'Now the lightsaber,' the talker said.
'You are better prepared than most.' Mace balanced his lightsaber on his palm. 'But like all those others, you've forgotten the only piece of equipment that would actually do you any good.' 'Yeah? What's that?' Mace's voice went cold, and his eyes went colder. 'An ambulance.' The leader's smile tried to turn into a chuckle, but instead it faded away: Mace's level stare was a humor-free zone.
The leader hefted his blaster. 'The lightsaber. Now.' 'Sure.' Mace tossed it toward him. 'Take it.' His lightsaber tumbled through a long arc. In the Force he felt them all fractionally relax: the slightest easing of trigger pressure: the tiniest shift of adrenaline-charged concentration. They relaxed because he was now unarmed.
Because none of them understood what a lightsaber was.
Mace had begun the construction of his lightsaber when he was still a Padawan. On the day he first put hand to metal, he had dreamed that lightsaber for three years already: had imagined it so completely that it existed in his mind, perfect in every detail. Its construction was not creation, but actualization: he took mental reality and made it physical. The thing of metal and gemstone, of particle beam and power cell, was only an expression; his real lightsaber was the one that existed only in the part of the Force Mace called his mind.
A lightsaber was not a weapon. Weapons might be taken, or destroyed. Weapons were unitary entities. Many people even gave them names of their own. Mace would no more give a name to his lightsaber than he would to his hand. He was not the boy who first imagined its shape, forty-one years before; nor was his lightsaber identical to that first image in the dreams of a nine-year-old boy. With each new step in his ever-deepening understanding of the Force and his place in it, he had rebuilt his lightsaber. Remade it. It had grown along with him.
His lightsaber reflected all he knew. All he believed.
All he was.
Which was why it required no effort, no thought, to seize his lightsaber's tumbling handgrip through the Force and fire it like a bullet.
It screamed through the air and its butt took the talker between the eyes with a hollow stone-on-wood whack. The impact flipped him off his feet, unconscious or dead before he hit the ground. His hands spasmed on the blaster, and it gushed energy. Through the Force Mace nudged the blaster's muzzle to sweep the talker's partner and blow him spinning to the ground; Mace guided it farther upward, and hammering energy chewed an arc of chunks from the walls before it battered the steering vanes of the speeder bike above and behind him, smacking it into a spin that kept the pilot too busy hanging on to even think about firing a weapon.
The over-unders of the two at the alley mouth now coughed, but Mace was already in motion: he Force- sprang at a slant and met the far wall five meters up, then kicked higher and across to the opposite wall, up and back again, zigzagging toward the rooftops through a storm of blasterfire.
Belated grenades burst below: spit-white glop spewed across the alley, swirling the purple cloud of Nytinite anesthetic gas, but Mace was already well above their effect zone. He sailed up over the lip of the flat baked-tile roof and there were people up there- The roof was cluttered with hods full of tiles and pots of liquid permacite and bundled tarpaulins that might have been keeping the winter rains out-but now had become camouflage for at least two men.
Lying concealed beneath the tarps, the men were invisible to the eye but Mace felt them in the Force: adrenaline shivers and the desperate self-control it took to remain motionless.
Bystanders? Roofers caught in a sudden firefight, hiding for their lives? Reserves for the assault team?
Mace was not certain he'd live to find out.
Before he could touch down, the other speeder pilot cut off his path with a fountain of blasterfire that traversed back to intercept him. A shove with the Force dropped him short, but as he made contact with the roof, the pilot fired an impact-fused grenade at Mace's feet. Mace reached out and the Force slapped the grenade away from himself and the hidden men, but the cannon's blast stream hammered a line of shattered tiles and smoking holes in the rooftop straight at them.
So he sprang toward it.
An upward thrust with the Force lifted him over the blast stream, and he made his spring into a twisting dive-roll that brought him to his feet with his back to the massive communal chimney that rose from the center of the roof. The chimney shuddered with the impact of cannonfire on its far side. Through the Force he felt the other speeder bike circling toward an open shot.
Cannon holes in the roof, he thought. Those cannons left shattered gaps big enough to dive through. If he could drop through one into the building- The chimney was only a meter taller than Mace was. He sprang to the top. Cannonfire blasted into its baked-clay wall, tracking up toward his legs. Before he could spot a roof hole big enough to dive through, the chimney bucked and began to crumble.
He clawed for his balance. A man shouted, 'Hey, Windu! Happy name-day!' and Mace got a glimpse of tarpaulins nipping back, and blue eyes and white teeth, and something came tumbling toward him through the air- It was shaped vaguely like a cryoban grenade but when Mace reached into the Force to slap it away, he recognized it: its feel was as familiar as the sound of Yoda's voice.
It was a lightsaber.
It was Depa's lightsaber.
Instead of slapping it away, Mace drew it toward him-and nixo. ouni through the Force hefelf her, felt Depa as though she stood at his side and had taken his hand. Its grip smacked into his palm.
In the green flash of Depa's blade, the situation looked different.
The rest of the fight lasted less than five seconds.
The speeder bike above opened fire again and Mace slipped to one side, letting the Force move the blade. Blaster bolts ricocheted from the energy fountain and smashed the speeder's power cell, sending it flipping toward the ground within the alley's end. The blue-eyed Korun- Smiley, the one who had led him here-and the other man who had lain beneath the tarp held rapid-fire slugthrowers that they slipped over the roof rim to fill the alley below with a lethal swarm of bullets.
Two more Korunnai popped out of cover on the rooftop across the alley. One had a slugthrower: flame leapt
