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Vaster shrugged. Where are Besh and Chalk?

"In the bunker," Mace answered without thinking, his mind still whirling around the concept of a necessary massacre.

Vaster swept the wounded men and women in the steamcrawler's cabin with a contemptuous glare. These will keep, doshalo. They cannot escape. Follow me. With a rush of the Force, he sprang straight upward through the hole Mace had cut.

That same rush of the Force tugged at Mace's will, inclining him to follow without thinking-but he understood now the power of this place, and of Vaster himself.

"You'll have to do better than that," Mace muttered.

He turned his attention to the terrified Balawai around him. He gestured, and all the discarded blasters flipped from the deck to hang in midair; with a single swift flourish he sliced every one of them in half, then cast their pieces out the hole. "Listen to me, all of you. You must surrender. It is your only hope."

"Hope of what?" a man said bitterly. His face was gray; he wore a bacta patch over a chest wound and clutched the stump of his wrist just above a wad of spray bandage that served him for a tourniquet. "We know what happens if we're captured."

"Not this time," Mace said: "If you fight, they will kill you. If you surrender I can keep you alive. And I will."

"We're supposed to just take your word for it?"

"I am a Jedi Master."

The man spat blood on the deck. "We know what that's worth."

"Obviously you don't." In the Force, Mace felt the dark flame that was the lor pelek fighting his way upslope toward the bunker. For an instant he was almost grateful-he'd be happy to leave the defense of Chalk and Besh in Vastor's hands-but then he remembered the children. The children were still inside.

Where Vastor was going.

Massacres are necessary.

"I won't argue." Mace moved to the rim of the hole Vastor had cut, and looked up through the one he'd cut himself, judging his clearance. "Fight to a sure death, or surrender to a hope of life. The choice is yours," he said, and threw himself upward into the burning night.

The whole compound was on fire: choking black smoke swirled above blazing lakes of flame-projector fuel. Blaster bolts flashed through every angle, their bursts an arrhythmic drumbeat under the howling chorus of the Korun shield-weapons. Vastor bounded up the slope toward the bunker in erratic zigzagging leaps, his shields flashing: catching stray bolts, carving metal, slashing flesh.

Mace dived from the top of the steamcrawler, flipped in the air, and hit the ground running. His blades wove a green and purple corona of power that splintered blasterfire into the sky.

A knot of Balawai huddled on their knees a few meters to the left of Mace's path, their hands finger-laced on the backs of their heads. Eyes closed against the horror around them, they screamed for mercy to a gore-smeared Korun whose face held nothing human. The Korun raised twin shields shrilling over his head, and with a roar of dark exultation he plunged them toward defenseless necks-But before he could land the blow, the sole of a boot slammed his spine so hard that he flipped completely over and landed on his head.

The Korun sprang to his feet, unhurt and raging. "Kick me? Gonna die, you! Gonna die-"

He stopped, because to move another centimeter would have brought his nose in contact with the rock-steady purple lightsaber blade poised in front of his face. At the other end of that blade stood Mace Windu.

"Yes, I will," he said. "But not today."

The Korun's expression curdled like sour grasser milk. "Must be the Windu Jedi, you," he said in Koruun. "Depa's sire."

The word gave Mace a twinge; in Koruun, sire could mean either "master"

or "father." Or both. He spoke in his rusty Koruun. "Don't kill not-fighters, you. Kill not-fighters andjyow die."

The Korun snorted. "Talk like a Balawai, you," he spat in Basic. "Don't take your orders, I."

Mace twitched his lightsaber. The Korun's eyes flickered. Mace returned to Basic as well. "If you want to live, believe