Star Wars®: Dark Nest I: The Joiner King

by Troy Denning

  “Ben, I think Gorog wants you to leave, too.”

  Ben glanced at the Killik, then asked Mara, “Are you going to kill her?”

  “Ben, I’m the one who’s bleeding here.”

  “But you’re a Jedi Master,” Ben said. “It doesn’t matter if a Jedi Master bleeds.”

  “You’ve been watching too many action holos,” Mara said. Nevertheless, she hung her lightsaber on her belt. “But, okay, I promise—if you leave right now.”

  Gorog rumbled something that caused Ben to scowl.

  “Maybe you should just be nice,” he said to the Killik. “Then maybe Mom would let you stay.”

  Gorog thrummed, and Mara began to wish C-3PO were here to translate.

  “She doesn’t always lie,” Ben protested. “Not even most—”

  Gorog raised two hands and shooed him toward the door.

  Ben sighed and left the room.

  Mara waited until she heard the front door slide open, then said, “Thank you for that.”

  The Killik spread its mandibles and sprang. Mara caught it in the Force and slammed it into a support post. There was a sharp crackle, and when the insect dropped to the floor, one of its wings jutted out at an angle.

  “I don’t understand why you want to fight,” Mara said. “Because you have no chance of winning—”

  Gorog jumped across the room, mandibles snapping at head height. Mara rushed to meet the attack, then dropped into a slide, catching both ankles as she passed beneath the insect, spinning to her belly, twisting its legs around and slamming the Killik down on its back.

  The insect flexed its good wing and landed back on its feet, but Mara was already driving an elbow into a tubular knee. The leg snapped with a sickening crackle, and the Killik dropped to the floor.

  Mara grabbed the Killik’s good leg and stood, jerking it up more or less upside down, then snake-locked her leg over the insect’s and shoved against the joint.

  “All right, that’s enough,” she said. “I promised Ben I wouldn’t kill you—but I didn’t say anything about hurting.”

  The Killik clacked its mandibles wildly, then released an acrid, foul-smelling vapor that filled Mara’s eyes with cloudy tears and turned her stomach queasy and rebellious. She snapped the joint and attempted to launch herself out of danger with a departing thrust-kick, but the insect was already rolling into Mara’s leg.

  She landed facedown, her kicking leg trapped beneath the Killik. Four pincer-hands grabbed hold of her calf and began to pull, dragging her foot toward the clacking mandibles. Mara’s own hand drifted toward her lightsaber, but she stopped short of pulling it free. This bug was not going to make a liar and a killer of her in her son’s eyes. She reached forward, clawing at the wooden floor, trying to pull free, and only slipped farther beneath the insect.

  Then Mara saw the table, lying on its side where it had fallen when Gorog attacked. She reached out with a mental hand, turned it end-on, and brought it sailing into the Killik’s head.

  The table connected with a spectacular pop, and Gorog’s grasp loosened. Mara scrambled free and Force-sprang to her feet, then spun around to find the Killik collapsed on its belly, all six limbs trembling and shaking in convulsions. She rushed to its side and pulled the table away, revealing a ten-centimeter dent in the head where the edge had cracked the chitin.

  “Stang!”

  Mara pulled the comlink from her pocket and started to call for medical assistance—then noticed the Killik slowly drawing its trembling arms in toward its body, gathering itself to spring.

  Mara slipped forward and brought her heel down on the dented chitin. “I said that was enough!”

  Gorog collapsed again, unable to do anything but lie on the floor and tremble. Then Mara felt Luke urgently reaching out to her, warning her to be careful, urging her not to kill it.

  Mara eyed the insect with spite in her heart. “What is it with you?”

  A few seconds later, Luke came rushing in the door with half a dozen senior apprentices at his back.

  “Mara, are you—”

  “I’m fine, Skywalker.” She took the hand he offered and glared down at the trembling insect. “But I’m getting awfully tired of people telling me not to squash that bug.”

  “Sorry about that, but the comm center just finished reconstructing some of Leia’s message.” Luke motioned the apprentices to secure the Killik, then added, “She says it could explode.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Reclining in long diagnostics chairs with their heads hidden beneath scanning helmets and their bodies swaddled in sensor feeds, the subjects of the experiment—Tahiri and the other Joiner Jedi Knights—reminded Luke of captives in an Imperial interrogation facility. It did not help that the Killik and Alema Rar, who had arrived aboard the Falcon just hours before, were heavily sedated and strapped in place with nylasteel bands. Even the isolation chambers in which the subjects were located—dark, gas-tight compartments with transparisteel doors—looked like detention-center cells.

  “I’m sorry it’s so dim in here, Master Skywalker,” Cilghal said. She was standing behind a semicircular control station in a white laboratory smock, studying a data-holo comparing the brain activity of her subjects. “But it’s better to have as little background stimulation as possible. It helps isolate their responses.”

  “I understand.” Luke did not bother denying his revulsion. Cilghal could certainly sense his feelings through the Force, just as Luke could sense the excitement that had caused her to comm him in the first place. “And it’s more than the darkness. The whole lab raises unpleasant associations.”

  “Yes, it does have a certain Imperial utilitarianism,” Cilghal said. “I wish there had been time to design something less dismal, but this configuration was the quickest to assemble.”

  “Speed is important,” Luke assured her. “It will only take Han a few days to repair the damage to the Falcon, and I’d like to have this thing figured out before he and Leia start back to the Qoribu system.”

  Cilghal studied him out of one bulbous eye. “You can’t convince them to wait until we learn more?”

  “Not with Jaina still there, not after what happened to Saba.”

  “Saba will recover, and Jaina…” Cilghal turned up the palms of her fin-like hands. “If Jaina would not return before, what makes them think she will listen to them now?”

  “I don’t know,” Luke said. “But they’re convinced we need to return to Qoribu as soon as possible…and I think I agree with them.”

  Luke had heard reports of Jacen’s visit to Tenel Ka and rumors of unexplained Hapan fleet maneuvers, and Leia had told him flatly that the balance of power at Qoribu was about to shift. He and the other Masters were still debating if that was a good thing or bad, but events were clearly moving faster than the order’s ability to deal with them. Whether the Jedi understood the Killiks or not, they had to take action soon.

  After considering Luke’s words for a moment, Cilghal said, “Then I should just tell you what I need and not waste time reporting failures.”

  Luke frowned at the hesitation…shame…he felt from the Mon Calamari. “If you think that’s best,” he said cautiously.

  Cilghal turned to her assistants—a trio of apprentice healers—and sent them out of the room.

  “That bad?” Luke asked.

  “Yes.” She pointed at the chambers holding Alema and Gorog. “I need to hurt them.”

  “Hurt them?”

  “Inflict pain,” she clarified. “Torture them, in truth. Not for long, and nothing that will injure. But it must be intense. It’s the only way to test a critical hypothesis.”

  “I see.”

  Luke swallowed and forced himself to look through the transparisteel doors at the two prisoners. There was a time when he would not even have considered such a request—and when Cilghal would never have made it. But now that the Jedi had elected to embrace all of the Force, to utilize the dark side as well as the light, nothing seemed off limits.
They deceived, they manipulated, they coerced. To be sure, it was all done in the name of a higher purpose, to promote peace and serve the Balance, yet he occasionally felt that the Jedi were losing their way; that the war with the Yuuzhan Vong had turned them from their true path. He sometimes thought this must have been how Palpatine started, pursuing a worthy goal with any means available.

  “Perhaps we should back up a little,” Luke said. “Have you made any progress at all?”

  “Of a sort.” Cilghal pointed to her data-holo, which was basically a flat grid plotting each subject’s name against various brain regions, with colored data bars above each square. As the level of activity changed, the bars rose and fell, changing colors and glowing more or less brightly. “As you can see, all of our subjects display similar levels of activity in their sensory cortices, which suggests they’re experiencing the same physical sensations.”

  “And they shouldn’t be?”

  The corners of Cilghal’s lips rose in a broad-mouthed grin. “Not really. The environment in each chamber is different—hot, cold, rank, fragrant, noisy, quiet.”

  Luke raised his brow. “Doesn’t that confirm your theory about the corpus callosum receiving impulses from other brains?”

  “It does.” Cilghal pointed at four red bars near the end of Alema’s and Gorog’s data rows. “But look at this. The hypothalamus and limbic system are the center of the emotions. Alema’s is correlating to Gorog’s.”

  Luke noticed that this was true only of Alema and Gorog. The hypothalami and limbic systems of Tesar, Tekli, and Tahiri remained independent. Jacen’s readings were, as usual, completely useless. He was playing with the brain scanner again, moving his color bars up and down in a rhythmic wave pattern. It was, Luke knew, a not-so-subtle form of protest; his nephew believed that the Jedi order should have more faith in its Jedi Knights than in Cilghal’s instruments. Under normal circumstances, Luke would have agreed—but circumstances were not normal.

  “Alema and Gorog are in a meld?” Luke asked.

  Cilghal shook her head. “No. They’re not perceiving each other’s emotions, as Jedi do in a meld. Alema and Gorog are sharing emotions, the same way Tesar and the others are sharing sensations. This takes the collective mind a step deeper than we have seen before.”

  Thinking of the Will that Formbi had described, Luke reached out to Gorog in the Force and felt only the vague sense of uneasiness that—after the battle in the Skywalkers’ cottage—he had come to associate with the blue Killiks that had been attacking them. But the data bars matched to Gorog’s hypothalamic and limbic systems brightened to orange and started rising. So did Alema’s.

  “Interesting,” Luke said. “This Killik is Force-sensitive.”

  “After a fashion,” Cilghal said. “I believe she and other Gorog can use the Force to hide their presence—not only from us, but from other Killiks as well. What I need to find out is whether they can also use the Force to pass neural impulses to other members of the Colony—even those outside their own nest.”

  “And that’s why you need to inflict the pain?” Luke asked.

  Cilghal nodded. “I’ll neutralize the numbing agent, but leave Gorog and Alema unable to move. If the pain is severe enough, Gorog will be motivated to reach out to the others, and we’ll see the results on their graphs.”

  “And this will tell us…?”

  “Whether Gorog is also able to influence the others,” Cilghal said. “We need to know that before we can begin thinking about countermeasures.”

  Luke’s heart sank at the word begin. If Cilghal had not yet started to think about countermeasures, it seemed unlikely she would have any ready before the Falcon was repaired. And if Luke asked her to find some other way to test her hypothesis, unlikely became almost impossible.

  Feeling just a little more lost inside, Luke nodded. “If there’s no other way…”

  “There isn’t.” Cilghal’s sad eyes grew even sadder. “Not in the time we have.”

  She activated the electromagnetic shielding between the cells, and all the sensory cortex readings returned to independent levels. Alema’s hypothalamic and limbic systems remained the same color and brightness as Gorog’s, however.

  Cilghal entered another command. A hypo dropped down from the ceiling panel and injected the neutralizing agent into a soft spot just below the Killik’s mouthparts. A few seconds later, the insect’s cortex activity began to fluctuate as its physical sensations returned. The hypo ascended back into the ceiling, and a flat-tipped probe took its place. Gorog’s hypothalamic bar turned brilliant white, shooting to the top of the data-holo and staying there. So did Alema’s.

  “Gorog is angry with us,” Cilghal observed.

  “I don’t blame her,” Luke said.

  He wanted to look away, but forced himself not to. If he was willing to sanction torture, then he had to make certain it never became easy.

  Cilghal brought the probe down to where one of Gorog’s upper arms joined the thorax, then sent an electrical charge through it. All six limbs—even the two casted legs—extended straight out and began to quiver. All of the insect’s data bars brightened to white and rose to the top of the holo. Alema’s limbic system continued to mirror the Killik’s, but her sensory cortices remained quiet.

  When the other subjects did not show a similar rise in the activity of their hypothalamic or limbic systems, Luke asked, “Is that enough?”

  “Not yet. She must believe it will never end.”

  The Killik’s mandibles clacked close, and its antennae began to whip madly back and forth. Luke reminded himself that this was the insect that had tried to turn his son against his wife, but that did not make torture feel right. Mara was spending every waking minute with Ben, trying to make him understand how the things that Gorog had said could be true and still not mean she was an evil person, and Luke knew that even she would not have approved of the insect’s suffering.

  Mara reached out to him in the Force, worried about Ben and curious about what was happening to Gorog.

  Luke’s stomach grew hollow with fear. Ben and Gorog were clearly joined—perhaps not as completely as Alema, but too much. A part of Luke wanted to kill the Killik right now, to punish it for trying to use his son against him, to sever the connection before it grew any stronger.

  But a bigger part of Luke wanted to protect Ben, to spare him the anguish of knowing that his friend was in pain. He started to tell Cilghal to turn off the probe—then Tesar’s hypothalamic bar began to rise. Tahiri’s limbic system also began to show more activity, and Tekli exhibited steep rises in both.

  A moment later, the trio’s data bars vanished as they pushed off their scanning helmets and began to peel electrodes off their bodies. Unlike Alema and Gorog, they were not restrained.

  “Okay, turn it off,” Luke said. He could feel Mara growing more concerned about Ben. “There’s no sense—”

  Cilghal held up a hand. “Wait.”

  Gorog continued to clench her limbs to her chest and whip her antennae. Tekli, who as a healer was a little faster at extricating herself from the equipment, emerged from her chamber first.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, marching straight for the exit. “I need to use the refresher.”

  “Of course.” Cilghal swiveled a dark eye in Luke’s direction, and he felt her interest growing. “Take your time.”

  Tahiri emerged next. “You need to give us a break sometimes,” she complained, walking over to the console. “I’m beginning to feel like I’m on a weeklong X-wing jump.”

  Tahiri’s gaze drifted to the data-holo and lingered for a moment on Gorog’s bars. Then she turned to Luke with her mouth twisted into a brutal grin.

  “Looks like I’m not the only one who came out of the war part Yuuzhan Vong,” she said. “What’s next? Jedi tattoos?”

  The comment stung Luke more than it should have—in large part because he could feel his wife growing more worried and angry as the experiment continued.

  “Th
is isn’t for fun,” Luke said. “We’re—”

  “Tahiri, are you feeling any pain?” Cilghal interrupted. “Is that why you came out here?”

  Tahiri looked at the Mon Calamari as though she were a dimwit. “Cilghal, I’m half Yuuzhan Vong inside. The only thing pain would cause me is a religious experience.”

  “You’re sure?” Cilghal asked. “You don’t feel any at all?”

  “This one feelz no pain, either, but that does not excuse what you are doing.” Tesar emerged from his compartment trailing a dozen broken sensor wires. “This one is through with your gamez. He will not be party to a breaking.”

  He tore a handful of electrodes off his chest, threw them on the floor, and started toward the exit.

  Tahiri watched him go, then looked back to Luke with the hardness of a Yuuzhan Vong in her green eyes. “Tesar and I must not be completely joined,” she said. “I’d kind of like to stay.”

  “I think we’re through,” Luke said, wondering if the revulsion he felt was for the Yuuzhan Vong in Tahiri’s personality, or for himself. “Isn’t that right, Cilghal?”

  “Yes, I have seen everything I need to.”

  She cut the power to the probe. Gorog’s data bars returned to normal, and Mara gushed relief through the Force.

  “We’re through for today,” Cilghal said to Tahiri. “Thank you.”

  As Luke watched the young Jedi Knight leave, he began to feel increasingly disappointed. He had no doubts now that Tesar and the others were completely under Raynar’s control; that they had agreed to return to the Galactic Alliance only so they could sneak away from the academy—as they had all done at one time or another—and seek support for the Colony.

  After the door had hissed shut, Luke shook his head and dropped onto a bench in front of the control panel. “I guess that tells us what we needed to know,” he said. “They’re all under control of the Colony’s Will.”