NINE

As the Falcon dropped toward the mottled pinnacles below, Leia found herself straining against her crash webbing, almost gasping at the bustling vastness of the Colony’s central nest. The Yoggoy towers, brightly adorned in wild splashes of color, stood hip-to-hip across the entire planet, and the air was so thick with flying vehicles that she could barely see the surface.

“Kind of looks like old Coruscant,” Han said, speaking to Leia and—over the comm—to Luke, Mara, and everyone else aboard the Shadow. “So big—and all that bustle.”

Leia continued to strain forward over her controls, peering out the lower edge of the canopy. As the Falcon descended, she began to see that while the pinnacles came in every size, they were all distinctly cone-shaped, and they all had horizontally banded exteriors—like the insect spires in Killik Twilight.

She started to say as much, then decided she was letting her imagination run wild. Cones were a basic geometric form. Creating them out of mud rings was probably as common among intelligent insects as was erecting stone rectangles among social mammals.

“I’m gonna blast that can of corrosion back to quarks!” Han said.

Leia glanced over to find Han frowning at his tactical display, then checked her own screen and saw that the XR808g’s transponder code had disappeared. “Did Juun land already?”

Han shook his head. “The little earworm shut off his transponder.”

Knowing better than to ask if Han had remembered to run a code search, Leia activated her throat mike.

“We’ve lost the Exxer.”

The report was greeted with a troubled silence. Right now, the XR808g was their only hope of locating Jaina and the others.

“Any ideas?” Han asked. “I’d like to find these kids before they become a bunch of bughuggers.”

“That’s not going to happen.” Even over the cockpit comm, Luke’s voice was calm and reassuring. “They’re Jedi.”

“What’s that have to do with the price of spice on Nal Hutta?” Han demanded.

“They’re too strong, Han,” Mara said. “Especially Jaina.”

“Yeah?” Han asked. “If they’re so strong, how’d that Force-call drag them all the way out here in the first place?”

The troubled silence returned.

Leia reached over and laid her hand over Han’s. “It’ll be all right, Han. I can still feel them out there. They’re not Joiners.”

“Yet,” Han grumbled. Over the comm, he asked, “How about those ideas?”

“Try a code search,” Luke suggested helpfully.

Han rolled his eyes.

Leia smiled at him, then said to Luke, “Thanks for the suggestion. We’ve already tried that.”

“No need to worry,” Mara said. “We haven’t lost them.”

“We haven’t?” Leia asked. Before the XR808g left Lizil, Han and Juun had hidden a subspace transceiver beneath the cockpit and linked it to the navicomputer. Each time the XR808g initiated a jump, the transceiver automatically encoded the galactic coordinates and broadcast them to the Shadow and Falcon—but that didn’t help them now, when they were already at those coordinates. “I don’t understand.”

“Give me a second.” Mara remained silent for a moment, then said, “Be ready to take a fix, in case Juun is smarter than he looked.”

Han raised his brow. “I don’t recall planting a homing beacon on the Exxer.”

“Because you’re not the sneaky one—despite all reports to the contrary,” Mara commed. “Ready?”

Leia smiled and prepared a navigation lock. “Ready.” A red dot began to blink in the upper corner of the tactical display. “Got it.”

Leia activated the lock, and Han swung the Falcon around behind the red dot. Yoggoy traffic proved an unimaginable free-for-all, with muscle-powered balloon-bikes competing for airspace against dilapidated cloud cars and modern airspeeders. Thick-waisted rocket planes flashed past in all directions, packed to bursting with goggle-eyed insects and trailing oily plumes of smoke. Battered space freighters eased their durasteel hulks down into the mess, descending through the traffic toward the haze-blanketed towertops below.

A stubby little rocket plane shot out from under a cargo blimp off to starboard and began to climb, coming for Leia’s side of the cockpit.

“Rodder!” Han cursed, and the Falcon took a sudden skip upward. “Watch where you’re going!”

“Don’t get so upset,” Leia said. “We have plenty—”

A thirty-meter insect shuttle flashed into view from beneath Leia’s side of the cockpit, headed straight for the little rocket plane.

“Oh, my!” C-3PO said from the navigator’s station. “That was too close—”

“Hard to port,” Leia interrupted. “Now, Han!”

“Port?” Han shot back. “You’re crazy!”

Leia glanced over and saw the mountainous hull of a giant transport gliding past above the Falcon’s forward mandibles.

“Oh—” Leia slapped the crash alarm, bringing the inertial compensators to maximum, priming the fire-suppression systems, and setting off a cacophony of alerts farther back in the vessel. “Brace yourself!”

“Dead stop!” Luke’s voice came over the comm. “Dead stop!”

Han already had his hand on the throttles—but before he could pull them back, the shuttle was diving and the rocket plane was climbing past the Falcon almost vertically, so close that Leia could have reached out and grabbed the pilot’s antennae.

Han casually slipped his hand off the throttle and deactivated the crash alarm. “No need to get all excited.” His hands were shaking as badly as Leia’s, but she saw no use in pointing that out. “I’ve got it under control.”

“Yes,” C-3PO agreed. “It’s fortunate that you were wise enough to do nothing. It gave the other pilots time to respond to your error.”

“My error?” Han replied. “I was flying straight and level.”

“Quite so, but the others are all following sine wave trajectories,” C-3PO said. “And may I point out that any system functions optimally only when all elements use the same equations?”

A two-seater rocket plane dropped in ahead of the Falcon and bobbed along pouring fumes into their faces, then swerved aside to reveal the bulbous shape of a balloon-bike coming at them head-on. Han rolled into an inverted dive and spiraled past beneath it.

“Now you tell me,” Han said.

“Watch it back there,” Leia warned the Shadow. “And have Artoo plot a sine wave trajectory for us—a safe one.”

“We’ll send it up in a moment,” Mara promised.

The moment went by, then two, then several. Finally, when her nerves could stand no more close calls—and no more of Han’s grouching—Leia commed back to the Shadow.

“Uh, we didn’t receive that trajectory.”

“We’re trying,” Luke said. “Artoo’s sort of locked up.”

“Locked up?” Han asked. “An astromech?”

“He’s been acting strange lately,” Luke explained. “All we got before he went blank was not safe, not safe, not safe.”

“Oh, dear!” C-3PO exclaimed. “It sounds as though he’s trying to resolve an unknowable variable. We’re doomed!”

“Yeah?” Han waved at the traffic outside the forward viewport. “Then how come none of them are crashing?”

C-3PO was silent for a moment, then said, “I wouldn’t know, Captain Solo. Their processors certainly aren’t any better than Artoo’s.”

“They don’t need processors.” Leia was thinking of Luke’s description of the cantina where Saba met Tarfang, of how the mysterious Joiners had arrived to lead away any patron with whom he struck up a conversation. “It was pretty clear that the Lizil can communicate telepathically. Maybe the Yoggoy can, too.”

“Probably,” Mara agreed. “And since we don’t have any Yoggoy navigators aboard—”

“We’re flying blind!” Han finished. “Better bring the shields to maximum, Leia. We’re going to get some bug spatter.”

“Perhapz not,” Saba commed from the Shadow. “Leia, have you been doing your reaction drill?”

Leia felt a stab of guilt. “When there’s been time.”

Saba was kind enough not to remind her that she was supposed to make time for her training. That was the obligation of a Jedi Knight—though Leia, in all honesty, had a hard time thinking of herself as anything other than an eternal apprentice. Perhaps that was why she found it so hard to find training time.

“Do the drill now,” Saba said. “But instead of stingerz, imagine the remote is shooting vesselz at you.”

Leia started a breathing exercise, then closed her eyes and opened herself to the Force. She immediately felt something swooping down on them from above.

“Down and starboard,” she said.

The Falcon continued on the same course.

“Han—”

“Are you crazy?” he interrupted. “With your eyes open, maybe. But not…”

The Falcon dropped five meters, and Leia opened her eyes to see the swollen underbelly of a big Gallofree transport gliding over them.

“Now you will…listen…to your nestie!” Saba was sissing hysterically. “Mara is flying with her eyes closed.”

“Who isn’t?” Han gave Leia a quick nod. “Whatever you say, dear.”

Leia closed her eyes again and began to call directions. At first Han emitted an alarming string of oaths and gasps, but gradually the sensations grew more concrete—and Han’s willingness to follow the blind more ready. Within the hour, they were bobbing and dodging along more or less steadily behind the XR808g.

Finally, Han said, “Looks like he’s going to ground.”

Leia opened her eyes to see the tracking blip drifting down toward the middle of the display, its color deepening to red as the XR808g lost altitude. She looked out the canopy and found the distinctive wafer of a YT light freighter in the distance ahead, descending into the hazy labyrinth of insect pinnacles. Traffic remained heavy above the spires, but there were only a handful of drifting balloon-bikes and slow-moving airspeeders among the towers themselves.

“We’ll take point,” Leia commed. “Why don’t you fly top cover?”

“It’s a plan,” Luke answered.

As the Falcon descended, Leia saw that the mottled colors decorating the pinnacles had been created by pressing colored pebbles into the exterior walls. The effect was remarkably calming. If she watched them out of the corner of her eye, or allowed her gaze to go unfocused, the bright blotches of color reminded her of a meadow in full bloom—and, she realized, of the elaborate mosaics inside the spires depicted in Killik Twilight.

“Could it be?” she gasped.

“Could be anything,” Han answered. “So let’s be ready. Send Cakhmaim and Meewalh to the cannon turrets, and tell Beady to go to ready standby.”

They followed the XR808g down to within a hundred meters of ground level, where the balloon-bikes and airspeeders gave way to rivers of racing landspeeders, speeder bikes, and dangerous-looking rocket carts steered exclusively by Yoggoy pilots. Pedestrians were forced to scurry along the tower bases, hanging on the walls sideways if they were insects or keeping themselves tightly pressed against the foundations if they were bipeds.

Juun began to fly erratically, making last-second turns and doubling back on his own trail. If not for the tracking blip, Leia would have lost him a dozen times in half an hour. Finally, they swung onto a large curving boulevard and began to circle a massive complex of fused towers sheathed in an eye-pulling mosaic done in every imaginable shade of red. The XR808g eased steadily toward the interior lanes, then abruptly dropped to ground level and disappeared into the dark mouth of a huge, barrel-vaulted gateway.

“That kreetle!” Han said. “I should’ve blasted him when I had the chance.”

Leia immersed herself in the Force, then reported, “It looks more dangerous than it feels.”

“You sure?” Han gave her a sidelong look. “No offense, but I know how much time you have to practice that Jedi stuff.”

“Would it make any difference if I wasn’t sure?”

Han gave her that crooked grin of his. “What do you think?”

He eased the yoke forward and swung the Falcon into the murky gateway. Leia activated the forward maneuvering lights, illuminating the interior of a huge, winding passage covered in a wavy pink-and-yellow mosaic. The tunnel was longer than Leia had expected, and each time the ship rounded a new bend, they sent a swarm of insects scurrying for the vault edges.

After a couple of minutes, they emerged in a small, flower-shaped plaza enclosed by a dozen fused towers. The mosaics were bright and disorienting, with solid bands of color gradually paling from deep amber at ground level to pure white at the pinnacletops. At the far side of the area, the XR808g sat on its landing struts, its boarding ramp already dropping into position.

Han brought the Falcon to within twenty meters and set her down with the missile launchers facing the XR808g. “Cakhmaim, Meewalh, be ready with those cannons,” he ordered over the intercom. “Ready—”

“Prepared to open fire, Captain,” the droid reported.

“Not yet,” Leia said, unbuckling her crash webbing. “Only if they shoot first.”

“Survival rates decrease thirty-two percent for combatants firing in reaction,” BD-8 objected.

“We’re not shooting first.” Han strapped on his BlasTech holster. “Just stand ready to look tough.”

“Look tough?” BD-8 inquired.

“Intimidation mode one,” C-3PO clarified. He turned to Han. “You really should use the standardized terms with the BD series. Their tactical overlays leave little processing power for semantic analysis.”

Han rolled his eyes. “Yeah, maybe I’ll read the manual someday.”

He led the way off the flight deck, and they descended the boarding ramp to find Juun scurrying toward them in a torn tunic.

“Han! Princess Leia!” he called cheerfully. “I was afraid we’d lost you!”

“Sure you were,” Han replied coldly. He stopped a few steps from the end of the ramp and rested a hand on his holstered blaster. “Your transponder just happened to go on the blink?”

“Of course not!” Juun said. “Our guide disabled it. After the last jump, he found the subspace transceiver.”

BD-8 came up behind Leia and glared over her shoulder, clicking and whirring loudly. Juun stopped three meters away and gawked up at the battle droid. Leia tried to get a read on the his truthfulness, but she felt only alarm and confusion.

Juun raised his hands. “Please! It wasn’t my fault!”

Leia glimpsed movement on the tower walls behind him, then saw several tiers of insect soldiers stepping into view. They looked much like Lizil workers, except they were the size of a Wookiee, with meter-long mandibles and scarlet carapaces covering their backs. The undersides of their thoraxes were bright gold, and their eyes were a deep, haunting purple. In their four hands, they each carried a crude electrobolt assault rifle and a short, thick-shafted trident. It took an instant to realize they were standing on small terraces instead of midair, for human eyes found it difficult to interpret the subtle interplay of hue and shadow that defined each belt of the wall mosaic.

“That does it!” Han said, reaching for his holster. “I’m gonna blast you myself.”

The edges of Juun’s cheek folds turned blue. “What for?”

“What for?” Han waved his blaster at the surrounding walls. “For leading us into a trap!”

Juun’s eyes went wide. “I did?”

Leia reached out to the insects above, searching for any hint of hostile intentions, and felt none.

“Don’t play dumb,” Han said to Juun. He aimed his blaster at the Sullustan’s knees. “It just makes me mad.”

Leia reached over and covered Han’s blaster hand. “Put that thing away!” she whispered. “It isn’t what it looks like.”

“Then what is it?” Han continued to glare at Juun.

“We’ll have a better chance of finding out if you keep that thing in its holster.”

Han allowed her to push the blaster down, but BD-8 was harder to convince.

“Situation serious,” the droid reported. “Suggest withdrawal to transport. Permission to lay covering fire?”

“Denied!” Leia and Han said simultaneously.

“Okay,” Han said to Juun. “Maybe it’s not what it looks like. Where’s Tarfang?”

Juun remained at a distance. “In the medbay. When our guide found the transceiver, there was a little fight.”

Leia began to have a sinking feeling. “What about the guide? It’s not—”

Her question was drowned out by the sudden thunder of insect drumming. The three lowest rows of soldiers raised their carapaces, then stepped off their terraces and added to the tumult the roar of hundreds of beating wings. Leia heard BD-8 ask something she could not understand and ordered him to stand down on general principles—though she did pluck the lightsaber off her belt and start easing back toward the Falcon’s boarding ramp.

Juun scurried over to join them, his round ears red with alarm. The soldiers continued to swirl overhead in a dark mass for several seconds, then glided to the plaza floor and formed a tightly packed cordon around the Falcon and XR808g.

“Situation critical,” BD-8 reported. “Permission to return to stand ready?”

“G-granted,” Leia said.

The soldiers thrummed their chests in a single deafening boom, then brought their feet together and snapped their weapons to the attention position against their thoraxes. On the far side of the XR808g, the cordon parted to admit a small parade of insects of many different body shapes, ranging in size from that of Leia’s thumb to somewhat larger than an X-wing. Most seemed to be simple variations on the standard Colony pattern, with feathery antennae, large bulbous eyes, and four arms and two legs. But some had exaggerated features, such as one with slender, two-meter antennae ending in fuzzy yellow spheres, another with five large eyes instead of the usual two large and three small, and several that walked on four legs instead of two. One of the largest had a coat of sensory bristles so thick it looked like fur.

In the center of the procession walked an imposing, melt-faced man with no ears or hair and a mere bulge for a nose. His brows had fused into a single knobby ridge, and all his visible skin had the shiny, stiff quality of a burn scar. He wore purple trousers with a scarlet cape over a gold chitin breastplate.

“Who’s the fashion victim?” Han asked Juun.

“I think it’s the Prime Unu.” Juun’s voice was almost a gasp. “Nobody ever sees him.”

“The Prime Unu?” Leia asked.

“You might consider him the chief of the Colony,” Juun whispered. “He’s doesn’t rule it, at least not the way most species think of ruling, but he’s the heart of the whole thing.”

“Sort of the king bee, huh?” Han asked.

Leia felt Luke reaching out to her from above, alarmed by the growing trepidation he had been sensing in her. She filled her mind with reassuring thoughts.

The Prime Unu stopped in front of the XR808g, and two of his companions boarded the battered freighter. Leia reached out in the Force, trying to gauge his intentions, and found the same double presence that she had come to recognize in the Joiners of the Lizil nest. But the individual element of his presence felt stronger than most and—to her surprise—somehow familiar. Leia allowed her thoughts to roam freely over the past, seeking their own connections to that familiarity.

Her mind went first to the Jedi academy on Yavin 4, during a time when Anakin was still too young to attend and jealous of his older siblings. The memory brought with it a flood of emotion, and Leia found herself struggling to retain her composure—to avoid the torrent of grief and remembrance that always threatened to sweep her away when she thought of her lost son.

Her mind was telling her that the Prime was tied to her children—particularly Anakin—and she could not help hoping that the Prime was Anakin; that her son had somehow survived the Myrkr mission after all, and the funeral on Hapes had been some other young man’s.

But that was fantasy. Had it been Anakin standing next to the XR808g, Leia would have known. She would have felt it in her bones.

Her thoughts wandered to another memory, on Eclipse, where Cilghal and Danni had learned to jam Yuuzhan Vong battle coordinators. The Jedi were meeting in a lab, with the milky splendor of the galactic core pouring down through the transparisteel ceiling. Cilghal was explaining that she had discovered where the enemy was growing the deadly voxyn that had been attacking the Jedi across the galaxy.

…a full-grown ysalamiri, the Mon Calamari was saying, and suddenly Leia felt an enormous, murky presence in the Force pressing her away from the Prime. She looked up and found him staring in her direction, his blue eyes shining like a pair of oncoming blaster bolts. Leia raised her chin and held his gaze. Her vision grew dark around the edges, and soon she could see nothing but his eyes.

He winked and looked away, and Leia felt herself falling.

“Whoa!” Han caught her under her arms. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Leia allowed Han to hold her as her vision returned to normal. “The king is Force-sensitive.”

“Yeah?” Han replied. “I’ve never seen you react that way before.”

“Okay, he’s very Force-sensitive.” Leia gathered her legs beneath her. “We might know him.”

“You’re kidding.” Han studied the Prime for a moment, then shook his head. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know yet,” Leia said.

A pair of insects emerged from the XR808g carrying the Yoggoy guide that Juun had been assigned. The chitin of its thorax was pitted and charred, three of its limbs hung beside its body loose and swinging, and both of its antennae had been broken off. The Prime pressed his melted brow to the insect’s, then raised the remains of a three-fingered hand and began to stroke the stumps of its antennae.

“An Ewok did that?” Han asked Juun.

The Sullustan nodded. “Tarfang is not the gentle soul he seems.”

A contented boom reverberated from the chest of the wounded guide, and the Prime stood and started toward the Falcon. It was impossible to read the expression behind his grotesque mask of a face, but the briskness of his pace suggested how he felt about what he had just seen.

“The king doesn’t look very happy,” Leia said. “Maybe you should wait aboard the Falcon, Captain Juun.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Juun said. “The guide assured me there would be no—”

The Prime raised two fingers and pointed at the Falcon’s laser cannons. There was a thunk as the turrets broke their collar locks, then the muffled scream of grating servomotors.

“Hey!” Han protested.

The turrets continued to rotate—tearing up their internal maneuvering mechanisms—until the cannons faced aft.

“Hostile action under way,” BD-8 reported. “Permission to—”

The Prime raised a finger toward him, and the request ended in a garbled blast of static. The harsh smell of melting circuits filled the air, then the droid crashed to the ground. Han glanced over his shoulder.

“Bloah!” he gasped. “Can Luke do that?”

“Maybe I’ll wait aboard the Falcon after all,” Juun said.

The Sullustan turned and raced up the boarding ramp—and the Prime surprised Leia by letting him. The ghastly figure crossed the last few steps and stopped in front of the Solos, towering over Han by a good third of a meter. For a moment, he stood glaring down, his breath coming in audible wheezes that suggested badly damaged lungs, his blue eyes sliding back and forth between their faces.

Then Cakhmaim and Meewalh appeared at the top of the boarding ramp with power blasters in hand. Leia started to order the Noghri to stand down, but she was no match for their reflexes. They shouldered their weapons and yelled for the Solos to drop to their bellies.

The Prime flicked his wrist, and both Noghri went tumbling back into the Falcon’s main corridor. He stared in their direction for a moment, no doubt checking to make sure they would not surprise him later, then turned back to Leia and Han.

“Captain Solo.” His voice was a deep, gravelly rasp that made Leia’s throat close with empathic pain. “Princess Leia. We weren’t expecting you.” He glanced skyward, where Luke and Mara were still circling onstation in the Shadow. “Nor the Masters Skywalker.”

“Sorry about that,” Han retorted. “We tried to comm, but it turns out there’s no HoloNet in the Unknown Regions.”

“No HoloNet.” The Prime’s upper lip quivered, straining to smile, but not quite able to break free of its scar-tissue cast. “We hadn’t considered that.”

He turned away and walked under the Falcon, craning his inflexible neck around awkwardly to inspect the ship’s belly. He made a complete circuit like this, pausing beneath the cargo lift, rising on his toes to peer at the seals around the missile tube doors, kicking the landing struts. Finally, he reached up and touched the carbon-scored hull.

“We never liked the black,” the Prime said. “White is better. White is your color.”

Leia’s mind flashed back to the Yavin 4 visit, to a handsome blond-haired boy lying unconscious on the floor after being bitten by Jacen’s crystal snake—a handsome boy dressed in the haughty scarlet, gold, and purple of the Bornaryn shipping empire.

“Raynar?” she gasped. “Raynar Thul?”