The Joiner King (15 page)

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?”

“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 knobby, 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.

Before he could point to another mosaic, Leia asked, “What exactly is the Unu? The governing nest?”

Raynar tilted his head and gave a short, negative click. “Not in the way you think. It the nest of the nests, so that Yoggoy may share our gift with all of the Kind.”

“Yeah?” Han asked. “And how’s that work?”

“You would not understand,” Raynar said. “No Other would.”

There was more, an attack by a disapproving nest, a time of starvation as the flourishing nests stripped their worlds bare, the beginning of the Colony as the Kind began to spread across local space. But Luke paid little attention. He was struggling with what he had learned already, with the fear that Raynar remained as lost to them as ever, and that Jaina and the others would soon be just as lost—and with the growing alarm he felt over what the young Jedi Knight had become. Jedi should not be leaders of galactic civilizations; it was too easy to abuse the power they wielded, too easy to use the Force to impose their will on others.

He felt Mara touching him through their Force-bond, urging him to keep his disapproval in check.

To Raynar, she said, “What happened to the Dark Jedi who abducted you?”

Raynar lowered his fused brow. “The Dark Jedi?”

“Lomi and Welk,” Luke prompted. He was careful to keep his disapproval well buried within himself, in case Raynar could sense his feelings better than he could Raynar’s. “The Jedi whom you rescued on the Myrkr mission.”

“Lomi and Welk …” Raynar’s eyes grew restless. “They were … trouble. You say they abducted us?”

“They stole the
Flier
with you aboard,” Mara said. “You must have figured this out by now. They tricked Lowbacca into leaving the ship, then stole it while you were unconscious inside.”

As Mara spoke, Raynar’s gaze kept sliding away from her face, then back again, and his presence in the Force grew confused as well. The familiar part, the part Luke recognized, rose repeatedly to the surface, only to be swallowed a moment later by the murkier, more powerful essence that confronted him every time he tried to probe a Colony member.

After a few moments, Raynar said, “We remember the Crash, but not the Dark Jedi. We think they … they must be dead.”

“You don’t remember them on the
Flier
at all?” Luke asked. “You must have seen them before you crashed.”