Star Wars 096 - Shatterpoint Page 9

  “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.

  Perfume of heavy blooms, sap from broken branches, dust from the road, sulfur dioxide rolling down from active calderas 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. Sometimes you’re wrong. Then you die. Or you have to live with having killed a friend.”

  He showed his teeth, but his smile had no warmth left in it. “And sometimes you’re right and you die anyway. Sometimes your friend isn’t a friend. You never know. You can’t know.”

  “I can. That’s part of what being a Jedi is.”

  Nick’s smile had turned knowing. “Okay. Take your pick. We’re murderers who must be brought to justice. Or we’re soldiers doing our duty. Either way, who else is gonna take you to De—uh, Master Billaba?”

  Mace growled, “This is not lost on me, either.”

  “So what are you gonna do about it?”

  He and the others watched Mace think it over.

  And, in the end, the decision Mace reached surprised none of them. It disappointed only himself.

  Nick had winked. “Welcome to Haruun Kal.”

  Now the groundcar’s dust plume slipped into a fold of the hills, and was gone.

  At the green wall above, Besh and Lesh had already vanished into the canopied shadow. Chalk and Nick waited for him just below the tree line, crouched in the scrub, watching the sky. Outlined against the green.

  The wall of jungle was green only on the outside: between the leaves and trunks, among the fronds and flowers and vines, was shadow so thick that from out here under the brilliant sun, it looked entirely black.

  Mace thought, It’s not too late to change my mind.

  He could leave Nick here. Could turn his back on Chalk and Besh and Lesh. Hike along the road, catch a ride into Pelek Baw, hop a shuttle for the next liner on the Gevarno Loop…

  He knew, somehow, that this was his last chance to walk away. That once he crossed the green wall, the only way out would be through.

  He couldn’t guess what he might find on the way—

  Except, possibly, Depa.

  …you should never have sent me here. And I should never have come…

  It was too late to change his mind after all.

  He was in the jungle already.

  He’d walked into it from the shuttle in the Pelek Baw spaceport. Maybe from the balcony on Geonosis. Or maybe he’d been just standing still, and the jungle had grown around him before he’d noticed…

  Welcome to Haruun Kal.

  His boots crunched through the husks of bracken as he toiled up the slope. Chalk nodded to him and vanished through the wall. Nick gave him a smile as if he knew what Mace had been thinking.

  “Better keep up, Master Windu. Another minute, we woulda left you standing there. You want to be alone out here? I don’t think so.”

  He was right about that. “If we should happen to get separated, is there a landmark I should make for?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just keep up.”

  “But if we do, how will I find you?”

  “You won’t.” Nick shook his head, smiling into the jungle. “If we get separated, you won’t live long enough to worry about finding us. You get it? Keep up.”

  He walked into the trees and was swallowed by the green twilight.

  Mace nodded to himself, and followed Nick into the shadows without looking back.

  Single file through the jungle: Chalk picked their path, parting gleamfronds, tipping gripleaf trailers aside with the muzzle of the Thunderbolt. Mace followed perhaps ten meters back, with Nick close behind his shoulder. Besh and Lesh brought up the rear together, switching positions from time to time, covering each other.

  Mace had to look sharp to keep track of Chalk. Once they were well into the jungle, he could no longer easily feel any of the Korunnai in the Force. His gaze had a tendency to slip aside from them, to pass over them without seeing unless he firmly directed his will: a useful talent in a place where humans were just another prey animal.

  Occasionally a Force-pulse as unmistakable as an upraised hand came from one or another of the Korunnai, and they would all stop in their tracks. Then seconds or minutes of stillness: listening to wind-rustle and animal cries, eyes searching among green shadow and greener light, reaching into the Force through a riot of lives fo
r—what? Vine cat? Militia patrol? Stobor? Then a wave of relaxation clear as a sigh: some threat Mace could not see or feel had passed, and they walked on.

  It was even hotter under the trees than in full sunlight. Any relief due to shade was canceled by the damp smothering stillness of the air. Though Mace heard a constant ruffle of leaves and branches high above, the breeze never seemed to reach down through the canopy.

  They broke out into a gap, and Nick called a halt. The jungle canopy layered a roof above them, but the folds of ground here were clear for dozens of meters around, smooth gray-gold trunks of jungle trees becoming cathedral buttresses supporting walls of leaf and vine. Upslope, a spring-fed pond brimmed over into a steamy sulfur-scented stream.

  Chalk moved into the middle of the gap, lowered her head, and went entirely still. A Force wave passed out from her and broke across Mace and thirty-five years fell away: for a delicious instant he was once more a boy returned to the company of ghôsh Windu after a lifetime in the Jedi Temple, feeling for the first time the silken warmth of a Korun’s Force-call to an akk…

  Then it passed, and Mace was again a grown man, again a Jedi Master, tired and worried: frightened for his friend, his Order, and his Republic.

  Within minutes a crashing outside the gap heralded the arrival of large beasts, and soon the jungle wall parted to admit a grasser. It lumbered into the gap on its hind legs, its four anterior limbs occupied with ripping down greenery and stuffing it into a mouth large enough to swallow Mace whole. It chewed placidly, bovine contentment in all three of its eyes. It turned these eyes toward the humans one at a time: first the right, then the left, then the crown, assuring itself that none of its three eyes spied a threat.

  Three more grassers tore their way into the gap. All four were harnessed for riding, the wide saddles cinched above and below their foreshoulders, exactly as Mace remembered. One wore a dual-saddle setup, the secondary saddle slung reversed at the beast’s midshoulder.

  All four grassers were thin, smaller than Mace remembered—the largest of them might not have topped six meters at full stretch—and their gray coats were dull and coarse: a far cry from the sleek, glossy behemoths he’d ridden all those years ago. This was as troubling as anything he’d yet seen. Had these Korunnai abandoned the Fourth Pillar?

  Nick reached up to take the knotted mounting rope of the dual-saddled grasser. “Come on, Master Windu. You’re riding with me.”

  “Where are your akks?”

  “Around. Can’t you feel them?”

  And now Mace could: a ring of predatory wariness outside the green walls: savagery and hunger and devotion tangled into a semisentient knot of Let’s-Find-Something-to-Kill.

  Nick rope-walked up the flank of the grasser and slid into the upper saddle. “You’ll see them if you need to see them. Let’s hope you don’t.”

  “Is it no longer customary to introduce a guest to the akks of the ghôsh?”

  “You’re not a guest, you’re a package.” Nick slid a brassvine goad out of its holster beside the saddle. “Mount up. Let’s get out of here.”

  Without even understanding why he did it, Mace moved away into the middle of the gap. One breath composed his mind. The next expressed his nature into the Force around him: Jedi serenity balancing buried temper, devotion to peace tipping the scales against a guilty pleasure in fighting. Nothing was hidden, here. Light and dark, pure and corrupt, hope, fear, pride, and humility: he offered up everything that made him who he was, with a friendly smile, lowered eyes, and hands open at his sides. Then he sent rippling through the Force the call he’d been taught thirty-five years before…

  And he got an answer.

  Slipping through the walls of the gap: measured tread blending seamlessly with wind-rustle and flybuzz: horned reptoid heads questing, lidless oval eyes of gleaming black—

  “Windu!” A hiss from Nick. “Don’t move!”

  Triangular fangs scissored along each other as jaws that could crush durasteel worked and chewed. Steaming drool trailed down mouth folds of scaled hide thick enough to stop a lightsaber. Splay-toed feet with shovel-sized claws churned kilos of dirt with every step. Muscular armored tails as long as their landspeeder-sized bodies whipped sinuously back and forth.

  The akk dogs of Haruun Kal.

  Three of them.

  Nick hissed again. “Back up. Just back up. Straight toward me. Very slowly. Don’t show them your back. They’re good dogs, but if you trigger their hunt–kill instincts…”

  The beasts circled, switching tails that could break Mace in half. Their eyes, hard-shelled and lidless, glittered without expression. Their breaths all stank of old meat, and their hides gave off a leathery musk, and for an instant Mace was on the sand in the Circus Horrificus in the bowels of Nar Shaddaa, surrounded by thousands of screaming spectators, at the mercy of Gargonn the Hutt—

  He understood now why he had done this. Why he’d had to.

  Because in that instant’s vision of a long-ago arena, Depa was at his side.

  Was that their last mission together? Could it be?

  It seemed so long ago…

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  I had come to Nar Shaddaa to track down exotic-animal smugglers who had sold attack-trained akk dogs to the Red Iaro terrorists of Lannik—and Depa had followed me to the Smugglers’ Moon because she had suspected I might need her help. How right she was: even together, we barely survived. It was a terrible fight, against mutated giant akks for the amusement of the Circus Horrificus patrons—

  But remembering it in the jungle, I found that my eyes filled with tears.

  On that day in Nar Shaddaa, she showed me blade work that surpassed my own; she had continued to grow and study and progress in Vaapad as well as the Force.

  She made me so very proud…

  It had been years since she had passed her Trials of Knighthood; she had long been a Jedi Master, and a member of the Council; but for that one day, we had again been Mace and Depa, Master and Padawan, pitting the lethal efficiency of Vaapad against the worst the galaxy could throw at us. We fought as we had so many times: a perfectly integrated unit, augmenting each other’s strengths, countering each other’s weaknesses, and on that day it seemed we should have never done anything else. As Jedi Knights, we were unbeatable. As Masters, members of the Council—

  What have we won? Anything?

  Or have we lost everything?

  How is it that our generation came to be the first in a thousand years to see our Republic shattered by war?

  “Windu!” Nick urgently hissed Mace back to the present.

  Mace lifted his head. Nick stared down at him from three meters above the jungle floor. “Don’t just stand there!”

  “All right.”

  Mace lifted his hands, and all three akk dogs lay down. A touch of the Force and a turn of both palms, and the three dogs rolled onto their backs, black tongues lolling to the side between razor-sharp teeth. They panted happily, gazing at him with absolute trust.

  Nick said something about dipping himself in tusker poop.

  Mace moved to one dog’s head, sliding the palm of his hand between the triangle that six vestigial horns formed on the akk’s brow. His other hand he placed just beside the akk’s lower lip, so that the creature’s huge tongue could flick Mace’s scent into the olfactory pits beside his nostrils. He moved from one to the next, and then to the last; they took his scent, and he took their Force-feel. With the severe formality such solemn occasions demanded they respectfully learned each other.

  Magnificent creatures. So different from the mutant giants that Depa and he had fought in the Circus Horrificus. In the fetid depths of Nar Shaddaa, Gargonn had taken noble defenders of the herd and twisted them into vicious slaughterers—

  And Mace could not help but wonder if something on Haruun Kal might have done the same to Depa.

  “All right,” he said, to everyone and no one. “I’m ready to go.”

  Every night, th
ey made a cold camp: no fire, and no need for one. The akks would keep predators at bay, and the Korunnai did not mind the darkness. Though militia gunships did not fly at night, a campfire was sufficiently hotter than the surrounding jungle that it could be detected by satellite sensors; Nick explained dryly that you never knew when the Balawai might decide to drop a DOKAW on your head.

  He said that the government still had an unknown number of DOKAW platforms in orbit; the De-Orbiting Kinetic Anti-emplacement Weapons were, basically, just missile-sized rods of solid durasteel with rudimentary guidance and control systems, set in orbit around the planet. Cheap to make and easy to use: a simple command to the DOKAW’s thrusters would kick it into the atmosphere on a course to strike any fixed-position coordinates.

  Not too accurate, but then it didn’t have to be: a meteorite strike on demand.

  For the Korunnai, campfires were a thing of the past.

  Many of the nocturnal insects signaled each other with light, making the night sparkle like a crowded starfield, and the different kinds of glowvines were mildly phosphorescent in varying colors; they combined into a pale general illumination not unlike faint moonlight.

  The grassers always slept standing, all six of their legs locked straight, eyes closed, still reflexively chewing.

  The Korunnai had bedrolls lashed to their saddles. Mace used a wallet tent he kept in a side pocket of his kitbag; once he split the pressure seal with his thumbnail, its internally articulated ribs would automatically unfold a transparent skin to make a shelter large enough for two people.

  They would sit or kneel on the ground, sharing their meals: once the food squares and candy they’d looted from the dead men ran out, their meals became strips of smoked grasser meat and a hard cave-aged cheese made from raw grasser milk. Their water came from funnel plants, when they could find them: waxy orange leaves that wrapped themselves in a watertight spiral two meters high, trapping rainwater to keep the plants’ shallow root system moist. Otherwise, they filled their canteens from warm streams or bubbling springs that Chalk occasionally tasted and pronounced safe to drink; even the ionic autosterilyzer in Mace’s canteen couldn’t remove the faint rotten-egg taste of sulfur.