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There was a time when we harvested enough to keep us fat, with plenty left over for trading with the miners, as well as for export offworld.

Now we barely scrape by with our tiny gardens here."

He gestured to small patches of plants outside the ramshackle homes.

"A few of our people have tried to clear some of our old acreage, but it's a dangerous task. The cursed miners plant burrowing detonators everywhere."

Jaina shuddered. She had heard about mobile robotic explosives that tunneled into the ground and waited there for someone-anyone-to unwittingly step on them.

"Some of our braver young men and women venture into the forests to hunt for food, but even the trees and shrubs are booby-trapped with deadly pits and trip wires. Sometimes our hunters don't come back."

Several villagers sighed or smothered soft moans of despair.

"It is only a matter of time before we're all wiped out," Ynos said.

"Then the mountain villagers will have won the war."

"Unless we kill them first," said one brash young helper.

"And then we will all be dead anyway," Ynos replied in a heavy voice.

Tenel Ka looked at the man and studied his stump of a leg. She seemed to feel a camaraderie with Ynos, though her injury had been caused by an accident, and his by an act of war. "There is no honor in such destruction. Only cowards kill those they cannot see. And only a fool kills when there are other options."

Ynos sighed and looked around at the squalid village. Jaina followed his gaze. Her heart went out to the desperate workers in the nearby fields.

She saw a few figures moving slowly, taking each step with meticulous care.

A sudden wash of dread flooded through her. All the young Jedi Knights whirled and focused on the same field, sensing the dangerjust as one of the distant farmers stepped forward. An explosion ripped under his feet, sending up a cloud of dust and dirt shards, along with an incinerating heat.

The scattered workers in the fields screamed. Some froze in utter terror, while others ran blindly back along the narrow, well-packed trails that led safely through the cropland. The villagers lurched into motion, rushing toward the field.

Anakin popped back into the Falcon and emerged a moment later carrying the medikit. Tenel Ka ran like a hunting cat, with Anja pacing her step for step, as if it were some kind of a competition rather than a race to rescue an injured man who had stepped on a burrowing detonator.

"Be careful!" Ynos shouted, limping behind them as the other young Jedi ran. At the edge of the fields, many of the farmers stopped to embrace those who had successfully made it onto safe ground. The young Jedi Knights followed the narrow footpaths. Jaina could see where other detonators had left craters and pockmarks in the fields, uprooting precious crops, leaving their poisonous residue as a chemical stain on the once-fertile dirt.

Ahead, Jaina saw the mangled body of the man who had been hurled high by the explosion and dropped back down among the rocks and clods of dirt.

His clothes were torn, his face and limbs scorched from the blast. Blood seeped from massive injuries in his legs and chest. The man groaned.

Jaina and her companions rushed to his side.

"Saw it...... the man groaned, " saw it coming toward me... jumped." He gasped for breath, and Jaina thought she could hear his ribs cracking as he inhaled. "Not fast enough. This place... infested with burrowers."

Han came up, panting. "Looks bad. Can we get him back to the Falcon's medical bay?"

Anakin opened the medikit, but the mangled man shuddered. Blood still oozed from his wounds. A moment later, he collapsed backward with a convulsion. Jaina could tell without checking that he had died.

Just then Ynos hobbled up on his mechanical leg and looked down at the dead man. He assessed the injuries with narrowed eyes and nodded grimly.

"Perhaps it's best he died quickly. He'd never have recovered, and he would have hated being crippled."

"That is not for us to judge," Tenel Ka said. "We cannot know what he might have contributed-even