Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

Behind him, the warrior squads scramble and regroup. Jacen ignores them.

All his attention, all his concentration, all his will, is focused on the blast bug bandolier in his hand.

The bandolier is bleeding from its severed ends; dying, its sole wish is to release its children—the blast bugs locked in its linked belt of hexagonal germination chambers—so that they might fulfill their explosive destiny. Jacen can keenly feel its desire. In the emotional language of his empathic talent, he promises the ultimate satisfaction of this desire, if the bandolier will only wait for his signal.

Ahead, the remaining two squads draw themselves into a tight wedge, its point toward Jacen, its broad base covering the bacta-tank-sized tub that holds the shreeyam’tiz. As more blast bugs hum toward him from all directions, Jacen heaves the bandolier overhand like a proton grenade; it twists lazily, high through the stark noon.

With his empathic talent, he projects a pulse-hammer thrill of anticipation teetering over the brink to fulfillment, a shuddering surge of adrenaline that would roughly translate as—

Now!

The bandolier flares into a starshell over the base of the wedge at the same time as the blast bugs targeted on Jacen arrive in a thundering swarm, striking him and the ground and the warriors nearby indiscriminately, concussion bursts battering them all helplessly this way and that, ending with Jacen finally blown off his feet into a high spinning arc through the air.

As the inside-out world wheels around him in a darkening blood-tinged whirl, Jacen has time to feel the agony from his slave seed-web suddenly ease and to push an exhausted empathic invitation down through the slave seed. All right, my friend. Now it’s your turn.

The blood-tinged darkness swallows him before he hits the ground.

* * *

“There, you see?” Nom Anor nodded contemptuously toward the suddenly vivid image in the viewspider’s optical sac, showing Jacen lying unconscious, bleeding on the blast-shredded Nursery turf, still within his improvised armor of amphistaffs. “Your ‘greatest of all the Jedi’ has succeeded in killing a mere two or three warriors. A useless, weak fool—”

“You are not paying attention,” Vergere chimed. “I ask you again: let me go to him before we are all lost.”

“Don’t be absurd. There cannot possibly be any danger. We’ll watch the end of this little farce in full color. He is unconscious; the warriors will restrain him and deliver him as ordered.”

Vergere’s lips curved upward like a human’s smile, and she opened her hands toward the sharp, detailed image, which showed Jacen stirring, shaking his head, struggling to rise. “Then why are they not doing so already?”

Nom Anor frowned. “I—I am not sure—”

“Perhaps the warriors have more pressing matters to attend to.”

“More pressing,” he said heavily, “than following my orders?”

“Executor, Executor,” she chided. “You see, but you do not see.”

In the viewspider’s image sac, the quality of light had changed: the Nursery’s stark blue-white noon now took on highlights of red, gold, yellow that danced and flickered and played over Jacen’s hair and face and his tattered, blood-soaked robeskin. Nom Anor frowned at this, uncomprehending, until a thick twist of black, greasy-looking smoke drifted through the image.

The new colors came from fire.

His frown darkened into a scowl; his anger and disgust curdled into a ball of ice in his stomach. “What is going on?” he demanded. “Vergere, tell me what is happening in there!”

Now in the image sac, two crab-armored warriors staggered into view, scorched, bleeding from multiple wounds. One passed too close to Jacen’s back, and one of the amphistaffs braided around the human’s torso lashed out convulsively, spearing the warrior through the side of the knee. The other warrior kept running headlong, fleeing without a backward glance, and Nom Anor soon discovered what the warrior fled from: a limping, snarling, shouting mob, bearing a variety of improvised weapons, from spade rays to malledillos to writhing wild amphistaffs as much a danger to their wielder as to an enemy, which descended upon the hamstrung warrior to beat and chop him to death with savage triumph.

“Those are slaves …” Nom Anor breathed. “How can slaves have gotten so far out of control?”

Vergere’s crest shifted to a brilliant orange, rippled with green. “Answer me this, Nom Anor: why is the viewspider’s image so suddenly clear?”

He stared, drop-jawed and panting.

“The warriors were never his target,” she said as though offering a hint to a puzzled child.

Finally, belatedly, he understood. The ball of ice inside his stomach sent freezing waves out to his fingertips. “He has killed the shreeyam’tiz!”

“Yes.”

“How could he—why didn’t you—he, I mean, you—”

“You will recall that I warned you.”

“You—Vergere, you—I thought you were—”

Her black, fathomless eyes held his. “Have you not yet learned, Executor,” she said expressionlessly, “that everything I tell you is the truth?”

* * *

The tizo’pil Yun’tchilat dissolved in slaughter.

Each dhuryam, severed from its telepathic links by the shreeyam’tiz, had been forced to wait, blind and deaf, sizzling in a rolling boil of stress hormones, burning with the desperate hope that the next sensation it would feel might be the awakening of sense and power and the pure clean knowledge that it, alone of all, had been chosen the pazhkic Yuuzhan’tar al’tirrna: the World Brain of God’s Crèche.

But each had been secretly consumed by deep, gnawing terror: that instead it would feel only a slice of unstoppable blade, delivering the devouring fire of amphistaff venom to rip it out of life and into the eternal suffering the Gods inflict upon the unworthy.

And so when the blast bug bandolier had burst, sending dozens of the explosive creatures rocketing into the tank that held the shreeyam’tiz—where the fluid bath that supported and nourished the shreeyam’tiz had multiplied their concussive force, sending an immense gout of fluid and blood and shredded flesh reaching for the fusion spark that was the Nursery’s sun—all but one of the dhuryams could not begin to guess what was going on.

All but one of the dhuryams were shocked, stunned, shattered to find their slave-based senses returning; all but one were more than shocked, more