Mace Windu stopped in the doorway and tried to recover his calm. An arc of sweat darkened the cowl of his robe, and his runic clung to his skin: he'd come straight from a training bout at the Temple without taking time to shower. And the brisk pace-almost a jog-he'd maintained through the labyrinth of the Galactic Senate had offered no chance for him to cool off.

Palpatine's private office, in the Supreme Chancellor's suite beneath the Senate's Great Rotunda, opened before him, vast and stark. An expanse of polished ebonite floor; a few simple, soft chairs; a flat trestle desk, also ebonite. No pictures, paintings, or decorations other than two lone statues; only floor-to-ceiling holographic repeaters showing real-time images of Galactic City as seen from the pinnacle of the Senate Dome. Outside, the orbital mirrors would soon turn their faces from Coruscant's sun, bringing twilight to the capital.

Within was only Yoda. Alone. Perched solemnly on his hover-chair, hands folded around the head of his stick. "On time you are," the ancient Master observed, "but barely. Take a chair; composed we must be. Serious, I fear this is." "I wasn't expecting a party." Mace's boot heels clacked on the polished floor. He pulled one of the soft, plain chairs closer to Yoda and sat beside him, facing the desk. Tension made his jaw ache. "The courier said this is about the operation on Haruun Kal." The fact that of all the members of the Jedi Council and the Republic High Command, only the two senior members of the Council had been summoned by the Chancellor, implied that the news was not good.

These two senior members could hardly have appeared more different. Yoda was barely two-thirds of a meter tall, with skin green as Chadian wander-kelp and great bulging eyes that could sometimes seem almost to take on a light of their own; Mace was tall for a human, less than a hand's breadth short of two meters, with shoulders broad and powerful, heavy arms, dark eyes, and a grim set to his jaw. Where Yoda had let his sparse remnants of hair straggle at random, Mace's skull was smooth-shaven, the color of polished lammas.

But their greatest difference perhaps lay in the fee! of the two Jedi Masters. Yoda emanated a sense of mellow wisdom, combined with the impish sense of humor characteristic of the true sage; but his great age and vast experience sometimes made him seem a bit removed, even detached. Nearing nine hundred years of age led him to naturally take the long view. Mace, in contrast, had been elevated to the Jedi Council before his thirtieth birthday. His demeanor was exactly opposite. Lean. Driven. Intense. He radiated incisive intellect and unconquerable will.

As of the Battle of Geonosis, which had opened the Clone Wars, Mace had been on the Council for more than twenty standard years. It had been ten since anyone had last seen him smile.

He sometimes wondered privately if he would ever smile again.

"But it is not the planet Haruun Kal that brings you in a sweat to this office," Yoda said now.

His tone was light and understanding, but his gaze was sharp. "Concerned for Depa, you are." Mace lowered his head. "I know: the Force will bring what it will. But Republic Intelligence has reported that the Separatists have pulled back; their base outside Pelek Baw is abandoned-" "Yet return she has not." Mace knotted his ringers together. A breath brought his voice back to its customary deep, flat dispassion. "Haruun Kal is still nominally a Separatist planet. And she's a wanted woman. It won't be easy for her to get offworld. Or even to signal for extraction-the local militia use all kinds of signal jamming, and whatever they don't jam they triangulate; whole partisan bands have been wiped out by one incautious transmission-" "Your friend she is." Yoda used his stick to poke Mace on the arm. "Care for her, you do." Mace didn't meet his eyes. His feelings for Depa Billaba ran deep.

She had been onworld for four standard months. She couldn't communicate regularly; Mace had tracked her activities by sporadic Republic Intelligence reports of sabotage at the Separatist starfighter base, and the fruitless expeditions of the Balawai militias trying-and failing-to wipe out Depa's guerrillas, or even contain them. More than a month ago, Republic Intelligence had sent word that the Separatists had pulled back to the Gevarno Cluster, because they could no longer maintain and defend their base. Her success could not have been more brilliant.

But he feared to learn at what cost.

"But it can't simply be that she's missing, or." he murmured. A dark flush spread over his bare dome of skull when he realized he'd spoken his thoughts aloud. He felt Yoda's eyes on him still, and gave half an apologetic shrug. "I was only thinking: if she'd been captured or-or killed-there would be no need for such secrecy." The creases on Yoda's face deepened around his mouth, and he made that tchk sound of mild disapproval that any Jedi would instantly recognize. "Frivolous, speculation is, when patience will reveal all." Mace nodded silently. One did not argue with Master Yoda; in the Jedi Temple, this was learned in infancy. No Jedi ever forgot it. "It's. maddening, Master. If only. I mean, ten years ago, we could have simply reached out-" "Cling to the past, a Jedi cannot," Yoda interrupted sternly. His green stare reminded Mace not to speak of the shadow that had darkened Jedi perception of the Force. This was not discussed outside the Temple. Not even here. "Member of the Jedi Council, she is. Powerful Jedi. Brilliant warrior-" "She'd better be." Mace tried to smile. "I trained her." "But worry you do. Too much. Not only for Depa, but for all the Jedi. Ever since Geonosis." The smile wasn't working. He stopped trying. "I don't want to talk about Geonosis." "Known this for months, I have." Yoda poked him again, and Mace looked up. The ancient Master leaned toward him, ears curled forward, and his huge green eyes glimmered softly. "But when, finally, to talk you want. listen, I will." Mace accepted this with a silent inclination of his head. He'd never doubted it. But still, he preferred to discuss something else.

Anything else.

"Look at this place," he murmured, nodding at the expanse of the Supreme Chancellor's office. "Even after ten years, the difference between Palpatine and Valorum. How this office was, in those days-" Yoda lifted his head in that reverse nod of his. "Remember Finis Valorum well, I do. Last of a great line, he was." Some vast distance drifted through his gaae: he might have been looking back along his nine hundred years as a Jedi.

It was unsettling to contemplate that the Republic, seemingly eternal in its millennium-long reign, was not much older than Yoda himself. Sometimes, in the tales Yoda told of his long- vanished younger days, a Jedi might have heard the youth of the Republic itself: brash, confident, bursting with vitality as it expanded across the galaxy, bringing peace and justice to cluster after cluster, system after system, world after world.

For Mace, it was even more unsettling to contemplate the contrast Yoda was seeing.

"Connected with the past, Valorum was. Rooted deep in tradition's soil." In the wave of his hand, Yoda seemed to summon Finis Valorum's dazzling array of antique furniture gleaming with exotic oils, his artworks and sculptures and treasures from a thousand worlds. Legacies of thirty generations of House Valorum had once rilled this office. "Perhaps too deep: a man of history, was Valorum. Palpatine." Yoda's eyes drifted closed. "A man of today, Pal-patine is." "You say that as though it pains you." "Perhaps it does. Or perhaps: my pain is only of this day, not its man.