Star Wars 390 - The Dark Nest Trilogy I - The Joiner King

by Troy Denning

  “Even I picked up on it,” Han said. “But I don’t see what difference it makes to finding Jaina and the others.”

  “That’s what we need to find out,” Leia said. Han’s mind ran as straight as a laser bolt when he was worried about his children—and she loved him for it. “Trust me, we’re better off knowing if Lomi and Welk are mixed up in this.”

  “And we need to talk to Raynar some more,” Luke added. “I don’t want to leave him here like that. I’m sure Cilghal knows someone who can repair that burn damage.”

  “That choice may not be ourz,” Saba said. “He is the heart of the Colony. This one does not think the Kind will let him go easily.”

  “Even if he wanted to, which he won’t,” Mara said. “Power is addictive, and he’s the king bee of a galactic empire.”

  “If power was the only appeal, we might have a chance,” Leia said. The passage divided about twelve meters ahead, and C-3PO and the guide vanished down the right branch without looking back. “But Raynar is responsible for the Colony. It wouldn’t exist without him, and he won’t abandon it lightly.”

  “Now I really have a bone to pick with those Dark Jedi,” Han said. “And with Raynar, too. Why couldn’t he just let bugs act like bugs?”

  “Because he’s a Jedi.” Luke sounded almost proud. “And he was trained in our old tradition—to serve life and protect it, wherever he found the need.”

  “Yeah, well, he won’t be protecting much life when that border conflict gets out of hand,” Han said.

  “Yes, now many more livez are at risk,” Saba said. “Nature is cruel for a reason, and Raynar has upset the balance.”

  “The law of unintended consequences,” Mara said. “That’s why it’s better not to intervene. A modern Jedi would have held himself apart and studied the situation first.”

  “And we’re sure that’s a good thing?” Leia asked. She was as surprised as anyone to hear herself asking this question, for the war had hardened her to death in a way that she would not have believed possible twenty years before. But the war was over, and she was tired of death, of measuring victory not by how many lives you saved, but how many you took. “How many beings would have died while a modern Jedi studied the situation?”

  Luke’s confusion filled the Force behind her. “Does it matter? A Jedi serves the Force, and if his actions interfere with the balance of the Force—”

  “I know,” Leia said wearily. “I just miss the days when all this was simple.”

  Sometimes, she wondered whether the tenets of this new Jedi order were an improvement or a convenience. She worried about what had been sacrificed to this new god Efficiency—about what had been lost when the Jedi abandoned their simple code and embraced moral relativism.

  They came to the divide in the passage and started down the right-hand branch. C-3PO and the guide were waiting about five meters ahead.

  “Buruub urub burr,” the guide droned.

  “Yoggoy asks that you please try to keep up,” C-3PO translated.

  “Rurr bururu ub Ruur.”

  “And she politely suggests that you start your investigations at the Crash,” C-3PO continued. “That way, you can see for yourself that UnuThul is not lying about the Dark Jedi.”

  “Urr buub ur bubbu.”

  “Or anything else.”

  Leia’s stomach tightened in surprise, but she wasted no effort trying to figure out how the insect knew what they had been discussing.

  Instead, she smiled calmly and said, “That sounds like an excellent idea, Yoggoy. Thank you for the suggestion.”

  By the time they reached the hangar a few minutes later, another Yoggoy was waiting for them with a battered hoversled.

  “Burru urr burrr ubb,” it explained, pointing toward the Shadow with one of its four arms. “Burrrr uuu!”

  “Oh, dear!” C-3PO exclaimed. “It seems that when Yoggoy attempted to collect Ben, Nanna threatened to open fire!”

  “I apologize, Yoggoy,” Luke said, addressing the driver. “But why were you trying to collect Ben?”

  The driver drummed an excited explanation.

  “Because you and Mistress Skywalker said it would be good for him to see the Crash,” C-3PO translated. He tipped his head, then added, “As a matter of fact, Master Luke, I do recall hearing you say that only one point seven minutes ago.”

  “Yes, but how—”

  “Collective mind,” Leia said, suddenly understanding how their guide had been eavesdropping on their conversation earlier. “What one Yoggoy hears—”

  “—they all do,” Han finished. “Kind of a new twist on being bugged, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is,” Leia said. As the constant stream of insects droned past, Yoggoy had been eavesdropping on them one word at a time. She took Han’s hand and stepped aboard the hoversled. “As I said, we have a lot to learn about the Colony.”

  The others climbed aboard as well. They stopped at the Shadow to pick up Ben and Nanna, then began a harrowing ride—it was very nearly a flight—through the congested avenues that wound through the skyscraping spires of the Yoggoy nest.

  An hour later, they were still in the “city,” standing in a long line of insects and Joiners outside the Crash. The site seemed part tourist attraction and part shrine, with thousands of insects waiting patiently in line, looking across a low stone wall up toward a wrecked light freighter. The crater slope was mottled with wadla and lyris and a dozen other kinds of flowers that Leia did not know, and the air was heavy with the vanilla tang of bond-inducing pheromones. Even the constant drone of several thousand drumming, ticking insect pilgrims had a strangely soothing effect.

  Despite the ambience, Leia was growing increasingly uneasy. She felt as though the half-buried YV-888 were still burning down through the atmosphere, as though something huge were about to come smashing down atop her head. And the other Jedi felt it, too. She could sense Luke’s disquiet through the Force and see Mara’s wariness in the sudden economy of her gestures. Even Saba seemed tense, watching the surrounding insects out of the corner of her eye and testing the air with her forked tongue.

  Or maybe the Barabel was just getting hungry.

  Leia stretched out into the Force, hoping to learn more. But reaching into the immense, diffuse presence that pervaded the insect nests was like looking into a room filled with smoke. There was something going on, but it was impossible to tell what.

  The Skywalker–Solo group finally reached a gate in the stone wall, where their escort motioned them to stop and wait.

  “Would anyone object to our visit, Yoggoy?” Leia asked. She still found it a little awkward to address every insect in a nest by the same name, but it certainly cut down on the need for introductions. “I keep having the feeling we’re not welcome here.”

  Yoggoy rumbled a reply.

  “Yoggoy assures you that your feeling is wrong,” C-3PO said. “Everyone is welcome to partake of the Crash.”

  “Partake?” Han asked. “What are we going to do, eat the dead?”

  “Uburu buu,” Yoggoy replied. “Bubu uu.”

  “There weren’t any dead,” C-3PO translated. “She apologizes.”

  “Uh, thanks,” Han said. “But no need. I wasn’t hungry anyway.”

  Leia felt a gentle tug through the Force. She turned slowly and found herself looking at her sister-in-law’s slender face.

  “Do you think Ben’s too young for this?” Mara asked. Her green eyes slid toward her right shoulder, indicating to Leia that she was asking another question entirely. “I don’t want him to see anything that would scare him off space travel.”

  “I’m old enough!” a small voice said from Luke’s side. “Nothing’s going to scare me.”

  “That’s a good question,” Leia said, ignoring Ben’s protest. “I guess it depends on what we see.”

  As Leia answered, she was looking past Mara’s ear toward a large, single-colored insect ten places back in the line. So blue it was almost black, it stood nearly th
e height of a man, with short bristling antennae and barbed, sharply curved mandibles. She could not tell whether its huge, bulbous eyes were focused on the Solo–Skywalker party, but when her gaze lingered an instant too long, the creature slipped out of sight behind a tanand-gray insect the size of a landspeeder.

  “We’ll just have to keep an eye out,” Leia said, “and take off if this starts to look disturbing.”

  “How disturbing can it be?” Han asked, clearly oblivious to what the two women were really talking about. “This wreck is seven years old. I’ll bet he sees worse stuff on the newsvids.”

  “Every day,” Ben agreed. Clearly eager to be on their way before his parents changed their mind, he turned to their guide. “Why are we standing here? I wanna see the Crash!”

  The guide thrummed an explanation.

  “Yoggoy assures you that we’ll see it soon, Master Ben,” C-3PO said. “But we must wait—”

  “Rurubur ur.” The guide extended one of her lower hands to Ben.

  “Oh. Apparently it’s our turn—”

  Before Nanna could stop him, Ben grabbed the insect’s hand and dragged her up the slope at a sprint.

  “Ben!” Nanna squawked, her repulsor-enhanced legs hissing as they propelled her enormous mass past Leia. “Stay with the group!”

  Mara shook her head, then turned to Han. “You seem to be rubbing off on my kid, Solo. Were yours this headstrong?”

  Han and Leia shared a glance, and they both nodded.

  “Anakin,” Han said. “If I said no, he had to find out why.”

  As Han spoke, a familiar sadness came to his face, and his eyes dropped. There was an awkward silence while everyone wondered what to say next, and Leia finally began to understand why there seemed to be such a bond between her husband and their nephew. Like Anakin, Ben was headstrong, fearless, and curious, with a clever mind and a quick wit, and he insisted on dealing with life on his own terms.

  After a moment, Mara reached over and squeezed Han’s forearm. “I just hope Ben grows up to be as fine a man as Anakin was. Nothing could make me more proud.”

  “Thanks.” Han looked up the slope—probably to disguise the glassiness that had come to his eyes—then added, “He will.”

  They followed Ben to the rim, then found themselves looking into the bottom of the crater. Ten meters below sat a cockeyed box of heat-softened durasteel, somewhat flattened in the bottom and so covered in crawling insects that they could barely tell the vessel had landed bridge-down. The hull was pocked with the oblong holes made by plasma cannons, and there were several long, twisted rips that were probably a result of the crash itself.

  “It looks like they flew through a plasma storm just leaving the Myrkr system,” Luke said. “I’m surprised they made it out.”

  “Corellian engineering,” Han said with pride. “A CEC ship will keep going until it hits something.”

  “Not always a good thing, especially when that something is a planet,” Leia said.

  She turned toward their escort, running her glance over the surrounding crowd, and noticed several dark blue insects similar to the one she had caught watching them earlier. It seemed to her that their huge eyes were all looking toward the Solo–Skywalker group, but that was hardly unusual. Most species of intelligent insect had an unsettling tendency to stare.

  Leia reached out to Luke and sensed that he had noticed the blue insects, too, then asked their guide, “What happened to the crew?”

  The guide used an upper hand to point at the base of the ship, where a pile of dirt lay slumped against the smashed bridge. Descending through the pile, toward a jagged rent in the hull, was a half-meter burrow that felt oddly familiar to Leia, as though she had seen it before—or somehow knew where it led.

  The insect began a lengthy explanation, which C-3PO translated: “That is where Yoggoy found Raynar Thul. He was badly burned and barely alive.”

  Leia forced her attention back to the guide and said, “I mean, what happened to the rest of the crew?” She knew what Yoggoy was going to say—that there had been no one else—but when confronted with an obvious lie, a good interrogator kept asking the same question in different ways, trying to find a seam that she could pry open to expose the truth. “We know Raynar survived.”

  A familiar touch came to Leia through the Force, one that she knew instantly and certainly to be her son’s, and she found herself looking away from their puzzled guide into the bottom of the crater. There, standing outside the burrow in a dirt-and soot-stained flight suit, was Jacen.

  Or, rather, a vision of Jacen. The Flier’s hull was still visible behind him, as was the mouth of the burrow.

  He smiled and said, “Hello.”

  The blood drained from Leia’s head, and she had to grab Han’s arm to steady herself. “Jacen’s been here.”

  “What?” Han peered into the crater. “I don’t see anything.”

  Luke saved her the trouble of explaining. “The Force, Han. She’s having a vision.”

  Han’s voice immediately grew wary. “Great. Just what we need. First, Force-calls, now Force-visions.”

  “Quiet, Solo,” Mara said. “Don’t interfere.”

  Jacen said something Leia could not hear, then a helmet and X-wing flight suit appeared in his hands.

  “Jacen,” Leia said, frowning. “I’m having trouble hearing you.”

  Jacen spoke again, but still she could not hear him.

  “Jacen?” Leia felt the color drain from her face. “How? You’re not—”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Uh-oh,” Han said beside Leia. His hand tightened around her arm. “Looks like someone’s been listening in.”

  Leia glanced over and saw three more deep blue insects pushing through the crowd gathered along the crater rim. They were clearly coming toward the Solo–Skywalker group, but Leia was not ready to leave yet. Jacen was still standing in the bottom of the crater, looking up at her.

  “Qoribu,” he said. “In the Gyuel system.”

  Leia wanted to ask him to repeat it, to be sure she had heard correctly, but Han was pulling her away, following Nanna down the crater slope through a swarm of astonished insects. Ben was in the droid’s arms, while Luke, Mara, and Saba flanked her on three sides. Leia and Han were in the rear.

  It took Leia a moment to see why they had suddenly grown so concerned. More blue insects had appeared, pushing through the crowd from all directions, not really attacking, just clacking their mandibles and staring. The rest of the Kind seemed unconcerned; they stepped aside politely, then continued to stare up at the Crash.

  Leia drew her own lightsaber and activated it. “Threepio, what are they saying?”

  “They’re not saying anything that makes sense,” C-3PO said. “They’re just repeating is it is it is…”

  Their guide rumbled an explanation.

  “What a relief!” C-3PO said. “Yoggoy says they’re just curious about us.”

  “Bugs are never just curious,” Han said. He drew his powerful BlasTech DL-44. “Especially when they’re hungry.”

  “Ubrub ubru Ruur!”

  “They just want to see the Crash!”

  “Then how come they’re coming after us?” Mara demanded.

  They reached the bottom of the slope and found the gate blocked by blue-black insects. Nanna shifted Ben to one arm and opened the other at the elbow, revealing her built-in blaster cannon.

  “That means move,” Han said, stepping past Nanna to confront the insects in front of them.

  The insects began to crowd forward to meet him.

  “The other way.”

  Han raised his blaster pistol and flicked the power setting from stun to lethal.

  “Not yet, Han.” Luke glanced in Han’s direction, and Han’s hand slowly fell to his side. “Let me handle this.”

  “Then you’d better handle it quick,” Leia said, looking back up the crater slope. Two dozen of the blue insects had emerged from the
mass and were slowly creeping closer. “It’s getting crowded back here.”

  Leia felt a brush of reassurance from Luke, then an astonished booming erupted behind her. She glanced back to see several dozen insects hanging in midair, their legs and arms wiggling wildly as they attempted to make contact with the ground. The group began to move forward again, and she backed out the gate under the dangling insects. Luke was standing to one side, holding his hands palms-up above his shoulders.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “Impressive, even.”

  Luke winked at her, then turned toward the rest of the blue insects, who were still attempting to follow. He lowered one of his hands and stretched it toward them…and the insects immediately began to back away, dipping their heads and clacking their mandibles.

  “They’re apologizing, Master Luke,” C-3PO said. “They didn’t mean to make you feel hunted.”

  “No harm,” Luke said. He waited until Leia, C-3PO, and their guide were past, then lowered the first group of blue insects down inside the gate. “As long as the feeling doesn’t come back anytime soon.”

  They followed Mara and Nanna back to the lot where Yoggoy had left their transport, then climbed aboard the battered hoversled. Their guide slipped behind the controls and turned her head all the way around to the passenger compartment, then thrummed a question.

  “Yoggoy asks what you would like to see next,” C-3PO said.

  “The Falcon,” Han said.

  “Rurr ur uu buubu.”

  “Yoggoy suggests a stop at a membrosia vault,” C-3PO said. “You seem rather tense.”

  “That’s ’cause I am,” Han growled. “And getting—”

  “I think we’ve seen enough for one day,” Leia said tersely. She could tell that the other Jedi shared the same feeling she did, for they were still holding their lightsaber handles in their hands and scanning the surrounding area. “I think we’d all like to go straight back to our vessels.”

  “Ububu.”

  The guide slipped the hoversled into motion so quickly that Leia and the others were knocked into their seats, and a moment later they were gliding onto a broad, traffic-choked boulevard flanked by looming insect spires.