sometime during his yearlong tan pel'trokal, had stumbled upon the ancient Jedi starship whose crash stranded on this planet his ancestors, and my own.
It was earlier this evening that I learned the real truth of Kar Vastor. Not only who he is, and why he is- But what he means.
Somewhere along our line of march Kar had located a cave that he deemed adequate to shelter a fire from gunship or satellite detection, and that night he set about curing Besh's and Chalk's fever wasp infestation. Besh and Chalk had remained in thanatizine suspension, tied to a grasser's travois like a bundle of cargo. The crude hacking Terrel had done to them had been mostly repaired with tissue binders from a captured medpac, though of course the wounds could not heal; the body's healing processes are suspended by thanatizine as well.
Depa was in attendance, as was I, as well as a select few others. A pair of the Akk Guards had carried her, chaise and all, in from her howdah. She lay back with one slim arm across her eyes; she was having another of her headaches, and the light from the fire of tyruun, the local wood that burns white-hot, was causing her pain. I suspect she might have preferred to skip the whole business.
Even so, when Kar laid the still forms of Besh and Chalk facedown on the mossy floor of the cave and tore open the backs of their tunics, Depa stirred and sat forward. Though she continued to shade her eyes, firelight gave them glitters of silver and red. She watched raptly, her small white teeth fixed in her lower lip, worrying the corner of her mouth near the burn scar.
Kar simply squatted beside the two, humming tunelessly under his breath, while a Korun I did not recognize injected them with the antidote. Vastor's humming deepened, and found a pulsing rhythm like the slow beat of a human heart. He extended his hands, and closed his eyes, and hummed, and I could feel motion in the Force, a swirl of power very unlike any I've felt from a Jedi healer-or anyone else, for that matter.
A streak of red painted itself along their spines, and a moment later this red suddenly blossomed into the glistening wetness of fresh blood oozing through their skin-and details, I suppose, are unnecessary. Suffice it to say that Kar had somehow used the Force-used pelekotan-to persuade the fever wasp larvae that they were in the wrong place to hatch: using the same animal tropism that draws them from the site of the wasp sting to cluster along the victim's central nervous system, Kar induced them to migrate- Out of Besh and Chalk entirely.
And such was his power that the entire wriggling mass of them-nearly a kilo all told- squirmed its way straight into the tyruun blaze, where the larvae popped while they roasted with a stench like burning hair.
In the midst of this extraordinary display, Depa leaned close to me and whispered, 'Don't you ever wonder if we might be wrong?' I didn't understand what she was talking about, and she waved her fine-boned hand vaguely toward Vastor. 'Such power-and such control-and never a day of training. Because what he does is natural: as natural as the jungle itself. We Jedi train our entire lives: to control our natural emotions, to overcome our natural desires. We give up so much for our power. And what Jedi could have done this?' I could not answer; Vastor has power on the scale of Master Yoda, or young Anakin Skywalker. And I had no desire to debate with Depa on Jedi tradition, and the necessary distinction between dark and light.
So I tried to change the subject.
I told her that Nick had shared with me the truth of the faked massacre and her message on the data wafer, and I reminded her that she had yesterday alluded to having some plan for me: something she wanted to teach me, or to show me. So I asked her.
I asked what she had hoped to accomplish by drawing me here.
I asked what are her victory conditions.
She said that she wanted to tell me something. That's all. It was a message she could have sent on a subspace squawk: a line or two, no more. But I had to be in the war-see the war, eat and drink, breathe and smell the war-or I wouldn't have believed it.
She told me: 'The Jedi will lose.' There in the cave, as fever wasp larvae snapped and crackled in the tyruun flames, I countered with numbers: there are still ten times as many Loyalist systems as Separatist, the Republic has a titanic manufacturing base, and huge advantages in resources. the beginnings of a whole list of reasons the Republic will inevitably win.
'Oh, I know,' was her response. 'The Republic may very well win. But the Jedi will lose.' I said I did not understand, but I now believe that is not true. The truth, I think, is what the Force said to me in the image of Depa back at the outpost: that I already understand all there is to understand.
I just don't want to believe it.
She said that I had foreshadowed the defeat of the Jedi myself. 'The reason you freed the Balawai, Mace,' she said, 'is the same reason that the Jedi will be destroyed.' War is a horror, she said. Her words: 'A horror. But what you don't understand is that it must be a horror. That's how wars are won: by inflicting such terrible suffering upon the enemy that they can no longer bear to fight. You cannot treat war like law enforcement, Mace. You can't fight to protect the innocent-because no one is innocent.' She said something similar to what Nick had said about the jungle prospectors: that there are no civilians.
'The innocent citizens of the Confederacy are the ones who make it possible for their leaders to wage war on us: they build the ships, they grow the food, mine the metals, purify the water. And only they can stop the war: only their suffering will bring it to a close.' 'But you can't expect Jedi to stand by while ordinary people are hurt and killed-' I began.
'Exactly. That is why we cannot win: to win this war, we must no longer be Jedi.' She speaks of this in the future tense, though I suspect that in her heart-in her conscience-the Jedi are dead already. 'Like dropping a bomb into the arena on Ceonosis: we can save the Republic, Mace. We can. But the cost will be our principles. In the end, isn't that what Jedi are for? We sacrifice everything for the Republic: our families, our homeworlds, our wealth, even our lives. Now the Republic needs us to sacrifice our consciences as well. Can we refuse? Are Jedi traditions more important than the lives of billions?' She told me how she and Kar Vastor had managed to drive the Separatists off this world.
The CIS had been using the Pelek Baw spaceport as a base for the repair, refit, and resupply of the droid starfighters they used to picket the Al' Har system. These operations required large numbers of civilian employees. Her strategy was simple: she proved to these civilian employees that the Separatist military and the Balawai militia together were powerless to protect them.
There was no pitched battle. Nothing heroic or colorful. Just an unending series of gruesome killings. One or two at a time. At first, the Separatists had flooded Pelek Baw with their forces-but battle droids are as vulnerable to the metal-eating fungi as are simple blasters, and soldiers of flesh and blood die just as easily as civilians. The essence of guerrilla warfare: the real target is not the enemy's emplacements, or even their lives.
