by Troy Denning
“It may take some time for your father to accept this,” Leia said. “He still has nightmares about whatever happened to him after that misunderstanding with the Kamarians.”
“We’re not Kamarians,” Jaina objected. Zekk absentmindedly rubbed his forearm along the back of her neck, and Han made a sour face and looked away. “We’re still his daughter.”
“Just give your father some time,” Leia said. She did not know how to explain—without offending Jaina and Zekk—what she knew in her heart: that Han was not as disappointed with Jaina as he was angry in himself; that he blamed himself for not protecting her from what she had become. “This is going to be hard for him.”
“It will be hard on us all, we think,” Zekk said.
Raynar slipped away from Luke and Mara—who were now crawling with Killik healers—and returned to Leia. He fixed his gaze on her, and suddenly her vision darkened around the edges. His blue eyes seemed the only lights in the chamber, and she felt an enormous, murky presence pressing down on her inside.
“Now you can explain this slaughter, Princess Leia,” Raynar said. “Why did the Jedi kill all these Kind?”
“Quite simply, we had no choice,” Leia said. “They were attacking Luke and Mara.”
This drew a round of suit-muffled chest pulsing from the entourage of Unu.
“Strange,” Raynar said. “This does not look like the Skywalkers’ nest. Are you sure they were not the ones attacking?”
“It’s complicated.” Leia started to suggest they come back to that in a moment, but the presence in her chest grew heavy, and she found herself explaining more about the mission than might have been wise. “This nest was drawing the Colony into a devastating war. We hoped to undermine their influence so you would consider our peace plan.”
Han’s jaw fell. “Leia! How about a little tact?”
“We prefer her candor,” Raynar growled. His burning eyes continued to hold Leia’s gaze. “But this slaughter was pointless. Eliminating this nest can only turn us against your plan.”
“Unfortunately, we had no choice.” By the sound of Luke’s voice—Leia remained unable to see anything but Raynar’s eyes—he was floating over to insert himself into the conversation. “They were trying to eliminate us. It was self-defense.”
“Self-defense?” Raynar sounded outraged. “The Kind fight only when they are attacked.”
“Yeah,” Han said. “You’re a lot like the Chiss that way.”
Raynar turned to glare at Han. Leia’s vision returned to normal, and she found Han sneering confidently back at Raynar, looking as though he were staring down an Aqualish bar brawler instead of the leader of an interstellar civilization.
Leia slipped between the two. “Let me show you something.” She addressed herself not only to Raynar, but to the entire Unu entourage. “You need to understand something about this nest, and then we can talk about whether the Colony truly wants peace.”
Without waiting for permission, Leia turned toward the ceiling, leading Raynar, Han, and the Unu through the body-filled darkness toward the nursery entrance. Luke and Mara, who had stopped using the Force to compensate for their injuries, remained behind at the insistence of the Killik healers, and Jaina and Zekk stayed with them. Leia did not understand why, but there was a lot about her daughter and Zekk that she did not understand right now.
After a few moments, they reached the cave that Bugs Two and Three had blasted through the ceiling, and the smell of decay grew sickening. Kyp and the other Masters were inside the nursery gathering Chiss survivors and searching for Lomi Plo, so Leia opened herself to the battle-meld and urged them to have the bugcrunchers stand down.
“Bugcrunchers?” Raynar said.
Leia was a little surprised, since she could not sense Raynar’s presence in the meld, but Han was nonchalant.
“No offense. We had to call ’em something.”
Halfway through the cave, they found Saba waiting. Her vac suit and face scales were smeared with wax and offal from pulling Chiss out of larval cells, and the stench rising off her was enough to send a rustle of revulsion through the Unu.
Saba allowed Raynar and the entourage to stare at her for a moment, then said, “This one is sorry for her smell. The work in here is meszy.”
“What is your work?” Raynar asked.
Saba looked to Leia before answering.
“It will be better if we just show you,” Leia said, directing her comment more to Saba than Raynar. “Any sign of Alema yet?”
“None,” Saba said. “Perhapz she was disintegrated in a detonator explosion.”
“Maybe.” Having seen for herself how acute the Twi’lek’s danger sense was, Leia had her doubts. “What about Lomi Plo?”
Saba turned her palms up. “Vanished.”
“Lomi Plo is dead,” Raynar said, as if by rote. “She died in the Crash.”
Saba glanced his way, gnashing her fangs, then looked back to Leia. “You are sure about this?”
Leia nodded. “Unu needs to see this.” Silently, she added that it was still the only way to break the Dark Nest’s hold on the Colony.
Saba shrugged, then led Leia and the others into the darkness of the nursery. The air was hot and dank and so filled with the stench of decay that Raynar gulped and the Unu rumbled their thoraxes. Kyp and the rest of the rescue team were working along the far side of the chamber, the beams of their helmet lamps sweeping across the wall but revealing little more than the hexagonal pattern of the nursery cells.
A few meters in, Leia stopped and swung her helmet lamp toward the nearest wall. The beam illuminated the half-devoured corpse of a Chiss prisoner, still curled around a squirming Gorog larva.
Raynar gasped, and the nearest Unu brought their mandibles together in shock. Han shined his helmet lamp on a second cell, and Saba a third. Both of those cells also contained the bodies of Chiss captives.
“What is this?” Raynar demanded.
“Looks pretty clear to me,” Han said. As more Unu poured into the room with their shine-balls, the chamber brightened rapidly, and the true extent of the horror grew more apparent. “Kind of makes a fella see how the Chiss might have a point, doesn’t it?”
Raynar whirled on Han. “You think we did this?”
“Not you, exactly,” Leia said, silently cursing Han’s biting humor. “The Dark Nest did it. The Gorog.”
“Gorog?” Raynar’s gaze drifted back to the gruesome sight in the cells. “What is this Dark Nest?”
“This.” Saba waved her arm at the murk around them. “The nest that keepz attacking us. The one that has been feeding on Chisz captivez. The one that made you build more nestz at Qoribu.”
Raynar glowered at the Barabel. “The nests do not lead Unu. Unu leads the nests.”
“Really?” Leia cocked her brow. “Then all this is Unu’s doing?”
“No.” Raynar’s voice grew sharp. When his entourage began to clack and drum, he added, “This is not even a Colony nest. We do not have a nest on Kr.”
Han looked around pointedly. “Funny. Looks a lot like that nursery on Jwlio—except for all the Chiss captives, of course.”
“Actually, it can be a Colony nest,” Leia said to Raynar. “And you wouldn’t remember.”
This drew an even louder protest from the Killiks, but Leia spoke over it. “Cilghal thinks the Dark Nest serves as a sort of unconscious for the Colony’s collective mind. It would be able to influence the Kind without you knowing—just as the unconscious mind of most species influences their behavior.”
“Impossible,” Raynar said, far too quickly. “There are no Gorog in the Kind. How could the nest influence us?”
“The same way you influenced Jaina and the others when you called them to help the Colony,” Leia replied. “Through the Force.”
Raynar’s voice grew soft. “Through the Force.”
“That’s right,” Leia said. “The same way you convinced Tesar to visit Bornaryn Trading. The same way you convinced Tahiri
and Tekli to argue the Colony’s case to the Jedi Order.”
Raynar’s eyes flared in understanding, but Unu’s protest rose to a crescendo. He closed his eyes as though trying to concentrate, but Leia could see in the twitching muscles of his face some internal struggle, some insect argument she would never understand. She began to have the unpleasant feeling she was attempting the impossible.
Leia glanced over at Saba and mouthed Welk’s name. The Barabel’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded and quickly slipped away.
At last, the insect din quieted, and Raynar opened his eyes.
“Even if you are right about the Dark Nest, conquering is not our way,” he said. “The Kind seek only to live in harmony with the Song of the Universe.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have to conquer something to take it over,” Han said. “And the Dark Nest had more in it than just Killiks.”
“I assume you remember the Dark Jedi,” Leia pressed. “Raynar fought them as a young man at Yavin Four. And Welk and Lomi Plo abandoned the strike team on Baanu Rass.”
Raynar studied her for a moment, then nodded. “We remember. And you think…” He let the sentence trail off as the Unu began to rustle and clack; then his voice grew stubborn again. “But you must be wrong. Welk and Lomi Plo died in the Crash.”
“Then who is this?” Saba asked.
She emerged from shadows dragging Welk’s badly slashed body. He was still dressed in his chitin-and-plastoid armor, with a new insect arm grafted to his shoulder. His face looked even less human than Raynar’s, but he clearly wasn’t Chiss.
Saba sent the corpse gliding toward Raynar’s chest.
Han waited until the thing hit, then said, “He’s got some pretty bad burn scars, but that tells you something right there.”
Once it was in front of him, Raynar seemed riveted by the corpse, his blue eyes slowly sliding back and forth beneath his scarred brow, his breath coming in ever-raggeder rasps.
“Jacen investigated the Crash,” Leia said. “He saw you pull Welk and Lomi out of the flames.”
The Unu fell deathly quiet, and Raynar’s gaze swung to Leia. “Saw us?”
“Through the Force,” she clarified.
“Yes—we remember.” Raynar nodded and closed his eyes. “He was there…on the bridge…for just a moment.”
“You saw Jacen?” Han gasped.
“That’s impossible,” Leia said. “He would have had to reach across time—”
“We saw Jacen. He gave us the strength to continue…to pull them…” Suddenly Raynar stopped and turned toward the center of the nursery. “Where is Lomi?”
He had barely asked the question when the Unu entourage began to disperse across the nursery, their shine-balls illuminating the vault in a spray of whirling light.
“Where is Lomi?” Raynar repeated.
Relief washed over Leia like a Rbollean petal-oil shower. She had broken through to Raynar’s memory. “Then you recall saving her?”
“We remember,” Raynar said. “She was afraid that the Yuuzhan Vong would find us again, or that Anakin would come looking for her, or Master Skywalker. She was afraid of many things. She wanted to hide.”
“Well,” Han said, “that sure confirms Cilghal’s theory.”
“What theory?” Raynar asked.
“The way Cilghal sees it,” Han said, “when a Killik nest swallows up someone who’s Force-sensitive, the nest takes on some of his personality.”
“In your case, the Yoggoy absorbed the value you place on individual life,” Leia said. “They started to care for their feeble and provide for the starving, and it wasn’t long before their success led to the creation of the Unu.”
“That’s much how we remember it,” Raynar allowed. “But it has nothing to do with the Gorog.”
“You said you remember pulling Welk and Lomi Plo out of the fire,” Han pointed out. “But then they just disappeared.”
“You said Lomi was afraid and wanted to hide,” Leia added. “That was what Yoggoy absorbed from her. Isn’t it possible that she also created a nest of her own—a nest hidden from everyone else?”
As Raynar considered this, the color seemed to drain from his face. “We caused this?”
“That’s not what we’re saying,” Leia said. “Only that the Dark Nest is influencing—”
“If we saved Lomi and Welk, we are responsible.”
An eerie tempest of clacking and muffled booming rolled through the nursery as the Unu again started to protest. Raynar turned from Leia and the others and slowly glided along the wall, peering into each cell he passed and shaking his head in despair.
“If we saved Lomi and Welk—”
Han caught up and took Raynar by the arm. “Look, kid, you couldn’t have known.”
Amazingly, Raynar did not send Han tumbling across the room or silence him with a gesture or even pull away. He merely continued to float along, seemingly unaware of Han at all, staring into the cells.
“If we saved Lomi and Welk, we did this.”
“You should get a medal for saving them,” Han said. “What happened later, that’s not your fault.”
That got Raynar’s attention. He stopped and turned to Han. “This is not our fault?”
“No way,” Han said. “All you did was save their lives. That doesn’t make you responsible for what they did later.”
“We are not responsible.” Raynar’s voice was filled with relief, and Unu’s clacking died away. “That’s right.”
The spray of shine-ball light slowly began to contract back toward Raynar, and Leia felt Kyp reaching out to her, demanding an explanation, but she could not sense what he wanted explained.
“Maybe this is a Chiss ruse,” Raynar said, talking more to himself than Han now. “It must have been a trick to convince the Jedi that the Colony is in the wrong.”
Saba shined her helmet lamp into one of the cells. “To this one, it lookz like the trick was on the Chisz.”
“The Chiss are ruthless,” Raynar said. There was an ominous note of insistence to his gravelly voice. “They would sacrifice a thousand of their own kind to turn the Jedi against us.”
“That doesn’t explain the Gorog that attacked us on the way in,” Leia said. She was alarmed by how Raynar was trying to reshape reality, by how he seemed to be searching for a story that worked. “They weren’t Chiss—and neither are all these larvae.”
“Yes, it was a very insidious plan,” Raynar said. “The Gorog must have been brain-slaves. They were forced to fight—and to feed on Chiss volunteers.”
“Perhaps,” Leia allowed carefully. In a human mind, she would have called Raynar’s thought process a psychotic break; in the collective mind of the Colony, she didn’t know what to make of it. “But there is another explanation.”
“The Chiss are creating Killik clones?” Raynar asked.
“I don’t think so,” Leia said.
The Unu entourage began to return, many of them drawing the helpless, wide-eyed forms of the Chiss survivors that the rescue team had been pulling out of the cells. Kyp and the other Masters were also approaching, pouring their displeasure into the battle-meld. Saba reached out to them, urging them to stand by, assuring them Leia was in control.
Thanks a lot, Leia thought.
“Do you remember what we were talking about?” Leia asked, continuing to address Raynar. “The Dark Nest?”
“Of course. Our memory is excellent.” Raynar’s eyes turned bright and angry. “Han said we were not responsible.”
“That’s right,” Leia said. Her vision began to dim around the edges again, and the heavy presence she had experienced before returned to her chest. “But that doesn’t…mean…”
The murky weight inside grew heavier, and Leia began to understand that Raynar had been damaged as much on the inside as on the outside. Hopelessly marooned, in unimaginable anguish, dependent on a bunch of insects—the shock had just been too much. Raynar had dissociated from the situation, literally becoming UnuThul so he w
ould not recall all the terrible things that had happened to Raynar Thul.
“We understand what not responsible means,” Raynar said. “It means that just because the Dark Nest exists, we are not the ones who created it.” He pointed to the nearest captive, a frightened-looking male wearing the black shreds of a CEDF gunnery officer’s uniform. “The Chiss did.”
The officer’s face paled to ash, and his eyes grew even wider—the only signs of fear that his paralyzed body could still exhibit.
“What we do not understand,” Raynar said, “is the purpose of this nest.”
An unintelligible groan rose from the Chiss’s throat, so weak and low that Leia took it to be more of a pained whimper than an attempt to speak.
“Tell us!” Raynar commanded.
The officer moaned again, but the noise sounded even less like words than before.
“We know you are lying.” Raynar’s tone was ominous, and the officer’s face grew white. “Do not insult us.”
“I don’t think he means to,” Leia said. She felt certain that the officer had not said anything at all; Raynar’s shattered psyche was just imposing its own meaning on the Chiss’s incoherent groans. “I’m sure he doesn’t even know that the Chiss created this nest.”
Raynar turned back to Leia. “You are sure?”
“Perhaps confident is a better word,” Leia corrected. Again, the weight pressed down inside, and she knew she had to tell Raynar something he wished to hear—something that would make him agree to her plan. “What if the Chiss didn’t even know they created the Dark Nest?”
“How could they create the Dark Nest without knowing it?” Raynar’s voice was doubtful. “We don’t see how that could work.”
“By accident,” Han said, picking up on Leia’s plan. “That’s the only way it could happen. The Chiss would never intentionally do something like this to themselves—not even to volunteers. They have too many honor codes.”
“That’s right,” Leia said. The weight inside was decreasing. “Chiss society is defined by war. They’re always fighting—against the Vagaari, the Ssi-ruuk, even each other.”