Shatterpoint (звёздные войны) Read online

  If she saw how sorry he felt for her, she'd hate him for it.

  So, instead, he lowered his voice, speaking gently and respectfully. "I see. My question, though: how are you certain that these men have done such things?" "Balawai, them." She said it as if she were spitting out a hunk of rotten meat.

  These were the people Depa had sent for him? The sick weight in his chest gathered mass.

  He stepped away from Smiley and opened his fingers toward his lightsaber, where it lay beside the talker's throat-cut corpse. The decharged grip leapt from the ground to his hand.

  "Listen to me. All of you." The simple authority in his voice drew their eyes and held them. He said, "You will do no murder while I am in your company. Do you understand this? If you try, I will stop you. Failing that." Muscle bunched along his jaw, and his knuckles whitened on his lightsaber's handgrip.

  Smoldering threat burned the calm from his dark eyes.

  "Failing that," he said through his teeth, "I will avenge your victims." Smiley shook his head. "Urn, hello, huh? Maybe you haven't noticed, but we're at war here.

  You get it?" A thin whistling in the distance swelled to become a shriek. Other whistles joined in, rising in pitch and volume both. Sirens: militia units on their way. Smiley turned to his companions.

  "That's the bell, kids. Saddle up." The Korunnai worked faster, stripping the corpses of medpacs, food squares, blaster gas cartridges. Credits. Boots.

  "You call it war," Mace said. "But these were not soldiers." "Maybe not. Sure got some nifty gear, though, don't they?" Smiley picked up one of the over-unders and sighted appreciatively along its barrel. " Verrrry nice. How else are we gonna get stuff like this? It's not like your bloody Republic sends us any." "Is it worth their lives?" "Shee. Little judgmental, aren't we? Didn't we just slip your jiffies off the roaster? A thanks wouldn't exactly be out of line-" "It was you," Mace replied grimly, "who put my jiffies' on the roaster. And you took your time about slipping them off." Though the mockery stayed in his tone, Smiley's eyes went remote. "I don't know you, Windu. But I know who you're supposed to be. She talks about you all the time. I know what you're supposed to be able to do. If they could have taken you-" "Yes?" His head flicked a centimeter to the right: a Korun shrug. "I would have let 'em. You coming, or what?" Pelek Baw rolled past the groundcar's tinted windows. The vehicle bumped along on large toroidal balloons made of a native tree resin, and used laminated wooden bow slats as springs.

  The driver was local: a middle-aged Korun with a web of cataract across one eye and bad teeth stained red from chewing raw thyssel bark. Mace and the Korunnai sat behind him in the passenger cabin.

  Mace kept his head down, pretending to be engrossed in cobbling together an improvised adapter to recharge his lightsaber from looted blasterpacks. It didn't require all that much of his attention; his lightsaber was designed to be easily rechargeable. In an emer gency, he could even use the Force to flip a concealed lock on the inside of its hermetically sealed shell, opening a hatch that would allow him to manually switch out the power cell. Instead, he laboriously wired up leads from the blasterpacks and pretended to study their charge monitors.

  Mostly, it was an excuse to keep his head down.

  The first thing the Korunnai did once they were on their way was swiftly and efficiently field- strip the captured weapons, despite the cramped compartment and the jouncing ride. Mace guessed they must've had plenty of practice. All exposed parts, they rubbed with chunks of a translucent orange-brown resin that Smiley said was portaak amber: a natural fungicide that the ULF used to protect their weapons. This was the same resin that coated the handgrip of Depa's lightsaber.

  Smiley passed Mace a chunk. "Better rub up yours, too. And you might consider getting yourself a knife. Maybe a slug pistol. Even with the amber, powered weapons are unreliable here." He told Mace to keep the chunk, and shrugged off his thanks.

  Smiley's name was Nick Rostu. He'd introduced himself in the groundcar while he was spray-bandaging Mace's cuts and treating his bruises by a liberal use of the stolen-captured- medpac. Mace recalled a ghosh Rostu that had been loosely affiliated with ghosh Windu; that Nick had taken the Rostu name meant he must be nidosh: a clan child, an orphan. Like Mace.

  But not much like Mace.

  Unlike his companions, Nick spoke Basic without an accent. And he knew his way around the city. Probably why he seemed to be in charge. Mace gathered from their conversation that Nick had spent much of his childhood here in Pelek Baw. After what he'd seen of the Korun children in this city, he refused to let himself imagine what Nick's childhood must have been like.

  The big, emotionally ravaged girl they called Chalk. The other two looked enough alike to be brothers. The older, whose teeth showed scarlet thyssel stains, was called Lesh. The younger brother, Besh, never spoke. A knurl of scar joined the corner of his mouth to his right ear, and his left hand was missing its last three fingers.

  In the groundcar, they spoke to each other in Koruun. Eyes on his lightsaber's handgrip, Mace gave no sign that he understood most of what they said; his Koruun was rusty-learned thirty-five standard years before-but serviceable enough, and the Force offered understanding where his memory might fail. Their chatter was mostly what he would expect from young people after a firefight: a mix of Did you see when I-? and Wow, I really thought I was gonna- while they sorted through the adrenaline-charged chaos of imagery that was inevitably the memory of battle.

  Chalk glanced at Mace from time to time. What's with Jedi Rockface? she asked the others generally. I don't like him. He looks the same when he's cleaning his weapons as he did while he was using them. Makes me nervous.

  Nick shrugged at her. Would you be happier if he was like Depa? Count your blessings.

  And mind your mouth: she said he spent some time upcountry a few years ago. He might still speak some Koruun.

  Chalk's only response was a bleak silent scowl that twisted in Mace's stomach like a knife.

  Like Depa.

  He burned to ask what Nick had meant by that-but he wouldn't. He couldn't. He couldn't ask them about Depa. He was half sick with dread already, which was no state in which to meet his former Padawan and examine her mental and moral health; he would need as clear and open a mind as all his Jedi training and discipline could produce. He couldn't risk contaminating his perceptions with expectations or hopes or fears.

  They bounced and swayed through a part of town Mace didn't recognize: a tangle of shabby stone housing blocks that rose from a scree of wood-frame shanties. Though the streets were far less crowded here-the only foot traffic seemed to be surly, ragged-looking men, and furtive women peering from doorways or clustered in nervous groups-the groundcar still spent valuable minutes stopped at this corner and that bend and another angle, waiting in the blare of the steam horn for the way to clear. They'd have made better time in an airspeeder, but Mace didn't suggest it; flying, on this world, struck him as a chancy undertaking.

  Though he couldn't say for certain that it would be any more chancy than spending more time with these young Korunnai. They worried him; they had enough Force-touch to be unpredictable, and enough savagery to be dangerously powerful.

  And then there was Nick, who was at best marginally sane.

  Back in the alley, standing among the corpses with the militia on the way, Mace had asked where their transport was, and why they weren't hurrying to meet it; he didn't want to get caught in another firefight.

  "Relax. Neither do they." Nick had smirked at him. "What d'you think those sirens are about? They're letting us know they're com ing." "They don't try to catch you?" "If they did, they'd have to fight us." He'd stroked his long-barreled slugthrower as though it were a pet. "Think they're gonna do that?" "I would." "Yeah, okay. But they're not Jedi." "I've noticed." Several of the weapons the Korunnai had left on the ground. Besh had picked up Mace's Power 5, frowned at it, then shrugged and tossed it back among the bodies. Mace had moved to retrieve it, and Nick had told him not to both
er.

  "It's mine-" "It's junk," Nick countered. He picked it up. "Here, look." He'd pointed it at Mace's forehead and pulled the trigger.

  Mace managed not to flinch. Barely.

  A wisp of greenish smoke had trailed downward from the grip.

  Nick had shrugged and tossed the blaster back to the ground. "Fungus got it. Just like that second speeder bike. Some of those circuits are only nanometers thick; a few spores can eat right through? em.

  "That," Mace had told him, "was not funny." "Not as funny as if I'd been wrong, huh?" Nick chuckled. "What's the matter, Windu? Depa says you got a great sense of humor." Through clenched teeth Mace said, "She must have been joking." In the car, he looked from one to another of the Korunnai. He could trust none of them.

  Though he felt no malice from them, he'd felt none from Geptun, either. But he did feel knotted around them a strangling web of anger and fear and pain.

  Korunnai were Force-users. But they'd never had Jedi training. These radiated darkness: as though they came from some reversed universe, where light is only a shadow cast by the darkness of the stars. Their anger and pain beat against him in waves that triggered resonance harmonics in his own heart. Without knowing it, they called to emotions that Mace's lifetime of Jedi training was supposed to have buried.

  And those buried emotions were already stirring to answer.

  He recognized that he was in danger here. In ways deeper than the merely physical.

  Now, sitting in the groundcar, waiting for his lightsaber to recharge, Mace decided that he should get some things straight with these four young Korunnai. And there'd never be a better time.

  "I think we'll all speak Basic now," Mace said. "Any being will soon enough tire of listening to conversation in a foreign tongue." Which was not even a lie.

  Chalk gave him a dark look. "Here, Basic is foreign tongue." "Fair enough," Mace allowed. "Nonetheless: when I am in your company, that is what we will speak." "Shee, pretty free with the orders, aren't we? No murder, no looting, speak Basic." Nick said. "Who said you're in charge? And if we don't feel like doing what we're told? What's it gonna be, Mister There-Is-No-Emotion? Harsh language?" "I am in charge," Mace said quietly.

  This was greeted with a round of half-pitying sneers and snorts and shaken heads.

  Mace looked at Nick. "Do you doubt my ability to maintain a grip on the situation?" "Oh, very funny," Nick said, massaging his arm.

  "I won't bore you with the complexities of chain of command," Mace said. "I'll stick to facts.

  Simple facts. Straightforward. Easy to understand. Like this one: Master Billaba sent you here to bring me to her." "Says who?" "If she wanted me dead, you'd have left me in that alley. She wouldn't have sent you to divert or ditch me. She knows you're not good enough for that." "Says you." "You're under orders to deliver me." "Depa doesn't exactly give orders," Nick said. "It's more like, she just lets you know what she thinks you should do. And then you do it." Mace shrugged. "Do you intend to disappoint her?" The uncertain looks they now exchanged drove that sick knife deeper into Mace's gut. They feared her-or something to do with her-in a way that they did not fear him. Nick said, "So?" "So you need my cooperation." Mace checked the meter on the blasterpack: this one was depleted. He pulled the adapter out of his lightsaber's charge port.

  Nick sat forward, a dangerous glint sparking in his blue eyes. "Who says we need your cooperation? Who says we can't just pack you up and send you Jedi Free Delivery?" Instead of hooking in the next blasterpack, Mace balanced the lightsaber's handgrip on his palm. "I do." Another glance made the rounds, and Mace felt swift currents ripple the Force back and forth among them. The brothers blanched. Chalk's knuckles whitened on the Thunderbolt.

  Nick's face went perfectly blank. Their hands shifted on their rifles. Mace hefted the lightsaber.

  "Reconsider." He watched each of them mentally calculate the odds of bringing a weapon to bear in the cramped cabin before he could trigger his blade. "Your chances come in two shapes," he said.

  "Slim, and fat." "Okay." Nick carefully lifted empty hands. "Okay, everybody. Stand down.

  Relax, huh? Shee, how twitchy are we, huh? Listen, you need us, too, Windu-" "MasterWmdu." Nick blinked. "You're kidding, right?" "I worked very hard to gain that title, and I've worked even harder to deserve it. I prefer that you use it." "Urn, yeah. I was saying you need us, too. I mean, you're not from around here." "I was born on the north slope of Grandfather's Shoulder." "Yeah, okay. Sure. I know: you're from here. But you're still not from here. You're from the galaxy." Nick's hands clutched as though he were trying to pull words from the air. "Depa says-you know what Depa says?" "Master Billaba." "Yeah, okay, sure. Whatever. Master Billaba tries to explain it like this. It's like, you live in the galaxy, y'know? The other galaxy." The other galaxy? Mace frowned. "Go on." "She says. she says that you-all of you, the Jedi, the government, everybody-you're, like, from the Galaxy of Peace. You're from the galaxy where rules are rules, and almost everybody plays along. Haruun Kal, though, we're a whole different place, y'know? It's like the laws of physics are different. Not opposite, not up is down or black is white. Nothing that simple. Just. different. So when you come here, you expect things to work a certain way. But they don't. Because things are different, here. You understand?" "I understand," Mace said heavily, "that you're not my only option for local guides. Republic Intelligence set up a team to take me up-country-" The looks exchanged among the Korunnai stopped Mace in mid-sentence. "You know something about that upcountry team." It wasn't a question.

  "Upcountry team," Nick echoed derisively. "See, this is what I'm talking about. You just don't get it." "Don't get what?" Some of that manic glitter snuck back into his bright blue eyes. "Who do you think we left dead in that alley just now?" Mace stared.

  Nick showed him those gleaming teeth of his.

  Mace looked at Lesh. Lesh spread his hands. His thyssel-stained smile was apologetic.

  "Does talk true, Nick: things are different, here." Besh shrugged, nodding.

  Mace looked at Chalk: at her eyes, incongruously dark in her fair-skinned face; at the way she cradled the massive Merr-Sonn Thunderbolt on her lap as though it were her child.

  And many things suddenly fell into place.

  "It was you," he said to her wonderingly. "You shot Phloremirrla Tenk." The blistering afternoon sun dissolved the departing groundcar into heatshimmer and dust.

  Mace stood in the road and watched it go.

  This far from the capital, the road was little more than a pair of ruts filled with crushed rock snaking through the hills. Green foliage striped its middle: the jungle reclaiming its own from the center out. For this short patch, the road paralleled the silver twist of Grandmother's Tears, a river of snowmelt from Grandfather's Shoulder that joined with the Great Downrush a few klicks from Pelek Baw. They were well above the capital now, on the far side of the great mountain.

  Nick and the others were already hiking uphill through an ankle-high litter of bracken and scrub, weapons slung across their shoulders. The living wall of the jungle loomed twenty meters above. In the far distance, Mace could just make out a segmented line of gray blotches: probably tame grassers. The Balawai government used teams of the great beasts to clear the jungle back from the road.

  "Master Windu-" Nick had stopped on the hillside above. He beckoned for Mace to follow, and pointed at the sky. "Air patrols. We need to make the tree line." But still Mace stood in the road. Still he watched dust rise and twist in the groundcar's wake.

  Nick had said: You're from the Galaxy of Peace.

  And: things are different, here.

  A deep uneasiness coiled behind his ribs. Were he not a Jedi and immune to such things, he might call it superstitious dread. An unreasoning fear: that he had left the galaxy behind in the groundcar; that civilization itself was bouncing away down the road to Pelek Baw. Leaving him out here.

  Out here with the jungle.

  He could smell it.

  Perfu
me of heavy blooms, sap from broken branches, dust from the road, sulfur dioxide rolling down from active calderae upslope on Grandfather's Shoulder. Even the sunlight seemed to carry a scent out here: hot iron and rot. And Mace himself.

  He could smell himself sweat.

  Sweat trickled the length of his arms. Sweat beaded on his scalp and trailed down his neck, across his chest, along his spine. The tatters of his bloodstained shirt lay somewhere along the roadway, klicks behind. The leather of his vest clung to his skin, already showing salt rings.

  He had begun to sweat before they'd even left the groundcar. He had begun to sweat while Nick explained why Republic-supported partisans under the command of a Jedi Master had murdered the station boss of Republic Intelligence.

  "Tenk's been playing her own game for years now," Nick had said. "Upcountry team, my bloody saddle sores. You, Master Windu, were on your way to a seppie Intel camp in the Gevarno Cluster. It goes like this. One: she turns you over to the'team.' Two: the'team' reports an 'accident in the jungle.' Your body's never recovered-because you're getting what's left of your brains sucked out in a torture cell somewhere in Gevarno. Three: Tenk retires to a resort world in the Confederacy of Independent Systems." Mace had been shaken. Too much of it made too much sense. But when he asked what evidence Nick had of this, the young Korun had only shrugged. "This isn't a court of law, Master Windu. It's a war." "So you murdered her." "You call it murder." Nick shrugged again. "I call it slipping your jiffies-" "Off the roaster. I remember." "We've been waiting for you for days. Depa-Master Billaba-described you to us and told us to watch for you at the spaceport, but we had a little militia trouble and missed you. We didn't pick you up again until you were coming out of the Washeteria with Tenk. And we almost lost you then, too-got a little hung up in a food riot. Then before we could get to you, you managed to get your Jedi butt stunned into next year. Fighting a pitched battle with the militia on an open street in Pelek Baw is not a high-percentage survival tactic, if you know what I mean." "You couldn't have just warned me?" "Sure we could. Which woulda decloaked us to Tenk and her Balawai pals. Gotten us killed for nothing. Because you wouldn't have believed us anyway." "I'm not sure I believe you now." Mace had turned his lightsaber over in his palm, feeling the unpleasant way the portaak amber gripped his skin. "It's not lost on me that I only have your word on this. Everyone who might contradict your story is dead." "Yeah." "That doesn't seem to trouble you." "I'm used to it." Mace frowned. "I don't understand." "That's what war is," Nick said. His voice had lost its mocking edge, and sounded almost kind. "It's like the jungle: by the time the Whatever-It-Is that's moving through the trees out there is close enough that you can see for sure what it is-or who it is-you're already dead. So you make your best guess. Sometimes you're right, and you take out an enemy, or spare an ally.