Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

lightning slashes and stabs of the amphistaffs he wielded in both hands. He didn’t even bother to wipe from his eyes the blood that flowed from a deep scalp wound.

All he did was walk, and kill.

He turned toward the center of the lake. Toward the hive-island. And kept walking.

Nom Anor breathed, “The dhuryams …”

“They are the brains of this ship, Executor. He has already shredded the tizo’pil Yun’tchilat, and he cannot hope to escape. What other target is worthy of his life?”

“You sound like you’re proud of him!”

“More than proud,” she replied serenely. “He surpasses my fondest hope.”

“Without a World Brain to direct the separation and atmospheric insertion, the whole ship could be destroyed! He’ll kill himself along with everyone else!”

Vergere shrugged and folded her arms, smiling. “Wurth Skidder.”

Nom Anor’s stomach roiled until he tasted blood. The Jedi Skidder had given his life to kill a single yammosk—and the dhuryams were vastly more valuable. Beyond valuable. Indispensable. “He can’t,” Nom Anor panted desperately. “He can’t—the life-forms aboard this ship are irreplaceable—”

“Yes. All of them. Especially: he himself.”

“He couldn’t! I mean—could he? Would he?”

“Ah, Executor, what a happy place the universe would be if all our questions were so easily answered,” she chimed, opening her hands toward the viewspider’s image sac.

It showed Jacen Solo on the hive-island’s shore, driving one of his blades through the chest of a maddened shaper while with the other he opened what might have been either a slave or a masqued warrior from collarbone to groin. Two of his escort survived; they had turned just at the waterline, where their blurring swipes of spade rays could not quite hold back a mob of suicidally fierce slaves. The two gave ground, forced backward up the beach, while Jacen scrambled up onto the nearest of the huge dhuryam chambers of calcified coral.

He paused there, hesitating, standing atop the waxy hexagonal plug that sealed the birth chamber’s end, his amphistaffs raised, again swaying as though he might faint. Below, blunt edges of spade rays hacked into slave flesh, and Jacen flinched as though jolted by a near-miss blaster bolt, seemingly only now remembering where he was and what he had come here to do.

Then he drove his twin amphistaff blades downward through the plug.

“A less tractable question, as you see,” Vergere said, “is, Can we stop him?”

Nom Anor staggered, fingers working uselessly as though he thought he could reach through the viewspider’s image sac and grab Jacen’s throat. “Has he gone completely mad?”

Vergere’s only reply was a steadily expectant stare.

He covered his face with his hands. “Go,” he said, his voice weak, muffled. “Kill him if you must. Save the ship.”

She gave a sprightly bow. “At your command, Executor.”

He heard the hatch open, then close again, and instantly he dropped his hands. In his eyes shone the clear light of simple calculation. He stroked the villip, snapped orders, then let it fall. When he opened the hatch sphincter, a swift glance assured him the tubeway was empty.

Executor Nom Anor ran for his coralcraft as though pursued by krayt dragons.

He had not survived so much of this war by underestimating Jedi. Particularly the Solo family.

   Killing dhuryams got easier after the first one.

The first one was murder.

Jacen could feel it.

Standing on the plug that sealed the mouth of the dhuryam’s hexagonal birth chamber, the wax warm under his feet, almost alive, he felt the searing terror of the infant dhuryam trapped beneath him: smothering in panicked claustrophobia, nowhere to run, no hope to hide, screaming telepathically, begging bitterly, desperately. He could feel the life he was about to take: a mind as full of hopes and fears and dreams as his own, a mind he was about to rip out of existence with a slash of blade and caustic burn of amphistaff venom.

His every instinct rebelled: all his training, his Jedi ideals, his whole life absolutely forbid him to slay a helpless cowering creature.

He swayed, suddenly dizzy, suddenly aware how badly wounded he was—aware of the blood that poured down his face, aware of broken ribs stabbing every breath, aware of numb weakness spreading down his thigh from a slash he could not remember taking, aware that the concussion he’d suffered from the blast bugs had left his eyes unable to properly focus. He had fought his way to the island in something like the battle frenzy of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior, where pain and injury were as irrelevant as the color of the sky; he had taken lives of warriors and crazed shapers, perhaps of the very slaves he was fighting to save—

He looked down at the beach. Beside the shaper he had killed lay another corpse.

It looked human.

He didn’t know, couldn’t know, if that had been one of the masqued warriors. He’d never know. The only truth he had was that this corpse had once been a person who had stood against him with violence. A warrior? Or a slave—innocent, driven to attack Jacen against his will, helplessly maddened by the lash of seed-web agony?

Why did he feel like it didn’t matter?

That feeling scared him more than dying did. If that’s who I’ve become, maybe it’s right that I should die here. Before he killed anyone else.

But each time the two slaves covering him, the ones trying to hold back the crush of slaves pressing up the beach, hacked into somebody’s side or leg or head with a hard-swung spade ray, he felt those wounds, too.

Already, the inflowing tide of slaves had swamped the warriors guarding the hive-island; it would be only a matter of moments before the dhuryams turned their slaves against each other in a savage winner-take-all bloodbath. Dozens, maybe hundreds of slaves had been driven to their deaths already, thrown recklessly against the lethal ring of warriors. Once the dhuryams turned on each other, thousands more would die.

To the dhuryam beneath his feet, these people were only tools. Fusion cutters. Glow rods. The death of a slave brought no more emotion to this dhuryam than the