Star Wars 096 - Shatterpoint

by Matthew Stover

  Mace couldn’t even tell if it had been a man, or a woman.

  He squatted on his heels at the edge of the scorch, staring. Then he wrapped his arms around his knees, and just sat. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

  He had asked that last captive where she’d last seen the girls’ mother.

  He could not possibly determine if this corpse had once been the woman who’d given birth to Pell and to Keela; if this smoking mass of charred dead flesh had held them in its arms and kissed away their childish tears.

  Did it matter?

  This had been someone’s parent, or brother, or sister. Someone’s child. Someone’s friend.

  Who had died anonymously in the jungle.

  He couldn’t even tell if this corpse had been killed by a Korun bullet, or a vibroshield, or a Balawai blaster. Or if it had simply been unlucky enough to get in the way of a stream of fire from a steamcrawler’s turret gun.

  Perhaps in the Force, he might have been able to sense some answers. But he couldn’t decide if knowing would be better than not knowing. And to touch the Force again in this dark place was a risk he was not prepared to take.

  So he just sat, and thought about the dark.

  Sat while the guerrillas splintered into bands that melted away down the mountainside. Sat while the prisoners were marched off in a gang, surrounded by akk dogs. Sat while the sun slanted past a pair of northeast peaks, and a wave of light rolled down the slope above him.

  Vastor came to him, rumbling something about leaving this place before the gunships arrived. Mace did not even look up.

  He was thinking about the light of the sun, and how it did not touch the darkness in the jungle.

  Nick stopped on his way out of camp. In one arm, he carried Urno; Nykl slept against his other shoulder, tiny arms clasped around his neck. Keela stumbled along behind, one hand pressing against the spray bandage that closed her head wound while she used the other to lead little Pell. Nick must have asked Mace a question, because he paused at the side of the Jedi Master as though waiting for an answer.

  But Mace had no answers to give.

  When he got no response, Nick shrugged and moved on.

  Mace thought about the dark. The Jedi metaphor of the dark side of the Force had never seemed so appropriate before—less the dark of evil than the dark of a starless night: where what you think is a vine cat is only a bush, and what appears to be a tree may very well be a killer standing motionless, waiting for you to look away.

  Mace had read Temple Archive accounts written by Jedi who had brushed the dark and recovered. These accounts often mentioned how the dark side seemed to make everything clear; Mace knew now that this was only a delusion. A lie.

  The truth was exactly opposite.

  There was so much dark here, he might as well be blind.

  Morning sun struck the compound, and brought gunships with it: six of them, a double flight, roaring straight in from the stinging glare of Al’har as it cleared the mountains. Their formation blossomed into a rosette as they peeled off to angle for staggered, crisscrossing strafing runs.

  Mace still didn’t move.

  Might as well be blind, he thought, and perhaps he also said it aloud—

  For the voice that spoke from behind him seemed to be answering.

  “The wisest man I know once told me: It is in the darkest night that the light we are shines brightest.”

  A woman’s voice, cracking with exhaustion and hoarse with old pain—and perhaps it was only this voice that could have kindled a torch in Mace’s vast darkness, only this voice that could have brought Mace to his feet, turning, hope blooming inside his head, almost happy—

  Almost even smiling—

  He turned, his arms opening, his breath catching, and all he could say was, “Depa…”

  But she did not come to his embrace, and the hope inside him sputtered and died. His arms fell to his sides. Even prepared by what Nick had told him, he was not remotely ready for this.

  Jedi Master Depa Billaba stood before him in the tattered remnants of Jedi robes, stained with mud and blood and jungle sap. Her hair—that had once been a lush, glossy mane as black as space, that she had kept regimented in mathematically precise braids—was tangled, spiked with dirt and grease, raggedly short as though she had hacked it off with a knife. Her face was pale and lined with fatigue, and had gone so thin her cheekbones stood out like blades. Her mouth seemed lipless and hard, and bore a fresh burn scar from one corner to the tip of her chin—but these were not the worst of it.

  None of these were what kept Mace motionless as though nailed to the ground, even as gunships swept overhead and rained blasterfire on the compound around them.

  In the inferno of explosions, amid the whine of rock splinters and the hammering webwork of plasma, Mace could only stare at Depa’s forehead, where she had once worn the shining golden bead of the Greater Mark of Illumination: the symbol of a Chalactan adept. The Mark of Illumination is affixed to the frontal bone of an adept’s skull by the elders of that ancient religion, as a symbol of the Uncloseable Eye that is the highest expression of the Chalactan Enlightenment. Depa had worn hers with pride for twenty years.

  Now, where the Mark had been was only an ugly ripple of keloid scar, as though the same knife that had slashed away her hair had crudely hacked the symbol of her ancestral religion from the bone of her skull.

  And across her eyes, she wore a strip of rag tied like a blindfold: a rag as weathered and stained and ragged as her robes themselves.

  But she stood as though she could see him all too well.

  “Depa…”

  Mace had to raise his voice to even hear himself through the roar of the repulsorlifts and the laser cannons and the exploding dirt and rock around him. “Depa, what happened? What has happened to you?”

  “Hello, Mace,” she said sadly. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  I finally understand what I’m doing here. Why I came. I understand the hypocrisy of that list of reasons I offered to Yoda and to Palpatine, in the Chancellor’s office those weeks ago.

  I was lying to them.

  And to myself.

  I must have seen the real reason I came here in the first instant I turned to her in the compound: in the pain-etched creases below her cheekbones. In the scar where the Mark of Enlightenment had been.

  Yes: it wasn’t really her. It was a Force-vision. A hallucination. A lie. But even a lie of the Force is more true than any reality our limited minds can comprehend.

  In the rag that bound her eyes but did not blind her to the truth of me—

  I found my conditions of victory.

  I didn’t come here to learn what has happened to Depa, nor to protect the reputation of our Order. I don’t care what’s happened to her, and the reputation of our Order is meaningless.

  I did not come to fight this war. I don’t care who wins. Because no one wins. Not in real war. It is only a question of how much each side is willing to lose.

  I did not come here to apprehend or kill a rogue Jedi, or even to judge one. I cannot judge her. I have been on the periphery of this war for barely a double handful of days, and look what I am on the verge of becoming; she has been in the thick of it for months.

  Drowning in darkness.

  Buried in the jungle.

  I didn’t come here to stop Depa. I came here to save her.

  I will save her.

  And may the Force have mercy on any who would try to stop me, for I will have none.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  I don’t remember leaving the compound. I suppose I must have been in some kind of shock. Not physical; my injuries are minor—though now the bacta patches from our captured medpacs are needed for more serious wounds, and the blaster burn on my thigh is angry and swelling with infection. But shock is the word. Mental shock, perhaps.

  Moral shock.

  A veil has fallen: bet
ween the moment when Depa came to me in the compound, and the moment I came back to myself on the slope below, there is in my mind mostly a blurred haze. In that blurred haze, I find two conflicting memories of our meeting there—

  And both of them, it seems, are false.

  Dreams. Imaginative reinterpretation of events.

  Hallucination.

  In one memory, she extends a hand toward me, and I reach to take it—but instead I feel a tug at my vest and her lightsaber leaps from its inner pocket and flips through the air to smack her palm. Blaster bolts from the gunships’ laser cannons smash craters in the compound; each bolt makes rock and dirt explode like grenades; the air around us fills with red plasma and orange flame—and that old familiar half smile tugs up one corner of her lips and she says, “Up or down?” and I tell her Up and she leaps into an aerial roll over my head and I take a single step forward so that she lands with her back against mine—

  And the feel of her back against my own, that strong and warm and living touch that I have felt so many times, in so many places, pulls the dread from my heart and the darkness from my eyes and our blades in perfect synchrony meet the fires from above and cast them back into the dawn-scorched sky—

  As I said: a dream.

  The other memory is a silent image of walking calmly at Depa’s side through the rain of blasterfire, conversing with calm unconcern, as oblivious to the gunships as we are to the jungle, and to the sunlight of the dawn. In this dream or memory, Depa turns her blindfolded face toward me, her head cocked as though she can see into my heart. Why have you come here, Mace? Do you even know?

  I don’t hear these words: again like a dream, it seems we merely intend our meaning, and somehow make ourselves understood.

  Why did you send for me? is my answer.

  That’s not the same thing, she reminds me gently. You have to define your conditions of victory. If you don’t know what you’re trying to do, how can you tell when you’ve done it? Why have you come? To stop me? You can do that with one slash of a lightsaber.

  I suppose, I somehow reply, I am trying to find out what has happened here. What is happening. To these people, and to you. Once I understand what’s going on, I’ll know what to do about it.

  The only thing you don’t understand, says this blind dream-image of my beloved Padawan, is that you already understand all there is to understand. You just don’t want to believe it.

  Then the veil thickens, and deepens toward night, and I remember no more until sometime later—not too much later—when I was running helter-skelter down through the jungle, quite alone.

  Bounding down a long, long slope half barren with old lava where it wasn’t burned with new, I could feel the guerrillas somewhere ahead by the dark pall like smoke they trailed in the Force—and I could track them by the blood spoor their many wounded left on ground and rock and leaf.

  And I remember skidding down the rim of a dry wash, and finding Kar Vastor waiting for me at the bottom.

  Kar Vastor—

  I have much to say of this lor pelek. Of the powers I have seen him wield, from the drawing of the fever wasps out of Besh and Chalk to the way the jungle itself seems to part for his passage and tangle itself behind. Of his followers: those six Korunnai he calls the Akk Guards, men he’s made into lesser echoes of himself. How he has trained them in their signature weapons—those terrifying “vibroshields”—that he had designed and built. Even the smallest details: the primal ferocity of his gaze, the jungle-noise growl of his wordless voice, and how you hear his meaning as though it were your own voice whispering inside your head—all deserve more depth of comment than I can give them here.

  I’m not sure why it took me so long to understand that he and I are natural enemies.

  The lor pelek stood on the slope below Mace, holding the reins of a saddled grasser. The grasser kept one of its three eyes fixed warily on Vastor, and when he spoke, the grasser trembled as though it would shy away were it not held in place by an invisible force that overpowered its instincts.

  Jedi Windu. You are sent for, dôshalo.

  Mace did not need to ask by whom. “Where is she?”

  An hour’s ride ahead. Resting in her howdah. She no longer walks.

  Mace felt dizzy; the world shifted focus as though he looked at its reflection in a rippling pool. “An hour…no longer walks—?” It made no sense, but in the Force it felt like the truth. “She was here—she was just here—”

  No.

  “But she was—she greeted me, and—” Mace passed a hand over his skull, checking for blood or swelling: searching for a head wound. “I returned her lightsaber—we fought—we fought the gunships—”

  You fought alone.

  “She was with me…”

  I sent two of my men to check on you, when you did not join the march. They watched from below, hiding from the Balawai ships. They saw you: alone in the compound, your blades flashing against the blasterfire. My men say you drove them off single-handed, though they did not seem to be damaged. Perhaps you have taught Balawai to fear the Jedi blade. He showed Mace his sharp-filed teeth. Nick Rostu spoke much of your victory at the pass. Even I might not be equal to such a feat.

  “She was with me.” Mace stared at the traces of portaak amber that stained his palms. “We fought—or we spoke—I can’t seem to remember—”

  It is pelekotan you recall.

  “The Force—? You’re saying it was some kind of Force-vision?”

  Pelekotan brings us waking dreams of our desires and our fears. Vastor’s tone was grave, but not unkind. When we desire what we fear and fear what we desire, pelekotan always answers. Have the Jedi forgotten this?

  “It seemed so real—it seemed more real than you do.”

  Vastor shrugged. It was. Only pelekotan is real. Everything else is forms and shadows: less even than a cloud, or a memory. We are pelekotan’s dream. Have the Jedi forgotten this as well?

  Mace didn’t answer. He had only then become aware of the balanced weight of his vest: he put a hand to his right-side ribs, and felt through the stained panther leather the outline of a lightsaber, matching his own, which he wore on his left.

  Depa’s lightsaber.

  And if what he’d seen in the compound had been a vision in the Force, what then? Did it change the truth he’d seen? Did it change the truth she’d seen in him?

  From the Force, those truths become more real, not less.

  “A dream,” he heard himself murmur. “A dream…”

  Vastor gestured for him to mount up. Dream she may be, but refuse her summons and you will learn how swiftly dream turns to nightmare.

  Mace climbed into the saddle without telling the lor pelek that he already knew.

  Some obscure impulse prompted him to ask: “And you, Kar Vastor: what visions does pelekotan bring to you?”

  His response was a limitless stare, inhuman, as full of unguessable danger as the jungle itself. Why should pelekotan show me anything? I have no fears.

  “And no desires?”

  But he had already turned to lead the grasser away, and he gave no sign that he had heard.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  Kar Vastor led my grasser on foot; he was able to find a path through the densest, most tangled undergrowth so effortlessly that we could move at a steady trot. After a time, I began to believe—as I now do—that his ability to move through the jungle was only half perception; the other half was raw power. Not only could he sense a path where none could be seen, I believe he could at need make a path where none had existed.

  Or perhaps make is the wrong word.

  I never saw this power in action; I never saw trees move, nor knots of vines unbind themselves. Instead I felt a continuous current in the Force: a rolling cycle like the breath of some vast creature alone in the dark. Power flowed into him and out again, but I did not feel him use it any more than I feel my muscles use the sugars that feed them.

  And that is exactly how it s
eemed: that we were carried through the jungle effortlessly, like corpuscles in its veins. Or thoughts in its infinite mind.

  As though we were pelekotan’s dream.

  In that ride from the rear to the front of the guerrillas’ line of march, I got my first view of the fabled Upland Liberation Front.

  The ULF: terror of the jungle. Mortal enemy of the militia. Ruthless, unstoppable warriors who had driven the Confederacy of Independent Systems off this planet.

  They were barely alive.

  Their march was a ragged column of walking wounded, tracking each other through the jungle by splashes of blood and rich stink of infection. I would learn, later, during the days of hellish march, that this latest operation had been a series of raids on jungle prospector outposts; they were out here not to kill Balawai, but to capture medpacs, food, clothing, weapons, ammunition—supplies that our Republic cannot or will not provide for them.

  They were heading for their base in the mountains, where they had gathered nearly all that was left of the Korun people: all their elders and their invalids, their children, and what was left of their herds. Living in confined, crowded space was unnatural for Korunnai. They had no experience with such conditions, and it swiftly took its toll. Diseases unknown in the civilized galaxy ravaged their numbers: in the months since Depa’s arrival, dysentery and pneumonia had killed more Korunnai than had the militia’s gunships.

  These gunships circled like vultures over the jungle. The trees constantly hummed with the sounds of heavy repulsorlifts and turbofans. The hums rose to roars and fell to insectile buzzing, mingled to swarms and split to individuals that curved through the invisible sky. Now and again flame poured into the jungle from above, bringing harsh orange light to the gloom under the canopy, casting black shadows among the green.

  I don’t think they were actually expecting to hit anyone.

  They harrassed us constantly, often firing down at random through the jungle canopy, or sweeping overhead to set vast swathes afire with their Sunfire flame projectors. To return fire would only fix our position for their gunners, and so all we could do was scurry along below the canopy and hope that we would not be seen.