Apocalypse (24 page)

“If you’ll show us the way.”

All three turned and led the Jedi and C-3PO up a stale-smelling passage that ascended along the outer walls of the palace. The climb was steep and lonely, rising in a rough spiral that felt five kilometers long.

They frequently passed through musty-smelling areas where a side tunnel led into the depths of the palace. The few insects they encountered seemed to be wandering about aimlessly rather than executing the business of the hive. Most of the time, the balls of luminescent wax hanging along the walls were too dim to see much more than the silhouettes of the three guides ahead. Every so often, however, they would pass one of the huge windows they had seen from outside, and the light would spill in to reveal archways decorated with bas-relief carvings of plants and animals from a thousand different worlds.

But it was the panels between the arches that put a flutter in Raynar’s stomach. The images depicted the grandeur of deep space, always with some peculiar twist that seemed unlikely to occur in nature. There was a supernova exploding in only one direction, a ring of nine planets circling their sun along a single orbital path, a nebula hanging like a curtain between two star systems. Finally came a scene that looked all too familiar—a system with five planets orbiting the same star in very similar orbits, with the third and fourth locked in a tight twin-planet formation.

Raynar stopped. “What’s that picture?”

The insects answered without stopping or looking back.
“Urrub.”

“Our work,” C-3PO translated. The droid paused, waiting in vain for a more thorough explanation, then said, “I’m sorry, Jedi Thul, but Thuruht doesn’t seem to be in a very informative mood right now. Perhaps they’ve been offended by Lowbacca’s rudeness.”

Lowbacca moaned a halfhearted apology.

Thuruht continued to ascend the corridor. Raynar remained where he was and called, “Is this one the Corellian system?”

The insects stopped five meters up the passage, then reluctantly turned around.
“Buurub uu ruub ur ru ub.”

“Thuruht wouldn’t know what it is called by lesser beings,” C-3PO translated. “But to Thuruht, it is known as Five Rocks.”

Tekli stood on her toes, reaching up to wipe the dust away from the third and fourth planets—the twins—then asked, “Does Thuruht know why the system was constructed?”

“Ub.”

The insects turned and walked on.

“Thuruht said ‘yes,’ ” C-3PO translated. “May I suggest we follow? They seem to be growing impatient with us.”

Lowbacca shrugged and started up the passage. Raynar and Tekli fell in behind the Wookiee. A few minutes later they turned toward the center of the palace, traveling down a long hall even larger and more ornate than the one they had just ascended. The air grew warmer and more humid, and the glow-balls started to shine more brightly. Dozens of workers began to appear, scurrying in and out of side passages, carrying tools and bales of a stringy yellow fungus, or waxy orbs of golden membrosia, one of the Killiks’ favorite nourishments. Raynar started to feel thirsty, and he noticed Lowbacca eyeing a membrosia bearer as she crossed the corridor ahead.

“
That
I miss about being Taat,” Tekli said. Taat was the hive she and Lowbacca had inadvertently joined years before, after Raynar had summoned them to help the Killiks fight the Chiss. “It will almost be worth the trip to have some again.”

“They sell it in Restaurant Galatina on Coruscant, you know,” C-3PO offered helpfully. “I understand the Horoh is especially fine this year.”

“And a thousand credits a liter,” Tekli said. “I’m a Jedi Knight, not an investment banker.”

They reached the end of the hall, where two huge guards stood to either side of the corridor, their long mandibles locked across an entrance ten meters wide. They looked much the same as the one that had eaten the landspeeder, except there was nothing vestigial about their eyes. The pair glared at the procession as it approached, and Raynar
began to fear that he and his companions would not be permitted to enter the queen’s chamber.

Then a deep drumming sounded from the interior. The guardians lifted their mandibles, and the guides led the way into a vast chamber containing hundreds of empty floor pits. In a healthy hive, the pits would have been filled with incubation cells. But the deep drifts of dust in the bottom of these cells suggested they had not been used in centuries. Unlike the rest of the palace, the room was well lit, with the sun’s orange light spilling in through a transparent membrane stretched across the vaulted ceiling.

The guides stopped a few steps inside, leaving Raynar and his companions to continue down a large center aisle toward the queen. Almost as large as the entrance sentries, she lay stretched across a massive dais, with six sturdy legs curled against a bantha-sized abdomen and a mouth flanked by a pair of multijointed mandibles. Standing on the floor in front of her were four guardians identical to those outside the entrance.

Closer to the dais were a pair of floor pits filled with the familiar comb of incubation cells. Raynar saw no more than thirty compartments, and only three nursery Killiks to attend them. The hive wasn’t quite dead, but it wasn’t thriving, either.

As Raynar and his companions passed the last nursery pit, the guardians shuffled away from the center of the dais, revealing a wide set of stairs. The queen’s abdomen rippled, filling the chamber with a long, low rumble barely audible to human hearing.

“I must say, this is quite unexpected,” C-3PO said. “The queen is inviting Lowbacca and Tekli to groom her.”

Lowbacca emitted an uncertain groan.

“It means you remove her external parasites,” Raynar explained. Lowbacca and Tekli’s old hive, Taat, had been much more egalitarian in social structure, so they had probably never participated in the ritual. “It’s an honor. Yoggoy used to groom me—”

Lowbacca huffed in disgust.

“Just think of it as a medical procedure,” Tekli whispered. “And remember why we’re here.”

The Wookiee sighed and dropped his head, and the group ascended the stairs. An attendant emerged from behind the queen, appearing
atop her giant abdomen with a bucket in one hand and a cloth and a bottle of antiseptic spray in two of her others, then motioned for the groomers to join her. As former Joiners themselves, Lowbacca and Tekli had enough experience to realize Killiks weren’t shy about crawling over one another, so they scrambled up to join the attendant.

Raynar watched them ascend, then stepped over to present himself to the queen. Her head was small compared with the rest of her body, but it was still half the size of Raynar himself, with eyes as big as shock-balls and slender mandibles the length of a Wookiee’s arm. Raynar raised his flesh-and-blood hand in greeting. In return, the queen dipped her head, then rubbed a feathery antenna along his wrist.

“Wuur uu rur uu,”
she thrummed.
“Ubub ruub uru.”

“Thuruht welcomes you back to the Kind,” C-3PO translated. “The hive will be honored to have you.”

Raynar felt a nervous flutter in his stomach. Lowbacca had clearly stated they had not come to join the hive, yet Thuruht was speaking as if it were already fact. All Killiks had a tendency to confuse belief with reality, so the queen might simply be saying she believed the three Jedi would eventually become Joiners again. But her tone was insistent, and it struck Raynar as an assertion of will—a warning that Thuruht would not be defied.

Raynar continued to hold his arm aloft until the queen withdrew her antenna. Then he said, “You know we are not here to join the hive.”

The queen lifted her head above his, clapped her mandibles together, and let out a short rumble.

“ ‘Yes, but it
will
happen,’ ” C-3PO translated. “She seems quite sure of it.”

Raynar let out his breath, taking a moment to calm himself, then looked into the queen’s nearest eye. “That can’t happen,” he said. “You remember last time, when I became UnuThul.”

The queen dipped her head a little and let out a series of soft booms.

“ ‘You won’t make the same mistake again,’ ” C-3PO translated. “ ‘You have grown in years and in wisdom.’ ”

“It doesn’t matter,” Raynar said. “The Chiss wouldn’t like it. They would go to war.”

The queen’s reply grew a little softer.

“ ‘What the Chiss don’t know will never hurt us,’ ” C-3PO said.

“They already know.”

A low rumble sounded from the insect’s thorax, and C-3PO translated, “ ‘You told them?’ ”

Raynar shook his head. “No, but they have spies everywhere.” As he spoke, he was trying to figure out why Thuruht seemed so determined to have him as a Joiner. Visitors became Joiners after they had been exposed to Killik pheromones for enough time. But hives rarely engaged in deliberate recruitment—not unless they were in need of something a new Joiner could provide. “If I don’t return to the Galactic Alliance soon, the Chiss will mobilize for war—and they
will
attack the Kind.”

The queen studied him for a time, then tipped her head and rumbled a question.

“Thuruht asks why you came, if your presence is such a danger?”

“Because a greater danger threatens the Galactic Alliance, and we need Thuruht’s help to defeat it,” Raynar explained. “We need to know everything Thuruht can tell us about the Celestials—and a being who calls herself—”

The queen’s entire body shuddered.
“Ruur ub?”

“It seems we’re in luck, Jedi Thul,” C-3PO said. “She asks if the name is Abeloth?”

Raynar nodded. “Then you know who Abeloth is?”

The queen gave several short, nervous booms.

“Indeed she does,” C-3PO responded. “Thuruht is the one who imprisoned her.”

Raynar’s heart began to pound. “Good. The Jedi need to know everything Thuruht can tell us about her.”

“Ub?”

Raynar needed no translation. “Because Abeloth has escaped,” he said. “And we don’t know where she went.”

The queen raised her head and let out a rumble so thunderous that Raynar’s own torso began to reverberate. Workers started to pour into the chamber from all sides, some bearing orbs of membrosia and others rushing to clean the dust from the cell pits in the floor. The nursery attendants dropped into the nearest clean pit and began to exude wax, creating a comb of fresh incubation cells.

Raynar turned to C-3PO, who was watching the sudden flurry of activity with an attentiveness that suggested a major portion of his processing power was engaged to make sense of it.

“Threepio,” Raynar shouted, trying to make himself heard above the rumbling queen. “What’s all the booming about?”

“I’m afraid it makes no sense, Jedi Thul,” the droid replied. “I must be misunderstanding.”

“Tell me anyway,” Raynar ordered.

“Very well,” C-3PO said. “Thuruht keeps saying that the hive must prepare.”

“Prepare?” Raynar asked. “For what?”

“That’s the part I must be misunderstanding,” C-3PO answered. “Thuruht seems convinced that the galaxy is about to perish. She keeps saying that the end of time has come.”

O
UTSIDE THE AIRTIGHT DOOR OF THE COMPUTER CORE STOOD TWO
Sith sentries, both holding their lightsabers in hand. Wearing black robes over black torso armor, they were scanning the long access corridor and speaking frequently into their headset comlinks. Clearly, they would not be easy to surprise.

Jysella watched the two guards on her screen for a moment longer, then thumbed the control-ball at the base of the remote display unit. The two Sith seemed to shrink and pull away as the tiny spy droid widened its angle of vision. Around the perimeter of the screen, a bright green border continued to flash, indicating that the unit’s molecular sampler was still finding traces of detonite—a prime ingredient in most antipersonnel mines.

She smiled. The mines weren’t going to be a problem.

Jysella studied the screen a moment longer. There wasn’t much else to see in the wide-angle view, only the white corridor that led to the decontamination chamber outside their objective—the Jedi Temple’s computer core. Once her team breached the core, the battle was—for
all practical purposes—won. Their droid, Rowdy, would plug into a data socket and convince the central computer to lower the shields and open the blast doors. Three brigades of Jedi-led space marines would storm the Temple. The battle would be bloody and costly, but the Sith had no place to run. They would be found and eliminated.

Simple.

Jysella switched to thermal imaging. The two guards smudged into bright yellow man-blobs. The corridor itself turned medium blue, with the orange stripes of electrical conduits running through the walls. Behind the stripes, she could make out the red ghost-shapes of another twenty Sith warriors, hiding in the cramped cavities behind the wall panels.

Sith were patient, she had to give them that. It had been thirty-six hours since her father and Master Skywalker had decided to break into the computer core, and the ambushers had probably been hiding behind the walls for most of that time. With any luck, they would be groggy and slow from the ordeal, and it would be easy to trick them—at least, as easy as it
ever
was to trick Sith.