The Joiner King (48 page)

They were supposed to have indomitable spirits.

Jaina felt a stirring deep down inside, in the place that had always belonged to her brother Jacen, and she knew he was with her, urging her to fight back, to throw off her lethargy, to break the Colony’s hold on her and reach for that part of her that was just Jaina.

Jaina stood.

Where are you going?
Zekk asked.
It doesn’t feel like you need the refresher.

“Get out of our—
my
—mind,” Jaina said.

Jacen was urging her to remember how Welk and Lomi Plo had tricked the strike team on
Baanu Rass
, how they had stolen the
Flier
and abandoned Anakin to die. And now Jaina was allowing them to control her mind.

Jaina did not understand how that could be. The entire Colony knew that Raynar Thul was the only survivor of the Crash.

But Jacen seemed so sure. A black fury rose in Jaina’s mind, the same black fury to which she had succumbed when she went to recover Anakin’s body, and finally she felt able to act.

She wanted to find Welk and kill him. She wanted to find Lomi Plo and make
her
wish for death.

But first, there was duty. To let anger distract her was to let the Dark Jedi win. First, Jaina had to stop the war—
then
she could kill Lomi and Welk.

Jaina turned toward the hangar.

“Where are you going?” Zekk whined from his bench. “We can’t do anything. It’s too late.”

Jaina opened herself to their meld, then reached out to him and let her anger pour from her heart into his.

I won’t surrender to
them.
I’m going to stop this war.

Zekk’s eyes widened, then turned a bright, angry green. He slammed his palms down and pushed himself to his feet.

“I’m with you,” he said, catching up. “How are we going to do this?”

“Tell you later,” Jaina said. She did not yet have a plan—and she had no intention of developing one until after they were away from the Taat nest. “For now, let’s just concentrate on getting to our StealthXs.”

They stepped into the sweet dampness of the wax-lined access tunnel and started down toward the hangar. As they progressed, Taat began to fill Jaina’s mind with doubts about her intentions, to make her wonder if she would really be stopping the war—or merely sparing the Chiss a much-deserved defeat.

Jaina thought of Anakin, and her doubts vanished in the black fire of her anger.

Taat workers began to pour into the tunnel, all scurrying up a passage that led only to the Jedi barracks. Jaina and Zekk threatened them with word and thought, but the Killiks continued to clamber past, slowing the pair’s progress to a crawl.

Zekk took the lead and began to muscle forward, using the Force to shove aside the Killiks ahead of him. More Taat poured into the tunnel, convinced they had some urgent errand in the Jedi barracks. Zekk continued to push ahead. Jaina added her Force powers to his, and the entire stream of insects began to slide backward down the tunnel.

The Killiks dispersed, and a strange resistance began to rise inside the two Jedi, a cold hand pushing at them inside their
own bellies. Their limbs grew heavier, their breathing became labored, their pulses pounded in their ears. They leaned against the cold hand, and still it grew harder to move. Soon, their legs were too heavy to lift, their lungs were ready to burst, their drumming hearts drowned out their own thoughts. They came to a stop, hanging parallel to the floor, and the harder they tried to move forward, the more impossible it became.

They hung there for several minutes, testing their wills against that of the Colony, and only grew more tired. Jaina thought of how Lomi and Welk had betrayed Anakin, and she grew more determined than ever to avenge him—and less able to move.

Jaina began to despair. Her anger was no match for the Will of the Colony. She had to find another way.

The seed of a new plan came to Jaina, a plan that relied not on anger, but on love instead.

Jaina did not nurture that seed. Instead, she buried it deep down in her mind, in that part that was still
I
instead of
we.

Keep trying
, she urged Zekk.
Don’t stop, no matter what.

Never!
he assured her.

Good.

Jaina let the pressure push her away from the hangar, back up the passage.

“Hey!” Zekk’s voice was strained. “Where are you going?”

“The barracks,” Jaina said. “I’m giving up.”

“What!”

“I’m not as strong as you.” It irked Jaina to say this, but it was the one way to be sure Zekk would continue to struggle. “I’ll see you later.”

As Jaina retreated up the passage, the pressure gradually diminished. Finally, she was able to simply walk back to the barracks. She could sense Zekk down near the hangar, feeling puzzled and angry and a little bit abandoned, but he remained determined not to quit, to show Jaina he was as strong as she believed.

Once Jaina reached the barracks veranda, she returned to her bench and began to contemplate the beauty of the Killik mind. Every member of a nest worked flawlessly with all the others, executing unbelievably complex tasks—such as refueling and
restocking several thousand rocket ships an hour—in near-perfect harmony. There were seldom any of the accidents or shortages or confusion so common to any military operation—and there were never arguments or disagreements or territorial spats.

Would it truly be so bad if there
was
a war, and the Colony won? For once, there would be true galactic peace—no vying for resources, no clashes of interest, no territorial conquests, just all the peoples of the galaxy working together for the common good. Was that so wrong?

Jaina supposed that the fact that she did not see anything wrong with that meant she had become a true Joiner. She was only worried that the Colony could never win a war against the Chiss.

The Colony would have help, Taat assured her. An image came through the nest mind of the
Ronto
being unloaded. A dozen long streams of Killiks were pouring in and out of its cargo bays, working together to off-load the huge, telescoping barrels of at least a dozen turbolaser batteries.

The Chiss were going to be
very
surprised when they attacked. Maybe the Killiks could win this war after all.

Jaina decided to wait there on the veranda until Unu called for her. Sooner or later, there would be a mission that only a Jedi in a StealthX could do, and Jaina would be ready.

Then, when her mind finally went quiet and she knew that Taat and Unu were no longer paying her any attention, she pictured the handsome, square, scarred face of Jagged Fel. She held the image in her mind and performed a series of breathing exercises, focusing on the feelings they had shared while they were fighting the Yuuzhan Vong together—and during those few times they had managed to rendezvous after the war—then turned roughly toward where the Chiss staging area would be, somewhere outside the orbit of Qoribu.

While Jag was not Force-sensitive, Jaina had touched him through the Force many times while they were together, and she felt sure he would recognize the sensation of her presence brushing his. But he wouldn’t trust her. He would think she was just another Joiner trying to lure him into a mistake. So she
would have to convince him that he was discovering the ambush on his own—and she would have to do it before Taat realized what she was doing.

Jaina reached out to Jag in the Force and found his presence—distant and dim—somewhere ahead on Qoribu’s orbital path, exactly where he would be if he was guarding the staging area for a Chiss assault fleet.

Come get me, lover boy
, Jaina sent. Jag would not understand the words, of course, but he would recognize the sentiment. She had used the same taunt many times when they sparred.
If you can.

Jaina felt Jag start in surprise, then she caught a flash of anger as he recognized her touch. This wasn’t a game! This was war, and …

His irritation suddenly changed to concern as it dawned on him why she had picked
that
particular day to reach out to him. Jaina sensed a rising tide of alarm, then lost contact as Jag drew in on himself.

Qoribu’s brightly striped orb hung sandwiched between the flat, twinkling clouds of two sizable space fleets. For now, both sides seemed content to avoid a battle, each hiding from the other behind the gas giant’s considerable bulk. But they were also maintaining aggressive postures, keeping their sublight drives lit and their shields up, dropping reconnaissance patrols through the planet’s golden ring system like airspinners from a Bespin raawk trawler.

“Good news,” Han said, decelerating hard. As they had half expected, the homing beacon aboard Alema’s stolen skiff had led them straight back into the middle of the Qoribu conflict. Though the standoff between the two fleets was certain to complicate their plans, Han could not have been more thrilled. After they destroyed the Dark Nest, he could track down Jaina and have her safely away from the Taat nest within hours. “We’re just in time for the war.”

“Why is that good news?” Juun asked from the navigator’s station. “Are we planning to go back into smuggling?”

“No!” Leia said. She keyed a command on the copilot’s console, and the tactical display began to light up with mass readings and vector arrows. “Han’s smuggling days were over a long time ago.”

Tarfang, still regrowing his fur after the head-to-toe clipping that had preceded a lengthy stay in the bacta tank, chittered a rude-sounding question.

“Tarfang wishes to inquire whether Princess Leia always answers questions on Captain Solo’s behalf,” C-3PO said.

Han did not bother to answer. He had brought Tarfang along only because Juun would not come without him, and he had brought Juun along because he was actually considering taking the Sullustan on as a copilot. After seeing how deftly Leia had resolved the crisis between the Jedi and the Galactic Alliance, it had finally grown clear to Han that he was blocking fate. Leia had been born to run things, and the wretched state of the Galactic Alliance Reconstruction was evidence enough of how badly she was needed. Thus he had made up his mind to step aside so she could follow her destiny … again.

Tarfang jabbered something else, which C-3PO translated as, “Tarfang says it is quite unfortunate that old age has broken your spirit, Captain Solo. Wars are good for smugglers. You might have been able to earn enough to replace the fine ship you tricked Captain Juun into sacrificing on your behalf.”

This was too much. “First, I’m not old, and my spirit is fine.” Han twisted around and wagged his finger at Tarfang. Without any fur, the Ewok reminded him of a womp rat with a short nose and no tail. “And second,
I’m
not the one who told Juun to out-fly his cover. Getting that rustcan blown out from under him probably saved his life.”

Tarfang started to yammer a reply.

“Later, you two,” Leia interrupted. “Luke and Mara will be arriving soon, and we have work to do.”

She pointed at the tactical display, which now identified the fleet hovering above Qoribu’s northern pole as Hapan and the one at the southern pole as Chiss. While the Chiss appeared to be outnumbered more than two to one, Han knew appearances were deceptive. In all likelihood, they had a much larger force waiting just inside Ascendancy territory, ready to jump into battle the instant the enemy attacked. He only hoped that Dukat Gray—or whoever commanded the Hapan fleet—understood the basic deceptiveness of Chiss war doctrine.

Across the center of Qoribu ran a thick band of yellow bogey symbols.

“Dartships?” Han gasped.

“That’s how it looks,” Leia said. “The spectrograph suggests a methane-based fuel.”

“There must be a million of ’em!”

“Closer to a hundred and fifty thousand, Captain,” Juun said from behind him. “Plus a handful of freighters, blastboats, and four KDY orbital defense platforms.”

Han raised his brow. “I wonder where
those
came from?”

Tarfang offered an opinion, which C-3PO reported as, “Smugglers.”

Han ignored the Ewok and asked Leia, “Where’s Alema?”

“Still working on that,” she said. “I could use a little help.”

“Yeah, sure,” Han said. “All you have to do is ask.”

A grid appeared over the bright band of bogey symbols strung across Qoribu’s equator.

“Alema’s skiff has to be somewhere in there, or we would have picked her up by now,” Leia said. A quarter of the grid turned red. “Do an efflux search on the areas I’m assigning you. She’s only a few minutes ahead, so her ion drives must still be active.”

The homing beacon they had planted on the stolen skiff was only accurate to within a light-month, which left a lot of territory to search via normal sensors. Han brought up the first grid square and began to look for a telltale plume of hot ions. At this scale, the band of dartships resolved itself into a lumpy strand of swirling dots, with the gray disk of one of Qoribu’s moons hanging just beneath the main area of activity.

After a moment of study, Han switched to the next grid and found several bogey symbols that turned out to be a Gallofree freighter and a pair of patrolling blastboats. As soon as he brought up the third grid, he was tempted to move immediately to the next one. The dartships in this area were spread so thin that he could make out the thin gold line of Qoribu’s ring system and the irregular nugget of a small ice moon. But the thin Killik defenses here just did not feel right. Han brought the moon, Kr, to the center of his display and enlarged the scale.

A blue circle the size of a fingertip appeared in the screen center, slowly growing smaller as it traveled toward the moon.

“Got it!” Han began a mass analysis to confirm his suspicions, but he was sure enough of himself to transfer an inset to
Leia’s display. “This one’s still moving insystem. It has to be her.”

“Very good.” Leia leaned across and kissed his cheek. “You win the reward.”

“That’s my reward?” Han complained. “I get that every day.”