[Dark Nest] - 1(165)

A soft flutter sounded above Mara’s head.

“Hear that?” Mara asked.

“What?”

“I was afraid you didn’t.” Mara reached out in the Force but felt only a shadowy sense of danger, so vague and ambiguous she could have been imagining it. “There’s something flying around over here.”

“Welk?” Luke asked.

A string of blaster bolts erupted from Luke’s other side, directly opposite the fluttering. He brought his lightsaber around and sent the bolts tearing back toward the source.

“I don’t think so,” Mara concluded.

She brought her own blade up, slashing through the darkness above her head, finding only dank air. Another flutter sounded behind her. She spun to attack and suddenly found herself in the Force grasp of someone else, twirling across the room and accelerating. Mara reached out, searching for her attacker. She felt only the horror and anguish that permeated the entire room.

Then she came to the wall, and a piercing agony blossomed low in her back. She looked down to find ten centimeters of mandible tip protruding from her abdomen, and the pain spread across her entire belly.

“Rodddddder!”

The second mandible closed, driving a pair of barbs deep into the flesh above her hip.

“That hurts”

Mara reversed her grip on her lightsaber, and a flutter arose in the darkness at her side. Suddenly the handle grew stinging cold, then the blade started to sputter, flicker, and fade. Mara attacked anyway.

The blade sank two centimeters and sizzled out. The larva began to shake its head back and forth, its mandibles tearing at her inside.

“Mara?” Luke had activated his second lightsaber-the one he had taken from Alema earlier-and was advancing on Welk, batting the Dark Jedi’s blaster bolts back at him. “Need the spare-“

“Fine here!” Mara returned her useless weapon to its clip. “Just take care of Welk.”

Welk broke into an evasive tumble, firing as he moved and seldom going astray. Luke deflected a chain of bolts, but finished with his blades out of position and had to somersault away.

Trying.

Mara drew her blaster and put a bolt into the larva’s head. It shook even harder, drawing an involuntary cry from her as a barb scraped something inside. She fired a second time, then heard a soft throb in front of her and brought her weapon around.

The handle grew icy cold, then a depletion alarm sounded. When she squeezed the trigger, she heard only the soft pop of a gas charge moving into the XCiter chamber.

“Neat trick,” Mara said to the darkness. “It isn’t going to save you.”

The air pulsed above Mara’s left shoulder. She swung her helmet lamp toward the sound and-as always-saw nothing. Then a prickle of danger sense raced up her spine, and she looked in the opposite direction. Gliding out of the darkness, just at the edge of her light, was a meter-high Gorog with thick chitin armor and overlong mandibles.

Even had she not seen the splint fused to its broken leg, Mara would have known that this was the assassin she had fought on Ossus. Much smaller than a typical Gorog warrior, it was coming at her in a fury, mandibles clacking, thorax drumming, crooked proboscis foaming.

Mara finally hesitated, confused, unsure, angry. The nest would be reaching out to Ben now, using the Force to share all that was happening here, to make him feel every Gorog death.

A puff of dank air brushed Mara’s face. Her helmet grew biting cold and the lamp dimmed to darkness, then a soft phoot sounded from the direction of the approaching assassin bug. A glob of caustic-smelling acid hit the front of her ragged vac suit, and her flesh erupted with a new kind of burning.

Ben would have to get over it.

Opening herself completely to the Force, using her resolve to draw it in, Mara lifted her hand toward the assassin bug and squeezed. It popped with a long, sharp crackle and the rotten smell of dissipating methane.

A pair of blue bolts flashed up from Welk’s direction and streaked into the smashed body. Mara had just enough time to push out with the Force and create a small bubble of protection before the assassin bug exploded.

In the orange light, floating just beyond arm’s reach, she glimpsed a pale oval with little to suggest a face, only a few dark areas where there might have been a mouth and nose and eyes. Mara swung her hand toward it, but the blast light faded and the apparition was gone.

Luke barely felt the heat of the explosion, but the shock wave sent him cartwheeling into darkness. He kept his helmet lamp fixed on Welk’s tumbling form and brought himself to a halt a few meters later. Welk slammed into a sealed cell and crashed through the wax cap.

Luke Force-plucked the blaster from Welk’s hand and started toward him. He could feel that Mara was wounded but, at the moment, no longer under attack. The best thing he could do was keep the enemy too busy to worry about her-at least until Han and Leia arrived with the rest of the team.