"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 ma.s.s 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 k.n.o.bby 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.
"n.o.body 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 rea.s.suring 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 a.s.signed. 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 Sull.u.s.tan 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 a.s.sured 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 m.u.f.fled 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 Sull.u.s.tan 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?"
TEN.
"Raynar Thul is no more," Raynar said. He was squatting on his haunches in the heart of the Prime Chamber, high atop a circular dais where he would always be visible to the hundreds of insect attendants that followed wherever he went. His long arms were hanging over his knees with the backs of his hands resting slackly on the ground before him, and his blue eyes were riveted, unblinking, to Luke"s face. "We are UnuThul."
"How strange, then, that I still sense Raynar Thul"s presence within yours," Luke said.
He found it difficult to meet Raynar"s gaze, not because of those unblinking eyes or the ghastliness of the face that held them, but because of the conflicting emotions they aroused - elation that Raynar had survived his abduction, regret over what had happened afterward, anger and anguish that so many others had failed to return at all...
especially his nephew Anakin. He still woke up nights praying that it had been just a bad dream; that there had been a better way to stop the voxyn and he had never been asked to authorize the mission to Myrkr at all.
But Luke was careful to keep those feelings hidden, buried deep inside where they would not show in the Force and complicate a discussion already sure to be difficult and full of emotion for both sides.
"Raynar Thul may be in hiding," Luke said carefully. "But he is not gone. I feel that clearly."
"We are surprised, Master Skywalker, that you cannot feel the difference between a ghost and a man." The same murky presence that Luke had felt in the Lizil cantina rose within Raynar"s body, not forcing Luke out, but preventing him from feeling anything else. "Raynar Thul vanished with the Crash."
"And then UnuThul was born?"
"The Kind are not born, Master Skywalker," Raynar said. "An egg drops, a chrysalis is spun."
"You mean there was a metamorphosis?" Leia asked. Along with Mara and Saba, she was sitting cross-legged with Luke on the dais floor. Han, of course, could not be talked into sitting. He was pacing the edge of the dais, keeping a wary eye on the attendants below and grumbling about the heat and mugginess and too-sweet smell of the nest. "Is that the story on the walls?"
Leia gestured at the colorful mosaics that decorated the interior of the Prime Chamber, and Raynar"s eyes flashed in delight, a pair of blue embers flaring back to life in that melted wreck of a face.
"You are as observant as we recall, Princess," he said. "Others are not usually observant enough to perceive the Chronicle."
"The Chronicle?" Luke asked.
Raynar pointed over Luke"s shoulder, where a red streak arced down the domed ceiling to a white smear opposite the main entrance to the chamber.
"A star wagon fell from the sky," Raynar said.
As Luke twisted around to look, he glimpsed the blocky hull of an overturned YV-888 light freighter protruding above the rim of a still-smoking crater. But as soon as his gaze fell directly on it, the image dissolved into the same blur of semi-random color that had been there before.
"I don"t see anything," Han complained.
"Only a wall of rockz," added Saba, whose Barabel eyes were incapable of seeing nearly half the colors in the design.
"You can"t look directly at it," Mara explained. "It"s like one of those air-jellies on Bespin. It only shows up when you look away."
"Oh, yeah," Han said.
Saba hissed in frustration.
Luke let his gaze slide to the next image and glimpsed Raynar kneeling over a wounded insect, his palms pressed to its cracked thorax.
"No, Master Skywalker. Over there." Raynar pointed to a pinkish blotch on the adjacent wall, eliciting a loud rustle as all the insects in the chamber turned to look in the direction he was pointing. "The Kind do not order such things in the same way you Others do."
When Luke turned his head, he saw a scorched figure lying in the bottom of the crash crater, surrounded by waiting insects.
"Beside the star wagon Yoggoy found Raynar Thul, a scorched and dying thing," Raynar continued. "We climbed down to wait for the Last Note so we could share his flesh among our larvae."
Raynar pointed across the room again, to another mosaic depicting the insects carrying him toward a small enclave of spires similar to those in the city outside.
"But he touched us inside, and we were filled with the need to care for his body."
The next image showed Raynar"s burned body in the bottom of a large six-sided basin, curled into a fetal position and tended by two human-sized insects.
"We built a special cell, and we fed him and cleaned him like our own larvae."
Luke had to slide his glance past the following scene three times before he could be sure of what he was seeing. The mosaic showed only Raynar"s face, surrounded by the walls of a much smaller cell, his neck craned back and his mouth gaping open to accept a meal from a nearby insect.
"After a time, Raynar Thul was no more."
The picture he pointed to next showed Raynar rising from the cell much as he was now, a k.n.o.bby, faceless, melted memory of a man, arms crossed across his chest, feet together and pointed downward, eyes shining beneath his heavy brow like a pair of cold blue moons.
"A new Yoggoy arose."
The following image showed Raynar splinting the leg of a wounded insect, and the one after that showed several Yoggoy tending to an entire chamber of sick and injured nest members.
"We learned to care for the infirm."
Several pictures showed the Yoggoy nest expanding and growing, with Raynar supervising the construction of irrigation aqueducts and a drying oven.
"Before, only the nest mattered. But Yoggoy is smart. Yoggoy learned the value of the individual, and Yoggoy grew stronger."
Then came the crucial set of images. The first showed Raynar trading with other nests for food and equipment, the second depicted several insects from different nests gathered around listening to him, and in the third he was leading an even larger group of insects-all different in color, size, and shape-off to start their own nest.
"The Unu was created," Raynar said.