[Dark Nest] - 1(131)
Han’s eyes bulged. “What in the blazes are you doing?”
“Stopping a war,” Leia whispered. Knowing Han would only grow stubborn if he realized how much this was going to hurt her, she tried to hide her dismay. “Saving billions of lives, keeping the council together, preserving the Galactic Alliance. That kind of thing.”
“Yeah, I know.” Han jerked a thumb toward the Ithorians. “What about them? That world we found was perfect-“
“And it’s perfect for the Killiks, too.” She had a familiar queasiness inside, a heavy feeling that used to come whenever she was forced to make an unfair choice as the New Republic Chief of State. “We’ll take care of the Ithorians another way.”
“How?” Han asked. “Ask Omas to give them a planet?”
“No,” Leia said. “Make him.”
She turned around and smiled across the table at Omas.
“On the way home, Han and I discovered a small group of uninhabited planets.” Leia waited for the murmur of surprise to fade, then said, “I think they might make a good home for the Qoribu nests.”
A wave of disappointment filled the Force, and Leia could not help looking past Omas toward the foyer. The Ithorians were all staring silently in her direction, their eyes half closed in resignation-or perhaps it was sorrow. Still, when Leia met Waoabi’s gaze, he merely tightened his lips and gave her an approving nod. No Ithorian would want to live on a world that had been bought with someone else’s blood.
Leia directed her attention to Luke. “I propose that we move the Qoribu nests to these planets.”
“How?” Jacen asked. “There are four nests in the system, each with at least twenty thousand Killiks, and you don’t just move a Killik nest. You have to rebuild it inside a ship, lay in stores-“
“I’m sure Tenel Ka will instruct her fleet to help with that,” Leia said. “In fact, I’m rather counting on it.”
Jacen’s jaw fell, then he closed his mouth and nodded. “That could work
“And it will look as though it’s what the Jedi intended all along,” Omas added. “Brilliant!”
“You’re sure about this planet?” Luke asked Leia. “It’s completely deserted?”
“We should stop on the way back to the Colony and do a thorough sector scan.” Leia glanced at Han, who nodded, then added, “But I’m sure. The astrobiology there is… unique.”
“Well, then.” Luke glanced around the circle, seeking and receiving an affirmative nod from each of the council Masters. “We seem to have reached an agreement.”
The bitterness began to fade from the Force, and the tension drained from the faces of the Masters.
“We’d better prepared to deal with the Dark Nest,” Mara said. “It might not like this idea.”
“Dark Nest?” Omas asked.
“The Gorog nest,” Luke explained. “The Colony seems completely unaware of it, so we’ve started calling it the Dark Nest.”
“It’s attacked us several times,” Mara said.
“Why?” Omas asked.
Mara hesitated, clearly unwilling to tell the chief about the nest’s personal vendetta against her, so Leia answered.
“We’re not sure,” she said. “The nest doesn’t seem to want us involved with the Colony, so it’s a good bet it will try to stop us.”
“Maybe the Dark Nest wants war,” Jacen suggested. “It sounds like the Colony was pushing up against Ascendancy territory even before their own worlds began to grow scarce. There must be a reason.”
“I don’t understand,” Omas said. “I thought you persuaded Tenel Ka to send her fleet because the Colony is trying to avoid a war?”
“The Colony is,” Cilghal said. “But the Dark Nest-“
“May have its own reasons to want a war,” Leia said. She did not want to complicate Omas’s view of the issue with a lengthy explanation of the Colony’s unconscious motivations-or give him reason to doubt the Jedi’s ability to resolve the crisis. “There’s a bit of a, um, power struggle going on inside the Colony.”
“Isn’t there always?” Omas said, nodding sagely. Power struggles were something that every government official understood well. He turned to Luke. “Is this going to be a problem for us?”
“Only finding it,” Mara said. “The Gorog are pretty secretive. So far, we’ve seen them on Yoggoy and Taat, but we have no idea-“
“Not a problem,” Han interrupted. “I can find their nest.”
“I don’t know if that’s even possible,” Cilghal said. “The Gorog social structure may be quite different from other nests’. They may have parasite cells hidden among all the other-“