Star Wars: Dark Nest II: The Unseen Queen

by Troy Denning

  Tarfang chittered off a sharp string of syllables.

  “I’m sorry, Tarfang,” Luke said, taking a guess at what the cranky Ewok was saying. “But if you want us to get you out of trouble for delivering that spinglass to the Fifth Fleet—”

  Tarfang barked a short reply, then pulled Han away from the navicomputer and began to program it himself.

  “Pardon me, Master Luke,” C-3PO said. “But Tarfang wasn’t objecting. He was suggesting that we set a course for the Tusken’s Eye.”

  “Why?” Han demanded.

  Tarfang jabbered an explanation, but Juun beat C-3PO to the translation.

  “Because that’s where we’ve been taking all that Tibanna we’ve been running for the Squibs,” he said. “And those pirates are hiding something.”

  SIXTEEN

  Orbiting above a swirling atmosphere of yellow sulfuric clouds, Supply Depot Thrago was classically Chiss—austere, utilitarian, and bristling with defenses. In addition to the floating fuel tanks that Jacen and his team would soon be destroying, the tiny moon base was equipped with turbolaser platforms, a shield array, cannon turrets, hidden bunkers, and a clawcraft hangar with two entrances. The weapons platforms were arranged with overlapping fields of fire, and the bunkers and hangar had been concealed with typical Chiss cunning. Even for Jedi in StealthXs, this was going to be a difficult run—especially if they wanted to minimize their target’s casualties.

  It had to be done. The attack on Jacen’s daughter had been only a single move in the Dark Nest’s plan—a plan that would ultimately lead to the eternal war Jacen had seen in his vision. Probably, that was even what the Dark Nest intended, since its larvae fed on live captives.

  Jacen was not foolish enough to believe he could stop the war. The Gorog had been waging it for months already, even if no one realized it. But he could prevent it from becoming the eternal war of his vision. All he needed to do was rouse the Chiss, to prod them into action before the Dark Nest completed its preparations.

  Of course, once the Chiss went to war, they would not stop with one nest. They would destroy the entire species, wipe out every Killik nest they could find, and that was Jacen’s plan. As long as there was a Colony, there would be a Dark Nest, and as long as there was a Dark Nest, his daughter’s life would be in danger. He had sensed that much from Ta’a Chume. Gorog had promised to kill Tenel Ka’s child, and she had believed the insects would make good on their word. So the insects had to go.

  Unfortunately, Jacen could not say as much to Jaina and Zekk and Tesar and the others. They would argue that only the Dark Nest needed to be destroyed, that a whole species should not be condemned to protect one child.

  They did not understand the Killiks the way Jacen did. The Colony had been harmless once, but Raynar and Welk and Lomi Plo had changed the insects. They had brought the knowledge of good and evil to an innocent species, had created a hidden aspect of the Colony’s collective mind that would forever be obsessed with vengeance, hatred, and conquest. The Killiks had become an aberration, and they had to be destroyed. It was the only way to stop the eternal war.

  It was the only way to save his daughter.

  Jacen reached out to his companions in the Force, letting them know that the time had come to act. A big fuel tanker was gliding toward the supply depot, decelerating as it approached the gate, and it was a good opportunity for the strike team to slip through the shields.

  As they opened the combat-meld, Jacen felt a sense of uncertainty from his sister and Zekk, and to a lesser extent from Tesar and Lowbacca. During the mission briefing that morning, they had all expressed reservations about launching a preemptive strike on the Chiss. The Ascendancy had laws against attacking first, so Jaina and Zekk had found it difficult to believe that the Chiss really intended to launch the surprise attack Jacen claimed he had foreseen.

  It had been Tahiri who had pointed out that the Colony was technically in violation of the Qoribu Truce. The Killiks had moved colonists into the buffer zone, so the Ascendancy was free to attack anytime it wanted. And everything the strike team had seen over the last few days of reconnoitering suggested the Chiss were mobilizing for a major attack. They were moving assets forward, stockpiling fuel, ammunition, food, and spare parts, and running fleet maneuvers with live gunnery.

  Of course, those were the same preparations the Chiss would make as a contingency plan. The strike team had seen nothing that pointed exclusively to a surprise attack, and even now, as they waited to move their StealthXs into position, Jacen could sense that Jaina and Zekk remained somewhat skeptical.

  Jacen concentrated on the place within him that had always belonged to his sister, filling it with his own sense of certainty, hoping Jaina would interpret his confidence to mean he was sure about the surprise attack. He felt bad about using the twin bond to mislead his sister—but not as bad as he would feel if his vision became reality.

  Jaina and Zekk’s hesitancy began to subside, and Tesar and Lowbacca grew almost enthusiastic. Giving his companions no further chance to hesitate, Jacen activated his sublight drive and led the way down to the freighter. Though their StealthXs were almost as invisible to the naked eye as they were to sensors, the pilots took the precaution of approaching from directly behind, where there would be no viewing ports.

  Once they had slipped up on the ship, they clustered together beneath the stern, tucked into the dark recess between the giant sphere of the vessel’s number three cargo tank and the immense flare of its engine housings.

  For several minutes, the Jedi had to float along in the shadows, able to see nothing but the swell of the cargo tank’s gray skin, the colored glow of a handful of running lights, and, out the sides of their canopies, the star-flecked velvet of deep space. Then Jacen’s astromech droid reported that a hole had opened in the shields, and the blue glow of an inspection light began to brighten space around the tanker.

  Jacen flipped his StealthX upside down so that he could keep watch as they approached the supply depot. Since he could no longer see anything of the freighter except the round bellies of its four big fuel tanks, he had to trust Jaina to keep him in position by urging him to speed up or fall back.

  It took only a few seconds before the supply depot’s gate-platforms came into view. Floating vertically, they were basically crescent-shaped weapons platforms with shield generators instead of turbolasers. The inner edges were lined with cannon turrets, missile launchers, and plasma guns—all designed to defend against just the sort of infiltration the six Jedi were attempting. Shining out from behind the weapons were two semicircular banks of inspection lamps, arranged so that they would illuminate the entire girth of the freighter as it passed through the gates.

  Jacen focused his attention on the vessel’s port side and watched patiently as the inspection lamps lit up the exterior of the number two cargo tank. When the forward end of the number three tank slid under the light, he visually followed one of the beams back to its source, then reached out in the Force and pulled the cathode out of its mounting.

  The lamp erupted into a brilliant spray of sparks, and a ten-meter section of the cargo tank was plunged into darkness. Jacen reached out to the team, then pushed his throttles forward and led the way through the gap. A backup lamp came online no more than five seconds later, but by then the Jedi and their StealthXs were safely inside the depot’s shields, tucked in a dark cranny between the freighter’s bow and its number one cargo tank.

  The Chiss swept their inspection lights back and forth over the number three tank a few times, but there was no question of a reinspection. Kilometer-long freighters did not simply stop and back up. Even at the vessel’s current low velocity, it would have taken the braking thrusters a full half kilometer to stop the vessel, and by then any infiltrators would be well inside the shields anyway.

  But Jacen knew the Chiss well enough to realize what would come next. Although lamp cathodes did sometimes blow spontaneously, the Chiss were cautious. They would almost certainly make
a flyby inspection. He kept the strike team in hiding only until the freighter had cleared the shields, then dropped out of the cranny and slowly began to move away, careful to keep the huge cargo tanks between the StealthXs and the well-armed gate-platforms.

  A few moments later, half a dozen shuttles appeared around the freighter, carefully working their way forward and shining their spotlights into every nook and cranny on the vessel’s exterior. Jacen let out a deep breath of relaxation, then led the strike team down through a zone of floating repair docks—mostly empty at the moment—and around a line of frigates and blastboat escorts beam-anchored to the tiny moon that served as the heart of the base.

  The battle-meld suddenly filled with Jaina and Zekk’s doubt, and Jacen sensed them worrying about the frigates. He reached out to the vessels in Force and did not feel anyone aboard. His IR sensors suggested that internal temperatures were well below freezing, and he knew that would make Jaina question whether the Chiss were really planning a massive surprise attack.

  Jacen could think of a dozen reasons the frigates might be in cold storage. Perhaps they were being held in reserve, or maybe their crews had not yet arrived . . . he tried to reassure his sister that there were many possible explanations.

  Jaina and Zekk only seemed to have more doubts about his vision, and Jacen was well aware that the empty vessels just did not support his claim that the Chiss were about to launch an assault. It would take a week to bring a cold frigate online. The reactor cores would have to be lit, the vessel’s temperature raised slowly to avoid stressing the hull or superstructure. Several kilometers of mechanical lines would have to be bled and filled with the proper fluids. Provisions would have to be brought aboard and properly stowed. These vessels showed no indication of any of that.

  Jacen projected an air of thoughtfulness into the meld, pretending to consider his sister’s feelings while he watched the tiny moon grow larger and brighter. It was little more than a hubba-shaped lump of rock, barely ten kilometers from end to end and so blanketed in dust that its thousands of craters had a soft, almost featureless look to them.

  The fighter hangar, their first target, was located inside a ridge between two particularly deep craters, with one entrance opening out of a crater slope on each side. The surrounding terrain was flecked with cannon turrets, indistinguishable from boulders except for the tired sentries Jacen could feel standing watch inside a handful of them.

  Jaina and Zekk projected their hesitation into the meld more forcefully.

  Jacen could sense where their line of thought was going—and he did not like it. Being careful not to let anyone else sense what he was doing, he reached out in the Force and touched the nearest sentry, urging the fellow to look up and pay attention.

  Jaina and Zekk began to urge the team to pull up—

  Too late. Jacen felt the sentry targeting him, then began to juke and jink as a flight of cannon bolts came streaming up from the side of the nearest crater.

  Jaina and Zekk were furious, and all thought of calling off the mission vanished from the meld. Unless the strike team wanted to find itself in a very bad dogfight—while trapped inside the supply depot’s shields—they had to proceed as planned.

  Tesar, Lowbacca, and Tahiri barrel-rolled away and swung around to attack the hangar entrance in the far crater, while Jaina and Zekk fell in behind Jacen and banked around to make their attack run barely three meters above the floor of the near one. Cannon bolts and plasma bursts began to stab out from the sides of more boulders, but it was practically impossible for gunners to target what their sensors could not see, so most shots went wildly astray.

  Jacen armed his glop bomb and ran the last hundred meters to the hangar mouth straight in, and bursts of cannon fire finally began to blossom on his forward shields. His astromech screeched a warning that the shields were about to go, and Jaina tried to move up and take the front position in the shielding trio. Jacen cut her off, then released his glop bomb and took two more forward hits as he stayed on course to guide it in.

  Jaina’s anger at his heroics scalded the combat-meld, then Jacen pulled up, climbing the crater wall slope so closely that his astromech began to screech about the belly shields. Jaina released her glop bomb behind him, then Zekk’s feeling of triumph confirmed that he had seen at least one of the bombs detonate and fill the hangar mouth with its quick-hardening foam.

  Jacen cleared the crater rim and felt Tesar rising exactly opposite him from the other crater. He spun his cockpit around and found himself flying almost wingtip-to-wingtip with the madly grinning Barabel. They held that position and corkscrewed away from the moon’s surface, the rest of the team close on their tails and the Chiss gunners lighting space around them with bright blossoms of fire.

  As soon as they were out of the gunners’ range, Tesar led Lowbacca and Tahiri back through the frigates toward the tank fields near the upper reaches of the shields. Jacen took Jaina and Zekk and wheeled back toward the moon. The area around the fighter hangar was so clouded in dust that the craters were no longer visible. The gunners, unable to see anything, had finally given up firing.

  Seeing that his front shields had fallen to zero, Jacen commanded, “Transfer half the available power to the forward shields.”

  His astromech bleeped a sharp reply, then displayed a message explaining that there were no forward shields. The generator had been blown off when Jacen ignored the droid’s warning that they were about to fail.

  Jaina moved into the lead position, with Zekk behind her, leaving Jacen to bring up the rear. He could feel his sister’s irritation in the meld and knew that once the team returned to the Colony, Jaina and Zekk were going to have a long talk with him about flying as a team. Until then, he would have to hide behind them.

  The darkness above turned a flashing, brilliant orange as Tesar and his squad attacked the floating fuel tanks. Jacen knew from their planning session that the trio would bypass any tank near which they sensed a living presence, but there was no question that most of the base’s fuel supply would be destroyed. During their reconnaissance, they had counted more than five hundred tanks, each half a kilometer in diameter, and the only time any Chiss had been near one was when it was being dropped off by a transport.

  Jaina led Jacen and Zekk a quarter of the way around the moon’s surface toward a dust-covered hill that was the depot’s primary ammunition dump. Instead of dropping close to the surface, this time they attacked from more than a kilometer above, each firing a two-stage bunker-buster torpedo.

  The propellant trails had barely flashed to life before dozens of “boulders” on the hill suddenly came alive and began to pour fire up toward the attacking StealthXs. Jacen slipped in close behind Zekk, then turned his hand over to the Force and began to weave and dodge through the crimson blooms.

  Then the bunker busters hit, raising a curtain of dust as their focused thermal detonators burned a meter-wide hole down through the roof of the dump. Half a second later the torpedoes’ main warheads—simple proton bombs—descended through the same hole into the bunker interior. Normally, such bombs would explode instantly, but the strike team’s were less deadly; they would spark and hiss for five minutes to give personnel time to evacuate the vicinity.

  Once the dust cloud had risen high enough to obscure the gunners’ aim, Jaina pulled up. She turned toward the second bunker, located about two kilometers away on the horizon of the little moon, and the trio instantly fired their second set of bunker busters. Again, as soon as the propellant trails flared to life, the Chiss laced the darkness with defensive fire. Jacen saw one torpedo flash out of existence as a laser cannon scored, but then the telltale curtain of dust rose from the bunker.

  Jaina turned away, dropping around the edge of the moon toward the third and final dump. But she did not fire her last torpedo. It took Jacen a couple of seconds to see the problem. A small but bustling repair hangar had been built into the wall of a shallow crater below the ammunition dump. When the dump exploded, it would a
lmost certainly bury the hangar beneath it.

  Jaina and Zekk started to pull up without firing, but Jacen continued on course. Jaina and Zekk filled the meld with alarm and confusion. There were a hundred Chiss in that hangar who would not realize what was happening until it was too late.

  Jacen adjusted his course toward the hangar. He would chase out the personnel; then Jaina and Zekk could take out the ammunition dump. The Chiss had to see that the Jedi were serious about stopping them, or they would simply continue with their plans.

  But Jaina and Zekk did not seem to understand what he was planning—or perhaps they simply thought it was too risky. They continued to angle away from the attack.

  Jacen adjusted his course back toward the ammunition dump, leaving Jaina and Zekk with two choices: chase the personnel out of the repair hangar—or leave them there to perish. It did not matter to Jacen which option they chose; the Chiss would get the message either way.

  The Chiss gunners opened fire, turning space ahead into a wall of flashing cannon bolts. Jacen yielded his stick hand to the Force and weaved his way through the barrage for another two seconds, then heard his astromech squeal as it took a hit. He locked on to the ammunition dump manually and fired his last bunker buster. An instant later he saw the telltale curtain of dust rise ahead and knew the torpedo had penetrated the ammunition dump.

  Jaina and Zekk poured disbelief and outrage into the meld, but Jacen felt them roll in behind him then drop into the crater. Suddenly a tempest of Chiss panic filled the Force, and Jacen knew that a bunker-buster torpedo had landed outside the repair hangar and begun to sputter its warning.

  Tesar began to pour triumph and relief into the Force, and Jacen looked up to see that the flames from the fuel fires were now boiling away into space. Tesar and his squad had brought the base shields down and were already streaking toward the rendezvous point. All that remained for Jacen and his squad was to escape the moon’s defenses and follow.