Matthew Stover - Shatterpoint

Because he knew. He could feel it. In the Force, stress lines spidered out from the wafer like frost scaling supercooled transparisteel. He could not read the pattern, but he could feel its power.

This would be ugly.

"Where did you find it?" "It was — uh, at the scene. Of the massacre. It was, well, at the scene." "Where did you find it?" The agent flinched.

Again, Mace took a breath. Then another. With the third, the fist in his chest relaxed. "I am sorry." Sometimes he forgot how intimidating some men found his height and voice. Not to mention his reputation. He did not wish to be feared.

At least, not by those loyal to the Republic.

"Please," he said. "It might be significant." The agent mumbled something.

"I'm sorry?" "I said, it was in her mouth." He waved a hand in the general direction of the holographic corpse at Mace's feet. "Someone had. fixed her jaw shut, so scavengers wouldn't get at it when they. well, y'know, scavengers prefer the, the, er, the tongue." Nausea bloomed below Mace's ribs. His fingertips tingled. He stared down at the woman's image. Those marks on her face-he had thought they were just marks. Or some kind of fungus, or a colony of mold. Now his eyes made sense of them, and he wished they hadn't: dull gold-colored lumps under her chin.

Brassvine thorns.

Someone had used them to nail her jaw shut.

He had to turn away. He realized that he had to sit down, too.

The agent continued, "Our station boss got a tip and sent me to check it out. I hired a steamcrawler from some busted-out jups, rented a handful of townies who can handle heavy weapons, and crawled up there. What we found. well, you can see it. That data wafer-when I found it." Mace stared at the man as though he'd never seen him before. And he hadn't: only now, finally, was he truly seeing him. An undistinguished little man: soft face and uncertain voice, shaky hands and allergies: an undistinguished little man who must have resources of toughness that Mace could barely imagine. To have walked into a scene that Mace could barely stomach even in a bloodless, translu cent laser image; to have had to smell them-touch them-to pry open a dead woman's mouth.

And then to bring the recordings here, so that he could live it all again- Mace could have done it. He thought so. Probably. He'd been some places, and seen some things.

Not like this.

The agent said, "Our sources are pretty sure the tip came from the ULF itself." Palpatine glanced a question. Mace spoke without taking his eyes off the agent. "The Upland Liberation Front, sir. That's Depa's partisan group; 'uplanders' is a rough translation of Korunnai-the name the mountain tribes give themselves." "Korunnai?" Palpatine frowned absently. "Aren't those your people, Master Windu?" "My. kin." He made himself unclench his jaw. "Yes, Chancellor. You have a good memory." "A politician's trick." Palpatine gave a gently self-deprecating smile and waved a dismissive hand. "Please go on." The agent shrugged as though there was little more to tell. "There have been a lot of. disturbing reports. Execution of prisoners. Ambushes of civilians. On both sides. Usually they can't be verified. The jungle. swallows everything. So when we got this tip-" "You found this because somebody wanted you to find it," Mace finished for him. "And now you think-" Mace turned the data wafer over and over through his fingers, watching it catch splinters of light. "You think those people might have been killed just to deliver this message." "What a hideous idea!" Palpatine lowered himself slowly onto the edge of his desk. He appealed to the agent. "This can't be true, can it?" The agent only hung his head.

Yoda's ears curled backward, and his eyes narrowed. "Some messages. most important, is how they are framed. Secondary, their content is." Palpatine shook his head in disbelief. "These ULF partisans-we ally ourselves with them?

The Jedi ally with them? What sort of monsters are they?" "I don't know." Mace handed the wafer back to the agent. "Let's find out." He slotted it into a port on the side of the holoprojector and touched a control.

The holoprojector's phased-wave speakers brought the jungle around them to life with noise: the rush of wind-rattled leaves, skrills and clatters of insect calls, dim dopplered shrieks of passing birds, the howls and coughs of distant predators. Through the eddies and boils of sound drifted a whisper sinuous as a riversnake: a human or near-human whisper, a voice murmuring in Basic, sometimes comprehensible for a word here or phrase there, sometimes twisting below the distorting ripples of the aural surface. Mace caught the words Jedi, and night-or knife- and something about look between the stars.

He frowned at the agent. "You can't clean this up?" "This is cleaned up." The agent produced a datapad from his trav-elcase, keyed it alight, and passed it to Mace. "We made a transcript. It's provisional. Best we can do." The transcript was fragmentary, but enough to draw chills up Mace's arms: Jedi Temple. taught (or possibly taut). dark. an enemy. But. Jedi. under cover of night.

One whisper was entirely clear. He read the words on the data-pad's screen as the whisper seemed to come from just behind his shoulder.

I use the night, and the night uses me.

He forgot to breathe. This was bad.

It got worse.

The whisper strengthened to a voice. A woman's voice.

Depa's voice.

On the datapad in his hand, and murmuring in the air behind his shoulder-,' have become the darkness in the jungle.

The recording went on. And on.

Her murmur drained him: of emotion, of strength, even of thought; the longer she rambled, the emptier he got. Yet her final words still triggered a dull shock inside his chest.

She was talking to him.

I know you will come for me, Mace. You should never have sent me here. And I should never have come. But what's done can never be undone. I knowyou think I've gone mad. I haven't. What's happened to me is worse.

I've gone sane.

That's why you II come, Mace. That's why you'll have to.

Because nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who's finally sane.

Her voice trailed off into the jungle-mutter.

No one moved or spoke. Mace sat with interlocked fingers supporting his chin. Yoda leaned on his cane, eyes shut, mouth pinched with inner pain. Palpatine stared solemnly through the holographic jungle, as though he saw something real beyond its boundary.

"That's-uh, that's all there is." The agent extended a hesitant hand to the holoprojector and flicked a control. The jungle vanished like a bad dream.

They all stirred, rousing themselves, instinctively adjusting their clothing. Palpatine's office now looked unreal: as though the clean carpeted floor and crisp lines of furniture, the pure filtered air, and the view of Coruscant that filled the large windows were the holographic projection, and they all still sat in the jungle.

As though only the jungle were real.

Mace spoke first.

"She's right." He lifted his head from his hands. "I have to go after her. Alone." Palpatine's eyebrows twitched. "That seems. unwise." "Concur with Chancellor Palpatine, I do," Yoda said slowly. "Great risks there would be.

Too valuable you are. Send others, we should." "There is no one else who can do this." "Surely, Master Windu"-Palpatine's smile was respectfully disbelieving-"a Republic Intelligence covert ops team, or even a team of Jedi-" "No." Mace rose, and straightened his shoulders. "It has to be me." "Please, we all understand your concern for your former student, Master Windu, but surely-" "Reasons he must have, Supreme Chancellor," Yoda said. "Listen to them, we should." Even Palpatine found that one did not argue with Master Yoda.

Mace struggled to put his certainty into words. This difficulty was a function of his particular gift of perception. Some things were so obvious to him that they were hard to describe: like explaining how he knew it was raining while he stood in a thunderstorm.