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

absentminded curse Jacen’s father would use if a hydrospanner broke while he struggled with the Falcon’s balky hyperdrive.

As though Vergere whispered in his ear, he remembered—

The gardener’s choice.

He raised his twin amphistaffs over his head, then sank to one knee to drive them downward through the wax plug.

He felt the blades enter the flesh of the infant dhuryam below as though they sliced through his own belly; he felt the caustic snarl of venom spreading into the dhuryam’s body as though it coursed his own veins.

He yanked the amphistaffs free and scrambled for the next birth chamber.

Killing the next one doubled the weight of his empathic pain, for the first one was still alive, still suffering, screeching telepathic terror and despair; killing the third buckled his knees and drew red-veined clouds across his vision.

And behind him, slaves who had been driven to suicidal madness by the relentless burn of seed-web pain now began to stop, gasping, blinking, to stand in stunned wonder, to turn to each other with hands out to ask for help or to offer it, rather than to wound and maim and kill. First the whole gang who had forced their way up the beach—then another gang, and another, as dhuryam after dhuryam thrashed, convulsed, death throes cracking birth chambers like eggshells.

Jacen kept moving.

A red haze closed in around him, a bloody mist that might have been real smoke and fog and copper-flavored fire, or might have been inside his head, or both. The hive-island became a nightmare mountain, all jagged rock and killing and an endless scramble toward a peak that he could never see. Figures rose up, indistinct blurs lurching at him through the red haze, swinging weapons, clutching, clawing. He cut at them, cut through them, killing and scrambling and killing, falling to hands and knees to drive blades again and again through one wax plug and another and another, casting aside amphistaffs with their venom glands exhausted, drawing new weapons out from his own armor, his armor that lived and saw and struck these red-blurred shapes with death-soaked accuracy.

Then he was up high, close to the top; he couldn’t tell who might be around him or where he might be but he knew he was high up a mountain, cresting the uttermost peak of the galaxy, beyond the atmosphere, beyond the moons, taller than the stars. He raised his last amphistaff like a battle flag. Before he could plant it down through the blood-smeared plug beneath his torn and cut bare feet, a supernova flared inside his brain—

And burned down the universe. There was nothing left.

Nothing but white.

Hungry white: eating everything he was. But he had been in the white before. He knew its secrets, and it could not stop him.

Beneath this hexagonal lid was the source, the wellspring, the fountain of white. He could feel it down there: squirming alien tentacles bathed in slime and terror. He could cut off the agony. One stroke more would end it for everyone. Forever.

He lifted his amphistaff.

“Jacen, no! Don’t do it!”

He whirled, staggering, white-blind and gasping.

The voice had been his brother’s.

“Anakin—?”

“You can’t kill this one, Jacen,” Anakin’s voice said from beyond the white. “This one’s your friend.”

Like a finger flick against a beaker of supersaturated solution, Anakin’s voice triggered a phase change in Jacen’s head: the white clouded, condensed, became crystalline, translucent, transparent—

Invisible.

The pain was still there, smoking through his veins, but it did not touch him: it passed through him unchanged like light through empty space.

He could see again.

Clearly.

Perfectly.

He saw the scarlet rags of meat that were the remains of three shapers caught before they could reach a breath vein on the far side of the Nursery beyond the sun. He saw the smoking ring of charred coraltree basals around the hive-lake. He saw the rivulets of blood trailing down his arms to drip from his knuckles.

Birth-chamber plugs all over the hive-island, pierced and leaking the blue milk of dhuryam blood—

Tangled corpses of warriors and slaves and shapers—

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 shipseeds, 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