Star Wars: Dark Nest III: The Swarm War

by Denning, Troy

  The corridor was hardly the ideal place for a lightsaber duel, but it would have to do. Luke could already sense a furious Raynar Thul at the far end of the passage, using his brute Force-strength to wrest open the safety-sealed hatch.

  As soon as the last of his platoon had entered the corridor, Luke pointed to the hatch through which they’d come. “Make that hatch airtight.”

  “Airtight, sir?” Stomper One asked. “Are you certain? As S-series droids, we enjoy a significant tactical advantage in a nonpressurized environment.”

  “But I don’t.” Luke plucked at the sleeve of his vac suit. “And I don’t want to worry about ripping this. The fight is about to get rough.”

  “Rough?” Stomper One looked up and down the corridor, appraising their position and apparently reaching the same conclusion that Luke had: the corridor was a bad place for a firefight. “As you wish, sir.”

  The droids quickly went to work, sealing the hatch to the officers’ mess and using their blaster cannons to spot-weld the others closed so the platoon could not be ambushed. When Luke noticed they were leaving the hatch directly behind them open, he pointed to it.

  “Fix that hatch, too.” He started up the corridor toward the hatch at the far end. “We won’t be retreating.”

  Stomper One’s synthesized voice assumed a note of approval. “Very good, sir.”

  Luke felt the Force stir as Raynar made a final exertion. “They’re coming. Prepare for—”

  The far hatch suddenly ruptured inward, bringing with it a short-lived decompression squall that rocked Luke back on his heels and hazed the corridor with airborne dust. He glimpsed a tall figure in a black pressure suit.

  Then the figure flicked one of his hands, and Luke found himself flying backward, bouncing off YVH droids and tumbling out of control. He reached out in the Force, grabbing at passing hatches, the ceiling, even Raynar himself, but he was whirling too fast to catch hold of anything.

  He hit the end of the corridor with a tremendous clung, unsure whether he was upside down or sideways, then crashed to the floor struggling to remain conscious.

  By the time his eyes came back into focus, the corridor had erupted into a crashing storm of cannon bolts and shatter gun pellets. The lower two-thirds of the corridor was blocked by a wall of laminanium bugcruncher armor, but the upper third of the passage belonged to Raynar’s Killiks. Still in their pressure carapaces, they were scurrying through the smoke along the walls and ceiling, pouring shatter gun pellets down on the droids’ heads, trying to get past so they could launch an attack from the rear.

  Luke rolled to his feet…and watched in astonishment as his helmet dropped to the floor in two pieces. He glanced at the wall behind him and saw a fist-deep depression where its impact had dented the durasteel.

  “Can’t let him do that again,” Luke groaned. He opened the seals on his vac suit gloves, shook them to the floor, and snatched the lightsaber off his belt. Then he averted his eyes and spoke into his throat mike. “Dazers!”

  The corridor erupted in rainbow iridescence; then a piercing squeal came over Luke’s earpiece and the smell of ripe hubba gourds filled his nostrils. Stunned by the Dazers’ aura-deadening properties, several Killiks dropped off the ceiling into the midst of the bugcrunchers. The rest of the insects were soon spread overhead in yellow smears.

  Luke had already rushed forward, only to find himself trapped behind his own bugcrunchers and unable to see the rest of the battle. “Make a hole!” he ordered. “Coming through.”

  Three bugcrunchers blocking his way obediently stepped aside, and Luke found himself staring up ten meters of corridor packed chest-high with Killik corpses and twisted YVH frames. At the other end, with his black helmet lying in a melted gob before him and the fingers of his vac suit gloves burned off by all the Force energy he had been throwing around, stood Luke’s melt-faced opponent. Raynar Thul.

  Luke jumped onto the pile of chitin and metal in front of him. Two of Raynar’s Unu bodyguards immediately popped up and sent a burst of shatter gun pellets zipping down the corridor toward him.

  Luke flicked his hand and Force-batted the projectiles into a wall, then the bugcrunchers at his back sent a stream of cannon fire down the hall. Raynar ignited a gold lightsaber and deflected most of the volley, but a few of the bolts made it through and splattered his bodyguards across the walls.

  “It’s not too late to surrender.” Luke started forward at a walk. “I’m not eager to do this.”

  Raynar’s burn-scarred lips twitched in a faint hint of a smile. “We are.”

  Raynar raised his lightsaber and jumped onto the carnage heap.

  Luke ignited his own blade and raced forward, using the Force to keep himself from stumbling over debris. A loud crunching erupted behind him as his surviving droids raced after him, then half a dozen of Raynar’s bodyguards leapt up from the other end of the pile and started forward, firing shatter guns with their lower set of arms and carrying flame tridents with their upper pair.

  A flurry of cannon bolts zipped past Luke from behind and took out three insects. Raynar pointed at the attacking droids. A muffled thump erupted inside one of them, and it went down in a sizzling, popping crash of laminanium. Luke killed the last of Raynar’s bodyguards by Force-slamming them into the wall so hard their thoraxes burst, then the two Jedi were on one another, their lightsabers flashing toward each other’s heads with all the speed and might they could summon.

  That was the trouble with powerful men—especially younger ones. Awed by their own strength, they so often believed strength was the answer to every problem. Luke was older and wiser. While Raynar swung, he pivoted.

  As Raynar’s gold blade sliced the air where Luke’s head had been, Luke’s boot was kicking him behind the ankles, knocking his legs out from under him and stretching him out flat.

  But Raynar was a Jedi, and all Jedi were quick. He caught himself in the Force, levitating himself just long enough to bring his golden blade sweeping in at Luke’s shoulder.

  Luke had no choice but to block with his blade, and no place to block but the forearm. Raynar’s lightsaber went spinning off, still securely in the grasp of his three-fingered hand, and caught one of Luke’s bugcrunchers squarely in the back. The weapon sliced through six centimeters of laminanium armor before the severed forearm flew free. The blade deactivated, and the hilt disappeared into the tangle of death and destruction at the droid’s feet.

  The pain of losing an arm might have forced a common Jedi to stop fighting, but Raynar was no common Jedi. He had the Force potential of the Colony to draw on, and he did that now, swinging his remaining hand up to hurl Luke down the corridor as he had done before.

  But this time, Luke was ready. He placed his own hand in front of Raynar’s and rooted himself in the heart of the Force, and when he did that, he became the very essence of the immovable object. Nothing could dislodge him—not one of Lando’s asteroid tuggers, not the Megador’s sixteen ion engines, not the black hole at the center of the galaxy itself.

  Luke stood that way, waiting, dimly aware that his surviving bugcrunchers were moving into defensive positions, one at his back and the other just inside the burst hatch. Raynar continued to struggle, trying to hurl Luke down the corridor, trying to move him a single centimeter.

  Luke did not budge, and finally Raynar stopped struggling and met his eyes with a stunned and anguished gaze.

  The Master sighed and shook his head. “What am I going to do with you, Raynar Thul?” he asked. “You learn nothing from your mistakes.”

  Luke deactivated his lightsaber and picked Raynar up by the collar and slammed him against the wall. He used the Force to pin him there, waiting for an answer to his question, watching as the expression in his captive’s pained eyes turned from astonishment to anger to calculation.

  But when Raynar’s free hand rose, it was not to summon the Force lightning that Luke had expected. It was to call his lightsaber back, to attempt to continue the battle that he obvi
ously could no longer win.

  It was in that moment that Luke finally decided that the life of Raynar Thul would be spared. He intercepted the weapon and used the Force to pin Raynar’s remaining arm against the wall along with the rest of his body. Then he opened the hilt of the captured lightsaber and removed the focusing crystal. He held it up in front of Raynar.

  “Someday I may return this—but for now, it’s staying with me.” He zipped the gem into a pocket of his vac suit, then reached out to Raynar in the Force and spoke in a softer voice. “Your days as UnuThul are done, Raynar. It’s time to surrender and come home.”

  The eyes beneath Raynar’s lumpy brow flashed with alarm. “The Colony is our home.”

  Luke shook his head. “That can’t be anymore, Raynar,” he said. “The Colony can’t be anymore. If you stay with the Killiks, the entire species will die.”

  Raynar curled his scarred lip. “Lies.”

  “No.” Luke touched Raynar through the Force. “You’re still a Jedi. You can sense when a person is telling the truth. You can sense it in me, now.”

  Hoping to force his Will on his captor, Raynar accepted the contact—as Luke had known he would—then gasped in astonishment as he sensed the truth in what Luke was saying. “How?”

  “Because as long as you are the Prime Unu, Lomi Plo will be the queen of the Gorog.” Luke began to press, as though he were trying to force his will on Raynar. “And as long as there is a Gorog, the Colony will be a threat to the Chiss.”

  Raynar began to pull, learning from Luke’s earlier tactics and trying to use Luke’s own attack against him. “The Chiss are a threat to the Colony.”

  Luke went along with Raynar—in fact, he pushed even harder.

  “That’s right. The Chiss are a threat to the Colony,” Luke said. “They have developed a weapon that can wipe out the entire Colony. They tried to use it here. Jaina and Zekk stopped them…but we both know they have more.”

  Backed by Luke’s strength, the truth was too much for Raynar. His Will broke, and his resolve turned to panic. “We know,” he admitted.

  Luke continued to push. “And they’ll use it—if you stay with the Colony.”

  Raynar shook his head. “We can’t let them.”

  “Then you have to leave,” Luke said. “It’s the only way to save the Killiks.”

  A terrible sadness came to Raynar’s melted face. He lowered his burned eyelids and reluctantly began to nod—then suddenly stopped and glanced toward the hatch through which he had burst earlier.

  “Not the only way.” Raynar’s voice assumed a dark tone, and Luke knew his true target was finally preparing to show herself. “Maybe there is a weapon to kill the Chiss?”

  Luke resisted the temptation to look toward the hatch. Lomi Plo would not show herself if she knew she was expected.

  “Even if there was such a weapon, it wouldn’t be right to use it,” Luke said. “The Jedi won’t permit speciecide against the Chiss—any more than we would against the Killiks.”

  “But you could…if it was self-defense.” Raynar bared his jagged teeth in a try at a grin. “Destroying the Chiss would be self-defense, so you would have to permit it.”

  Raynar began to push back now, filling Luke’s chest with the dark weight of UnuThul’s Will.

  “If it were self-defense, we might have to permit it,” Luke said, playing along—and again using Raynar’s own attack against him. “But even that wouldn’t save the Colony. It cannot survive as it is. We know that.”

  “How do we know that?” Raynar demanded angrily. “We know no such thing.”

  “We might,” Luke insisted, exerting his own will through the Force again, reeling Raynar in. “If the Colony grew too large, it would devour its own worlds and destroy itself.”

  “There are always more worlds,” Raynar countered.

  “Not always,” Luke said. “Sometimes all of the other worlds are taken. That could have been what happened when the Killiks disappeared from Alderaan.” He paused, then used the Force to pull as hard as he could, trying to draw Raynar into his own view of reality. “In fact, I’m sure that’s what happened on Alderaan. The Killiks devoured their own world and tried to take someone else’s. That’s the reason the Celestials drove the Killiks into the Unknown Regions.”

  The fight finally went out of Raynar. “You’re sure?” He folded his cauterized forearm stump across his stomach and cradled it with his other arm, his lips quivering in pain and tears welling in his eyes. “You know—”

  The question was drowned out by the roar of a blaster cannon, and Luke glanced down the corridor to see the bugcruncher stationed there suddenly powering down. The droid fell out of the opening backward and crashed to the deck, then Lomi Plo scuttled through the hatchway on her mismatched set of legs—one human, the other insectile. She turned her bulbous eyes and noseless face down the corridor, then extended her crooked upper arms toward the lightsaber in Luke’s hands.

  The last remaining bugcruncher opened fire, forcing Lomi Plo to ignite the lightsaber in her lower set of hands. Her blocks and parries came so slowly that she was barely able to deflect the cannon bolts and she was forced to swing her upper arms toward the droid and drain its power. Raynar, thankfully, continued to stand dazed—and seemingly impotent.

  Determined to reach Lomi Plo before she drained his lightsaber’s power cell, Luke sprang down the corridor and leapt off the carnage heap to attack. Lomi blocked his first pass with her white lightsaber. Then, in place of the purple lightsaber she had left in Jacen at the end of their last meeting, she ignited a familiar-looking green blade—the lightsaber Raynar had confiscated on Woteba. Luke’s lightsaber.

  “Now you’re just ticking me off,” Luke said.

  Lomi clacked her mandibles and hissed, then launched a deadly low–high–low combination with her flashing blades. Luke parried, ducked, and jumped, then brought an elbow up under her mandibles and sent her staggering back, all four arms flailing as she struggled to catch her balance on her mismatched legs.

  Luke whipped his blade around, cocking it for a death slash across her middle—then had a prickle of danger sense between his shoulder blades and tried to spin away. He almost made it.

  Something heavy and huge slammed into his shoulder—a shatter gun pellet?—and sent him tumbling across the floor past Lomi Plo’s feet. He tried a reactionary slash as he rolled by, only to discover that was he was no longer holding his lightsaber, and he could not move his prosthetic hand—nor the rest of his arm.

  Lomi Plo’s two blades began to chop the floor behind him, so he used the Force to accelerate himself and continued to roll, then came to his feet two meters on the other side of her and called his lightsaber back to his good hand.

  The weapon arrived just ahead of Lomi Plo, and suddenly Luke found himself on the defensive, being driven into a corner while Raynar Thul—not so impotent after all—used his other hand to fire more shatter gun pellets.

  In lightsaber combat, Luke favored two-handed styles, but he could still fight single-handed—even with his weak hand—just as well as anyone in the academy. What he could not do, however, was fight wounded and weak-handed against twin blades while a second party fired a steady stream of hard-to-deflect shatter gun pellets at him.

  In short, Luke was desperate.

  So he dropped to his side and caught Lomi Plo’s human leg in a scissoring motion between his feet. The knee bent backward and popped with a sickening crunch.

  She fell, squealing in pain and clacking her mandibles—and redoubled her attacks, slashing so ferociously with her twin blades that Luke’s lone hand barely had the strength to block.

  Of course, Control picked that moment for an important announcement from the Megador. “Be advised that three Killik swarms are diverting to attack Healing Star.”

  Lomi Plo’s attacks slackened for a moment, and Luke realized that she was gently probing him through the Force, searching for any hint of fear or doubt. He put the Healing Star—the fleet�
��s main hospital ship—out of his mind and remained focused on the fight. Lomi Plo had almost certainly used the Dark Nest to divert those swarms, to try to create an opening that would give her power over his mind.

  Still dodging shatter gun pellets, rolling back and forth on the floor and parrying madly, Luke glanced up the corridor and used the Force to reach into the carnage heap beneath Raynar’s feet. He grabbed the largest, heaviest thing he could find—a disabled bugcruncher droid—and jerked it free.

  The pile shifted and Raynar crashed down on his back, but Luke barely noticed. He was pulling the droid down the corridor straight at Lomi Plo.

  She deflected it easily, of course—but she had to spin away from Luke and wave a hand, and that gave him the chance he needed to Force-spring up the corridor toward Raynar, who was just returning to his feet.

  “As I was saying,” Luke said, pointing his lightsaber down at Raynar’s chest. “You never learn.”

  Raynar’s eyes flashed with alarm and he rolled away—presenting the side of his head for a perfect knockout blow. Luke brought his lightsaber down, but deactivated the blade and flipped it around at the last second to strike at the base of the ear.

  The blow landed with a sharp crack that suggested a breaking skull, but Luke had no time to worry about Raynar. Lomi Plo was dragging herself out the hatchway, trying to escape into the general confusion of the Ackbar’s recapture. He sprang after her, using the Force to drag her back into the corridor.

  Lomi Plo whirled around, her lightsabers rising into a guard position but not attacking. Trapped on the floor with a broken knee, she knew as well as Luke did that she could not defend herself; that he could kill her any time he wished.