spray hypo still clutched nervelessly in his hand. Not because the jungle kills you, Nick had said. Just because it is what it is.
Nick retrieved the medpac's scanner and waved it near Mace's head. 'You're okay,' he said thinly, licking pale sweat from his upper lip. 'No sign of infestation.' He turned to Chalk, frowning down at the medpac's readout.
His shoulders slumped and his hand started to shake.
He had no words, but he didn't need any. She read her fate on his face.
She stiffened and her mouth went thin and hard. Then she turned away and marched downslope.
'Chalk-' Nick called after her helplessly. 'Chalk, wait-' 'Getting the Thunderbolt, me.' Her voice was squeezed flat, as unemotional as a navcomp's vocabulator. 'Good weapon. Will need it, you.' Nick turned his stricken look on Mace. 'Master Windu-' He held out the medpac scanner imploringly. 'Don't make me do my own reading, huh?' Mace quickly scanned Nick's spine and skull. The readings indicated a clear negative, but Nick didn't seem much relieved.
'Yeah, well,' he said with understated bitterness, 'if I was gonna die in the next day or two, I wouldn't have to worry about taking care of them.' 'Taking care of them?' Mace said. 'Is there a treatment?' 'Yeah.' Nick drew his pistol. 'I got their treatment right here.' 'That's your answer?' Mace stepped in front of him. 'Kill your friends?' 'Just Lesh,' he said, his voice grim and hard, even though it trembled a little, like his hand. He didn't have Chalk's mental toughness. His eyes watered, and his face twisted, and he could barely make himself look at his friends. 'Time enough to take care of Besh and Chalk when they start the twitches.' Mace still couldn't believe Nick was serious. 'You want to just shoot them? Like Chalk's grasser?' 'Not like her grasser,' Nick said. His face had gone gray. 'Not in the head. Scatters the larvae. Some of them will be developed enough to be dangerous.' He coughed. 'To us.' 'So it's not enough that he dies.' Mace breathed Jedi discipline into a wall around his heart: to lock down his empathic horror at the gray rictus of Lesh's face. Pink-tinged foam bubbled from Lesh's lips. 'The. infested areas. have to be destroyed. Brain and spinal cord.' Nick nodded, looking even sicker. 'With wasp fever, we usually burn the body, but.' Mace understood. The escaped gunships would have transmitted their position. No telling what might already be on its way.
He could not believe what he was about to do. He could not even believe what he was about to say. But he was a Jedi. The purpose of his life was to do what must be done. To do what others would not, or could not.
No matter what it was.
He undipped the lightsabers from his belt. His own and Depa's both.
Green blade and purple sizzled together in the smoke-hazed air.
Besh looked up from the ground. Chalk went still on the slope, the Thunderbolt cradled in her arms. Nick opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, but didn't know what it might be.
They all stared at Mace as though they'd never seen him before.
'He's your friend. Your brother.' Mace took a deep breath, steadying his own fear and revulsion and his dark, dark loathing for what he must do. 'You might want to say good-bye.' Besh shook his head mutely. With an inarticulate sob compounded of grief and terror, he threw himself to his feet and stumbled away upslope.
Chalk only held Mace's eye for a second, and gave him one slow nod. Then she followed Besh. She put one strong arm around Besh's shoulders. Besh collapsed against her, sobbing.
Nick was the last. His eyes showed nothing but pain. Finally, he shook his head, and tears spilled onto his cheeks. 'He's already gone.' He touched Mace on the shoulder. 'Master Windu-you don't have to do this-' 'Yes, I do,' Mace said. 'Or you'll have to.' Nick nodded reluctant understanding.
'Thanks. Windu, uh, Master, I-just-thanks.' He turned and walked after the others. 'I won't forget it.' Neither would Mace.
He stared down at Lesh between the two shining blades. He reached into the Force, seeking to touch anything of the young man that might remain, to offer what little comfort might be his to give, but it was as Nick said: Lesh was already gone. A long moment passed while Mace composed himself, found an attitude of calm reverence, and consigned whatever might have been left of Lesh's consciousness or spirit to the Force. Then he took a deep breath, lifted his blades, and began.
The razorback ridge eclipsed the southern sky behind them. The jungle canopy overhead glowed with early sunset; on the ground it was already twilight. The companions walked along a broad track crushed bare by repeated passages of steamcrawler treads. The canopy had arched over the track, joining above so that their path lay along a jungle-lined tunnel that wound and switchbacked up and down the folds that radiated from the ridge's north face.
Mace wore bacta patches trimmed to fit the worst of his burns. Nick's temple was shiny with spray bandage. Chalk wore a sling restraining the shoulder she'd separated when she tumbled into the rocks, and a compression wrap supported her twisted knee. Besh walked in expressionless silence. He might have been in shock.
What was left of Lesh was buried at the tree line.
Their backpacks were heavy with supplies scavenged from the dead grassers. Little of Mace's gear survived; his wallet tent, his changes of clothing, his own medpac and identikit, all had been destroyed with Nick's grasser. The war on Haruun Kal was erasing Mace's connections to life outside the jungle: of all the physical evidence that he had ever been anything other than a Korun, only the two lightsabers remained.
Even the fake datapad that he had carried all this way-its miniature subspace coil must have been damaged in the blast. He'd considered summoning the Halleck to evacuate Besh and Chalk for medical treatment, despite the fact that it would have severely compromised his mission here; the sudden appearance of a Republic cruiser in the Al' Har system would certainly have drawn entirely too much Separatist attention. But the datapad's holocomm had been unable to even pick up a carrier wave. His last link to what Depa called the Galaxy of Peace was as dead as the Balawai militia Mace had sent crashing into the razorback ridge.
A stroke of irony-the fake datapad's recording function still worked. Disguise had become reality: the datapad was a fake no longer. Mace had a superstitious hunch that this was somehow symbolic.
Galthra walked among them at Chalk's side instead of ranging around; she was the last of their akks. With a little luck, her presence alone might keep major predators at a respectful distance.
No gunships had yet come to the pass behind them. Mace found this inexplicable, and disturbing. Once in a while, Galthra gave a Force-twitch that may have meant she heard engines in the distance, but it was hard to tell.
