To where Keela held Pell, both of their heads lowered against the leaf-whirl thrown up by the ship's turbojets.
I don't expect to be forgiven. I don't even hope for it. I only hope that someday, these children may be able to look at a Jedi without hatred in their hearts.
That's the only reward I want.
Night was falling, and the sun slanted low through the canyon mouth. Navigating was easy: they loped through the thickening twilight, heading directly toward where the Force showed Mace maximum threat.
'So, you've handled the militia's Jedi problem, have you?' Nick muttered as they jogged under the trees. 'That'll come as a surprise to Kar and Depa, I'm guessing.' 'I'm not interested in Kar,' Mace said. 'I'm only interested in Depa. Where's the nearest subspace comm?' Nick shrugged. 'The Lorshan Pass caverns. That's our base-it's only a couple of days away, if we can ever lose the fraggin' gunships. That's where we're heading anyway. Why?' 'Less than a day after you get me subspace comm, Depa and I will be leaving this planet. I am willing to waste no more time. I need subspace to call for extraction.' 'And me, right? You wouldn't leave your whole staff behind, would V
you?
'You have seen what my word is worth.' 'You think maybe you could, like, send me out first? Because, y'know, I don't want to be anywhere in this whole sector when Kar finds out she's leaving.' 'Leave Vaster to me.' 'And, uh, Master General, sir? Have you considered what you're gonna do if she doesn't want to go?' 'It's not up to her.' 'She could have gotten out of here weeks ago, if she wanted. How are you gonna make her go?' Mace said, 'I have a hostage.' 'A what? Are you allowed to do that? I mean, do Jedi take hostages?' 'There is one hostage a Jedi may lawfully take. I hope it won't come to that.' 'Have you considered that she might not give a bucket of tusker poop about this hostage?' 'I have,' Mace said. His voice was cold, but the thought made a hot knife twist in his belly.
Nick stopped in his tracks. He said weakly, 'Have you considered that neither of us might live that long?' He said this because of the twelve snarling akk dogs who had materialized around them as though the jungle had birthed them from the twilight.
Fury chuffed into the Force like the steam from their nostrils. Moving out of the gloom- haunted trees came all six of the Akk Guards. They wore their vibroshields pushed up over their biceps, freeing their hands for the assault rifles and grenade launchers they carried.
Weapons for hunters stalking human prey.
All six wore the human equivalent of the akks' snarls.
None of them spoke.
It was possible, at that moment, that none of them remembered how.
The Force hummed with anger, as though every one of them resonated on a single harmonic.
Mace felt, then, the power of the Force-bonds that linked them-but not to each other. Not one of the Akk Guards had a link with a dog like the one Chalk had had with Galthra.
All eighteen of them, dogs and men alike, were Force-bonded not with each other, but each with one single other, as though they were spokes on a wheel of which he was the hub.
The anger Mace felt was Kar's.
He recognized its distinctive flavor.
He said, 'I think Kar might be a little upset about those prisoners after all.' Nick stood with his back against Mace's: where once Depa would have been.
Where Depa should have been.
Where, in any sane universe, she would be right now.
Mace heard the familiar snap of an igniting blade and turned to Nick. 'Give me that.' The young Korun's eyes flared green with the blade's glow. 'What am I supposed to fight with, then? My rapierlike wit?' Which would do him as much good as a lightsaber against twelve akk dogs, but Mace didn't tell him that. 'You won't be fighting.' 'Says you.' Instead of arguing, Mace reached over the blade and finger-snapped the end of his nose as though flicking away a fly.
Nick blinked, flinching, blurting a reflexive obscenity, and by the time he remembered that he'd had a lightsaber in his hand, the lightsaber was in Mace's.
'Vastor is a predator, not a HoloNet villain: they're not holding us here so that he can gloat.
If he planned to kill us, we'd already be dead.' 'So why are they holding us here?' A massive shadow approached through the trees: low and huge, with side-bent legs and immense splay-clawed feet.
Nick breathed, 'Oh, I get it. He's bringing Depa.' HOSTAGE I
he immense shadow crashed closer, its walk a symphony of splintering trees.
It was an ankkox.
A massive armored saurian, the ankkox was the largest land animal of Haruun Kal.
Ankkoxes were twice the size of grassers-more than half again the mass of a full-grown bantha-but built low and wide, with a broad dorsal shell like an oval soup plate turned upside down. The dorsal shell of this one was nearly three meters wide, and well over four meters long.
A drover's chair was bolted to the top of the ankkox's crown shell, a convex disc of armor that capped the beast's head; when an ankkox retracted its head and legs, its crown shell and all six knee shells fit into gaps in its armor as snugly as air locks, enabling the ankkox to survive washes of volcanic gas that it couldn't outrun.
This drover did not sit, but stood wide-legged on the crown armor behind the chair, brandishing a long pole that ended in a sharp-looking hook, to use as a goad in directing the ankkox's path. Two teardrop-shaped shields of ultrachrome were pushed up onto his biceps.
