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Yes. It's-[Rostu]: "Wow. So some weird alien Jedi a thousand years from now can pull this out and it'll be like I'm saying Hi to him from a thousand years ago, huh? Hi, you creepy Jedi monkeyhunker, whoever you-"

Major.

[Rostu]: "Yeah, I know: Shut up, Nick."

[sound of a heavy sigh]

Depa is to meet us here.

She has some strategem to get Kar Vaster and his Akk Guards far enough away for us all to make a clean extraction; she did not offer details, and I did not ask.

I was afraid to hear what she might have told me.

The signal was sent early this morning, using the same technique her sporadic reports had. Instead of a straight subspace transmission-which would be intercepted by the militia's satellites and allow them to pinpoint our location-she broadcast the coded extraction call on a normal comm channel, using a tight beam that they bounced to the HoloNet satellite off one of the mountains within our line of sight; the comm signal also contains a Jedi priority override code that hijacks part of the local HoloNet capacity, and uses that to send the actual extraction code to the Haileck. It is very safe, though there is always data loss from beam scatter.

I heard the acknowledgment myself, in the base's comm station.

The Haileck is on its way.

We arrived at this base about a standard hour after sunrise. The Haileck is probably insystem by now. The base itself is... not what I was expecting.

It's less a military base than an underground refugee camp.

The complex is enormous, a randomly dug hive that honeycombs the whole north wall of the pass; a number of access tunnels extend well downslope, to concealed caves deep in the jungle. Some of the caverns are natural: volcanic bubbles and water channels eroded by drainage from the snowcapped peaks above. The inhabited caverns have been artificially enlarged and smoothed. Though there is no mining industry on Haruun Kal, and thus no excavation equipment to be had, a vibro-ax cuts stone almost as easily as wood; many of the smaller chambers have pallet beds, tables, and benches of stone cut and dressed by such blades.

Which would make it relatively comfortable, were it not so crowded.

Thousands of Korunnai cram these caverns and tunnels and caves, and more trickle in every day. These are the noncombatants: the spouses and the parents, the sick and the wounded. And the children.

The global lack of mining equipment means that ventilation is necessarily rudimentary, and sanitation virtually nonexistent. Pneumonia is rampant; antibiotics are the first thing to run out in the captured med-pacs, and there is nowhere in the caverns one can go and not hear people wheezing as they struggle to pull their next breath into wet, clogged lungs.

Dysentery claims lives among the elderly and the wounded, and with sanitation basically at the level of buckets, it will only get worse.

The largest caverns have been given over to the grassers. All the arriving Korunnai bring whatever grassers survive the trip; even in wartime, the Fourth Pillar holds them in its grip. These grassers spend their days crowded together with no food and little room to move; they are all sickly, and restive. There have been fights between members of different herds, and I am told several die each day: victims of wounds from fighting, or infectious disease from the close quarters. Some, it seems, simply surrender their will to live; they lie down and refuse to get up, and eventually starve.

The Korunnai tend them as best they can; improvised fences of piled cut rock separate the various herds, and they are driven out the access tunnels in turns to forage in the jungles below the pass, under the watchful eyes of herding akks. But even this half measure is becoming problematic: as more and more grassers arrive, the Korunnai must take the herds farther and farther afield, to avoid thinning the jungle so much that it might reveal the base's location.

I do understand, now, why Depa doesn't want to leave.