Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

she had intended. He discovered that he didn’t really care what Vergere had intended. He had chosen.

Expressionlessly, he rose and turned his back on the warrior, and moved away into the mob.

He’d decided who the weeds were.

You want gardening? he thought with icy clarity. Just wait. I’ll show you gardening.

Just you wait.

FOUR

THE WILL OF THE GODS

A battered, barren world circled a blue-white spark of fusion fire. This world had seen the rise and fall of nation after nation, from simple provincial states to planetary confederations to interstellar empires and galactic republics. It had been the scene of a million battles, from simple surface skirmishes to the destruction of whole civilizations. It had been ravaged by war and reconstruction until its original environment survived only beneath sterile polar ice caps; it was the most artificial world of a galactic culture devoted to artifice. The whole planet had become a machine.

This was about to change.

Its new masters began by stealing its moons.

Stripped from orbit by dovin basal gravity drives, the three smaller moons were steered well away, while the largest was pulverized by tidal stress created by pulses from other yammosk-linked dovin basals. A refined application of similar techniques organized the resultant mass of dust and gravel and lumps of hardening magma into a thick spreading ring-disk of rubble that rotated around the planet at an angle seventeen degrees from the ecliptic.

This, while dramatic in itself, was only a prologue.

Dovin basals had been grown on the planet’s surface.

The effect of gravity can be profitably described topographically, as an altered curvature of space-time. The dovin basals on the planet’s surface altered the curve of local space-time in such a way that the direction of the planet’s orbit became, roughly speaking, uphill.

The planet slowed. Slowing, it fell inward, toward its sun.

It got warmer.

On its long slow fall toward its sun, the planet suffered a bombardment of small meteors, carefully sized and with their angle of atmospheric entry precisely calculated so that they would reach an average temperature sufficient to vaporize their primary mineral, without cracking it into its constituent molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. The primary mineral of these small meteors was a mineral only in the black chill of interplanetary space; by the time it reached the warming surface, it had lost its crystalline structure, and was simply water.

For the first time in a thousand years, natural rain fell across the face of the planet.

Once the planet had spiraled into its revised orbit, the dovin basals quieted, and space returned to its customary topography. The three remaining moons were moved back into new, more complex orbits, whose tidal effects would eventually braid the striated disk of rubble that ringed the planet into a permanent sky-bridge of rainbow lace.

By the time the seedship fell back into normal space and moved toward an orbital intercept, the planet duplicated—in its gross elements of orbital length, rotation, moons, and rings—the eon-lost homeworld of the Yuuzhan Vong. It remained only to remake the surface, and bring Life to the shattered remnants of what once had been a single planetwide city, so that the planet could grow into the name it would bear: Yuuzhan’tar, the Crèche of God.

Coruscant was ready for seedfall.

   In the Nursery, it was the tizo’pil Yun’tchilat: the Day of Comprehending the Will of the Gods.

In these last few hours before seedfall, teams of shapers fanned out through the dhuryams’ domains, measuring, calculating, indexing, and evaluating. Each shaper team walked in company with a squad of towering, lanky warriors: heavily armored, weapons at the ready, glittering eyes scanning ceaselessly, moving with the ponderously sinister threat of reeks in mating season.

Four squads guarded the shreeyam’tiz: a small, specialized subspecies of yammosk, this speeder-sized creature existed only to emit a powerful interference signal in the telepathic band used by yammosks and dhuryams alike. The squads had carried the barrel-bodied shreeyam’tiz into the Nursery in a huge basin filled with nutrient fluid. This was the first act of the tizo’pil Yun’tchilat, because each dhuryam knew that this was the day that would decide life or death. The shreeyam’tiz ensured that none of the dhuryams could use its slaves for any desperate act of sabotage or self-defense.

These slave seeds are designed with a fail-safe: when telepathic contact with a dhuryam is severed, each slave seed automatically immobilizes its slave by driving him mercilessly toward its parent, the coraltree basal from which slave coral was harvested. Shrieking sudden inexplicable agony, the slaves scrambled for each domain’s coraltree basal. Only actual physical contact with the coraltree basal could quiet a slave’s pain; even the sick and wounded had dragged themselves over rocks and through swamps, howling. This organized the slaves into neat little clusters, keeping them safely out of the way until they could be most conveniently disposed of.

To the slaves, it didn’t matter which dhuryam won.

None of them were supposed to live long enough to find out.

   Nom Anor glared at the image in the viewspider’s sac of optical jelly. “Why doesn’t he do something?”

Vergere shrugged liquidly, and leaned to one side to get a better look through the viewspider’s thicket of legs. “He is doing something. Just not what you expected.”

“He knows, doesn’t he? He knows the slaves are to be killed?”

“He knows.”

The image in the optical jelly was barely more than a shadow in a twilit mist. The shreeyam’tiz blocked the viewspider’s image links along with the dhuryams’ control; to maintain its view of Jacen Solo, it was forced to generate a shadow shape using the infrared-sensitive eyespots of the sessile polyps in the amphistaff grove.

“He just stands there,” Nom Anor growled. He shifted his weight, glowering at the image. “How can he simply stand? The agony—!”

“Agony, yes. Suffering? Perhaps. He has learned much.”

“Is he hiding? Is that it?”

Vergere shrugged again. “If so, he has picked the perfect spot.”

The shadow of Jacen Solo stood at the heart of the amphistaff grove.

“And the polyps don’t attack,” Nom Anor muttered, gnawing absently on the edge of one knuckle.