Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

stay where you are, while this chamber is—I believe the Basic word is—digested, yes? This you would not enjoy.”

“Enjoy … Oh, right. I forgot,” he muttered. “I’m supposed to be having fun.”

“You mean you’re not?” She tossed him a crude robe that seemed to be woven of coarse, unbleached fiber. “Let’s see if we can find you a residence more entertaining, hmm?”

He forced himself to his feet and slipped the robe over his head. The robe was warm to the touch; it writhed gently as he struggled into it, fibers bunching and unbunching like sleepy worms. Putting it on hurt. Slower to heal than his skin, his shoulders and hip joints grated as though packed with chunks of duracrete, but he didn’t so much as grimace.

This was merely pain; he barely noticed.

She held something in her other hand: a baling hook of sun-yellowed bone, long and curved and sharp.

He stopped. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“In your hand. Is that some kind of weapon?”

Her crest flattened and spread again, its green now shimmering with yellow highlights. “Why would I carry a weapon? Am I in danger?”

“I—” Jacen rubbed his eyes. Now only a blur hung from her fist; had he seen what he thought he saw?

“Probably just a trick of the light,” Vergere said. “Forget about it. Come with me.”

He stepped through the hatch sphincter. The corridor had somehow changed; instead of the resin-smoothed yorik coral passageway he had glimpsed when Vergere would come or go, he now stood inside one end of a tunnel—or a tube. The floor was warm and soft, fleshy, and it pulsed faintly beneath his bare feet.

A pair of tall, impassive Yuuzhan Vong warriors stood outside in full vonduun crab armor, right arms thick with the coils of their amphistaffs. “Pay no attention to them,” Vergere said lightly. “They speak no Basic, nor have they tizowyrms to translate—and they have no idea who you are. They are here only to ensure that you cause no mischief. Don’t make them hurt you.”

Jacen only shrugged. He looked back through the closing sphincter. He was leaving a lot of pain in that room.

He was bringing a lot of pain with him.

Anakin … Every time he blinked, he could see his brother’s corpse on the inside of his eyelids. It still hurt. He guessed it always would.

But pain didn’t mean so much to him anymore.

He fell in at Vergere’s side as she stalked away along the slick warm tunnel; it was valved like the inside of a vein. The warriors followed.

Jacen forgot about the hook of bone.

It had probably been just a trick of the light.

   Jacen couldn’t find a direction or a pattern in the route they walked, through endless tangles of fleshy tubes that seemed to branch and coil and knot themselves at random. Light filtered through the walls from outside, vividly illuminating striated arterial clusters in the tubes’ translucent skin. Valves before them opened at Vergere’s touch; valves behind closed by themselves. Sometimes the tubes contracted until Jacen had to walk hunched over, and the warriors were forced to bend nearly double. Sometimes they were in large tunnels that flexed and pulsed as though pumping air; a constant breeze huffed at their backs like the breath of a well-fed watchbeast.

The tube-skin vibrated like a huge slack drumhead, making the air hum and rumble, sometimes so low that Jacen could only feel the sound with his hand against the skin wall, sometimes louder, higher, scaling up to a tidal roar of a thousand voices moaning and shouting and screaming in pain.

Often they passed hatch sphincters like the one that had sealed the Embrace of Pain; sometimes these might be open, revealing chambers floored with grassy swamp, woody trunks branching above brownish muck, globular yawns draped with cocoons of alien pupae, or caverns vast and dark where tiny flames of crimson and chartreuse, of vivid yellow or dim, almost invisible violet floated and gleamed and winked like eyes of predators gathered in the night to watch prey huddled around a campfire.

Rarely Jacen caught glimpses of other Yuuzhan Vong: mostly warriors, whose unscarred faces and unmutilated limbs hinted at low status, and once or twice even a few of the shorter, squattier-seeming Yuuzhan Vong, each wearing some kind of living headdress that reminded Jacen of Vergere’s feathered crest. These must be shapers; Jacen remembered Anakin’s tale of the shaper base on Yavin 4.

“What is this place?” Jacen had been on Yuuzhan Vong ships before, and he’d seen their planetside installations at Belkadan: sure, they had been organic, more grown than built—but they had been comprehensible. “Is this a ship? A space station? Some kind of creature?”

“It is all those, and more. The Yuuzhan Vong name for this—ship, station, creature, what you will—translates as ‘seedship.’ I suppose a biologist might call it an ecospheric blastoderm.” She pulled him close and lowered her voice as though sharing a private joke. “This is an egg that will give birth to an entire world.”

Jacen made a face like he tasted something foul. “A Yuuzhan Vong world.”

“Of course.”

“I was on Belkadan. And Duro. There was nothing like this. To do their—what would you call it? Vongforming?—they just sprayed gene-tailored bacteria into the atmosphere—”

“Belkadan and Duro are no more than industrial parks,” Vergere said. “They are shipyards producing war matériel. They will be used up, and abandoned. But the world transformed by this seedship—it will be home.”

Jacen felt weak. “Home?”

“A planet can be described as a single organism, a living creature with a skeleton of stone and a heart of molten rock. The species that inhabit a planet, plant and animal alike, from microbe to megalossus, are the planet-creature’s organs, internal symbionts, and parasites. This seedship itself is composed mostly of incubating stem cells, which will differentiate into living machines—which will in turn construct an entire planet’s worth of wildlife with vastly accelerated growth. Animals will mature within a few standard days; whole forests within weeks. Mere months after seeding, the new world will bear a fully functioning, dynamically stable ecosystem: the