[Dark Nest] - 3(108)

Her outburst sent a troop of long-armed monkey-lizards swinging away through the trees, screeching and hissing in alarm. Saba watched them go with a hungry leer, her long tongue flickering between her pebbly lips.

“Focus, Master,” Leia urged. She pulled her scanner off her utility belt, then programmed it to ignore the wing and turned in a slow circle. She was about halfway around when the scanner began to beep again, and a contact-blip appeared at the top of the screen.

“Found something!” Leia reported.

“This one, too,” Saba answered.

Leia glanced over her shoulder and saw Saba staring in the opposite direction.

“Of course-it would have been too much to ask that they fall together,” Leia complained. “We’ll have to split up.”

“It’z okay, Jedi Solo,” Saba said. “This one is not afraid.”

Sissing with laughter, Saba turned and Force-jumped down to an adjacent branch. Leia watched the Barabel vanish into the foliage, worried that perhaps she was absorbing more than Jedi wisdom from her Master. She actually understood the joke.

Leia took a bearing to her own contact, then selected a safe-looking branch to serve as her intermediate landing point and Force-leapt into the rain. She would much rather have used a repulsor pack, but Saba disdained technological “crutches” when the Force would do instead.

On the way down, a cold shiver of danger sense raced along Leia’s spine, and she felt something hungry descending on her from above. The hiss of air rushing over wing scales began to rise behind her, and she rolled into a Force flip and ignited her lightsaber, bringing the blade up through the body of something huge, green, and musty smelling.

The snake-bird fell away in two pieces. Then Leia sensed her target branch coming up behind her-fast. She reached out to it in the Force and drew herself over to it, landing backward in the wet moss and nearly slipping off the branch.

Leia’s danger sense continued to ripple.

She could hear a large river purling through the jungle somewhere far below, but she had no sense of where this new predator was hiding. She turned in a slow circle. When she saw nothing but clouds of emerald foliage, she reached out in the Force, but she felt only the same hunters as before. This danger was something different-something that could hide itself in the Force.

Leia stilled herself and began to search for an empty place in the gauzy fog of the living Force on Tenupe. It did not take long to find. There was an odd calm where her branch connected to the mogo’s trunk, hidden behind a green curtain of strangle-vines. Still holding her lightsaber in one hand, she drew her blaster and began to fire into the vines. The snap-hiss of an igniting lightsaber sounded from inside the mass of vines, then a blade so blue it was almost black sliced through the foliage and began to bat Leia’s bolts aide. The tangle of vines quickly fell away, revealing a blue-skinned Twi’lek female with an amputated head-tail and one withered arm hanging useless beneath a sagging shoulder. She wore a StealthX flight suit two sizes too small for her slender figure, her front zipper open down to the navel.

Leia stopped firing and touched Saba through their battle-meld, trying to let her knew she had found something as important as the bombs. “Alema Rar. I should have known you’d crawl out of a hole around here somewhere.”

Alema’s unblinking eyes widened with anger, but she deactivated her lightsaber and bared her teeth in what looked more like an insect’s threat display than a smile.

“Come now, Princess,” Alema purred. “We are both here to destroy the bombs. Perhaps we should work together.”

The Twi’lek’s voice was so beguiling that Leia found herself thinking that Alema was not really such a bad girl; that anyone who had had such a hard life was entitled to make a few mistakes along the way. And besides, the suggestion was reasonable. The Dark Nest had even more reason than the Jedi to want those parasite bombs destroyed, and any time she and Alema spent fighting each other was time that would bring the Chiss closer to recovering them.

Then an image of Jaina and Zekk diving for the clouds in their battered StealthXs flashed through Leia’s mind, and an icy knot of danger sense formed at the base of her skull. This was how Alema Rar-and probably the whole Dark Nest-worked, by offering the promise of something pleasant or reasonable to secure the target’s cooperation. But in the end, it was the target who suffered-who played the decoy, or who had to stay and fight while the Twi’lek and the Dark Nest simply faded into the night.

“Thanks, but I’ll pass,” Leia said. “I’ve seen your

kind

of cooperation. It nearly got my daughter killed.”