He'd never felt it coming.
Dark power swirled around him.
He let his blade shrink away and crouched between two console banks, his heart hammering. "Nick!" he called. "Did you get him?" "Don't think so." Nick's voice came out thin and tight. "Sounded like he took both on the shields. You?" Mace smelled smoke: charred flesh. "Perhaps. A piece of him, any, way.
"See where he came from?" "No. I think-" Mace's breath hissed through his teeth. "I thin they're hiding among the bodies. Stay ready." "You better believe it." The low snarling growl became mocking. Your Force can't help yo here. Here there is only pelekotan. And we are only pelekotani dream.
Mace crept his way silently along the console bank.
You didn't feel me coming at you. You can't.
"That wasn't you," Mace said, low.
But it was. One-seventh of me.
Your pardon: one-eighth.
He could feel the transceiver chamber now: two meters away o the far side of this console bank. Its ceiling began a meter and a ha below the floor.
You have lost her. Lost her to pelekotan. Lost her to pelekotan's drean a world free from Balawai.
Mace muttered, "We are all Balawai here." He triggered his blade just long enough to stab into the leg well c the console under which he crouched, and carve an arch out of? back just large enough to crawl through. He pulled the cutaway piec free and laid it flat.
On the far side lay a knot of dead clones. Four. He had to crav over them.
Someone had taken off their helmets. Their eyes were open.
Jango Fett's dead face stared at him four times over.
Dead eyes looked into him and saw nothing but his guilt.
He kept moving.
The spot he needed was just ahead. Mace finally tore his attentio away from the dead clones, and froze.
Someone had been carving the floor there already. Blackene hunks of the command bunker's armor plating lay strewn around human-sized pit already nearly a meter deep. Beside them, a sl? form in tattered brown robes lay crumpled on the floor.
Her lightsaber was still in her hand.
For one giddy instant, his heart sang: she had anticipated him. She hadn't fallen to the dark-it had been an act, all an act't't She had been cutting through the floor to help him- But it was only one instant. He knew better.
Of course she had anticipated him: she knew all there was to know about his style. She'd known exactly what his target had to be, and she hadn't been cutting into the chamber below in order to help activate the transceiver.
She'd been going there to destroy it.
Looked like the proton grenade blast had caught her just in time. She didn't seem to be breathing. In the blinding swirl of dark power that filled the bunker, he could not feel if she still lived.
You have gone very quiet, doshalo. Do you think silence can save you? Do you think that because you cannot feel me, the reverse is also true?
Too much fatigue; too much pain. He had no room left in his heart for more.
He would grieve later. Now, looking at her corpse, he felt only a vague, melancholy relief that he hadn't had to kill her himself.
Do you think there is anything about you I don't know?
"I think," Mace said, "that if you were all you claim, I'd already be dead." He pushed himself into a forward roll that brought him up to a crouch, and looked down into the hole. She'd done most of his work for him already. He could cut through with a single stroke.
You are not yet my kill.
"No? Whose kill am I, then?" The answer to his question was a lightsaber's emitter jammed against his belly.
Mace had time to think blankly: Oh. Not dead. Faking.
"Depa-?" She screamed as she triggered her blade. And kept screaming as its green fire chewed a tunnel through Mace's guts and speared out his back. His hand seized hers instinctively, locking her blade against his body so that she could not kill him by slashing it free. His own blade ignited- But he could not strike her. Even now. Not here, so close he could kiss her instead; not while her scream spiraled up into a shriek; not while he had to look into her wide staring eyes and see no hate or rage but only stark agony.
He was going to have to do this the hard way.
He struck downward into the pit beside them, his blade slicing out a lopsided ellipse of armor plate that dropped into darkness below and clanged to an unseen floor.
"Geptunf he roared. "NOW Flashes of battle: — shadows fleeing the bunker as swarms of screaming electric blue blaster bolts rebounding off walls shoot them to rags- a flood of troopers spreading into a wave through the doorway, weapons gouting lightning-colored energy, Geptun in the middle of them, head down and running, datapad cradled like a baby in his arms- a buzzing shield of silver flame that sliced through a blaster rifle so that it exploded and took with it the trooper's hands- These images burned in Mace's brain as he fought for his life against the woman who should have been his daughter.
He brought his blade back up from the pit and turned his wrist on the forehand so that his recovery stroke took her in the temple with his lightsaber's butt. Her fingers slipped off the blade's activation plate and it shrank back down through his body. She howled and punched his eyesocket with her free hand, but Mace got his foot wedged between them and he shoved her away with a powerful thrust.
At the same instant both of them backflipped into the air, landing on their feet poised in perfect mirror images, their blades whipping in identically curving slashes almost too fast to see.
Blaster bolts howled around them. The air crackled with streaks and splatters of energy.
Their blades flickered and whipped and no bolt touched their flesh.
Their eyes never left each other's.
Something had torn in his guts when he did the backflip. Smoke trickled upward from the hole in his belly. He could smell it, but he felt no pain. Not yet. His blade whirred through the air.
Hers whirred faster. She advanced.
The slashes never stopped. They would never stop. They flowed one into the next with liquid precision.
This constant near-invisible weave of lethal energy is the ready-stance of Vaapad.
"Depa," Mace said desperately. "I don't want to fight you. Depa, please-" She sprang at him, screaming without words; he couldn't know if she'd heard him. He couldn't know if language still had meaning for her.
Then she was on him. His whole world turned to green fire.
Twenty-four troopers entered the bunker in a wedge around Colonel Geptun. Nick Rostu kept his back against the wall while he watched them die.
Akk Guards leaped over and past them, and with every leap another clone fell. The clones never stopped, never faltered, firing blaster carbines from the hip, forcing their way forward over the bodies of their comrades.
And it wasn't only clones who died.
The Force nudged Nick, and he swung a pistol and fired without thinking. A leaping Akk Guard whirled and the slug banged sparks off his shield, but in the instant his attention was diverted he fell against the muzzle of a trooper's DC-15 and blue energy exploded out his back.