'You can say it, if you like,' she said after a moment. 'I don't mind.' Keeping half his attention on the widescan to watch the droid starfighters shoot down gunship after gunship, Mace turned the other half of his attention to the gunship's data logs, calling up flight plans. Control codes.
Recognition codes.
'Really, Mace, it's all right,' she said sadly. Half-blind with migraine, her breath coming a little short, she blinked dizzily through the remainder of the windscreen. 'I know what you're thinking.' Mace said quietly, 'I don't believe you do.' 'It's not that my way is the right way. I know it isn't.' A soft, bitter laugh. 'I do know it. But it's the only way.' 'The only way to what?' 'To win, Mace.' 'Is that what you call what you have done? Winning?' She nodded exhaustedly out toward the dogfight that still raged above them. 'This battle is a masterpiece. Even after everything I have seen you accomplish, I could never have believed something like this if I hadn't seen it myself. You have done a great thing, today.' 'Today's not over yet.' 'And yet it's all for nothing. At this day's end, what will you have done? Destroyed most of the militia's airpower? So what?' Her voice was going hoarse, and her words became labored, as though she could not bear the effort to push them out through her pain. 'You have bought us days. Perhaps weeks. No more. When you're gone, we'll still be here. We'll still be dying in the jungle. The Balawai will get more gunships. As many as they need. And we'll go back to killing them. We have to make them fear the jungle. Because that fear is our only real weapon.' 'Not today.' 'What? I-what do you mean?' 'I have decided,' Mace said, still studying the sensor screens, 'that you have been right all along.' Depa blinked in disbelief. 'I have?' 'Yes. We used these people for our purposes; to abandon them now, when their only choice is to suffer genocide, or to commit it?' Mace shook his head grimly. 'That would be as dark as any night in this jungle. Darker. That is no innocent savagery. It would be active evil: the way of the Sith. There is fighting to be done. The Jedi cannot walk away.' 'You-you're serious? You really mean it?' Disbelief struggled with hope in her pain- wracked eyes. 'You're going to walk away from the Clone War? You're going to stay here and fight?' Mace shrugged, still watching the scan. 'I will stay here and fight. That doesn't mean walking away from the Clone War.' 'Mace, the Summertime War isn't something that can be resolved in weeks-or months-' 'I know that,' he murmured distractedly. 'I don't have weeks or months to spare. The Summertime War won't last that long.' 'What? How can you say that? How long do you think it will last?' 'My best guess? About twelve hours. Maybe less.' She could only stare.
And finally, he saw on the widescan screen what he'd been waiting for: the droid starfighters peeling away from the dogfight and streak ing back toward space, and the handful of surviving gunships turning to limp home.
'See that?' he said, opening his hand toward the screen. 'Do you know what that means?' Depa nodded. 'It means that someone figured out what we did.' 'Yes-and that this someone has the control codes for those starfighters.' He turned toward her now, and in his eye was a spark that on another man would have been a wide fierce grin. 'I told you: I don't have weeks or months to spare.' 'I don't understand-What are you doing to doT Mace said, 'Win.' He keyed the command frequency for the Republic landers. 'General Windu for CRC- 09,'571. Stand by for verification and orders. Initiate simultaneous data link. Tightbeam.' The comm crackled. 'Seven-One here. Go ahead, General?
Depa was so astonished by the orders she heard Mace issue that she nearly crashed the Turbostorm into a mountain. When she had finally wrestled the craft back to stability, she flipped on the autopilot and faced her former Master breathlessly. 'Are you insaneT 'Just the opposite,' Mace said. 'Haven't you heard? There's nothing more dangerous than a Jedi who has finally gone sane.' She sputtered like a droid with a shorted-out motivator.
'And if you don't mind, I'd like my lightsaber back,' he added apologetically. 'I think I'll need it.' 'But-but-but-' Finally the words burst out of her. 'We're going to take Pelek Bawl1' 'No,' said Mace Windu. 'We are going to take the whole system. All of it. Right now.' DEJARIK I he ic key to the Gevarno Loop was the Al'har system. The key to Al'har was control of the droid starfighter fleet. The fleet was controlled from a secure transmitter below the command bunker of the Pelek Baw spaceport.
The spaceport did have a chance. But only one.
Two of the landers and their complements of troopers had been grounded at the Lorshan Pass, to establish a defensive perimeter around the lone open grasser tunnel, and to provide light artillery support. The other ten hopped over the mountains and kept going at their top atmospheric speed, which was not particularly impressive, but was still somewhat better than could be done by the few battered Turbostorms that were limping back to their various bases, scattered among the larger towns close by on the Highland.
Only one of the gunships went as far as Pelek Baw.
It crept over Grandfather's Shoulder on one-quarter repulsorlift power, leaking smoke and radiation. The tower officers at the spaceport listened in horror to the pilots gasping message: a reactor breach. Imminent catastrophic failure. The pilot had heroically kept his craft in the air, making for Pelek Baw, because only the spaceport itself was fully equipped for containment and decontamination-to have landed anywhere else might have meant the sacrifice of his crew, and of the infantry platoon on board.
The news leaped like lightning from the tower to the ground staff, from the anti-rad techs to the bored garrison crews working the spaceport's Confederacy-provided array of modern turbolasers and ion cannons; this was the most exciting thing that had happened since the Separatist pullback. The battle at the Lorshan Pass had been astonishing, even tragic, but that was all the way on the other side of the Highland, and so didn't really count.
Every eye in the spaceport watched the Turbostorm, either in person or on screen, rooting for it, praising the crew's selfless courage as it swung wide around the city so as not to endanger civilians below, some praying aloud that they would make it, many more secretly hoping to witness a spectacular crash- Instead of tending to their duties, such as monitoring their sensor screens.
After all, why should they? The spaceport was linked in realtime with the network of detector satellites in orbit around the planet; nothing was in the air right now except the twenty- odd surviving gunships. The last of the droid starnghters had returned to space hours ago, and the Republic landing craft which had caused so much excitement had vanished shortly thereafter.
No one was worried about those landers. After the staggering 40 percent losses they had suffered, the Republic ships surely would seek no further battle. Without a doubt, they were hiding in the 'soup'-the thick oceanic swirl of toxic gases that surrounds the Highland plateau-until a cruiser could sneak in-system to extract them. Without a doubt.
This was a considerable display of confidence on their part, because those same detector satellites on which they depended were as out of date as the rest of the local government's planetary equipage. Their IR and visual- light detectors were useless to penetrate the thick hot swirl of the 'soup,' and the satellites' more subtle sensors were defeated by the extremely high metals content of the gases. Once the landers went deep enough, they effectively vanished from the face of the planet.
Which is why any sensor tech at the Pelek Saw spaceport with the discipline to keep his eyes on his short- range screen might have seen indications of something extraordinary.
