Shatterpoint (звёздные войны) Read online

  He revised his threat assessment again. Upward.

  Geptun shifted his weight like a man getting comfortable after a large meal. "So. Back to this Jedi in question. I'm thinking this Jedi is also someone a little on the capable side. Even, perhaps, actively dangerous. Since he answers the description of a fellow who broke several bones belonging to a pair of my best men." "Those were your best? I'm sorry." "So am I, Master Jedi. So am I. Well. I fell to wondering what business might possibly bring an important, dangerous Jedi like yourself to our little backworld of Haruun Kal. You would hardly have come so far just to commit petty assault upon peace officers. I fell to wondering if your business might possibly have something to do with another Jedi. One who seems to be running around upcoun-try, doing all sorts of un-Jedi-ish kinds of things. Like murdering civilians. Might your business have something to do with her?" "If it does?" Geptun tilted his chair back and looked at Mace over the curves of his plump cheeks.

  "We've been hunting this Jedi for some time now. I've even posted a bounty. A big bounty. It's possible that if someone were to, mm-deal with-my existing Jedi problem, I might feel fully compensated. I might not even miss that reward we were talking about earlier." RT w see.

  "Maybe you do. And maybe you don't. Here's the thing: I can't quite make up my mind." Mace waited.

  Geptun sighed irritably and settled his chair back on the floor. "You're not the easiest man to have a conversation with." This didn't call for a reply, so Mace didn't make one.

  "See? That's exactly what I'm talking about. Well. I suppose I just need a way to ease my mind, you understand? I'm right on the bubble, here: I can go either way. I'd like that reward.

  Yes, indeed I would. But given the choice, I'd prefer my, er, upcountry]z&i problem taken care of-but I'm not sure that's the best decision I could make right now. For my future. I'm wavering. You see? Teetering. I need a little reassurance. If you know what I mean?" Now Mace finally understood what they were talking about. "How much reassurance do you need?" Geptun's eyes glinted the same flat sheen as the shearplanes of the gravel in the walls. "Ten thousand." "I'll give you four." Geptun scowled at him. Mace stared back; his face might have been carved from stone.

  "I can keep you here a very long time-" Mace said, "Thirty-five hundred." "You insult me. What, am I not worth even haggling with?" "We are haggling. Thirty-two fifty." "I'm wounded, Master Jedi-" "You mean: Jedi Master," Mace said. "Three thousand." Geptun's face blackened, but after a moment wasted trying to match uncompromising stares with Mace Windu-a losing proposition-he shook his head and shrugged again. "Three thousand. I suppose one must make allowances." He sighed. "There is a war on, after all." They cut him loose at dawn.

  Mace descended the worn stone sweep of the Ministry of Justice's front steps. The high cirrus over Grandfather's Shoulder bled morning. The lightpoles had gone pale. The street below was as restlessly crowded as ever.

  He had his kitbag over his shoulder and his blaster strapped to his thigh. His lightsaber was in an inside pocket of his vest, concealed below his left arm.

  He slid into the crowd and let its current carry him along.

  Endless faces passed him, meeting his eyes incuriously or not at all. Carts clattered. Music trickled from open doorways and leaked from personal players. Once in a while the massive rumble of steam-crawler treads forced the crowds to one side or another; at such times the touch of unfamiliar flesh made his skin crawl. The smell of human sweat mingled with Yuzzem urine and the musky funk of Togorians. He smelled the unmistakable tang of t'landa Til elbow glands, and the smoke of portaak leaf roasting over lammas fires, and he could only marvel dully at how alien it all was. Of course, the alien here was Mace.

  He could not guess what he should do next.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU I should have been working my way toward Depa already. I could have headed for the Highland Green Washeteria, to make new contact with the remaining Republic Intelligence agents onworld. I could have hired my own team: though the bribe to Geptun wiped out the credit account of "KinsalTrappano"-it never contains more than a few thousand-that account is monitored by the Jedi Council. New funds would be added as required. A steamcrawler wouldn't be hard to come by, and the streets were filled with dangerous-looking people who might be willing to hire on. I could have done any number of things.

  Instead, I drifted with the current of the crowds.

  I discovered that I was afraid. Afraid of making another mistake.

  It's an unfamiliar feeling. Not until Geonosis did I truly understand that such a thing was even possible.

  At the Temple, we teach that the only true mistake a Jedi ever makes is to fail to trust the Force. Jedi do not "figure things out" or "come up with a plan." Such actions are the opposite of what being a Jedi means. We let the Force flow through us, and ride its currents to peace and justice. Most of Jedi training involves learning to trust our instincts, our feelings, as opposed to our intellects. A Jedi must learn to "unthink" a situation, to "unact": to become an empty vessel for the Force to fill with wisdom and action. We feel the truth when we stop analyzing it. The Force acts through us when we surrender all effort. A Jedi does not decide. A Jedi trusts.

  To put it another way: we are not trained to think. We are trained to know.

  But at Geonosis, our knowing failed us all.

  Haruun Kal has already taught me that the tragedy of misjudgment that was Geonosis was not an isolated event. It can happen again.

  Will happen again.

  I don't know how to stop it.

  To have come here alone made sense. but it was intellectual sense, and the intellect is a deceiver. To go after Depa myself feels right. but my feelings can no longer be trusted. The shadow on the Force turns our instincts against us.

  I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know how to decide what to do.

  There were instincts, though, that had little to do with Jedi training. It was one of these Mace followed when he felt a Hey, buddy nudge on his shoulder, and looked around to find no one there. The nudge had come through the Force.

  He scanned a sea of faces and heads and steamcrawler smoke. Limp cafe banners dripping in the moist air. A cart with a ragged mange-patched grasser in the traces. The driver flourished an elec-troprod. "Two creds, anywheres in town. Two creds!" Nearby, a Yuzzem with alcohol- bleared eyes snarled. He was harnessed to one of the two-wheeled taxicarts. He turned in the traces and snatched a human out of the seat, holding him overhead in one enormous hand while the other displayed wickedly hooked claws. His snarl translated: No money? No problem. I'm hungry.

  Another nudge- Mace got a glimpse of him this time. The crowd made one of those smoke-random rifts that let him see a hundred meters along the street: a slender Korun half Mace's age or less, darker skin, wearing the brown close-woven tunic and pants of a jungle ghoshin. Mace caught a quick flash of white teeth and a hint of startling blue eyes and then the young Korun turned and moved away up the street.

  Those startling eyes-had Mace seen him before? On the street the night before, maybe: around the time of the riot.

  Mace went after him.

  He needed a direction. This one looked promising.

  The young Korun clearly wanted him to follow; each time the crowds would close between them and Mace would lose him, another Force-nudge would draw his eyes.

  The crowds had their own pace. The faster Mace tried to move, the more resistance he met: elbows and shoulders and hips and even one or two old-fashioned straight-arms to the chest, accompanied by unfriendly assessments of his walking manners and offers to fill that particular gap in his education. To these, he responded with a simple "You don't want to fight me." He never bothered to emphasize this with the Force; the look in his eyes was enough.

  One excitable young man didn't say a word, deciding instead to communicate with a wild overhand aimed at Mace's nose. Mace gravely inclined his head as though offering a polite bow, and the young man's fist shattered against the frontal bone
of Mace's shaven skull. He briefly considered passing along some friendly advice to the excitable youth about the virtues of patience, nonviolence, and civilized behavior-or at least a mild critique of the fellow's sloppy punch-but the agony on his face as he knelt, cradling his broken knuckles, put Mace in mind of one of Yoda's maxims, that The most powerful lessons, without words are taught, so he only shrugged apologetically and walked on.

  The pressure of the crowds brought his pursuit up against the law of diminishing returns: Mace couldn't gain on the young Korun without attracting even more attention and possibly injuring any number of insufficiently polite people. Sometimes when the Korun flicked a glance back, Mace thought he might detect a hint of a smile, but he was too far away to read it: was that smile enouraging? Friendly? Merely polite? Malicious?

  Predatory?

  The Korun turned down a narrower, darker street, still shadowed with the lees of night.

  Here the crowds had given way to a pair of Yarkora sleeping off their evening's debauchery arm in arm, perilously close to a pool of vomit, and three or four aging Balawai women who had ventured out to sweep the walkstones in front of their respective tenement doorways. Their morning rite of mutual griping broke down as Mace approached. They clutched their brooms possessively, adjusted the kerchiefs that bound whatever thin hair they may have had left, and watched him in silence.

  One of them spat near his feet as he passed.

  Instead of responding, he stopped. Now off the main streets and away from the constant rumble of voice, foot, and wheel, he could hear a new sound in the morning, faint but crisp: a thin, sharp hum that pulsed irregularly, bobbing like a cup on a lazy sea.

  Repulsorlift engine. Maybe more than one.

  Echoes along the building-lined street made the sound come from everywhere. But it wasn't getting louder. And when he got another Force-nudge from Smiley up the street and moved on, it didn't get fainter, either.

  On the opposite sides of the buildings around, he thought. Pacing me.

  Maybe swoops. Maybe speeder bikes. Not a landspeeder: a land-speeder's repulsorlifts hummed a single note. They didn't pulse as the vehicle bobbed.

  This was starting to come into focus.

  He followed Smiley through a maze of streets that twisted and forked. Some were loud and thronged; most were quiet, giving out no more than muttered conversation and the thutter of polymer cycle tires. Rooftops leaned overhead, upper floors reaching for each other, eclipsing the morning into one thin jag of blue above permanent twilight.

  The twisting streets became tangled alleys. One more corner, and Smiley was gone.

  Mace found himself in a tiny, enclosed courtyard maybe five meters square. Nothing within but massive trash bins overflowing with garbage. Trash chutes veined the blank faces of buildings around; the lowest windows were ten meters up and webbed with wire. High above on the rim of a rooftop, Mace's keen eyes picked out a scar of cleaner brick: Smiley must have gone fast up a rope, and pulled it up behind him, leaving no way for Mace to follow.

  In some languages, a place like this was called a dead end.

  A perfect place for a trap.

  Mace thought, Finally.

  He'd begun to wonder if they'd changed their minds.

  He stood in the courtyard, his back to the straight length of alley, and opened his mind.

  In the Force, they felt like energy fields.

  Four spheres of cautious malice layered with anticipated thrill: expecting a successful hunt, but taking no chances. Two hung back at the far mouth of the alley, to provide cover and reserves. The other two advanced silently with weapons leveled, going for the point-blank shot.

  Mace could feel the aim points of their weapons skittering hotly across his skin like Aridusian lava beetles under his clothes.

  The repulsorlift hum sharpened and took on a direction: above to either side. Speeder bikes, he guessed. His Force perception ex panded to take them in as well: he felt the heightened threat of powerful weapons overhead, and swoops were rarely armed. One rider each. Out of sight over the rims of the buildings, they circled into position to provide crossing fire.

  This was about to get interesting.

  Mace felt only a warm anticipation. After a day of uncertainty and pretense, of holding on to his cover and offering bribes and letting thugs walk free, he was looking forward to doing a little straightforward, uncomplicated buttwhipping.

  But then he caught the tone of his own thoughts, and he sighed.

  No Jedi was perfect. All had flaws against which they struggled every day. Mace's few personal flaws were well known to every Jedi of his close acquaintance; he made no secret of them. On the contrary: it was part of Mace's particular greatness that he could freely acknowledge his weaknesses, and was not afraid to ask for help in dealing with them.

  His applicable flaw, here: he liked to fight. This, in a Jedi, was especially dangerous.

  And Mace was an especially dangerous Jedi.

  With rigorous mental discipline, he squashed his anticipation and decided to parley. Talking them out of attacking might save their lives. And they seemed to be professionals; perhaps he could simply pay for the information he wanted.

  Instead of beating it out of them.

  As he reached his decision, the men behind him reached their range. Professionals indeed: without a word, they leveled their weapons, and twin packets of galvenned plasma streaked at his spine.

  In even the best-trained human shooter there is at least a quarter-second delay between the decision to fire and the squeeze on the trigger. Deep in the Force, Mace could feel their decision even before it was made: an echo from his future.

  Before their fingers could so much as twitch, he was moving.

  By the time the blaster bolts were a quarter of the way there, Mace had whirled, the speed of his spin opening his vest. By the time the bolts were halfway there, the Force had snapped his lightsaber into his palm. At three-quarters, his blade extended, and when the blaster bolts reached him they met not flesh and bone but a meter-long continuous cascade of vivid purple energy.

  Mace reflexively slapped the bolts back at the shooters-but instead of rebounding from his blade, the bolts splattered through it and grazed his ribs and burst against a trash bin behind him so that it boomed and bucked and shivered like a cracked bell.

  Mace thought:,' might be in trouble after all.

  Before the thought could fully form in his mind, the two shooters (a distant, calculating part of Mace's brain filed that they were both human) had flipped their weapons to autoburst. A blinding spray of bolts filled the alleyway.

  Mace threw himself sideways, flipping in the air; a bolt clipped his shin, hammering his leg backward, turning his flip into a tumble, but he still managed to land in a crouch behind the cover of the alleyway's inner corner. He glanced at his leg: the bolt hadn't penetrated his boot leather.

  Stun setting, he thought. Professionals who want me alive.

  While he was trying to feel his way toward what they might try next, he noticed that his blade cast a peculiarly pale light. Much too pale.

  Even as he crouched there, staring drop-jawed into the paling shaft, it faded, flickered, and winked out.

  He thought: And this trouble I'm in just might be serious.

  His lightsaber was out of charge.

  "That's not possible," hz snarled. "It's not-" With a lurch in his gut, he got it.

  Geptun.

  Mace had underestimated him. Corrupt and greedy, yes. Stupid? Obviously not.

  "T J" I" Jedi!

  A man's voice, from the alley: one of the shooters. "Let's do this the easy way, huh? Nobody has to get hurt." If only that were true, Mace thought.

  "We got all kinds of stuff out here, Jedi. Not just blasters. We got glop. We got Nytinite. We got stun nets." But they hadn't used any yet. Mercenaries, Mace decided. Maybe bounty hunters. Not militia. Glop grenades and sleep gas were expensive; a blaster bolt cost almost nothing. So they were saving a few credits
.

  They were also giving him time to think. And he was about to make them regret it.

  "You want to know what else we got?" Mace could hear his smirk. "Look up, Jedi." Over the roof rims above, the pair of speeder bikes bobbed upward, visored pilots skylining themselves against the blue. Their forward steering vanes scattered mirror flashes of the sunrise across the courtyard floor. Their underslung blaster cannons bracketed Mace with plasma- scorched muzzles. He was completely exposed to their crossfire-but they weren't firing.