"Not only does encryption keep its contents secure, it protects me from the temptation to go back and edit entries to make myself look better." "You'd do that?" "The opportunity has not presented itself. If I had the chance. I can't really say. I hope that I would resist. But Jedi or not, I am still human." He shrugged. "I should make a last entry, preparatory to my formal report to the Council on our return to Coruscant." "Can I listen?" "I suppose you can. I have nothing to say that you don't already know." FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU [FINAL HARUUN KAL ENTRY] Major Rostu and I wait in a cave at the Korun base in the Lorshan Pass; Depa- [Male voice identified as NICK ROSTU, major (bvt), GAR]: "Hey, is that on? So they can, like, hear me?" Yes. It's- [Rostu]: "Wow. So some weird alien Jedi a thousand years from now can pull this out and it'll be like I'm saying Hi to him from a thousand years ago, huh? Hi, you creepy Jedi monkeyhunker, whoever you-" Major.
[Rostu]: "Yeah, I know: Shut up, Nick." [sound of a heavy sigh] Depa is to meet us here.
She has some strategem to get Kar Vaster and his Akk Guards far enough away for us all to make a clean extraction; she did not offer details, and I did not ask.
I was afraid to hear what she might have told me.
The signal was sent early this morning, using the same technique her sporadic reports had.
Instead of a straight subspace transmission-which would be intercepted by the militia's satellites and allow them to pinpoint our location-she broadcast the coded extraction call on a normal comm channel, using a tight beam that they bounced to the HoloNet satellite off one of the mountains within our line of sight; the comm signal also contains a Jedi priority override code that hijacks part of the local HoloNet capacity, and uses that to send the actual extraction code to the Haileck. It is very safe, though there is always data loss from beam scatter.
I heard the acknowledgment myself, in the base's comm station.
The Haileck is on its way.
We arrived at this base about a standard hour after sunrise. The Haileck is probably insystem by now. The base itself is. not what I was expecting.
It's less a military base than an underground refugee camp.
The complex is enormous, a randomly dug hive that honeycombs the whole north wall of the pass; a number of access tunnels extend well downslope, to concealed caves deep in the jungle.
Some of the caverns are naturaclass="underline" volcanic bubbles and water channels eroded by drainage from the snowcapped peaks above. The inhabited caverns have been artificially enlarged and smoothed. Though there is no mining industry on Haruun Kal, and thus no excavation equipment to be had, a vibro-ax cuts stone almost as easily as wood; many of the smaller chambers have pallet beds, tables, and benches of stone cut and dressed by such blades.
Which would make it relatively comfortable, were it not so crowded.
Thousands of Korunnai cram these caverns and tunnels and caves, and more trickle in every day. These are the noncombatants: the spouses and the parents, the sick and the wounded. And the children.
The global lack of mining equipment means that ventilation is necessarily rudimentary, and sanitation virtually nonexistent. Pneumonia is rampant; antibiotics are the first thing to run out in the captured med-pacs, and there is nowhere in the caverns one can go and not hear people wheezing as they struggle to pull their next breath into wet, clogged lungs. Dysentery claims lives among the elderly and the wounded, and with sanitation basically at the level of buckets, it will only get worse.
The largest caverns have been given over to the grassers. All the arriving Korunnai bring whatever grassers survive the trip; even in wartime, the Fourth Pillar holds them in its grip.
These grassers spend their days crowded together with no food and little room to move; they are all sickly, and restive. There have been fights between members of different herds, and I am told several die each day: victims of wounds from fighting, or infectious disease from the close quarters. Some, it seems, simply surrender their will to live; they lie down and refuse to get up, and eventually starve.
The Korunnai tend them as best they can; improvised fences of piled cut rock separate the various herds, and they are driven out the access tunnels in turns to forage in the jungles below the pass, under the watchful eyes of herding akks. But even this half measure is becoming problematic: as more and more grassers arrive, the Korunnai must take the herds farther and farther afield, to avoid thinning the jungle so much that it might reveal the base's location.
I do understand, now, why Depa doesn't want to leave.
We rode her ankkox right up one of the concealed tunnels. When we left the gloom of the jungle for the deeper darkness underground, Depa pulled back the curtains of her howdah and moved forward to the chair mounted on the beast's crown armor, and she seemed to inhale serenity with the thick stinking air.
Everyone we passed-everyone we saw- There was no cheering, or even shouts; the welcome she got was more profound than anything that can be expressed by voice.
A woman, huddled against a sweating stone wall, caught sight of Depa, and pushed herself forward, and her face might have been a flower opening toward the sun. Depa's mere presence brought light to her eyes, and strength to her legs. The woman struggled to rise, pulling herself up the tunnel wall then leaning upon it for support, and she stretched a hand toward us, and when Depa gave her a nod of acknowledgment, the woman's hand closed to catch Depa's gaze from the air; she pressed that closed hand to her breast as though that one simple glance was precious.
Sacred.
As though it was exactly the one thing she needed to keep on living.
And that's what our welcome here was: that woman, multiplied by thousands. The warriors and the wounded. The aged. The sick and the infirm, the children- Depa is more than a Jedi to them. Not a goddess-Force-users themselves, they are not easily impressed by Jedi powers. She is, I think, a totem. She is to them what a Jedi should be to everyone, but writ so large upon their hearts that it has become a form of madness.
She is their hope.
[Rostu]: "It's true, y'know." Nick?
[Rostu]: "You think things are bad here? Okay, sure: they're bad. Not just here here. The whole highland. Bad enough. But you got no idea what it was before Depa-y'know, we're not the bad guys here." No one has suggested that you are. Nor are you the good guys. I haven't seen any good guys.
[Rostu]: "So far? I've seen one. No: two." You have?