Dark Nest_ The Joiner King Part 4

"We have," Luke said. "What we don't understand is why. He started to close himself off after the war."

"Ben says he wants to be like his uncle Han and do things the hard way," Mara added. "But I think there's more to it than that. This has lasted too long to be a phase."

Mara did not add and he's gotten too good at it, perhaps because of how much that thought frightened her. She had to concentrate hard and long to find the Force in her son, and sometimes Luke had trouble sensing Ben's presence at all.

"Interesting." Saba licked the air with her long tongue, then turned to look down the access corridor. "Perhapz he did not like how the war felt."

"Perhaps not," Luke said. "We tried to s.h.i.+eld him from it, but it just wasn't possible."

"There was too much happening in the galaxy," Mara said, surprised to find herself feeling almost defensive. "The Force was too filled with anguish."

"And so were we," Luke said. "That's what really worries us, Saba... maybe he's hiding from us."

"Then you have nothing to worry about," Saba said. "Ben will not hide from you forever. Even this one can see how attached he is to his parentz."

Luke thanked her for the rea.s.surance, then asked R2-D2 to bring up an infrared image of the unknown object. What looked like a collection of palpitating blood cells appeared on Mara's display screen. Each cell had an irregular white heart surrounded by a pink halo, and they were all connected by a tangled web of flowing red dashes.

"It looks like a network of housing modules," Mara observed.

"And it feelz like a rangi mountain," Saba added.

"Now we're getting somewhere," Luke said. "By the way, what are rangies?"

"Very tasty-and the feeling is mutual!" Sissing hysterically, Saba rose and turned to leave the flight deck. "This one will take the StealthX and reconnoiter."

"Better hold tight," Mara said. On the infrared display, a string of tiny white circles was flaring to life near the center of the unknown object. "At least until we know what those are."

The circles began to swirl and grow larger. Mara didn't even try to count the number, but there had to be over a hundred of them. More tiny circles blazed into existence and shot after the others. She initiated a series of automated systems checks to warm the Shadow's battle circuits.

"Lower-"

The Shadow's retractable laser cannons dropped into firing position as Luke antic.i.p.ated Mara's order. She armed the proton torpedoes and opened the firing-tube doors.

"Artoo, tell Nanna to put Ben in his crash couch," Luke ordered.

R2-D2 tweetled a protest.

"n.o.body said they were shooting," Luke said. "We just want to be ready."

R2-D2 added another warning.

"Really?" Luke responded. "That many?"

Mara glanced at the corner of her display and saw a counter quickly adding numbers.

"Five hundred?" she gasped. "Who sends five hundred craft to investigate one intruder?"

R2-D2 chirped testily, then Mara's screen displayed a message telling her to have some patience. He was still trying to a.s.semble vessel profiles. Identifying who had sent them would have to wait.

"Sorry," Mara said, wondering when she had started to be intimidated by astromech droids. "Take your time."

R2-D2 acknowledged, then added a note about the propulsion systems the vessels were using.

"Rockets?" Luke asked in disbelief. "As in old nuclear rockets?"

R2-D2 tweeted irritably. The note on Mara's display read, Chemical rockets. Methane/oxygen, specific impulse 380.

Luke whistled at the low number. "At least we can run, if we have to."

"Jedi?" Saba began to siss again. "Run?"

The image on Mara's display melded into a single infrared blob. She looked up and saw a small cloud of twinkling stars between the Shadow and the unknown object. As she watched, the swirling cloud grew steadily larger and brighter. Soon the stars resolved into two parts, yellow slivers of rocket exhaust and brilliant green bursts that looked a lot like strobe beacons.

Mara engaged the ion drive actuator. "Does this make sense to anyone?" She began to turn, giving the Shadow some running room. "With all that evasive maneuvering, that has to be a combat-"

R2-D2 began to whistle and trill urgently.

Mara checked her display, then asked, "What old blink code?"

R2-D2 buzzed in impatience.

"Imperial?" Mara looked out the side of the canopy. The swarm had drawn close enough now to reveal the sleek, dart-shaped hulls of a small fighter craft stretched between the green nose strobes and the yellow rocket tails. In the closest vessel, she could barely make out a pair of curved antennae pressed against the interior of a low c.o.c.kpit canopy, and there were two bulbous black eyes peering out at her. "As in Palpatine's Empire?"

R2-D2 squawked a peevish affirmative.

"Then tell us what they're saying," Luke ordered. "And stop talking to Mara that way."

R2-D2 warbled a halfhearted apology, then the message appeared on Mara's display.

Lizil welcomes you... Please all arrivals may please enter through the central portal please.

FOUR.

The nearer the Falcon drew to her destination, the more mystified Leia became. The thumb-sized oval of darkness they had found when they emerged from hypers.p.a.ce-at the coordinates they had wheedled out of Corran Horn, who was supervising operations in Luke's absence-was now a wall of murk that stretched to all edges of the c.o.c.kpit canopy. But the terrain scanners showed a jumble of asteroids, iceb.a.l.l.s, and dustbergs ranging from a hundred meters across to several thousand, all held together by a web of metal struts and stony tubes. Though the structure had not yet collapsed under its own gravity, a rough guess of its ma.s.s was enough to make Leia worry.

The Falcon's escorts-a swarm of small darts.h.i.+ps being flown by something with antennae and big, bulbous eyes-suddenly peeled off and dispersed into the surrounding darkness. A jagged array of lights came to life ahead, hooking along its length toward a single golden light at the end.

"That must be the guidance signal the darts.h.i.+ps told us to watch for," Leia said. The terrain schematic on her display showed the lights curving over the horizon of a small carbonaceous asteroid located on the cl.u.s.ter's outer edge. "Follow the amber light. And slow down-it could be dangerous in there."

"In where?"

Leia sent a duplicate of the terrain schematic to the pilot's display. Han decelerated so hard that even the inertial compensators could not keep her from being pitched into her crash webbing.

"You sure about this?" he asked. "It looks about as safe as a rancor's throat down there."

The image on their displays was that of a jagged five-kilometer mouth surrounded by a broken rim of asteroids, with dark ma.s.ses of dust and stone tumbling down into the opening in lazy slow motion. Though the scanner's view extended only two thousand meters into the chasm, the part it did show was a twisted, narrowing shaft lined by craggy protrusions and dark voids.

"I'm sure." Leia could feel her brother's presence somewhere deep inside the jumble of asteroids, calm, cheerful, and curious. "Luke knows we're here. He wants us to come in."

"Really?" Han turned the Falcon toward the lights and started forward. "What'd we ever do to him?"

As they pa.s.sed over the array, Leia began to catch glimpses of a black, grainy surface carefully cleared of the dark dust that usually lay meters thick on carbonaceous asteroids. Once, she thought she saw something scuttling across a circle of light, but Han was keeping them too far above the asteroid to be certain, and it would have been too dangerous to ask him to go in for a closer look. She trained a vidcam on the surface and tried to magnify the image, but the shaft was too dusty and dark for a clear picture. All she saw was a screenful of gray grains not too different from sensor static.

They were barely past the first array when two more came to life, beckoning the Falcon deeper into the abyss. The s.h.i.+p bucked as Han avoided- only half successfully-a tumbling dustberg, then a frightened hiss escaped Leia's lips as the jagged silhouettes of two small boulders began to swell in the forward viewport.

"Don't sit there hissing." Han's gaze remained fixed on his display, where the resolution of the terrain schematic was not fine enough to show the two objects. "Tell me what's wrong."

"There!" Leia pointed out the viewport. "Right there!"

Han looked up from his display.

"All right, no need to get all worried." He calmly flipped the Falcon on her side and slipped between the two boulders an instant before the pair came together, then went back to watching his display. "I had my eye on them."

Han's voice was so c.o.c.ky and sure that Leia forgot for a moment that this was not the same brash smuggler who had been running her defenses since she was still fighting the Empire - the man whose lopsided grins and well-timed barbs could still raise in her a ruddy cloud of pa.s.sion or a red fog of anger. He was wiser now, and sadder, maybe a little less likely to hide his goodwill behind a cynical exterior.

"Whatever you say, flyboy." Leia pointed at the light arrays, the ones she had decided would be too dangerous to investigate. "I want to do a close pa.s.s on one of those."

Han's eyes widened. "What for?"

"To see what kind of technology we're dealing with here." Leia put on a flirtatious pout, then asked in an innocent voice, "That isn't too risky for you, is it?"

"For me?" Han licked his lips. "No way."

Leia smiled and, as Han angled toward the array, shunted extra power to the particle s.h.i.+elds. Maybe the challenge of nap-of-terrain flying down a dark, twisting shaft filled with flotsam would help snap Han out of his touchy mood.

Han weaved past a dozen obstacles, working their way across the abyss toward the second array of lights... and that was when C-3PO, returning from a postjump hyperdrive check, arrived on the flight deck.

"We're cras.h.i.+ng!"

"Not yet," Han growled.

"Everything's under control, Threepio." Leia's attention was focused on the asteroid ahead, where the lights had begun a slow flas.h.i.+ng as the Falcon approached. "Why don't you go back and continue supervising the maintenance checks?"

"I couldn't possibly, Princess Leia!" C-3PO placed himself in the navigator's chair behind Han. "You need me in the c.o.c.kpit."

Han started to reply, but stopped when a ball of frozen gas came floating across the Falcon's path.

"You see?" C-3PO demanded. "Captain Solo nearly missed that object!"

"I did miss it," Han snapped. "Otherwise you'd be plastered across the canopy right now."

"What I meant was that you failed to see it until the last moment,"

C- 3PO explained. "Do be careful-there's a rather large one coming toward us from forty-seven point six-six-eight-"

"Quiet!" Han swung around an oblong megalith the size of a heavy cruiser, then added, "You're distracting me."

"Then perhaps you should have your synapses checked," C-3PO suggested. "Slow processing time is indicative of aging circuits. There's another object at thirty-two point eight-seven-eight degrees, inclination five point-"

"Threepio!" Leia spun around to glare at him. "We don't need help.

Go to the main cabin and shut down."

C-3PO's chin dropped. "As you wish, Princess Leia." He stood and half turned toward the exit. "I was only trying to help. Captain Solo's last medical evaluation showed a reaction time decrease of eight milliseconds, and I myself have noticed-"

Leia unbuckled her crash webbing.

"-that he seems to be growing-"

She rose and hit the droid's circuit breaker.

"-rather hesiii t a a a."

The sentence trailed off into a ba.s.s rumble as C-3PO lost power.

"I think it's time to get his compliance routines debugged." She pushed the droid into the seat in front of the navigation station and strapped him in. "He seems to be developing a persistence glitch."

"No need." The Falcon shot to the right, then shuddered as a dustberg burst against its s.h.i.+elds. "n.o.body listens to droids anyway."

"Right-what does Threepio know?" Leia kissed Han on the neck, then returned to her own seat.

"Yeah." Han smiled the same hungry grin that had been making Leia's stomach flutter since Palpatine was Emperor.

Han swung the Falcon in behind the lights and began a steep approach toward the surface. The array began to flash more brightly, illuminating the rough, silvery surface of a metallic asteroid. On the ground behind the first beacon, Leia saw the swirling lines of a closed iris hatch, made from some tough membrane that bulged slightly outward under the pressure of the asteroid's internal atmosphere. The light itself was held aloft on the end of a conical, meter-long stand that seemed to be crawling across the surface of the asteroid on six stick-like legs. At the forward end of the apparatus, the lenses of a large ovoid helmet reflected the glow of the next beacon in line.

"Bugs!" Han groaned and shook his head. "Why did it have to be bugs?"

"Sorry," Leia said. Han normally avoided insect nests - something to do with a water religion he had once started on the desert world of Kamar. Apparently, a mob of angry Kamarian insects had tracked him down months after his hasty departure, taking him captive and demanding that he turn Kamar into the water paradise he had shown them. That was all Leia knew about the incident. He refused to talk about how he had escaped. "It'll be okay. Luke seems to feel comfortable with them."

"Yeah, well, I always knew the guy was a little strange."

"Han, we have to go in," Leia said. "This is where Jaina and the others came."

"I know," Han said. "That's what really gives me the creeps."

They reached the end of the array and pa.s.sed over the insect holding aloft the amber light; then Leia glimpsed a second iris hatch and they left the asteroid behind. Far ahead, spiraling down the walls of the ever- narrowing pa.s.sage, three more beacon lines flared to life. Han stayed close to the walls, showing off for Leia by following the contour of the conglomeration's unpredictable topography.

After a time, the arrays began to grow hazy and indistinct as the dust, being slowly drawn inward by the conglomeration's weak gravity, thickened into a gray cloud. Han continued to hug the wall, though now it was to make it easier for the terrain scanner to penetrate the powdery fog.

A nebulous disk of golden light appeared at the bottom of the shaft. As its glow brightened, Leia began to see meter-long figures in insect- shaped pressure suits working along the pa.s.sage walls, dragging huge bundles across asteroid surfaces, repairing the stony tubes that held the jumbled structure together, or simply standing in a shallow basin and staring out at her from behind a transparent membrane.

"You know, Han," she said, "this place is starting to give me the creeps."