Shatterpoint

Instead of a straight subspace transmission-which would be intercepted by the militia's satellites and allow them to pinpoint our location-she broadcast the coded extraction call on a normal comm cha

I heard the acknowledgment myself, in the base's comm station.

The Haileck is on its way.

We arrived at this base about a standard hour after sunrise. The Haileck is probably insystem by now. The base itself is. not what I was expecting.

It's less a military base than an underground refugee camp.

The complex is enormous, a randomly dug hive that honeycombs the whole north wall of the pass; a number of access tu

Some of the caverns are natural: volcanic bubbles and water cha

Which would make it relatively comfortable, were it not so crowded.

Thousands of Koru

The global lack of mining equipment means that ventilation is necessarily rudimentary, and sanitation virtually nonexistent. Pneumonia is rampant; antibiotics are the first thing to run out in the captured med-pacs, and there is nowhere in the caverns one can go and not hear people wheezing as they struggle to pull their next breath into wet, clogged lungs. Dysentery claims lives among the elderly and the wounded, and with sanitation basically at the level of buckets, it will only get worse.

The largest caverns have been given over to the grassers. All the arriving Koru

These grassers spend their days crowded together with no food and little room to move; they are all sickly, and restive. There have been fights between members of different herds, and I am told several die each day: victims of wounds from fighting, or infectious disease from the close quarters. Some, it seems, simply surrender their will to live; they lie down and refuse to get up, and eventually starve.

The Koru

I do understand, now, why Depa doesn't want to leave.

We rode her ankkox right up one of the concealed tu

Everyone we passed-everyone we saw- There was no cheering, or even shouts; the welcome she got was more profound than anything that can be expressed by voice.

A woman, huddled against a sweating stone wall, caught sight of Depa, and pushed herself forward, and her face might have been a flower opening toward the sun. Depa's mere presence brought light to her eyes, and strength to her legs. The woman struggled to rise, pulling herself up the tu

Sacred.

As though it was exactly the one thing she needed to keep on living.

And that's what our welcome here was: that woman, multiplied by thousands. The warriors and the wounded. The aged. The sick and the infirm, the children- Depa is more than a Jedi to them. Not a goddess-Force-users themselves, they are not easily impressed by Jedi powers. She is, I think, a totem. She is to them what a Jedi should be to everyone, but writ so large upon their hearts that it has become a form of madness.

She is their hope.

[Rostu]: "It's true, y'know." Nick?

[Rostu]: "You think things are bad here? Okay, sure: they're bad. Not just here here. The whole highland. Bad enough. But you got no idea what it was before Depa-y'know, we're not the bad guys here." No one has suggested that you are. Nor are you the good guys. I haven't seen any good guys.

[Rostu]: "So far? I've seen one. No: two." You have?

[Rostu]: "All that good guy, bad guy stuff goes out the air lock pretty fast, doesn't it? I mean, you know why Pelek Baw withdrew from the Republic? It's got nothing to do with 'corruption in the Senate' and all that political tusker poop, either. The Balawai joined the Confederacy because the seppies promised to respect their sovereignty. Get it? Planetary rights. And the only planetary right the Balawai care about is the right to kill us all. The seppies park their droid starfighters and support staff at the spaceport, and all of a sudden the militia has an unlimited supply of gunships, and the Balawai have made it illegal for a Korun to be outside the city limits of Pelek Baw, and pretty soon they start rounding up Koru

"They had a camp for us. I was there. That's where Depa found us. You think things are ugly here? You should see what she saved us from.

"So maybe we went from living there to dying here. So? You think there's a difference? You think that was better?

"You go live in a cage if you want. Me? I'll die a free man. That's what Depa is to us.

"That's who you're taking away." She would be leaving you soon, regardless.

[Rostu]: "Says you." She is dying, Nick. The war is killing her. This planet is killing her.

The Koru