Mace released him. Smiley massaged his arm, looking aggrieved. "What exactly is your malfunction, anyway?" "You didn't lead me into a trap. You used me to lead them into a trap." "Hey, Captain Obvious, news flash: this wasn't a trap." Mace frowned. "Then what would you call it?" "It was an ambush." Smiley smirked. "What, they don't teach Basic in Jedi school?" "Do you know," Mace said, "that I disliked you the instant we met?" "Is that Jedi-speak for thank you so much for saving my lightsaber-waving butt} Shee." He shook his head, mock-sad. "So what is it? What's your fuss?" "I would have liked," Mace told him solidly, "to have taken them alive." "What for?" In Pelek Baw, Mace reflected, that was a fair question. Turn them over to the authorities?

What authorities? Geptun? The cops who ran the strong-arm at the pro-bi showers? He took a deep breath. "For questioning." "Everything needing to know, you?" This came from the big red haired girl with the Thunderbolt. She looked up at Mace, still crouched beside a corpse. Her accent dripped high upland. "Are looking at it, you. Six Balawai scum. Over and done. Never another Korun's home burn. Never another herd slaughter, never another child murder, never another woman-" She didn't finish, but Mace would read the final word in the smoke of hate that clouded her eyes. He could feel it in the anger and violation that pulsed from her into the Force. He could more than guess what she had been through; in the Force, he could feel how it had made her feel: sick with loathing, so wounded inside her heart that she could not allow herself to feel at all.

His face softened for an instant, but he hardened it again. He knew instinctively that she wanted no pity. She was no one's victim.

If she saw how sorry he felt for her, she'd hate him for it.

So, instead, he lowered his voice, speaking gently and respectfully. "I see. My question, though: how are you certain that these men have done such things?" "Balawai, them." She said it as if she were spitting out a hunk of rotten meat.

These were the people Depa had sent for him? The sick weight in his chest gathered mass.

He stepped away from Smiley and opened his fingers toward his lightsaber, where it lay beside the talker's throat-cut corpse. The decharged grip leapt from the ground to his hand.

"Listen to me. All of you." The simple authority in his voice drew their eyes and held them. He said, "You will do no murder while I am in your company. Do you understand this? If you try, I will stop you. Failing that." Muscle bunched along his jaw, and his knuckles whitened on his lightsaber's handgrip.

Smoldering threat burned the calm from his dark eyes.

"Failing that," he said through his teeth, "I will avenge your victims." Smiley shook his head. "Urn, hello, huh? Maybe you haven't noticed, but we're at war here.

You get it?" A thin whistling in the distance swelled to become a shriek. Other whistles joined in, rising in pitch and volume both. Sirens: militia units on their way. Smiley turned to his companions.

"That's the bell, kids. Saddle up." The Korunnai worked faster, stripping the corpses of medpacs, food squares, blaster gas cartridges. Credits. Boots.

"You call it war," Mace said. "But these were not soldiers." "Maybe not. Sure got some nifty gear, though, don't they?" Smiley picked up one of the over-unders and sighted appreciatively along its barrel. " Verrrry nice. How else are we gonna get stuff like this? It's not like your bloody Republic sends us any." "Is it worth their lives?" "Shee. Little judgmental, aren't we? Didn't we just slip your jiffies off the roaster? A thanks wouldn't exactly be out of line-" "It was you," Mace replied grimly, "who put my jiffies' on the roaster. And you took your time about slipping them off." Though the mockery stayed in his tone, Smiley's eyes went remote. "I don't know you, Windu. But I know who you're supposed to be. She talks about you all the time. I know what you're supposed to be able to do. If they could have taken you-" "Yes?" His head flicked a centimeter to the right: a Korun shrug. "I would have let 'em. You coming, or what?" Pelek Baw rolled past the groundcar's tinted windows. The vehicle bumped along on large toroidal balloons made of a native tree resin, and used laminated wooden bow slats as springs.

The driver was local: a middle-aged Korun with a web of cataract across one eye and bad teeth stained red from chewing raw thyssel bark. Mace and the Korunnai sat behind him in the passenger cabin.

Mace kept his head down, pretending to be engrossed in cobbling together an improvised adapter to recharge his lightsaber from looted blasterpacks. It didn't require all that much of his attention; his lightsaber was designed to be easily rechargeable. In an emer gency, he could even use the Force to flip a concealed lock on the inside of its hermetically sealed shell, opening a hatch that would allow him to manually switch out the power cell. Instead, he laboriously wired up leads from the blasterpacks and pretended to study their charge monitors.

Mostly, it was an excuse to keep his head down.

The first thing the Korunnai did once they were on their way was swiftly and efficiently field- strip the captured weapons, despite the cramped compartment and the jouncing ride. Mace guessed they must've had plenty of practice. All exposed parts, they rubbed with chunks of a translucent orange-brown resin that Smiley said was portaak amber: a natural fungicide that the ULF used to protect their weapons. This was the same resin that coated the handgrip of Depa's lightsaber.

Smiley passed Mace a chunk. "Better rub up yours, too. And you might consider getting yourself a knife. Maybe a slug pistol. Even with the amber, powered weapons are unreliable here." He told Mace to keep the chunk, and shrugged off his thanks.

Smiley's name was Nick Rostu. He'd introduced himself in the groundcar while he was spray-bandaging Mace's cuts and treating his bruises by a liberal use of the stolen-captured- medpac. Mace recalled a ghosh Rostu that had been loosely affiliated with ghosh Windu; that Nick had taken the Rostu name meant he must be nidosh: a clan child, an orphan. Like Mace.

But not much like Mace.

Unlike his companions, Nick spoke Basic without an accent. And he knew his way around the city. Probably why he seemed to be in charge. Mace gathered from their conversation that Nick had spent much of his childhood here in Pelek Baw. After what he'd seen of the Korun children in this city, he refused to let himself imagine what Nick's childhood must have been like.

The big, emotionally ravaged girl they called Chalk. The other two looked enough alike to be brothers. The older, whose teeth showed scarlet thyssel stains, was called Lesh. The younger brother, Besh, never spoke. A knurl of scar joined the corner of his mouth to his right ear, and his left hand was missing its last three fingers.

In the groundcar, they spoke to each other in Koruun. Eyes on his lightsaber's handgrip, Mace gave no sign that he understood most of what they said; his Koruun was rusty-learned thirty-five standard years before-but serviceable enough, and the Force offered understanding where his memory might fail. Their chatter was mostly what he would expect from young people after a firefight: a mix of Did you see when I-? and Wow, I really thought I was gonna- while they sorted through the adrenaline-charged chaos of imagery that was inevitably the memory of battle.