The Unseen Queen Read Free

doing
here
.”
    “Yes—”
    “And what it has to do with Tibanna tapping.”
    Zekk sighed. Sometimes he missed finishing his own sentences.
    On the flight deck, Jaina and Zekk found three Verpine slumped at their flight stations in a membrosia-induced stupor. The floor surrounding all three tappers was littered with empty waxes, and their long necks were flopped on their thoraxes or over their shoulders at angles unnatural even for insects. The long fingers and limbs of all three were fitfully jerking, as though in a dream, and when the pilot managed to turn his head to look toward them, tiny sparkles of gold light appeared deep inside his bulbous eyes.
    “Won’t get any answers here for a while,” Jaina said.
    “Right,” Zekk said. “But they didn’t unload those siphoning balloons themselves.”
    Jaina and Zekk left the tug and returned to the siphoning balloons, then followed a new transfer hose over to a section of missing deck. The line descended through the hole and disappeared into the fog, angling down toward the top of the unipod—where the carbonite freezing facilities were usually located.
    Jaina and Zekk looked at each other, silently debating whether it would be better to slide along the hose or work their way down through the central hub of the station … and that was when the repulsorlift generator finally stopped shuddering.
    They felt their stomachs rise and hoped that they were just reacting to the sudden stillness—that the sudden silence was not the bad sign they feared.
    Then the blue glow of a large repulsor drive flared to life below.
    “Rodders!” Jaina cursed.
    The blue glow of the departing vessel swung around, briefly silhouetting the hazy lance of the station’s unipod, then quickly receded into the fog.
    “They shut the generator down!” Zekk said.
    Jaina and Zekk turned to race to their cloud car, then remembered the tappers and started for the tug instead.
    Their knees buckled as the deck suddenly lurched upward beneath them; then a strut collapsed beneath the tug, and it tumbled across the platform. Jaina and Zekk were too confused to react—until they noticed that they were also starting to slide.
    The station was tipping.
    Jaina spun back toward their cloud car and found it sliding across the deck, rocking up on its struts and about to tumble over. She thrust an arm out, holding Zekk with her other hand, and used the Force to pluck the vehicle up and bring it over. She caught hold of the cockpit and started to pull herself inside, then realized Zekk was still a deadweight in her other hand.
    He was staring toward a missing section of deck, holding his arm out. But his Force grasp was empty, and Jaina could feel how angry he was with himself for missing the tug.
    “Get over it!” She pulled herself into the cloud car’s cockpit, dragging him after her. “They’re Tibanna toppers. They’re not worth dying for!”

ONE
    Woteba.
    The last time Han Solo had been here, the planet had had no name. The air had been thick and boggy, and there had been a ribbon of muddy water purling through the marsh grass, bending lazily toward the dark wall of a nearby conifer forest. A jagged mountain had loomed in the distance, its pale summit gleaming against the wispy red veil of a nebular sky.
    Now the air was filled with the aroma of sweet membrosia and slow-roasted nerf ribs, and the only water in sight was rippling down the face of an artificial waterfall. The conifer forest had been cut, stripped, and driven into the marsh to serve as log pilings beneath the iridescent tunnel-houses of the Saras nest. Even the mountain looked different, seeming to float above the city on a cushion of kiln steam, its icy peak almost scraping the pale-veined belly of the Utegetu Nebula.
    “Interesting, what the bugs have done to the place,” Han said. He was standing in the door of the glimmering hangar where they had berthed the
Falcon
, looking out on the nest along with Leia, Saba Sebatyne, the