Star Wars - Shatterpoint Read online

  'Vaapad?" Palpatine repeated, eventually. Perhaps he'd grown tired of waiting for someone to explain. "Isn't that some kind of animal?" 'A predator of Sarapin," Yoda supplied gravely. "Also the nickname it is, given by students, for the seventh form of lightsaber combat." 'Hmp. I've always heard there are only six." 'Six there were, for generations of Jedi. The seventh. is not well known. A powerful form it is. Deadliest of all. But dangerous it is-to its master, as well as its opponent. Few have studied. One student alone to mastery has risen." 'But if she's the only master-and this style is so deadly-what makes you think-" 'She's not the only master, sir." He lifted his head to meet Palpatine's frown. "She is my only student to become a master." 'Yo®r only student." Palpatine echoed.

  'I didn't study Vaapad." Mace let his hands fall to his sides. "I created it." Palpatine's brows drew together thoughtfully. "Yes, I seem to recall now: a reference in your report on the treason of Master Sora Bulq. Didn't you train him as well? Didn't he also claim to be a master of this Vaapad of yours?" 'Sora Bulq was not my student." 'Your. associate, then?" 'And he did not master Vaapad," Mace said grimly. "Vaapad mastered him." 'Ah-ah, I see." 'With respect, sir, I don't think you do." 'I see enough to worry me, just a bit." The warmth of Palpatine's smile robbed insult from his words. "The relationship of Master and Padawan is intense, you said; and I well believe it.

  When you faced Dooku on Geonosis." 'I prefer," Mace said softly, "not to talk about Geonosis, Chancellor." 'Depa Billaba was your Padawan. And she is still perhaps your closest friend, is she not? If she must be slain, are you so certain you can strike her down?" Mace looked at the floor, at Yoda, at the agent, and in the end he had to meet Palpatine's eyes once more. It was not merely Palpatine of Naboo who had asked; this question had come from the Supreme Chancellor. His office demanded an answer.

  'May the Force grant, sir," Mace said slowly, "that I will not have to find out." PART ONE THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL T

  hrough the curved transparisteel, Haruun Kal was a wall of mountain-punched clouds beside him. It looked close enough to touch. The shuttle's orbit spiraled slowly toward the surface: soon enough he would be able to touch it in truth.

  The insystem shuttle was only a twenty-seater, and even so it was three-quarters empty. The shuttle line had bought it used from a tour company; the tubelike passenger fuselage was entirely transparisteel, its exterior scarred and fogged with microbody pits, its interior bare except for strips of gray no-skid laid along the aisles.

  Mace Windu was the lone human. His shipmates were two Kubaz who fluted excitedly about the culinary possibilities of pinch beetles and buzzworms, and a mismatched couple who seemed to be some kind of itinerant comedy act, a Kitonak and a Pho Ph'eahian whose canned banter made Mace wish for earplugs. Or hard vacuum. Or plain old-fashioned deafness. They must have been far down on their luck, to be taking a tourist shuttle into Pelek Baw; Haruun Kal's capital city is a place lounge acts go to die. Passenger liners on the Gevarno Loop only stopped there at all because they had to drop into realspace anyway for the system transit.

  Mace sat as far from the others as the shuttle's limited space allowed.

  The Jedi Master wore clothing appropriate to his cover: a stained vest of Corellian sand panther leather over a loose shirt that used to be white, and skintight black pants with wear patches of gray. His boots carried a hint of polish, but only above the ankle; the uppers were scuffed almost to suede. The only parts of his ensemble that were well maintained were the supple holster belted to his right thigh, and the gleaming Merr-Sonn Power 5 it held. His lightsaber was stuffed into the kitbag beneath his seat, disguised as an old-fashioned glow rod.

  The datapad on his lap was also a disguise: though it worked well enough for him to encrypt his journal on it, most of it was actually a miniature subspace transmitter, frequency-locked to the band monitored by the medium cruiser Halleck, onstation in the Ventran system.

  The Korunnal Highland swung into view: a vast plateau of every conceivable shade of green, skirted by bottomless swirls of cloud, crisscrossed by interlocking mountain ranges. A few of the tallest peaks were capped with white; many of the shorter mountains plumed billows of smoke and gas. The eastern half of the highland had already rolled through the terminator; when the shuttle passed into the planet's shadow, gleams of dark red and orange specked the world like predators' eyes beyond the ring of a campfire's light: open calderae of the highland's many active volcanoes.

  It was beautiful. Mace barely noticed.

  He held the recording wand of the fake datapad and spoke very, very softly.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU [Initial Haruun Kal Entry]: Depa's down there. Right now.

  I shouldn't be thinking about this. I shouldn't be thinking about her. Not yet. But-She's down there. She's been down there for months.

  I can't imagine what might have happened to her. I don't want to imagine.

  I'll find out soon enough.

  Focus. I have to focus. Concentrate on what I know is true while I wait for the mud to settle and the water to become clear.

  A lesson of Yoda's. But sometimes you can't wait.

  And sometimes the water never clears.

  I can focus on what I know about Haruun Kal. I know a lot.

  Here's some of it: HARUUN KAL (Al'har I): sole planet of the AL'HAR system. Haruun Kal is the name given to it in the language of the indigenous human population, the Korunnai (uplanders). It translates to Basic as "above the clouds." From space, the world appears to be oceanic, with only a few green-topped islands rising from a restless multicolored sea. But this is deceptive: the sea that these islands punctuate is not liquid, but an ocean of heavier-than-air toxic gases, which plume endlessly from the planet's innumerable active volcanoes. Only on the mountaintops and the high plateaus can oxygen-breathing life survive-and not on many of these; unless they rise far above the cloudsea, they are vulnerable to Haruun Kal's unpredictable winds. Especially during Haruun Kal's brief winter, when the thakiz baw'kal-the Downstorm-blows, the winds can whip the thick cloudsea high enough to scour lowlands free of oxygen breathers within hours. Its capital, PELEK BAW, is located on the sole inhabited landmass, the plateau known as the KORUNNAL HIGHLAND, and is the largest permanent settlement on this primarily jungle-covered planet. The indigenous humans live in small seminomadic tribal groups called ghosh and avoid the settlements, which are maintained by offworlders of a wide variety of species. The Korunnai lump all offworlders and settled folk under the somewhat contemptuous category of Balawai ("downfolk"). There is a long history of unorganized local conflicts.

  L This doesn't help.

  I can't fit what I know of Haruun Kal into a guidebook description. Too much of what I know is the color of the sunflash and the smell of the wind off Grandfather's Shoulder, the silken ripple of a grasser's undercoat through my fingers, the hot fierce sting of an akk dog's Force- touch.

  I was born on Haruun Kal. Far back in the highland.

  I am a full-blooded Korun.

  A hundred generations of my ancestors breathed that air and drank that water, ate the fruit of that soil and were buried deep within it. I've returned only once, thirty-five standard years ago-but I have carried that world with me. The feel of it. The power of its storms. The up- swelling tangle of its jungles. The thunder of its peaks.

  But it is not home. Home is Coruscant. Home is the Jedi Temple.

  I have no recollection of my infancy among the Korunnai; my earliest memory is of Yoda's kindly smile and enormous gentle eyes close above me. It is still vivid. I don't know how old I might have been, but I am certain I could not yet walk. Perhaps I was too young to even stand.

  In memory, I can see my plump infant's hands reaching up to tug at the white straggles of hair above Yoda's ears.

  I recall squalling-shrieking like a wounded glowbat, as Yoda prefers to describe it-as some kind of toy, a rattle, it might have been, bobbed in the air just beyond my grasp. I recall how no amount of shouting, screaming, howling, or
tears could draw that rattle one millimeter closer to my tiny fist. And I recall the instant I first reached for the toy without using my hands: how I could feel it hanging there, and I could feel how Yoda's mind supported it. and a whisper of the Force began to hum in my ears.

  My next lesson: Yoda had come to take the rattle away, and I-with my infant's instinctive selfishness-had refused to release it, holding on with both my hands and all I could summon of the Force. The rattle broke-to my infant mind, a tragedy like the end of a world-for that had been Yoda's way of introducing the Jedi law of nonattachment: holding too tightly to what we love will destroy it.

  And break our hearts as well.

  That's a lesson I don't want to be thinking about right now.

  But I can't help myself. Not right now.

  Not while I'm up here, and Depa is down there.

  Depa Billaba came into my life by accident: one of those joyous coincidences that are sometimes the gift of the galaxy. I found her after I fought and killed the pirates who had murdered her parents; these pirates had kidnapped their victims' lovely infant daughter. I never learned what they wanted to do with her. Or to her. I refuse to speculate.

  An advantage of Jedi mental discipline: I can stop myself from imagining such things.

  She grew to girlhood in the Temple, and to womanhood as my Padawan.The proudest moment of my life was the day I stood and directed the Jedi Council to welcome its newest member.

  She is one of the youngest Jedi ever to be named to the Council. On the day of her elevation, Yoda suggested that it was my teaching that had brought her so far while still so young.

  He said this, I think, more from courtesy than from honesty; she came so far while still so young because she is who she is. My teaching had little to do with it. I have never met anyone like her.

  Depa is more than a friend to me. She's one of those dangerous attachments. She is the daughter I will never have.

  All the Jedi discipline in the galaxy cannot entirely overpower the human heart.

  I hear her voice again and again:. you should never have sent me here, and I should never have come.

  I can't stop myself from reaching into the Force, though I know it is useless. Since shortly before Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi stood in front of the Council to report the rebirth of the Sith, a mysterious veil of darkness has clouded the Force. Close by-in both space and time-the Force is as it has always been: guide and ally, my invisible eyes and unseen hands.

  But when I try to search through the Force for Depa, I find only shadows, indistinct and threatening.The crystal purity of the Force has become a thick fog of menace.

  Again:. but what's done can never be undone.

  I can shake my head till my brain rattles, but I can't seem to drive away those words. I must clear my mind; Pelek Baw is still Separatist, and I will have to be alert. I must stop thinking about her.

  Instead, I think about the war.

  The Republic was caught entirely unprepared. After a thousand years of peace, no one- especially not us Jedi-truly believed civil war would ever come. How could we? Not even Yoda could remember the last general war. Peace is more than a tradition. It is the bedrock of civilization itself.

  This was the Confederacy's great advantage: the Separatists not only expected war, but counted on it.

  By the time the smoldering Clone War burst into Geonosian flame, their ships were already in motion. In the weeks that followed, while we Jedi tended our wounds and mourned our dead, while the Senate scrambled to assemble a fleet-any kind of fleet-to match the power of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, while Supreme Chancellor Palpatine pleaded and bargained and sometimes had to outright threaten wavering Senators to not only stay loyal to the Republic but also support its clone army with their credits and their resources, the Separatists had fanned out across the galaxy, seeding the hyperspace lanes with their forces. The major approaches into Separatist space were picketed by droid starfighters, backed up by newly revealed capital ships: Geonosian Dreadnaughts that lumbered out from secret shipyards.

  Strategically, it was a masterpiece. Any thrust into the worlds at the core of the Confederacy would be blunted, and delayed long enough for Separatist reserves to engage it; any attack with sufficient strength to swiftly overwhelm their pickets would leave hundreds or thousands of worlds open to swift Separatist reprisal. Behind their droid-walled frontier, they could gather their forces at leisure, striking out to swallow Republic systems piecemeal.

  Even before the Republic was ready to fight, we had lost.

  Yoda is the master strategist of the Jedi Council. A life as vast as his predisposes one to see the big picture, and take the long view. He developed our current strategy of limited engagement on multiple fronts; our goal is to harass the Separatists, wear them down in a war of attrition, chip away at them and prevent them from consolidating their po sition. In this way, we hope to gain time for the titanic manufacturing base of the Republic to be converted to the production of ships, weapons, and other war materiel.

  And time to train our troops. The Kaminoan clone troopers are not only the best soldiers we have, they are very nearly our only soldiers. We would use them to train civilian volunteers and law-enforcement personnel in weapons and tactics, but the Separatists have managed to keep nearly all 1.2 million of them fully engaged, rushing from system to system and planet to planet to meet probing attacks from the bewildering variety of war droids that the TechnoUnion, with the financial backing of the Trade Federation, turns out in seemingly unlimited quantities.

  Since we need all our clones simply to defend Republic systems, we have been forced to find ways to attack without them.

  The Separatists don't enjoy unalloyed popularity, even in their core systems; and in any society, there are fringe elements eager to take up arms against authority. Jedi have been covertly inserted on hundreds of worlds, with a common mission: to organize Loyalist resistance, train partisans in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and generally do whatever possible to destabilize the Separatist governments.

  This was why Depa Billaba came to Haruun Kal.

  I sent her here.

  The Al'Har system-of which Haruun Kal is the sole planet-lies on the nexus of several hyperspace lanes: the hub of a wheel called the Gevarno Loop, whose spokes join the Separatist systems of Killisu, Jutrand, Loposi, and the Gevarno Cluster with Opari, Ventran, and Ch'manss-all Loyalist. Due to local stellar configurations and the mass sensitivities of modern hyperdrives, any ship traveling from one of these systems to another can cut several standard days off its journey by coming through Al'Har, even counting the daylong realspace transit of the system itself.

  None of these systems has any vast strategic value-but the Republic has lost too many systems to secession to risk losing any to conquest. Control of the Al 'Har nexus offers control of the whole region. It was decided that Haruun Kal is worth the Council's attention-and not solely for its military uses.

  In the Temple archives are reports of the Jedi anthropologists who studied the Korun tribes.They have a theory that a Jedi spacecraft may have made a forced landing there, perhaps thousands of years ago during the turmoil of the Sith War, when so many Jedi were lost to history. There are several varieties of fungi native to the jungles of Haruun Kal that eat metals and silicates; a ship that could not lift off again immediately would be grounded forever, and comm equipment would be equally vulnerable. The ancestors of the Korunnai, the anthropologists believe, were these shipwrecked Jedi.

  This is their best explanation for a curious genetic fact: all Korunnai can touch the Force.

  The true explanation may be simpler: we have to. Those who cannot use the Force do not long survive. Humans can't live in those jungles; the Korunnai survive by following their grasser herds. Grassers, great six-limbed behemoths, tear down the jungle with their forehands and massive jaws. Their name comes from the grassy meadows that are left in their wake. It is in those meadows that the Korunnai make their precarious lives.
The grassers protect the Korunnai from the jungle; the Korunnai, in turn-with their Force-bonded companions, the fierce akk dogs-protect the grassers.

  When the Jedi anthropologists were ready to depart, they had asked the elders of ghosh Windu if they might take with them a child to train in the Jedi arts, thus recovering the Force talents of the Korunnai to serve the peace of the galaxy.

  That would be me.

  I was an infant, an orphan, called by the name of my ghosh, for my parents had been taken by the jungle before my naming day. I was six months old. The choice was made for me.

  I've never minded.

  It is the Korunnai that Depa came here to train and use as anti-government partisans. The civil government of Haruun Kal is entirely Balawai: off-worlders and their descendants, beneficiaries of the financial interests behind the thyssel bark trade. Government of the Balawai, by the Balawai, and for the Balawai.

  No Korun need apply.

  The government-and the planetary militia, their military arm-joined the Confederacy of Independent Systems as a cynical dodge to squelch an ongoing Judicial Department investigation into their treatment of the Korun natives; in exchange for the use of the capital's spaceport as a base to conduct repair and refit for the Al'har fleet of droid starfighters, the Separatists provided arms for the militia and turned a blind eye toward illegal Balawai activities in the Korunnai Highland.