Star Wars: Dark Nest I: Joiner King

by Denning, Troy

  The droid replied with a cynical whistle.

  Jaina continued to maneuver until, a second later, the torrent of cannon fire ceased for an instant and she knew the Chiss had been momentarily blinded by her passing torpedoes. She pushed the stick up and to the left, circling out of the dartship tangle as quickly as she could and climbing for the stars, where her dark craft would not be silhouetted against Qoribu’s scintillating rings.

  A pair of bright dots flared through the smoke in Jaina’s cockpit, and she leaned closer to her tactical display. Two shrinking circles of light indicated that her proton torpedoes had detonated where she intended, just behind the defoliator’s thrust nozzles. The big ship was already beginning to swing off course, rising into a tight banking turn that would carry it into Qoribu’s gravity well if the crew did not regain control soon.

  Jaina allowed herself a moment of self-congratulation—just so her wingmates would know she had completed her assignment—then the Saras swarm began to drift back toward Ruu, leaving the crippled defoliator to recover control and flee. Even now, after two months of living and fighting with the Taat, Jaina was awed by the insects’ complete lack of spite. Once a threat had been turned away, they never attempted to cause it more harm.

  Jaina’s admiration was mirrored in the Force by that of the other Jedi, and her thoughts turned to the other three defoliators.

  “Give me an overall sitrep, Sneaky. And clean this smoke out of the cockpit.” Jaina finally realized that she was reflexively using the Force to keep from coughing. “I can barely see my display.”

  A valve hissed open and cleared the air, then Jaina was hit by a wave of shock so sudden and powerful it reminded her of the time her X-wing had been blown from under her at Kalarba. She automatically began a systems sweep, but knew before her gaze reached the life-support readout that the alarm had come to her through the meld, from the three Jedi she had sent to stop the middle two defoliators.

  The tactical display showed the other three defoliators also drifting dead in space. But a new vessel had appeared on the far side of the battle, well positioned to prevent the Taat—and Jedi—from returning to their home nest. It was simultaneously bleeding clawcraft into space and sweeping the area with tractor beams, gathering up dartships like flitnats in a net.

  “Victory-class Star Destroyer.” Jaina turned toward the battle zone and poured on velocity. “Where did that come from?”

  Sneaky let out a defensive tweet, then replayed a high-speed version of the last ten seconds of tactical record. The vessel had simply appeared a few moments ago, after the Jedi had disabled the defoliatiors. Jaina grew instantly cold and emotionless inside.

  “Cloaked.”

  She wasted no time asking herself why she had failed to anticipate the tactic—capable enemies always surprised you—but her thoughts did leap to the implications. Had the Star Destroyer been an escort, it would have revealed itself as soon as the nests moved against the defoliators. Instead, it had waited until the Jedi launched their proton torpedoes—betraying both their presence and their general location. It had come for them—using their own subterfuge against them.

  It had been one of Jag Fel’s favorite tactics, when they had flown together against the Yuuzhan Vong. Jaina reached out toward the Star Destroyer, searching for his familiar presence, but could not find him among all the beings on the vessel—at least not in the middle of the battle.

  A burst of dismay swept through the Force, then a soft growl arose inside Jaina’s head. Lowbacca was caught in one of the tractor beams. She wondered how bad, then had a brief vision in which dartships were flying past in a black, swirling wall and the cockpit was filled with the screaming whine of overloaded fusial thrust engines.

  Jaina felt Tesar reaching out to Lowbacca, urging him to hold on until he and Jaina could get there. They might be able to shut down the tractor beam if they could destroy its generators. But none of the Jedi knew what the tractor beam generators on a Chiss Star Destroyer looked like…or where to find them.

  Lowbacca thought they were being foolish; that they would only get themselves captured by trying something so risky. The best way to help him was to avoid falling into the Chiss trap themselves.

  A swell of anger rose in the Force. Jaina was still too far from the battle to see anything more than a hazy cloud of dartships silhouetted against Qoribu’s gleaming rings, but the tactical display showed more than a dozen clawcraft swarming Jacen and Tahiri, methodically herding them toward the Star Destroyer’s tractor beams. Supported by a throng of Taat, they were fighting back valiantly, opening one hole after the other in the enemy formation. The Chiss always managed to cut them off and drive them back toward the sweeping tractor beams.

  Then a clawcraft designator vanished. Another turned yellow and spiraled through the ring system and out of the system. Jaina felt Alema and Zekk urging Tahiri and Jacen to accelerate through the gap. Two of three clawcraft moving to cut them off also lost control and flew out of the battle, then Tahiri and Jacen were free, pulling away from their pursuers and weaving a crooked path among the few enemy fighters still in a position to attack.

  Tahiri’s gratitude flooded the Force, but quickly changed to astonishment when a clawcraft behind her exploded in a flash of static. A second one vanished an instant later, then a third turned yellow on Jaina’s display and broke into two parts.

  Tahiri’s shock was overpowered by Alema’s glee, then almost instantly by Zekk’s righteous fury.

  This is wrong! Zekk raged. He was furious with Alema; she was killing for revenge!

  But Alema did not think so. She felt she was only killing to teach them a lesson, to make them understand there were consequences.

  Jaina added her anger to Zekk’s. Alema had violated the unspoken rules of the conflict. She had killed without purpose. When the Chiss reviewed their battle vids, they would feel bound to retaliate in kind.

  Alema didn’t care, and Taat seemed to agree. The hundreds of dartships not yet swept up in the tractor beams began to coalesce in tightly knit balls, moving with eerie precision into the path of oncoming clawcraft. Chiss fighters began to explode as though they were crashing into asteroids. The conflict was turning into an all-out battle.

  Sensing Jaina’s alarm, Tahiri opened a comm channel. “Reya-Taat, call off the dartships! Our last attacks were mistakes.”

  “They did not feel like mistakes,” Reya countered. “They felt good.”

  “This battle is getting out of hand,” Tahiri responded, echoing Jaina’s feelings. “Reya was Chiss. She knows what will happen if you continue.”

  Reya fell silent, but the dartships continued to attack. Jaina found her frustration with Alema growing. The Twi’lek was a fine pilot, but she was too wild, too quick to surrender to the pearl of hatred that had been accreting inside her since the death of her sister, Numa. Now Alema’s anger would spread across the Gyuel system like a nova blast.

  When the Taat continued to attack, Jacen said, “ReyaTaat, the Chiss will return with bigger ships. They’ll attack the nests directly, and Taat will be destroyed. All the Qoribu nests will be destroyed.”

  “What difference does it make? Our nests are already dying.” Reya’s voice grew icy. “But Lowbacca must not be captured.”

  The Force resonated with agreement—none of the Jedi wanted to see their friend captured—but Lowbacca was calling the shots. He was the one in trouble.

  “Lowbacca can take care of himself,” Tahiri said. “And if he is captured, what the Taat are doing now will only hurt him.”

  “Lowbacca won’t be captured,” Reya said. “The Colony does not wish it.”

  The Taat continued to place themselves in front of their enemies, but instead of pursuing Tahiri and Jacen all the more ferociously, the clawcraft peeled away, giving them a clear route to freedom. Jaina exhaled in relief. At least Jag—or whoever was commanding this task force—still had the sense to back off before the conflict escalated.

  Then a new tractor
beam shot out from the Star Destroyer, capturing Tahiri, Jacen, and—judging by their surprise and anger—Alema and Zekk. Jaina cursed at the same time she heard Tesar’s irate hiss in her ears. It was not easy to lock on to a wildly dodging spacecraft visually, but if a beam crew knew the comm frequency being used by the target, they could follow the carrier wave straight to their victim. And while Reya had not initiated the contact with Tahiri, she had kept the young Jedi talking until the clawcraft dispersed.

  Jaina was close enough to the battle now that she could see the laser cannons flashing inside the whirling cloud of dartships. Four waving fingers of darkness marked the areas where the tractor beams were sweeping the Taat out of space, slowly pulling them toward the Star Destroyer. The vessel itself resembled a gray version of the Empire’s old Victory-class Star Destroyers, save that it was a little sleeker, longer, and narrower, with a conical hull that gave it a menacing, needle-like appearance. It was impossible to tell where the bridge was located—it was not in the Chiss nature to reveal such a crucial detail just for the looking—but a dome-shaped bulge amidships probably housed the cloaking equipment that had masked the vessel’s approach.

  Jaina dropped the nose of her StealthX and started a fast approach toward the bow of the Star Destroyer, then felt Tesar’s excitement starting to mount as he initiated his own run. An image of his view of the ship appeared in the back of her mind. He seemed to be approaching from the opposite end, more or less head-on toward Jaina. They would have to be careful to avoid a collision.

  “Sneaky, give me a ten-mag view of the area around the root of the nearest tractor beam,” Jaina ordered.

  Risky or not, she could not let the Chiss reel in four Jedi.

  Over the comm, Reya said, “We will have you free in a minute, friends.”

  Not kriffing likely, Jaina thought. Half of the Taat were already being sucked toward the Star Destroyer’s capture bays, and the rest were too busy hurling themselves in front of clawcraft to disable any tractor beams.

  “Help is coming.” Reya’s voice was reassuring. “The Mueum are almost here.”

  The timely assurance raised the hair on the back of Jaina’s neck. Recalling Taat’s uncanny ability to sense what foods she and the other Jedi were longing for, she began to wonder what else Reya could sense.

  Tesar began to think Reya was a better spy than they had thought. Projecting his thoughts openly into the battle-meld, he wondered if he should eliminate her.

  Jaina had the mental image of Tesar selecting Reya’s lancet as a primary target, but realized instantly that the Barabel was only trying to test whether Reya knew what was happening in the battle-meld. He was passing over the stern of the Star Destroyer and could not have targeted her if he wished.

  When Reya did not fall for the ploy, Jaina checked her tactical display and found a blue storm of Mueum dartships cascading down from the direction of Eyyl and Jwlio—just as promised.

  “Sneaky, do an EM sweep of the hull,” Jaina ordered. She still did not see how the arrival of the fresh swarm was going to save Lowbacca and the others. “We might get lucky and locate an energy output that will tell us where those generators are.”

  Sneaky whistled an acknowledgment, then the image on her display switched to a rectangular portal set into a field of gray durasteel. The tractor beam itself was invisible, save for a few distortion ripples that suggested it was a very powerful beam indeed—one designed to drag in unwilling ships. As Jaina had feared, the portal was protected by a grid of blue energy—a repulsor screen designed to prevent someone from disabling the beam by dropping a piece of ordnance into it. The Chiss were far too good to overlook something that obvious.

  “Go to five mag,” Jaina ordered.

  The beam portal grew small in her display, and the white cave of a capture bay appeared beneath it. Jaina could see a pair of weapons turrets flanking a transparisteel viewing panel set high in the innermost wall, but no hint of the tractor beam generator.

  Sneaky piped a warning, and Jaina looked up to see the Star Destroyer stretched out before her like the long gray plain of an empty speeder lot. The beam cannons, big and small, remained silent in their sunken firing pits—a sure sign that the gunners still had not detected the approaching StealthXs.

  “Anything on that EM sweep, Sneaky?” Jaina asked.

  The droid tootled a negative, and Jaina sensed that the same was true for Tesar. It was beginning to look like they would have to do this the hard way. The Jedi would have to eject and destroy their ships.

  Tahiri did not want to leave her living ship. It was a gift from Zonama Sekot…and it was a friend.

  But her only other choice was to let herself be captured—and Jaina forbade that. She would go EV with Jacen and everyone else. Ten seconds.

  Lowbacca did not have ten seconds. Five—if he was lucky.

  Three, then.

  “Give us eight!” Reya pleaded. No doubt now about whether she could read their emotions in the Force. “The Mueum are almost here.”

  Sure—enough time for your friends to capture Lowbacca’s StealthX, Jaina thought. Two seconds.

  Tesar urged Jaina to wait. The Mueum were attacking.

  Jaina glanced at her display and saw a single, tightly packed arrow of Mueum designators driving through a screen of Chiss clawcraft like a blaster bolt through a tunic. The Star Destroyer opened up with all bearing batteries, hitting the mass with a devastating fusillade that would have torn a minor moon in half.

  The Mueum did not even slow down. Long furrows of dartships vanished into fiery nothingness, and the swarm simply flowed into the open spaces, shrinking a little, but continuing toward the Star Destroyer amidships.

  “No, Reya!” Jaina ordered. “Stop them!”

  Lowbacca went EV, and Jaina lost all hope of bringing the conflict back under control. The Mueum took another volley of laser cannons and continued on as before, coalescing into a single black harpoon aimed at the heart of the Chiss Star Destroyer. Lowbacca’s StealthX detonated in the mouth of the capture bay, taking with it fifty square meters of deck and several dozen dartships, but doing nothing whatsoever to interrupt the tractor beam.

  Jaina rolled away from the Star Destroyer and started firing, trying to force as many clawcraft as possible away from Tahiri and the other captured Jedi. Tesar dropped in behind Jaina, firing to kill as a string of brave Chiss pilots jumped on her tail.

  Finally, the Mueum reached the Star Destroyer. On her tactical display, Jaina glimpsed the lead dartships crashing into the vessel’s particle shields, vaporizing themselves in an ever-broadening circle of light and fire. She thought for one moment that the suicide attack would come to no more than that; that the entire Mueum swarm would simply smash itself against the powerful Chiss shields.

  Then the shields crackled, flashed, and fell. The Mueum assault smashed into the hull in a conflagration of rocket fuel and fire and burned through within seconds. Bodies and equipment began to tumble from the breached hull, but the swarm continued to pour through, streaming through the inner hull and spreading along the corridors to all the hidden corners of the vessel. Within moments, long tongues of flame began to lick out of the gun turrets, and towers of white fire started to shoot from the discharge vents.

  A wave of explosions shook the Star Destroyer, and the hull began to come apart. Jaina was shaken by an all-too-familiar wave of anguish and fear, then a rip seemed to open in the Force as the huge vessel began to disintegrate from the inside.

  The tractor beams sputtered into nothingness, and a sense of relief permeated the Force as Tahiri and Alema and Zekk finally regained control of their craft. A Chiss fighter appeared in front of Jaina, coming at her head-on and pouring angry streams of blaster bolts more or less in her direction. Jaina returned fire automatically, and she did not notice how her hand was shaking until after the clawcraft exploded.

  Jaina reached out for Lowbacca and felt him drifting away, frightened and awed and lonely.

  We’ll find you! sh
e promised. But he would have to stay open to the meld, he would have to help them find him.

  She’ll be doing well, Lowbacca thought, just to save herself.

  FOURTEEN

  After a week of travel and three off-course jumps, the dark-banded surface of Qoribu’s night side was finally swelling in the Shadow’s forward viewport, biting an ever-larger crescent from the blue-green sun behind it. The planet was girded by a spectacular ring system, and the dusky shadows of its penumbra were brightened by a litter of twinkling moons, but Luke’s gaze kept drifting to the velvet void beyond, to a few bright stars where the Chiss frontier hung stretched like the web of some dark, deadly spider better left undisturbed.

  The Chiss prided themselves on never being the aggressor people. By their own law, they never attacked first. Their military doctrine took the edict even farther, decreeing that an enemy must attack them within Ascendancy space before they responded. So Luke did not understand how the Chiss had ended up in a border conflict when both sides acknowledged that the Colony was still over a light-year from the border.

  Perhaps doctrine had changed. After all, the war with the Yuuzhan Vong had changed almost everything else. And Luke knew from his last journey into the Unknown Regions that there were things happening out here that the Galactic Alliance still did not understand. The number of Chiss ruling houses been reduced from nine to four for some unknown reason, and the Empire of the Hand had mysteriously vanished. So it certainly seemed possible the Chiss had changed their doctrine.

  Still, Luke doubted that the Chiss would abandon their most basic tenet—the prohibition against attacking first. The law had stood for a thousand years, and Thrawn—the Chiss Grand Admiral who had nearly defeated the New Republic single-handedly—had been exiled from the Ascendancy for violating it.

  To Luke, there was only one logical conclusion. The Colony had brought this conflict on itself—or Raynar had.