Star Wars: Dark Nest I: Joiner King

by Denning, Troy

  Kre’fey stared at Jacen from his gold-flecked violet eyes. “Are you certain?”

  Jacen returned Kre’fey’s stare. “Absolutely, Admiral. We’ve got to get our people out of there.”

  Kre’fey looked again at the display, at the shimmering interference patterns that ran over Jacen’s pointing finger. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that has to be the explanation.” He turned to his staff. “Order the extended wing to rejoin.”

  A host of communications specialists got very busy with their microphones. Kre’fey continued staring at Jacen’s pointing finger, and then he nodded to himself.

  “The extended wing is to fire a missile barrage here.” Kre’fey said, and gave the coordinates indicated by Jacen’s finger.

  The capital ships on the detached wing belched out a gigantic missile barrage, seemingly aimed into empty space, and scurried back to the safety of the main body. When the Yuuzhan Vong reinforcements shimmered into realspace the missiles were already amid them, and the new arrivals hadn’t yet configured their ships for defense, or launched a single coralskipper.

  On the displays Jacen watched the havoc the missiles wrought on the startled enemy. Almost all the ships were hit, and several broke up.

  Kre’fey snarled. “How can I hurt the Vong today? We’ve answered that question, haven’t we?”

  One of his staff officers gave a triumphant smile. “Troopships report the landing party has been recovered, Admiral.”

  “About time,” someone muttered.

  Since the wing was contracting inward anyway, Kre’fey got the whole fleet moving in the same direction. The newly arrived Yuuzhan Vong were too disorganized, and too out of position, to make an effective pursuit. The first arrivals charged after Kre’fey, but they were strung out while Kre’fey’s forces were concentrating, and their intervention had no hope of being decisive.

  But even though Kre’fey had assured the escape of his force, the battle was far from over. The Yuuzhan Vong commander was angry and his warriors still possessed the suicidal bravery that marked their caste. Ships were hard hit, and starfighters vaporized, and hulls broken up to tumble through the cold emptiness of Ylesian space, before the fleet exited the traitor capital’s mass shadow and made the hyperspace jump to Kashyyyk.

  “I don’t want to do anything like that again,” Jaina said. She was in the officers’ lounge of Starsider, sitting on a chair with a cup of tea in her hand, her boots off, and her stockinged feet in Jag Fel’s lap.

  “Ylesia was like hitting your head again and again on a brick wall,” she went on. “One tactical problem after another, and the solution to each one was a straightforward assault right at the enemy, or straightforward flight with the enemy in pursuit.” She sighed as Jag’s fingers massaged a particularly sensitive area of her right foot. “I’m better when I can be Yun-Harla the Trickster,” she said. “Not when I’m playing the enemy’s game, but when I can make the enemy play mine.”

  “You refer to sabacc, I take it,” Jag said, a bit sourly.

  Jaina looked at Jacen, sitting opposite her and sipping on a glass of Gizer ale. “Are you going to take Kre’fey up on his offer of a squadron command?”

  Jacen inhaled the musky scent of the ale as he considered his answer. “I think I may serve better on the bridge of Ralroost,” he said finally, and thought of his finger floating in Kre’fey’s holo display, pointing at the enemy fleet that wasn’t there.

  “Ylesia,” he continued, “showed that my talents seem to be more spatial and, uh, coordinative. Is coordinative a word?”

  “I hope not,” Jag said.

  Jacen felt regret at the thought of leaving starfighters entirely. He had joined Kre’fey’s fleet in order to guard his sister’s back, and perhaps that was best done by flying alongside her in an X-wing. But he suspected that he’d be able to offer a higher order of assistance if he stayed out of a starfighter cockpit, instead using the Jedi meld to shape the way the others fought.

  “Look,” Jag pointed out, “Jaina’s got it wrong. Ylesia wasn’t a defeat. Jaina’s downed pilots were rescued, and so were mine. We hurt the enemy a lot more than they hurt us, thanks in part to Spooky Mind-Meld Man, here.” He nodded toward Jacen. “We destroyed a collaborationist fleet and captured enough of the Peace Brigade’s upper echelon to provide dozens of splashy trials. The media will be occupied for months.”

  “It didn’t feel like a victory,” Jaina said. “It felt like we barely escaped with our necks.”

  “That’s only because you don’t have a sufficiently detached perspective,” Jag said seriously.

  Mention of the Peace Brigade had set Jacen’s mind thinking along other channels. He looked at Jaina. “Do you think Thrackan’s really innocent?”

  Jaina was startled. “Innocent of what?”

  “Of collaboration. Do you think the story he told about being forced into the Presidency could possibly have been true?”

  Jaina gave a disbelieving laugh. “Too ludicrous.”

  “No, really. He’s a complete human chauvinist. I know he’s a bad guy and he held us prisoner and wants to rule Corellia as diktat, but he hates aliens so much I can’t believe he’d work with the Yuuzhan Vong voluntarily.”

  Jaina tilted her head in thought. Jag’s foot massage had put a blissful expression on her face. “Well, he did call Pwoe a Squid Head. That’s a point in his favor.”

  “If Sal-Solo wishes to prove his innocence,” Jag said, “he need only volunteer for interrogation under truth drugs. If his collaboration was involuntary, the drugs would reveal it.” Grim amusement passed across his scarred features. “But I think he’s afraid that such an interrogation would reveal how he came to be in the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong in the first place. That’s what would truly condemn him.”

  “Ahh,” Jaina said. Jacen couldn’t tell if she was enlightened or, in light of the foot rub, experiencing a form of ecstasy.

  Jacen, sipping his ale, decided that whatever the truth of the matter, it wasn’t any of his business.

  Star Wars: Dark Nest I: The Joiner King is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A Del Rey Books Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2005 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used under authorization.

  Included is the following previously published e-book: “Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Ylesia” by Walter Jon Williams copyright © 2002 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used under authorization.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.delreybooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-46314-2

  v3.0

  About the Author

  TROY DENNING is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Abyss; Star Wars: Tatooine Ghost; Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Star by Star; the Star Wars: Dark Nest trilogy: The Joiner King, The Unseen Queen, and The Swarm War; and Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Tempest, Inferno, and Invincible—as well as Pages of Pain, Beyond the High Road, The Summoning, and many other novels. A former game designer and editor, he lives in western Wisconsin with his wife, Andria.

  By Troy Denning

  Waterdeep

  Dragonwall

  The Parched Sea

  The Verdant Passage

  The Crimson Legion

  The Amber Enchantress

  The Obsidian Oracle

  The Cerulean Storm

  The Ogre’s Pact

  The Giant Among Us

  The Titan of Twilight

  The Veiled Dragon

  Pages of Pain

  Crucible: The Trial of Cyric the Mad

  The Oath of Stonekeep

  Faces of Deception

  Beyond th
e High Road

  Death of the Dragon (with Ed Greenwood)

  The Summoning

  The Siege

  The Sorcerer

  Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Star by Star

  Star Wars: Tatooine Ghost

  Star Wars: Dark Nest I: The Joiner King

  Star Wars: Dark Nest II: The Unseen Queen

  Star Wars: Dark Nest III: The Swarm War

  Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Tempest

  Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Inferno

  Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Invincible

  Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Abyss

  Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Vortex

  STAR WARS—The Expanded Universe

  You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …

  In The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia Organa said to Han Solo, “I love you.” Han said, “I know.” But did you know that they actually got married? And had three Jedi children: the twins, Jacen and Jaina, and a younger son, Anakin?

  Luke Skywalker was trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But did you know that, years later, he went on to revive the Jedi Order and its commitment to defending the galaxy from evil and injustice?

  Obi-Wan said to Luke, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” Did you know that over those millennia, legendary Jedi and infamous Sith Lords were adding their names to the annals of Republic history?

  Yoda explained that the dreaded Sith tend to come in twos: “Always two, there are. No more, no less. A Master, and an apprentice.” But did you know that the Sith didn’t always exist in pairs? That at one time in the ancient Republic there were as many Sith as Jedi, until a Sith Lord named Darth Bane was the lone survivor of a great Sith war and created the “Rule of Two”?

  All this and much, much more is brought to life in the many novels and comics of the Star Wars expanded universe. You’ve seen the movies and watched the cartoon. Now venture out into the wider worlds of Star Wars!

  Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars novels to learn more.

  PROLOGUE

  Like thieves all across the galaxy, Tibanna tappers worked best in darkness. They slipped and stole through the lowest levels of Bespin’s Life Zone, down where daylight faded to dusk and shapes softened to silhouettes, down where black curtains of mist swept across purple, boiling skies. Their targets were the lonely platforms where honest beings worked through the endless night de-icing frozen intake fans and belly-crawling into clogged transfer pipes, where the precious gas was gathered atom by atom. In the last month alone, the tanks at a dozen stations had been mysteriously drained, and two Jedi Knights had been sent to bring the thieves to justice.

  Emerging into a pocket of clear air, Jaina and Zekk saw BesGas Three ahead. The station was a saucer-shaped extraction platform, so overloaded with processing equipment that it seemed a wonder it stayed afloat. The primary storage deck was limned in blue warning strobes, and in the flashing light behind one of those strobes, Jaina and Zekk saw an oblong shadow tucked back between two holding tanks.

  Jaina swung the nose of their borrowed cloud car toward the tanks and accelerated, rushing to have a look before the processing facility vanished behind another curtain of mist. The shadow was probably just a shadow, but down here at the bottom of the Life Zone, heat and pressure and darkness all conspired against human vision, and every possibility had to be investigated up close.

  Spin-sealed Tibanna gas had a lot of uses, but the most important was to increase the yield of starship weapons. So if somebody was stealing Tibanna gas, especially as much as had been disappearing from Bespin in recent weeks, the Jedi needed to find out who they were—and what they were doing with it.

  As Jaina and Zekk continued to approach, the shadow began to acquire a tablet-like shape. Zekk readied the mini tractor beam, and Jaina armed the twin ion guns. There was no need to remark that the shadow was starting to look like a siphoning balloon, or to complain that the strobe lights were blinding them, or even to discuss what tactics they should use. Thanks to their stay with the Killiks, their minds were so closely connected that they scarcely knew where one began and the other ended. Even after a year away from the Colony, ideas and perceptions and emotions flowed between them without effort. Often, they could not even tell in whose mind a thought had formed—and it did not matter. They simply shared it.

  A blue glow flared among the holding tanks, then a small tapper tug shot into view, its conical silhouette wavering against the pressure-blurred lights of the station’s habitation decks. An instant later three siphoning balloons—the one Jaina and Zekk had spotted and two others—rose behind it, chased by long plumes of Tibanna gas still escaping from siphoning holes in the holding tanks.

  Jaina opened fire with the ion guns, narrowly missing the tug, but spraying the station’s central hub. Ion beams were safer to use around Tibanna gas than blaster bolts, since all they did was disable electronic circuitry, so the barrage did not cause any structural damage. But it did plunge two levels of habitation deck into a sudden blackout.

  Zekk swung the tractor beam around and caught hold of a siphoning balloon. The tappers released it, and the balloon came flying straight at the cloud car. Zekk deactivated the beam immediately, but Jaina still had to swing wide to avoid being taken out by the huge, tumbling bag of supercooled gas.

  Jaina let out a tense breath. “Too—”

  “—close!” Zekk finished.

  By the time she brought the cloud car back around, the last two balloons were following the tug up into a dark, churning cloud. Jaina raised their nose and sent another burst of ionized energy streaming after the tappers, but Zekk did not reactivate the beam.

  They agreed—the capture attempt had looked realistic enough. Now the quarry needed room to run. Jaina backed off the throttles, and they began a slow spiral up after the thieves.

  A moment later, a fuzzy pinpoint of yellow appeared deep inside the cloud, rapidly swelling into a hazy tongue of flame that came shooting out into clear air almost before Jaina could bring the ion guns around. She pressed both triggers and began to sweep the barrels back and forth. She was not trying to hit the missile—that would have been impossible, even for a Jedi. Instead, she was simply laying a blanket of ionized energy in its path.

  Zekk reached out and found the missile in the Force, then gently guided it into one of Jaina’s ion beams. Its electrical systems erupted into a tempest of discharge lightning and overload sparks, then failed altogether. Once the tempest died down, Zekk used a Force shove to deflect it from the extraction platform. The dead missile plunged past, barely a dozen meters from the edge of the storage deck, then vanished into the seething darkness of the Squeeze Zone.

  Jaina frowned. “Now, that was—”

  “—entirely uncalled for,” Zekk finished.

  With all that supercooled Tibanna pouring out onto the storage deck, even a small detonation would have been enough to blow the entire platform out of the sky. But that had probably been the idea, Jaina and Zekk realized: payback for calling in Jedi—and a warning to other stations not to do the same.

  “Need to get these guys,” Zekk said aloud.

  Jaina nodded. “Just as soon as we know who they’re working for.”

  Judging they had allowed the thieves a large enough lead to feel comfortable, Jaina and Zekk stretched out into the Force in an effort to locate them. It was not easy. Even at these depths, Bespin was surprisingly rich in life, from huge gasbag beldons to their mighty velker predators, from vast purple expanses of “glower” algae to the raawks and floaters that scavenged a living from extraction platforms like BesGas Three.

  Finally, Jaina and Zekk found what they were searching for, a trio of presences exuding relief and excitement and more than a little anger. The three thieves felt insect-like, somehow more in harmony wit
h the universe than most other beings. But they remained three distinct individuals, each with a unique presence. They were not Killiks.

  And that made Jaina and Zekk a little sad. They would never have changed the decision that had gotten them banished from the Colony. It had prevented the outbreak of a savage war, and they did not regret it. But being apart from Taat—the nest they had joined at Qoribu—was like being shut off from themselves, like being cast aside by one’s sweetheart and friends and family without the possibility of return. It was a little bit like becoming a ghost, dying but not departing, floating around on the edges of the living never quite able to make contact. So they did feel a little sorry for themselves sometimes. Even Jedi were allowed that much.

  “Need to get these guys,” Jaina said, reiterating a call to action that she felt sure was more Zekk than her. He had never had much use for regrets. “Ready?”

  Silly question. Jaina accelerated after the tappers, climbing up into a storm so violent and lightning-filled that she and Zekk felt as if they were back in the war again, fighting a pitched battle against the Yuuzhan Vong. After a standard hour, they gave up trying to maintain a steady altitude and resigned themselves to having their stomachs alternately up in their throats and down in their guts. After three hours, they gave up trying to stay right-side up and concentrated on just making forward progress. After five hours, they emerged from the storm into a bottomless canyon of clear, still air—only to glimpse the tappers entering a wall of crimson vortexes where two bands of wind brushed against each other in opposite directions. Amazingly, the tug still had both siphoning balloons in tow.

  Jaina and Zekk wondered whether the tappers knew they were being followed, but that seemed impossible. This far down in the atmosphere, Bespin’s magnetic field and powerful storms prevented even rudimentary sensor equipment from working. Navigation was strictly by compass, gyroscope, and calculation. If the tug was going through that wind wall, it was because it was on its way to deliver its stolen Tibanna.