The passage opened into a murky vault too large for Mara’s helmet lamp to illuminate; the beam merely reached into the darkness and vanished. She shined the light at her feet and found a dark, ribbed slope strewn with membrosia balls. In places, the balls were heaped a meter high. Her spine felt prickly and cold, but that was nothing new. Her danger sense had been on overload since the moment they entered the nest.
Luke’s blaster flashed behind her. A distant peew-peew sounded through Mara’s helmet, suggesting that air pressure had been restored to at least this part of the nest. A quick check of the heads-up display inside her faceplate confirmed her guess.
“At least my hisser’s no problem now.” Luke opened his faceplate and continued to fire. “One less thing to worry about.”
Mara glanced back and found a wall of six-legged dartship canopies scurrying up the passage. She used the Force to shove all but one of the insects back down the passage, clogging the tunnel while Luke concentrated on the leader. Half a dozen shots later, the canopy finally cracked, and a blaster bolt burst the pilot’s head.
Mara allowed another Killik to come forward, and she and Luke repeated the maneuver once more before the insects in back turned around and started down the tunnel.
“Time to go,” Mara reported, still speaking over her suit comm. “Trying to flank us again.”
Luke finished the insect they had isolated, then they floated out into the weightless darkness. Fifteen meters in, Luke stopped and began to shine his helmet lamp around the chamber.
“Might be a good place to make a stand,” he said. “Room to maneuver. With the Force, we’ll have an agility advantage.”
Mara swept her own lamp around the vault. Once in a while, she glimpsed a stretch of shapeless wax or a few membrosia balls resting on a dark, sloping wall. Otherwise, they seemed to be floating in empty air.
“Sounds good.” Mara shined her light back into the passage from which they had come. She was surprised to find it completely empty. The dartship pilots were nowhere in sight. “Just one problem.”
Luke turned to look as well. Mara sensed him reaching into the Force, then he said, “Han and Leia must be drawing them off. I think the Falcon is inside the nest.”
Mara equalized her suit pressure, then retracted her faceplate and nearly gagged on the cloying rankness of the air. “You could have warned me,” she complained. “What is that smell?”
“Maybe it’s better not to know,” Luke said. “Something rotting, I think.”
“And I thought Lizil smelled bad.”
As Mara spoke, a ball of membrosia drifted past, “falling” at an angle toward her knees. In contrast to the clear amber syrup of the Lizil and Yoggoy nests, this liquid looked dark and muddy inside its wax container, with stringy clots of solids silhouetted in the glow of her helmet lamp.
Mara looked up toward the ceiling and thought for a moment she was only looking at an area of burnished wax. Then, as her eyes grew more accustomed to what she was seeing, she began to make out several speeder-sized Killik heads. All were deep, dark blue, and all were facing a two-meter runnel opening.
“What the blazes?” Mara reached for her lightsaber. “Queens?”
“I don’t think so,” Luke said, sounding a little disgusted. “Membrosia givers. Look at the other end.”
Mara ran her light along one of the Killiks’ bodies, past a thorax clamped to the ceiling by six tubular legs running to a hugely swollen abdomen. About the size of a bantha, it was oozing cloudy beads of dark membrosia and crawling with tiny Gorog attendants, which carefully slurped up each drop and re-deposited it in a waxy ball extruded from their own abdomens.
“Appetizing,” Mara commented dryly. Neither the membrosia givers or their attendants seemed inclined to attack-no doubt because they were entirely lacking in combat ability. “What now? Start back?”
As Mara asked this, Alema Rar appeared in the tunnel above, still dressed in the skintight flight suit she had been wearing when she stole the skiff back on Ossus. Now the material was stained and rumpled in a way Alema would never have permitted before.
The membrosia givers extended short feeding tubes and began to clack their mandibles for attention, but Alema ignored them.
“Sorry,” she said to Mara. “We can’t let you leave.”
“You can’t let us?”
The sight of their betrayer made Mara’s blood boil. She tried to remind herself that Alema was not entirely responsible for her actions-that the Twi’lek had unwittingly fallen under the Dark Nest’s influence-but it didn’t make her feel any less angry. She pulled her lightsaber from its belt hook, then glanced toward the empty tunnel that led back toward the hangars.