Shatterpoint

you?

"You have seen what my word is worth." "You think maybe you could, like, send me out first? Because, y'know, I don't want to be anywhere in this whole sector when Kar finds out she's leaving." "Leave Vaster to me." "And, uh, Master General, sir? Have you considered what you're go

Nick stopped in his tracks. He said weakly, "Have you considered that neither of us might live that long?" He said this because of the twelve snarling akk dogs who had materialized around them as though the jungle had birthed them from the twilight.

Fury chuffed into the Force like the steam from their nostrils. Moving out of the gloom- haunted trees came all six of the Akk Guards. They wore their vibroshields pushed up over their biceps, freeing their hands for the assault rifles and grenade launchers they carried.

Weapons for hunters stalking human prey.

All six wore the human equivalent of the akks' snarls.

None of them spoke.

It was possible, at that moment, that none of them remembered how.

The Force hummed with anger, as though every one of them resonated on a single harmonic.

Mace felt, then, the power of the Force-bonds that linked them-but not to each other. Not one of the Akk Guards had a link with a dog like the one Chalk had had with Galthra.

All eighteen of them, dogs and men alike, were Force-bonded not with each other, but each with one single other, as though they were spokes on a wheel of which he was the hub.

The anger Mace felt was Kar's.

He recognized its distinctive flavor.

He said, "I think Kar might be a little upset about those prisoners after all." Nick stood with his back against Mace's: where once Depa would have been.

Where Depa should have been.

Where, in any sane universe, she would be right now.

Mace heard the familiar snap of an igniting blade and turned to Nick. "Give me that." The young Korun's eyes flared green with the blade's glow. "What am I supposed to fight with, then? My rapierlike wit?" Which would do him as much good as a lightsaber against twelve akk dogs, but Mace didn't tell him that. "You won't be fighting." "Says you." Instead of arguing, Mace reached over the blade and finger-snapped the end of his nose as though flicking away a fly.

Nick blinked, flinching, blurting a reflexive obscenity, and by the time he remembered that he'd had a lightsaber in his hand, the lightsaber was in Mace's.

"Vastor is a predator, not a HoloNet villain: they're not holding us here so that he can gloat.

If he pla

Nick breathed, "Oh, I get it. He's bringing Depa." HOSTAGE I

he immense shadow crashed closer, its walk a symphony of splintering trees.

It was an ankkox.

A massive armored saurian, the ankkox was the largest land animal of Haruun Kal.

Ankkoxes were twice the size of grassers-more than half again the mass of a full-grown bantha-but built low and wide, with a broad dorsal shell like an oval soup plate turned upside down. The dorsal shell of this one was nearly three meters wide, and well over four meters long.

A drover's chair was bolted to the top of the ankkox's crown shell, a convex disc of armor that capped the beast's head; when an ankkox retracted its head and legs, its crown shell and all six knee shells fit into gaps in its armor as snugly as air locks, enabling the ankkox to survive washes of volcanic gas that it couldn't outrun.

This drover did not sit, but stood wide-legged on the crown armor behind the chair, brandishing a long pole that ended in a sharp-looking hook, to use as a goad in directing the ankkox's path. Two teardrop-shaped shields of ultrachrome were pushed up onto his biceps.

Kar Vaster.

He moved only to direct the ankkox. His face held no expression. He did not even look at Mace and Nick.

The air around him shimmered with his rage.

Smaller trees the ankkox shouldered aside; underbrush it simply crushed beneath its speeder-sized feet. To get the ankkox through tree gaps too small to pass its huge shell where the trees were too large to overbear, Vaster would reach out with his goad, indicating specific points on their trunks-which would be struck by some whirring object, invisibly fast, that impacted with enough power to shatter the trunks and let it pass: the creature's tail mace.

The only part of the ankkox's body that was not armored was its extensile, muscular, surprisingly flexible tail. The tail was tipped with a thick round ball of armor, and an adult ankkox could snap its tail faster than the human eye could see, using that mace to accurately strike targets up to eight meters away with enough power to stun an akk dog or shatter a small tree.

There was a time, before the reopening of Haruun Kal to the civilized galaxy, when a mace taken from a juvenile ankkox was the traditional weapon of Korun herders: dangerous to acquire. Difficult to use. Deadly in effect.

On the central bulge of this ankkox's dorsal shell had been built a howdah: a small curtained cabin framed with lammas wood, two meters by three, barely larger than the long padded chaise within. The draped canopy stood slightly higher than Mace was tall, bounded by a polished rail perhaps a meter above the shell. The curtains, not to mention the fine-worked wood itself, were probably spoils looted from some Balawai's home. Multiple layers of gauzy lace, the curtains were translucent as smoke.

With the sunset behind, Mace could see her silhouette.

The ankkox crunched to a ponderous stop, settling onto its ventral shell with a long hiss through its teeth like gas venting from pneumatic landing jacks. Vastor tucked the goad into its holster bolted to the ankkox's crown shell, then stepped forward over the drover chair and folded his thick-muscled arms.

He stared down into the eyes of the Jedi Master.

The akk dogs started to growl low in their throats, a sound more felt than heard, like the subterranean precursor of a coming groundquake.