what makes you think—”

  “She’s not the only master, sir.” He lifted his head to meet Palpatine’s frown. “She is my only student to become a master.”

  “Your only student…” Palpatine echoed.

  “I didn’t study Vaapad.” Mace let his hands fall to his sides. “I created it.”

  Palpatine’s brows drew together thoughtfully. “Yes, I seem to recall now: a reference in your report on the treason of Master Sora Bulq. Didn’t you train him as well? Didn’t he also claim to be a master of this Vaapad of yours?”

  “Sora Bulq was not my student.”

  “Your…associate, then?”

  “And he did not master Vaapad,” Mace said grimly. “Vaapad mastered him.”

  “Ah—ah, I see…”

  “With respect, sir, I don’t think you do.”

  “I see enough to worry me, just a bit.” The warmth of Palpatine’s smile robbed insult from his words. “The relationship of Master and Padawan is intense, you said; and I well believe it. When you faced Dooku on Geonosis…”

  “I prefer,” Mace said softly, “not to talk about Geonosis, Chancellor.”

  “Depa Billaba was your Padawan. And she is still perhaps your closest friend, is she not? If she must be slain, are you so certain you can strike her down?”

  Mace looked at the floor, at Yoda, at the agent, and in the end he had to meet Palpatine’s eyes once more. It was not merely Palpatine of Naboo who had asked; this question had come from the Supreme Chancellor. His office demanded an answer.

  “May the Force grant, sir,” Mace said slowly, “that I will not have to find out.”

  Through the curved transparisteel, Haruun Kal was a wall of mountain-punched clouds beside him. It looked close enough to touch. The shuttle’s orbit spiraled slowly toward the surface: soon enough he would be able to touch it in truth.

  The insystem shuttle was only a twenty-seater, and even so it was three-quarters empty. The shuttle line had bought it used from a tour company; the tubelike passenger fuselage was entirely transparisteel, its exterior scarred and fogged with microbody pits, its interior bare except for strips of gray no-skid laid along the aisles.

  Mace Windu was the lone human. His shipmates were two Kubaz who fluted excitedly about the culinary possibilities of pinch beetles and buzzworms, and a mismatched couple who seemed to be some kind of itinerant comedy act, a Kitonak and a Pho Ph’eahian whose canned banter made Mace wish for earplugs. Or hard vacuum. Or plain old-fashioned deafness. They must have been far down on their luck, to be taking a tourist shuttle into Pelek Baw; Haru
un Kal’s capital city is a place lounge acts go to die. Passenger liners on the Gevarno Loop only stopped there at all because they had to drop into realspace anyway for the system transit.

  Mace sat as far from the others as the shuttle’s limited space allowed.

  The Jedi Master wore clothing appropriate to his cover: a stained vest of Corellian sand panther leather over a loose shirt that used to be white, and skintight black pants with wear patches of gray. His boots carried a hint of polish, but only above the ankle; the uppers were scuffed almost to suede. The only parts of his ensemble that were well maintained were the supple holster belted to his right thigh, and the gleaming Merr-Sonn Power 5 it held. His lightsaber was stuffed into the kitbag beneath his seat, disguised as an old-fashioned glow rod.

  The datapad on his lap was also a disguise: though it worked well enough for him to encrypt his journal on it, most of it was actually a miniature subspace transmitter, frequency-locked to the band monitored by the medium cruiser Halleck, onstation in the Ventran system.

  The Korunnal Highland swung into view: a vast plateau of every conceivable shade of green, skirted by bottomless swirls of cloud, crisscrossed by interlocking mountain ranges. A few of the tallest peaks were capped with white; many of the shorter mountains plumed billows of smoke and gas. The eastern half of the highland had already rolled through the terminator; when the shuttle passed into the planet’s shadow, gleams of dark red and orange specked the world like predators’ eyes beyond the ring of a campfire’s light: open calderas of the highland’s many active volcanoes.

  It was beautiful. Mace barely noticed.

  He held the recording wand of the fake datapad and spoke very, very softly.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  [Initial Haruun Kal Entry]:

  Depa’s down there. Right now.

  I shouldn’t be thinking about this. I shouldn’t be thinking about her. Not yet.

  But—

  She’s down there. She’s been down there for months.

  I can’t imagine what might have happened to her. I don’t want to imagine.

  I’ll find out soon enough.

  Focus. I have to focus. Concentrate on what I know is true while I wait for the mud to settle and the water to become clear…

  A lesson of Yoda’s. But sometimes you can’t wait.

  And sometimes the water never clears.

  I can focus on what I know about Haruun Kal. I know a lot.

  Here’s some of it:

  HARUUN KAL (Al’Har I): sole planet of the AL’HAR system. Haruun Kal is the name given to it in the language of the indigenous human population, the Korunnai (uplanders). It translates to Basic as “above the clouds.” From space, the world appears to be oceanic, with only a few green-topped islands rising from a restless multicolored sea. But this is deceptive: the sea that these islands punctuate is not liquid, but an ocean of heavier-than-air toxic gases, which plume endlessly from the planet’s innumerable active volcanoes. Only on the mountaintops and the high plateaus can oxygen-breathing life survive—and not on many of these; unless they rise far above the cloudsea, they are vulnerable to Haruun Kal’s unpredictable winds. Especially during Haruun Kal’s brief winter, when the thakiz baw’kal—the Downstorm—blows, the winds can whip the thick cloudsea high enough to scour lowlands free of oxygen breathers within hours. Its capital, PELEK BAW, is located on the sole inhabited landmass, the plateau known as the KORUNNAL HIGHLAND, and is the largest permanent settlement on this primarily jungle-covered planet. The indigenous humans live in small seminomadic tribal groups called ghôsh and avoid the settlements, which are maintained by offworlders of a wide variety of species. The Korunnai lump all offworlders and settled folk under the somewhat contemptuous category of Balawai (“downfolk”). There is a long history of unorganized local conflicts…

  This doesn’t help.

  I can’t fit what I know of Haruun Kal into a guidebook description. Too much of what I know is the color of the sunflash and the smell of the wind off Grandfather’s Shoulder, the silken ripple of a grasser’s undercoat through my fingers, the hot fierce sting of an akk dog’s Force-touch.

  I was born on Haruun Kal. Far back in the highland.

  I am a full-blooded Korun.

  A hundred generations of my ancestors breathed that air and drank that water, ate the fruit of that soil and were buried deep within it. I’ve returned only once, thirty-five standard years ago—but I have carried that world with me. The feel of it. The power of its storms. The upswelling tangle of its jungles. The thunder of its peaks.

  But it is not home. Home is Coruscant. Home is the Jedi Temple.

  I have no recollection of my infancy among the Korunnai; my earliest memory is of Yoda’s kindly smile and enormous gentle eyes close above me. It is still vivid. I don’t know how old I might have been, but I am certain I could not yet walk. Perhaps I was too young to even stand. In memory, I can see my plump infant’s hands reaching up to tug at the white straggles of hair above Yoda’s ears.

  I recall squalling—shrieking like a wounded glowbat, as Yoda prefers to describe it—as some kind of toy, a rattle, it might have been, bobbed in the air just beyond my grasp. I recall how no amount of shouting, screaming, howling, or tears could draw that rattle one millimeter closer to my tiny fist. And I recall the instant I first reached for the toy without using my hands: how I could feel it hanging there, and I could feel how Yoda’s mind supported it…and a whisper of the Force began to hum in my ears.

  My next lesson: Yoda had come to take the rattle away, and I—with my infant’s instinctive selfishness—had refused to release it, holding on with both my hands and all I could summon of the Force. The rattle broke—to my infant mind, a tragedy like the end of a world—for that had been Yoda’s way of introducing the Jedi law of nonattachment: holding too tightly to what we love will destroy it.

  And break our hearts as well.

  That’s a lesson I don’t want to be thinking about right now.

  But I can’t help myself. Not right now.

  Not while I’m up here, and Depa is down there.

  Depa Billaba came into my life by accident: one of those joyous coincidences that are sometimes the gift of the galaxy. I found her after I fought and killed the pirates who had murdered her parents; these pirates had kidnapped their victims’ lovely infant daughter. I never learned what they wanted to do with her. Or to her. I refuse to speculate.

  An advantage of Jedi mental discipline: I can stop myself from imagining such things.

  She grew to girlhood in the Temple, and to womanhood as my Padawan. The proudest moment of my life was the day I stood and directed the Jedi Council to welcome its newest member.

  She is one of the youngest Jedi ever to be named to the Council. On the day of her elevation, Yoda suggested that it was my teaching that had brought her so far while still so young.

  He said this, I think, more from courtesy than from honesty; she came so far while still so young because she is who she is. My teaching had little to do with it. I have never met anyone like her.

  Depa is more than a friend to me. She’s one of those dangerous attachments. She is the daughter I will never have.

  All the Jedi discipline in the galaxy cannot entirely overpower the human heart.

  I hear her voice again and again:…you should never have sent me here, and I should never have come…

  I can’t stop myself from reaching into the Force, though I know it is useless. Since shortly before Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi stood in front of the Council to report the rebirth of the Sith, a mysterious veil of darkness has clouded the Force. Close by—in both space and time—the Force is as it has always been: guide and ally, my invisible eyes and unseen hands. But when I try to search through the Force for Depa, I find only shadows, indistinct and threatening. The crystal purity of the Force has become a thick fog of menace.

  Again:…but what’s done can never be undone…

  I can shake m
y head till my brain rattles, but I can’t seem to drive away those words. I must clear my mind; Pelek Baw is still Separatist, and I will have to be alert. I must stop thinking about her.

  Instead, I think about the war.

  The Republic was caught entirely unprepared. After a thousand years of peace, no one—especially not us Jedi—truly believed civil war would ever come. How could we? Not even Yoda could remember the last general war. Peace is more than a tradition. It is the bedrock of civilization itself.

  This was the Confederacy’s great advantage: the Separatists not only expected war, but counted on it.

  By the time the smoldering Clone War burst into Geonosian flame, their ships were already in motion. In the weeks that followed, while we Jedi tended our wounds and mourned our dead, while the Senate scrambled to assemble a fleet—any kind of fleet—to match the power of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, while Supreme Chancellor Palpatine pleaded and bargained and sometimes had to outright threaten wavering Senators to not only stay loyal to the Republic but also support its clone army with their credits and their resources, the Separatists had fanned out across the galaxy, seeding the hyperspace lanes with their forces. The major approaches into Separatist space were picketed by droid starfighters, backed up by newly revealed capital ships: Geonosian Dreadnaughts that lumbered out from secret shipyards.

  Strategically, it was a masterpiece. Any thrust into the worlds at the core of the Confederacy would be blunted, and delayed long enough for Separatist reserves to engage it; any attack with sufficient strength to swiftly overwhelm their pickets would leave hundreds or thousands of worlds open to swift Separatist reprisal. Behind their droid-walled frontier, they could gather their forces at leisure, striking out to swallow Republic systems piecemeal.

  Even before the Republic was ready to fight, we had lost.

  Yoda is the master strategist of the Jedi Council. A life as vast as his predisposes one to see the big picture, and take the long view. He developed our current strategy of limited engagement on multiple fronts; our goal is to harass the Separatists, wear them down in a war of attrition, chip away at them and prevent them from consolidating their position. In this way, we hope to gain time for the titanic manufacturing base of the Republic to be converted to the production of ships, weapons, and other war matériel.