“Then what is it?” Han continued to glare at Juun.
“We’ll have a better chance of finding out if you keep that thing in its holster.”
Han allowed her to push the blaster down, but BD-8 was harder to convince.
“Situation serious,” the droid reported. “Suggest withdrawal to transport. Permission to lay covering fire?”
“Denied!” Leia and Han said simultaneously.
“Okay,” Han said to Juun. “Maybe it’s not what it looks like. Where’s Tarfang?”
Juun remained at a distance. “In the medbay. When our guide found the transceiver, there was a little fight.”
Leia began to have a sinking feeling. “What about the guide? It’s not- “
Her question was drowned out by the sudden thunder of insect drumming. The three lowest rows of soldiers raised their carapaces, then stepped off their terraces and added to the tumult the roar of hundreds of beating wings. Leia heard BD-8 ask something she could not understand and ordered him to stand down on general principles-though she did pluck the lightsaber off her belt and start easing back toward the Falcon’s boarding ramp.
Juun scurried over to join them, his round ears red with alarm. The soldiers continued to swirl overhead in a dark mass for several seconds, then glided to the plaza floor and formed a tightly packed cordon around the Falcon and XR808g.
“Situation critical,” BD-8 reported. “Permission to return to stand ready?”
“G-granted,” Leia said.
The soldiers thrummed their chests in a single deafening boom, then brought their feet together and snapped their weapons to the attention position against their thoraxes. On the far side of the XR808g, the cordon parted to admit a small parade of insects of many different body shapes, ranging in size from that of Leia’s thumb to somewhat larger than an X-wing. Most seemed to be simple variations on the standard Colony pattern, with feathery antennae, large bulbous eyes, and four arms and two legs. But some had exaggerated features, such as one with slender, two-meter antennae ending in fuzzy yellow spheres, another with five large eyes instead of the usual two large and three small, and several that walked on four legs instead of two. One of the largest had a coat of sensory bristles so thick it looked like fur.
In the center of the procession walked an imposing, melt-faced man with no ears or hair and a mere bulge for a nose. His brows had fused into a single knobby ridge, and all his visible skin had the shiny, stiff quality of a burn scar. He wore purple trousers with a scarlet cape over a gold chitin breastplate.
“Who’s the fashion victim?” Han asked Juun.
“I think it’s the Prime Unu.” Juun’s voice was almost a gasp. “Nobody ever sees him.”
“The Prime Unu?” Leia asked.
“You might consider him the chief of the Colony,” Juun whispered. “He’s doesn’t rule it, at least not the way most species think of ruling, but he’s the heart of the whole thing.”
“Sort of the king bee, huh?” Han asked.
Leia felt Luke reaching out to her from above, alarmed by the growing trepidation he had been sensing in her. She filled her mind with reassuring thoughts.
The Prime Unu stopped in front of the XR808g, and two of his companions boarded the battered freighter. Leia reached out in the Force, trying to gauge his intentions, and found the same double presence that she had come to recognize in the Joiners of the Lizil nest. But the individual element of his presence felt stronger than most and-to her surprise-somehow familiar. Leia allowed her thoughts to roam freely over the past, seeking their own connections to that familiarity.
Her mind went first to the Jedi academy on Yavin 4, during a time when Anakin was still too young to attend and jealous of his older siblings. The memory brought with it a flood of emotion, and Leia found herself struggling to retain her composure - to avoid the torrent of grief and remembrance that always threatened to sweep her away when she thought of her lost son.
Her mind was telling her that the Prime was tied to her children-particularly Anakin-and she could not help hoping that the Prime was Anakin; that her son had somehow survived the Myrkr mission after all, and the funeral on Hapes had been some other young man’s.
But that was fantasy. Had it been Anakin standing next to the XR808g, Leia would have known. She would have felt it in her bones.
Her thoughts wandered to another memory, on Eclipse, where Cilghal and Danni had learned to jam Yuuzhan Vong battle coordinators. The Jedi were meeting in a lab, with the milky splendor of the galactic core pouring down through the transparisteel ceiling. Cilghal was explaining that she had discovered where the enemy was growing the deadly voxyn that had been attacking the Jedi across the galaxy.