Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [127]
And losing.
Mace balanced on his heels, staring into the rock wall beside him.
The granular surface gleamed with sweat condensed from his breath, and flecks of mineral sparkled within it, but Mace didn't see any of that. He wasn't looking at the stone. He was looking into the stone. Through the stone.
Into the Force.
"So that's it, then, huh?" Nick's words came distantly to Mace's ears, hollow and faint, as though he spoke from the bottom of a well. "There's no way we can evacuate."
"That's it, yes. No way." This was a reflexive echo; Mace was barely aware of what Nick had said, and not at all aware that he had answered.
"No way..."
His consciousness was elsewhere.
"Have I mentioned how much I hate this place? Every time I come here it's like being buried alive..."
Into the Force-Mace wasn't actually looking, not really; the sense he used was not sight. This sense invaded the Force, touching power and letting the power touch it, shading the power then drawing on the shade it created to deepen its own shade, feeding upon the Force and feeding the Force in a regenerative spiral, gathering strength, spidering outward from this specific nowhere-in-particular-right-now to the general ail-where of every time: from a crossroads inside a mountain that stood in a jungle the size of a continent, on a world that whirled through a galaxy that was rapidly becoming a jungle of its own.
This sense brought to his perception the stress-vectors of reality. It was more than the searching of a shatterpoint, it was as though this single moment existed in a crystal shell, and if he could strike it in exactly the right way, the shell enclosing this one would shatter as well-and the shell enclosing that shell, and on, and on, a single stroke whose Shockwaves would propagate outward to crash through the trap that held not only him and Nick, but Depa and Kar and the Korunnai, the world of Haruun Kal, the Republic, perhaps the galaxy itself: more than a chain of shatterpoints, it was a fountain of shatterpoints. A cascade.
An avalanche.
If he could only find the spot to strike...
Faintly, distantly, resonating from the here-and-now to Mace's everywhere-at-once: "We're trapped in here... The whole fraggin'
planetary militia is outside, and there's nobody who can get here to help us, and we're all gonna die. This is a stupid place to die. Stupid, stupid, stupid."
"Stupid," Mace echoed. "Stupid, yes... Stupid! Exactly.1"
"Are you even listening to me?"
"You," Mace said, his gaze slowly returning from the stone depths he had been contemplating, "are brilliant. Not to mention lucky."
"Excuse me?"
"Some years ago, the Jedi Order contemplated using droid star-fighters for antipirate work-convoying freighters, that sort of thing. Do you know why we decided against it?"
"Do I care?"
"Because droids are stupid"
"Wow, that's a relief! I'd hate to be killed by a genius-"
Mace turned back to the comm unit and keyed the transmit once again.
"Commander, this is General Windu. All the troops-get them loaded onto the remaining landers, and get those landers on course for the original coordinates. ^,'/of them. The original coordinates. Do you copy?"
"Yes, sir. But... no match for DSF... casualties... lucky if half of them make atmosphere..."
"That's not your problem. Once the landers are away, you will withdraw.
Do you copy? This is a direct order. When the landers are away, the Halleck will jump for Republic space."
"... landers... only sublight. With no hyperdrive, how will you...?"
"Commander, is there so little for you to do right now that you can afford the time to argue with me? You have your orders. Windu out."
He plucked the powercell out of the back of the comm unit and returned it to the handgrip of his lightsaber. "Who's the best shooter you know?"
Nick shrugged. "Me."
"Nick..."
"What, should