Star Wars_ Traitor Part 13

Sometimes they had wandered deep in the gloom of the lower levels, creeping along rickety walkways or down corridors slick with granite slug trails, as though this were still the planet on which he'd grown up; sometimes those lower levels opened unexpectedly upon immense open swaths where gargantuan buildings had collapsed, becoming vast valleys that teemed with alien life, and they were forced to pick their way across a dangerously chaotic surface of Vonglife-covered rubble.

Though the Yuuzhan Vong had altered the planet's...o...b..t--the sun, formerly a searing pinpoint, was now close enough that it showed a clear disc nearly the size of Jacen's fingernail at arm's length--they seemed to have left the planet's rotation alone, as near as he could tell; his own circadian rhythms, conditioned by a lifetime in Galactic City, seemed to match the day-night cycle of Yuuzhan'tar well enough.

Vergere had seemed perfectly content to let Jacen set the pace and direct the journey. She never again so much as asked where they were going. They ate when he was hungry, and rested when he was tired; when he was neither, they walked. If Vergere ever slept, Jacen didn't see her do it. She would seem to settle into herself from time to time, and was capable of remaining immobile for hours; but whenever he would move or speak she was alert as though she'd been standing continuous watch.

Also in his knapsack he carried a few useful items they'd scrounged: a glow rod, a pair of electrobinoculars, a handful of power cells and his prize, an MDS personal datapad. Though it was ancient--a 500 series, hopelessly obsolete--and most of what it was loaded with seemed to be instructional games, simplified image generators, and other kid stuff, there was one useful program: an interactive holomap of Coruscant.

Every few days, he'd managed to find an intact PDD terminal--buried deep within the midlevels of a half-ruined building, or sheltered under a slab of fallen wall, once even hanging by its access cable on a twisted steel walkway that led to empty air, the building to which it had connected having collapsed entirely. Public Data Display terminals are extremely durable, designed to absorb a lot of abuse--they have to--and some of the PDDs he found still worked, or could be kicked to life after jacking in one of his spare power cells. Then he could upload the PDD's location into the You ARE HERE function of the datapad's holomap, tracking his progress.

What he would do when he arrived, he didn't know. There probably wasn't anything left but a vast mound of wreckage like the ones across which they scrambled every day. He didn't even really know why he was going. He had no plan, only a destination.

A destination was enough.

He pulled the electrobinoculars out of his knapsack and powered them up. Something about the Vonglife down in the crater bothered him. He wasn't sure what it was, couldn't be sure; even after weeks in the Nursery and weeks more on Yuuzhan'tar, he was far from an expert.

He'd avoided contact with the Vonglife whenever possible; much of it had unpleasant properties--the tea-smelling purple sap that had bled from the duracrete moss, for example, had turned his hands into ma.s.ses of blistered welts for three days. Over the weeks of the trek, he'd found that the Vonglife had a certain pattern: it grew in vast patches, surrounded by rings of starkly bare rubble. Near the center of each patch, he could usually spot one of the ecogenerating biomachines that the s.h.i.+pseeds had scattered across the planet, churning out spores or seeds or sometimes even living creatures.

He and Vergere had once spent most of a day watching hundreds of unnamable herd beasts stumble out into the light from the cavernlike mouth of one of these biomachines. Slow-moving bovine s.e.xapeds, they would blink stupidly at the unfamiliar sun, gathering themselves instinctively into herd groups before shuffling off to begin cropping vegetation. No sooner had they begun to eat than they began to grow--so quickly that Jacen had been able to watch them mature over the course of the day. And for every fifty or hundred of the s.e.xapeds, the biomachine had produced a predator, from huge bipedal lizardlike creatures with knife-tipped facial tentacles instead of teeth, to groups of fierce insectile pack hunters no larger than Gupin.

He and Vergere had seen the Yuuzhan Vong themselves now and again, and not only shapers tending their new planet. Warriors patrolled even the midlevels, armed, s.h.i.+vering with disgust at the machines through which they were forced to march. For a time, Jacen had wondered if they might be searching for him personally, but as their trek lengthened they began to come across signs that he wasn't the only fugitive lurking in the deep shadows below the zone of destruction: fresh tracks in the dust, caches of food recently picked over, wreckage cunningly arranged to look random while it concealed hiding places within.

Three or four times, he even caught glimpses of other humans, darting furtively from cover to cover, always at night, always cautious about exposing themselves even to the light of the Bridge.

They could have been refugees, people left behind and forgotten in the chaos of the evacuation; they could have been lifelong midlevel dwellers, avoiding contact with the upper world by instinct; they could have been slaves escaped from the seeds.h.i.+p. Jacen didn't know.

He never planned to find out. He avoided them. They were attracting the attention of the Yuuzhan Vong. He didn't know if the Yuuzhan Vong had any use for slaves on their new homeworld, or if whatever people they caught were executed on the spot. This was something else he planned never to find out. The Vonglife that clung to the inner curve of the crater looked different from any he'd encountered so far. He twiddled the autozoom on his electrobinoculars, to flip the enhanced image back and forth between a wide-angle overview and tightly focused close-ups of individual plants. The foliage was patchy and strange, and its coverage was unexpectedly poor; everywhere he directed the electrobinoculars, he found streaks of rusting durasteel and hunks of rubble, as though the Vonglife struggled here with an environment too hostile for it to flourish. The mosses, so brilliantly colored everywhere else, here were nondescript grays and browns and murky greens; the ferns that elsewhere formed towering jungle canopies were here stunted, twisted, curling randomly, fronds dull and streaked as though coated with dust.

Dialing back the magnification, he swept the vertical tower of the thunderhead that rose from the crater's midpoint. Its gray-black base looked as flat as its dazzling white anvil, and the whole column twisted as it rotated slowly, as though the cloud couldn't quite decide if it might want to become a ma.s.sive Coriolis storm.

All this looked plenty threatening, he allowed, but not enough to explain the smothering dread that crushed his chest when he so much as thought about going down there.

"All right, I give up. What is it about this place? What makes it so dangerous?"

Vergere touched his arm, and with a gesture directed his attention toward a thicket of what looked like coniferous shrubs--though the electrobinoculars' range and azimuth display indicated the smallest of them stood more than ten meters tall. On the slope around the thicket, a small herd of agile hoofed reptilelike creatures sprang from rock to rock, cropping nervously at the spa.r.s.e moss. An instant later he found out what had been making them so nervous: one of those ma.s.sive bipedal tentacle-faced predators lunged out of the shrub thicket with astonis.h.i.+ng speed.

It seized the nearest of the hoofed reptilians in powerful prehensile forepaws, its blade-tipped mouth-tentacles stabbing and sawing to swiftly slay and disjoint the captured animal, carving it into bite-sized hunks. As the rest of the herd bounded away, the predator settled down in the slanting sunlight to devour its kill.

"That is why this place is so dangerous," Vergere said with a hint of a challenging smile. "It is filled with what you would call the dark side. I should say: the dark side is very, very powerful here, more powerful than anywhere else on this planet. As powerful, perhaps, as it is anywhere in the galaxy."

Jacen lowered the electrobinoculars, blinking.

"That's not the dark side," he said. "A predator hunts to feed itself and its family. That's just nature."

"And the dark side isn't? I thought the danger of the dark side was that it is natural: that's why it's easier than the light, yes?"

"Well, yes, but..."

"Is what you have seen not the exemplar of the dark side? Is this not what you fear so much: aggression, violence, pa.s.sion?"

"You want to know what the real dark side would look like? If that predator had slaughtered the entire herd, just for the fun of it.

For the joy of killing."

"Do you think this predator takes no joy in its successful kill?"

Jacen looked again through the electrobinoculars, watching for a moment as the predator seemed to s.h.i.+ver with delight in its meal.

He didn't answer.

"Kill one, it's nature, kill them all, it's the dark side?" Vergere went on. "Is the line between nature and dark side only one of degree?

Is it the dark side if that predator kills only half the herd? A quarter?"

He lowered the electrobinoculars once more.

"It's the dark side if it kills more than it needs to feed itself and its family," he said, heating up. "That's the line. Killing when you don't need to kill."

Vergere c.o.c.ked her head. "And how do you define need? Are we talking about the line of starvation, or simple malnutrition? Is it the dark side if they only eat half the slain animal? Does a predator partake of the dark side if its family is a few kilos overweight?"

"It's not about that..."

"Then what is it about? Are we back to why? Does intention always trump action? It's not the dark side for that predator, say, to slaughter the entire herd and leave them to rot, so long as it thinks it needs them for food?"

"It's not that simple," Jacen insisted. "And it's not always easy to describe..."

"But you know it when you see it, yes?"

He lowered his head stubbornly.

"Yes."

Vergere uncoiled her fingers toward the blood-smeared predator on the slope below.

"You didn't this time..." Jacen's answer was interrupted by a shattering thunder-burst that sounded like the whole sky had exploded. He yelped and threw himself against the wall at his back.

Rubble slid and s.h.i.+fted in the crater wall above; an avalanche of duracrete hunks and twisted support beams poured over the lip of the wall to slam the notch's floor centimeters from Jacen's knees.

Another crash blasted through the sky, and another; he turned sideways to the wall and tucked his head, hands doubled to protect the back of his neck against the pounding of debris. More blasts sounded, but the crater no longer shook, and Jacen risked a glance upward.

"What was that?"

Vergere pointed into the limitless purple above the arch of the Bridge.

"There."

"I don't see anything..."

"Jacen..." She waved a hand at the electrobinoculars that hung, forgotten, around his neck. He yanked them to his eyes, aiming where she had pointed. The autofocus sharpened an image, and one of his father's Corellian curses snuck through his lips. Those explosions hadn't been explosions, and they hadn't been thunder.

They'd been sonic booms. Yorik coral vessels the size of the Millennium Falcon whipped through broad looping arcs around the crater, tracing an impossibly complex rosette. And all of them spat bulbous objects like seedpods, colored the same purple as the sky, in a continuous stream. Now the sh.e.l.l of one seedpod began to peel back like an Ithorian starflower opening toward the sun, revealing tangled wads of white filaments like silkweed. The silk unraveled swiftly, releasing its seeds to the wind, trailing long, long streamers of white fibers.

Jacen spun the zoom wheel on the electrobinoculars, and one of those seeds snapped into focus, and it wasn't a seed. It was a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. The white silk strands trailing above it snapped open into a parachute canopy. Soon all the seedpods had blossomed, dropping a round dozen warriors apiece... hundreds... thousands...

"Great." Jacen lowered the electrobinoculars. "We've stumbled into their airborne infantry training camp. Could have been worse, huh?

Could have been an artillery range..."

"Jacen." There was a hard, cold darkness in Vergere's voice that he'd never heard before. He went suddenly still, watching: an animal catching wind of a larger, faster predator. She said, "This is no training exercise. They are hunting for you."

Jacen swallowed. "I'm not going back," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "I've had enough of the Embrace of Pain for three lifetimes..."

"Oh, no fear of that." Her usual sprightly cheer flowed back into her, straightening her back and curving her lips into a human-style grin.

"They have no interest in your pain, Jacen Solo.

These are the soldiers of the master shaper. If they catch you, they will kill you. Purely. Simply. On the spot."

He squinted back up into the sky with only his unaided eyes; he could now just barely make out the thousands upon thousands of tiny purplish specks.

"All this?" he murmured. "All this, just for me?"

"You now get the first hint of how important you are."

He met her gaze steadily.

"Well, somebody thinks so, anyway. Any suggestions?"

Vergere nodded, turning away to gaze once more upward.

"There seems to be an updraft from the crater; perhaps something to do with that strange storm. It's blowing the pod troopers outward, toward the rim of the crater, and beyond."

"So?"

"So: if you are to escape them, there is only one way you can go."

Again, she unfurled a hand toward the interior of the crater.

"Down."

EIGHT.

INTO THE DARK.

Lightning blazed overhead, and thunder slammed the crater floor hard enough to shake the ground. s.h.i.+vering, Jacen pressed himself into a broken corner that had once been the interior of a fas.h.i.+onable refresher.

Icy rain streamed down his spine, and pellets of hail stung his skin.

He clenched his jaw so that his teeth wouldn't chatter. The Yuuzhan Vong were coming. Whole squads of warriors had come bounding over the crater's rim before Jacen and Vergere had made it even halfway down the inner slope. The warriors had leapt recklessly from slab to rock to rubble, gaining rapidly. Jacen could not possibly have matched their speed; in the service of the True G.o.ds, injury or maiming--even death--is a warrior's fondest hope. He didn't know how long he'd been waiting here, s.h.i.+vering in the icy rain. Vergere had told him to wait, had told him she could find an escape route, but she had to hunt for it and she could move faster alone. Though she had not said the words, had not asked him to, Jacen trusted her.

What choice did he have? Oh yeah, sure, I'm free, he thought sourly.

Some freedom. The rain, the hail, the bitter wind, they were bad.

The waiting was worse. Worst of all was that he could feel the Yuuzhan Vong closing in. The center of his chest was hollow: an empty s.p.a.ce where the slave seed once had been. If he changed his breathing, if he closed his eyes, if he thought about that hollow--directed his attention into the emptiness at his center-- somehow that brought another sense to life.

He couldn't have described the feeling; there were no words, exactly, for how it felt. The slave seed had sent fibers throughout his body, had woven itself into his nervous system until those fibers were an inextricable part of who he was--but those fibers vibrated to a life foreign to this galaxy.

He just knew... He could feel the Yuuzhan Vong swarming down the crater's slopes, could feel them slogging through the thunderstorm in the crater's center. He felt the sizzle of alien stress hormones coursing alien veins.

He felt one's shortness of breath as a warrior slipped around a blind corner that might hide a fugitive Jedi; he felt one's black rage at the death of comrades in the Nursery, and his heart echoed with another's savage l.u.s.t for vengeance. He felt the shocking, nauseating nonpain that slammed up a leg from an ankle broken by an unlucky s.h.i.+ft of rubble, and he felt the frustration of a warrior ordered to remain behind to tend some clumsy brenzlit's broken ankle while he burned to leap forward, to hunt and find and slay. He felt them all. Like he was all of them, and all of them were him. At the same time.

And more: he felt the crush of tender fronds under hard hot boot heels.

He felt the primitive distress of moss when half a struggling colony was sc.r.a.ped off a broken door by the stumble of a warrior against it.

He felt the blank terror of a small family of burrowing, roughly mammalian creatures, cringing at the groundborne impact vibrations of so many running feet. Accepting the warriors' feelings, opening himself to their emotions, their sensations, he no longer felt the cold: Yuuzhan Vong metabolism, faster and hotter than human, turned the icy rain into a refres.h.i.+ngly astringent shower. The sting of hail became harshly intoxicating, like scratching an inflamed rash.

And he was no longer afraid--Not that he was afraid to die. He'd left fear of death behind on the worlds.h.i.+p at Myrkr--but in the blasting thunderstorm, his body had cringed and shook, twisting away from imagined slashes of amphistaffs, bracing against impacts of imagined thud bugs, a biological reflex that took no account of his courage.

But now... Now, all he felt was a fierce rise of predatory joy as a warrior raised his amphistaff and crept toward a small white-robed human s.h.i.+vering in a corner at the meeting of two broken walls, and only when a tall shadow loomed through the curtain of rain right in front of him did Jacen realize that the small white-robed human who was about to die was himself. Lightning blasted overhead as he twisted, and the amphistaff blade only scored his ribs before stabbing deep into the duracrete of the wall at his back. In the ringing darkness that followed the flash he let the knapsack drop off his shoulders, catching one strap as it fell; while the warrior yanked his amphistaff free, Jacen swung the knapsack two-handed and slammed fifteen kilos of cans and equipment into the warrior's face.

The warrior staggered backward and Jacen pounced, swinging again, landing solidly, buckling the warrior's knees. Jacen spun the knapsack overhand to smash the warrior straight down to the ground, but the warrior lifted his blade to parry, slas.h.i.+ng the knapsack in half, scattering protein bars and canned synthmilk, shearing the electrobinoculars neatly in half and stabbing into the electronic guts of the datapad--which exploded into blue-white sparks that lit up the rain and scaled the length of the amphistaff to scorch the warrior's hands.

The warrior hacked a glottal curse as his hands spasmed involuntarily.

Smoking, the amphistaff fell limp to the ground between them.

Jacen grimaced as pain bit his own hands, chewing its way up his arms--but it wasn't his pain. This was pain from the warrior's burns.

When the warrior leapt to attack unarmed, Jacen met his attack effortlessly, pivoting slightly so that the warrior's spiked boot missed him by a centimeter. The warrior skidded, caught himself, then twisted and fired a lightning punch overhand toward Jacen's temple.Jacen tilted his head a fraction, and the punch only ruffled his hair.

"If you don't stop," Jacen said, "I'll have to hurt us."

The warrior snarled and swung his knotted fists. Jacen flicked the first punch aside; the second, he parried with an open palm as he stepped forward, swinging his own doubled arm, so that the warrior's knuckles slammed into the point of Jacen's oncoming elbow. The warrior howled as his knuckles shattered, and a blaze of alien pain ignited in Jacen's arm: splintered bones stabbing through third-degree electrical burns.

"I can do this all day."

He could: the warrior might as well have been a part of Jacen's own body. He could no more fail to meet an attack than one of his hands would miss the other in the dark. He would feel every sc.r.a.p of whatever pain he inflicted, but so what? It was only pain. And the rest... He let himself go, moving light and easy, counters to every attack as clear and obvious and predictable as a form he'd done a thousand times: like training with Jaina, when their Force talents and their twin bond had made them practically one person.

More warriors sighted the fight--the dance--and thud bugs snapped through the air, and Jacen actually felt he should apologize as he gracefully faked the warrior off balance and then took his outstretched arm and spun him into their path. The thud bugs. .h.i.t him like hammers.

Vonduun crab armor saved his life, but transferred enough hydrostatic shock to snuff his consciousness like a switched-off glow rod.