• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"But you can't expect Jedi to stand by while ordinary people are hurt and killed-" I began.

"Exactly. That is why we cannot win: to win this war, we must no longer be Jedi." She speaks of this in the future tense, though I suspect that in her heart-in her conscience-the Jedi are dead already. "Like dropping a bomb into the arena on Ceonosis: we can save the Republic, Mace. We can. But the cost will be our principles. In the end, isn't that what Jedi are for? We sacrifice everything for the Republic: our families, our homeworlds, our wealth, even our lives. Now the Republic needs us to sacrifice our consciences as well. Can we refuse? Are Jedi traditions more important than the lives of billions?"

She told me how she and Kar Vastor had managed to drive the Separatists off this world.

The CIS had been using the Pelek Baw spaceport as a base for the repair, refit, and resupply of the droid starfighters they used to picket the Al'Har system. These operations required large numbers of civilian employees. Her strategy was simple: she proved to these civilian employees that the Separatist military and the Balawai militia together were powerless to protect them.

There was no pitched battle. Nothing heroic or colorful. Just an unending series of gruesome killings. One or two at a time. At first, the Separatists had flooded Pelek Baw with their forces-but battle droids are as vulnerable to the metal-eating fungi as are simple blasters, and soldiers of flesh and blood die just as easily as civilians. The essence of guerrilla warfare: the real target is not the enemy's emplacements, or even their lives.

The target is the enemy's will to fight.

Wars are won not by killing enemies, but by terrorizing them until they give up and go home.

"That's why I brought you to Haruun Kal," she said. "I wanted to show you what winning soldiers will look like." She pointed past the fire. "That is the Jedi of the future, Mace. Right there."

She was pointing at Kar Vastor.

Which is why at this black hour, long after midnight and long before dawn, as the glowvines weaken and predators go quiet, when only sleep has meaning, I lie upon my bedroll and stare at the black leaves above, and think of tomorrow.

Tomorrow we leave this place.

Back to worlds where showers are just clean water, instead of pro-bi mist. Back to worlds where we sleep indoors, on bedrolls, with clean bleached-fiber sheets.

Back to worlds that still lie, however temporarily, within the Galaxy of Peace.

FINAL ENTRY

The air above the Lorshan Pass was so clear that the sky-colored peak Mace could barely discern in the distant south might have been Grandfather's Shoulder itself. There was a pall of brown haze down in that direction that he suspected was the smog over Pelek Baw. In the nearer distance, tiny silver flecks of gunships patrolled the jungle canopy below the pass. A lot of gunships: Mace had counted at least six flights, possibly as many as ten, weaving among the hills.

The occasional silent flash of cannonfire, or curling black smoke from flame projectors, he actually found comforting: it meant the militia thought the guerrillas were still down among the trees.

He sat cross-legged on the shadowed dirt of the cave mouth's floor, his datapad slung on his shoulder. Only two meters away, brilliant late-afternoon sunlight slanted across the cliffside meadow: a grassy sward, relatively flat for a few tens of meters before it curled over the lip of the cliff and dropped half a klick to the pass below.

Easily large enough for a Republic Sienar Systems Jadfhu-clzss lander.

Mace determinedly avoided staring up into the sky. It would get there when it got there.

Only minutes to go, now.

He found himself tallying the list of injuries Haruun Kal had inflicted upon him, from the stun-blast bruises through flame burns, cracked ribs, a concussion, and a human bite wound. Not to mention innumerable insect bites and stings, some kind of rash on his right thigh, and blistering around his toes that was probably