Aphra didn't hit the ground hard, but that was because she hit the droids below her hard, immediately cancelling her momentum and potentially giving her more bruises than she would have sustained anyway. Their bony shoulders, elbows, and arms drove into her like blows from a quarterstaff, thumping the breath out of her before she hit the ground. It was a testament to her awesome talent and immense brains that she remembered to roll when she made the final collision. The shock made everything hurt, but nothing broke.
The droids didn't try to stun her, thankfully. They all had bigger problems, right now. The ceiling groaned and ground against itself, cracks snapping into place along its dome. The pillars holding it up shook. Rocks the size of Darth Vader crashed to the floor, peeling out of the walls and shaking and booming. Aphra was already on the floor; the shockwaves that flooded the room just left her there, winded. But they knocked over the droids like toy soldiers.
A few landed on Aphra, and she yelled. They were as tall as her, and heavy. She seized the nearest one by its arm, hard and cold against palms that were still gritty with sand and slimy with the mucus-like ooze that had covered the queen. Before she could twist it off of her, her gaze caught on the ceiling directly above her, illuminated only by the dim light of the phidnas. It cracked more, and more, creeping towards the floor until it was directly above her. It split.
The shower of pebbles was small, but the ceiling was high enough that they could have knocked Aphra unconscious and possibly dead in one blow. She yanked on the droid and held it above her like a makeshift tent. Another rumble through the ground and more droids fell on her. She grimaced, but it was a decent shield.
She curled up there, under her cage of droids, when the larger rocks fell. The dais was a metre to her left; trying not to dislodge the droid, she inched towards it and cowered against it. She'd had so much training on how to survive a cave-in before—it was a common threat in archaeology! She'd been here many times—but she couldn't remember whether she should get close to walls or get away from them. Were they more likely to collapse or more likely to shield her? The dais was a thick jut of rock out of the floor; it was wide, with a low centre of gravity. It shouldn't fracture. It shouldn't fracture…
It didn't. But the wall behind it did, chunks of rock tumbling out of the ceiling, and the phidnas clinging to the wall weren't very happy about that. They detonated.
The plume of fire was large enough that Aphra felt hot air whip past her face. Sand rushed around the room, buffeted by the falling rocks and the rising currents, smoke and dust bulging. Aphra grabbed the edge of her jacket and pressed it over her nose and mouth before her lungs were terraformed into a desert.
She wracked her brain. She'd been in cave-ins before, blast it! Something was wrong. Something about fire—
Oxygen. Carbon monoxide. That was it. If she didn't choke to death on dust and sand, fire and explosions would do the job for her, sucking up all the oxygen and replacing it with carbon monoxide. What were the symptoms again? Dizziness. Headache. Confusion. Feeling weak. Shortness of breath. Sickness. Muscle pain.
Her head pounded already, the noise bringing dizziness as well as pain. Of course she was confused: everything had happened so fast, everything had changed so fast! Short breaths: she was panicking. Muscle pain: she'd just fallen into a pack of droids and had them fall on her; that had hurt. Feeling weak?
Vader had abandoned her. She was on her own.
But Doctor Aphra never felt weak.
That was how her mother had died. That was how this had all started. She did not have carbon monoxide poisoning—yet—and she had her blasters and her wits and she would get out of here.
Aphra was on her own. That was probably for the best.
She clasped her hands over her head and burrowed her face into the ground, her jacket still held up to her mouth by her elbow, and scrunched her eyes shut. The debris from the phidnas' explosion shattered on her and her droids, bouncing with an ear-splitting rhythm along and through their prone bodies, striking her in soft, non-essential parts. Her organs were twisted towards the floor. The world flashed beyond her eyelids, red and orange and yellow, but she refused to look. Not until it all went black.
Silence followed eventually. The ringing in her ears took longer to fade but fade it did. Then, there was a loud, chattering clicking. Some of the droids on top of her used her as a springboard to push off of, and she groaned, uncurling from her position to glare at them. They weren't even looking at her.
But she'd survived the cave-in. That was the first step done, at least.
It was as dark as the inside of Vader's soul. Aphra grimaced, glad she still had her helmet on, and momentarily wondered what Luke had done with his. The droids and the Geonosians had night vision; Aphra did not. She switched on her headtorch.
The light bounced off the droids and right back into her eyes. She winced. They ignored her, at least, instead making a beeline for all the fallen rocks in the middle of the chamber. This place was large enough and tall enough that most of the rocks were massive but dispersed and didn't block one side from the other. But the same couldn't be said for the arched exits. Half of them had collapsed—some only half-collapsed, so they were workable, but others totally blocked off by massive chunks of rock.
Aphra spun around, the long beam of her headtorch fingering the holes in the ceiling, the dark slits between the rocks that blocked their escape. Orange dust still settled on the droid's vibrant pink carapaces, on Aphra's air and clothes, on the dais. She dug into her bag and pulled out—alright, she didn't have a breathing mask. Maybe that was something else she'd made Luke carry. Instead, then, she tore off the bottom of her jacket and tied the strip around her mouth loosely. It was better than nothing. Threads dangled against her belly, ticklish, but she ignored them.
When her headtorch met the top of the dais, she nearly screamed.
The queen was still up there, lying on her side. The enormous segments of her body that had seemed so large when Aphra was bouncing over them seemed deflated, white goo leaking out in a few places. She was surrounded by the corpses of her flying droids, who'd rushed to protect her like they'd accidentally protected Aphra, but the queen was a much larger target. They were splattered on the dais around her, splintering and flattened by rocks.
With tiny, spindly arms that were in no way up for the task, the queen tried to push herself back to her former glory, but she stayed lying there, limp. One of her arms was even pulped and flattened itself; she'd torn it from where it lay under a rock, and from the joint downwards it was ragged, smashed, and bloody.
A droid flew to assist her. The whine and crackle of its wings beating made Aphra flinch; it sounded just like—it was just like—Luke's new wings. Was that why they'd given them to him?
She might never know. She'd never see Luke again.
Even if she escaped with her life, he was with Vader. She doubted he would escape with his.
Her chest seized. She laid a hand on it in panic. Carbon monoxide poisoning? Already?
Worse. It might just be grief.
The queen was lifted back upright by her surviving droids, and Aphra looked away, the light of her headtorch skipping along the rocks and the rubble. She might as well have raised a lightsaber and shouted, "Look at me!" The queen's gaze zeroed in on her.
"You," she declared.
Aphra shrugged, trying to act natural. She turned to look at the queen and positioned the beam right in her eyes; she wailed, and Aphra had to take a small amount of satisfaction from that. "Me," she agreed. "Guess we're both pretty kriffed over, here."
"We will survive," the queen informed her.
"That's what everyone says." Irritation welled up in her like bile, acidic and itchy. "We're trapped hundreds of feet underground in a cave-in, lady. Vader wouldn't have left it like this if he didn't want the both of us dead."
"Invader knows nothing."
"Alright," Aphra said, hands digging into her pockets. She took a step away from the queen, her headtorch beam bouncing in a way that made her feel vaguely nauseated—or was that a symptom?—and stepped around an enormous hunk of rock, taller than her. At least she didn't have to look at the queen's grotesque face for a short time. "He knows nothing, you're gonna live, and I'm stuck here with you. What're you gonna do? Kill me too?"
She had a blaster at her waist and three in her bag. All her charges had run out. Her foot struck gold when she wandered another step: she angled her beam down and grinned at the long, black flamethrower lying at her feet, nearly invisible in the darkness, but no worse for wear other than the dust. It was trusty and reassuring in her hands when she knelt to pick it up. At least she had that, too.
But they only had so much oxygen down here. She knew that. It was a good thing all her charges had run out; hadn't they done enough damage? Hadn't she done enough damage?
Fire was wild and unpredictable. Just like her. It gobbled all the oxygen in its surroundings in moments, sucking it out of the lungs of everyone else, then went out just like they did when it was all gone. Just like her.
She couldn't die like this.
At least if she'd been crushed in the cave-in… that would've been epic. If Vader had cut her down personally, her head rolling, it would have been worthy of remembrance. Better yet: if she'd detonated the charges and been taken out by her own explosions directly? Awesome.
This was dull.
This was amateurish.
She kicked a rock at her feet petulantly. She was going to die a long, slow death that any stupid caver would suffer, because the charges and the phidnas had already taken precious oxygen from her, and if the droids shot her that would take even more.
"We will survive," the queen said. "So, we will make a deal with you."
And to Aphra's horror, out of her flabby, squishy behind, she pushed another egg. She took a step back, clutching her flamethrower, even as she knew she couldn't use it. Shouldn't.
"No."
"You—"
"No!" And before she could think about it, she gripped the flamethrower, stepped forwards, and pointed it at that blasted egg.
It was a few metres away from her, and a few metres away from the queen; otherwise, the fire could have hit either of them. But the flames spurted out. The egg caught immediately. No screams emanated from it as it burned, but Aphra imagined she could hear them anyway.
The queen did not react. Huh. Aphra had expected more. Her heart was certainly racing—no fire in caves. No fire in caves…
"The method of our escape already approaches," the queen continued, ignoring her, "but to include you in this rescue, we require something in return."
"This isn't happening." Aphra was a survivor. She had to find her door, even if there were only arches down here, and they had all collapsed. Doors could look like anything. She didn't need this. "I'm not kriffing joining your hivemind. You're not gonna mind control me—I bet you don't even have a way out, you're just—"
"We are many. The droid you reprogrammed cannot destroy us."
"Switchy?" Aphra whirled around. "How'd you know about that?"
"We notice when our creations go missing. We notice when they plant bombs around our sanctuary. We cannot stop it—not when it is fast and determined, and we must fight off your own assault. But we know what it does."
Aphra snorted. "Useful. So, you knew it was happening, but you did nothing?"
"Your advance through our catacombs was long. Invader is a force we have never been able to stand against, but we can delay. We did so. We protected all that we needed to. Now, our hope will return."
"I love it when people give me straight answers," Aphra said.
"Presumably then you do not love yourself."
Aphra's mouth dropped open in offence, but she had nothing to retaliate. They had Luke's memories, Luke's thoughts, Luke's observations. They knew what he thought of her. How he had so desperately wanted her to be better. How annoying she'd been—intentionally—about keeping Vader and the Death Star plans a secret from him.
Maybe that had been a mistake. She'd always known he was a talented kid, and she'd only discovered more talents of his when he'd started working against her. Maybe if he'd known from the start, he could have used them to help, as he'd insisted.
But there was no point in regrets. Aphra had enough of them already.
"Whatever," she said and turned away from the queen. "I'm gonna find my way out of here. You can have fun down here, waiting for your rescue."
She strode for the nearest archway, but she slowed when she approached it. Strictly speaking, it hadn't collapsed entirely. She could still squeeze through to the tunnel behind it, that wrapped around the chamber. But that didn't matter when in several spaces, that tunnel had collapsed too. She walked out into another flood of dust and rubble, one exit blocked. When she rounded the curve, that way was blocked too.
The queen waited patiently while Aphra scowled and tried the next archway. And the next. All the ones that she could feasibly fit through—that she felt reasonably confident trying to fit through; some of those were clearly death traps in the making—had the same issue.
Even if the exits from this chamber weren't all collapsed, the tunnels beyond were.
They were trapped.
"You came for the Death Star plans," the queen said. Aphra stiffened, spinning around to look at her. That hadn't been what she expected. "We will grant you the Death Star plans."
"You said you didn't have them."
"We informed you we did not have a physical copy of them to give you."
"That's the same thing."
But Aphra paused.
None of their droids had specs. They were just programmed straight into the factory computer. Stumbling through the catacombs, she hadn't been able to find any sign that they kept written records at all. Only sand, walls made out of phidna shit, and darkness.
What societies didn't keep written records? Oral societies. But the Geonosians didn't have a language—they just formed the Geonosian hivemind language out of binary to communicate with their droids—so what did they have instead that was holding onto their information for them?
Aphra knew the answer to that. She eyed the egg that she'd incinerated, then turned away to gather her thoughts.
The hivemind.
The Death Star plans were here. They were just inaccessible to her because they weren't here, physically. The Geonosians just… remembered them.
How did they have the biology for that sort of memory? Science and anthropology, no matter how many all-human teams shipped out from the Core worlds to research other species, had never understood hiveminds. Perhaps that was the problem, but it left Aphra with an appalling lack of understanding of what this meant for anything.
But Aphra had only ever bothered understanding machines, anyway. People were beyond her.
She didn't need to understand them—she just needed to know what made them tick well enough to talk her way out of whatever scrape she was in now.
"You want—what? You're gonna give me the Death Star plans in return for consuming my mind and soul? No thanks."
"We want you to take them to Wormie's Rebellion."
That made her look back over her shoulder. The queen looked bad. She'd really taken a beating with those phidnas exploding. For the first time, Aphra noticed the reddish burns consuming her torso, her tail; she stood steady enough not to draw attention to them.
"I'm not a Rebel," she said. "You should know that. I'm not gonna help the Rebellion, and even if you eat my mind, I'm not gonna help you."
"You rarely help anyone other than yourself," the queen agreed.
Aphra pointed a finger. "Don't you forget it."
Silence fell. Aphra didn't turn away, though. Her finger twitched on the trigger of the flamethrower, before she realised the stupidity of that action and let the flamethrower fall, the strap hanging around her neck. She looked back up at the queen and said, with a voice that was shamefully breaking:
"What changed?"
The queen said nothing. She was gonna make her ask properly.
"What changed?" Aphra said louder. "I asked you before. You're gonna give me an answer now. I'm a loveless, self-centred individual. We all know it. You don't want me corrupting your precious hivemind. We all know that too. What changed?" She huffed. "And why do you wanna help the Rebellion?"
"The construction of the Death Star destroyed our civilisation. We have recovered—soon, we will thrive." Privately, Aphra thought that was a bit of a premature statement, given everything that had happened. "We would not see other civilisations likewise destroyed. But most importantly," her lips stretched into something approximating a human grin, "we desire revenge."
"Understandable," Aphra had to admit.
"The Rebellion will grant that to us."
"Only if they win. Which they won't." A brainwave came. "You know, Vader wants to destroy it too!" At least, Aphra was pretty sure of that. If he didn't, there was no reason he couldn't have sourced the plans from an Imperial databank, rather than going to all this trouble. "If you gave them to him—"
"We will grant Invader nothing." Her head heaved with the force of how she shook it; her eyes flashed in the harsh light of Aphra's headtorch. "The Rebellion fights him. That is enough for us."
"And what makes you think the moment I have the Death Star plans, I'm not gonna hand them to him?" Aphra pushed. She didn't know why she was debating this. This was not going to happen, either way. But she wanted to know.
"He has destroyed you. You will not crawl back to him. And you will not risk futility for all of our efforts by doing so."
Aphra snorted. She'd done it often enough. She needed credits. "Your first character assessment of me was better. I'm not a good person."
"Wormie had faith in you."
She stiffened. "Has," she said. "Wormie— Luke has faith in me."
"We do not know that. We know that he did."
Yeah.
"You shouldn't take Luke's advice," she said weakly. "He's an idiot." Then, sharply, she looked back up at the queen. "But you did. That's why you've changed your opinion of me—because of what he thought. But you were right the first time. I am a loveless individual."
"Wormie loved you," the queen corrected.
What was she supposed to say to that? He shouldn't have?
"You must allow my child to enter you," the queen continued, as if Aphra had agreed to anything. "It will show you our mind. What we know, you will know."
"I'll be consumed by it."
"You are far too bitter for consumption to be enjoyable. And too self-centred to integrate properly."
Aphra's mouth dropped open. "Excuse me?"
"You will have to process a great deal of information at once. Your puny human mind will probably not explode."
"I'm loving this."
"Wormie's did not. But Wormie is a Jedi. Jedi are selfless. They are accustomed to holding others' thoughts and needs in their minds; they are excellent ambassadors. You are not. You will be required to focus on the Death Star plans and transcribe them on whatever technology you have with you."
She had a datapad, yeah, but— "That would take forever."
"We have at least eight of your standard hours before my children rescue us. That is time to record enough to be useful. We know what the weaknesses are and where. We need only show you."
Aphra clenched her fists, then unclenched them. The plan wasn't infeasible. It would get her what she wanted: the Death Star plans. Hadn't she wanted them from the start, for herself, anyway? A weapon like that… wow. That was what she was all about. Awesome weapons. Selling them on.
But no number of credits was worth this sort of risk. This horror would never find its reward.
And Luke would hate her for selling the plans on.
Aphra bit her lip and closed her eyes. He'd confronted her about it. He'd always been disgusted that selling weapons for profit was all she cared about. And every time, she'd shut him down. Yes, that was what she cared about. Yes, this was what she did.
Luke had wanted the Death Star plans for the Rebellion. He had wanted to stop that terror before it began.
He'd never be able to do it himself, now.
"And you promise," she said, opening her eyes again, "to vacate my head and leave me alone after I've recorded the Death Star plans in digital format for you?"
"Once you have delivered them to the Rebellion—"
"Nope! Nope, nope, nope. Not happening. I am not hearing your voice in my head while I talk to Rebels. I'd act so weird. My reputation wouldn't withstand it. The moment I don't need the hivemind to look at the plans anymore, I'm out of there. Deal?"
The queen looked at her for a long, hard moment. Aphra wanted to squirm.
"We doubt we would want to stay longer," she conceded. Saying it like that was just unnecessary, but Aphra had to take it. "Come forward."
Aphra did. She got out her datapad and swallowed.
This wasn't a mistake. She just needed to make sure she wasn't overwhelmed. That must be how they controlled people: overwhelming them. Until the voices in their head were ones to listen to without question, rather than with many questions, many objections. A forum for debate.
The queen had believed wholeheartedly that Aphra was scum. Luke had changed that. Luke's love for Aphra had changed the mind of the entire hive.
The Abersyn symbiotes she'd been comparing the worms to were parasites. They built their empire off of controlling other species. But the worms were larval Geonosians. And Aphra and Vader had seen how the worms were used in the brains of Geonosians, just as much as random Jedi they wanted to add to the hive. Why would the queen want to mind control her own subjects? And why would she allow those subjects to have any influence on her own will if she did?
Communication. Not control. The hivemind was about communication.
The Geonosian Empire was only an empire because that was what humanoid explorers had called it, when the Geonosians had no language of their own to describe it better.
The queen expelled, without thinking, another round, grotesque egg from her backend. Aphra wanted to vomit. She couldn't believe she was doing this. She couldn't believe she was doing this…
She knelt down beside the egg.
"Eight standard hours, huh?" she said. "Who's coming for us, anyway?"
"We are."
Aphra supposed she'd know what that meant, in a moment or two.
"Will there be enough oxygen down here for me to survive that long?" she mused. "We could run out—"
"Geonosians require less oxygen than humans," the queen said. "We will survive."
Great. Exactly what Aphra had wanted to hear.
She looked at the egg by her knees and grimaced. Her flamethrower still hung from the strap around her neck. She held it in her hands for a moment, but she knew what she had to do. All it would do was steal breath she didn't have, like Vader was choking her all over again for not being good enough. Fighting these people, instead of cooperating with them, would only waste oxygen. It would only kill them all.
She lifted it from around her neck and tossed it aside. Then she picked up the egg. It cracked the moment it was cradled in the heat of her palms.
"Oh," she said, "gross."
A worm slunk out. They stared at each other. Aphra leaned forwards to touch it with her nose, tip to tip, and closed her eyes.
It shot up her nostril like a stab wound. When Aphra opened her eyes again, she could see in colours she'd never even dreamt of before.
We were prepared for the apocalypse, and that is why we survive it. When the traitor droid marched through the darkness we called home with packets of fire and pain, we noticed. We took precautions.
These tunnels are our creations, just as much as the traitor droid is. Just as much as Wormie's wings. We know them through and through. Did Invader truly not expect us, we who live deep underground, to be able to survive cave-ins? In what other circumstance would we consume each other for any reason beyond the ritual? We have food. We collect food from the desert and its creatures. But we heal quickly, and we are always present for each other; we have survived a collapse like this before.
He tried to destroy us in our own homes. He forgot that we are the ones who built them.
The only place we would suffer immense, irretrievable loss if the walls came down upon our heads would be in the birthing chamber. The dozens of bodies that Wormie gathered from the desert, healthy and free of poison, writhe inside, the worms within them eating them from the inside out. They do not drop dead, this time. They do not sicken, like the queen once did. On the bodies of their brethren, our children grow strong. We protected them, and then we knew we were safe.
We removed the charges around the birthing chamber. That is all. Everything else comes tumbling down.
But already, from Wormie's work, young drones crawl out of the birthing chamber, wings yet too weak to fly on. Still, the droids that marched out of the factory march intact, avoiding the worst of the damage. The factory is crushed. Our tunnels are collapsed. But we have a future, now. We can rebuild.
We—drones and droids alike—work towards the queen's chambers in unison, from all directions. Orders have been given. Orders have been carried out. We could grow a new queen if need be, with the young now thriving in the birthing chamber, but we need not. She is not dead yet.
These walls are not rock. They are stone powder and the excrement of phidnas. From a paste, they harden into something strong, shattered only by the shockwaves of powerful bombs. But we can return them to paste. Would we use a building material we did not fully understand the components of? Rot decays the excrement in the mixture. Our own excrement is acidic and breaks it down. We have what we need to destroy the damage left behind and clear our tunnel for rebuilding.
We know our world. We know how to use the resources it provides us.
When the new mind joins ours, it is not unexpected and thus easier to ignore. It is insular, sour, and focused on one thing alone. Good: that is the mark of a competent drone, sometimes. A single-minded focus gets a job done quickly, though it does not cross-pollinate with other tasks quite as well. It is poor for cooperation, but we do not want to cooperate with her.
She knows machines. She sings their language, just as we do. Deep in the recesses of her mind, we find a name we feel fitting for her: Boop. Affectionate and paternal, certainly; assigned by someone who, at the time, knew more than she did. Associated with the blinking boops of the machines she so adores.
Most importantly, it is the sound of warning before a detonator goes off.
We cannot let our guard down around her. Look at Boop's mind. Even as she absorbs all of us into her fragile human brain, she plots. We admire plotters, but not those who seek only to benefit themselves.
You know we know you intend to make a copy of these plans.
You know we know you intend to sell them for the most credits you can justify for them.
And you know we know that despite this intent, you still would not have agreed to this vulnerability of mind if you did not feel you owed it to Wormie.
We see you, Boop. Your past. Your present. Even your future, if our astuteness is not incorrect. We see who you have hurt and who you will hurt again; we see what motivates you, and what does not; we see how little you care.
We see how lonely you are. And we feel your anguish at this truth as keenly as we feel the heat of your tears on your cheeks.
And finally, we think, we see what Wormie saw in you.
A moral compass you buried beneath the hull rather than guide your ship by it. A burning love for all those you betrayed, not strong enough to have saved them, but strong enough to make it hurt. You refuse to connect, refuse to belong with those around you, but you cannot help it. You love Wormie. You love Sana Starros. You love your parents.
We feel how much you hate us for seeing this. It does not matter. You transcribe the plans for the Star of Death beautifully, and that is what we need from you for now. What you need is your issue, not ours. Your misery and rejection of all we stand for leaves a bitterness in our mind. We will expel you as soon as the work is done.
It comes here, soon. Can you hear it? Can you hear us approaching to save Queen Karina—and you, as the afterthought you are?
Rocks dissolve before us. They roll before us. Air rushes through the gaps we create, brushing dust and salt from your cheeks, delivering oxygen to your shaking lungs.
And soon, we also hear the beating of mechanical wings.
A body once known, now foreign, soaring through the passages we have cleared. Relief that radiates through us despite that foreignness, despite the minds we do not share, and the smile that stretches a human face in ways we cannot misinterpret, because we know this human. We do not have the resources to welcome him back now, but we know him.
"Hello," he says with his tongue, because without us that is the only communication he knows.
We deign to engage language protocols and understand it. It is a luxury we extend only to a few.
He asks us: "How can I help?"