The immense shadow crashed closer, its walk a symphony of splintering trees.

It was an ankkox.

A massive armored saurian, the ankkox was the largest land animal of Haruun Kal. Ankkoxes were twice the size of grassers—more than half again the mass of a full-grown bantha—but built low and wide, with a broad dorsal shell like an oval soup plate turned upside down. The dorsal shell of this one was nearly three meters wide, and well over four meters long. A drover’s chair was bolted to the top of the ankkox’s crown shell, a convex disc of armor that capped the beast’s head; when an ankkox retracted its head and legs, its crown shell and all six knee shells fit into gaps in its armor as snugly as air locks, enabling the ankkox to survive washes of volcanic gas that it couldn’t outrun.

This drover did not sit, but stood wide-legged on the crown armor behind the chair, brandishing a long pole that ended in a sharp-looking hook, to use as a goad in directing the ankkox’s path. Two teardrop-shaped shields of ultrachrome were pushed up onto his biceps.

Kar Vastor.

He moved only to direct the ankkox. His face held no expression. He did not even look at Mace and Nick.

The air around him shimmered with his rage.

Smaller trees the ankkox shouldered aside; underbrush it simply crushed beneath its speeder-sized feet. To get the ankkox through tree gaps too small to pass its huge shell where the trees were too large to overbear, Vastor would reach out with his goad, indicating specific points on their trunks—which would be struck by some whirring object, invisibly fast, that impacted with enough power to shatter the trunks and let it pass: the creature’s tail mace.

The only part of the ankkox’s body that was not armored was its extensile, muscular, surprisingly flexible tail. The tail was tipped with a thick round ball of armor, and an adult ankkox could snap its tail faster than the human eye could see, using that mace to accurately strike targets up to eight meters away with enough power to stun an akk dog or shatter a small tree.

There was a time, before the reopening of Haruun Kal to the civilized galaxy, when a mace taken from a juvenile ankkox was the traditional weapon of Korun herders: dangerous to acquire. Difficult to use. Deadly in effect.

On the central bulge of this ankkox’s dorsal shell had been built a howdah: a small curtained cabin framed with lammas wood, two meters by three, barely larger than the long padded chaise within. The draped canopy stood slightly higher than Mace was tall, bounded by a polished rail perhaps a meter above the shell. The curtains, not to mention the fine-worked wood itself, were probably spoils looted from some Balawai’s home. Multiple layers of gauzy lace, the curtains were translucent as smoke.

With the sunset behind, Mace could see her silhouette.

The ankkox crunched to a ponderous stop, settling onto its ventral shell with a long hiss through its teeth like gas venting from pneumatic landing jacks. Vastor tucked the goad into its holster bolted to the ankkox’s crown shell, then stepped forward over the drover chair and folded his thick-muscled arms.

He stared down into the eyes of the Jedi Master.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 11