“Doesn’t that worry you?” Mara asked.
“No,” Zekk said, frowning. “Why should it?”
“Because they’re Joiners,” Han said. “They don’t have their own minds. “
“Actually, they have two minds,” Jacen said, speaking for the first time since entering the infirmary. “They still have their own mind, but they share the nest mind as well.”
Han grimaced, but Mara was relieved. At least Jacen still sounded as though he were considering matters from outside the Killik perspective. Maybe his odyssey had given him an extra resistance to the Killik influence… or maybe he had just arrived later than the others. Either way, it made him an asset when dealing with the rest of the strike team.
After a moment, Han said, “You’d better not be trying to tell me this is a good thing.”
“It’s not a good thing or a bad thing, Dad,” Jacen replied. “It just is. What disturbs you is that the Will of the nest mind is more powerful than the will of the individual mind. They appear to lose
their independence.”
“Yeah.” Han’s eyes flashed to Jaina and the other young Knights. “That disturbs me. A lot.”
“And it would certainly disturb the Chiss,” Leia said. “They would feel very threatened by anything that limits their self-determination.”
“That doesn’t justify speciecide,” Jaina countered.
“Speciecide is a harsh accusation,” Luke said. The calmness of his voice, and the fact that he had been even more quiet than Jacen so far, commanded the attention of the entire group. “It doesn’t sound like the Chiss. They have very strict laws regarding aggression-especially outside their own borders.”
“You don’t know the Chiss.” Alema’s voice was full of bitterness. “They keep Kind prisoners in isolation cells in a free-drifting prison ship and starve them to death.”
“How can you know that?” Leia asked. “I can’t see the Chiss letting anyone inspect their prisons.”
“A Chiss Joiner revealed it,” Jacen explained.
“The prison ships I believe,” Mara said. “But I can’t see the Chiss starving any prisoner. Their conduct codes wouldn’t bend that far.”
“The starvation is incidental,” Jacen said. “The Chiss are trying to feed their prisoners.”
“It can’t be that hard to figure out what bugs eat,” Han said.
“Not what, Dad-how,” Jacen said. Motioning the group after him, he started toward the infirmary’s main entrance. “Come on. This whole problem will make more sense if I just show you.”
Jacen led the group into a huge, wax-lined corridor bustling with Killik workers. Most were bearing large loads-beautiful jewel-blue shine-balls, multicolored spheres of wax, wretchedly small sheafs of half-rotten marr stalks. But some carried only a single small stone, usually quite smooth and brightly colored, and these insects moved slowly, searching for the perfect place to affix their treasure amid the scattered groupings on the walls.
‘So this is how they make the mosaics,” Leia commented.
“One pebble at a time,” Jaina said. “Whenever one of the Killiks comes across a pretty stone, she stops whatever she’s doing and rushes back to the nest to find the perfect place. It can take days.”
Mara was surprised to hear a tone of awe in her niece’s voice; normally, Jaina was too preoccupied with tactics or readiness drilling to even notice art.
“She?” Leia asked. “The males don’t contribute to the mosaics?”
“There aren’t many males,” Zekk explained.
“And males only leave their nest when it’s time to establish a new one,” Alema added.
The corridor branched, then ended a short time later at the brink of a huge, sweet-smelling pit so dimly lit that Han would have plunged over the edge had Jaina not caught him with the Force and pulled him back. Mara and the other Jedi had more warning. The Force inside the chamber ached with a hunger so fierce that they instinctively hesitated at the entrance.
“This is the busiest place in the nest,” Jacen said over the din of clacking mandibles and drumming chests. “The grub cave.”
As Mara’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that the chamber was swarming with Killiks, all carefully crawling over an expanse of hexagonal cells. Half the cells were empty, a handful were sealed beneath a waxy cover, and the rest contained the thick, squirming bodies of Killik larvae.
Each larva was being attended by an adult, who was either carefully cleaning its head capsule or feeding it small pieces of shredded food. As the group watched, a nearby larva ejected a brown, sweet-smelling syrup. The adult grooming it unfurled a long, tongue-like proboscis and quickly sucked up the fluid, then burped and turned to leave the chamber. A new Killik quickly took its place.