Shatterpoint

Only one of the gunships went as far as Pelek Baw.

It crept over Grandfather's Shoulder on one-quarter repulsorlift power, leaking smoke and radiation. The tower officers at the spaceport listened in horror to the pilots gasping message: a reactor breach. Imminent catastrophic failure. The pilot had heroically kept his craft in the air, making for Pelek Baw, because only the spaceport itself was fully equipped for containment and decontamination-to have landed anywhere else might have meant the sacrifice of his crew, and of the infantry platoon on board.

The news leaped like lightning from the tower to the ground staff, from the anti-rad techs to the bored garrison crews working the spaceport's Confederacy-provided array of modern turbolasers and ion ca

Every eye in the spaceport watched the Turbostorm, either in person or on screen, rooting for it, praising the crew's selfless courage as it swung wide around the city so as not to endanger civilians below, some praying aloud that they would make it, many more secretly hoping to witness a spectacular crash- Instead of tending to their duties, such as monitoring their sensor screens.

After all, why should they? The spaceport was linked in realtime with the network of detector satellites in orbit around the planet; nothing was in the air right now except the twenty- odd surviving gunships. The last of the droid starnghters had returned to space hours ago, and the Republic landing craft which had caused so much excitement had vanished shortly thereafter.

No one was worried about those landers. After the staggering 40 percent losses they had suffered, the Republic ships surely would seek no further battle. Without a doubt, they were hiding in the "soup"-the thick oceanic swirl of toxic gases that surrounds the Highland plateau-until a cruiser could sneak in-system to extract them. Without a doubt.

This was a considerable display of confidence on their part, because those same detector satellites on which they depended were as out of date as the rest of the local government's planetary equipage. Their IR and visual-light detectors were useless to penetrate the thick hot swirl of the "soup," and the satellites' more subtle sensors were defeated by the extremely high metals content of the gases. Once the landers went deep enough, they effectively vanished from the face of the planet.

Which is why any sensor tech at the Pelek Saw spaceport with the discipline to keep his eyes on his short-range screen might have seen indications of something extraordinary.

Pelek Baw spread along the western shore of the Great Downrush, the mightiest river on Haruun Kal. The Downrush was fed by tributaries from across the Highland-from as far east as the Lorshan Pass, and as far north as the lands above the impassable cliffs called the Trundur Wall. By the time the great river reached the capital, it was a full kilometer wide. Its dramatic roaring spray-clouded plunge from the terminal cliffs that formed the southern boundary of the city was one of the great natural wonders of the sector: it foamed and misted and spread as it fell kilometer after kilometer, becoming a snowy fan that stirred the roiling "soup" below into wild fractal whirls and blooms of colorfully immiscible gases.

What the sensor tech would have seen, had he been disciplined and duty-conscious enough to still be looking into his short-range screen, was ten Jadthu-class Republic landers climbing, straight up, within the Downrush Falls-single file, battered by the thundering water, but perfectly cloaked from long-range detection. If the sensor tech had seen that, the outcome might have been different.

That was the only chance they would have had.

But the sensor techs' attention was caught up in the drama of waiting to see if the crippled gunship could possibly struggle in for a landing before it blew up.

Not to mention the fact that a second or two before it would have touched down, it opened fire on the guardhouses surrounding the spaceport's control center, and an instant later seven immense half-naked Koru

And that these unexpected Koru

The Jedi lightsaber.

So flustered were the spaceport's crew, that not a being among them even bothered to look up until the very moment the light of Al'har upon their positions was eclipsed by the shadows of hovering Jadfhu-cl&ss landers.

Then they did look up: in time to see ten durasteel clouds burst in a rain of armored clone soldiers of the Grand Army of the Republic, whose arrival was so swift, efficient, and disciplined-and in such overwhelming force-that the antiship emplacements were taken without the loss of a single trooper.

The same, however, could not be said of the militia crewmen. The clone troopers, being unsentimental about such things, did not even bother to wipe the blood off the walls and floors before replacing the crews with their own men.

The fighting at the control center was hotter, and lasted a few seconds longer, but the outcome was the same-because the attackers were Akk Guards and Jedi, and the defenders were, after all, only ordinary beings.

The capture of the Pelek Baw spaceport took less than seven minutes from the instant the gunship opened fire, and resulted in the capture of 286 military perso

Taken together with the Battle of Lorshan Pass, the capture of the Pelek Baw spaceport would have been considered one of the masterstrokes of General Windu's distinguished career, if only the rest of the operation had gone as pla

But it is a truism that no battle plan long survives contact with the enemy. This one was no exception.

Mace didn't even have to leave the command bunker to watch everything start to go wrong.

The command bunker was a large, heavily armored hexagon in the middle of the spaceport's control center, filled with angled banks of consoles. The only illumination in the room was spill from the console monitors and the huge rectangular holoprojector views that dominated each of the six walls; the general gloom thickened below console-height so that everyone inside waded hip-deep in shadow. Dead space below the wall screens was currently serving as a holding area for prisoners, as well as a makeshift aid station where wounded men and women sat or lay while clone troopers dispassionately tended their injuries.