Star Wars_ Traitor Part 10

An inside-out world stuffed with terror, agony, slaughter...

He had done this. All of it. And: he saw Vergere. Panting harshly, he watched her scramble up the last few meters of the dhuryam hive.

Below, armored warriors struggled to hold off a mob of shouting, scrambling, bleeding slaves... slaves Jacen could feel, through his link with the dhuryam beneath his feet. He could feel it whipping them on, driving them upward. He could feel it shrieking for them to kill him. He heard a low, feral growling, like a wounded rancor cornered in its den.

It came from his own throat.

"It was you," Jacen rasped. Vergere looked up. She stopped, well away, out of amphistaff range. "I heard him," he panted. His breath came hot and painful.

"Anakin told me to stop. But it wasn't Anakin. It was you."

Vergere flattened her crest against her oblate skull, and there was no trace of cheer in her eyes.

"Jacen," she said slowly, sadly, "in the story of your life, is this your best ending? Is this your dream?"

My dream... He remembered hazily his hope of freeing the slaves; he remembered his deal with the dhuryam: it had agreed to spare the lives of the slaves, transport them safely planetside in the s.h.i.+pseeds, in exchange for Jacen's help in destroying its sibling-rivals. But in the slaughterhouse he had made of the Nursery, that memory seemed as indistinct as his dream on Belkadan: a ghost of self-delusion, a wisp of hope, lovely but intangible.

Unreal.

The savage chaos of blood and pain and death Jacen had spread throughout this inverted world--that was real. The bitterly clear light inside Jacen's head showed him all the stark shadows of reality: he saw what he had done, and he saw what he needed to do now. He lifted his amphistaff over his head and let it swing to vertical, blade down.

"Jacen, stop!" Vergere took a step closer. "Would you kill your friend? Is that who you are?"

"This is no friend," Jacen said through his teeth. "It's an alien.

A monster."

"And what does that make you? Did it betray your trust? Who is the monster here?"

"I can kill it right now. And when I kill it, I kill the Yuuzhan Vong homeworld."

The amphistaff writhed in his hands. He tightened his grip until his hands burned.

"Letting it live--that would be a betrayal. That would betray the New Republic.

All the men and women the Yuuzhan Vong have murdered. All the fallen Jedi..

. even my... even..." His voice trailed away; he could not say Anakin's name. Not now.

But still he did not strike.

"And so you face a choice, Jacen Solo. You can betray your nation, or you can betray a friend."

"Betray a friend?" He lifted the amphistaff once more. "It doesn't even know what a friend is..."

"Perhaps not." Vergere's crest rippled, picking up scarlet highlights.

She took another step forward.

"But you do." Jacen staggered as though she had punched him. Tears streamed from his eyes.

"Then you tell me what to do!" he shouted. "Tell me what I'm supposed to do!"

"I would not presume," Vergere said calmly, taking another step toward him. "But I will tell you this: in killing this dhuryam, you kill yourself. And all the warriors, and shapers, and Shamed Ones on this s.h.i.+p--and every one of these slaves. Weren't you trying to save lives, Jacen Solo?"

"How do I..." Jacen shook his head sharply to clear tears from his eyes. "How do I know you're telling the truth?"

"You don't. But if what I say is true, would that change your mind?"

"I... I don't " Snarling red rage welled up inside him. They had put him through too much. He had pa.s.sed beyond questions; all he wanted now was an answer. An end.

"Everything..." Jacen forced words through his teeth. "Everything you tell me is a lie."

Vergere spread her hands.

"Then choose, and act."

He chose. He raised the amphistaff--but before he could bring it down, Vergere sprang forward into his way: to kill the dhuryam, he'd have to spear through her. He hesitated for an eyeblink, and in that instant she reached up and caressed his cheek, just as she had the very first time her touch had drawn him down out of the Embrace of Pain's blank white agony. Her palm was wet.

Jacen said, "Wha...?" He said no more, because his mouth had stopped working. He had just enough time to think. Her tears... Vergere's tears... - before the paralytic contact poison they had become overwhelmed his brain, and the Nursery, the dhuryam, and Vergere herself all faded as he fell into a different personal universe, infinite and eternal.

This one was black. There was a world that had once been the capital of the galaxy. It had been called Coruscant, and was a planet of a single global city, kilometers deep from pole to pole. It had been a cold world with four moons, far from its blue-white sun, orbited by mirrored platforms that focused the light of the distant sun to prevent the world from freezing.

Things had changed.

Closer now to its sun, warm, tropical, its kilometers-deep global city now kilometers-deep global rubble, with new seas forming where once there had been apartment towers and government offices. Three moons now wove an orbital ring into a rainbow bridge in the sky. And above this world that had been a capital, this capital that had been a world, a shooting star flared: an immense globe of yorik coral entered the atmosphere at a steep angle, shedding a planetwide meteorite shower of bits and pieces and chunks of itself and blossomed with fire as they streaked to the surface. Where they struck, they rooted, and began to grow.

The planet had ceased to be Coruscant; it had become Yuuzhan'tar.

But soon it would be, once again, the capital of the galaxy.

PART TWO.

THE CAVE.

SIX.

HOME.

Thousands of years pa.s.sed before Jacen opened his eyes. He spent those thousands of years in one endless claustrophobic nightmare: of being held, bound, coc.o.o.ned, unable to move, to speak. He couldn't see, because his eyes would not open. He couldn't swallow.

He could not breathe. For a millennium he smothered, helpless. Then he felt a muscle twitch in the middle of his back. It took a century, but he found that muscle, and he found he could make it contract, and he could make it relax again.

As decades grew into another century, he found he could work surrounding muscles in his back as well. Then he could clench his thighs, and bunch the muscles in his upper arm--and his nightmare had become a dream, filled with possibility rather than dread. And throughout the dream he kept expecting, somehow, that his chrysalis would crack, and he would at last be able to spread his new wings, and hear his wingflutes piping in harmony as he soared into the four-mooned sky...

When he finally opened his eyes and realized that this had been only a dream, a tremendous wash of relief flooded through him: he thought, for a moment, that it had all been a dream, the Nursery, the Embrace of Pain, the voxyn queen, Anakin... Duro. Belkadan. All the way back to Sernpidal. Either that had been all a dream, or he was still dreaming, because he didn't hurt anymore. He lay on something soft, rounded, insanely comfortable, like an acceleration couch upholstered in living scarlet moss that smelled of flowers and ripe fruit. Insects buzzed nearby, invisible, screened by gently waving ferns twice Jacen's height; through these ferns wove vines like garlands of flowers, blooming with brilliant yellow and blue and vivid orange in fantastic and delicate array. The far distance echoed with a long, mournful pack hunter's howl.

Somewhere above, an unseen creature lifted its voice in a song as thrillingly lovely as that of a manullian bird calling its mate in the Mother Jungle of Ithor.

Ithor, he thought, dully bitter. He remembered what the Yuuzhan Vong had done to Ithor.

Where in all nine Corellian h.e.l.ls am I? The sunlight that trickled through the ferns around him had a familiar color: the way the shadows'

penumbrae were rimmed in faded red...

mmm, that was it. This sunlight was exactly the same color as the fusion spark that had lit the Nursery.

"Oh," he murmured numbly. "Oh, I get it, now " It only made sense: the Yuuzhan Vong would of course have tuned their artificial sun to the same spectrum as the natural one that would light the world where they wanted the seeds.h.i.+p's life-forms to grow.

He was on Yuuzhan'tar. Still, there was something about the color of this light that twisted his stomach. The light in the Nursery hadn't affected him the same way, perhaps because of the thick mists that had always swirled through the interior--or maybe it was the deep purple-blue of this sky...

No two planets have skies exactly the same color; sky color is a function of complex interactions between the solar spectrum and a world's atmospheric composition, and he couldn't help feeling that he'd seen this one before. Or one very like it. The color was close enough to spark his memory, but not so exact that he could recall which planet it reminded him of. He sat up, and had to stifle a groan; he was sore, bruised from head to foot, and though his ribs had been expertly bound, moving gave him a stabbing pain in his side that slowly-- agonizingly slowly--faded to a dull ache that throbbed all the way up into his neck. Okay. This isn't a dream. Slowly, more cautiously now, he swung his legs off his moss couch; it hurt, but he didn't feel dizzy or nauseated. After a couple of seconds, he stood up. A robeskin lay nearby, neatly folded.

Whoever had bound his ribs had also fas.h.i.+oned him a sort of breechclout, sufficient to protect his modesty.

He left the robeskin where it lay. Beyond the ferns that had screened his bower he found a short cliff stretching up two or three times his height, thickly carpeted with variegated mosses. Some kind of epiphyte clung to the cliff with knurled woody finger-claws, draping long sprays of roots so fine they looked like wigs hung from hooks. Jacen dug his hands into the mosses and tugged, to see if they might support his weight so he could climb up and get a look around, but the moss pulled free almost without resistance, leaking purplish sap that smelled like tea and stained his fingers.

And the surface it had clung to... Even cracked and stained with juices of unfamiliar plants, he could not mistake this stuff: this was what his whole world had been built from.

Duracrete. This wasn't a cliff. It was a wall.

"Oh..." He stepped back, hands dropping nervelessly to his sides.

As though his dream closed in on him again, he couldn't seem to breathe.

"Oh, no, not really..."

He followed the wall a few meters to his left, where he saw clear sky through another screen of ferns. He parted the ferns, stepped through... And found an alien world spread beneath him.

He stood on a ledge, one stride from a sheer drop that plunged more than a kilometer to a dazzlingly multicolored jungle of ferns similar to the ones that screened his bower. Patches of brilliant scarlet darkened to crimson, joined other patches of s.h.i.+mmering black or gap-spark blue, all shot through with curving streaks of s.h.i.+mmer like rivers of precious metals, and it all moved: s.h.i.+fting, rippling, rolling through a rainbow spectrum and back again as leaves and fronds and branches and vines all twisted in some wind he could not feel. Flying creatures flitted from point to point far below him, hunting just above the forest canopy, too distant for his eyes - - unaccustomed to such vast s.p.a.ces--to make out their details.

This jungle curved away over a topography too random, too jagged, too young to be real; valleys were bottomless chasms, shrouded in mist, joined by razorback ridges that intersected and parted again and doubled upon each other with no pattern any known geology could produce. Immense mountains rose in the distance: sharp spires, flat-sided and needle-topped, as though there had never come wind or rain to erode them. Some of these mountains had sides too steep even for this tenacious jungle of mosses and ferns.

Where their bones were exposed, Jacen could pick out oddly regular patterns: squares, rectangles, all arranged rank upon rank, metric arrays in lines both horizontal and vertical.

He squinted, frowning: those patterns were far too regular to be natural; they were mathematically precise. He had seen something like this before... Thinking, he happened to glance upward... and forgot everything else, because that was his first sight of the Bridge. From a razor-sharp, needle-pointed arc above the distant horizon, a mind-bending river of color swelled overhead. Following it, Jacen craned his neck back, and back, and back: a t.i.tanic spectrum, cascades of azure and incarnadine, of argent and viridian braided into an impossibly complex, impossibly vivid rainbow that filled a third of the sky before narrowing again to another knife-edged curve that vanished into the purple sky above the opposite horizon. Jacen knew what it was; more than a few worlds in the New Republic sported planetary rings. And he also knew that none of those worlds had rings like this one.

This would have been famous, legendary; for this view alone, such a world would have been renowned throughout the galaxy as a tourist destination. And if it was this vivid--this huge--even now, when its color must be washed out by the light of day and the purple of the sky, what must it look like after dark?

He could barely imagine.

Looking upon it, he felt he understood something about the Yuuzhan Vong that had always puzzled him before. It was not uncommon for primitive species on ringed worlds to mistake the rings in their sky for magical bridges built by G.o.ds; even for Jacen, who was well aware of the physics behind what he saw, the sight produced a faint shudder of sympathetic awe. He could imagine all too clearly being one of a species that had evolved under such a sight: to them, such a Bridge could only be the work of G.o.ds. It would be impossible to doubt the G.o.ds' existence with the highway from their deific home to the world hanging forever overhead--so obviously magical, as well, that a creature could follow its curve all the way around the world and never reach either end. It would be only too easy to imagine G.o.ds patrolling their Bridge, looking down upon their creation. With the G.o.ds so close at hand... If the world is full of violence, savagery, and torture, this must be how they want it.

Lots of things about the Yuuzhan Vong made sense to him now.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" Vergere's voice came from just behind his shoulder; though he hadn't heard her approach, he was too lost in wonder and new comprehension to be startled.

And he had known somehow already that she would be here. He had felt her shadow upon his thousand-year dream. He had known, somehow, that she was still part of his life.

"You know," Jacen murmured, still gazing up into the sky, "that's exactly what you said when you brought me into the Nursery. Those same words. Just like that."

"Truly?" Her wind-chime laughter tinkled around him. "You recall all that I say to you?"

"Every word," Jacen answered grimly.

"Such a clever child. Is it any wonder that I love you so?"

Slowly, painfully, Jacen lowered himself to sit with his legs over the edge, his feet dangling free a kilometer above the rugged jungle canopy.

"I guess I was pretty messed up. Pretty battered," he said, laying one hand along the bandages that bound his sprung ribs in place. "You patched me up. You and those tears of yours."

"Yes." He nodded: not thanks, just acknowledgment. "I didn't expect to live through it."

"Of course not. How could you, and achieve what you did?" she said kindly. "You found the power that arises of acting without hope... and also without fear. I was... I am... very proud of you."

Jacen met her eyes. He could see his own reflection, dark and distorted, in their glossy black surface.

"Proud? All the people up there who died because of me..."

"All the people down here who live because of you," she countered, interrupting. She briefly told him how the shapers had been forced to give the dhuryam immediate control of the seeds.h.i.+p, and how it had begun the breakup into individual s.h.i.+pseeds so quickly that there had been no time to round up the rampaging slaves. The dhuryam itself had used their slave seeds to herd them to safety, fulfilling its side of the bargain it had made with Jacen.

"Yes, hundreds died in the battle--but thousands of slaves were able to ride the s.h.i.+pseeds to the surface: slaves who were to have been executed at the climax of the tizo'pil Yun'tchilat.

You were magnificent, Jacen Solo. A true hero."

"I don't feel much like a hero."

"No?" Her crest splayed orange.

"How does a hero feel?" Jacen looked away, shaking his head silently. She settled in beside him, swinging her legs over the void below them, kicking her heels aimlessly like a little girl in a chair too high for her. After a moment, Jacen sighed, and shook his head again, and shrugged. "I guess heroes feel like they've accomplished something."

"And you haven't? Several thousand slaves might disagree."

"You don't understand." In his mind, he saw again the body on the hive-island's beach: the one who might have been a slave, who might have been a warrior, who had bled out his life next to the corpse of a shaper who'd had no clue in combat: a shaper who'd only thought to put his own body between the infant dhuryams and the killing machine Jacen had become.

"In the Nursery--once I started killing," he said softly, "I didn't want to stop. That must be... I can only think that's how the dark side must feel. I didn't ever want to stop."

"But you did."