Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [129]
Nick stopped a couple of meters short and gave Mace a significant look, nodding toward the others as if to say, This was your idea. Leave me out of it.
Mace approached slowly, staying on the next ledge down. He stopped when he reached them and spoke softly to Chalk. "How is he?"
She wouldn't look at him. "Dying. How are you?"
She dipped her rag into the bucket, brought it out again, sponged, and returned it to the bucket with numb mechanical persistence: doing it to be doing something, though she showed no sign of hope that it might help.
"Chalk, we need you to come with us."
"Not leaving him, me. Needs me, him."
"We need you. Chalk, you have to trust me-"
"Did trust you, me. So did Besh."
Mace had no answer.
Nick came to Mace's shoulder. "The Archives are starting to look pretty good right now."
The Jedi Master squinted at him.
Nick shrugged. "Hey, it's the only immortality any of us can hope for, right?"
"And how do you achieve immortality," Mace murmured, "if my journal is buried under a mountain on Haruun Kal?"
"Uh. Yeah." Nick looked like his stomach hurt. "That could be a problem."
"Forget about immortality. Let's concentrate on not dying today."
Vaster's eyes were closed, and the Force shimmered around him. Mace could feel some of what the lor pelek was doing: searching within Besh's chest for the essential aura of the fungus that was killing him, focusing power upon it to burn it out spore by spore.
Another shockwave rattled the cavern. Loose rock clattered from the ceiling.
"Kar," Mace said, "this is not the way. We don't have time."
Vastor's eyes stayed closed. His expression did not so much as flicker.
Is there something better for me to be doing right now?
"As a matter of fact," Mace said, "yes. There is."
Does it involve killing Balawai?
Mace said apologetically, "Probably not more than a thousand. Maybe two."
Vaster opened eyes filled with pelekofan's darkness. Chalk lifted her head, rag hanging forgotten from her fist.
"So," said Mace Windu. "Are we on?"
Smoke and dust clouded the huge cavern; it reeked of grasser fear-musk, of dung and urine and blood, and with each new DOKAW-shock the smell got worse.
Torchlight flared and blazed and vanished again. The stinking fog swirled with gigantic shapes: grassers bucking and clawing at each other, some with jaws panic-locked on their own or others' limbs. They charged at random, slamming into each other, trampling the injured and their own young. Korunnai darted among them, appearing from the smoke and vanishing again, hands full of sharp goads and blazing torches as they fought to separate the knots of shrieking, honking, fear-crazed beasts.
A swirl opened a gap: a looming akk dog paused to stare into Mace's eyes, measuring him with saurian malice as a thick rope of bloody drool looped from its jaws, then it ponderously turned aside and slipped into the murk, tail tapering so smoothly it might have been dissolving.
Mace threaded through the chaos.
Behind him followed a pair Korunnai, carrying a stretcher that held the EWHB and its generator. Two more brought the shoulder-fired torpedo launchers and the preloaded tubes on another stretcher. Chalk half-walked, her arm looped over Nick's shoulders as he helped her along.
Five more pairs of Korunnai trotted around the circumference of the caverns, sidling past all the confusion and riot; one of each pair carried a homespun sack holding five proton grenades apiece, and the others carried torches. Each pair soon slipped down a different one of the five vast passages along which grassers were daily driven to graze.
Erratic booming shivered the air, sharper and much smaller than the DOKAW-shocks, but still powerful enough to vibrate the floor. Mace pointed toward the source of the booming: a side cave where the great ankkox paced in restless fury. The concussions were its angrily