Pelek Baw; Haruun Kal's capital city is a place lounge acts go to die. Passenger liners on the Gevarno Loop only stopped there at all because they had to drop into realspace anyway for the system transit.
Mace sat as far from the others as the shuttle's limited space allowed.
The Jedi Master wore clothing appropriate to his cover: a stained vest of Corellian sand panther leather over a loose shirt that used to be white, and skintight black pants with wear patches of gray. His boots carried a hint of polish, but only above the ankle; the uppers were scuffed almost to suede. The only parts of his ensemble that were well maintained were the supple holster belted to his right thigh, and the gleaming Merr-Sonn Power 5 it held. His lightsaber was stuffed into the kitbag beneath his seat, disguised as an old-fashioned glow rod.
The datapad on his lap was also a disguise: though it worked well enough for him to encrypt his journal on it, most of it was actually a miniature subspace transmitter, frequency-locked to the band monitored by the medium cruiser Halleck, onstation in the Ventran system.
The Korunnal Highland swung into view: a vast plateau of every conceivable shade of green, skirted by bottomless swirls of cloud, crisscrossed by interlocking mountain ranges. A few of the tallest peaks were capped with white; many of the shorter mountains plumed billows of smoke and gas. The eastern half of the highland had already rolled through the terminator; when the shuttle passed into the planet's shadow, gleams of dark red and orange specked the world like predators' eyes beyond the ring of a campfire's light: open calderae of the highland's many active volcanoes.
It was beautiful. Mace barely noticed.
He held the recording wand of the fake datapad and spoke very, very softly.
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU [Initial Haruun Kal Entry]: Depa's down there. Right now.
I shouldn't be thinking about this. I shouldn't be thinking about her. Not yet. But-She's down there. She's been down there for months.
I can't imagine what might have happened to her. I don't want to imagine.
I'll find out soon enough.
Focus. I have to focus. Concentrate on what I know is true while I wait for the mud to settle and the water to become clear.
A lesson of Yoda's. But sometimes you can't wait.
And sometimes the water never clears.
I can focus on what I know about Haruun Kal. I know a lot.
Here's some of it: HARUUN KAL (Al'har I): sole planet of the AL' HAR system. Haruun Kal is the name given to it in the language of the indigenous human population, the Korunnai (uplanders). It translates to Basic as 'above the clouds.' From space, the world appears to be oceanic, with only a few green-topped islands rising from a restless multicolored sea. But this is deceptive: the sea that these islands punctuate is not liquid, but an ocean of heavier-than-air toxic gases, which plume endlessly from the planet's innumerable active volcanoes. Only on the mountaintops and the high plateaus can oxygen-breathing life survive-and not on many of these; unless they rise far above the cloudsea, they are vulnerable to Haruun Kal's unpredictable winds. Especially during Haruun Kal's brief winter, when the thakiz baw'kal-the Downstorm-blows, the winds can whip the thick cloudsea high enough to scour lowlands free of oxygen breathers within hours. Its capital, PELEK BAW, is located on the sole inhabited landmass, the plateau known as the KORUNNAL HIGHLAND, and is the largest permanent settlement on this primarily jungle-covered planet. The indigenous humans live in small seminomadic tribal groups called ghosh and avoid the settlements, which are maintained by offworlders of a wide variety of species. The Korunnai lump all offworlders and settled folk under the somewhat contemptuous category of Balawai ('downfolk'). There is a long history of unorganized local conflicts.
L This doesn't help.
I can't fit what I know of Haruun Kal into a guidebook description. Too much of what I know is the color of the sunflash and the smell of the wind off Grandfather's Shoulder, the silken ripple of a grasser's undercoat through my fingers, the hot fierce sting of an akk dog's Force- touch.
I was born on Haruun Kal. Far back in the highland.
I am a full-blooded Korun.
A hundred generations of my ancestors breathed that air and drank that water, ate the fruit of that soil and were buried deep within it. I've returned only once, thirty-five standard years ago-but I have carried that world with me. The feel of it. The power of its storms. The up- swelling tangle of its jungles. The thunder of its peaks.
But it is not home. Home is Coruscant. Home is the Jedi Temple.
I have no recollection of my infancy among the Korunnai; my earliest memory is of Yoda's kindly smile and enormous gentle eyes close above me. It is still vivid. I don't know how old I might have been, but I am certain I could not yet walk. Perhaps I was too young to even stand.
In memory, I can see my plump infant's hands reaching up to tug at the white straggles of hair above Yoda's ears.
I recall squalling-shrieking like a wounded glowbat, as Yoda prefers to describe it-as some kind of toy, a rattle, it might have been, bobbed in the air just beyond my grasp. I recall how no amount of shouting, screaming, howling, or tears could draw that rattle one millimeter closer to my tiny fist. And I recall the instant I first reached for the toy without using my hands: how I could feel it hanging there, and I could feel how Yoda's mind supported it. and a whisper of the Force began to hum in my ears.
My next lesson: Yoda had come to take the rattle away, and I-with my infant's instinctive selfishness-had refused to release it, holding on with both my hands and all I could summon of the Force. The rattle broke-to my infant mind, a tragedy like the end of a world-for that had been Yoda's way of introducing the Jedi law of nonattachment: holding too tightly to what we love will destroy it.
And break our hearts as well.
That's a lesson I don't want to be thinking about right now.
