He saw the gunships at the notch pass: flying away only seconds after he first flashed his blades. They had been ordered to withdraw.
Because he'd been alone.
Because if he was killed before he reached Depa and her guerrilla it wouldn't solve the militia's Jedi problem.
He saw himself in the Pelek Baw alley, staring in disbelief at h depowered lightsaber.
He saw the hours he'd spent in the binder chair in that dirty rooi in the Ministry of Justice, waiting; that long wait hadn't been an ir terrogation technique. Geptun had never intended to interrogai him in the first place.
Following that stress fault back in time, he saw a shielded room i the Ministry of Justice, where technicians made cut after cut with h lightsaber. Where they had shot the blade with blaster bolts and bu lets, and used it to cut thyssel, and lammas, and portaak leave duracrete, transparisteel.
So that they could measure and record the emission signature this blade.
So that their satellites would recognize it whenever it was usei No matter what it might be used for.
That's why his blade had been out of charge. Geptun had prob; bly had no idea about that upcountry team; he'd wanted Mace to g out of Pelek Baw.
Wanted him to make contact with Depa and the 'ULF.' Wanted to find where all the missing Korunnai had been hiding Now in the meadow, other stress faults connected his mind ' dozens of gunships that converged on the Lorshan Pass. Gunshi] packed with eager troops, trailing billows of hate and fear and fieri anticipation like the ash plume from an erupting volcano.
One fracture terminated at an orbiting satellite that whizzt across the face of the planet at almost twenty- eight thousand kil meters per hour, and through the fracture he could feel a sil con brain make an electronic connection. He could feel tl execution of a simple command program, and he could feel aut mated clamps releasing huge durasteel bars layered in ablati1 shielding, and he could feel primitive guidance jets driving them in the atmosphere at an angle too steep for any spacecraft to survive.
But these were not spacecraft, and they were not intended to survive.
Vaster was still in the air, and Nick was still twisting to track him with his blazing pistol, when Mace Windu whipped his arms straight and shouted, 'Stop!' The Force blasts that accompanied the Jedi Master's command clubbed Nick to the ground and sent Vaster spinning against the mountain's face above the cave.
'What are you doing?' Nick rolled to his feet and snapped the pistol back into line. 'He just tried to frag you- kill him!' Vaster crouched above, clinging to the rock like a krayt dragon. No more talking. It is time to fight.
'Yes,' Mace Windu said. 'But not each other. Look around you!' He swung his arm toward the jungle below the pass.
All the patrolling gunships, the dozens that had leisurely crisscrossed the jungle all these past days, now traced converging streaks that would intersect at the Lorshan Pass.
Nick swore, and Vaster's growl lost meaning.
'And there,' Mace said, pointing to what seemed to be a slowly developing dark cloud, high above the mountains, but was in fact the smoke from ablative shielding burning off in the atmosphere.
The center of the cloud grew red, then orange, then pale as a blue-white star: ion thrusters kicking in.
Nick frowned. 'That can't be the lander-the angle's all wrong, and it's coming in way too fast.' 'It isn't,' Mace said. 'I should say, they aren't.' 'I'm not gonna like this, am I?' Nick passed a hand over his eyes. 'Oh, nuts. Ohhh, nuts nuts nuts. You're about to tell me those are DOKAWs.' 'At least five. More to follow.' YOU! Vastor's explosive roar seemed to yank him off the rock face and carry him raging to the meadow. He shook a sizzling shield at Mace. This is YOUR fault! YOU have brought them here!
'There will be time later to argue blame.' Mace let the lightsabers' blades shrink to nonexistence. 'There's something we need to do right now.' 'What's that?' The Jedi Master looked from the lorpelek to the young Korun officer, then into a sky at the durasteel missiles streaking through the atmosphere.
At thirty thousand kilometers per hour, and accelerating.
Mace Windu said, 'Run.' They ran.
PART THREE SHATTERPOIKT SHOCKWAVES A
fully-assembled De-Orbiting Kinetic Anti-emplacement Weapon (DOKAW)-hardened durasteel spear, ablative shielding, miniature ion drive, and tiny attitude thrusters-massed slightly more than two hundred kilograms. By the time the spear impacted a target at ground level, the shielding, the drive, and the attitude thrusters, as well as a fair bit of the hardened durasteel itself, would have all burned away; the final warhead massed in the general neighborhood of one hundred kilograms, slightly more or less depending on angle of entry, atmospheric density, and other minor concerns.
These concerns were minor because the DOKAW was not, in it-serf, a particularly sensitive or sophisticated weapon; its virtues lay more in the the realm of being inexpensive to produce and simple to operate, which is why it was found mostly in more primitive back-world areas of the galaxy. It was vulnerable to counterfire from rur- bolaser batteries, for example. It was also largely useless against a target capable of even rudimentary evasive action, and once its attitude thrusters had burned away, mere atmospheric disturbances would be sufficient to push it off course, making it less than ideally accurate against stationary targets smaller than a medium- sized town. Because, after all, it was basically just a hundred-kilo hunk of durasteel.
Ideal accuracy, though, was also a minor concern, because at the point of impact, this hundred-kilo spear of hardened durasteel was traveling at well over ten kilometers per second, In a word: WHAM.
Mace, Nick, and Kar had reached the widening throat of the first of the major caverns when the floor dropped out from under them for one astonishing second, then jumped back up and smacked them tumbling through the air toward the jagged rock roof overhead.
The blast transcended sound.
Mace controlled his spin instinctively so that he could absorb the impact against the roof with bent legs. His
