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

“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 ship—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 passed 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 passed before Jacen opened his eyes.

He spent those thousands of years in one endless claustrophobic nightmare: of being held, bound, cocooned, 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 hells 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