Mostly, she mourned her dead packmates: her Force presence was a long moan of grief and loss.
They pushed on. Nick set a killing pace. He had not spoken since they'd buried Lesh's remains.
Mace guessed that Nick was thinking about Besh and Chalk; he himself certainly was.
Thinking about the fever wasp larvae that teemed within their brain and spinal cord tissue. They might have a day or two before dementia would begin. A day or two after that: convulsions and an ugly death. Besh walked with his head down, shivering, as though he could think of nothing else; Chalk marched like a war droid, as though suffering and death were too alien for her to even comprehend, let alone fear.
Mace matched Nick's pace, close by his side. 'Talk to me.' Nick's eyes stayed on the jungle ahead. 'Why should I?' 'Because I want to know what you have in mind.' 'What makes you think I have anything in mind? What makes you think anything I might have in mind can make a difference?' His voice was angrily bitter. 'We have two people about to go into second-stage wasp fever. No grassers. One akk. A handful of weapons, militia on our tail. And you and me.' His gaze slid sideways to meet Mace's. His eyes were red and raw.
'We're dead. You get it? Like that tusker in the death hollow: a few meters short of where we needed to be. We didn't make it. We're dead.' 'For dead men,' Mace observed, 'we're making good time.' For an instant he thought Nick might crack a smile. Instead, Nick shook his head. 'There's a lor pelek who travels with Depa's band. He's. very powerful. More than powerful. If we can get Besh and Chalk to him before they start the twitches, he might be able to save them.' Lor pelek: 'jungle master.' Shaman. Witch doctor. Wizard. In Korun legend, the lor pelek was a person of great power, and great peril. As unpredictable as the jungle. He brought life or death: a gift or a wound. In some stories, a lor pelek was not a being at all, but was rather pelekotan incarnate: the avatar of the jungle-mind.
Mace made a connection. 'Kar Vaster.' Nick goggled at him. 'How'd you know that? How'd you know his name?' 'How long before we reach them?' Nick trudged on a few paces before he answered. 'If we still had grassers, and akks for warding? Maybe two days. Maybe less. On foot? With only one akk?' His shrug was expressive.
'Then why march us so hard?' 'Because I do have something in mind.' He flicked a sidelong glance at Mace. 'But you're not gonna like it.' 'Will I like it less than having to do to Besh and Chalk what I had to do to Lesh?' 'That's not for me to say.' Nick's gaze went remote, staring off into the gloom-filled tunnel ahead. 'There's a little outpost settlement about an hour west of here. Ones like it are strung out every hundred klicks or so along these steamcrawler tracks. They'll have a secure bunker, and a comm unit. Even though we-the ULF-don't use comms, we still monitor the frequencies. We get in there, we can send a coded signal to them with our position. Then we put Chalk and Besh in thanatizine suspension, sit tight, and hope for the best.' 'A Balawai settlement?' He nodded. 'We don't have settlements. DOKAWs saw to that.' 'These Balawai-they'll take us in?' 'Sure.' Nick's teeth gleamed in the jungle twilight, and that manic spark kindled in his eyes.
'You just have to know how to ask.' Mace's face darkened. 'I won't let you harm civilians. Not even to save your friends.' 'No need to scorch your scalp over that one,' Nick said, trudging onward. 'Out here, civilians are a myth.' Mace didn't want to ask what Nick meant by that. He came to a stop on the rugged track.
He saw again the holoprojected carnage spread across the Supreme Chancellor's desk; he saw again images of huts broken and burned, and nineteen corpses in the jungle. 'You were right,' he said. 'I don't like it. I don't like it at all.' Nick kept walking. He didn't even look over his shoulder as he left Mace behind. 'Yeah, well, as soon as you come up with a better idea,' he said into the darkness ahead, 'you be sure to let me know, huh?' CIVILIANS FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU In this bunker, the air is closer to cool than any I've felt since the interrogation room in the Ministry of Justice. The bunker is set into the igneous stone of the hillside- mostly just a durasteel door across the mouth of a bubble some pocket of gas or softer stone once left in the granite here. Though it overlooks the remnants of the outpost compound below, it was clearly never meant to be a combat position: no gun ports. From the way it's constructed- excavated-I believe it was more along the lines of a panic room: a safe place to hole up in the event of an attack. A safe place to wait for help from the militia.
If so, it didn't work.
The night air gently curls around the twisted shards that are all that's left of the door; its whispering passage darkly echoes the violence that still hums in the Force around me.
I dare not meditate. The dark is too deep here. It has a tidal pull: a black hole that I've taken up too tight an orbit around, and it's tearing me in half. Gravity draws the near half of me in toward an event horizon that I'm afraid to even glimpse.
Behind me, lost in the night shadows against the stone, Besh and Chalk lie motionless, nearly as cool as the rock they lie on, in full tha natizine suspension. Only with the Force can I tell that they still live: their hearts beat less than once per minute, and an hour spans no more than ten or twelve shallow breaths. The fever wasp larvae in their bodies are similarly suspended; Besh and Chalk might survive a week or more like this.
Provided nothing eats them in the meantime.
Making sure they're safe is my job. Right now, it's my only job. And so I sit among the wreckage of this doorway and stare out into the infinite night.
The Thunderbolt rests on its bipod in the doorway, muzzle canted toward the sky. Chalk maintains her beloved weapon well; she insisted on field-stripping it one last time before she would let me inject her. I have test-fired it at intervals, and it's still working fine. Though I am trying to learn to feel the action of the metal-eating fungi in the Force, the way the Korunnai do, I prefer to depend on practical experiment.
There is little for me to do right now. I pass the time by recording this-and by thinking about my argument with Nick.
Back on the trail, Nick said that civilians are a myth. He meant, I found, that there are no civilians out here: that to be in the jungle is to be in the war. The Balawai government promulgates a myth of innocent jungle prospectors being massacred by savage Korun partisans.
This, Nick says, is only propaganda.
Now, here in the ruins of this Balawai outpost, I find the thought oddly comforting-but earlier this evening I rejected the idea instinctively. It seemed to me nothing more than rationalization. An excuse. A sop to consciences haunted by atrocities. On the hike along the steam-crawler track that led us here, Nick and I went back and forth about it quite a bit.
According to Nick, civilians stay in the cities; the only real civilians on Haruun Kal are the waiters and the janitors, the storekeepers and the taxicart pullers. He said there's a reason why jungle prospectors carry such heavy weapons, and that reason has more to do with akk dogs than with vine cats. Balawai do not go into the jungle unless they're ready, willing, and able to kill Korunnai. Nobody on either side waits for the other to attack. In the jungle, if you don't strike first you're nothing but prey.
