Shatterpoint

Before lolu could pull it back out, Nick flipped his pistol's muzzle up against the Akk Guard's extended elbow.

The slug didn't quite blow his arm off. lolu swayed, stu

Chalk's gun in Nick's other hand came up under lolu's chin. "Never liked you anyway," Nick said, and pulled the trigger.

The corpse fell against him. Its shattered arm slipped free of the shield's retaining straps.

Nick pushed himself sideways out from under, looking for another target, and the dead Guard slid down the wall.

Geptun was nowhere to be seen. He was either dead or down with the transceiver. Either way, there was nothing left to do but fight.

A knot of clone troopers stood back-to-back, firing desperately at one lone Akk Guard who leaped and spun and slaughtered with demonic precision.

No: not an Akk Guard.

It was Kar Vaster.

Nick leveled Chalk's gun. "This is for her, scum-packer," he muttered. "Never liked you either." But her pistol was too heavy for him to hold steady. His own seemed to have gained a dozen kilos as well. "What the frag-?" His knees turned to cloth.

He looked over at lolu's corpse. The other shield, one that still hung silent along his dead arm, was stained bright red. Dripping.

Nick said, "Oh." He looked down. A huge diagonal gash opened his tunic across his abdomen, and his legs were soaked with blood. He sagged back against the wall.

"Oh," he said again. "Oh, nuts." And, in the end, he was just too tired. Too old.

Too wounded.

Through the trace of Force co

Every cut and bruise, every cracked bone and sprained joint, the man-bite on his shoulder and the hole through his guts: all of them blossomed into silent screams.

His lightsaber went heavy, and his arms went slow. She burned a stripe across his chest, and he staggered.

His fighting spirit wasn't destroyed. It wasn't even far away. He could feel where it had gone.

He could reach out and touch it.

It was waiting for him in the dark.

Lorz Geptun quivered uncontrollably. Crouched in the cramped chamber that was filled with the refresher-sized tranceiver, he tried not to listen to the steady diminuendo of the blaster fire above. Each gun that fell silent was one less man up there to protect his life.

His hands trembled so badly he could barely punch the keys on the codelock that sealed his datapad's armored shell. When he finally got it open, he had to fumble in the inky shadows for the linkport on the transceiver. His shaking hands made inserting his pad's datalink resemble threading a needle with his feet, but he got it done.

With a gasp of triumph, he keyed the droid starfighter recall sequence.

Nothing happened.

A moment later, his datapad's screen a

In the Force, Mace felt Geptun's despair. It felt like a gift.

Another man might even have smiled.

He took one last look at the darkness that called to him- Darkness within mirroring darkness without- And turned away.

He let his blade vanish. His arms dropped to his sides.

Depa moved in for the kill.

Mace backed away.

She leaped for him, slashing, and he slipped aside. She pressed her attack and he retreated, over bodies and through blaster-riddled wreckage of console banks, until he came hard up against a console that still had power: indicator lights flashed like droid eyes in the gloom.

The blade of green fire whirled up, poised, and struck.

He let himself collapse.

He fell to the floor at her feet, and instead of cleaving his skull, her blade slashed the console behind him in half. Cables spat blue sparks across the burned gap.

This was the console that controlled the spaceport's signal-jamming equipment.

Down in the transceiver chamber, Geptun stared at his datapad's screen with astonished reverence, conscious of having been unexpectedly granted undeserved grace.

It read: COMMAND EXECUTED.

In the skies over Pelek Baw, as the snowcap on Grandfather's Shoulder kindled with the first red rays of dawn, droid starfighters disengaged from clone-piloted ships and streaked back into the depths of space.

In the command bunker, the swirl of dark power crested, paused, and began to recede.

Mace lay on the floor. He didn't think he could get up. Depa stared down at him, her face lit jungle-green by the glow of her blade, and a single needle of light seemed to pierce the dark madness in her eyes. "Oh, Mace." Her voice was a moan of astonished pain. Her blade vanished, and her arms fell limp and helpless to her sides. "Mace, I'm sorry-I'm so sorry." He managed to lift a hand to reach up to her. "Depa-" "Mace, I'm sorry," she repeated, and brought her lightsaber up to put its emitter to her own temple. "We shouldn't have come." "Depa, no!" Mace found he did have the strength to rise, to stand, even to leap for her, but he was exhausted, and wounded, and far, far too slow. She squeezed the activator plate.

A single sharp report-like a handclap-rang out behind him, and a spark flew from the metal of her blade as it was smacked spi

It twisted lazily through the air and clattered among the wreckage. She blinked dizzily, as though she couldn't quite understand why she was still alive, then crumpled to the floor. Mace turned toward where the sound had come from. Sitting next to the corpse of a dead Akk Guard, his back propped against the wall, one hand pressed to his chest to hold closed a horrible wound, Nick Rostu gri

"Told you." "Nick-" "Told you I can shoot." he said. His fingers opened and the gun fell to the floor; his hand dropped on top of it and his eyes drifted shut.

"Nick, I-" The young Korun was beyond hearing. Mace said softly, "Thank you." He swayed. He had to put out a hand to the wrecked comm console to steady himself.

The bunker had once again gone quiet and dark and full of death. Quiet except for a low growl.

The growl came from a black shape that rose like corpse-fungus from among the bodies.