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Use what you're given.

"Kid?" Mace called, roughening his voice. Making himself sound the way the boy would expect a Korun to sound, adopting a thick upland accent like Chalk's. "Kid: five seconds to toss that blaster out the hatch and come after it, you got."

"Never!" the boy screamed from inside. "Never!"

"Don't come out, you, and the next thing you see-the last thing you see, ever-is a grenade coming in. Hear me, you?"

"Go ahead! I know what happens if we get taken alive!"

"Kid-already got the others, don't I? The girl. Urno and Nykl. Gonna leave them all alone, you? With me?"

There came a pause.

Mace said into the silence, "Sure, go ahead and die. Any coward can do that. Guts enough to live for a while, you got?"

He was moderately sure that a thirteen-year-old boy who'd load up four other children and set out in a steamcrawler across the Korunnai Highland at night-a boy who'd rather die than leave an unconscious girl behind-had guts enough for just about anything.

A second later, he was proven right.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU

From this doorway, I can see a spray of brilliant white flares-headlamps of three, no, wait, four steamcrawlers-climbing the spine of the fold, heading for the broken track.

Heading for us.

Dawn will come in an hour. I hope we'll all live that long.

The eruptions have subsided, and the rain has trailed off to an intermittent patter. We've shifted some things around in the bunker. The three younger children are curled up on scavenged blankets in the back, asleep. Besh and Chalk now lie near the Thunderbolt, where I can keep an eye on them; I'm not at all sure that one of these children might not try to do them some harm. Terrel, a boy of thirteen who seems to be their natural leader, is remarkably fierce, and he still does not entirely believe that I'm not planning to torture all five of them to death. Yet even on Haruun Kal, boys are still boys: every time he stops worrying about being tortured to death, he starts pestering me to let him fire the Thunderbolt.

I wonder what Nick would say about these civilians. Are they a myth, too?

Now all my work in cleaning up this compound does not seem pointless; the children have been through enough tonight without having to see what had been done to the people who'd lived here. Without having to see the kind of thing that has probably been done to people they know, at their outpost.

Possibly even to their parents.

I can't consider such questions right now. Right now, all I seem to be able to do is stare past the twisted jags of durasteel that once had been this bunker's door, watching the steamcrawlers' upward creep.

I don't need any hints from the Force to have a bad feeling about this.

In dejarik, there is a classic manuver called the fork, where a player moves a single holomonster into position to attack two or more of his opponent's, so that no matter which 'monster the opponent moves to safety, the other will be eaten. Caught in the fork, one's only choice is which piece to lose. The word has come to symbolize situations where the only choice to be made is a choice of disasters.

We are well and truly forked.

I know who these steamcrawlers are bringing: jungle prospectors from the same outpost as the children, fleeing the same ULF guerrillas whose attack had forced the children away-probably the same band that destroyed this outpost. I got the story from Terrel, while I was tending to his broken arm and the girl's scalp wound.

Their outpost had been the next one on this track, some seventy klicks to the north and east.They had come under attack by the ULF at dusk;Terrel's father had given him the task of gathering the other children and driving them to safety.

They'd had no way to know that the ULF had been to this outpost first.

Terrel's arm had been broken by either a bullet or a grenade fragment; he wasn't sure which. He told me proudly how he managed the dual-stick controls of the steamcrawler with only one hand, and how he had crashed into grassers as he broke