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

already a hundred meters away, at the far end of the corridor, looking back over his shoulder. “Come on, Jacen! You have to run! Follow me!”

“Count on it.” Jacen burst into a sprint; the Force lent wings to his heels, driving him inhumanly fast, and faster, and faster still. He covered the hundred meters in an eyeblink, and found Anakin still well ahead, still looking back, beckoning, urging him onward.

Jacen ran.

The pursuit became a dream of flight, of effortless leaps, feet only skimming the floors beneath. The Force rolled through him, a crimson river sweeping him onward, beyond the sterile precincts below the crater. The river not only fed him strength, it spoke the structure of the buildings through which he raced directly into his mind: he could feel twists and turns and doorways ahead and behind, could feel where his path might be blocked with rubble or where the floor might not support his weight. It whispered girders and beams, transparisteel and duracrete beneath the Vonglife that thickened around him, Vonglife growing to a riot of shapes and colors, fibrous and fleshy, that clung to walls and ceilings and sprang from floors, Vonglife he could see and smell and touch, but that still wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, not to Jacen, not now, because it didn’t shape the flow of the crimson river. It didn’t exist in the Force, and so for Jacen it didn’t exist at all.

Right up until he ran into a corridor that snapped closed behind him like the maw of a space slug.

He skidded to a stop. The floor and walls were warm, body temperature, ridged with cartilaginous rings that glowed a sickly bioluminescent green. The ends of the corridor felt open—in the Force, there was nothing around him save wide-open space—but to his eyes, the corridor was closed at both ends by flaps of striated flesh like muscular valves.

Anakin was nowhere to be seen.

Panting dry rage, Jacen turned his mind toward that void in the center of his chest where the slave seed had once been. The Force faded from his consciousness; the structure of the broken buildings around him faded into the same nonexistence from which the Vonglife now emerged—but even as the nature of this corridor leaked into his mind, he found he still couldn’t feel Anakin.

Maybe it wasn’t just in the Force that he didn’t exist, Jacen thought.

Hawk-bats had scattered in panic when he’d leapt to the balcony … why hadn’t they reacted to Anakin? In the cold smooth slime that had coated the balcony’s surface, there had been no footprints.

Suckered.

He’d let the red tide drown his brains.

I’ve been had.

With a crackle of deforming cartilage, the ring closest to the mouth of the corridor squeezed shut, then the next and the next and the next. Jacen frowned, struggling to correlate this with what he sensed through the remnants of the slave seed-web: no malice, no blood lust, nothing aggressive at all, only a kind of pleasurable contentment, a happy relish pulsing around him—then the contraction of the rings reached him, crushing him off his feet, squeezing him along the corridor like a glop of vegitein in a null-g foodpaste tube, and he understood.

The contraction of the rings wasn’t an attack, it was a peristaltic wave. This wasn’t a corridor.

It was a throat.

   Jacen knelt, shuddering, eyes squeezed shut, hands splayed on the flesh-warm floor. After the valve at the end of the corridor had dilated to let him squirt through, it had sealed itself behind him with a wet, meaty slap.

He tried not to listen to the screaming.

—please somebody please please somebody HELP ME—

The screaming was another trick.

Probably.

—please oh PLEASE help me I don’t want to do this I don’t want to DO this can’t you HELP ME PLEEEEEEASE—

It had to be a trick.

The floor had the grainy smoothness of water-worn limestone, all grays and browns, pocked and pimpled with mineral deposits dissolved in the fluids dripping from overhead along down-reaching irregular nipple-cones like stalactites. Some of them wore the iridescent sheen of travertine. Scattered clots of bioluminescent growths shed a soft yellow-green glow—these could have been some kind of cave moss, or phosphorescent fungus. To the eye, this place was a typical cavern of porous limestone, hollowed by the erosion of a vanished underground river.

That’s why Jacen had his eyes closed. Because he knew it wasn’t.

It was a stomach.

It was the belly of the beast that had swallowed him.

With his eyes open, the dissonance between what he saw and what he felt had spun his brain into dizzy retching nausea; even with his eyes closed, even driving his consciousness down into the hollow center of his chest, the shimmering discord was twisting his mind inside out.

He could feel the beast as though he were the beast—throat and stomach and chilly semisentient satisfaction at having lured another victim—but he could still feel his own body, still feel the bruises left by the cartilage rings of the throat, the sting of one elbow where he had skinned it skidding through the beast’s pyloric valve, the ache in his swelling knee that he did not remember twisting while he’d chased the phantom Anakin, the hot rasp of his own breathing, and the cold empty fullness in his stomach, which was inside the belly of the beast, which was the belly of the beast, because the beast and he were one.

He had swallowed himself.

—please oh PLEASE why why WHYYYY please I don’t want to die like this you have to help me HELP me you have to HELP MEEEEEE—

The voice sounded human. Female. Raw, ragged, sobbing with exhausted terror. It sounded absolutely real.

As real as Anakin had looked.

He wouldn’t fall for it again.

Many kinds of Vonglife used forms of telepathy, from yammosks to villips—even coralskippers reportedly had a mental bond with their pilots. It was obvious to Jacen now: this great cavern beast was a sessile Vonglife predator that had developed a specialized variety of telepathy to lure victims into its mouth. The hallucination of Anakin