The center of the cloud grew red, then orange, then pale as a blue-white star: ion thrusters kicking in.

Nick frowned. "That can't be the lander-the angle's all wrong, and it's coming in way too fast." "It isn't," Mace said. "I should say, they aren't." "I'm not gonna like this, am I?" Nick passed a hand over his eyes. "Oh, nuts. Ohhh, nuts nuts nuts. You're about to tell me those are DOKAWs." "At least five. More to follow." YOU! Vastor's explosive roar seemed to yank him off the rock face and carry him raging to the meadow. He shook a sizzling shield at Mace. This is YOUR fault! YOU have brought them here!

"There will be time later to argue blame." Mace let the lightsabers' blades shrink to nonexistence. "There's something we need to do right now." "What's that?" The Jedi Master looked from the lorpelek to the young Korun officer, then into a sky at the durasteel missiles streaking through the atmosphere.

At thirty thousand kilometers per hour, and accelerating.

Mace Windu said, "Run." They ran.

PART THREE SHATTERPOIKT SHOCKWAVES A

fully-assembled De-Orbiting Kinetic Anti-emplacement Weapon (DOKAW)-hardened durasteel spear, ablative shielding, miniature ion drive, and tiny attitude thrusters-massed slightly more than two hundred kilograms. By the time the spear impacted a target at ground level, the shielding, the drive, and the attitude thrusters, as well as a fair bit of the hardened durasteel itself, would have all burned away; the final warhead massed in the general neighborhood of one hundred kilograms, slightly more or less depending on angle of entry, atmospheric density, and other minor concerns.

These concerns were minor because the DOKAW was not, in it-serf, a particularly sensitive or sophisticated weapon; its virtues lay more in the the realm of being inexpensive to produce and simple to operate, which is why it was found mostly in more primitive back-world areas of the galaxy. It was vulnerable to counterfire from rur-bolaser batteries, for example. It was also largely useless against a target capable of even rudimentary evasive action, and once its attitude thrusters had burned away, mere atmospheric disturbances would be sufficient to push it off course, making it less than ideally accurate against stationary targets smaller than a medium- sized town. Because, after all, it was basically just a hundred-kilo hunk of durasteel.

Ideal accuracy, though, was also a minor concern, because at the point of impact, this hundred-kilo spear of hardened durasteel was traveling at well over ten kilometers per second, In a word: WHAM.

Mace, Nick, and Kar had reached the widening throat of the first of the major caverns when the floor dropped out from under them for one astonishing second, then jumped back up and smacked them tumbling through the air toward the jagged rock roof overhead.

The blast transcended sound.

Mace controlled his spin instinctively so that he could absorb the impact against the roof with bent legs. His Force-hold caught Nick a meter short of severe head trauma; then as they both fell back toward the floor, the pressure-wave of superheated air that shrieked in through the fissure from the meadow cave sent them skidding and bouncing and rolling over the rough-cut floor in a hailstorm of rock shards and burning dirt.

Mace kept his Force-hold on Nick; as they skidded to a stop in the nightmare of dust and smoke and screaming, he set Nick on his feet and crouched beside him. "Stay up!" he shouted.

"Stay low but off the floor?

He huddled there, hands jammed against his ears, bounced by another blast-lesser-and another lesser still, the natural inaccuracy of the DOKAWs causing some scatter. A final convulsion of the mountain cracked the roof of the cavern and rained boulders at random. Some screams were crushed to gurgles; others scaled up to shrieks of agony.

Two seconds passed-two more-and Mace sprang to his feet. Light from glowglobes made luminous spheres that could not overlap through the thick swirl of dust and smoke that stung tears into his eyes; one incautious breath sent him into a paroxysm of coughing. He yanked Nick to his side-the young Korun had an arm over his streaming eyes and he was hacking into his other hand-and Mace grabbed the hem of his homespun tunic with both hands.

"Hey-hackhagh-hey, what are you-" "We need your shirt." With one twist he ripped the tunic in half up the back; another twist continued the rip from collar to waist in front. He left half in Nick's hands while he tied his own half over his face in a sort of hood. The cloth was coarse enough to see through, and it cut the dust and smoke from intolerable down to merely hellish.

While Nick imitated him, Mace picked his way around the rubble and over dead and wounded Korunnai toward a gleam of ultra-chrome under a huge slab of stone. He dropped to his heels beside it and gestured, clearing smaller rocks away from the lorpelek.

"Kar? Can you hear me?" Even hoarse with dust and pain, Vastor's growl had a sardonic edge. Better stand back.

When you're around, big hard things seem to fall on my head.

Mace breathed himself into his center, and found the slab's shat-terpoint. "Don't move." His blade flared, bit in, and the slab cracked in two over Vastor's back. A shrug of Vastor's huge shoulders shifted the two pieces enough that he could push himself up to his knees between them. He was caked with dust, and blood trickled from an ugly gash over one ear.

You could have killed me. You should have.

"You're no good to me dead," Mace said. "Is there a hardpoint in this base? A hardened bunker, preferably airtight?" The heavy weapon lockup. It can be sealed.

"All right. Get all the non-ambulatory sick and wounded in there and seal it up. When the militia comes, they'll start with gas." Vaster and Nick exchanged grim looks.

Mace glanced over his shoulder. "Nick. You're with me. Let's go." We'll never hold them. Not for a day. Not an hour.

"We don't have to hold them ourselves. I have a medium cruiser in-system that's carrying a regiment of the finest soldiers this galaxy has ever seen." Mace put one hand on Vastor's shoulder, and the other on Nick's, and there was a strange shine to his dark eyes. "We aren't going to hold them. We aren't even going to fight them. With the Halleck for air cover and the troopers holding the ground, those twenty landers can evacuate this entire place within hours." "Grassers and all?" Mace nodded. "We just have to get them here." DOKAWs pounded the mountain. Korunnai ran and screamed and bled. Some tried to help the wounded. Some died. Some huddled shivering against the nearest wall.

Mace kept moving. Nick trotted at his heels. Sometimes shock-waves knocked them down.

Sometimes the dust was so bad that Mace had to light their way with scatter from his and Depa's blades.

"Why do you need me! You were in the comm center this morning," Nick gasped through a mouthful of dust that his spit had turned to mud. "I'm good with a medpac. You go on. I can look after wounded-" "That's why." Bladelight picked up jagged gleams ahead: the corridor was blocked with a sloping wall of tumbled rock.