by Troy Denning
“Ben, how do you know about the escape tunnel?” Tenel Ka interrupted. “Did you find it through the Force?”
“No,” Jacen said, answering for Ben. Joiners had trouble separating their own thoughts from those of the collective mind of the nest. He used the Force to pull Ben away from the cabinet, then said, “Gorog told him.”
Ben scowled. “No way!” He tried to go back to the cabinet. “I just knew.”
“Gorog knew,” Jacen countered. He activated his lightsaber, then plunged it into the floor and began to cut a large circle. “And if they want you to open that door—”
“—we don’t.” Tenel Ka reached out with the Force and pulled Ben to her side. “Let us do this Jacen’s way.”
A loud metallic patter sounded inside the cabinet Ben had tried to open and quickly changed to a cacophony of scratching and scraping. Jacen continued to cut his circle in the floor, at the same time trying to puzzle out who had contracted the Dark Nest to attack Tenel Ka’s child—and how. The Gorog were notoriously difficult to locate—the Jedi had not even been certain the nest had survived the battle at Qoribu until about three months ago—and experience suggested they were far too interested in their own agenda to accept an assassination contract for credits alone. So whoever had hired the nest possessed the resources to find it in the first place—and to provide whatever the Dark Nest had asked in return.
The gnawing above suddenly grew more distinct, and a section of ceiling dropped to the floor. Jacen lifted his free hand toward the hole, but DD-11A was already taking aim. As the first cloud of insects began to boil down into the room, her wrist folded down and discharged a crackling plume of fire.
Ben screamed and began to thrash about, trying to break free of Tenel Ka’s Force grasp.
“Ben, stop it!” Tenel Ka ordered. The baby was wailing in her arm now. “We cannot let theeemmmargh—”
Tenel Ka’s command ended in a startled cry as Ben whirled on her with an untrained but powerful Force shove. She slammed into the corner two meters above the floor, her head hitting with a sharp crack, her eyes rolling back and her shoulders slumping, but her arm never slackening beneath the crying baby.
Jacen used the Force to gently guide Tenel Ka to the floor, then turned to find Ben leaping toward DD-11A’s upraised arm. His eyes were bulging and he was screaming at the droid not to burn his friends, and Jacen was too unnerved by his young cousin’s anger—and the raw Force-strength he had displayed—to take the chance of being gentle. He extended his arm and used the Force to pull Ben into his grasp, grabbing him by the throat.
“Enough!” Jacen pinched down on the carotid arteries on the sides of the neck. “Sleep!”
Ben gurgled once; then his eyes rolled back in his head and he sank into a deep slumber that would not end until the Force command was lifted. There was a time, before Vergere and the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, when Jacen would have felt guilty for having to use such a powerful attack on a nine-year-old boy. But now all that mattered was protecting Tenel Ka and the baby, and Jacen felt nothing but relief as he laid his young cousin aside.
He cut through a few more centimeters of floor, and the ferrocrete substructure began to sag. He continued cutting until he judged that the droid’s mass would be enough to fold the circle down like a trapdoor, then shut off his lightsaber and stepped to DD-11A’s side.
The hole above the droid’s head was rimmed with white foam from the palace’s fire-suppression system, but the Gorog were not foolish enough to peer out of the same hole DD-11A had just blasted with flame. Instead Jacen could hear the insects scurrying past overhead, spreading out across the ceiling and beginning to gnaw in several different places.
“What do you have that can generate a good-sized fireball?” Jacen asked DD-11A.
“Grenades.” The droid pivoted around to the other side of the hole and sprayed a stream of fire at a line of scurrying, blue-black shadows. “Two each, thermal, concussion, and flash—”
“That’ll do. Here’s what I want you to do.”
Jacen outlined his plan, then gathered Ben in his arms and retreated to the corner with Tenel Ka and the baby. The Gorogs in the secret tunnel had scratched their way into the cabinet, and the tips of hundreds of tiny blue-black pincers were beginning to protrude through the thin line between the doors.
Jacen laid Ben beside Tenel Ka, then pointed. “DeDe!”
The droid swiveled around and poured flame into the crack. A trio of fire-suppression nozzles popped down to coat the doors with suppressant, but by then black wisps of smoke were already seeping out the back of the cabinet.
Jacen pulled his cloak off and held it in front of them at chin height.
“Okay, go!”
DD-11A’s photoreceptors lingered on the cloak. “Your camouflage is inadequate. I can’t leave the child with you.”
“It’s . . . fine.” Tenel Ka’s voice was groggy, but firm. “Do as Jacen commands.”
Jacen was already immersing himself in the Force, allowing it to flow through him as fast as his body would allow.
Small pieces of plasrock began to rain from the ceiling. DD-11A raised her arm and began to spray flame into the holes, but openings were appearing faster than even a droid could target. Still, DD-11A did not move to obey.
“Now, Honeygirl!” Tenel Ka snapped.
DD-11A’s head swiveled around. “Override command accepted.”
The droid stepped into the sagging circle Jacen had cut in the floor. The flap gave way beneath her weight and folded down, and she crashed into the room below.
Jacen exhaled in relief, then glanced over his shoulder and touched the corner behind them, forming a complete sensory image of how the walls looked and smelled and felt, even of the nearly inaudible sounds coming from the pipes and ducts concealed inside, then looked forward again and quickly expanded the image into the Force.
The baby continued to cry.
Tenel Ka started to open one of her nursing flaps, hoping to silence the child by feeding her, but Jacen stopped her. He needed that crying.
Instead of allowing the Force to flow through his body, he began to use his fear and anger to consciously pull it through. His skin began to nettle and his head to ache, and still he continued to draw the Force, catching his daughter’s wailing voice in the stillness of its depths, sending the sound streaming down through the floor after DD-11A, not allowing it to return to the surface until it had overtaken the metallic clank of the droid’s receding footsteps.
He was almost too late. The fire retardant had barely started to drip from the holes DD-11A had left in the ceiling before clouds of tiny blue-black Killiks began to drop into the room on their droning wings. They were much smaller than the assassin bugs that had attacked Mara and Saba the year before, only a little larger than Jacen’s thumb. But they had the same bristly antennae and black bulbous eyes, and they all had long, venom-dripping proboscises protruding between a pair of sharply curved mandibles.
Instead of dropping down through the hole, the Gorog simply seemed to swirl about the room, gathering in an ever-darkening swarm, ignoring the hole in the floor and the sound decoys Jacen had arranged. They began to land on the cabinet that concealed the escape tunnel and on the surrounding walls, on the door that closed off Tenel Ka’s dressing chamber, on the empty crib in the center of the nursery.
A few even came and landed on the cloak that Jacen was using as the basis of his Force illusion, and when a pair of Gorog started to hover in the air above the top edge of the cloak, he feared his plan would fail. The illusions he had learned to craft from the Adepts of the White Current were powerful, but even they would not keep an insect crawling in midair. Jacen began to think that he had overreached in planning to take out the entire swarm at once; he should have settled for leaving DD-11A behind to slow the assassins while he and Tenel Ka fled with Ben and the baby.
Then suddenly Tenel Ka’s palm was there for the insects to land on, and the illusion held.
Jacen loo
ked over and saw the baby floating on a cushion of Force levitation, her head resting on the stump of Tenel Ka’s amputated arm and her feet kicking the empty air.
A tense moment later, the cabinet doors clanged open. The insects on Tenel Ka’s palm and Jacen’s robe sprang into the air, joining the black fog of Killiks that came growling into the nursery, and the whole boiling mass swirled down through the floor in pursuit of DD-11A and the sound of the baby’s crying voice.
Jacen maintained the illusion until the last insect had followed, then continued to maintain it for another hundred heartbeats. When no sound in the room remained except the pounding of their own hearts, he waited another hundred heartbeats, his eyes scanning every dark corner of the nursery, searching the shadows for any hint of blue carapace, examining the Force for ripples with no tangible source.
An uneasy feeling remained in the Force, but the ripple pattern was too diffuse and confused for Jacen to locate the observers Gorog had almost certainly left to watch the nursery. Still, the swarm would catch up to DD-11A any instant and discover it had been fooled.
Jacen dropped his illusion, then reached out in the Force and began to pull the folded circle of floor back into place. The ferrocrete substructure rose with a loud, grating shriek, and he felt the Force ripple as the swarm reversed course.
A handful of blue-black insects rose into the air from the dark corners of the nursery and came streaking toward the corner. Tenel Ka’s lightsaber sizzled to life behind Jacen, and one of the bugs burst into a yellow spray as she Force-smashed it against the wall.
Jacen finished pulling the floor section back into place, then flung his cloak up in front of the approaching insects and used the Force to pin them against the wall. The tough molytex lining lasted about a second before the tips of their slashing mandibles started to work through.
Jacen sprang across the room, Force-leaping over the crib, and smashed the insects beneath the pommel of his lightsaber.
A loud bang sounded from the corner as Tenel Ka’s lightsaber ignited the methane sac the assassin bugs carried inside their carapaces as a final surprise. He glanced over to see Tenel Ka trying to blink the spots from her eyes, her lightsaber weaving a defensive shield in front of her. The baby lay crying in the corner behind her, and two more insects were flitting around her knees, trying to dodge past her guard to attack.
Jacen stretched out in the Force and nudged them both into the path of her turquoise blade. They detonated with a brilliant flash that left stars dancing before his eyes and the baby screeching louder than ever, but Jacen sensed no pain in the infant, only fear and alarm.
Realizing he still had not heard the carumpf of DeDe’s first grenade, Jacen started to reach for his comlink—then heard a muffled drone building behind him and spun around to find the first Gorog crawling through the seam his blade had left in the floor.
“Now, DeDe!” Jacen screamed at the floor. He jumped into the center of the circle and began to drag his lightsaber along the seam, igniting the insects before they could take flight. “What’s taking so—”
A sharp jolt struck Jacen in the pit of his stomach, then suddenly he found himself kneeling in the middle of the circle, surrounded by a curtain of yellow flame, the air filled with the naphthalene smell of a thermal grenade.
“About—”
He was jolted by another explosion, and this time he was unsurprised enough to feel the floor buck as more flames came shooting up through the seam.
“—time.”
The floor bucked another time, then another, and suddenly white foam was showering down from the ceiling, smothering the smoke and the fumes beneath the soapy clean smell of flame retardant. A series of wet thuds sounded on the surrounding floor as the foam weighed down the handful of Gorog assassins that had escaped DD-11A’s grenades.
The insects immediately turned toward the corner and began to scurry toward where Tenel Ka was kneeling with the baby and Ben. Jacen used the Force to sweep them all back toward him, then batted them into oblivion with a single stroke of his lightsaber. They exploded brilliantly, but Jacen did not allow himself to look away. He was too afraid of letting one of the creatures slip past his blade.
A moment later, with spots still dancing before his eyes, he turned toward the corner. “Are you okay?” he asked Tenel Ka. “Both of you?”
“We are fine,” she answered. “It is Ben I worry about.”
“Don’t.” Though Jacen knew Ben’s behavior had not been the boy’s fault, he could not quite keep the anger he felt out of his voice. “I don’t think Gorog would hurt him. He’s practically a Joiner.”
“I am not worried about what Gorog did to him,” Tenel Ka answered. “I am worried about those bruises on his throat.”
Jacen stood, his vision clearing, and went to his young cousin’s side. The impression of his thumb and forefinger were purple and deep, clearly made in anger, but Ben’s breathing was regular and untroubled.
“There’s no need to worry.” Jacen placed his fingers over the bruises and touched Ben through the Force. “They’ll fade in no time.”
Tenel Ka frowned. “That is not the point, Jacen.”
Jacen looked up. “Then what is?”
A globule of fire retardant dropped off the wall and splatted at Tenel Ka’s feet. There were no insects inside, but she stomped on it anyway.
“Never mind. I will tell you later.” She stepped past Jacen and started toward the door to her dressing room. “We need to leave here. If I know my grandmother, she already knows that her first attempt failed.”
“Your grandmother?” Jacen lifted Ben in his arms and followed. “You think Ta’a Chume is behind this?”
“I know she is,” Tenel Ka said. She stopped at the door and faced Jacen with narrowed eyes. “The only ones who know about the escape tunnel are the Queen Mother . . . and the former Queen Mother.”
FIVE
The route to Cilghal’s lab on Ossus was as meandering as any across the academy grounds, winding through a labyrinth of shrubbery and detouring past carefully planned vistas, following a path of tightly placed stepping-stones that deliberately forced walkers to slow down and contemplate the garden. Even so, Leia’s gaze kept coming back to the stasis jar in her hands. The glob suspended inside was pulsating like a silvery heart, growing larger each time it expanded, trembling a little more noticeably each time it contracted. She shuddered to think what might happen if the mysterious froth exploded over the interior of the jar. Anything that throbbed inside a stasis field could probably eat its way through seven millimeters of nonreactive safety glass.
The path rounded a gentle bend, and a dozen meters ahead, the trapezoidal span of Clarity Gate framed a tranquil courtyard accented by a small fountain. Leia passed under the crosspieces without stopping, then turned toward an opening to one side of the fountain—and heard a disapproving hiss behind her.
“This one is shocked at the forgetfulnesz of her student,” Saba rasped. “What must a Jedi do as she enterz the academy groundz?”
Leia rolled her eyes and turned to face the Barabel. “We don’t have time to meditate right now, Master.”
Saba blinked twice, then clasped her claws together and remained standing on the other side of the gateway.
“Really.” Leia went back through the gate and tapped the side of the jar. “Look at this stuff.”
Saba looked, then said, “That is no excuse for ignoring the rulez.”
“We don’t have time for rules,” Leia said. “We need to get this jar to Cilghal.”
“And the sooner you complete your meditationz, the sooner we will do that.”
“Saba—”
A rumble sounded low in Saba’s throat.
“Master Sebatyne,” Leia corrected, “don’t you think Luke would want us to hurry?”
The Barabel tipped her head and glared down at Leia out of one eye. “You are doing it again.”
“Doing what ?”
“Reasoning. That is a skill you hav
e already mastered.” Saba’s tone grew stern. “What you have not yet learned is obedience.”
“I’m sorry, Master.” Leia was growing exasperated. “I promise to work on that later, but right now I’m more worried about this stuff getting loose inside the academy.”
“It is when we are alarmed that meditation is most important.” Saba reached for the stasis jar. “This one will hold the froth so you can concentrate.”
Realizing that her determination was no match for a Barabel’s stubbornness, Leia reluctantly yielded the stasis jar. She focused her attention on the fountain, watching its silver spray umbrella into the air, listening to it rain back into the pool, and began a Jedi breathing exercise. She grew aware of the crisp scent of anti-algal agents and the coolness of mist on her skin. But even that faded after a moment, and she was left with only her breathing to concentrate on . . . in through the nose . . . out through the mouth . . . and the knots inside her started to come undone.
Leia began to realize that she was not worried about the froth at all. She had seen on Woteba that it did not disintegrate anything instantly. Even if the glob were to explode inside the stasis jar, she would still have plenty of time to reach Cilghal’s lab and contain it in something else.
What troubled her was Han—or, rather, Han’s absence. She felt guilty about having to leave him on Woteba, especially to honor a promise Luke had made . . . and especially knowing how he felt about “bugs.” Even more than that, everything just seemed wrong. It was the first time in years she had traveled more than a few hundred thousand kilometers without Han, and it felt as if a part of her was missing. It was as if an MD droid had removed the wisecracking part of her brain, or she had suddenly lost a third arm.
And Leia knew that her sister-in-law felt much the same about Luke. After landing on Ossus, the first thing Mara had done was head for the Skywalkers’ apartment to see if Ben was back from his camping trip with Jacen. She had claimed she only wanted to be sure that the academy rumor mill did not alarm him with a tangled version of why Luke had not returned with the Falcon, but Leia had sensed the same hollow in her sister-in-law that she felt in herself. Mara had been trying to fill the uncomfortable void caused by leaving Luke behind, to reassure herself that her family’s life would quickly return to normal . . . just as soon as Cilghal told them how to stop the froth.
