"I prefer the office like this." Mace half nodded around the sweep of open floor. Austere.

Unpretentious and uncompromising. To Mace, it was a window into Palpatine's character: the Supreme Chancellor lived entirely for the Republic. Simple in dress. Direct in speech.

Unconcerned with ornamentation or physical comfort. "A shame he can't touch the Force. He might have made a fine Jedi." "But then, another Supreme Chancellor would we need." Yoda smiled gently. "Better this way, perhaps it is." Mace acknowledged the point with a slight bow.

"Admire him, you do." Mace frowned. He'd never thought about it. His adult life had been spent at the orders of the Supreme Chancellor. but he served the office, not the man. What did he think of the Supreme Chancellor as a person? What difference coukl that make?

"I suppose I do." Mace vividly recalled what the Force had shown him while he watched Palpatine sworn in as Supreme Chancellor, ten years before: Palpatine was himself a shatterpoint on which the future of the Republic-perhaps even the whole galaxy-depended.

"The only other person I can imagine leading the Republic through this dark hour is. well-" He opened a hand. "-you, Master Yoda." Yoda rocked back on his hover chair and made the rustling snuffle that served him for a laugh. "No politician am I, foolish one." He still occasionally spoke as though Mace were a student. Mace didn't mind. It made him feel young. Everything else these days made him feel old.

Yoda's laughter faded. "And no fit leader for this Republic would I be." He lowered his voice even further, to barely above a whisper. "Clouded by darkness are my eyes; the Force shows me only suffering, and destruction, and the rise of a long, long night. Better off without the Force, leaders perhaps are; able to see well enough, young Palpatine seems." "Young" Palpatine-who had at least ten years on Mace, and looked twice that-chose that moment to enter the room, accompanied by another man. Yoda stepped down from his hoverchair. Mace rose in respect. The Jedi Masters bowed, greeting the Supreme Chancellor with their customary formality. He waved the courtesies aside. Palpatine looked tired: flesh seemed to be dissolving beneath his sagging skin, deepening his already hollowed cheeks.

The man with Palpatine was hardly larger than a boy, though clearly well past forty; lank, thinning brown hair draped a face so thoroughly undistinguished that Mace could forget it the instant he glanced away. His eyes were red-rimmed, he held a cloth handkerchief to his nose, and he looked so much like some minor bureaucratic functionary-a clerk in a dead-end government post, with job security and absolutely nothing else-that Mace automatically assumed he was a spy.

"We have news of Depa Billaba." Despite his earlier reasoning, the simple sadness in the Chancellor's voice sent Mace's stomach plummeting.

"This man has just come from Haruun Kal. I'm afraid-well, perhaps you should simply examine the evidence for yourself." "What is it?" Mace's mouth went dry as ash. "Has she been captured?" The treatment a captured Jedi could expect from Dooku's Separatists had been demonstrated on Geonosis.

"No, Master Windu," Palpatine said. "I'm afraid-I'm afraid it's quite a bit worse." The agent opened a large travelcase and produced an old-fashioned holoprojector. He spent a moment fiddling with controls, and then an image bloomed above the mirror-polished ebonite that served as Palpatine's desk.

Yoda's ears flattened, and his eyes narrowed to slits.

Palpatine looked away. "I have seen too much of this already," he said.

Mace's hands became fists. He couldn't seem to get his breath.

The shimmering corpses were each the size of his finger. He counted nineteen. They looked human, or close to it. There was a scatter of prefabricated huts, blasted and burned and broken.

The ruins of what must have once been a stockade wall made a ring around the scene. The jungle that surrounded them all stood four decimeters high, and covered a meter and a half of Palpatine's desk.

After a moment, the agent sniffled apologetically. "This is-er, seems to be-the work of Loyalist partisans, under the command of Master Billaba." Yoda stared.

Mace stared.

There-those wounds. Mace needed a better view. When he reached into the jungle, his hand crawled with the bright ripples of the holoprojector's scanning-matrix lasers. "These." He passed his hand through a group of three bodies that gaped with ragged wounds.

"Enhance these." The Republic Intelligence agent answered without taking his handkerchief away from his reddened eyes. "Uh, I'm uh-Master Windu, this recording is, er, is quite unsophisticated- almost, uh, primitive-" His voice vanished into a sneeze that jerked him forward as though he'd been slapped on the back of the head. "Sorry-sorry, I can't-my system won't tolerate histamine suppressors. Every time I come to Coruscant-" Mace's hand didn't move. He didn't look up. He waited while the agent's whine trickled to silence. Nineteen corpses. And this man complained about his allergies.

"Enhance these," Mace repeated.

"I, ah-yes. Sir." The agent manipulated the holoprojector's controls with hands that didn't quite tremble. Not quite. The jungle flicked out of existence. It reappeared an instant later, spread across ten meters of the office's floor. The tangled upper branches of the holographic trees had become glimmering scan patterns on the ceiling; the corpses were now almost half life- sized.

The agent ducked his head, scrubbing furiously at his nose with the handkerchief. "Sorry, Master Windu. Sorry. But the system… Its…" "Primitive. Yes." Mace waded through the light-cast images until he could squat beside the bodies. He rested his elbows on his knees, folding his hands together before his face.

Yoda walked closer, then crouched as he leaned in for a better view. After a moment, Mace looked up into his sad green eyes. "See?" "Yes. yes," Yoda croaked. "But from this, no conclusion can be drawn." "That's my point." "For those of us who are not Jedi-" Supreme Chancellor Palpatine's voice had the warm strength of a career politician's. He rounded his desk, on his face the slightly puzzled smile of a good man who faced an ugly situation with hope that everything might still turn out all right. "- perhaps you'll explain?" "Yes, sir. The other bodies don't tell us much, between decomposition and scavenger damage. But some of the mutilation on the soft tissue here-" A curve of Mace's hand traced gaping slashes across a holographic female torso. "-isn't from claws or teeth. And they didn't come from a powered weapon. See the scoring on her ribs? A lightsaber-even a vibroblade- would have slashed right through the bone. This was done with a dead blade, sir." Revulsion tightened the Supreme Chancellor's face. "A-dead blade? You mean just-like a piece of metal? Just a sharp piece of metal?" "A very sharp piece of metal, sir." Mace cocked his head a centimeter to the right. "Or ceramic. Transparisteel. Even carbonite." Palpatine took a deep breath as though suppressing a shudder. "It sounds. dreadfully crude. And painful." "Sometimes it is, sir. Not always." He didn't bother to explain how he knew. "But these slashes are parallel, and all of nearly the same length; it's likely she was dead before the cuts were made. Or at least unconscious." "Or-" The agent sniffled, and coughed apologetically. "-just, er, y'know, tied up." Mace stared at him. Yoda closed his eyes. Palpatine lowered his head as though in pain.