by Troy Denning
Jacen scowled at the rebuke. “Cilghal would have a better idea than I do,” he said. “Normally, an outsider has to spend several months in a nest to become a full Joiner, but it might go faster for insect species.”
“In the meantime, our bacta supply is cut off,” Omas said. “And if we launch a counteroffensive, the damage could be even worse.”
“The fighting will be widespread, and the xoorzi crop will suffer,” Zalk’t said.
“Xoorzi crop?” Han asked. “I thought bacta was made out of a couple of kinds of bacteria.”
“It is,” Zalk’t replied. “Xoorzi fungus is the growth medium for the alazhi bacteria. It occurs only in the wild, in the deepest shade of the forest floor. The slightest disturbance will cause it to release its spores and shrivel.”
“As you can see, a conventional battle would be devastating,” Pellaeon said. “We were hoping the Jedi would be able to handle the situation a bit more delicately.” He turned to Omas, his expression carrying an unspoken demand. “Weren’t we?”
Omas swallowed hard, then said, “Yes. The Galactic Alliance would be very grateful for the Jedi’s help.”
Luke kept a sober expression, but inwardly he was smiling. The Jedi’s quick response to the coup attempts had regained some measure of respect from Chief Omas, and now he was asking for the Jedi’s help—albeit reluctantly.
“Of course.” Luke felt a bolt of alarm shoot through the Force as Han, Jacen, and even Leia grew worried that he was allowing political concerns to undermine his judgment. “The Jedi would be delighted to help.”
“If you and Admiral Pellaeon think that’s best,” Mara added, obviously sensing the same objections from their companions.
Omas frowned at her. “We do.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.” Luke noticed Pellaeon’s brown eyes studying Mara with their usual shrewdness. He nudged the admiral through the Force, feeding Pellaeon’s doubt and urging him to question the situation. Outwardly, he simply bowed to Chief Omas. “If you’ll excuse me, then, I’ll start recalling our Jedi Knights—”
“Not yet,” Pellaeon said. His gaze flickered briefly between Luke and Mara, and Luke knew the admiral had figured out that he was being played. That did not prevent him from asking the right question. “You don’t think sending the Jedi to Thyferra is a good idea, do you, Master Skywalker?”
Luke kept his gaze fixed on Omas. “The Jedi are willing to go wherever Chief Omas feels we are needed.”
“Blast it, Luke!” Pellaeon barked. “That’s not what I asked. If you know something we don’t—”
“It’s not anything we know,” Leia interrupted. “It’s just experience.”
“What experience?” Omas looked suspicious, but he was clearly unwilling to deny his Supreme Commander the leeway to pursue his own line of inquiry. “With the Killiks?”
“Precisely,” Leia said. “I’m sure it hasn’t appeared this way from your position as the Chief of State, but the Jedi are convinced that much of the Colony’s aggression since Qoribu has actually been directed at the Jedi order.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” Omas said icily. “As I’m sure you recall, I didn’t want the Jedi involved with the Colony in the first place.”
“I don’t see how that has any bearing on the current situation,” Pellaeon said sharply. “And you feel these coups are directed at the Jedi how?”
“Not at us,” Luke said. “They’re diversions, to keep us on the defensive instead of destroying the Colony’s strength at a crucial time.”
“The Killiks are launching something major,” Leia said. When Omas’s brow rose, she raised a hand to forestall his question. “I can feel it through Jaina—there’s a big battle going on, one she seems confident of winning.”
This was news to Luke, who had not been able to get a clear Force reading on his niece since she became a Joiner, but Pellaeon nodded in agreement.
“Bwua’tu feels they’re preparing another breakout attempt in the Utegetu,” the admiral said. “And they certainly wouldn’t want the Jedi interfering in that—not after the role you played in spoiling their first attempt.”
Omas looked at Pellaeon with a dropped jaw. “You believe them?”
“I do. The Colony can’t fight the Alliance and the Chiss at the same time. I never believed the coups were meant to be anything more than a diversion—and I’m certainly willing to consider the possibility that it wasn’t the military they were trying to distract.” Pellaeon turned to Luke. “Can the Jedi really destroy the Colony’s strength?”
Luke nodded, using the Force to project more confidence than he felt. “We can.”
“You’ll forgive me if I want to know how,” Omas said.
“Simple.” It was Jacen who said this. “We take out Raynar Thul.”
Pellaeon and Omas exchanged uneasy glances, then Omas asked, “By ‘take out,’ you mean—”
“We mean do whatever is necessary to remove him from power,” Luke said. He was still not ready to commit to killing one of his own Jedi Knights—at least not publicly. “But to destroy the Colony, we can’t stop there. I’ll have to find and kill Lomi Plo.”
Pellaeon’s eyes narrowed. “And you can do that? I thought she was invisible.”
“She won’t be invisible this time,” Luke said. “And we have a backup plan.”
“We do?” Han asked, raising his brow.
Luke nodded. “Something Cilghal developed while you and Leia were scouting Lizil.”
Luke avoided any reference to the mission being unauthorized. Despite Leia’s misgivings about him assuming sole leadership of the Jedi, she was obviously still dedicated to the Alliance and the order—she had proved that when she and Han returned to sound the warning about the coups instead of continuing after Jaina and Zekk.
When Luke did not elaborate, Pellaeon grew impatient. “Master Skywalker, you obviously have a plan to end this entire crisis. Would you please stop wasting the Chief’s time and tell us?”
Luke smiled. “Of course.”
He laid out the basics of the plan that he and Mara had been developing for some time, outlining what he would need from the Defense Forces, how the Alliance’s Jedi would be used, and what they would need from Chief Omas. By the time he finished, there had been a clear shift in the mood on the command platform.
“Just so I’m sure I understand,” Omas said. “This will destroy the Colony, but not the Killiks?”
“That’s right,” Luke said. “And even if the Colony does somehow form again, it won’t be able to expand.”
Omas nodded, then caught Luke’s eye and held it. “And you really said ‘the Alliance’s Jedi’?”
Luke laughed, trying to keep hidden the sense of loss he felt inside. “I did,” he said. “The Jedi serve the Force—but we can’t serve it in a vacuum. We need the Galactic Alliance as much as it needs us.”
“Well, then!” Omas’s face brightened, and he turned to Pellaeon. “What do you think of our Jedi’s plan?”
Pellaeon grew thoughtful, absentmindedly twisting the ends of his mustache, then frowned in approval. “It’s sneaky,” he said. “I like it.”
FOURTEEN
A terrible ripping noise growled down out of the clouds, and Jaina looked up to see another flight of Chiss missiles arcing through the downpour. It had been days—more than a week—since the Great Swarm had boiled out of the ground beneath the enemy’s drop ships, and the missiles had not stopped. They came day and night, painting streaks of white fire across the sky and trailing green plumes of insecticide, grating nerves raw with their endless growling.
Jaina made a sweeping motion with her hand, using the Force to hurl three missiles back toward their launchers. The other two dropped into the defoliated jungle behind her and detonated in a blinding pulse, hurling trunks in every direction and flashing killer radiation through the naked trees for a hundred meters.
Killiks died by the hundreds in an instant, and they would die by the t
housands as the plumes of poisonous vapor settled to the jungle floor and began to take their toll. It did not matter. UnuThul was urging the Great Swarm onward, filling every thorax with the same irresistible compulsion to attack, attack, attack that Jaina felt hammering inside her own chest. The Killiks had to overrun the Chiss lines; they had to do it now.
There was just one problem.
Already, the jungle floor lay buried so deeply beneath dead Killiks and pieces of dead Killiks that Jaina could barely walk. In places, she was literally wading through pools of insect gore or scrambling over mounds of broken chitin, and the enemy lines remained as unattainable as ever. For every hundred meters the Great Swarm advanced, the Chiss pulled back a hundred and one. Eventually, of course, they would run out of room to retreat—but Jaina was beginning to worry that the Colony would run out of Killiks first.
Jaina slipped behind the trunk of a giant mogo and dropped to her knees, keeping one eye on the flickering battle ahead as she uncapped her canteen. The problem was not that the Killiks were failing to kill the enemy. Jaina could see half a dozen panicked Chiss ripping at their armor to get at the Jooj underneath, and every few moments, a Rekker would spring over a breastwork and send a Chiss soldier bouncing off the trees—often in pieces.
The problem was that—with UnuThul’s Will compelling them to attack almost mindlessly—the Killiks were a lot less efficient than the Chiss. They were running headlong into walls of charric fire, while the enemy remained concealed and protected behind their temporary fortifications, exposing themselves to attack only when there were so many Killik bodies piled in front of them that they had to withdraw to a clear position.
Jaina turned, looking for her newest communications assistant—she lost at least one Wuluw a day—and found only the two black-furred Squibs who had assigned themselves to watch her back.
“Wuluw?” she called.
A soft clatter sounded from the base of the mogo tree, and she looked down to find the little brown Killik crawling out from beneath a root-knee. “What are you doing down there?”
“Ubb.”
“Okay.” Jaina sighed. “Just don’t disappear entirely.”
Wuluw withdrew back under the root, leaving visible the tiniest tip of one antenna.
The rain-soaked Squibs snickered openly, mocking Wuluw for being a coward—until a passing charric beam singed a hand-wide band of fur off the side of Longnose’s head.
“Rurub,” Wuluw thrummed from her muddy hole.
“I know you’re not laughing at me, bug.” Longnose started to raise his repeating blaster. “Because you aren’t that brave.”
“Knock it off,” Jaina said. She used the Force to push both Squibs away, then addressed herself to the mouth of Wuluw’s hiding place. “Tell UnuThul this isn’t working. We have to slow down and fight from position—”
“Bb!” Wuluw relayed.
“We have to,” Jaina said. “At this rate, the swarm will run out of soldiers!”
“Bruu ruu urubu,” Wuluw thrummed, still relaying UnuThul’s message. “Ur bu!”
“Even the Colony’s army isn’t that big!” Jaina protested. “The Chiss are slaughtering us by the millions.”
“Ur bu!” Wuluw repeated. “Urub bub ruuur uur.”
“What do you mean you’re going to be out of touch?” Jaina demanded. “You’re the commander, UnuThul! You can’t just leave the battle!”
“Ru’ub bur,” Wuluw relayed. “Ur bu!”
The “trust me” command was accompanied by the dark pressure of UnuThul’s Will, urging Jaina to continue the attack, to overrun the Chiss lines. Everything depended on that.
“What choice do we have?” Jaina grumbled. “But before UnuThul goes, there’s something he should know about the Chiss.”
“Ub?”
“They’re not surrendering,” Jaina reported. “Even when they have no way to keep fighting, they make us kill them.”
“Uuuu,” Wuluw rumbled. “Bu?”
“They seem to think we’re laying eggs in them,” Jaina reported, “and letting our larvae eat them, like what the…”
Jaina could not remember the name of the nest that had been doing those terrible things at Kr.
“Like what happened at Qoribu,” she finished.
Wuluw relayed UnuThul’s response quickly—too quickly. “Buub urr bubb.”
“It’s more than a rumor,” Jaina objected. “We saw what happened at Kr. So did you, UnuThul.”
“Ubbb ruur?” Wuluw asked for UnuThul. “Burrubuur rububu ru.”
“Maybe,” Jaina said. The pressure to attack had turned to a dark weight now, pressing down inside her chest, urging her to reexamine her memories. “It was dark in the grub cave. We could have misunderstood what we were seeing.”
“Buuu ururub,” Wuluw relayed. “Rbuurb u rubur ruu.”
“That’s probably it,” Jaina agreed.
She knew that UnuThul was forcing the conclusion on her, that somewhere down inside she remembered events another way. But Zekk was still hiding in the mountains with the airborne swarm, too far away to share her thoughts and bolster her resolve, and without him, she simply lacked the strength to resist UnuThul’s Will.
“It would be just like the Chiss to make that up,” Jaina said. “That must be what happened. They must be afraid their soldiers will surrender and join the Colony.”
“Bur.”
Wuluw went on to reiterate UnuThul’s orders, instructing Jaina to continue pressing the attack on all fronts. Of course, it was not actually necessary for her to issue the order herself. The entire swarm simply felt the same pressure in their thoraxes that Jaina did in her chest, and they began to redouble their efforts, the Rekkers springing over the Chiss breastworks in waves, the Jooj swarming through the jungle in a droning brown-green cloud.
Taking care to make certain Wuluw stayed with her—and that she always knew where those Squibs were—Jaina started toward the mountains in the distance, hidden though they were by rain and mist. She could have turned toward any quadrant, since the swarm was attacking the Chiss from all directions inside the perimeters. But the mountains were where Zekk was waiting, and Jaina longed to be as near to him as possible. With Taat still trapped in the Utegetu Nebula, he was her entire nest now—the words that completed her thought, the beat that drove her heart—and if she was going to die today, she wanted to do it near him.
Suddenly, the sizzle of the charric rifles began to fade and the swarm began to advance more rapidly. Jaina finally waded free of the Killik gore and saw nothing ahead but scurrying limbs and fanning wings. There were no Chiss anywhere, no beams of death flickering out to slow the Colony. Jaina could not believe they had actually broken the legendary Chiss discipline, that UnuThul’s last exhortation had been all that was needed for the swarm to push through the enemy lines.
Something was wrong.
Jaina stopped and turned to Wuluw. “Halt! Tell them to stop. It’s a—”
The crackle of an incoming barrage echoed through the trees, then the jungle erupted into a raging storm of detonating artillery shells and splintering wood. Whole treetops began to crash down from above, crushing thousands of unlucky insects, and wisps of green vapor began to spread through the mogos and sink toward the forest floor.
The Killiks stopped and drummed their chests in alarm, working their wings and trying to keep the mist from settling on their bodies, but the artillery shells continued to come. The wisps of vapor turned into a ground haze, then the haze to a fog. The rain only seemed to make the fog grow thicker, as though the insecticide was water-activated. The river of Jooj stopped advancing, the jungle floor grew crowded with convulsing Rekkers, and Jaina began to gag on the sickly-sweet smell of the deadly gas.
She used the Force to clear a hole through the green fog. Before she could pull the electrobinoculars from her utility belt, the hole grew congested with charging Rekkers. She started to hop up on a mogo trunk so she could see over them, then realized how exposed that wou
ld leave her and thought better of it.
“Tell those soldiers to wait!” Jaina said to Wuluw. “I need to see.”
Wuluw had barely acknowledged the order before the Rekkers dropped to the jungle floor. Jaina set the electrobinoculars to scan and peered down the tunnel she was keeping open through the green cloud. Even with all the foliage stripped away by Chiss defoliators, it was nearly impossible to see very far through the thick timber. But eventually, she did glimpse a muzzle flash from beside a fifty-meter mogo. She gave the tree a fierce Force shove and sent it crashing to the jungle floor.
A flurry of Chiss charric beams reduced the upended roots to a spray of dirt and smoking splinters, but Jaina wasted no time searching for the attackers. The fire had been quick and precise, which meant it had come from dismounted infantry, and that told her much of what she needed to know.
The rest Jaina discovered when another muzzle flash filled the viewfinder of her electrobinoculars. She centered the flash, magnified the image, and found herself looking at the blocky silhouette of a MetaCannon, one of the Chiss’s largest drop-deployable field pieces. The MetaCannon could fire maser beams, blaster bolts, or even primitive artillery shells with a “quick-and-easy” change of the barrel.
What it could not do, however, was react quickly to changing tactics.
“Everybody into the treetops,” Jaina ordered. The Chiss insecticide would not be as effective in the jungle canopy, since it would rapidly be dispersed by the wind or sink to the ground. “Advance rapidly until the enemy starts to fire into the jungle canopy, then drop to the ground and continue. Expect small-arms fire in—” She checked her range-finder. “—approximately one kilometer.”
Having already relayed the orders, Wuluw started up the nearest mogo. The Squibs followed close behind. Jaina returned her electrobinoculars and lightsaber to her utility belt, then started after them, giving orders as she climbed.
“Report to all nests that it looks like the Chiss have brought their heavy artillery back to stop us.”
Wuluw stopped climbing and spun her head around backward, her mandibles spread in alarm as she looked down her back at Jaina.
