Vastor touched down in the middle of the compound and rolled out of his fall without slowing. He flashed into an inhumanly fast sprint toward the very steamcrawler atop which Mace lay. Vastor’s sprint became a headlong dive that carried him sliding between the treads.

The steamcrawler’s armor hummed under Mace’s hands, and a harsher squeal joined the chorus of snarling shields; he had to bite back an obscenity he’d learned from Nick.

Vastor was cutting through the ’crawler’s undercarriage.

Had he stolen that dark dream right out of Mace’s head?

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.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 8