Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [50]
"You're bleeding," I told him, but that dark gleam in his bright blue eyes never wavered. He kept going on about "Alone against three gunships. Three. Alone."
I told him that I hadn't been alone. I quoted Yoda:" 'My ally is the Force.'" He didn't seem to understand, so I explained: "I had them outnumbered."
What happened next I remember vividly, no matter how much I wish I could wipe it from my mind. I couldn't tear my eyes from the two damaged gunships that by then were mere specks of durasteel soaring into the limitless sky.
Nick followed my gaze, and said, "Yeah, I know how you feel. Shame you couldn't roast all three, huh?"
"How I feel?" I rounded on him. "How,' feel?"
I had a sudden urge to punch him: an urge so powerful the effort to restrain it left me gasping. I wanted-I needed-to punch him. To punch him in the face. To feel my fist shatter his jaw.
To make him shut up.
To make him not look at me.
The understanding in his voice-the knowledge in his cold blue eyes-I wanted to hit him because he was right. He did know how I felt.
It was an ugly shock.
As he said: I'd wanted to destroy those other gunships, too. I wanted to rip them out of the sky and watch them burn. No thought of the lives I'd already taken in the first gunship. No thought of the lives I would take in the other two. In the Force, I reached out toward the burning wreckage on the ridge face above, searching among the flames; for what, I can't say.
I'd like to think I was feeling for survivors. Checking to see if there were any people, merely wounded, who might be saved from the wreckage.
But I cannot honestly say that is true.
I might have just wanted to feel them burn.
I also cannot honestly say I'm sorry for the way the fight turned out.
Though I took their lives in self-defense, and the defense of others, neither I nor those I defended are innocents. I cannot honestly claim that my Korun companions are any more deserving of life than were the people in the gunship. What I did in the pass, I cannot call my duty as a Jedi.
What I did there had nothing to do with peace.
One might call it an accident of war: it happened that this small band of murderous guerrillas accompanied a Jedi Master, and so the spouses and children of a gunship crew have suffered a horrible loss. One might call it an accident of war... even I might call it that-If it had been anything resembling an accident.
If I hadn't been trying to bring that ship down. If I hadn't felt the fever in my blood: blood fever.
The lust for victory. To win, at any cost.
Blood fever.
I feel it even now.
It's not overpowering; I haven't fallen that far. Yet. It's more a preference. An expectation. An anticipation that has been disappointed.
This is bad. Not the worst it can be, but bad enough.
I have long known that I am in danger here. But only now am I beginning to understand how dark and near that danger is; I never guessed how close Haruun Kal has already brought me to that fatal brink.
It is a side effect of the Force immersion of Vaapad. My style grants great power, but at a terrible risk. Blood fever is a disease that can kill anyone it touches. To use Vaapad, you must allow yourself to enjoy the fight. You give yourself to the thrill of battle. The rush of winning. This is why so few students even attempt the style.
Vaapad is a path that leads through the penumbra of the dark side.
Here in the jungle, that shadow fringe is unexpectedly shallow. Full night is only a step away. I must be very, very careful here.
Or I may come to understand what's happened to Depa all too well.
Mace lowered his head. The electric sizzle of combat drained from his limbs, leaving them heavy and hurting: he had a variety of superficial burns from plasma splatter and splinters of half-molten