• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

They reached the end of the hall, where two huge guardian insects stood to either side of the corridor, their long mandibles locked across an entrance ten meters wide. The insects looked much the same as the one that had eaten the landspeeder, except there was nothing vestigial about their eyes. The pair glared at the procession as it approached, and Raynar began to fear that he and his companions would not be permitted to enter the queen’s chamber.

Then a deep drumming sounded from the interior. The guardians lifted their mandibles, and the guides led the way into a vast chamber containing hundreds of empty floor pits. In a healthy hive, the pits would have been filled with incubation cells. But the deep drifts of dust in the bottom of these suggested they had not been used in centuries. Unlike the rest of the palace, the room was well lit, the sun’s orange light spilling in through a transparent membrane stretched across the vaulted ceiling.

The guides stopped a few steps inside, leaving Raynar and his companions to continue down a large center aisle toward the queen. Almost as large as the entrance sentries, she lay stretched across a massive dais, with six sturdy legs curled against a Bantha-sized abdomen and a mouth flanked by a pair of multi-jointed mandibles. Standing on the floor in front of her were four guardians identical to those outside the entrance.

Closer to the dais were a pair of floor pits filled with the familiar comb of incubation cells. Raynar saw no more than thirty compartments, and only three nursery Killiks to attend them. The hive wasn’t quite dead, but it wasn’t thriving, either.

As Raynar and his companions passed the last nursery pit, the guardians shuffled away from the center of the dais, revealing a wide set of stairs. The queen’s abdomen rippled, filling the chamber with a long, low rumble barely audible to human hearing.

“I must say, this is quite unexpected,” C-3PO said. “The queen is inviting Lowbacca and Tekli to groom her.”

Lowbacca emitted an uncertain groan.

“It means you remove her external parasites,” Raynar explained. Lowbacca and Tekli’s old hive, Taat, had been much more egalitarian in social structure, so they had probably never participated in the ritual. “It’s an honor. Yoggoy used to groom me—”

Lowbacca huffed in disgust.

“Just think of it as a medical procedure,” Tekli whispered. “And remember why we’re here.”

The Wookiee sighed and dropped his head, and the group ascended the stairs. An attendant emerged from behind the queen, appearing atop her giant abdomen with a bucket in one hand and a cloth and bottle of antiseptic spray in two of her other hands, then motioned for the groomers to join her. As former Joiners themselves, Lowbacca and Tekli had enough experience to realize Killiks weren’t shy about crawling over one another, so they scrambled up to join the attendant.

Raynar watched them ascend, then stepped over to present himself to the queen. Her head was small compared to the rest of her body, but it was still half the size of Raynar himself, with eyes as big as shock-balls and slender mandibles the length of a Wookiee’s arm. Raynar raised his flesh-and-blood hand in greeting. In return, the queen dipped her head, then rubbed a feathery antenna along his wrist.

“Wuur uu rur uu,” she thrummed. “Ubub ruub uru.”

“Thuruht welcomes you back to the Kind,” C-3PO translated. “The hive will be honored to have you.”

Raynar felt a nervous flutter in his stomach. Lowbacca had clearly stated they had not come to join the hive, yet Thuruht was speaking as if it were already fact. All Killiks had a tendency to confuse belief with reality, so the queen might simply be saying she believed the three Jedi would eventually become Joiners again. But her tone was insistent, and it struck Raynar as an assertion of will—a warning that Thuruht would not be defied.

Raynar continued to hold his arm aloft until the queen withdrew her antenna, then said, “You know we are not here to join the hive.”

The queen lifted her head above his, then clapped her mandibles together and