"May the Force be with us." He looked at CC-8,'349.
"All right, Captain. Blow the door." THE HARD WAY G
reasy smoke curled from the shattered blast door. It reeked of blood and flesh and human waste.
The smell of death.
Mace stood next to the door, waiting for the smoke to thin.
The command bunker was dark as a cave. The only light was the white shaft that spilled in through the opening that used to be the door. The interior materialized as though it slowly drew substance from the haze itself.
Bodies were everywhere.
Piled along the walls. Draped over the banks of monitor consoles. Facedown on the floor in black pools.
Some wore combat armor. Some wore militia khakis. Some wore no uniform at all.
Some were missing pieces.
Mace's blade hissed in the smoke as he went inside.
As a weapon, a lightsaber was uniquely tidy. Even, in a sense, merciful. Its powerful cascade of energy instantly seared and cauterized any wound it inflicted. The wounds rarely bled at all. It was a clean weapon.
A vibroshield was not.
STAR WARS: SHATTERPOIN1 The floor in the command bunker was treacherously slippery.
Mace trod with care. Behind him, Nick slipped through the doorway and put his back to the wall.
All was silence and death. A whole different world from the madness outside. Inside was a darker madness.
So dark he might as well be blind.
"Depa," he said softly. "Kar. Come out. I know you're watching? me.
His answer was a low, silky predator's growl that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
We don't have to be enemies.
Mace brought up his blade. He moved cautiously around the ruins of the monitor bank closest to the doorway.
Aren't we on the same side? We've won the planet for you, haven't we?
Mace reached into the Force, feeling for the emptiness below that would contain the transceiver. With each step, he worked his feet down, seeking solid footing on the floor before taking the next.
Do you really want to fight us? We are kin, you and I.
We are your own people.
"You were never my people." Mace spoke without emotion. "A man like you will always be my enemy, no matter whose side you're on. And I will always fight you." Why do they name you a Master? You have mastered only futility. You cannot possibly win.
"I don't have to win," Mace said. "All I have to do is fight." A low snarl was the only warning he got.
Nick's guns roared flame at a hurtling dark shape that leaped from nowhere. Sparks clanged in the gloom as Mace whirled instinctively and slashed at the shape and it vanished in a dive that carried it over the console bank. Before he'd even seen what it was.
He'd never felt it coming.
Dark power swirled around him.
He let his blade shrink away and crouched between two console banks, his heart hammering. "Nick!" he called. "Did you get him?" "Don't think so." Nick's voice came out thin and tight. "Sounded like he took both on the shields. You?" Mace smelled smoke: charred flesh. "Perhaps. A piece of him, any, way.
"See where he came from?" "No. I think-" Mace's breath hissed through his teeth. "I thin they're hiding among the bodies. Stay ready." "You better believe it." The low snarling growl became mocking. Your Force can't help yo here. Here there is only pelekotan. And we are only pelekotani dream.
Mace crept his way silently along the console bank.
You didn't feel me coming at you. You can't.
"That wasn't you," Mace said, low.
But it was. One-seventh of me.
Your pardon: one-eighth.
He could feel the transceiver chamber now: two meters away o the far side of this console bank. Its ceiling began a meter and a ha below the floor.
You have lost her. Lost her to pelekotan. Lost her to pelekotan's drean a world free from Balawai.
Mace muttered, "We are all Balawai here." He triggered his blade just long enough to stab into the leg well c the console under which he crouched, and carve an arch out of? back just large enough to crawl through. He pulled the cutaway piec free and laid it flat.
On the far side lay a knot of dead clones. Four. He had to crav over them.
Someone had taken off their helmets. Their eyes were open.
Jango Fett's dead face stared at him four times over.
Dead eyes looked into him and saw nothing but his guilt.
He kept moving.
The spot he needed was just ahead. Mace finally tore his attentio away from the dead clones, and froze.
Someone had been carving the floor there already. Blackene hunks of the command bunker's armor plating lay strewn around human-sized pit already nearly a meter deep. Beside them, a sl? form in tattered brown robes lay crumpled on the floor.
Her lightsaber was still in her hand.
For one giddy instant, his heart sang: she had anticipated him. She hadn't fallen to the dark-it had been an act, all an act't't She had been cutting through the floor to help him- But it was only one instant. He knew better.
Of course she had anticipated him: she knew all there was to know about his style. She'd known exactly what his target had to be, and she hadn't been cutting into the chamber below in order to help activate the transceiver.
She'd been going there to destroy it.
Looked like the proton grenade blast had caught her just in time. She didn't seem to be breathing. In the blinding swirl of dark power that filled the bunker, he could not feel if she still lived.
You have gone very quiet, doshalo. Do you think silence can save you? Do you think that because you cannot feel me, the reverse is also true?
Too much fatigue; too much pain. He had no room left in his heart for more.
He would grieve later. Now, looking at her corpse, he felt only a vague, melancholy relief that he hadn't had to kill her himself.
Do you think there is anything about you I don't know?
"I think," Mace said, "that if you were all you claim, I'd already be dead." He pushed himself into a forward roll that brought him up to a crouch, and looked down into the hole. She'd done most of his work for him already. He could cut through with a single stroke.
You are not yet my kill.
"No? Whose kill am I, then?" The answer to his question was a lightsaber's emitter jammed against his belly.
Mace had time to think blankly: Oh. Not dead. Faking.
"Depa-?" She screamed as she triggered her blade. And kept screaming as its green fire chewed a tunnel through Mace's guts and speared out his back. His hand seized hers instinctively, locking her blade against his body so that she could not kill him by slashing it free. His own blade ignited- But he could not strike her. Even now. Not here, so close he could kiss her instead; not while her scream spiraled up into a shriek; not while he had to look into her wide staring eyes and see no hate or rage but only stark agony.