Shatterpoint

"You just have to know how to ask." Mace's face darkened. "I won't let you harm civilians. Not even to save your friends." "No need to scorch your scalp over that one," Nick said, trudging onward. "Out here, civilians are a myth." Mace didn't want to ask what Nick meant by that. He came to a stop on the rugged track.

He saw again the holoprojected carnage spread across the Supreme Chancellor's desk; he saw again images of huts broken and burned, and nineteen corpses in the jungle. "You were right," he said. "I don't like it. I don't like it at all." Nick kept walking. He didn't even look over his shoulder as he left Mace behind. "Yeah, well, as soon as you come up with a better idea," he said into the darkness ahead, "you be sure to let me know, huh?" CIVILIANS FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU In this bunker, the air is closer to cool than any I've felt since the interrogation room in the Ministry of Justice. The bunker is set into the igneous stone of the hillside-mostly just a durasteel door across the mouth of a bubble some pocket of gas or softer stone once left in the granite here. Though it overlooks the remnants of the outpost compound below, it was clearly never meant to be a combat position: no gun ports. From the way it's constructed- excavated-I believe it was more along the lines of a panic room: a safe place to hole up in the event of an attack. A safe place to wait for help from the militia.

If so, it didn't work.

The night air gently curls around the twisted shards that are all that's left of the door; its whispering passage darkly echoes the violence that still hums in the Force around me.

I dare not meditate. The dark is too deep here. It has a tidal pull: a black hole that I've taken up too tight an orbit around, and it's tearing me in half. Gravity draws the near half of me in toward an event horizon that I'm afraid to even glimpse.

Behind me, lost in the night shadows against the stone, Besh and Chalk lie motionless, nearly as cool as the rock they lie on, in full tha natizine suspension. Only with the Force can I tell that they still live: their hearts beat less than once per minute, and an hour spans no more than ten or twelve shallow breaths. The fever wasp larvae in their bodies are similarly suspended; Besh and Chalk might survive a week or more like this.

Provided nothing eats them in the meantime.

Making sure they're safe is my job. Right now, it's my only job. And so I sit among the wreckage of this doorway and stare out into the infinite night.

The Thunderbolt rests on its bipod in the doorway, muzzle canted toward the sky. Chalk maintains her beloved weapon well; she insisted on field-stripping it one last time before she would let me inject her. I have test-fired it at intervals, and it's still working fine. Though I am trying to learn to feel the action of the metal-eating fungi in the Force, the way the Koru

There is little for me to do right now. I pass the time by recording this-and by thinking about my argument with Nick.

Back on the trail, Nick said that civilians are a myth. He meant, I found, that there are no civilians out here: that to be in the jungle is to be in the war. The Balawai government promulgates a myth of i

This, Nick says, is only propaganda.

Now, here in the ruins of this Balawai outpost, I find the thought oddly comforting-but earlier this evening I rejected the idea instinctively. It seemed to me nothing more than rationalization. An excuse. A sop to consciences haunted by atrocities. On the hike along the steam-crawler track that led us here, Nick and I went back and forth about it quite a bit.

According to Nick, civilians stay in the cities; the only real civilians on Haruun Kal are the waiters and the janitors, the storekeepers and the taxicart pullers. He said there's a reason why jungle prospectors carry such heavy weapons, and that reason has more to do with akk dogs than with vine cats. Balawai do not go into the jungle unless they're ready, willing, and able to kill Koru

Then I asked him about the dead children.

It's the only time I've yet seen Nick angry. He wheeled on me like he wanted to throw a punch. "What children?" he said. "How old do you have to be to pull a trigger? Kids make great soldiers. They barely know what fear is." It is wrong to make war on children-or with them-and I told him so. No matter what.

They're not old enough to understand the consequences of their actions. He replied in staggeringly obscene terms that I should tell that to the Balawai.

"What about our children?" He shook with barely restrained fury. "The jups can leave their kids at home in the city. Where do we leave ours? You've seen Pelek Baw. You know what happens to a Korun kid on those streets-,' know what happens. I was one of them. Better blown to pieces out here than having to-survive-like I did. So then, out here, how do you tell the gu

At the time, I managed to restrain myself, and even to maintain a civil tone, while Nick revealed that he knew all about the jungle massacre and the data wafer.

It wasn't easy.

He told me that not only had he been there-at the very scene Yoda and I had viewed in Palpatine's office-he had been in the company of Depa and Kar Vastor when they'd thought the whole scheme up. He had helped them dress the scene, and later it was Nick himself who had tipped off Republic Intelligence.

Even now, hours later, it's hard for me to put into words how that made me feel.