by Troy Denning
“And a thousand credits a liter,” Tekli said. “I’m a Jedi Knight, not an investment banker.”
They reached the end of the hall, where two huge guards stood to either side of the corridor, their long mandibles locked across an entrance ten meters wide. They looked much the same as the one that had eaten the landspeeder, except there was nothing vestigial about their eyes. The pair glared at the procession as it approached, and Raynar began to fear that he and his companions would not be permitted to enter the queen’s chamber.
Then a deep drumming sounded from the interior. The guardians lifted their mandibles, and the guides led the way into a vast chamber containing hundreds of empty floor pits. In a healthy hive, the pits would have been filled with incubation cells. But the deep drifts of dust in the bottom of these cells suggested they had not been used in centuries. Unlike the rest of the palace, the room was well lit, with the sun’s orange light spilling in through a transparent membrane stretched across the vaulted ceiling.
The guides stopped a few steps inside, leaving Raynar and his companions to continue down a large center aisle toward the queen. Almost as large as the entrance sentries, she lay stretched across a massive dais, with six sturdy legs curled against a bantha-sized abdomen and a mouth flanked by a pair of multijointed mandibles. Standing on the floor in front of her were four guardians identical to those outside the entrance.
Closer to the dais were a pair of floor pits filled with the familiar comb of incubation cells. Raynar saw no more than thirty compartments, and only three nursery Killiks to attend them. The hive wasn’t quite dead, but it wasn’t thriving, either.
As Raynar and his companions passed the last nursery pit, the guardians shuffled away from the center of the dais, revealing a wide set of stairs. The queen’s abdomen rippled, filling the chamber with a long, low rumble barely audible to human hearing.
“I must say, this is quite unexpected,” C-3PO said. “The queen is inviting Lowbacca and Tekli to groom her.”
Lowbacca emitted an uncertain groan.
“It means you remove her external parasites,” Raynar explained. Lowbacca and Tekli’s old hive, Taat, had been much more egalitarian in social structure, so they had probably never participated in the ritual. “It’s an honor. Yoggoy used to groom me—”
Lowbacca huffed in disgust.
“Just think of it as a medical procedure,” Tekli whispered. “And remember why we’re here.”
The Wookiee sighed and dropped his head, and the group ascended the stairs. An attendant emerged from behind the queen, appearing atop her giant abdomen with a bucket in one hand and a cloth and a bottle of antiseptic spray in two of her others, then motioned for the groomers to join her. As former Joiners themselves, Lowbacca and Tekli had enough experience to realize Killiks weren’t shy about crawling over one another, so they scrambled up to join the attendant.
Raynar watched them ascend, then stepped over to present himself to the queen. Her head was small compared with the rest of her body, but it was still half the size of Raynar himself, with eyes as big as shock-balls and slender mandibles the length of a Wookiee’s arm. Raynar raised his flesh-and-blood hand in greeting. In return, the queen dipped her head, then rubbed a feathery antenna along his wrist.
“Wuur uu rur uu,” she thrummed. “Ubub ruub uru.”
“Thuruht welcomes you back to the Kind,” C-3PO translated. “The hive will be honored to have you.”
Raynar felt a nervous flutter in his stomach. Lowbacca had clearly stated they had not come to join the hive, yet Thuruht was speaking as if it were already fact. All Killiks had a tendency to confuse belief with reality, so the queen might simply be saying she believed the three Jedi would eventually become Joiners again. But her tone was insistent, and it struck Raynar as an assertion of will—a warning that Thuruht would not be defied.
Raynar continued to hold his arm aloft until the queen withdrew her antenna. Then he said, “You know we are not here to join the hive.”
The queen lifted her head above his, clapped her mandibles together, and let out a short rumble.
“ ‘Yes, but it will happen,’ ” C-3PO translated. “She seems quite sure of it.”
Raynar let out his breath, taking a moment to calm himself, then looked into the queen’s nearest eye. “That can’t happen,” he said. “You remember last time, when I became UnuThul.”
The queen dipped her head a little and let out a series of soft booms.
“ ‘You won’t make the same mistake again,’ ” C-3PO translated. “ ‘You have grown in years and in wisdom.’ ”
“It doesn’t matter,” Raynar said. “The Chiss wouldn’t like it. They would go to war.”
The queen’s reply grew a little softer.
“ ‘What the Chiss don’t know will never hurt us,’ ” C-3PO said.
“They already know.”
A low rumble sounded from the insect’s thorax, and C-3PO translated, “ ‘You told them?’ ”
Raynar shook his head. “No, but they have spies everywhere.” As he spoke, he was trying to figure out why Thuruht seemed so determined to have him as a Joiner. Visitors became Joiners after they had been exposed to Killik pheromones for enough time. But hives rarely engaged in deliberate recruitment—not unless they were in need of something a new Joiner could provide. “If I don’t return to the Galactic Alliance soon, the Chiss will mobilize for war—and they will attack the Kind.”
The queen studied him for a time, then tipped her head and rumbled a question.
“Thuruht asks why you came, if your presence is such a danger?”
“Because a greater danger threatens the Galactic Alliance, and we need Thuruht’s help to defeat it,” Raynar explained. “We need to know everything Thuruht can tell us about the Celestials—and a being who calls herself—”
The queen’s entire body shuddered. “Ruur ub?”
“It seems we’re in luck, Jedi Thul,” C-3PO said. “She asks if the name is Abeloth?”
Raynar nodded. “Then you know who Abeloth is?”
The queen gave several short, nervous booms.
“Indeed she does,” C-3PO responded. “Thuruht is the one who imprisoned her.”
Raynar’s heart began to pound. “Good. The Jedi need to know everything Thuruht can tell us about her.”
“Ub?”
Raynar needed no translation. “Because Abeloth has escaped,” he said. “And we don’t know where she went.”
The queen raised her head and let out a rumble so thunderous that Raynar’s own torso began to reverberate. Workers started to pour into the chamber from all sides, some bearing orbs of membrosia and others rushing to clean the dust from the cell pits in the floor. The nursery attendants dropped into the nearest clean pit and began to exude wax, creating a comb of fresh incubation cells.
Raynar turned to C-3PO, who was watching the sudden flurry of activity with an attentiveness that suggested a major portion of his processing power was engaged to make sense of it.
“Threepio,” Raynar shouted, trying to make himself heard above the rumbling queen. “What’s all the booming about?”
“I’m afraid it makes no sense, Jedi Thul,” the droid replied. “I must be misunderstanding.”
“Tell me anyway,” Raynar ordered.
“Very well,” C-3PO said. “Thuruht keeps saying that the hive must prepare.”
“Prepare?” Raynar asked. “For what?”
“That’s the part I must be misunderstanding,” C-3PO answered. “Thuruht seems convinced that the galaxy is about to perish. She keeps saying that the end of time has come.”
OUTSIDE THE AIRTIGHT DOOR OF THE COMPUTER CORE STOOD TWO Sith sentries, both holding their lightsabers in hand. Wearing black robes over black torso armor, they were scanning the long access corridor and speaking frequently into their headset comlinks. Clearly, they would not be easy to surprise.
Jysella watched the two guards on her screen for a moment longer, then thumbed the control-bal
l at the base of the remote display unit. The two Sith seemed to shrink and pull away as the tiny spy droid widened its angle of vision. Around the perimeter of the screen, a bright green border continued to flash, indicating that the unit’s molecular sampler was still finding traces of detonite—a prime ingredient in most antipersonnel mines.
She smiled. The mines weren’t going to be a problem.
Jysella studied the screen a moment longer. There wasn’t much else to see in the wide-angle view, only the white corridor that led to the decontamination chamber outside their objective—the Jedi Temple’s computer core. Once her team breached the core, the battle was—for all practical purposes—won. Their droid, Rowdy, would plug into a data socket and convince the central computer to lower the shields and open the blast doors. Three brigades of Jedi-led space marines would storm the Temple. The battle would be bloody and costly, but the Sith had no place to run. They would be found and eliminated.
Simple.
Jysella switched to thermal imaging. The two guards smudged into bright yellow man-blobs. The corridor itself turned medium blue, with the orange stripes of electrical conduits running through the walls. Behind the stripes, she could make out the red ghost-shapes of another twenty Sith warriors, hiding in the cramped cavities behind the wall panels.
Sith were patient, she had to give them that. It had been thirty-six hours since her father and Master Skywalker had decided to break into the computer core, and the ambushers had probably been hiding behind the walls for most of that time. With any luck, they would be groggy and slow from the ordeal, and it would be easy to trick them—at least, as easy as it ever was to trick Sith.
Jysella opened a comlink channel to Master Skywalker. “No change.”
She wasn’t concerned about being overheard. She and Ben and Valin were hiding inside a closed room, more than a hundred meters from the nearest Sith. Jysella wasn’t sure where her father and Luke and Jaina were hiding, but she knew it would be where they, too, could not be overheard.
The comm channel itself was even more secure, encrypted using the Jedi’s own unbreakable logarithms. The strike team had been using their comlinks to coordinate with Admiral Bwua’tu and his staff. Once, during a rest break, Jysella and her brother had used the channel to let their mother, Mirax, know they had survived the disastrous ambush in the water treatment plant. Jaina Solo had even managed to link to the HoloNet so she could talk to Jagged Fel—in the Imperial Remnant.
Alone in here, they were not.
After a few seconds, Master Skywalker acknowledged, “Copy, no change. All clear?”
“You’re good to move,” Jysella confirmed. “May the Force be with you.”
“And with you, too,” Luke answered. “If something doesn’t feel right—”
“Don’t worry, Dad,” Ben said. He was standing next to Valin behind Jysella, watching the remote display over her shoulder. “No heroes here.”
The voice in Jysella’s earbud changed to that of her own father. “You three are already heroes, just trying this,” he said. “What we don’t need are dead heroes. Understood?”
“That goes double for you guys,” Jysella said. “Now can we please get this done? It’s been ages since I had a decent sanisteam.”
An awkward silence fell over the channel—mostly because no one really wanted to sign off. After nearly two days of nerve-racking evasion, heavy fighting, and rushed healing trances, the entire team was feeling a little punchy.
The silence continued until Jysella finally sighed. “Joke, okay?” She shook her head, then added, “See you in a few.”
“Yes,” Jaina replied from the other end. “See you in a few.”
The channel went silent again. Jysella slid a control glide down, and the blobby images of the Sith ambushers began to diminish as the spy droid retreated. The droid was barely the size of a flitnat, but she was careful to keep its speed down to avoid drawing attention to it. This was their last chance to make the Temple assault work, and if it failed, the best they could hope for would be to die fighting rather than have the Sith take them alive.
Still, Jysella would not have wanted to be anywhere else. When she and Valin had volunteered to enter the Temple with the first wave of Jedi, Master Skywalker himself had said that he would be proud to have the Horn siblings guarding his back—despite the Abeloth-induced psychosis that had caused them to betray him and Ben on Nam Chorios. And if Luke Skywalker could show that kind of loyalty to them, then Jysella could sure as the Void do the same for him.
After a few seconds, a trio of yellow ghost-shapes entered the thermal image and began to advance up the corridor. The two sentry-blobs guarding the computer core stepped to the front of the decontamination chamber, then vanished behind the white-hot brightness of ignited lightsabers.
Jysella reactivated her throat-mike. “Seven meters,” she said, estimating the distance to the antipersonnel mines the spy droid had detected. “Stop there.”
All three figures—one small and female, the other two large and male—stopped. The taller male extended a hand, and Jysella barely managed to switch back to conventional imaging before a Force-generated pressure wave triggered the first mine. A cone of orange fire shot up to mushroom against the ceiling, then a second one erupted, and a third, and a fourth. The image on the display deteriorated into a wild blur as the shock waves sent the spy droid tumbling.
“Trap defanged,” Jysella commented. She glanced back at Ben. “Good plan. Let’s hope the rest works this well.”
“It wasn’t mine alone,” Ben said.
Ben’s original suggestion had called for him and Jysella to draw the ambushers off, but their fathers had believed the Sith would be more likely to fall for the ploy if they knew where both Masters and Jaina were.
“But it will work,” Ben said. “You can count on it.”
No sooner had he spoken than the muffled crack of Force lightning sounded from the computer core. Jysella used the thumb-ball to resume control of the spy droid, then reoriented it until they could see the Sith ambushers. All twenty appeared to be racing down the corridor behind a rolling storm of blasterfire and Force lightning. There was no sign of either Ben’s father or her own, but Jaina’s small form could be glimpsed up near the ceiling, Force-tumbling through the air as she batted colored bolts back into the pursuing mob.
Jysella rotated the spy droid back toward the computer core. On her display screen appeared a smoky, blast-pocked corridor showing stretches of exposed conduit and ductwork. Six bodies—all Sith—lay scattered along the passage. The heavy door that guarded the decontamination chamber stood sealed but unguarded, the control panel keypad casting a faint green glow into the battle haze.
“Too easy,” Jysella said. “Even your plans aren’t that good, Jedi Skywalker.”
“Another trap,” Ben agreed. “No sentries, and that’s a lot of bodies for three people to leave behind while running in the other direction.”
“That wasn’t just anyone running in the other direction,” Valin reminded him. “It was the Sword of the Jedi and two Council Masters.”
“All the same.” Ben reached over Jysella’s shoulder to tap the screen. “Run the droid past and see which ones are faking.”
Jysella elevated the droid’s auditory sensors to maximum and did as Ben suggested. They heard a lot of crackling and hissing from broken conduits and breached ductwork, but nothing that sounded remotely like a heartbeat—not even a weak one. She stopped the droid a few meters from the computer core.
“We’re just going to have to accept it,” Valin said. “Our dads are awesome in a fight.”
“Jaina, too,” Jysella added. “But let’s play it safe—I’ll scout ahead.”
Before Ben or her brother could object, Jysella hit the door control and stepped out into the corridor. Twenty seconds later, she entered the smoke-filled passage that led to the computer core. She paused at the intersection, then slowly extended her Force awareness toward the door and sensed nothing—no
t even a tenuous sign of life.
And that was when she heard the soft whir of droid wheels approaching behind her. Jysella glanced back and found Rowdy following a few meters behind. Whether the little droid had misinterpreted an instruction or slipped away from Ben and Valin on its own was impossible to say, but there was no question of sending him back. They didn’t have time, and even issuing the instruction would draw more attention to them than she cared for.
Motioning Rowdy to wait behind her, Jysella pulled her blaster pistol and advanced up the corridor to the first body. A Sith male with a blaster hole still smoking in his forehead, he was obviously no threat. She put two more bolts into the corpse, hoping to encourage anyone playing dead to reveal themselves now.
When no one moved, Jysella continued to the next corpse and found that this one, too, had a blaster hole in the center of his forehead. So did the next one, and the one after that, and the last of the six. She tried to tell herself it was only natural, that with the Sith wearing armor beneath their robes, the only place to hit them was the head. But no matter how she looked at it, that was amazing marksmanship for someone on the run.
Jysella was just a few steps from the computer core when a soft whir sounded behind her again. She spun, igniting her lightsaber and bringing it around less than a centimeter above Rowdy’s dome. The little droid gave an alarmed screech and rocked back on his treads—then suddenly extended his welding arm and started to roll forward again, shooting sparks in Jysella’s direction.
“Stop that!” Jysella pointed her lightsaber down the corridor toward the intersection. “Didn’t I order you to wait back there?”
Rowdy ignored her and rolled under the sizzling blade toward the computer core. He exchanged his welding arm for an interface arm and went to work slicing the lock.
Jysella took the chance to comm Ben. “Are you missing something?”
“Rowdy.” Ben sounded exasperated. “He went out the door about ten seconds after you did, then started to make too much noise when I tried to haul him back. In the end, Valin and I decided it was safer just to let him follow.”