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I use my sword as a shield. They use their shields as swords.

Depa tells me that these "vibroshields" are Kar's own design. Vibro-axes are common equipment among jungle prospectors, used for harvesting lumber and clearing paths through stands too thick for their steamcrawlers to crush through; since the sonic generators that power vibro-axes are fully sealed, they are remarkably resistant to the metal-eating molds and fungi.

And the metal itself... well, that's an interesting story of its own. It seems to be an alloy that the fungi don't attack. It is extremely hard, and never loses its edge. Nor does it rust, or even tarnish.

It also seems to be a superconductor.

This is why my blade could not cut it: the entire shield is always the same temperature throughout. Even the energy of a lightsaber is instantly conducted away. Hold a blade against it long enough and the whole thing will melt, but it cannot be cut. Not by an energy blade.

File the data.

When Kar accepts a man into his Akk Guards, the man builds his own weapons, not unlike the tradition in the spirit of which Jedi construct our lightsabers.

It strikes me now that Kar may have hit upon this idea from stories of Jedi training I shared with my long-lost friends in ghosh Windu, thirty-

five years and more ago: Korunnai have a living oral tradition, and stories are passed through families as treasured possessions.

I have not shared this speculation with Depa.

And Depa swears that she did not teach Kar and his guards the Jedi skill of interception; she says Kar knew this already when she first met him.

If what she says is true, he must have taught himself-and he probably got the idea from those same stories that I, in my thoughtless youth, innocently shared with my innocent friends.

And so: in some odd, circuitous way, Kar Vaster may be my fault.

The source of this metal is a mystery; though Kar never speaks of it to anyone, I believe I know what it is.

Starship armor.

Thousands of years ago-before the Sith War-when shield generators were so massive that only the largest capital ships could carry them, smaller starships were armored with a mirrorlike superconducting alloy, which was sufficient to resist the low-fire-rate laser cannons of the day.

I think Kar, somewhere out in the jungle of the Korunnai Highland, sometime during his yearlong tan pel'trokal, had stumbled upon the ancient Jedi starship whose crash stranded on this planet his ancestors, and my own.

It was earlier this evening that I learned the real truth of Kar Vastor.

Not only who he is, and why he is-But what he means.

Somewhere along our line of march Kar had located a cave that he deemed adequate to shelter a fire from gunship or satellite detection, and that night he set about curing Besh's and Chalk's fever wasp infestation. Besh and Chalk had remained in thanatizine suspension, tied to a grasser's travois like a bundle of cargo. The crude hacking Terrel had done to them had been mostly repaired with tissue binders from a captured medpac, though of course the wounds could not heal; the body's healing processes are suspended by thanatizine as well.

Depa was in attendance, as was I, as well as a select few others. A pair of the Akk Guards had carried her, chaise and all, in from her howdah.

She lay back with one slim arm across her eyes; she was having another of her headaches, and the light from the fire of tyruun, the local wood that burns white-hot, was causing her pain. I suspect she might have preferred to skip the whole business.

Even so, when Kar laid the still forms of Besh and Chalk facedown on the mossy floor of the cave and tore open the backs of their tunics, Depa stirred and sat forward. Though she continued to shade her eyes, firelight gave them glitters of silver and red. She watched raptly, her small white teeth fixed in her lower lip, worrying the corner of her mouth near the burn scar.

Kar simply squatted beside the two, humming tunelessly under his breath, while