Cannon holes in the roof, he thought. Those cannons left shattered gaps big enough to dive through. If he could drop through one into the building- The chimney was only a meter taller than Mace was. He sprang to the top. Cannonfire blasted into its baked-clay wall, tracking up toward his legs. Before he could spot a roof hole big enough to dive through, the chimney bucked and began to crumble.
He clawed for his balance. A man shouted, "Hey, Windu! Happy name-day!" and Mace got a glimpse of tarpaulins nipping back, and blue eyes and white teeth, and something came tumbling toward him through the air- It was shaped vaguely like a cryoban grenade but when Mace reached into the Force to slap it away, he recognized it: its feel was as familiar as the sound of Yoda's voice.
It was a lightsaber.
It was Depa's lightsaber.
Instead of slapping it away, Mace drew it toward him-and nixo. ouni through the Force hefelf her, felt Depa as though she stood at his side and had taken his hand. Its grip smacked into his palm.
In the green flash of Depa's blade, the situation looked different.
The rest of the fight lasted less than five seconds.
The speeder bike above opened fire again and Mace slipped to one side, letting the Force move the blade. Blaster bolts ricocheted from the energy fountain and smashed the speeder's power cell, sending it flipping toward the ground within the alley's end. The blue-eyed Korun- Smiley, the one who had led him here-and the other man who had lain beneath the tarp held rapid-fire slugthrowers that they slipped over the roof rim to fill the alley below with a lethal swarm of bullets.
Two more Korunnai popped out of cover on the rooftop across the alley. One had a slugthrower: flame leapt from its barrel. The other-a big light-skinned Korun girl with reddish hair-stood upright, wide-legged, a massive Mer-Sonn Thunderbolt tucked into her armpit, showering the alley with howling packets of galvenned particle beam.
The other pilot didn't like the new odds: he power-slewed his speeder and shrieked away above the rooftops. Smiley yanked his barrel around and took aim at the pilot's back-but before he could fire, the speeder bike flipped in the air, tumbled out of control, and crashed through the wall of a distant building at roughly two hundred kilometers an hour.
Smiley waved a hand, and the Korunnai stopped firing.
The sudden silence rang in Mace's ears.
"Was that fun or what?" Smiley grinned at Mace, and winked. "Come on, Windu: tell me that didn't warm your shorts a little." Mace dropped to the rooftop and angled Depa's blade to a neutral position. "Who are you?" "I'm the guy who just slipped your jiffies off the roaster. Let's go, man. Militia'll be here any minute." The two Korunnai across the alley were already sliding down slender ropes toward the ground. Smiley and his friend hooked grapnels that might have been made of polished brassvine over the lip of the roof and paid out rope below. His friend slung his slug rifle and slipped over the edge.
Mace scowled toward the column of smoke that now rose from the gaping hole the second speeder bike had left in the building blocks away. Smiley caught his look and chuckled. "Love that fungus: ate his fly-by-wire. Saved me a shot." Mace muttered, "I'm just hoping nobody was home." "Yeah, think of the mess." Smiley gave him that big white grin. "Forget about identifying bodies, huh? Better to just hose it out." Mace looked at him. "I have a feeling," he said slowly, "that you and I aren't going to be friends." "And that's got my heart pumping pondwater, let me tell you." Smiley took a rope in his hands and beckoned. "On the double, Windu. What do you want, an invitation? Flowers and a box of candy?" The cascade of Depa's lightsaber highlighted both their faces the color of sunlight in the jungle. "What I want," Mace told him, "is for you to tell me what you were doing with this blade." "The lightsaber?" The blue in his eyes sparked with manic fire. "That's my credentials," he said, and disappeared below the rim.
JUNGLE TO JUNGLE M
ace stood on the roof, staring into the emerald gleam of Depa's blade. Either she'd given it to Smiley, or he'd taken it off her corpse. Mace hoped it was the former.
At least, he thought he did.
The Depa he knew-would she lend out her lightsaber? Would she give away part of herself?
Something told him it hadn't exactly been a Concordance of Fealty.
After a few seconds, he released the activation plate. Her blade shrank and vanished, leaving behind only a tang of ions in the air. He slipped the handgrip into the inner pocket of his vest. It didn't go in easily: the grip was tacky with a thin layer of goo that had an herbaceous scent.
Some kind of plant resin. Sticky, but it didn't come off on his hand.
He shook his head, scowling at his palm. Then he sighed. And shrugged. Perhaps it was time he stopped expecting things on this planet to make sense.
He leaned out over the roof rim. Four bodies below in the alley, plus the pilot lying amid the wreckage of his speeder bike in the al ley. Include the one who'd crashed into the building, and that was all of them.
Smiley and the Korunnai were swiftly and efficiently looting the dead.
Mace's jaw tightened. One of the dead-the talker, maybe-had a deep blood-lipped gash from ear to ear.
Someone had cut his throat.
A sick weight gathered in Mace's chest. Some things did make sense after all, and the sense this made turned his stomach.
The Force gave him no sign of guilt from any of them; perhaps the violence here was so recent that its echoes washed away any such subtleties. Or perhaps whichever of them had done this felt no guilt at all.
And these killers were his best hope-perhaps his only hope-of reaching Depa.
But he could not simply let this pass.
Another lesson of Yoda's came to mind: When all choices seem wrong, choose restraint.
Mace slid down the rope.
Smiley nodded him over. "You're a mess, you know that? Take that shirt off." He reached down to pull a medpac off a dead man's belt. "There'll be spray bandage in here-" Mace took Smiley's upper arm with one hand. "You and I," he said, "need to reestablish our relationship." "Hey-ow, huh?" Smiley tried to jerk free, and discovered that Mace's grip would not suffer by comparison with a freighter's docking claw: trying just hurt his arm. "Hey!" "We got off on the wrong foot," Mace said. "We're going to make an adjustment. Do you think we can manage this peacefully?" The other Korunnai looked up from their looting. They stood, faces darkening as they turned toward Mace and Smiley, shifting grips on their weapons. Fingers slipped through trigger guards.
"Bad idea," Mace said. "For everyone concerned." "Hey, easy on the arm, huh? I might need it again someday-" Mace's hand tightened. "Tell them what we're doing." "You want to lay off the bone-crushing grip?" Smiley's voice was going thin. Beads of sweat swelled across his upper lip. "What, you like my arm so much you want to take it home with you?" "This isn't my bone-crushing grip. This is my don't-do-something-stupid grip." Mace tightened it enough to draw a squeak of pain through Smiley's lips. "We'll graduate to bone- crushing in about ten seconds." "Um. when you put it that way." "Tell them what we're doing." Smiley twisted his neck to look over his shoulder at the other Korunnai. "Hey, you kids stand down, huh?" he said weakly. "We're just. uh, reestablishing our relationship." "Peacefully." "Yeah, peacefully." The other three Korunnai let their weapons dangle from their shoulder slings and went back to looting the bodies.