wedged between them and he shoved her away with a powerful thrust.
At the same instant both of them backflipped into the air, landing on their feet poised in perfect mirror images, their blades whipping in identically curving slashes almost too fast to see.
Blaster bolts howled around them. The air crackled with streaks and splatters of energy.
Their blades flickered and whipped and no bolt touched their flesh.
Their eyes never left each other's.
Something had torn in his guts when he did the backflip. Smoke trickled upward from the hole in his belly. He could smell it, but he felt no pain. Not yet. His blade whirred through the air.
Hers whirred faster. She advanced.
The slashes never stopped. They would never stop. They flowed one into the next with liquid precision.
This constant near-invisible weave of lethal energy is the ready-stance of Vaapad.
'Depa,' Mace said desperately. 'I don't want to fight you. Depa, please-' She sprang at him, screaming without words; he couldn't know if she'd heard him. He couldn't know if language still had meaning for her.
Then she was on him. His whole world turned to green fire.
Twenty-four troopers entered the bunker in a wedge around Colonel Geptun. Nick Rostu kept his back against the wall while he watched them die.
Akk Guards leaped over and past them, and with every leap another clone fell. The clones never stopped, never faltered, firing blaster carbines from the hip, forcing their way forward over the bodies of their comrades.
And it wasn't only clones who died.
The Force nudged Nick, and he swung a pistol and fired without thinking. A leaping Akk Guard whirled and the slug banged sparks off his shield, but in the instant his attention was diverted he fell against the muzzle of a trooper's DC-15 and blue energy exploded out his back.
This Akk Guard had been a man Nick knew, as he knew them all. This one's name had been Prouk. He'd liked to gamble, and he once lost sixty credits to Nick on a bet, and he'd paid it.
Another nudge from the Force and another shot took out the knee of an Akk Guard. He crumpled on top of a dying trooper, who still had enough life left in him to hold down the trigger of his carbine and blow the akk to rags.
This was the Guard whose nose Mace had broken. His name was Thaffal.
Nick was waiting for his next shot when a massive shadow rose up right in front of him; intent on the Force, Nick hadn't seen him coming. He said, 'Whoops.' This one's name was lolu. He had saved Nick's life during a fire- fight, once. A long time ago.
'Hello, Nick,' lolu said, and drove his shield's sizzling edge toward Nick's neck.
Depa's blade was everywhere.
Mace backpedaled, parrying frantically, absorbing the shock of her attacks with bent arms and a two-handed grip. He was taller than she, with more reach and weight, and vastly more muscle in his upper body, but she drove him backward as though he were a child. Green flame struck through his guard, and only a frantic jerk of his head turned what would have been a brain-burning thrust into a line of char along his cheekbone.
Still he did not strike back.
'I will not kill you,' he said. 'Death is not the answer to your pain.' Her reply was a scream louder and more savage and an onslaught to match. She broke through his guard again and scorched his wrist. Another stroke burned a slice through his pants leg just above the knee.
Power roared around her, a rising storm of darkness.
Mace got it now: as each Akk Guard died, his share of pelekotan backflowed through the bonds Vaster had forged among them.
She was getting stronger.
And with each stroke of her blade, he could feel himself slipping into the shadows. He had to. She was too strong, too fast, too everything. The only way he could survive was to give more of himself to Vaapad. To give all of himself.
To sink into pelekotaris dream.
He felt it: he had reached his own shatterpoint. And he was breaking.
The vibroshield flashed toward his neck.
Nick's knees buckled and he bent backward like a drawn bow. lolu's fist grazed Nick's nose as the horizontal vibroshield passed over the young Korun's upturned face and bit into the wall so smoothly that the Akk Guard's knuckles hit as well; the unexpected shock loosened his grip on the vibroshield's activator and its hum died, leaving it stuck fast in the wall.
Before lolu could pull it back out, Nick flipped his pistol's muzzle up against the Akk Guard's extended elbow.
The slug didn't quite blow his arm off. lolu swayed, stunned.
Chalk's gun in Nick's other hand came up under lolu's chin. 'Never liked you anyway,' Nick said, and pulled the trigger.
The corpse fell against him. Its shattered arm slipped free of the shield's retaining straps.
Nick pushed himself sideways out from under, looking for another target, and the dead Guard slid down the
