Mara waited until she heard the front door slide open, then said, “Thank you for that.”
The Killik spread its mandibles and sprang. Mara caught it in the Force and slammed it into a support post. There was a sharp crackle, and when the insect dropped to the floor, one of its wings jutted out at an angle.
“I don’t understand why you want to fight,” Mara said. “Because you have no chance of winning-“
Gorog jumped across the room, mandibles snapping at head height. Mara rushed to meet the attack, then dropped into a slide, catching both ankles as she passed beneath the insect, spinning to her belly, twisting its legs around and slamming the Killik down on its back.
The insect flexed its good wing and landed back on its feet, but Mara was already driving an elbow into a tubular knee. The leg snapped with a sickening crackle, and the Killik dropped to the floor.
Mara grabbed the Killik’s good leg and stood, jerking it up more or less upside down, then snake-locked her leg over the insect’s and shoved against the joint.
“All right, that’s enough,” she said. “I promised Ben I wouldn’t kill you-but I didn’t say anything about hurting.”
The Killik clacked its mandibles wildly, then released an acrid, foul-smelling vapor that filled Mara’s eyes with cloudy tears and turned her stomach queasy and rebellious. She snapped the joint and attempted to launch herself out of danger with a departing thrust-kick, but the insect was already rolling into Mara’s leg.
She landed facedown, her kicking leg trapped beneath the Killik. Four pincer-hands grabbed hold of her calf and began to pull, dragging her foot toward the clacking mandibles. Mara’s own hand drifted toward
her lightsaber, but she stopped short of pulling it free. This bug was not going to make a liar and a killer of her in her son’s eyes. She reached forward, clawing at the wooden floor, trying to pull free, and only slipped farther beneath the insect.
Then Mara saw the table, lying on its side where it had fallen when Gorog attacked. She reached out with a mental hand, turned it end-on, and brought it sailing into the Killik’s head.
The table connected with a spectacular pop, and Gorog’s grasp loosened. Mara scrambled free and Force-sprang to her feet, then spun around to find the Killik collapsed on its belly, ail six limbs trembling and shaking in convulsions. She rushed to its side and pulled the table away, revealing a ten-centimeter dent in the head where the edge had cracked the chitin.
“Stang!”
Mara pulled the comlink from her pocket and started to call for medical assistance-then noticed the Killik slowly drawing its trembling arms in toward its body, gathering itself to spring.
Mara slipped forward and brought her heel down on the dented chitin. “I said that was enough!”
Gorog collapsed again, unable to do anything but lie on the floor and tremble. Then Mara felt Luke urgently reaching out to her, warning her to be careful, urging her not to kill it.
Mara eyed the insect with spite in her heart. “What is it with you?”
A few seconds later, Luke came rushing in the door with half a dozen senior apprentices at his back.
“Mara, are you-“
“I’m fine, Skywalker.” She took the hand he offered and glared down at the trembling insect. “But I’m getting awfully tired of people telling me not to squash that bug.”
“Sorry about that, but the comm center just finished reconstructing some of Leia’s message.” Luke motioned the apprentices to secure the Killik, then added, “She says it could explode.”
TWENTY-NINE
Reclining in long diagnostics chairs with their heads hidden beneath scanning helmets and their bodies swaddled in sensor feeds, the subjects of the experiment-Tahiri and the other Joiner Jedi Knights-reminded Luke of captives in an Imperial interrogation facility. It did not help that the Killik and Alema Rar, who had arrived aboard the Falcon just hours before, were heavily sedated and strapped in place with nylasteel bands. Even the isolation chambers in which the subjects were located - dark, gas-tight compartments with transparisteel doors-looked like detention-center cells.
“I’m sorry it’s so dim in here, Master Skywalker,” Cilghal said. She was standing behind a semicircular control station in a white laboratory smock, studying a data-holo comparing the brain activity of her subjects. “But it’s better to have as little background stimulation as possible. It helps isolate their responses.”
“I understand.” Luke did not bother denying his revulsion. Cilghal could certainly sense his feelings through the Force, just as Luke could sense the excitement that had caused her to comm him in the first place. “And it’s more than the darkness. The whole lab raises unpleasant associations.”