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The comm crackled. "Seven-One here. Go ahead, General?

Depa was so astonished by the orders she heard Mace issue that she nearly crashed the Turbostorm into a mountain. When she had finally wrestled the craft back to stability, she flipped on the autopilot and faced her former Master breathlessly. "Are you insane!"

"Just the opposite," Mace said. "Haven't you heard? There's nothing more dangerous than a Jedi who has finally gone sane."

She sputtered like a droid with a shorted-out motivator.

"And if you don't mind, I'd like my lightsaber back," he added apologetically. "I think I'll need it."

"But-but-but-" Finally the words burst out of her. "We're going to take Pelek Bawl!"

"No," said Mace Windu. "We are going to take the whole system. All of it.

Right now."

DEJARIK

The ic key to the Gevarno Loop was the Al'har system. The key to Al'har was control of the droid starfighter fleet. The fleet was controlled from a secure transmitter below the command bunker of the Pelek Baw spaceport.

The spaceport did have a chance. But only one.

Two of the landers and their complements of troopers had been grounded at the Lorshan Pass, to establish a defensive perimeter around the lone open grasser tunnel, and to provide light artillery support. The other ten hopped over the mountains and kept going at their top atmospheric speed, which was not particularly impressive, but was still somewhat better than could be done by the few battered Turbostorms that were limping back to their various bases, scattered among the larger towns close by on the Highland.

Only one of the gunships went as far as Pelek Baw.

It crept over Grandfather's Shoulder on one-quarter repulsorlift power, leaking smoke and radiation. The tower officers at the spaceport listened in horror to the pilots gasping message: a reactor breach. Imminent catastrophic failure. The pilot had heroically kept his craft in the air, making for Pelek Baw, because only the spaceport itself was fully equipped for containment and decontamination-to have landed anywhere else might have meant the sacrifice of his crew, and of the infantry platoon on board...

The news leaped like lightning from the tower to the ground staff, from the anti-rad techs to the bored garrison crews working the spaceport's Confederacy-provided array of modern turbolasers and ion cannons; this was the most exciting thing that had happened since the Separatist pullback. The battle at the Lorshan Pass had been astonishing, even tragic, but that was all the way on the other side of the Highland, and so didn't really count.

Every eye in the spaceport watched the Turbostorm, either in person or on screen, rooting for it, praising the crew's selfless courage as it swung wide around the city so as not to endanger civilians below, some praying aloud that they would make it, many more secretly hoping to witness a spectacular crash-Instead of tending to their duties, such as monitoring their sensor screens.

After all, why should they? The spaceport was linked in realtime with the network of detector satellites in orbit around the planet; nothing was in the air right now except the twenty-odd surviving gunships. The last of the droid starnghters had returned to space hours ago, and the Republic landing craft which had caused so much excitement had vanished shortly thereafter.

No one was worried about those landers. After the staggering 40 percent losses they had suffered, the Republic ships surely would seek no further battle. Without a doubt, they were hiding in the "soup"-the thick oceanic swirl of toxic gases that surrounds the Highland plateau-until a cruiser could sneak in-system to extract them. Without a doubt.

This was a considerable display of confidence on their part, because those same detector satellites on which they depended were as out of date as the rest of the local government's planetary equipage. Their IR and visual-light detectors were useless to penetrate the thick hot