Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor

by Matthew Stover

  Rubble slid and shifted 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 shell 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 hoarsely. "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. Shivering, Jacen pressed himself into a broken corner that had once been the interior of a fashionable 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 Gods, injury or maiming--even death--is a warrior's fondest hope. He didn't know how long he'd been waiting here, shivering 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 space 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 lust for vengeance. He felt the shocking, nauseating nonpain that slammed up a leg from an ankle broken by an unlucky shift 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 scraped 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 refreshingly 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 worldship 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 shivering 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, slashing 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 amphist
aff 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 scrap 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 hit him like hammers. Vonduun crab armor saved his life, but transferred enough hydrostatic shock to snuff his consciousness like a switched-off glow rod.

  Jacen felt that, too: an eyeflash of blackout that staggered him. When his eyes cleared, three warriors had him boxed. Knowing how they would attack wouldn't help; no one alive could move fast enough to dodge.

  The warriors slashed at him, amphistaffs lengthening with whipcrack speed.

  None of the blades even grazed him.

  He had not moved. To the nerve nodes that served as all three amphistaffs' primitive brains, Jacen suddenly appeared to be a--small, disturbingly misshapen, but still unmistakable--amphistaff polyp; uncounted millennia of natural selection had hardwired amphistaffs against cutting polyps.

  Well, that worked okay, Jacen thought. But once they drop them and come after me barehanded, I'm cooked. So he attacked.

  He took three running steps for momentum toward the one on the left and sprang into the air. The warrior's instinctive reaction--to lift his amphistaff and spear Jacen through the guts--did him no good at all, because the amphistaff dropped limp between his hands and the warrior could only gape in astonishment as Jacen slammed both feet into his chest and flattened him as if he'd been hit by a speeder.

  Jacen hit the ground running, and never looked back. They came after him like hungry gundarks, snarling fury. He dashed blind through the storm, slipping, skidding, head down, navigating by the feeling in the middle of his chest: toward where the Yuuzhan Vong weren't. He could feel them spot him, could feel surges of rage and feral blood lust from all directions as hunters glimpsed him, vaguely, wraithlike through the rain and hail, and felt every flash of stark joy when they spotted him in the stuttering blue-white strobe of lightning.

  Thud bugs tracked him, blasting splinters off walls, scattering chunks of sodden moss. Shouts from all sides: harsh coughs with too many consonants, half smothered in rain, half buried in thunder. He didn't speak the language, but he could feel the meaning. They had him surrounded, and were closing in. This, he said to himself, would be a really good time for Vergere to show up. As if summoned by his thought, an invisible hand shoved his shoulder, knocking his headlong dash into a diagonal stagger. Before he could recover his balance, an invisible rope hobbled his ankles and brought him crashing to the ground...

  Which collapsed under him with the dull rip of rotten fibertile, and dumped him headfirst four meters down to a damp stone floor that he hit like a cargo sack.

  He lay there, half stunned, gasping, wind knocked completely out of him, staring at the sudden constellations that wheeled around his head but shed no light into the surrounding gloom. A section of wall slid aside, revealing another room beyond, dimly lit by glow globes in conservation mode. The light from the far room haloed a small, slim avian silhouette in the doorway.

  "Jacen Solo. It is time to come in from the storm." He looked up at the Jacen-sized hole in this room's ceiling, and let the icy rain that poured in on him wash the stars out of his head.

  "Vergere?..."

  "Yes."

  He felt the confusion of the hunters above: as far as they could tell, he had simply vanished.

  "Uh, thanks, I guess..."

  "You're welcome."

  "But..."

  "Yes?"

  Slowly, he pulled himself up. No bones seemed to be broken, but his whole body ached.

  "You couldn't have just, maybe, said ‘Hey, Jacen! Run this way!'?"

  Her head canted a centimeter, and her crest seemed to glow a deep burnt orange. She extended a hand toward him.

  "Hey, Jacen," she said. "Run this way."

  After one last glance through the hole above at the black, lightning-lashed clouds, he did. Deep into the planet, deep into the darkness...

  Running.

  Glow globes dead, or pulsing feebly; flashes of rooms, bare and sterile, the only life flattened cartoons of foliage spidering across walls in mosaic tiles; hard clap of boots on stone, harsh breath rasping through dust-filled throat, over lips and teeth coated with sand...

  Running.

  Sweat burned in Jacen's eyes, blurring Vergere's back; she streaked ahead, turning corners, ducking through doorways, diving down stairwells, leaping into abandoned turbolifts to slide the guardrails, and he followed desperately...

  Deeper into the planet. Deeper into the darkness.

  Running.

  That calm open hollow at his center evaporated somewhere along the way; he didn't feel the Yuuzhan Vong anymore. Gasping, losing Vergere and catching sight of her again, his sprint dipping into a stagger, he couldn't know if the Yuuzhan Vong were gaining, falling behind, circling ahead. His imagination crowded the corridors at his back with fierce sprinting warriors, but to look behind risked losing Vergere forever. Daggers of fire stabbed into his lungs with every step.

  Ragged black blots danced in his vision, growing, blending, twisting until they suddenly billowed and swallowed him whole.

  Deep in the darkness...

  He awoke on the floor. Warm rain trickled down his cheeks as he sat up. The palm of one hand was skinned raw. A drop of that warm rain touched his lips, and he tasted blood. Vergere crouched nearby, half shadowed in the weak amber light from a single glow globe well down the corridor. She watched him with feline patience.

  "Until your head becomes as hard as these flagstones, I'd suggest you avoid knocking it into them," she said.

  "I..." Jacen's eyes drifted closed, and opening them again cost him tremendous effort. His head thundered like the storm above. The corridor swirled around him, and darkness pressed in on his brain.

  "I can't... get my breath..."

  "No?"

  "I... can't keep up, Vergere. I can't... draw on the Force like you do, I can't get... strength..."

  "Why not?"

  "You know why not!" Black fury ignited his heart, blood steaming in his head, spinning him to his feet. Two strides put him above her. "You did it to me! I am sick of your questions.--sick of your training..." He pulled her to her feet, then off her feet, holding her dangling above the floor so close that his teeth might as well have been clenched in her flesh.

&
nbsp; "And most of all," he growled, low, murderous, "I am sick of you."

  "Jacen..." Her voice sounded oddly thick, oddly tight, and her arms fell limp to her sides--And Jacen discovered that his hands were locked around her throat. Her voice trailed to a fading hiss.

  "That... twisssst..." My species has a particularly vulnerable neck...

  His hands sprang open, and he took a step back, and another, and another until his back came hard against the sweating stone of the wall. He covered his face with his hands, blood from his palms painting his face, blood and sweat from his face stinging his skinned palm. His chest heaved but he couldn't quite breathe; he never had managed a really good breath; his strength fled along with his rage and his knees turned to cloth, and he sank down to huddle against the wall, eyes squeezed shut behind his fingers.

  "What?..." he murmured, but he couldn't finish. What is happening to me?

  Vergere's voice was warm as a kiss. "I told you: here, the dark side is very, very strong."

  "The dark side?" Jacen lifted his head. His hands shook, so he clasped them together and pinned them between his knees. "I, ah... Vergere, I'm sorry..."

  "For what?"

  "I wanted to kill you. I almost did."

  "But you didn't."

  Waves of trembling rippled through him. He ventured a shaky laugh. "You should have left me behind. I probably have less to fear from the Yuuzhan Vong than I do from the dark side."

  "Oh?"

  "All the Yuuzhan Vong can do is kill me. But the dark side..."

  "Why is it so to be feared?"

  He turned his face away. "My grandfather was a Lord of the Sith."

  "What? Of the Sith?"

  He turned back to find Vergere staring at him in blank astonishment. She tilted her head one way, then another, as though she suspected he might change appearance when viewed from a different angle.

  "I had thought," she said carefully, "that you were of Skywalker blood."

  "I am." He hugged himself against the shaking. Why couldn't he breathe? "My grandfather was Anakin Skywalker. He became Darth Vader, the last Sith Lord..."