“Okay. Okay.” Nick tore himself away from Chalk and pointed toward an intersection ahead. “Okay, go left at the corner, then—”

The street in front of them erupted like a chain of volcanos: explosions at the terminal points of scarlet particle beams that rained upon them from the night sky: aimed not at the street but at a hurtling dark shape that twisted through a barrel roll over the buildings before it took a direct hit and tumbled into a ball of debris-spewing fire that slammed an apartment block only a few dozen meters short of the Turbostorm.

The blast picked up the gunship and spun it down the street.

Of the unarmored groundcars, and the pedestrians, the taxicarts and street vendors, the elderly on their stoops and the children who had darted playfully around the tall lightpoles—

Nothing was left but smoking rubble and twisted metal.

“What in the—” Nick reeled off an impressive string of obscenities. “—was that?”

Mace wrestled the Turbostorm out of its spin and cut the engines; the ship skidded down the street trailing a fountaining tail of sparks. He leaned forward, his knuckles pale on the control yoke, and stared up through the windscreen.

“May the Force give me strength …” he whispered: as close to a curse as he had ever come.

That hurtling dark shape had been one of the Incom Skyhoppers from the spaceport. The cannonfire that had rained on the street and brought down the skyhopper had come from droid starfighters.

The night sky was full of ships.

Above the city.

“Oh, Depa …” Mace breathed.

More than four hundred thousand people lived in Pelek Baw. Drawing fire from the starfighters down upon it could put the entire capital to the torch.

No: not could.

Had.

The skyhopper wasn’t the first ship to crash into the crowded streets of the capital tonight. And there were over a hundred more, from tiny racing yachts to immense freighters.

He felt the city in the Force: a holocaust of flame and darkness.

Panic. Rage. Grief.

Horror.

There was nothing else left.

But the spaceport had a different feel entirely.

“Depa, what have you done?”

The comm panel chimed to announce an incoming voice-and-visual. Numbly, Mace reached past Nick and Chalk to hit the receive key. Scanning lasers in the comm unit traced a blue-lined image shadow on the windscreen: an electronic pre-echo of the larger-than-life holo-image projected into the burning night outside.

An image of a huge Korun with a shaven head and a smile like a mouthful of bone needles.

He growled, and Mace wondered how Vastor could expect to be understood—his Force-powered semi-telepathy wouldn’t modulate a comm signal—but this little mystery instantly solved itself.

When the lor pelek growled, the dark storm that had swallowed Pelek Baw growled with him.

Thank you for giving us the city, dôshalo. His smile spread like flames on oil. We have decided to redecorate.

Mace opened his mouth to ask for CRC-09/571—and closed it again. The commander had been warned not to take orders from them.

They must have killed him.

“Kar, where’s Depa?” Mace held his desperate horror locked deep inside his chest. “Let me talk to her.”

She doesn’t want to talk to you. She doesn’t want to see you. Ever. I have arranged matters so she won’t have to.

“Kar, stop this. You have to stop this!”

And I will. Vastor’s lips pulled back from those needle teeth, and there was no longer even the pretense of a smile. When everyone is dead.

“You don’t understand what you’re doing—”

Yes. I do. And so do you.

Mace’s stare burned like the city around him.

He did understand. Finally. Too late.

He had no words for what he felt. Perhaps there were no words.

I called to say good-bye, dôshalo. Depa will remember you fondly. As will we all. It is a hero’s death you go to, Mace of the Windu.

Mace showed his own teeth. “I’m not dead yet.”

Vastor’s blue-imaged head tilted a centimeter to the right. What time is it?

Mace froze.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 21