Star Wars: Shatterpoint: A Clone Wars Novel by Matt Stover

Author:Matt Stover [Stover, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-46423-1
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2011-10-04T13:00:00+00:00

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU [FINAL HARUUN KAL ENTRY]

Major Rostu and I wait in a cave at the Korun base in the Lorshan Pass; Depa—

[Male voice identified as NICK ROSTU, major (bvt), GAR]: “Hey, is that on? So they can, like, hear me?”

Yes. It’s—

[Rostu]: “Wow. So some weird alien Jedi a thousand years from now can pull this out and it’ll be like I’m saying Hi to him from a thousand years ago, huh? Hi, you creepy Jedi monkey-hunker, whoever you—”

Major.

[Rostu]: “Yeah, I know: Shut up, Nick.”

[sound of a heavy sigh]

Depa is to meet us here.

She has some strategem to get Kar Vastor and his Akk Guards far enough away for us all to make a clean extraction; she did not offer details, and I did not ask.

I was afraid to hear what she might have told me.

The signal was sent early this morning, using the same technique her sporadic reports had. Instead of a straight subspace transmission—which would be intercepted by the militia’s satellites and allow them to pinpoint our location—she broadcast the coded extraction call on a normal comm channel, using a tight beam that they bounced to the HoloNet satellite off one of the mountains within our line of sight; the comm signal also contains a Jedi priority override code that hijacks part of the local HoloNet capacity, and uses that to send the actual extraction code to the Halleck. It is very safe, though there is always data loss from beam scatter.

I heard the acknowledgment myself, in the base’s comm station.

The Halleck is on its way.

We arrived at this base about a standard hour after sunrise. The Halleck is probably insystem by now. The base itself is … not what I was expecting.

It’s less a military base than an underground refugee camp.

The complex is enormous, a randomly dug hive that honeycombs the whole north wall of the pass; a number of access tunnels extend well downslope, to concealed caves deep in the jungle. Some of the caverns are natural: volcanic bubbles and water channels eroded by drainage from the snowcapped peaks above. The inhabited caverns have been artificially enlarged and smoothed. Though there is no mining industry on Haruun Kal, and thus no excavation equipment to be had, a vibro-ax cuts stone almost as easily as wood; many of the smaller chambers have pallet beds, tables, and benches of stone cut and dressed by such blades.

Which would make it relatively comfortable, were it not so crowded.

Thousands of Korunnai cram these caverns and tunnels and caves, and more trickle in every day. These are the noncombatants: the spouses and the parents, the sick and the wounded. And the children.

The global lack of mining equipment means that ventilation is necessarily rudimentary, and sanitation virtually nonexistent. Pneumonia is rampant; antibiotics are the first thing to run out in the captured medpacs, and there is nowhere in the caverns one can go and not hear people wheezing as they struggle to pull their next breath into wet, clogged lungs.

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