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THE SUMMERTIME WAR

Single file through the jungle: Chalk picked their path, parting gleamfronds, tipping gripleaf trailers aside with the muzzle of the Thunderbolt. Mace followed perhaps ten meters back, with Nick close behind his shoulder. Besh and Lesh brought up the rear together, switching positions from time to time, covering each other.

Mace had to look sharp to keep track of Chalk. Once they were well into the jungle, he could no longer easily feel any of the Korunnai in the Force. His gaze had a tendency to slip aside from them, to pass over them without seeing unless he firmly directed his will: a useful talent in a place where humans were just another prey animal.

Occasionally a Force-pulse as unmistakable as an upraised hand came from one or another of the Korunnai, and they would all stop in their tracks.

Then seconds or minutes of stillness: listening to wind-rustle and animal cries, eyes searching among green shadow and greener light, reaching into the Force through a riot of lives for-what? Vine cat? Militia patrol?

Stobor? Then a wave of relaxation clear as a sigh: some threat Mace could not see or feel had passed, and they walked on.

It was even hotter under the trees than in full sunlight. Any relief due to shade was canceled by the damp smothering stillness of the air. Though Mace heard a constant ruffle of leaves and branches high above, the breeze never seemed to reach down through the canopy.

They broke out into a gap, and Nick called a halt. The jungle canopy layered a roof above them, but the folds of ground here were clear for dozens of meters around, smooth gray-gold trunks of jungle trees becoming cathedral buttresses supporting walls of leaf and vine. Upslope, a spring-fed pond brimmed over into a steamy sulfur-scented stream.

Chalk moved into the middle of the gap, lowered her head, and went entirely still. A Force wave passed out from her and broke across Mace and thirty-five years fell away: for a delicious instant he was once more a boy returned to the company of ghosh Windu after a lifetime in the Jedi Temple, feeling for the first time the silken warmth of a Korun's Force-call to an akk...

Then it passed, and Mace was again a grown man, again a Jedi Master, tired and worried: frightened for his friend, his Order, and his Republic.

Within minutes a crashing outside the gap heralded the arrival of large beasts, and soon the jungle wall parted to admit a grasser. It lumbered into the gap on its hind legs, its four anterior limbs occupied with ripping down greenery and stuffing it into a mouth large enough to swallow Mace whole. It chewed placidly, bovine contentment in all three of its eyes. It turned these eyes toward the humans one at a time: first the right, then the left, then the crown, assuring itself that none of its three eyes spied a threat.

Three more grassers tore their way into the gap. All four were harnessed for riding, the wide saddles cinched above and below their foreshoulders, exactly as Mace remembered. One wore a dual-saddle setup, the secondary saddle slung reversed at the beast's mid-shoulder.

All four grassers were thin, smaller than Mace remembered-the largest of them might not have topped six meters at full stretch-and their gray coats were dull and coarse: a far cry from the sleek, glossy behemoths he'd ridden all those years ago. This was as troubling as anything he'd yet seen. Had these Korunnai abandoned the Fourth Pillar?

Nick reached up to take the knotted mounting rope of the dual-saddled grasser. "Come on, Master Windu. You're riding with me."

"Where are your akks?"

"Around. Can't you feel them?"

And now Mace could: a ring of predatory wariness outside the green walls: savagery and hunger and devotion tangled into a semi-sentient knot of Let's-Find-Something-to-Kill.

Nick rope-walked up the flank of the grasser and slid into the upper saddle. "You'll see them if you need to see them. Let's hope you don't."

"Is it no longer customary to