Star Wars: Dark Nest I: Joiner King

by Denning, Troy

  The flight deck was hidden behind a curtain of smoke and rolling flame. Geysers of fire retardant rose from the ceiling nozzles, creating swirling ghosts of pink fog. Howls of human anguish drowned out the scream of buckling metal.

  A single figure crawled out of the smoke, hairless and coughing and blistered raw. His face was unrecognizable, but four gashes ran diagonally across his chest, the wound hanging half open where the fleshglue had dissolved in the heat. One hand trailed behind, dragging a pair of levitated shapes along by their cloak collars. The two shapes were still burning, writhing in the air and flailing against each other in their pain.

  Smoke began to rise from beneath Jacen’s palm, and the smell of cooking flesh filled the air. He kept his hand pressed against the wall. Pain no longer troubled him. Pain was his servant; he had learned that from Vergere.

  The crawling figure reached the hatchway and paused, turning in Jacen’s direction. The face was too scorched and swollen to recognize, but the eyes belonged to Raynar, questioning and proud and so terribly naïve. The two of them locked gazes for a moment, then Raynar cocked his head in confusion and started to open his mouth…

  Jacen pulled his hand from the wall. The figures vanished instantly, returning him to a flight deck filled with the stale smell of ash and clouds of pink dust.

  An insect brushed its antennae over his scorched hand. “Rurrrrruu,” it drummed in concern. “Urrubuuuu?”

  “Yes, it does hurt.” Jacen smiled. “It’s nothing.”

  He removed a small canister from his equipment belt and sprayed a coating of synthflesh over his palm. Raynar had been the misfit of their childhood group, trying a little too hard to fit in and often the butt of jokes for his arrogance and showy clothes. He had never impressed anyone as exceptional Jedi material, and there had been a few conversations in which fellow candidates had expressed reservations about his judgment and initiative. Yet what Raynar had done on the Flier, risking his own life to save those who had betrayed his friends and abducted him, was the essence of being a Jedi Knight. Jacen doubted he would have done the same thing—and Jaina would have stayed to watch them burn. Given what the theft of the Flier had meant—that Anakin would certainly die of his wounds—Jacen might even have joined her.

  Floating his Force light ahead of him, Jacen crawled into the engineering cabin and followed Raynar’s trail through a cramped maze of toppled equipment. The stench of charred bones grew stronger, and Jacen feared he would only find their burned remains trapped in some dead-end corner, or simply lying in the middle of the aisle where Raynar had succumbed to smoke inhalation. His fears began to seem justified when he started to find scorched bones in the middle of the aisle—first, a few finger and toe and hand bones, then a forearm and a shin, then finally a femur. The space between the floor and ceiling grew smaller and smaller, and he had to drop to his belly, and he began to sense the residue of Raynar’s panic in the Force.

  Then Jacen came to the shoulder blade, lying half buried in a pile of dirt that had poured in through a rent in the hull, and he knew. He began to dig, pulling the soft dirt under his body and pushing it back with his feet, and a moment later he felt a welcome draft of fresh air. Raynar had reached an exit—but in what condition? Had he survived? Had either of the others?

  His chest tight with hope and fear, Jacen belly-crawled through the hole, out into the bottom of the crater…and was surprised to find his guide waiting. In its hands, the insect held a new star-fighter helmet and flight suit.

  “Ubu rrru ubb.” Without waiting for Jacen to stand, the guide offered the helmet and suit to him. “Urru bu.”

  Jacen stood. “Why would I need a starfighter helmet?” Instead of taking either item, he began to brush himself off. “I fly a skiff.”

  The guide raised one of its four hands toward the crater rim, where one of the Reconstruction Police’s new XJ5 X-wings sat with an open cockpit.

  Jacen had a sinking feeling. “I’m happy with my skiff.”

  The guide thrummed a long explanation, which seemed to assert that he would be much happier serving the Colony in a ChaseX than his skiff, which the Colony was already using to ferry a group of Togot pilgrims back to the spaceport.

  Jacen did not bother to demand its return. He had already learned that the Colony insects had no real understanding of private property. The skiff would be put to use—and, fortunately, well maintained—until he was ready to track it down again.

  “Why would I want to serve the Colony?” Jacen asked. “Especially in a combat craft?”

  A membrane slid over the guide’s bulbous eyes and rose again, and it continued to hold the helmet and flight suit out to Jacen.

  “It’s a simple question,” Jacen said. “If the Colony expects me to kill people, you’d better be able to tell me why.”

  The guide cocked its head in incomprehension, and Jacen knew he was asking too much. As social insects, Colony residents obviously had a very limited sense of self—and absolutely no concept of free will. He might as well have been asking a beldon to take him fishing.

  Always the preacher. The voice was the same that had come to Jacen back in Akanah’s teaching circle—save that now the words were raspy and booming instead of faint and wispy. You still think too much, Jacen.

  “I usually find it preferable to catastrophic blunders,” Jacen said. The voice was so harsh and deep he found it even more difficult to place. It might have been Raynar—or it might have been Lomi or Welk or someone else altogether. “You seem to know me. You couldn’t believe I would just start killing for you.”

  We do know you, Jacen, the voice said, not unkindly. We know what you will fight for.

  As the voice spoke, an immense murky presence rose inside Jacen’s mind, overwhelming his defenses so quickly he had no chance to shut it out. In the midst of the presence, he saw Jaina and the others, their faces filled with surprise and revulsion and pity. They were all in their flight suits, haggard and travel-worn, but healthy enough and unafraid.

  They serve the Colony, Jacen, the voice said. Will you join them? Will you help your sister?

  Jacen did not answer, even in his thoughts. A day ago, he had felt Jaina growing small and cold in the Force, the way she always did before a battle. But there had been no indication afterward of anything alarming, not even the usual weary sorrow that always came of taking lives. He reached out to her, probing to see if there was anything amiss. She responded with a welcoming warmth that let him know she was looking forward to seeing him.

  But there was more, just a hint of the murky presence that had pushed its way into Jacen’s mind—not hostile or ominous or threatening, just there.

  The guide drew Jacen’s attention back to it by pressing the helmet and flight suit into his hands. “Buu buur urub ruuruur.”

  Jacen pushed the equipment back into the guide’s hands. “I haven’t said I’m going.”

  “Buu rurr. Ubu ur.”

  “Perhaps,” Jacen allowed. The murky presence had withdrawn from his own mind, once again leaving him solely with his guide. “Once I’ve found out what happened here.”

  He squatted on his haunches and ran his fingers through the dirt, searching for any sign that Raynar and the others had died here. When he found no more large bones, he pictured the raw and blistered face he had seen on the flight deck, then called on the Force again, trying to reach into the past and learn what had become of Raynar.

  But this time, the Force opened itself to him in its own way. Instead of the smoke and scorched flesh he had smelled on the flight deck, the odor it brought down to him was fresh and fragrant and familiar, a smell he had known since childhood.

  Jacen looked up at the crater rim and was puzzled to find an image of his mother there, frowning across the gap at the Flier’s blast-pocked hull. She was wearing a white blouse with a brown skirt and vest that reminded Jacen of his father’s swashbuckling style, right down to the holstered blaster hanging on her hip. There were some new strands of gray hair and a
few more laugh lines around her mouth, but she looked healthy and content, and Jacen’s heart leapt at the sight of her. The last time he had seen her face had been over five standard years ago, before leaving on his odyssey of self-discovery, and he was astonished at the joy even a vision of it brought to him.

  Jacen swallowed his surprise and tried instead to simply concentrate on what the Force was revealing to him. He knew that she was not actually standing there now, but at some other time. And, since his mother was the only figure he could see, she was probably the link to discovering what had become of Raynar.

  She turned to someone he could not see, then asked, “What happened to the crew?”

  There was a pause while she listened to the reply. Jacen could imagine only one thing that would bring his parents this deep into the Unknown Regions, the heart of the Colony itself. They had to be looking for the strike team.

  His mother looked back to the Flier. “I mean the rest of the crew. We know Raynar survived.”

  Jacen had his answer, but he was not ready to release the vision—not yet. He looked up at his mother’s image, reaching out to her in the Force to strengthen their contact.

  “Hello.”

  Her gaze dropped toward Jacen’s voice, then she furrowed her brow and reached out, as though grasping for someone’s arm. “Jacen has been here.”

  Has. So they were still behind him.

  The guide snapped its mandibles next to Jacen’s ear. “Bubu ruu bu?”

  “No one. Sorry.” Continuing to hold the vision through the Force, Jacen finally took the helmet and flight suit. “Okay. Where am I going?”

  The guide replied that Jacen wouldn’t recognize the name of the system. It was on the Chiss frontier.

  Up on the crater rim, the vision of his mother frowned. “Jacen? I’m having trouble hearing you.”

  Jacen ignored her and continued to speak to the guide. “Humor me. In case something happens and I need to find my own way.”

  The navigator spread its antennae. “Burubu,” it answered. “Ur bu Brurr rubur.”

  “Jacen?” His mother’s face grew pale. “How? You’re not—”

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

  The guide turned a bulbous eye toward the crater rim.

  “Qoribu,” Jacen said, looking up at his mother. “In the Gyuel system.”

  NINE

  As the Falcon dropped toward the mottled pinnacles below, Leia found herself straining against her crash webbing, almost gasping at the bustling vastness of the Colony’s central nest. The Yoggoy towers, brightly adorned in wild splashes of color, stood hip-to-hip across the entire planet, and the air was so thick with flying vehicles that she could barely see the surface.

  “Kind of looks like old Coruscant,” Han said, speaking to Leia and—over the comm—to Luke, Mara, and everyone else aboard the Shadow. “So big—and all that bustle.”

  Leia continued to strain forward over her controls, peering out the lower edge of the canopy. As the Falcon descended, she began to see that while the pinnacles came in every size, they were all distinctly cone-shaped, and they all had horizontally banded exteriors—like the insect spires in Killik Twilight.

  She started to say as much, then decided she was letting her imagination run wild. Cones were a basic geometric form. Creating them out of mud rings was probably as common among intelligent insects as was erecting stone rectangles among social mammals.

  “I’m gonna blast that can of corrosion back to quarks!” Han said.

  Leia glanced over to find Han frowning at his tactical display, then checked her own screen and saw that the XR808g’s transponder code had disappeared. “Did Juun land already?”

  Han shook his head. “The little earworm shut off his transponder.”

  Knowing better than to ask if Han had remembered to run a code search, Leia activated her throat mike.

  “We’ve lost the Exxer.”

  The report was greeted with a troubled silence. Right now, the XR808g was their only hope of locating Jaina and the others.

  “Any ideas?” Han asked. “I’d like to find these kids before they become a bunch of bughuggers.”

  “That’s not going to happen.” Even over the cockpit comm, Luke’s voice was calm and reassuring. “They’re Jedi.”

  “What’s that have to do with the price of spice on Nal Hutta?” Han demanded.

  “They’re too strong, Han,” Mara said. “Especially Jaina.”

  “Yeah?” Han asked. “If they’re so strong, how’d that Force-call drag them all the way out here in the first place?”

  The troubled silence returned.

  Leia reached over and laid her hand over Han’s. “It’ll be all right, Han. I can still feel them out there. They’re not Joiners.”

  “Yet,” Han grumbled. Over the comm, he asked, “How about those ideas?”

  “Try a code search,” Luke suggested helpfully.

  Han rolled his eyes.

  Leia smiled at him, then said to Luke, “Thanks for the suggestion. We’ve already tried that.”

  “No need to worry,” Mara said. “We haven’t lost them.”

  “We haven’t?” Leia asked. Before the XR808g left Lizil, Han and Juun had hidden a subspace transceiver beneath the cockpit and linked it to the navicomputer. Each time the XR808g initiated a jump, the transceiver automatically encoded the galactic coordinates and broadcast them to the Shadow and Falcon—but that didn’t help them now, when they were already at those coordinates. “I don’t understand.”

  “Give me a second.” Mara remained silent for a moment, then said, “Be ready to take a fix, in case Juun is smarter than he looked.”

  Han raised his brow. “I don’t recall planting a homing beacon on the Exxer.”

  “Because you’re not the sneaky one—despite all reports to the contrary,” Mara commed. “Ready?”

  Leia smiled and prepared a navigation lock. “Ready.” A red dot began to blink in the upper corner of the tactical display. “Got it.”

  Leia activated the lock, and Han swung the Falcon around behind the red dot. Yoggoy traffic proved an unimaginable free-for-all, with muscle-powered balloon-bikes competing for airspace against dilapidated cloud cars and modern airspeeders. Thick-waisted rocket planes flashed past in all directions, packed to bursting with goggle-eyed insects and trailing oily plumes of smoke. Battered space freighters eased their durasteel hulks down into the mess, descending through the traffic toward the haze-blanketed towertops below.

  A stubby little rocket plane shot out from under a cargo blimp off to starboard and began to climb, coming for Leia’s side of the cockpit.

  “Rodder!” Han cursed, and the Falcon took a sudden skip upward. “Watch where you’re going!”

  “Don’t get so upset,” Leia said. “We have plenty—”

  A thirty-meter insect shuttle flashed into view from beneath Leia’s side of the cockpit, headed straight for the little rocket plane.

  “Oh, my!” C-3PO said from the navigator’s station. “That was too close—”

  “Hard to port,” Leia interrupted. “Now, Han!”

  “Port?” Han shot back. “You’re crazy!”

  Leia glanced over and saw the mountainous hull of a giant transport gliding past above the Falcon’s forward mandibles.

  “Oh—” Leia slapped the crash alarm, bringing the inertial compensators to maximum, priming the fire-suppression systems, and setting off a cacophony of alerts farther back in the vessel. “Brace yourself!”

  “Dead stop!” Luke’s voice came over the comm. “Dead stop!”

  Han already had his hand on the throttles—but before he could pull them back, the shuttle was diving and the rocket plane was climbing past the Falcon almost vertically, so close that Leia could have reached out and grabbed the pilot’s antennae.

  Han casually slipped his hand off the throttle and deactivated the crash alarm. “No need to get all excited.” His hands were shaking as badly as Leia’s
, but she saw no use in pointing that out. “I’ve got it under control.”

  “Yes,” C-3PO agreed. “It’s fortunate that you were wise enough to do nothing. It gave the other pilots time to respond to your error.”

  “My error?” Han replied. “I was flying straight and level.”

  “Quite so, but the others are all following sine wave trajectories,” C-3PO said. “And may I point out that any system functions optimally only when all elements use the same equations?”

  A two-seater rocket plane dropped in ahead of the Falcon and bobbed along pouring fumes into their faces, then swerved aside to reveal the bulbous shape of a balloon-bike coming at them head-on. Han rolled into an inverted dive and spiraled past beneath it.

  “Now you tell me,” Han said.

  “Watch it back there,” Leia warned the Shadow. “And have Artoo plot a sine wave trajectory for us—a safe one.”

  “We’ll send it up in a moment,” Mara promised.

  The moment went by, then two, then several. Finally, when her nerves could stand no more close calls—and no more of Han’s grouching—Leia commed back to the Shadow.

  “Uh, we didn’t receive that trajectory.”

  “We’re trying,” Luke said. “Artoo’s sort of locked up.”

  “Locked up?” Han asked. “An astromech?”

  “He’s been acting strange lately,” Luke explained. “All we got before he went blank was not safe, not safe, not safe.”

  “Oh, dear!” C-3PO exclaimed. “It sounds as though he’s trying to resolve an unknowable variable. We’re doomed!”

  “Yeah?” Han waved at the traffic outside the forward viewport. “Then how come none of them are crashing?”

  C-3PO was silent for a moment, then said, “I wouldn’t know, Captain Solo. Their processors certainly aren’t any better than Artoo’s.”

  “They don’t need processors.” Leia was thinking of Luke’s description of the cantina where Saba met Tarfang, of how the mysterious Joiners had arrived to lead away any patron with whom he struck up a conversation. “It was pretty clear that the Lizil can communicate telepathically. Maybe the Yoggoy can, too.”