The Joiner King (6 page)

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 cockpit 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.

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 hyperspace—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 cockpit canopy. But the terrain scanners showed a jumble of asteroids, iceballs, 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 mass was enough to make Leia worry.

The
Falcon
’s escorts—a swarm of small dartships 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 dartships 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 cluster’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 masses 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 passed 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 ship 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 cocky 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 passion 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 pass 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 shields. 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 crashing!”

“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 flashing 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 cockpit.”

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 bass 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 shields. “Nobody 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 passed 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 passage, 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 passage 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.”

“Wait till you hear a pincer rap,” Han said. “Those things will really ice your spine.”

“Pincer rap?” Leia glanced over at the pilot’s seat, wondering if there was something Han wasn’t telling her. “Han, do you recognize—”

Han cut her off. “No—I’m just saying …” He raised his shoulders and shuddered at some memory he had kept buried their entire married life, then finished, “It’s not something you want to experience. That’s all.”

The dust cloud finally began to thin, revealing the disk of light below to be a bulging hatch membrane more than a hundred meters across. Several dozen insects were scuttling away from the middle of the hatch, oozing a thick layer of greenish gel from a valve at the rear of their pressure suits. Han eased back on the throttles, then—when the portal showed no sign of opening—brought them to a stop twenty meters above the center.

The insects reached the edge and turned around, the lenses of their dark helmets turned up toward the
Falcon.
Soon, the gel began to bleed off in green wisps.

“What are they waiting for?” Han turned his palms up and gestured impatiently. “Open already!”

Once the gel had evaporated, the insects returned to the center of the portal and began to mill about aimlessly.

“Is there
anything
on the comm channels?” Han asked.

Leia double-checked the channel scanner. “Only background static—and not much of that.” She did not suggest trying to comm the
Shadow.
Some insect species were sensitive to comm waves, a fact that had led to some tragic misunderstandings in the early days of contact between the Verpine and the rest of the galaxy. “I could wake Threepio. He might be able to tell us something about who we’re dealing with here.”

Han sighed. “Do we have another choice?”

“We could sit here and wait for something to happen.”

“No,” Han said, shaking his head wearily. “You can’t outwait a bug.”

Leia rose and flipped the droid’s circuit breaker. After the light had returned to his photoreceptors, he sat turning his head back and forth as he calibrated himself to his surroundings, then finally fixed his gaze on Leia.

“I
do
wish you would stop doing that, Princess Leia. It’s most disorientating, and one of these times my file allocation table will be corrupted. I could lose track of my personality!”

“Wouldn’t that be too bad,” Han replied.

“Threepio, we need your help,” Leia said, allowing the droid no time to process Han’s sarcasm. “We’re having trouble communicating with the indigenous species.”

“Certainly!” C-3PO responded cheerily. “As I was saying before you debilitated me, I’m always happy to help. And you are certainly aware that I’m fluent in—”

“Over six million—we know,” Han interrupted. He pointed outside. “Just tell us how to communicate with the bugs.”

“Bugs?” C-3PO stood and turned toward the roiling mass of insects. “I don’t believe those are bugs, Captain Solo. They appear to be a sentient hybrid of coleoptera and hymenoptera, which often use complex dances as a means of communication.”

“Dances? You don’t say!” Han returned his hands to the control yoke and throttle. “So what are they telling us?”

C-3PO studied the insects for a moment, then emitted a nervous gurgle and moved forward to the control console.

“Well?” Han demanded.

“How odd.” C-3PO continued to study the creatures. “I have no record of this happening before.”