A gripleaf trailer snaked down from above and seized one of Mace’s ankles in its unbreakable clutch. His airborne tumble became a wide-swinging head-down arc.
Gripleaf trailers only grew tighter as their victim struggled, and their fibers were nearly as strong as durasteel cable; they could not be broken by mortal strength. This one squeezed his ankle, drawing blood with the edges of its sharp waxy leaves. Another trailer reached toward his other ankle, and from his upside-down vantage he could see a thick blade-thorned length of brassvine curving toward his neck.
He almost reached into the Force for his lightsaber—
But that would be admitting defeat.
Time to be clever.
He used the Force to shove the gripleaf trailer so that the arc of his swing sent him whirling out over the ring of dogs and men. One of the Akk Guards smirked at him as he swung overhead: “Big dog? More like little tusk-pig.”
When his swing carried him back in, Mace reached down and grabbed the Akk Guard by the arm, yanking him into the air. Drawing upon the Force for a burst of strength, Mace whipped the astonished Guard up and over and used the edge of his razor-sharp shield to slice through the trailer before releasing him to flail helplessly through the air and crash into the jungle darkness.
Mace turned his own fall into a flip that landed him on an akk dog’s shoulders. He bounded off into the air—
And Vastor’s Force grip seized him again.
Vastor was on his feet now, and his arms didn’t seem hurt at all. His blood-smeared mouth spread wide in a howl of triumph as he yanked Mace through the multicolored glowvine-shaded night, pulling him in while he opened his arms for that lethal embrace.
Mace thought: Well, if you insist…
Instead of resisting or grounding the power of Vastor’s Force grip, Mace added his own strength to it. The speed of his flight suddenly doubled; Vastor had only time to widen his eyes in dismay as Mace flipped headfirst in the air. The top of his head speared into Vastor’s gut and drove the lor pelek to the ground as though he’d been hit by a concussion missile.
On the other hand, Vastor’s stomach wasn’t much softer than that lammas he’d slammed Mace into; the impact didn’t do Mace’s head a lot of good, either.
Another spiral galaxy blossomed where the first had been as Mace rolled off him, lying on his back while he watched stellar clusters wheel inside his skull. Vastor lay beside him, making faint panting noises while he tried to pull air into his spasming chest.
Vastor’s breath began to return in great whooping gasps, and Mace knew his time was running out. He shook the stars out of his head and reached down to his ankle to unwrap the severed gripleaf trailer. Limp now, dying, it was unresisting as an ordinary rope; Mace took one end in each fist, and as Vastor rolled over and gained his hands and knees, Mace slipped a loop of the trailer over the lor pelek’s head from behind and tightened it around his throat.
Vastor straightened and his hands went to his throat, clawing at Mace’s improvised garrote, but not even he was strong enough to break a gripleaf trailer with his bare hands. His face darkened, swelling with blood; the back of his neck bulged; veins writhed across his temples and forehead.
Ten seconds, Mace thought, hanging on, wedging his knees into Vastor’s back. Ten seconds and out.
Vastor got one foot under him.
Mace swallowed, gasping for breath as he tried to tighten the trailer around the lor pelek’s throat.
Pure will powered Vastor to his feet. He didn’t even seem to notice the weight of a large Jedi Master hanging down his back.
Mace thought: Here it comes.
In an eyeblink, Vastor’s grip shifted from the gripleaf trailer to Mace’s wrists. He threw himself forward, bent at the waist, and with a surge of incredible strength yanked the Jedi Master over his head and slammed him bodily to the dirt.
The impact replaced the stars in Mace’s head with billowing black nebulae; he’d never gotten his breath back properly after landing on the akk dog, and now he couldn’t breathe at all. The jungle above faded into a black haze; through the darkness descending inside his skull, he barely caught a glimpse of Vastor leaping into the air to drop a body-slam that would finish him. With a gasp, he rolled aside, and Vastor landed hard on the ground beside him.
Mace dizzily tried to pull himself up to his hands and knees; Vastor was still down, his hands clawing weakly at Mace’s flanks. Mace pushed him off and made it to his knees. Vastor rolled onto his side, found a tree trunk, and pulled himself up it, leaning on it drunkenly.
Though Mace couldn’t breathe—could barely see through the black-and-red haze inside his head—he could draw upon the Force to throw himself upright, and he lunged at Vastor, whirling, hands clasped together to deliver every erg of power at his command into one last thundering punch that lifted Vastor bodily off the ground, flipped him over backward, and dropped him on the back of his neck.
Mace swayed, almost out on his feet. The jungle hazed in and out of focus. All he could clearly see was the lor pelek climbing to his feet.
Vastor was smiling.
Is that the best you have?
“I’m just—” Mace gasped for breath. His arms came up slowly; each one felt like it was made out of collapsium. “Just getting started—”
One of those open-handed slaps flashed out of the darkness; the next thing of which Mace was aware was a bell-like ringing in his ears, and the grip of Vastor’s huge hand around his neck, holding him up off the jungle floor.
Mace’s eyelids fluttered open. Vastor’s blood-smeared grin was the only thing in the world.
Vastor growled, How many arms do you see?
Mace didn’t answer.
He certainly didn’t see the one attached to the hand that snuffed the world like a blown-out candle.
In the darkness, a smell of ammonia and rotten meat: predator breath.
A dry rough tongue the size of his lost kitbag licked him back to consciousness, and Mace opened his eyes.
The Akk Guards were crowded around him, leaning over, their faces in deep shadow, haloed by the pulsing light of the glowvines in the canopy; one now pushed the nose of the akk dog who’d been licking Mace’s unconscious body so that the great beast backed up.
Kar Vastor stepped into the gap. He squatted on his haunches at Mace’s side. His face was lumped up, and blood still trickled from his split cheek, but his grin was fiercer than ever.
He barked something, and one of the Akk Guards stepped away for a brief moment. Mace heard Nick say, “Hey, cut it out. Hey, ow, huh? Come on, lay off the arm, you know I’m good for it—”
The Akk Guard returned, dragging Nick.
Vastor growled.
Nick said, “Hey, why are you telling me—?”
Vastor’s growl sharpened, and Nick flinched away from him. He looked uncertainly up at the Akk Guard who held his arm, back at Vastor, then down at Mace.
“He, uh—” Nick swallowed hard. “—he wants me to say so everybody hears it: You can get up, if you want…”
Mace’s eyes drifted closed. He didn’t answer.
Vastor made a rumbling noise.
“He says, Come on. You wanted to be the big dog. Get up and fight.” Nick lowered his voice. “I mean, you can get up, right? If you want to—I mean, I got odds, it’s worth five hundred creds, I’ll split it with you—”
Mace opened his eyes. “No.”
Vastor’s rumble broadened humorously, as though the lor pelek was a groundquake telling a joke.
“Um, he—he wants to know, No, what? That is—y’know, no to the money?”
“No,” Mace said. He couldn’t find a place on his body that did not hurt. “No more fighting. I’ve had enough. You win.”
Vastor seized Mace’s shoulder in one enormous hand and stood, pulling the Jedi Master upright without apparent effort. Now his growl once more became words in Mace’s mind.
Tell them. Tell them who is the big dog here.
Mace hung his
head, careful not to meet Vastor’s eye. “You are.” He coughed, and blood bubbled from his smashed mouth. “You’re the big dog.”
Nick looked stricken.
Tell them you were wrong to take my prisoners. Tell them you were wrong to let them go.
Mace kept his eyes on the ground at his feet. Blood from the shallow akk-spine gouges in his belly ran down his legs. “I was wrong to take your prisoners. I was wrong to let them go.”
Tell them you are sorry that you challenged me, and you will never do it again.
Mace’s only motion was to glance up at the howdah on the back of the ankkox. Now after dark, the curtains were opaque. He couldn’t tell if Depa was even in there.
He lowered his head once more.
“I am sorry that I challenged you. I will never challenge you again.”
A twitch of motion in his peripheral vision: Nick had let Mace’s vest unroll from his hand. Now he held it alongside his leg. He gave it another suggestive twitch.
Mace could feel the lightsaber within it.
He met Nick’s eye. Nick deliberately looked away, miming a nonchalant whistle, while he twitched the vest one more time.
A twist of the Force—no more effort than Nick expended to wiggle the vest—would bring that lightsaber to Mace’s hands.
Mace said slowly, “Kar?”
Vastor hummed a yes.
“My weapon is in that vest. May I have it?” He kept his eyes fixed resolutely on the lor pelek’s chest. “Please?”
Vastor released his shoulder with a contemptuous shove, and extended a hand for the vest. Nick looked at Mace with open shock, as though he’d been unexpectedly betrayed.
Mace looked at the ground.
Vastor took the vest, and pulled Mace’s lightsaber out of its pocket. This is yours?
“Yes, Kar,” Mace said quietly. “May I have it, please?”
Vastor gave a sidelong glance at an Akk Guard, and purred something. The guard smirked, nodding.
“Please,” Mace repeated humbly. “It’s my only weapon. I won’t be much good to anyone without it.”
You’re not much good to anyone with it, Vastor grunted. He held it out to Mace, but when the Jedi Master extended a hesitant hand to take it, Vastor flipped it carelessly away from him. The Akk Guard he’d purred at snatched it from the air.
The guard held it in one hand. The vibroshield on his other arm whined to life.
“Hey, Kar, c’mon, lay off, huh?” Nick’s face was twisted in an ongoing wince; it was painful to pity someone previously respected. “You won, didn’t you? Isn’t that enough? Why do you have to be such a—”
Vastor interrupted the young Korun with a backhanded cuff that knocked him to the ground. He never even looked at him; his gaze was still on Mace Windu.
The Jedi Master seemed not even to notice Nick lying on the ground, cradling his bloodied mouth, cursing continuously into his hand. “Don’t,” Mace said brokenly. “Don’t. You don’t understand—a Jedi’s lightsaber—”
Can be destroyed as easily as a Jedi Master. Vastor flicked his fingers as though brushing off a fly, but before the Akk Guard could bring the lightsaber’s handgrip against the edge of his shield—
“Kar…”
Through the gauzy opacity of the curtained howdah above, Depa’s voice had an eerie power, and it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
“To send him out into the jungle without his weapon would be murder, Kar. He is not the enemy.”
Not your enemy. Perhaps.
“Please, Kar. Keep it safe for him, and return it to him when he departs.”
He is departing now.
“He cannot travel,” Depa said. “Can you not feel it? You hurt him, Kar. Hurt him badly. He needs rest, and medical treatment. Let us take him to the base. He can ride the ankkox with me. Keep his lightsaber yourself. You’ve shown him he cannot face you without it.”
Vastor’s inhuman stare searched the blank face of the howdah, but now night had fully fallen. Glowvine light shimmered off the curtains, and nothing could be seen within.
Finally he gave an irritable shrug and extended a hand. The Akk Guard tossed the handgrip back to him, and Vastor tucked it into the waistband of his vine cat leather pants.
He cast Mace’s vest to the ground at the Jedi Master’s feet.
Did it hurt even more, knowing she was watching?
He no longer sounded mocking; this came in the tone of simple curiosity.
Slowly, painfully, like an old man protecting arthritic knees, Mace bent down to retrieve the vest. He said, “I’m not sure it could have hurt much more.”
You might remember that this all began because you refused to come when I told you.
This began, Mace thought, when I was summoned to the private office of Chancellor Palpatine. But he said nothing.
Because you refused to do what you were told.
“Yes,” Mace said. “Yes, I remember.” He picked up the vest and slipped it on. The sting of dirt in open wounds announced that the lammas tree’s bark had torn his back.
If there is a next time, dôshalo, it will be your last time.
“Yes, Kar. I know.” He looked at Nick, who was now sitting on the ground staring balefully at Vastor. “Come on,” Mace said softly. “I’ll need you to help me up onto the ankkox.”
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU
Vastor was willing to let Nick help me, and treat my more serious injuries with supplies from a captured medpac. He was willing to believe the battering he’d inflicted on me was nearly crippling.
It wasn’t far from the truth.
Nick was still simmering as he helped me to my feet, muttering under his breath a continuous stream of invective, characterizing Vastor as a “lizard-faced frogswallower,” and a “demented scab-chewing turtlesacker” and a variety of other names that I don’t feel comfortable recording, even in a private journal.
“That’s enough,” I told him. “I have gone to considerable trouble to keep us both alive, Nick. I’d prefer we stay that way.”
“Oh, sure. Nice job on that.” His voice was bitter, and he didn’t want to meet my eyes.
I told him I was sorry about his hundred credits, and pointed out to him gently that no one had told him to bet on me.
He turned on me then, instantly furious, hissing savagely to keep his voice down, as the Akk Guards and the dogs were still milling about. “This isn’t about credits! I don’t care about the credits—” He stopped himself, blinking, and his familiar smile flickered briefly across his lips. “Shee. Did I really just say that? Wow. So okay, sure, that was a lie: I care about the creds. I care a lot. But that’s not why I’m angry.”
I nodded, and told him I understood: he was angry at me. He felt like I’d let him down.
“Not me,” he said. “I mean, come on: Jedi are supposed to stand for something, aren’t you? You’re supposed stand up for what’s right. No matter what.” Angry at me as he may have been, he still swung his head under one of my arms and held it across his shoulders, so he could help me walk.
It was appreciated. Only as the adrenaline and concussion shock were wearing off did I begin to understand what a beating I had taken; later, with access to the medpac’s scanner, I would discover two cracked ribs, a severe ankle sprain from the gripleaf trailer, a moderate concussion, and some internal bleeding, not to mention the bite wound on my neck and an astonishing variety of scrapes and bruises.
As Nick helped me up onto the ankkox, I discovered what had made him so angry with me: more than anything else, it was that I’d declared we had been wrong to free the prisoners.
“I don’t care what you say,” he muttered darkly. “I don’t care what Kar says. There were kids there. And wounded. I mean: those Balawai, they weren’t evil. They were just people. Like us.”
“Nearly everyone is.”
“We did the right thing, and you know it.”
It dawned on me then that Nick was proud of himself. Proud of what
we had done. It may have been an unfamiliar feeling for him: that peculiarly delicious pride that comes from having taken a terrible risk to do something truly admirable. Of overcoming the instinct of self-preservation: of fighting our fears and winning.
It is the pride of discovering that one is not merely a bundle of reflexes and conditioned responses; that instead one is a thinking being, who can choose the right over the easy, and justice over safety. The pride Nick took in this made me proud of him, too—though of course I could not tell him so. It would only have embarrassed him, and made him regret speaking at all.
I hope I never forget the fierce conviction on his face as he helped me climb the extended leg of the ankkox and clambered up onto its dorsal shell. “Just because Kar beat you like a rented gong doesn’t mean he was right. Just because he won doesn’t mean you were wrong to challenge him. I can’t believe you’d ever say those things.”
His answer came from within the curtained darkness of the howdah at the top of the curved shell.
“If you spend much time around us, Nick, you will learn…” Depa’s voice was strong and clear and as sane and gentle as it has always been in my heart. “You will learn that Jedi do not always tell the truth.”
Nick stopped, suddenly scowling as though he found himself unexpectedly deep in thought. “Don’t always—hey…” he muttered suspiciously. “Hey, wait one second here—”
She pulled back the curtain once more, and pushed open the small swing gate in the rail. “Come on in. You look like you might want to lie down.”
“I might,” I admitted. “This hasn’t been my best couple of days.”
She took my hand to steady me as I stepped into the howdah, and she made room for me on the chaise. “I have to hand it to you, Mace,” she said with a softly ironic smile. “You still take a beating as well as any man in the galaxy.”
Nick’s eyes bulged as though his head might explode. “I knew it!” He shook a fiercely triumphant fist in my face. “I knew it. I knew you could take him!”
I told him to keep it down, because Vastor and the Akk Guards were still moving through the trees nearby, and I had no idea how sharp Vastor’s ears might be. I didn’t tell him to shut up altogether because it wouldn’t have done any good.
Star Wars®: Shatterpoint Page 25
