feet.
Nick was saying something as Mace pulled him upright, but Mace heard only a distant mutter over the high singing whine in his ears. 'You'll have to speak up.' Nick cupped one hand to his ear. 'What?' 'Speak upl' 'What? You'll have to speak up!' Mace sighed and shoved Nick stumbling along the corridor; he turned, reaching into the Force as he extended a hand, and the sub-space unit floated out the doorway, down the passage and into his arms.
He jogged after Nick while their stunned eardrums recovered, i Three minutes' scramble brought them to a a nexus of intersecting passageways, some cut, some natural. 'This will have to do.' 'Do for what? What's left?' Nick sagged against the wall, panting. 'And what are you lugging that fraggin' thing around for?' Mace set the comm unit on the passage floor. He pulled off his improvised dust-mask and frowned at the rear access panel; fasteners unscrewed themselves and floated to a neat little pile in a dimple in the rock, joined shortly by the access panel itself. Mace examined the leads and contacts inside the unit for a moment, then nodded.
He opened his hand and his lightsaber jumped to it from its pocket inside his vest. A flick of the Force tripped the handgrip's secret interior latch; a curved section of the grip popped open, and Mace pulled out the power cell. Another flick of the Force bent a pair of lead-panels inside the comm unit's guts. Mace wedged the powercell between them, and the unit's ready-lights came on.
'Hold this here,' Mace said. Nick held the energy cell in place while Mace keyed the HallecKs emergency channel.
'Halleck, this is General Windu. This is a priority clear-call, inti-ation code oh six one five.
Acknowledge.' The comm unit crackled to life in a burst of ECM static. A stolid voice came faintly through the buzz: 'Response. one nine.' 'Verification seven seven.' 'Go a. General.' 'Captain Trent, I need your status.' 'Regret to in. Cap. bridge crew. ously wounded. This is Commander Urhal. der heavy. Repeat: We are under heavy DSF attack.' Nick frowned. 'DSF?' 'Droid starfighter.' Mace keyed the transmitter. 'Can you hold?' '. gative. Too many. sustained heavy. shields and armor, but.' Through the bursts of static and washes of white hiss, the acting captain of the Halleck sketched their situation: An unknown number of Trade Federation droid starfighters had been lying in wait, deactivated and drifting outside the system's ecliptic plane amid cometary dust and debris of ancient asteroids. The commander guessed that it was something about the lander itself that had triggered them; they had attacked as soon as the extraction lander un-docked and made for orbit. The lander had been lost with all hands, and the DSFs had quickly overwhelmed the Halleck's escort complement of six starfighters; they were pounding the cruiser with everything they had. The ship Mace had been looking to for rescue was already fighting for its life.
And losing.
Mace balanced on his heels, staring into the rock wall beside him.
The granular surface gleamed with sweat condensed from his breath, and flecks of mineral sparkled within it, but Mace didn't see any of that. He wasn't looking at the stone. He was looking into the stone. Through the stone.
Into the Force.
'So that's it, then, huh?' Nick's words came distantly to Mace's ears, hollow and faint, as though he spoke from the bottom of a well. 'There's no way we can evacuate.' 'That's it, yes. No way.' This was a reflexive echo; Mace was barely aware of what Nick had said, and not at all aware that he had answered. 'No way.' His consciousness was elsewhere.
'Have I mentioned how much I hate this place? Every time I come here it's like being buried alive.' Into the Force- Mace wasn't actually looking, not really; the sense he used was not sight. This sense invaded the Force, touching power and letting the power touch it, shading the power then drawing on the shade it created to deepen its own shade, feeding upon the Force and feeding the Force in a regenerative spiral, gathering strength, spidering outward from this specific nowhere-in-particular-right-now to the general ail-where of every time: from a crossroads inside a mountain that stood in a jungle the size of a continent, on a world that whirled through a galaxy that was rapidly becoming a jungle of its own.
This sense brought to his perception the stress-vectors of reality. It was more than the searching of a shatterpoint, it was as though this single moment existed in a crystal shell, and if he could strike it in exactly the right way, the shell enclosing this one would shatter as well- and the shell enclosing that shell, and on, and on, a single stroke whose Shockwaves would propagate outward to crash through the trap that held not only him and Nick, but Depa and Kar and the Korunnai, the world of Haruun Kal, the Republic, perhaps the galaxy itself: more than a chain of shatterpoints, it was a fountain of shatterpoints. A cascade.
An avalanche.
If he could only find the spot to strike.
Faintly, distantly, resonating from the here-and-now to Mace's everywhere-at-once: 'We're trapped in here. The whole fraggin' planetary militia is outside, and there's nobody who can get here to help us, and we're all gonna die. This is a stupid place to die. Stupid, stupid, stupid.' 'Stupid,' Mace echoed. 'Stupid, yes. Stupid! Exactly. 1' 'Are you even listening to me?' 'You,' Mace said, his gaze slowly returning from the stone depths he had been contemplating, 'are brilliant. Not to mention lucky.' 'Excuse me?' 'Some years ago, the Jedi Order contemplated using droid star-fighters for antipirate work-convoying freighters, that sort of thing. Do you know why we decided against it?' 'Do I care?' 'Because droids are stupid' 'Wow, that's a relief! I'd hate to be killed by a genius-' Mace turned back to the comm unit and keyed the transmit once again. 'Commander, this is General Windu. All the troops-get them loaded onto the remaining landers, and get those landers on course for the original coordinates.^,'/of them. The original coordinates. Do you copy?' 'Yes, sir. But. no match for DSF. casualties. lucky if half of them make atmosphere.' 'That's not your problem. Once the landers are away, you will withdraw. Do you copy? This is a direct order. When the landers are away, the Halleck will jump for Republic space.' '. landers. only sublight. With no hyperdrive, how will you.?' 'Commander, is there so little for you to do right now that you can afford the time to argue with me? You have your orders. Windu out.' He plucked the powercell out of the back of the comm unit and returned it to the handgrip of his lightsaber. 'Who's the best shooter you know?' Nick shrugged. 'Me.' 'Nick.' 'What, should I lie?' 'All right. Second best.' 'Who's still alive?' Nick thought for a second or two. 'Chalk, maybe. She's pretty good.
Especially with the heavy stuff. Or she would be if she could, y'know, walk.' 'She won't have to. Let's go.' Nick stayed against the wall, shrugging hopelessly. 'Why bother? It's not like we can get anywhere, right? With the ship gone, there's nowhere to go.' 'There is. And we will go there.' 'Where?' 'I'm not going to tell you.' 'You're not?' 'I have had enough,' Mace said, 'of being told I'm insane.' Nick rose warily, eyeing Mace as though the Jedi Master might be a worrt in disguise.
'What are you talking about? You just mid there's no way we can evacuate.' 'We're not going to evacuate. We're going to attack' Nick gaped. 'Attack?' he echoed numbly.
