Mace popped to his feet and both his lightsabers hummed to life. He felt Vastor in the Force: a torch that flared with darkness. He was almost through the undercarriage; once inside, he’d be loose among the wounded. The Force showed him how the wounded men and women inside the crawler had already pressed themselves away from the shining blades that sliced upward from below.

Mace decided it was time he introduced himself to this lor pelek.

He sprang into the air, flipping high over the steamcrawler’s turret to land on its flat mid-deck armor directly above Vastor. A twitch of the Force reversed his grips so that the lightsabers’ blades projected downward from his fists. Then he dropped to his knees, twisting to swing the blades in a circle around him.

A vibroshield is not the only thing that can cut steamcrawler armor.

A disk of that armor—edges still glowing from the lightsabers’ cuts, Mace still kneeling in its center—dropped straight down like a free-falling turbolift.

Mace heard one explosive obscenity from below before he and the disk of armor flattened Kar Vastor like a fusion-powered pile driver.

The interior of the steamcrawler was crowded with wounded men and women. One of them brandished a heavy blaster; Mace slashed it in two with a flip of his lightsaber. “No shooting,” he said, and the Force made his words into a command that sent several other blasters clattering to the floor.

Vastor lay pinned facedown to the deck, half stunned.

Mace leaned close to his ear. “Kar Vastor, I am Mace Windu. Stand down. That’s an order.”

A twitch of the Force was his only warning, but for Mace it was more than he needed. He threw himself into a back flip a quarter of a second before the disk of armor slammed upward to smash against the ceiling with a deafening clank. Before it could fall again, Vastor was on his feet. Then as the disk dropped, an ultrachrome flame licked through it, slicing it in half.

Vastor faced Mace across the hole. Darkness pulsed at Mace through the Force, but on the lor pelek’s face was not anger, but instead inhuman focus: a primal ferocity like a krayt dragon surprised over the corpse of a bantha.

The way he had shrugged Mace off, the slicing of the armor disk: a predator’s dominance display.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 8