Traitor - Matthew Stover (iphone ebook reader .txt) 📗

that was something she had projected, something she had done. What if it wasn’t? What if his empathy came from part of the Force that he could still touch?

Standing on the hillock under the blue-white fusionball noon, Jacen began a cycle of breath that would ease his mind into Jedi focus. He reached down inside himself, feeling for the presence of the slave seed that was the dhuryam’s link to him—and his link to the dhuryam.

He felt it, where it coiled along his nerves: an alien animal, sharing his body.

Hey there, little guy, he said inside himself. Let’s be friends.

   The viewspider stood on a spray of nine slim jointed legs that arched high from its central hub before curving down to support its weight on grip-clawed feet. Below its central hub hung a transparent sac large enough to hold a Wookiee, filled to bulging with optical jelly. The central hub also held the viewspider’s brain, which integrated telepathic signals channeled from a variety of the slave seeds that drove the creatures in the Nursery. It integrated these signals into a holographic image, created within the jelly medium by the intersection of phased electromagnetic pulses from a cluster of glands where the jelly sac attached to the brain hub.

Nom Anor studied this image with a certain satisfaction, as did Vergere, who crouched on the chamber floor beyond the viewspider. Though he was not inclined to the doctrinaire fanaticism of, say, a Tsavong Lah, the executor had to admit that there were some ways in which Yuuzhan Vong bioformed creatures truly were far superior to their mechanical counterparts in the New Republic. The viewspider itself, for example. Though not very intelligent, it did at least understand that its task was to maintain a real-time image of the Nursery centered on one specific subject, and to follow that subject wherever he might go. This it did very well.

The subject in question was Jacen Solo.

Nom Anor stretched onto his toes to stroke the viewspider’s hub in a specific way, so that Jacen’s image shrank, bringing into view more and more of the Nursery around him: the slaves who toiled in the wheel of domains that radiated from the dhuryam hive-island. Jacen seemed to be splinting the wrist of a slave who had taken a hard fall, but to Nom Anor’s eye, much of Jacen’s attention was clearly directed toward the hive-island in the distance.

“So,” he said. “You say the second step is complete? The dhuryam has successfully seduced him?”

“Or he the dhuryam.” Vergere leaned to one side to meet his eye through the thicket of viewspider legs. “It is the same. To create the empathic bond, as he has done, requires each of them to downplay their differences, and focus on all they have in common. Yes: the second step is complete.”

“So.” Nom Anor leaned back, and folded his long, bony fingers across his chest. “Jacen Solo has, for the moment, an alarming degree of freedom.”

“Freedom is always alarming,” Vergere agreed.

“Though more alarming is that he is now aware of it. I wonder if Tsavong Lah may have been overconfident in agreeing to this phase of the plan.”

“Don’t you mean,” Vergere said with a sly half smile, “that you fear you were overconfident in proposing it?”

Nom Anor waved this aside. “Giving him room to act is one thing; giving him that room in this ship is another.”

“You believe he could threaten the ship? How?”

“I do not know.” Nom Anor shifted his weight forward, resting his chin on his knuckles as he stared into the optical jelly. “But I have not survived this much of the war by underestimating Jedi—particularly the Solo family. I am concerned. Even the slightest threat to this ship is far too great a risk.”

He had no need to elaborate; Vergere knew already that the genetic material that had gone into the creation of the seedship was irreplaceable: gene samples preserved through the incalculable millennia of the Yuuzhan Vong’s intergalactic voyage aboard the worldships. Samples preserved from a homeworld so long vanished in the dust of history that not even its name survived.

“Ease your mind, Nom Anor. Has not each step gone perfectly so far?”

He scowled. “I distrust such easy victories.”

“But easy victories are proof of the True Gods’ favor,” Vergere said in that irritating chime, a tone that may or may not have been intentionally mocking; Nom Anor had never been able to decide. “To distrust victory smacks of blasphemy—to say nothing of ingratitude …”

“Remember to whom you speak.” The executor waved a dismissal. “Leave me. Maintain your vigilance. In fact, intensify it. These last few days before seedfall will be especially dangerous. Take no chances.”

“As you say, Executor.” Vergere favored him with a millimetrically correct bow, then opened the chamber’s hatch sphincter and climbed out.

And Nom Anor, in his cautious, methodical way, took his own advice. As soon as Vergere left, Nom Anor sent a message by villip to the commander of a special detachment of warriors; this detachment had been brought aboard and specially trained for just such a moment as this. He issued a short string of orders.

Before the end of the day, warriors in ooglith masquers would begin to infiltrate the other slave gangs in the Nursery. They would stay well away from Jacen Solo, conceal their presence, and wait.

Before seedfall, there would be more than a hundred of them.

And meanwhile, Nom Anor made a mental note to have his coralcraft fed, groomed, and prepped for sudden takeoff.

He would take no chances. He had not survived so much of this war by underestimating Jedi.

   When the Devaronian died, Jacen thought, Okay, maybe I was wrong.

He knelt on the hive-lake’s verge. A mob of injured, wounded, and sick slaves surged and shouted around him, hands and tentacles and talons reaching for him, tugging at his robeskin. His robeskin had soaked up a lot of blood before Jacen had managed to tourniquet the stump of the Devaronian’s arm; the Devaronian’s silver-based blood was black as tarnish, and smelled