[Dark Nest] - 1(45)

“How disturbing can it be?” Han asked, clearly oblivious to what the two women were really talking about. “This wreck is seven years old. I’ll bet he sees worse stuff on the newsvids.”

“Every day,” Ben agreed. Clearly eager to be on their way before his parents changed their mind, he turned to their guide. “Why are we standing here? I wanna see the Crash!”

The guide thrummed an explanation.

“Yoggoy assures you that we’ll see it soon, Master Ben,” C-3PO said. “But we must wait-“

“Rurubur ur.” The guide extended one of her lower hands to Ben.

“Oh. Apparently it’s our turn-“

Before Nanna could stop him, Ben grabbed the insect’s hand and dragged her up the slope at a sprint.

“Ben!” Nanna squawked, her repulsor-enhanced legs hissing as they propelled her enormous mass past Leia. “Stay with the group!”

Mara shook her head, then turned to Han. “You seem to be rubbing off on my kid, Solo. Were yours this headstrong?”

Han and Leia shared a glance, and they both nodded.

“Anakin,” Han said. “If I said no, he had to find out why.”

As Han spoke, a familiar sadness came to his face, and his eyes dropped. There was an awkward silence while everyone wondered what to say next, and Leia finally began to understand why there seemed to be such a bond between her husband and their nephew. Like Anakin, Ben was headstrong, fearless, and curious, with a clever mind and a quick wit, and he insisted on dealing with life on his own terms.

After a moment, Mara reached over and squeezed Han’s forearm. “I just hope Ben grows up to be as fine a man as Anakin was. Nothing could make me more proud.”

“Thanks.” Han looked up the slope-probably to disguise the glassiness that had come to his eyes-then added, “He will.”

They followed Ben to the rim, then found themselves looking into the bottom of the crater. Ten meters below sat a cockeyed box of heat-softened durasteel, somewhat flattened in the bottom and so covered in crawling insects that they could barely tell the vessel had landed bridge-down. The hull was pocked with the oblong holes made by plasma cannons, and there were several long, twisted rips that were probably a result of the crash itself.

“It looks like they flew through a plasma storm just leaving the Myrkr system,” Luke said. “I’m surprised they made it out.”

“Corellian engineering,” Han said with pride. “A CEC ship will keep going until it hits something.”

“Not always a good thing, especially when that something is a planet,” Leia said.

She turned toward their escort, running her glance

over

the surrounding crowd, and noticed several dark blue insects similar to the one she had caught watching them earlier. It seemed to her that their huge eyes were all looking toward the Solo-Skywalker group, but that was hardly unusual. Most species of intelligent insect had an unsettling tendency to stare.

Leia reached out to Luke and sensed that he had noticed the blue insects, too, then asked their guide, “What happened to the crew?”

The guide used an upper hand to point at the base of the ship, where a pile of dirt lay slumped against the smashed bridge. Descending through the pile, toward a jagged rent in the hull, was a half-meter burrow that felt oddly familiar to Leia, as though she had seen it before-or somehow knew where it led.

The insect began a lengthy explanation, which C-3PO translated: “That is where Yoggoy found Raynar Thul. He was badly burned and barely alive.”

Leia forced her attention back to the guide and said, “I mean, what happened to the rest of the crew?” She knew what Yoggoy was going to say-that there had been no one else-but when confronted with an obvious lie, a good interrogator kept asking the same question in different ways, trying to find a seam that she could pry open to expose the truth. “We know Raynar survived.”

A familiar touch came to Leia through the Force, one that she knew instantly and certainly to be her son’s, and she found herself looking away from their puzzled guide into the bottom of the crater. There, standing outside the burrow in a dirt-and soot - stained flight suit, was Jacen.

Or, rather, a vision of Jacen. The Flier’s hull was still visible behind him, as was the mouth of the burrow.

He smiled and said, “Hello.”

The blood drained from Leia’s head, and she had to grab Han’s arm to steady herself. “Jacen’s been here.”

“What?” Han peered into the crater. “I don’t see anything.”

Luke saved her the trouble of explaining. “The Force, Han. She’s having a vision.”

Han’s voice immediately grew wary. “Great. Just what we need. First, Force-calls, now Force-visions.”