Star Wars®: Dark Nest I: The Joiner King Read online

  He picked up his tools and carefully repaired the break in R2-D2’s deep-reserve chip. Once the solder was cool, he flipped his magnispecs up again and turned to the diagnostic display above the workbench.

  “All right, Artoo. Let’s see what your deep-reserve memory shows now.”

  A list of headings and numbers began to scroll down the screen, but suddenly stopped as it approached the location of the repaired sector.

  “Don’t stop,” Luke said. “I need to see if you can access that sector.”

  R2-D2 whirred a moment, then the scrolling resumed. The missing sector number appeared, but the descriptive heading looked like nothing but random characters.

  “Stop,” Luke said.

  The scrolling continued until the heading vanished off the top of the screen, then stopped.

  “Now your response time is slow,” Luke complained. “Bring it back.”

  R2-D2 piped a question.

  “The sector I’ve been trying to repair. Two twenty-two.”

  The list scrolled down until the lower half of the entry appeared at the top the screen.

  “And you’re having roll problems.” Luke sighed. “It looks like you’ve got a bug in your system. I may need to get out the blast degausser.”

  The entry dropped toward the middle of the screen, one letter in the heading changing with each line it sank.

  “Stop! Why are you randomizing the heading?”

  The droid whistled a denial.

  “You are, too,” Luke said. “I saw the letters change.”

  R2-D2 whirred a moment, then displayed a message on diagnostic screen.

  It must be encoded.

  “Encoded?” Luke began to wonder if perhaps the sector had been sequestered on purpose. R2-D2 had seen a lot of action even before the Rebellion, and Luke was always curious about what secrets the little droid might have locked away. “Then slice it.”

  R2-D2 grated an objection.

  “Artoo, you’re an astromech droid,” Luke said. “You have enough computing power to slice a triple-key, double-blind randomizer. I think you can solve a simple substitution code.”

  The droid buzzed in resignation, then began to whir and hum. A few moments later, the heading vanished altogether. Luke waited for it to return in legible form, then finally gave up and groaned.

  “Don’t tell me you lost the heading.”

  R2-D2 trilled an apology.

  “No problem,” Luke said, losing his patience with the little droid’s excuses. He lowered his magnispecs. “I’ll just fuse it to a sector that is in the directory.”

  R2-D2 withdrew his interface arm from the data socket and whistled in protest.

  “Then plug back in and stop making this difficult,” Luke said. “Let me see what’s in that sector.”

  The droid warbled a question.

  “This one.”

  Luke touched the tip of his soldering filament to sector 222 and was astonished to hear a tinny female voice erupt from the droid’s speaker.

  “Anakin…”

  Luke caught a glimmer of moving light on the workbench. He flipped up his magnispecs, expecting to find the images of Tahiri and his dead nephew, Anakin, sharing a personal moment R2-D2 had caught with his holorecorder.

  Instead, Luke found himself watching a beautiful, hand-sized, brown-eyed woman whom he did not recognize. She walked across the workbench, then stopped beside a sinewy young man dressed, as she was, in nightclothes.

  “What’s bothering you?” she asked.

  The young man continued to look away from her. “Nothing.”

  “Anakin, how long is it going to take for us to be honest with each other?”

  Luke’s heart rocketed into his throat. He had not immediately recognized his father. He wanted to call out to Mara, to share with Leia what he was feeling…but he was too stunned. He simply continued watching.

  The young man—Anakin—turned to face the woman. “It was a dream.”

  “Bad?”

  Anakin looked over her head. “Like the ones I used to have about my mother…just before she died.”

  The woman hesitated, then finally asked, “And?”

  Anakin’s gaze fell. “It was about you.”

  The hologram crackled to an abrupt end, and an ominous humming arose deep inside R2-D2’s internal workings. Luke flipped down his magnispecs and peered in to find the recording head bumping against his soldering filament as it attempted to access sector 222.

  “Artoo!” Luke reached for the droid’s primary circuit breaker. “Wait!”

  The recording head stopped moving, but Luke did not lift the soldering filament.

  “What are you doing?”

  The droid reinserted his interface arm into the data socket, and Luke had to flip up his magnispecs to read the message on the diagnostics screen. He continued to hold the soldering filament in place.

  I need to reformat sector 222. Those data are corrupted.

  “Nothing looks corrupted to me.” Luke could not understand why R2-D2 would try so desperately to hide 222’s contents, but he had no doubt that was exactly what the droid was doing. “Who was that woman with my father?”

  R2-D2 whistled two notes.

  “The woman in the hologram,” Luke said irritably. “Show it to me again.”

  R2-D2’s holoprojector obediently came to life, displaying the familiar, three-dimensional figure of an Alderaanian Princess in an elegant white gown.

  “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” the figure said. “You’re my only hope.”

  “Not that woman,” Luke said. “I know my sister. The one talking to Anakin. Is that…is she my mother?”

  A message appeared on the diagnostics display.

  I don’t know what woman you’re talking about. That sector is defective. It should be sequestered.

  “It was sequestered—probably on purpose.”

  Luke studied R2-D2 carefully, touching him through the Force. With most other droids, any hope of sensing the truth would have been lost to the indecipherable Force static generated by its system routines. But R2-D2 had been Luke’s close companion for nearly three decades. The little droid’s static aura was as distinctive to him as was the presence of Mara or Leia or Han.

  After a moment, Luke sensed the direction his questions should take. “It didn’t look like they knew you were holorecording. What were you doing? Spying?”

  R2-D2 let out a squeal that Luke took to be a protest of denial—until it ended in a sharp crackle and a surge of electricity melted the filament Luke was using to protect sector 222. He jerked the wire free and started to rebuke the droid for his stubbornness, but one whiff of the acrid fumes pouring from the access panel told him this much damage was nothing the droid would do to himself. Luke used the Force to trip R2-D2’s primary circuit breaker, then opened a second access panel to vent the interior of the casing.

  When the smoke cleared, he flipped his magnispecs down and saw that every circuit within a millimeter of sector 222 had been melted. Worse, a bead of hot filament had landed on the sector itself. Luke tore his magnispecs off and hurled them against the wall.

  “Kriffing slicers!” He could not help feeling that someone had gone to a great effort to prevent him from discovering his mother’s identity, but of course that was just his disappointment. Whoever had booby-trapped R2-D2’s spyware had done it for their own reasons—reasons important fifty years ago, but that hardly mattered now. “Kriffing history!”

  “Dad,” Ben’s voice asked, “what’s kriffing?”

  Luke turned to find his son standing at his side, mouth agape at his father’s unaccustomed display of anger.

  “Nothing—a bad word,” Luke said, calming himself. With a little luck—and the proper equipment—the memory chip could be restored and the booby trap bypassed. Things were never as bad as they seemed. “Your mother won’t be happy I said it in front of you.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell.” An innocent smile came to Ben’s small face. “M
aybe I can have a tube of nerfspread?”

  NINETEEN

  With the dance-field glowing in the iridescent light of Qoribu’s reflection and a thousand Taat swirling through the intricate patterns of the Little Dawn Rumble, Leia felt as though she had stepped a thousand centuries into Alderaan’s past, when the Colony still ruled the planet and human expansion remained a dark storm on the galaxy’s horizon. The Killiks were “singing” their part of the Song of the Universe as they danced, chirping melody through their tiny proboscises, tapping time with their mandibles, drumming bass in their chest cavities. Alien and primal though the music was, the performance was as flawless as anything Leia had ever heard in Harmony Hall on Coruscant, a thousand instruments played by a single artist.

  “Now that is just not right,” Han said, adding his own special counternote to the concert. “Why didn’t she marry Jag Fel when she had the chance?”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Leia said, following Han’s gaze. “If we don’t get her out of here soon, she might be spending more time than we like with Jag—being interrogated in his…”

  Leia saw what Han had been looking at and let her sentence trail off. On the near side of the swarm, Jaina, Zekk, and Alema were frisking through the dance steps amid an eddy of dancers. The three Jedi were holding their hands above their heads, waving them in unison with the Killiks’ antennae. Every few seconds, Jaina and Zekk would bow forward with the entire nest and rub forearms with the antennae of whatever insect they happened to be facing. Alema bowed as well, but rubbed lekku instead of arms.

  “It does look a little…unnatural,” Leia admitted.

  “Not at all,” C-3PO assured them. “It’s a bonding dance, welcoming the birth of the new day. They perform it once a week, before they go to the Harem Cave to mate.”

  Stomach tightening in alarm—or perhaps it was revulsion—Leia turned to Han. “We’ll talk to them as soon as the dance ends. You’re okay with the plan?”

  “For what good it’ll do,” Han grumbled. “Kidnapping her would be easier—and we both know how well that would work.”

  Leia grew exasperated with his pessimism. “Since when did you start worrying about the odds? You’re starting to sound—”

  She was saved from uttering the lethal like Threepio by the thunderous reverberation of an alarm rumble. She turned and found all the Killiks looking toward one of the passage entrances that ringed the dance-field. The insects were holding their antennae vertical and motionless, and their mandibles were spread wide in menace. Most of the Joiners were mimicking the gesture to the extent that their various anatomies allowed, but Alema was the only Jedi doing the same.

  “That doesn’t look good.” Han turned to scan the sky. “Chiss?”

  “I’ll be happy to ask,” C-3PO said.

  He shot a burst of squelch at a nearby Killik.

  “The Taat speak Bocce?” Leia asked.

  “Why, yes, Princess Leia. I’ve yet to discover a language the Killiks don’t understand. It seems they learn every language their Joiners know.” A second Killik turned and answered C-3PO’s question with a series of mandible clacks. “For instance, that was just Snutib click code.”

  “And?” Han asked.

  “It was quite fluent,” C-3PO said. “Though that particular dialect predates—”

  “We’re more interested in what it said,” Leia clarified.

  “My apologies.” C-3PO sounded disappointed. “I believe it concerns Jedi Sebatyne.”

  “Saba?”

  “Apparently, she appeared in the depths of the nest rather badly injured.”

  A knot of Taat emerged from the tunnel, tumbling and staggering as they attempted to keep ahold of a flailing mass of scales. The rest of the Killiks turned as one to look in Han and Leia’s direction, then thrummed their chests.

  “In fact, Taat is rather hoping that you might help calm down Master Sebatyne so their healers can close the small hole in her skull.”

  Han took off at a sprint, with Jaina and the other young Jedi forcing their way across the dance-field behind him. Leia asked Meewalh to fetch the emergency medpac from the Falcon, then started running.

  She arrived to find Saba strapped to a primitive stretcher, an elliptical slice of scalp and skull missing from one side of her head. Han was already standing at the Barabel’s side, trying to quiet her.

  “I know they’re creepy looking,” he was saying. “But settle down. They’re trying to help.”

  “No!” Saba’s eyes twitched as though she was trying to throw her head back and forth, but the head itself remained motionless. “Azzazzinz!”

  Her lisp was more pronounced than usual—a bad sign, given the head wound. Leia also saw a number of other injuries—a circle of broken scales around her temple, some lost fingertips, a third of a tail missing, and some suspicious swelling on her neck and calf. Lying on the stretcher, strapped next to the injured tail, was something that hadn’t come off Saba—a human bicep fused at the elbow to a chitinous Killik forearm.

  A blue chitinous forearm.

  The Killiks holding Saba drummed in protest.

  “They point out that Jedi Sebatyne’s brain is showing,” C-3PO translated. “She’s quite delusional.”

  C-3PO rose into the air and began to spin like a pinwheel.

  “What? Stop!…Put me down, you overgrown newt!”

  “Not…deluzional,” Saba growled.

  “Saba, it’s okay.” Leia reached out to the Barabel in the Force, trying to assure her that they did not doubt her. “We believe you.”

  C-3PO stopped spinning, and Saba’s gaze shifted to Leia. The pupils of her eyes were hugely dilated. “Yezz?”

  “Sure.” Han let his gaze linger on the forearm. “Something happened to you. Anyone can see that.”

  “Why don’t we take care of these wounds?” Leia wished Tekli had not left with Luke. She and Han had certainly patched up their share of wounds, but this was beyond their skill. “Then you can tell us about it.”

  “Now,” Saba insisted. “This one will tell you…now.”

  “Okay.” Leia gestured to the Taat healers cowering on the edge of the sled. “As long as you’ll let them work on you while we talk.”

  Saba narrowed a pebbly eye. “This one…thought you believed her.”

  “Saba, some of your wounds are cauterized,” Leia pointed out. “Does that mean you shouldn’t trust anyone who carries a lightsaber?”

  The Barabel snorted.

  “Look, we’ve got some concussion missiles on the Falcon,” Han said. “If they kill you, we’ll blast the place.”

  “Blazt it?” Saba began to siss weakly. “You are alwayz joking!”

  “He wasn’t joking,” Leia said. “Do we have a deal?”

  Saba eyed the healers cowering on the edge of her stretcher, then nodded. “Deal.”

  She lowered C-3PO to the ground again.

  “Thank goodness!” He clunked over to stand behind Leia, then said more softly, “They say she’s been an impossible patient!”

  A dozen Killik healers crawled onto her body and went to work, sterilizing her wounds and spinning silken bandages. As they labored, Saba recounted—in a halting voice—her discovery of the empty exoskeletons and the attack by Welk, then ended by noting that she had found three empty egg cells and killed only two immature assassins. She was worried that the third had left early to stow away aboard the Shadow.

  One of the healers squatting over her opened skull purred an opinion, which C-3PO translated as, “Patients with head wounds often suffer from hallucinations.”

  “It waz no—”

  “Allow me.” Leia laid a calming hand on the Barabel’s shoulder, then pointed to the arm lying next to Saba’s truncated tail. “If it was a hallucination, how do you explain that?”

  One of the Killiks holding the stretcher began to clack its mandibles.

  “The healers sometimes make grafts for the injured,” C-3PO translated. “In her delirium, Saba must have
mistaken a Joiner for a Chiss. The nest is searching for his body now.”

  Saba raised her head. “It waz no—”

  “Let us handle this, Hisser.” Han motioned Saba down, then asked, “Then how’d she get delirious in the first place? Where’d all these wounds come from?”

  It was one of the healers on her neck that answered.

  “Oh, dear!” C-3PO exclaimed. “She says Saba must have fallen after she was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?” Leia gasped.

  “Did this one not mention…that?” Saba asked.

  The healer on her head purred a comment.

  “Head wounds often cause forgetfulness,” C-3PO translated. The Killik on Saba’s neck added, “And they’re very sorry about the poison. They hope you won’t blast the nest.”

  “Blast the nest?” Leia looked to the healer that had spoken. “What’s that mean?”

  It was the healer on Saba’s leg that thrummed an answer.

  “It’s a powerful neurotoxic venom,” C-3PO said. “It causes permanent paralysis—and they have no antidote.”

  Saba cocked her brow up at Leia. “Told…you.”

  “You’re not dead yet,” Leia said. “How do you feel?”

  “Worze than…it lookz.”

  Wondering if Saba had any idea how bad she looked, Leia turned to Han. “She might beat it with a healing trance, but—”

  “We’ve got to take her back.”

  He looked as worried and frustrated as Leia felt. There was no question of not taking Saba back. The Barabel was clearly in danger of dying or being permanently paralyzed, and Cilghal—the Jedi Master-healer—had an infirmary and a lab back on Ossus that would have the best resources to help her.

  Han turned to Cakhmaim. “Catch Meewalh and start prepping the Falcon.”

  The Noghri nodded and raced off toward the tunnel that led down to the hangar.

  “And don’t wake Juun up!” Han yelled as an afterthought. “The last thing we want is a Sullustan slowing things down with procedure.”

  Leia motioned the stretcher bearers after Cakhmaim. “Let’s get her to the Falcon.”

  “Not zo…fazt,” Saba said. The Killiks paid no attention to her and started across the dance-field after Cakhmaim. “The third azzazzin…we muzt warn Mazter Zkywalker.”