5 BLOOD FEVER
The gunship bore down on them, riding a towering fan of flame.
The grasser unleashed an earsplitting honk and threw itself into a shockingly fast sprint, bounding from rock to rock, bucking and twisting in the air. Nick unleashed an equally earsplitting stream of profanity as he wrapped his arms around its neck to hang on. Its forebody whipped back and forth, and all four of its arms windmilled in panic.
Mace gathered himself, feeling the flow of the Force, letting his mind link the path of the bucking grasser to the jets of the gunship’s flame projectors. As the gunship sailed overhead, Mace stiffened his hand into a blade and jabbed the grasser in the nerve plexus below its midshoulder.
The grasser blared a yelp like the horn of an air taxi in heavy traffic and leapt five meters sideways—into the gap between the fringes of two flame streams, so that they roared around Nick and Mace, only a few splashes igniting patches of fur on the grasser’s legs. Mace gestured, and the Force pushed air away from the burning fur, snuffing it within a bubble of vacuum.
The gunship thundered past, gouts of flame clawing toward Chalk. She slipped around to the chest of her grasser, and it cradled her in its forelimbs as it ran, shielding her with its body. Nick’s curses strangled to coughs on the thick black petrochemical smoke.
The smoke burned Mace’s eyes like acid, blinding him with tears. He used the Force to nail himself to the saddle, then by feel he flipped open the stolen medpac that hung from Nick’s belt, and let the Force tell him which spray hypo to use. He jabbed it into Nick’s back beside his spine, then triggered it against his own chest.
Nick twisted at the sting. “What the frag—?”
“Gas binder,” Mace said. Intended for emergency use during fires on shipboard, the gas binder selectively scrubbed a user’s bloodstream of a variety of toxins, from carbon monoxide to hydrogen cyanide. “Not as good as a breath mask, but it’ll keep us conscious for a few minutes—”
“We get to be wide awake while we burn to death? Great! How can I ever thank you?”
The gunship heeled over as it slewed into a curve that would bring it around for another run. Flame raked the haunches of Chalk’s grasser, and its whole flank caught fire. It screamed and threw up its hands as it pitched forward, thrashing on the burning rocks, sending Chalk tumbling hard into a boulder. Her Force-bonded akk, Galthra, bounded from crag to crag, howling fury, clawing at the air as though she wanted to reach up and drag the gunship down on top of her. Mace felt no fear from her: akks were bred on the slopes of active volcanoes, and their armored hide was tough enough to stop a lightsaber.
The gunship rounded its turn and streaked back toward Mace and Nick.
Mace reached deeper into the Force, opening himself, seeking a shatterpoint. The fluid situation in the notch pass gelled, then splintered into crystal: grassers and akks and people and gunships became nodes of stress, vectors of intersecting energy joined by flaws and fault lines. Mace’s mouth set in a grim slit.
He saw one bare chance.
The gunship could pass above them and rain fire all day long; no lightsaber was going to deflect a wash of flame-fuel. But: if the militia in the gunship wanted to take out the akks as well …
The gunship’s aft launchers coughed and concussion missiles streaked back down the pass toward Besh and Lesh. The shock of explosions made the inferno around Mace and Nick whip and jump and spit, and was answered by smaller detonations on all sides, as heat-stressed stone began to shatter. Red-hot shards of half-molten rock slashed through the flames. Wherever they landed they stuck, sizzling. Mace’s vest smoldered, and Nick was kept too busy smacking flames off his tunic and pants to even remember to curse.
Mace used the Force to unclip the grenade pack Nick had taken off the mercenaries in Pelek Baw, then he snatched the captured over–under out of its scabbard on the grasser’s harness.
Nick twisted again, eyes wild, barely hanging on. “What are you doing now?”
“Jump.”
“What—?”
With a surge of the Force Mace yanked him out of the saddle an instant before a missile took their grasser full in the chest. The explosion blasted them tumbling through the air in a cloud of vaporized flesh and bone.
Through the Force Mace felt Nick’s consciousness fuzz from the shock wave; he turned his tumble into a forward flip that landed him on his feet among the rocks. The Force whipped the over–under’s sling up his arm to his shoulder to free his hands, then caught Nick’s limp body and delivered him lightly to Mace’s arms.
Nick looked up at him with eyes that didn’t quite focus. “Wha—? Wha’ happen—?”
“Stay here,” Mace said. He tucked Nick into a gap between two house-sized boulders; their mass would take a long time to heat, even in the raging inferno. Meanwhile they’d offer shelter from the fire.
“Are you crazy?” Nick asked blurrily. “You know what kind of firepower those ruskakks pack?”
“Two Taim and Bak dual KX-Four ball turrets, port and starboard,” Mace said absently as he crouched behind the rock, slapping a Nytinite grenade into the over–under while he waited for the gunship to finish its sweep. “Twin fixed-position Krupx MG-Three mini missile tubes fore and aft, a belly-mounted Merr-Sonn Sunfire One Thousand flame projector—”
“And their armor!” Nick said. His eyes were only now starting to clear. “What do we have that can punch through that armor?”
“Nothing.”
“So what exactly do you think you’re gonna do?”
Mace said, “Win.”
The gunship hurtled past. In the bare second that Mace was in the gunners’ blind zone he stood up and launched a Nytinite grenade in a high arc. In the Force he felt its path; as it overtook the gunship, only the subtlest of nudges was required to loop it directly in front of the gunship’s starboard turbojet intake, which promptly sucked it in like a snapfish taking a bottle bug.
Metal screamed. Nytinite grenades didn’t actually detonate; they were canisters that released jets of gas. That this one was a grenade was not pertinent. What was pertinent was that a half-kilo chunk of durasteel had been sucked into turbojet fans that were rotating at roughly one bazillion rpm.
In round numbers.
A wash of purple gusted out the exhaust, followed by white-hot chunks of the turbojet’s internal fans. More superheated chunks ripped through the turbojet’s housing, and the whole engine blasted itself to shards, sending the gunship slewing wildly sideways to bounce off the face of the cliff wall.
Mace looked down at Nick. “Any questions?”
Nick appeared to be in danger of choking on his own tongue.
Mace said, “Excuse me,” and was gone.
The Force launched him over the rocks like a torpedo. He stayed low, blasting through flames too fast to get burned, skimming the slag beneath; kicking off from one boulder to another, he ricocheted across the pass toward Chalk and her aak, Galthra.
The two gunships approaching from below swooped up toward the gap. Besh’s grasser was down, kicking, on fire and screaming. Lesh’s was already just a pile of ragged meat. A missile took one of their akks in the flank; though akk hide is nearly impenetrable, the hydraulic shock of the missile’s detonation made a bloody hash of its internal organs. The akk staggered into the rocks before it fell. Besh dragged his brother through the flames into cover behind its massive armored body. The akk’s body bucked and jounced as round after round of cannonfire slammed into it, making it twitch as though still alive.
Behind Mace, the pilot of the first gunship finally recovered control, shutting down the port turbojet and bringing the craft around on repulsorlifts alone. Mace could feel Chalk recovering consciousness among the burning rocks, but he didn’t have time to do anything for her right now. Instead, he followed the drift of her awakening mind into the Force-bond she shared with Galthra. One second was enough for Mace to sound the depths of that bond: he took its full measure.
Then he just took it.
Galthra’s bond with Chalk was deep and strong, but it was a function of the Force, and Mace was a Jedi Master. Until he released the akk, Galthra’s bond would be with him.
Mace hurled himself flipping through the air as Galthra sprang down to meet him. She hit the ground already gathered for her next leap and Mace finished his flip to land standing on her back. She was not trained to carry a rider in battle, but the flow of the Force through their bond made them a single creature. Mace wedged his left foot behind her cowl spines and she sprang out into the pass, bounding a jagged path through the inferno of flame and bursting stone.
Crouching low to take some cover from Galthra’s massive skull, Mace slipped a grenade from the pack into the over–under’s launcher, then slung the weapon without firing. Behind him, he felt the forward missile ports of the damaged gunship cycle open.
Mace murmured, “Right on time.”
He and Galthra reached the crest of the pass. The two gunships in front of him roared up the slope. The one behind launched a concussion missile at Galthra’s back.
In the shaved semisecond after launch, that eyeblink when the missile seemed to hang in the air as though gathering itself for the full ignition of its main engine and the multiple dozens of standard gravities of acceleration it would pull in its lightning flight, the Force-bond between Mace and Galthra pulsed and the great akk made a sudden leap to the left.
The missile screamed past so close that its exhaust scorched Mace’s scalp.
And one little nudge in the Force—hardly more than an affectionate chuck under the chin—tipped its diamond-shaped warhead up a centimeter or two, altering its angle of attack just enough that the missile skimmed the crest of the pass instead of impacting on the burning ground. It streaked on, punching black smoke into turbulence vortices that trailed its tail fins, until the lead gunship swooped up the far side of the pass and took the missile right up its nose.
A huge white fireball knocked it rearing back like a startled grasser, and black smoke poured from the twisted gap blown in its nose armor. Its turbojets roared, and smoke whipped from its screaming repulsorlifts as its pilot fought for control. The third gunship slewed, yawing wildly as it reversed thrust and dived to avoid ramming the other’s rear end.
Mace and Galthra raced straight toward them.
As they passed the shuddering hulk of Chalk’s grasser, Mace reached for the Thunderbolt. It flipped from the ground into his arms, its power pack nestling between his feet. He cradled the massive weapon at his hip, angled the barrel at the third gunship, and held down the trigger.
Mace surfed through the flames and black stinging smoke, over the slag of melting rock, through the thunder and shrapnel shrieks of bursting stone on the back of three-quarters of a metric ton of armored predator, firing from the hip, hammering out a fountain of packeted energy that ripped its way up the side of the gunship. The Thunderbolt didn’t have the punch to penetrate the gunship’s heavy armor plating, but that didn’t matter; the roaring repeater was merely Mace’s calling card.
Galthra shot down the slope beneath the gunships and Mace turned to face them, riding backward, spraying the air with blasterfire until the Thunderbolt overheated and coughed sparks and Mace cast it aside. The third gunship fired a pair of missiles, but Mace could feel their point of aim before they squeezed the triggers, and Galthra was so fast in response to his Force commands that neither of the missiles came close enough for its detonation to have so much as mussed his hair.
If he’d had any.
Now the gunship’s side-mounted laser turrets rotated to track them, and through the Force Mace felt their targeting computers lock on. The two damaged ships reached firing position, and they also locked on. They were coordinating their fire: he could not hope to dodge. So he didn’t bother. He brought Galthra to a halt beneath him.
He stood motionless, empty-handed, waiting for them to open fire.
Waiting to give them a brief tutorial on the art of Vaapad.
Their cannons belched energy and Mace threw himself into the Force, releasing all but his intention. It was no longer Mace Windu who acted: the Force acted through him. Depa’s lightsaber snapped into his left hand while his own flipped into his right. The green cascade was a jungle-echo of the purple as they both met clawing chains of red.
On Sarapin, a Vaapad was a notoriously dangerous predator, powerful and rapacious. It attacked with its blindingly fast tentacles. Most had at least seven. It was not uncommon for them to have as many as twelve. The largest ever killed had twenty-one. The thing about a Vaapad was that you never knew how many tentacles it had until it was dead: they moved too fast to count. Almost too fast to see.
So did Mace’s.
Energy sprayed around him, but only splatters of it grazed him here and there; the rest went back at the gunship. Though the Thunderbolt hadn’t the power to penetrate their heavy armor, a Taim & Bak laser cannon is a whole different animal.
Ten bolts reached his blades. Two apiece went back at the damaged ships, bursting against their armor and knocking them reeling to break their target lock. The other six hammered the cockpit of the third gunship, blasting a gaping hole in its transparisteel viewport.
Mace dropped the lightsabers, swung the over–under forward on its sling, and fired from the hip. It belched a single grenade that the Force guided right through that hole into the cockpit. The grenade made a dull, wet-sounding whump inside the gunship. A fountain of white goo splashed out the hole.
Mace grunted to himself; he thought he’d loaded Nytinite.
Then he shrugged: Eh. Same difference.
One of the forward turbojets sucked strings of hardening glop through its intake, squealed, and chewed itself to shrapnel. The gunship lurched wildly; with the crew glued fast in the grenade’s glop, there was nothing they could do except watch in horror as their ship careened into the face of the ridge and detonated in an impressive explosion that splashed flame three hundred meters down the slope.
Mace thought, And now, for my next trick …
He released the over–under and extended his hands and both lightsabers hurtled back to his grip—
But the two damaged gunships had peeled off and were already limping away into the smoke-stained sky.
He watched them go, frowning.
He felt oddly distressed.
Unhappy.
This had been … strange. Uncomfortable.
His rigorous self-honesty wouldn’t allow him to deny the actual word that described the feeling.
It had been unsatisfying.
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU
I don’t know how long I stood there, frowning into the sky. Eventually, I recovered enough of my equanimity to slide off Galthra’s back and release my hold on her Force-bond. She bounded off, searching for Chalk upslope among the burning rocks.
Nick came stumbling down the slope, picking his way through the dying flames, avoiding the half-slagged rocks that still glowed a dull red. He seemed most impressed by the fight. Adrenaline drunk and childishly giggly, he seemed deliriously happy, bubbling over with jittery enthusiasm. I don’t recall much of what he said beyond some nonsense about me being a “walking one-man war machine.”
Something like that. I’m not sure the word he used was walking.
Most of what he said was lost in the roar that lived inside my head: a hurricane-whirl of the thunder of my heart, echoes of the battle’s explosions, and the tidal surge of the Force itself.
When he reached me, I saw that he was wounded: blood washed down his face and neck from a deep gash along the side of his head—probably a graze from a rock splinter. But he just kept on about how he’d never seen anything like me until I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“You’re bleeding,” I told him, but that dark gleam in his bright blue eyes never wavered. He kept going on about “Alone against three gunships. Three. Alone.”
I told him that I hadn’t been alone. I quoted Yoda: “ ‘My ally is the Force.’ ” He didn’t seem to understand, so I explained: “I had them outnumbered.”
What happened next I remember vividly, no matter how much I wish I could wipe it from my mind. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the two damaged gunships that by then were mere specks of durasteel soaring into the limitless sky.
Nick followed my gaze, and said, “Yeah, I know how you feel. Shame you couldn’t roast all three, huh?”
“How I feel?” I rounded on him. “How I feel?”
I had a sudden urge to punch him: an urge so powerful the effort to restrain it left me gasping. I wanted—I needed—to punch him. To punch him in the face. To feel my fist shatter his jaw.
To make him shut up.
To make him not look at me.
The understanding in his voice—the knowledge in his cold blue eyes—
I wanted to hit him because he was right. He did know how I felt.
It was an ugly shock.
As he said: I’d wanted to destroy those other gunships, too. I wanted to rip them out of the sky and watch them burn. No thought of the lives I’d already taken in the first gunship. No thought of the lives I would take in the other two. In the Force, I reached out toward the burning wreckage on the ridge face above, searching among the flames; for what, I can’t say.
I’d like to think I was feeling for survivors. Checking to see if there were any people, merely wounded, who might be saved from the wreckage. But I cannot honestly say that is true.
I might have just wanted to feel them burn.
I also cannot honestly say I’m sorry for the way the fight turned out.
Though I took their lives in self-defense, and the defense of others, neither I nor those I defended are innocents. I cannot honestly claim that my Korun companions are any more deserving of life than were the people in the gunship. What I did in the pass, I cannot call my duty as a Jedi.
What I did there had nothing to do with peace.
One might call it an accident of war: it happened that this small band of murderous guerrillas accompanied a Jedi Master, and so the spouses and children of a gunship crew have suffered a horrible loss. One might call it an accident of war … even I might call it that—
If it had been anything resembling an accident.
If I hadn’t been trying to bring that ship down. If I hadn’t felt the fever in my blood: blood fever.
The lust for victory. To win, at any cost.
Blood fever.
I feel it even now.
It’s not overpowering; I haven’t fallen that far. Yet. It’s more a preference. An expectation. An anticipation that has been disappointed.
This is bad. Not the worst it can be, but bad enough.
I have long known that I am in danger here. But only now am I beginning to understand how dark and near that danger is; I never guessed how close Haruun Kal has already brought me to that fatal brink.
It is a side effect of the Force immersion of Vaapad. My style grants great power, but at a terrible risk. Blood fever is a disease that can kill anyone it touches. To use Vaapad, you must allow yourself to enjoy the fight. You give yourself to the thrill of battle. The rush of winning. This is why so few students even attempt the style.
Vaapad is a path that leads through the penumbra of the dark side.
Here in the jungle, that shadow fringe is unexpectedly shallow. Full night is only a step away. I must be very, very careful here.
Or I may come to understand what’s happened to Depa all too well.
Mace lowered his head. The electric sizzle of combat drained from his limbs, leaving them heavy and hurting: he had a variety of superficial burns from plasma splatter and splinters of half-molten rock.
He made himself look back up the slope into the pass, through the dying flames and the black twists of fading smoke. In the pass above were dead akks, dead or wounded grassers, and Chalk and Besh and Lesh.
He recalled his Force-flash of this morning.
“Come on, settle down,” he told Nick. It was astonishing how tired he’d suddenly become. “I think we have casualties.”
They worked their way up the ramp of scree. Above, Chalk limped over to her wounded grasser and shook her head: it had been terribly burned. One whole flank was only a mass of char. She walked back up the six-meter length of its body, dropped to one knee, and stroked its head. It made a faint honk of pain and distress, and nuzzled her hand as Chalk drew her slug pistol and shot it just below its crown eye.
The pistol’s single sharp pop echoed from the cliff walls that bound the notch. To Mace, it sounded like a punctuation mark: a period for the end of the battle. The echoes made it into sardonic applause.
Besh and Lesh still huddled in the shadow of the dead akk. With the akk on one side and a huge crag on the other to shelter them from the flames, Mace thought they might have made it through.
Chalk got there before Nick and Mace. All the way down from the corpse of her grasser, her eyes stayed locked on where the brothers must have been, and from her face Mace could tell that what she saw was bad. She glanced over at Nick as he and Mace came up, and she gave that same slow expressionless shake of the head.
Besh sat on the ground by the dead akk’s head. Hugging his knees. Rocking back and forth. Scattered on the ground around him were contents of a standard medpac: hand scanner, spray hypos and bandages, bone stabilizers. He didn’t seem to be injured, but he was pale as a dead man, and his eyes were round and blankly staring.
Lesh was in convulsions.
His face had twisted into a rigid mask, a blind gape at the empty afternoon sky. He bucked and writhed, hands clutching spastically, heels drumming the rocks. Mace’s first thought was head wound—shrapnel or rock splinters in the skull could trigger such seizures—and he couldn’t understand why Nick and Chalk and his own brother just stood as though they were helpless to do anything but watch him suffer. Dropping to a knee, Mace reached for the medpac scanner. Chalk said, “Leave it.”
Mace looked up at her. She gave him the head shake. “Dead already.”
Mace picked up the scanner anyway, and slid the medpac cover open to activate the display. The readout said Lesh wasn’t wounded.
Unidentified bloodborne parasites had collected in his central nervous system. They had now entered a new stage in their life cycle.
They were eating his brain.
The previous night in the wallet tent made sense to Mace now: Lesh must have been sick with these parasites already. And Mace had thought it was nothing but stress and thyssel intoxication.
“Fever wasps,” Nick said hoarsely. He was almost as pale as Besh. He could face violent death with a wink and a sarcastic one-liner, but this had his face shining with pale sweat. He stank of fear. “No telling when he might have been stung. Thyssel chewers go faster. The larvae like the bark. When they hatch—”
He swallowed and his eyes went thin. He had to look away. “They’ll hatch from his skull. Through his skull. Like an, an, an eggshell …”
The pure uncomplicated horror on his face told Mace this wouldn’t be the first time he’d seen it happen.
Mace set the medpac on a cool spot by the dead akk. “It says here he can still be saved.” It took only a second to charge a spray hypo with thanatizine. “We can put him in suspended animation. Slow down the … wasp larvae … until we can get him to Pelek Baw and a full hospital. Even if he’s identified—”
Besh looked up at him, and shook his head in a mute No.
Mace brushed past him and knelt at Lesh’s side. “We can save him, Besh. Maybe it’ll mean giving him up to the militia, but at least he’ll be alive.”
Besh caught Mace’s arm. His eyes were raw, spidered with blood. Again, he shook his head.
“Master Windu.” Nick picked up the medpac case and glanced at the readout. “Lesh is way more advanced than this thing says.”
“Medpac scanners are extremely reliable. I can’t imagine it’s wrong.”
“It’s not wrong,” Nick said softly. He turned the case so that Mace could check the screen again. “These aren’t Lesh’s readings.”
“What?”
Besh, looking at the ground, touched his own chest with the tips of his fingers, then sagged; he seemed to crumple in on himself, breath leaving him along with hope and fear. His Force aura shaded into black despair.
Mace looked from Besh to Nick and back again, and then at Lesh spasming on the rocks, and then at the spray hypo still clutched nervelessly in his hand. Not because the jungle kills you, Nick had said. Just because it is what it is.
Nick retrieved the medpac’s scanner and waved it near Mace’s head. “You’re okay,” he said thinly, licking pale sweat from his upper lip. “No sign of infestation.” He turned to Chalk, frowning down at the medpac’s readout.
His shoulders slumped and his hand started to shake.
He had no words, but he didn’t need any. She read her fate on his face.
She stiffened and her mouth went thin and hard. Then she turned away and marched downslope.
“Chalk—” Nick called after her helplessly. “Chalk, wait—”
“Getting the Thunderbolt, me.” Her voice was squeezed flat, as unemotional as a navcomp’s vocabulator. “Good weapon. Will need it, you.”
Nick turned his stricken look on Mace. “Master Windu—” He held out the medpac scanner imploringly. “Don’t make me do my own reading, huh?”
Mace quickly scanned Nick’s spine and skull. The readings indicated a clear negative, but Nick didn’t seem much relieved.
“Yeah, well,” he said with understated bitterness, “if I was gonna die in the next day or two, I wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of them.”
“Taking care of them?” Mace said. “Is there a treatment?”
“Yeah.” Nick drew his pistol. “I got their treatment right here.”
“That’s your answer?” Mace stepped in front of him. “Kill your friends?”
“Just Lesh,” he said, his voice grim and hard, even though it trembled a little, like his hand. He didn’t have Chalk’s mental toughness. His eyes watered, and his face twisted, and he could barely make himself look at his friends. “Time enough to take care of Besh and Chalk when they start the twitches.”
Mace still couldn’t believe Nick was serious. “You want to just shoot them? Like Chalk’s grasser?”
“Not like her grasser,” Nick said. His face had gone gray. “Not in the head. Scatters the larvae. Some of them will be developed enough to be dangerous.” He coughed. “To us.”
“So it’s not enough that he dies.” Mace breathed Jedi discipline into a wall around his heart: to lock down his empathic horror at the gray rictus of Lesh’s face. Pink-tinged foam bubbled from Lesh’s lips. “The … infested areas … have to be destroyed. Brain and spinal cord.”
Nick nodded, looking even sicker. “With wasp fever, we usually burn the body, but …”
Mace understood. The escaped gunships would have transmitted their position. No telling what might already be on its way.
He could not believe what he was about to do. He could not even believe what he was about to say. But he was a Jedi. The purpose of his life was to do what must be done. To do what others would not, or could not.
No matter what it was.
He unclipped the lightsabers from his belt. His own and Depa’s both.
Green blade and purple sizzled together in the smoke-hazed air.
Besh looked up from the ground. Chalk went still on the slope, the Thunderbolt cradled in her arms. Nick opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, but didn’t know what it might be.
They all stared at Mace as though they’d never seen him before.
“He’s your friend. Your brother.” Mace took a deep breath, steadying his own fear and revulsion and his dark, dark loathing for what he must do. “You might want to say good-bye.”
Besh shook his head mutely. With an inarticulate sob compounded of grief and terror, he threw himself to his feet and stumbled away upslope.
Chalk only held Mace’s eye for a second, and gave him one slow nod. Then she followed Besh. She put one strong arm around Besh’s shoulders. Besh collapsed against her, sobbing.
Nick was the last. His eyes showed nothing but pain. Finally, he shook his head, and tears spilled onto his cheeks. “He’s already gone.” He touched Mace on the shoulder. “Master Windu—you don’t have to do this—”
“Yes, I do,” Mace said. “Or you’ll have to.”
Nick nodded reluctant understanding.
“Thanks. Windu, uh, Master, I—just—thanks.” He turned and walked after the others. “I won’t forget it.”
Neither would Mace.
He stared down at Lesh between the two shining blades. He reached into the Force, seeking to touch anything of the young man that might remain, to offer what little comfort might be his to give, but it was as Nick said: Lesh was already gone. A long moment passed while Mace composed himself, found an attitude of calm reverence, and consigned whatever might have been left of Lesh’s consciousness or spirit to the Force.
Then he took a deep breath, lifted his blades, and began.
The razorback ridge eclipsed the southern sky behind them. The jungle canopy overhead glowed with early sunset; on the ground it was already twilight. The companions walked along a broad track crushed bare by repeated passages of steamcrawler treads. The canopy had arched over the track, joining above so that their path lay along a jungle-lined tunnel that wound and switchbacked up and down the folds that radiated from the ridge’s north face.
Mace wore bacta patches trimmed to fit the worst of his burns. Nick’s temple was shiny with spray bandage. Chalk wore a sling restraining the shoulder she’d separated when she tumbled into the rocks, and a compression wrap supported her twisted knee. Besh walked in expressionless silence. He might have been in shock.
What was left of Lesh was buried at the tree line.
Their backpacks were heavy with supplies scavenged from the dead grassers. Little of Mace’s gear survived; his wallet tent, his changes of clothing, his own medpac and identikit, all had been destroyed with Nick’s grasser. The war on Haruun Kal was erasing Mace’s connections to life outside the jungle: of all the physical evidence that he had ever been anything other than a Korun, only the two lightsabers remained.
Even the fake datapad that he had carried all this way—its miniature subspace coil must have been damaged in the blast. He’d considered summoning the Halleck to evacuate Besh and Chalk for medical treatment, despite the fact that it would have severely compromised his mission here; the sudden appearance of a Republic cruiser in the Al’Har system would certainly have drawn entirely too much Separatist attention. But the datapad’s holocomm had been unable to even pick up a carrier wave. His last link to what Depa called the Galaxy of Peace was as dead as the Balawai militia Mace had sent crashing into the razorback ridge.
A stroke of irony—the fake datapad’s recording function still worked. Disguise had become reality: the datapad was a fake no longer. Mace had a superstitious hunch that this was somehow symbolic.
Galthra walked among them at Chalk’s side instead of ranging around; she was the last of their akks. With a little luck, her presence alone might keep major predators at a respectful distance.
No gunships had yet come to the pass behind them. Mace found this inexplicable, and disturbing. Once in a while, Galthra gave a Force-twitch that may have meant she heard engines in the distance, but it was hard to tell. Mostly, she mourned her dead packmates: her Force presence was a long moan of grief and loss.
They pushed on. Nick set a killing pace. He had not spoken since they’d buried Lesh’s remains.
Mace guessed that Nick was thinking about Besh and Chalk; he himself certainly was. Thinking about the fever wasp larvae that teemed within their brain and spinal cord tissue. They might have a day or two before dementia would begin. A day or two after that: convulsions and an ugly death. Besh walked with his head down, shivering, as though he could think of nothing else; Chalk marched like a war droid, as though suffering and death were too alien for her to even comprehend, let alone fear.
Mace matched Nick’s pace, close by his side. “Talk to me.”
Nick’s eyes stayed on the jungle ahead. “Why should I?”
“Because I want to know what you have in mind.”
“What makes you think I have anything in mind? What makes you think anything I might have in mind can make a difference?” His voice was angrily bitter. “We have two people about to go into second-stage wasp fever. No grassers. One akk. A handful of weapons, militia on our tail. And you and me.”
His gaze slid sideways to meet Mace’s. His eyes were red and raw. “We’re dead. You get it? Like that tusker in the death hollow: a few meters short of where we needed to be. We didn’t make it. We’re dead.”
“For dead men,” Mace observed, “we’re making good time.”
For an instant he thought Nick might crack a smile. Instead, Nick shook his head. “There’s a lor pelek who travels with Depa’s band. He’s … very powerful. More than powerful. If we can get Besh and Chalk to him before they start the twitches, he might be able to save them.”
Lor pelek: “jungle master.” Shaman. Witch doctor. Wizard. In Korun legend, the lor pelek was a person of great power, and great peril. As unpredictable as the jungle. He brought life or death: a gift or a wound. In some stories, a lor pelek was not a being at all, but was rather pelekotan incarnate: the avatar of the jungle-mind.
Mace made a connection. “Kar Vastor.”
Nick goggled at him. “How’d you know that? How’d you know his name?”
“How long before we reach them?”
Nick trudged on a few paces before he answered. “If we still had grassers, and akks for warding? Maybe two days. Maybe less. On foot? With only one akk?” His shrug was expressive.
“Then why march us so hard?”
“Because I do have something in mind.” He flicked a sidelong glance at Mace. “But you’re not gonna like it.”
“Will I like it less than having to do to Besh and Chalk what I had to do to Lesh?”
“That’s not for me to say.” Nick’s gaze went remote, staring off into the gloom-filled tunnel ahead. “There’s a little outpost settlement about an hour west of here. Ones like it are strung out every hundred klicks or so along these steamcrawler tracks. They’ll have a secure bunker, and a comm unit. Even though we—the ULF—don’t use comms, we still monitor the frequencies. We get in there, we can send a coded signal to them with our position. Then we put Chalk and Besh in thanatizine suspension, sit tight, and hope for the best.”
“A Balawai settlement?”
He nodded. “We don’t have settlements. DOKAWs saw to that.”
“These Balawai—they’ll take us in?”
“Sure.” Nick’s teeth gleamed in the jungle twilight, and that manic spark kindled in his eyes. “You just have to know how to ask.”
Mace’s face darkened. “I won’t let you harm civilians. Not even to save your friends.”
“No need to scorch your scalp over that one,” Nick said, trudging onward. “Out here, civilians are a myth.”
Mace didn’t want to ask what Nick meant by that. He came to a stop on the rugged track. He saw again the holoprojected carnage spread across the Supreme Chancellor’s desk; he saw again images of huts broken and burned, and nineteen corpses in the jungle. “You were right,” he said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”
Nick kept walking. He didn’t even look over his shoulder as he left Mace behind. “Yeah, well, as soon as you come up with a better idea,” he said into the darkness ahead, “you be sure to let me know, huh?”