The only part of the ankkox’s body that was not armored was its extensile, muscular, surprisingly flexible tail. The tail was tipped with a thick round ball of armor, and an adult ankkox could snap its tail faster than the human eye could see, using that mace to accurately strike targets up to eight meters away with enough power to stun an akk dog or shatter a small tree.
There was a time, before the reopening of Haruun Kal to the civilized galaxy, when a mace taken from a juvenile ankkox was the traditional weapon of Korun herders: dangerous to acquire. Difficult to use. Deadly in effect.
On the central bulge of this ankkox’s dorsal shell had been built a howdah: a small curtained cabin framed with lammas wood, two meters by three, barely larger than the long padded chaise within. The draped canopy stood slightly higher than Mace was tall, bounded by a polished rail perhaps a meter above the shell. The curtains, not to mention the fine-worked wood itself, were probably spoils looted from some Balawai’s home. Multiple layers of gauzy lace, the curtains were translucent as smoke.
With the sunset behind, Mace could see her silhouette.
The ankkox crunched to a ponderous stop, settling onto its ventral shell with a long hiss through its teeth like gas venting from pneumatic landing jacks. Vastor tucked the goad into its holster bolted to the ankkox’s crown shell, then stepped forward over the drover chair and folded his thick-muscled arms.
He stared down into the eyes of the Jedi Master.
The akk dogs started to growl low in their throats, a sound more felt than heard, like the subterranean precursor of a coming groundquake.
The wind died; even the rustle of leaves went silent.
In the hush of fading day, the Force showed Mace a shatterpoint.
The darkness of the jungle, not of the Sith.
Life without the restraints of civilization.
“We’re done,” Nick said. “You get that, don’t you? We’re as done as a week-old roast. What do they call it in the army? Aid and comfort to the enemy?”
“Be quiet. Don’t draw attention to yourself.”
“Great idea. Maybe they’ll forget I’m here.”
“This isn’t about aid and comfort to the enemy,” Mace said. “If this were going to be anything military, they’d put us under arrest. We’d be taken back to have some kind of show trial witnessed by the rest of the ULF. Instead, we’re out here in the jungle, and the only witnesses are Kar, Depa, and these akks—human and saurian.”
“So they’re just gonna kill us.”
“If we’re lucky,” Mace said, “it’s going to be a dogfight.”
“A dogfight? If we’re lucky? Okay, sure. Let’s not even try to make sense. Just tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
“You’re supposed to remember that you are an officer of the Grand Army of the Republic.”
“I just took the fraggin’ oath three hours ago—”
“Three hours or thirty years. It makes no difference. You have sworn to conduct yourself to the credit of the Republic as its commissioned officer.”
“So that kind of rules out wetting my pants and sobbing like a baby, huh?”
“Stay calm. Show no weakness. Think of Vastor as a wild akk: do nothing to trigger his prey drive. And shut up.”
“Oh, sure. Is that an order, General?”
“Will making it an order help you do it?”
Above on the ankkox’s shell, Vastor had been staring silently while an aurora of rage built in the air around him. Only now did Mace meet the lor pelek’s gaze.
Mace allowed his lip to curl with a hint of contempt.
Nick whispered, “What are you doing?”
Mace’s gaze never wavered. “Nothing you need concern yourself with.”
“Um, maybe I should have told you,” the young Korun muttered nervously. “Kar doesn’t like to be stared at.”
“I know.”
“It gets him mad.”
“He’s already mad.”
“Yeah. And you’re makin’ him madder.”
“That’s my intention.”
“Y’know,” Nick said, “I’m gonna give up asking if you’re crazy. Let’s consider it a standing question, huh? Every time you open your mouth, go ahead and assume I’m wondering if nikkle nuts have started falling out your earholes. ‘Good morning, Nick.’ Are you crazy? ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ Are you crazy?”
Mace hissed from the side of his mouth, “Will you be quiet?”
“Are you crazy?” Nick ducked his head. “Sorry. Just a reflex.”
Vastor’s jaw worked, and a wordless growl escaped from his tight-drawn lips.
You were sent for.
Mace sighed, looking bored.
Vastor’s growl thickened.
Defiance carries a price.
Nick cocked his head, frowning. “This isn’t about the prisoners?”
Mace looked at him sidelong: Nick had understood. So Vastor was talking to both of them—or rather, to Mace, but at least partially for the benefit of Nick. He glanced up at the howdah.
Likely for the benefit of Depa as well.
“Of course it’s about the prisoners,” Mace said softly. “He’s just warming up. Play along.”
Mace hooked his thumbs in his belt and walked casually forward. “I told you already: I am not to be sent for. Since you have brought her to me as ordered, I’ll see her now.”
The shimmer around Vastor deepened, but he held himself perfectly still. His growl sharpened into a vine cat’s hunting cough. I don’t take orders. Depa is here at her own request.
“Oh?”
She came to say good-bye.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Vastor’s response was a silent grinning gape that showed all his inhumanly sharp teeth. He gestured, and the ring of akks and humans parted before him.
“I told you he’s gonna kill us!” Nick hissed. “I told you! Shee, I hate it when I’m right!”
“Like I said before: think of Vastor as a wild akk. He won’t kill us unless there’s no other way to get what he wants.”
“Yeah? What does he want?”
“Same as any akk dog: to assert his dominance. Defend his territory. And his pack.”
“And you think he won’t kill us for taking those prisoners?”
Mace shrugged. “Not you, anyway. You’re subordinate: you don’t really count.”
“Oh, sure. Thanks a lot—” Nick stopped in mid-sarcasm and looked thoughtful. “Know what? I think I actually mean that.”
“You’re welcome.”
Vastor spun the hooked goad, and the ankkox lumbered toward Mace and Nick, its tail mace whipping through threatening arcs around it.
“So, what?” Nick kept on under his breath. “You think he’s just gonna throw you out of here? ‘You got till sundown to get off my planet’?”
“Something like that.”
“What about this hostage you were talkin’ about?”
“We’ll see if we need him.”
“Um, it’s not me, is it? Because, y’know, to tell you the truth, I don’t think Depa likes me all that much—or even, y’know, any. At all.”
“Hush.”
The ankkox stopped. The beak-curve of the crown armor on its landspeeder-sized skull lowered to the ground at Mace’s feet. The beast’s eyes were orange and gold and as large as Mace’s head, and they peered up from under the curve of armor with melancholy saurian patience.
Vastor vaulted to the ground. Make your good-byes. Then you are leaving.
“Nice doggy…” Nick said with a sickly forced smile. He gave a weak laugh. “Nice—”
Vastor’s immense left arm flashed at Nick in a blinding palm slap that would have taken his head right off before he could even blink—but that massive arm was intercepted by the heel of Mace’s open hand.
Mace’s fingers locked momentarily around Vastor’s wrist. “He’s with me,” he said, and before the lor pelek could react, he released Vastor and backhanded Nick off his feet.
Nick lay crumpled on the leaf mold, stunned, staring up at Mace in astonishment. Through their Force-link, Mace sent a pulse of private reassurance: an invisible deadpan wink.
Nick played along. “What was that for?”
The Jedi Master jabbed a finger at his face. “You are an officer in the Grand Army of the Republic. Act like one.”
“How does one act?”
Mace turned back to Vastor. “I apologize for him.”
Vastor grunted. His mother should apologize.
“Any problem you have with him, you bring to me.” Mace had to bend his neck back to look up into the lor pelek’s eyes. “I struck one of your men, earlier. I apologize for that as well.” He met Vastor’s glare lazily. “I should have hit you.”
You are Depa’s Master, and my dôshalo, and I do not wish you harm. Vastor’s rumble went low and silken. Don’t touch me again.
Mace sighed, still looking bored. He said to Nick, “Don’t get up,” and to Vastor, “Excuse me,” and he sidestepped the lor pelek to vault onto the dorsal shell of the ankkox.
He had time to wonder if his pretense of confidence was fooling anyone.
Mace looked up at the howdah, now only a step or two away. His mouth had gone entirely dry.
He still couldn’t feel her.
Even this close, finally, after all this time, whatever presence she cast in the Force blended invisibly into the jungle night around them.
The sick weight gathered in his chest again: the one that had been born weeks ago in Palpatine’s office. The one that had grown heavier in Pelek Baw, and had nearly crushed him last night in the outpost bunker. That weight had lifted somehow through this long afternoon: maybe it was because he’d been so sure he was doing the right thing.
The only thing.
And now he was a meter away from being face to face with her: his Padawan: his protégée: the woman for whose sake he had left behind Coruscant and the Jedi Temple and the simple abstractions of strategic war. For whose sake he had plunged into this jungle. Had subjected himself to the harsh, complicated, intractable reality behind the strategies that had seemed so simple and so clean back in the sterile chambers of the Council.
He discovered that once again, he didn’t know what he should do.
Just seeing her shadow on the curtains had loosened his grip on right and wrong.
Palpatine’s words echoed inside his head:
Depa Billaba was your Padawan. And she is still perhaps your closest friend, is she not?
Is she? Mace thought. I wish I knew.
If she must be slain, are you so certain you can strike her down?
Right now, he wasn’t entirely certain he could look at her.
He was that frightened of what he might see.
…I have become the darkness in the jungle…
A slim brown hand took one edge of the curtains. Long fingers, but strong: nails broken, and black with grime—the shape of the palm, the faint rolling texture of vein and tendon and bone, that he knew as vividly as he did his own—and the curtain was streaked with mold and stained, and hand-patched with dark thread that showed like scars against the lace, and it draped around her hand as she drew it slowly aside, and Mace’s heart hammered and he nearly turned away, because he should have known he wouldn’t meet her in the dawn, at the beginning of a day, even among a firestorm raining from gunship cannons; he should have known that was only wishful thinking, a solace from the Force; he should have known that they would only meet again in the twilight shadow—
But fear, too, leads into the dark.
He thought, I have met the darkness in this jungle already. I’ve felt it in my own heart. I have fought it hand to hand and mind to mind. Why should I fear to see it on her face?
The knot in his gut untied itself.
All his anxiety drained from him. All his darkness trickled away. He stood empty of everything save for fatigue and the pains of his battered flesh, and a calm Jedi expectation: ready to accept the turn of the Force, no matter what it may bring.
She drew the curtain aside.
She sat on the edge of a long, padded chaise. She wore the tatters of Jedi robes over the rough homespun of a jungle Korun. Her hair was as he had seen at the outpost: ragged, greasy, hacked short as though she’d used a knife to trim it without the benefit of a mirror. Her face was every bit as thin as he had seen it: her cheekbones sharp, and her jaw going prominent. The burn scar was there, from one corner of her hardship-thinned mouth to the point of her jaw—
But instead of a blindfold, she wore the strip of dirty rag tied around her forehead, concealing the Greater Mark of Illumination.
Or the scar it had left behind…
The Lesser Mark still glinted gold on the bridge of her nose, and though her eyes were bloodshot and pain-haunted, her gaze was clear, and level, and, after all, she was Depa Billaba.
Whatever had happened to her; whatever she had seen, or done.
She was still Depa.
With an effort that nearly broke Mace’s heart, she curved her mouth into a smile, and she extended a hand that trembled, just a little, as Mace reached to take it. It felt fragile in his, as though her bones were as hollow as a bird’s, but her grip was strong and warm.
“Mace,” she said slowly. A single jewel of a tear welled in one eye. “Mace. Master Windu.”
“Hello, Depa.” He opened his vest and produced her lightsaber. “I have kept this safe for you.”
As she reached for it her hand trembled even more. “Thank you, Master,” she said slowly, with exhausted formality. “I am honored to receive it from your hand.”
Her smile turned more genuine. She looked down at her lightsaber, turning it over and over in her hand as though she didn’t quite remember what it was for. She lowered her head until he could no longer see her eyes. “Oh, Mace…How could you?”
“Depa?”
“How could you be so arrogant? So stupid? So blind?” Though her words were angry, her voice was only tired. “I wish…You should have come to me, Mace. Straight to me. Those people—they’re not worth this. Not worth you not knowing. You should have asked me—I could have told you—”
“Why innocent children had to die?”
Her head hung even lower. “We all have to die, Mace.”
“I’m not here to argue with you, Depa. I’m here to take you home.”
“Home…” she echoed, and raised her head again. Her eyes were event horizons: infinitely deep, and infinitely dark. “You use that word as though it means something.”
“It does to me.”
“But it doesn’t. Not anymore. Not even to you. You just haven’t realized it yet.” She sighed a bleak, bitter chuckle as dark as her eyes and swung her trembling hand at the jungle around them. “This is home. As much home as any place will ever be. For any of us. For all of us. That’s what I brought you here to learn, Mace. But now you’ve messed everything up. It’s falling apart and flying off in all directions. It’s all wrong, and it’s all too late, and I should have known it would happen like this, I should have known because you’re just too blasted arrogant to mind your own business!” Her voice had risen to a screech, and a drop of blood seeped from a crack in her lower lip.
“You are my business here.”
“Exactly. Exactly!” She snatched his wrist and yanked him down toward her with astonishing strength. “I was your business here. Those people had nothing to do with you. Nor you with them. But you can’t stop being a Jedi,” she said bitterly. “No matter what. With the existence of the whole Jedi Order at stake, you had to play HoloNet hero. Now your business here is ruined. Destroyed. Everything is wasted. It’s too late. Too late for all of us. You have to leave here, Mace. You have to leave right now, or Kar will kill you.”
“I’m planning on it,” Mace agreed. “And you’re coming with me.”
“Oh,” she said. The fire inside her dwindled, and her strength with it. Her hand went slack on Mace’s arm. “Oh…you think—you thin
k I can just leave…”
“You must leave, Depa. I don’t know what you think is holding you here—”
“You don’t understand. How could you? You haven’t seen—I haven’t shown you—You can’t possibly understand…”
Mace thought of his hallucination at the outpost. “I understand,” he said slowly, “all there is to understand. And now I believe it.”
“Do you understand that I am not in command here?”
Mace shrugged. “Is anyone?”
“Exactly,” she said. “Exactly. Master Yoda—Master Yoda would say, You see, but you do not see.”
“Depa—”
“You are alive right now because Kar doesn’t want to upset me. That’s the only reason. Not because I can order him. To do anything. Because I asked him. I asked to give you a chance to run away. Because Kar—because Kar likes me—”
Mace turned and looked down at the people and akks in the jungle. Twilight was deepening, and glowvines were beginning to pulse to life. The akks stirred uneasily, muttering deep half growls down in their enormous chests. Nick sat on the ground, knees drawn up and wrapped by his arms. He kept his head down, studiously avoiding looking at Vastor. The lor pelek paced back and forth in front of the ankkox’s head, stalking like a hungry vine cat, flicking glances up at Mace and Depa and away again, as though he did not want to be caught looking.
“Vastor commands the ULF—?”
“There is no ULF!” Depa hissed. “The ULF is a name, that’s all. I made it up! The Upland Liberation Front is a make-believe bogey on which to blame every raid and ambush and theft and petty sabotage and I don’t know what all. The militia’s going crazy looking for a pattern to our strikes. Trying to figure out our strategy. Because there is no pattern. No strategy. There is no ULF. There is just this clan, and that family, and one gang here and another there. That’s all. Ragged Korun bandits and murderers.”
“Your reports—”
“Reports.” She looked like she wanted to grab him and shake him, but was just too tired. “What should I have told you? You’ve seen a little of Haruun Kal. What could I have said to make you understand?”
“You don’t have to make me understand. All you have to do is come with me.”
“Mace, listen to me: I can’t.” She sagged, and lowered her face into her hands. “Kar is willing to let you go only because I am staying. To keep you away from me. If I leave with you…Going through the jungle, Mace: think of it. On foot, on grassers. Even in a steamcrawler. All the way back to Pelek Baw? Haven’t you seen enough of him today to know that nowhere in the jungle could you ever be safe?”
Star Wars®: Shatterpoint Page 23
