Star Wars®: Dark Nest I: The Joiner King

by Troy Denning

  She led the way deeper into the hangar cavern, past rack after rack of dartship berths. Stacked a staggering fifteen berths high, they were strewn with fueling lines and swarming with Killik technicians. Their technology was unsophisticated, but the insects were incredibly efficient, working a dozen at a time in cramped spaces that would have had just two human technicians throwing hydrospanners at each other. The fuel-tinged air was permeated by a low, rhythmic rumble that sounded like machinery, but Mara soon realized it was coming from the creatures themselves.

  She turned to Tahiri, who was walking beside her, and asked, “That sound…are they singing?”

  It was Alema—walking at Luke’s side—who answered. “It’s more like humming.”

  “They do it when they concentrate,” Tesar added. “The harder they work, the louder it growz.”

  “It’s their part in the Song of the Universe,” Tahiri explained.

  “Doesn’t sound like any song I’ve ever heard,” Han said from a step ahead of Mara. “In fact, I’ve heard more rhythm in a bantha stampede.”

  “That’s because you can’t hear the whole song,” Zekk explained helpfully. “Only insect species hear it all.”

  “Yeah?” Han scowled and turned to Jacen. “Can you hear it?”

  “No.” Jacen flashed an imitation of Han’s roguish smile. “Then again, I’ve only been here about a month.”

  “Relax, Dad,” Jaina called from the front of the group. “We don’t hear it, either.”

  Han let out an audible sigh of relief, then Jaina suddenly stepped into an empty berth and ducked down a waxy passage that led out the back.

  C-3PO stopped outside the berth. “That doesn’t look like a proper corridor, Mistress Jaina.”

  “You could always stay here, Threepio,” Han said, watching six Killik workers carry a damaged dartship past. “I’ll bet these guys are always looking for spare parts.”

  “I was just commenting, Captain Solo.”

  C-3PO dropped into an awkward crouch that was half squat and half hunch, and they all followed Jaina into the passage.

  “Sorry about this,” Zekk said from behind Mara. “They weren’t thinking of larger species when they dug these tunnels.”

  “No problem. We’re not that old.” Mara was bent over nearly double, so Zekk had to be crawling on all fours. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

  The Force ahead grew heavy with pain and fear, and the humid air began to smell of blood, burns, and bacta. A moment later, they emerged into a large oblong chamber lined by hundreds of hexagonal wall bunks. In the open areas of the room, hand-sized Killik healers were swarming over casualties from both sides, spitting antiseptic saliva into their wounds, spinning silk sealant into cracked chitin, slipping tiny pincers into torso punctures to pull shrapnel from internal organs. Low purrs of gratitude reverberated from the chest plates of the insect patients, but the Chiss—those who were still conscious—were staring at the creatures in horror.

  As the rest of the group stepped into the chamber behind Mara, a green triage nurse rushed over and brushed its antennae across Jaina’s arm, then looked at Luke and thrummed a question.

  “Oh, dear,” C-3PO said. “She doesn’t seem to know what’s wrong with Master Luke!”

  “Nothing’s wrong with him, Taat,” Jaina said to the insect. “We’re all fine. We just wanted to see the infirmary.”

  The triage nurse stepped closer to Luke and scrutinized him with its bulbous gaze, then clicked its mandibles doubtfully.

  “I’m sure.” Jaina glanced at Mara. “Right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mara said. Even had there been something wrong with him, she would not have trusted the insects to fix it—not after what had become of Raynar.

  “I’m just a little burned out,” Luke assured the Killik.

  The nurse spread its antennae in doubt, then scurried off to hold down a screaming Chiss. The patient did not seem pleased to have three Killik healers rummaging around inside his torso.

  “They are not being cruel,” Tesar said. “But the Taat are very stoic. They don’t use anesthesia themselvez.”

  “And when they have it available for other species, they never get the dosage right,” Jaina added. “They’ve decided that it’s just faster and safer to do without.”

  “I’ll bet,” Han said, eyeing the carnage. “Because it kind of looks like they’re enjoying it.”

  “They’re not,” Zekk assured him. “The Kind are the most gentle and forgiving species I’ve ever met.”

  “They have no malice,” Alema added. She pointed to a nearby bunk, where a trio of Killik nurses clung to the wall, hovering over a half-conscious Chiss, holding a casted leg in traction. “Once the fighting’s over, they care for their attackers as their own. They don’t even imprison them.”

  “I can’t imagine that works very well with Chiss,” Leia said. “What happens when the prisoners attack?”

  “Their escortz bring them here for evaluation,” Tesar rasped. “They think other speciez are aggressive only because they can’t stomach pain. So they look for the source of the pain…”

  “Eventually, the Chiss figure it out and stop attacking,” Tahiri said.

  “Yeah, well, a little bug-probing would stop me,” Han said. His gaze was fixed on a Killik healer, whose four limbs were straddling a Chiss face as it extracted something from the patient’s red eyeball. “At least until I could escape this creep show.”

  “Dad, the Chiss don’t need to escape,” Jaina said. “They’re free to leave whenever they like, if they can find a way.”

  Han nodded knowingly. “There’s always a catch.”

  “Always,” Alema agreed.

  “But it’s not what you think,” Zekk added.

  “The Chisz won’t take back their MIAz,” Tesar finished.

  “I’m sure,” Mara said. The young Jedi Knights’ habit of talking fast and completing each other’s thoughts was beginning to make her edgy. It was almost as if they were sinking into a permanent battle-meld. “I can’t imagine the Chiss are much for prisoner exchanges.”

  “Oh, we’re not talking about exchanges,” Jaina said.

  “The Chiss won’t take them back at all,” Tahiri explained.

  “Before we got here, they used to steal transports and try to go back on their own,” Alema said. “The Chiss just turned them away.”

  “How awful for them,” C-3PO said sympathetically. “What happens to prisoners now?”

  “A few hitch rides out, then who knows what happens to them,” Jaina said. “Most end up staying with the nest.”

  Alarm bells began to ring inside Mara’s head. She glanced toward the heart of the chamber, where Tekli and several Chiss medics had set up a makeshift surgical theater beneath the jewel-blue glow of a dozen shine-balls, then looked back to Jaina.

  “Doesn’t that worry you?” Mara asked.

  “No,” Zekk said, frowning. “Why should it?”

  “Because they’re Joiners,” Han said. “They don’t have their own minds.”

  “Actually, they have two minds,” Jacen said, speaking for the first time since entering the infirmary. “They still have their own mind, but they share the nest mind as well.”

  Han grimaced, but Mara was relieved. At least Jacen still sounded as though he were considering matters from outside the Killik perspective. Maybe his odyssey had given him an extra resistance to the Killik influence…or maybe he had just arrived later than the others. Either way, it made him an asset when dealing with the rest of the strike team.

  After a moment, Han said, “You’d better not be trying to tell me this is a good thing.”

  “It’s not a good thing or a bad thing, Dad,” Jacen replied. “It just is. What disturbs you is that the Will of the nest mind is more powerful than the will of the individual mind. They appear to lose their independence.”

  “Yeah.” Han’s eyes flashed to Jaina and the other young
Knights. “That disturbs me. A lot.”

  “And it would certainly disturb the Chiss,” Leia said. “They would feel very threatened by anything that limits their self-determination.”

  “That doesn’t justify speciecide,” Jaina countered.

  “Speciecide is a harsh accusation,” Luke said. The calmness of his voice, and the fact that he had been even more quiet than Jacen so far, commanded the attention of the entire group. “It doesn’t sound like the Chiss. They have very strict laws regarding aggression—especially outside their own borders.”

  “You don’t know the Chiss.” Alema’s voice was full of bitterness. “They keep Kind prisoners in isolation cells in a free-drifting prison ship and starve them to death.”

  “How can you know that?” Leia asked. “I can’t see the Chiss letting anyone inspect their prisons.”

  “A Chiss Joiner revealed it,” Jacen explained.

  “The prison ships I believe,” Mara said. “But I can’t see the Chiss starving any prisoner. Their conduct codes wouldn’t bend that far.”

  “The starvation is incidental,” Jacen said. “The Chiss are trying to feed their prisoners.”

  “It can’t be that hard to figure out what bugs eat,” Han said.

  “Not what, Dad—how,” Jacen said. Motioning the group after him, he started toward the infirmary’s main entrance. “Come on. This whole problem will make more sense if I just show you.”

  Jacen led the group into a huge, wax-lined corridor bustling with Killik workers. Most were bearing large loads—beautiful jewel-blue shine-balls, multicolored spheres of wax, wretchedly small sheafs of half-rotten marr stalks. But some carried only a single small stone, usually quite smooth and brightly colored, and these insects moved slowly, searching for the perfect place to affix their treasure amid the scattered groupings on the walls.

  “So this is how they make the mosaics,” Leia commented.

  “One pebble at a time,” Jaina said. “Whenever one of the Killiks comes across a pretty stone, she stops whatever she’s doing and rushes back to the nest to find the perfect place. It can take days.”

  Mara was surprised to hear a tone of awe in her niece’s voice; normally, Jaina was too preoccupied with tactics or readiness drilling to even notice art.

  “She?” Leia asked. “The males don’t contribute to the mosaics?”

  “There aren’t many males,” Zekk explained.

  “And males only leave their nest when it’s time to establish a new one,” Alema added.

  The corridor branched, then ended a short time later at the brink of a huge, sweet-smelling pit so dimly lit that Han would have plunged over the edge had Jaina not caught him with the Force and pulled him back. Mara and the other Jedi had more warning. The Force inside the chamber ached with a hunger so fierce that they instinctively hesitated at the entrance.

  “This is the busiest place in the nest,” Jacen said over the din of clacking mandibles and drumming chests. “The grub cave.”

  As Mara’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that the chamber was swarming with Killiks, all carefully crawling over an expanse of hexagonal cells. Half the cells were empty, a handful were sealed beneath a waxy cover, and the rest contained the thick, squirming bodies of Killik larvae.

  Each larva was being attended by an adult, who was either carefully cleaning its head capsule or feeding it small pieces of shredded food. As the group watched, a nearby larva ejected a brown, sweet-smelling syrup. The adult grooming it unfurled a long, tongue-like proboscis and quickly sucked up the fluid, then burped and turned to leave the chamber. A new Killik quickly took its place.

  “Blast!” Han sounded as though he might imitate the larva. “Don’t tell me that was dinner.”

  “It’s not that unusual,” Jacen said. He guided them to one side of the entrance, so they would not impede the constant flow of Killiks entering and leaving the nursery. “There are bees and wasps across the entire galaxy that feed this way. It produces a very stable social structure.”

  Han turned to Leia. “Didn’t I tell you this would happen? We let him have too many weird pets when he was a kid.”

  “But it does explain why the Chiss captives are starving,” Mara surmised, ignoring Han’s joke. “Without larvae, the prisoners can’t eat.”

  “You make it sound like an accident, and it’s not.” Zekk’s voice was sharp with outrage. “The Chiss are trying to starve all of the Qoribu nests into leaving.”

  “But they can’t leave.” Alema’s voice was bitter. “Even if they had someplace to go, each nest would need a vessel the size of a Star Destroyer, and it would take months to prepare. They’d have to build a whole new nest inside the ship.”

  “That’s not the answer, anyway,” Jaina said. “This isn’t Chiss space. The Killiks are innocent victims here.”

  “Victims, possibly,” Mara said. She was growing alarmed by the wholehearted naïveté with which her niece and the others appeared to be embracing the Killik cause. “But hardly innocent.”

  Jaina’s eyes flashed at the challenge, but her voice remained steady. “You don’t know the situation. This system—”

  “I know that on the way in here, the Shadow was jumped by Killiks,” Mara said.

  “The trouble you had on the way in?” Jacen asked. “I’ve been wondering about that.”

  “So have we,” Han said dryly.

  “And you think it was Killikz?” Tesar asked.

  “We know what a dartship lookz like,” Saba said. “But these were better than the craft that met us at Lizil. These were powered by hydrogen rocketz.”

  “Hydrogen?” Zekk echoed. “That can’t be right.”

  He exchanged a confused glance with the others, then Jaina explained, “We’ve been trying to get them to convert to hydrogen rockets, but they produce the methane themselves.”

  “What are you saying?” Leia demanded. “That those weren’t Killik dartships attacking the Shadow? Or that we’re making this up?”

  The young Jedi Knights all looked uncomfortable, then Tahiri finally said, “We’re saying none of this makes sense. The Kind wouldn’t attack you, you wouldn’t lie, none of the Kind nests have hydrogen rockets—”

  “And those blast craters in my hull armor didn’t get there by themselves,” Mara finished. She kept her gaze fixed on Jaina. “Do you think maybe you’re wrong about these insects?”

  Jaina met her gaze squarely. “That’s just not possible.” She motioned a passing Killik over, then asked, “Our friends were attacked by a swarm of flying hydrogen rockets. Are any of the nests—”

  An earnest thumping began to resonate from the Killik’s chest.

  “She claims it was the Chiss, pretending to be Kind,” C-3PO translated. “They’re trying to make the Protectors leave.”

  “It wasn’t Chiss,” Mara said. “I could see the pilots. They were insects.”

  The Killik drummed a reply, and C-3PO translated, “There are a lot of space-faring insects in the galaxy. The Chiss could have hired some.”

  “Not very likely,” Leia said. “The Chiss are arrogant…elitist.”

  “These were Killiks,” Luke agreed. “We’re not mistaken.”

  A series of sharp booms reverberated from the Killik’s chest.

  “She asks if there’s anything you will believe?” C-3PO translated.

  “The truth,” Mara answered.

  The Killik rumbled a short reply, then dropped to all sixes and started down the corridor at a trot.

  “She said she doesn’t know the truth,” C-3PO said. “And she sees no reason to think of one, since you won’t believe it anyway.”

  Luke turned to Jaina. “We’ve seen enough. Take us back to the hangar.”

  “Not yet,” Jaina said. “You still don’t understand—”

  “We understand all we need to.” Luke glanced at Mara and Saba, silently asking if the council’s representatives had reached a consensus. When they both nodded, he took a step back so he could address
all of the AWOL Jedi. “The situation here is as confused as it is volatile, and your team has lost the neutrality required of Jedi Knights. The Masters ask for your return to Coruscant.”

  Mara cringed inwardly. Like Kyp, Corran, and several other Masters, she believed the Jedi Order should command the obedience of its Jedi Knights, rather than “ask” for it. Luke preferred to allow the Jedi Knights their independence, saying that if the Jedi Order could not trust the good judgment of its members, then the Masters were failing at their most important job. Being first among equals, Luke’s opinion held sway.

  Jaina was quick to seize on the opening, of course. “Is it our neutrality the council is worried about—or the Galactic Alliance’s relationship with the Chiss?”

  “At the moment, it’s you we’re worried about.” Luke’s voice was as warm as it was firm. “Any Jedi should recognize the importance of maintaining good relations with the Chiss. The sectors they patrol for us along the border are the only ones free of piracy and smuggling.”

  “The Jedi are not servants of the Galactic Alliance,” Alema countered.

  “No, we aren’t,” Luke agreed.

  As he spoke, Killiks were beginning to gather in the corridor, clambering up onto the walls and ceiling. Mara did not sense anything threatening in the Force—it was closer to grim concern, if she was reading the insects’ emotions correctly—but she reached out to Saba and Leia, subtly suggesting they move to a more defensible position.

  “But a peaceful Galactic Alliance is the strongest pillar of a peaceful galaxy,” Luke continued. “And the Jedi do serve peace. If the Reconstruction fails and the Galactic Alliance sinks into anarchy, so does the galaxy. The Jedi will have failed.”

  “What happened to defending the weak?” Zekk demanded. “To sacrificing for the poor?”

  “Those are worthy virtues,” Luke said. “But they won’t stop the galaxy from sinking into chaos. They aren’t the duties of a Jedi Knight.”

  “So we abandon the Killiks for the good of the rehab conglomerates snapping up our part of the galaxy?” Jaina asked. “Isn’t that how Pal—”

  “Don’t say it!” Mara stepped toward her niece, drawing a rustle from the ceiling and walls as the Killik spectators shrank back. “It’s bad enough to desert your posts and make us come out here looking for you. Don’t you dare make that comparison. Some things I won’t tolerate even from you, Jaina Solo.”