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Mace left him there. He brushed past Vastor and reentered the cockpit.

"Chalk. Give me your seat."

The Korun girl frowned at Depa. Depa nodded. "It's okay, Chalk. Do it."

As soon as he could settle into the seat, he leaned over the sensor screens, studying them intently. He felt Depa's eyes upon him, but he did not lift his head.

"You can say it, if you like," she said after a moment. "I don't mind."

Keeping half his attention on the widescan to watch the droid starfighters shoot down gunship after gunship, Mace turned the other half of his attention to the gunship's data logs, calling up flight plans.

Control codes.

Recognition codes.

"Really, Mace, it's all right," she said sadly. Half-blind with migraine, her breath coming a little short, she blinked dizzily through the remainder of the windscreen. "I know what you're thinking."

Mace said quietly, "I don't believe you do."

"It's not that my way is the right way. I know it isn't." A soft, bitter laugh. "I do know it. But it's the only way."

"The only way to what?"

"To win, Mace."

"Is that what you call what you have done? Winning?"

She nodded exhaustedly out toward the dogfight that still raged above them. "This battle is a masterpiece. Even after everything I have seen you accomplish, I could never have believed something like this if I hadn't seen it myself. You have done a great thing, today."

"Today's not over yet."

"And yet it's all for nothing. At this day's end, what will you have done? Destroyed most of the militia's airpower? So what?" Her voice was going hoarse, and her words became labored, as though she could not bear the effort to push them out through her pain. "You have bought us days.

Perhaps weeks. No more. When you're gone, we'll still be here. We'll still be dying in the jungle. The Balawai will get more gunships. As many as they need. And we'll go back to killing them. We have to make them fear the jungle. Because that fear is our only real weapon."

"Not today."

"What? I-what do you mean?"

"I have decided," Mace said, still studying the sensor screens, "that you have been right all along."

Depa blinked in disbelief. "I have?"

"Yes. We used these people for our purposes; to abandon them now, when their only choice is to suffer genocide, or to commit it?" Mace shook his head grimly. "That would be as dark as any night in this jungle. Darker.

That is no innocent savagery. It would be active evil: the way of the Sith. There is fighting to be done. The Jedi cannot walk away."

"You-you're serious? You really mean it?" Disbelief struggled with hope in her pain-wracked eyes. "You're going to walk away from the Clone War?

You're going to stay here and fight?"

Mace shrugged, still watching the scan. "I will stay here and fight. That doesn't mean walking away from the Clone War."

"Mace, the Summertime War isn't something that can be resolved in weeks-or months-"

"I know that," he murmured distractedly. "I don't have weeks or months to spare. The Summertime War won't last that long."

"What? How can you say that? How long do you think it will last?"

"My best guess? About twelve hours. Maybe less."

She could only stare.

And finally, he saw on the widescan screen what he'd been waiting for: the droid starfighters peeling away from the dogfight and streak ing back toward space, and the handful of surviving gunships turning to limp home.

"See that?" he said, opening his hand toward the screen. "Do you know what that means?"

Depa nodded. "It means that someone figured out what we did."

"Yes-and that this someone has the control codes for those starfighters."

He turned toward her now, and in his eye was a spark that on another man would have been a wide fierce grin. "I told you: I don't have weeks or months to spare."

"I don't understand-What are you doing to doT

Mace said, "Win."

He keyed the command frequency for the Republic landers. "General Windu for CRC-09,'571.