Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

“Oh,” he murmured numbly. “Oh, I get it, now.”

It only made sense: the Yuuzhan Vong would of course have tuned their artificial sun to the same spectrum as the natural one that would light the world where they wanted the seedship’s life-forms to grow.

He was on Yuuzhan’tar.

Still, there was something about the color of this light that twisted his stomach. The light in the Nursery hadn’t affected him the same way, perhaps because of the thick mists that had always swirled through the interior—or maybe it was the deep purple-blue of this sky …

No two planets have skies exactly the same color; sky color is a function of complex interactions between the solar spectrum and a world’s atmospheric composition, and he couldn’t help feeling that he’d seen this one before. Or one very like it. The color was close enough to spark his memory, but not so exact that he could recall which planet it reminded him of.

He sat up, and had to stifle a groan; he was sore, bruised from head to foot, and though his ribs had been expertly bound, moving gave him a stabbing pain in his side that slowly—agonizingly slowly—faded to a dull ache that throbbed all the way up into his neck.

Okay. This isn’t a dream.

Slowly, more cautiously now, he swung his legs off his moss couch; it hurt, but he didn’t feel dizzy or nauseated. After a couple of seconds, he stood up. A robeskin lay nearby, neatly folded. Whoever had bound his ribs had also fashioned him a sort of breechclout, sufficient to protect his modesty. He left the robeskin where it lay.

Beyond the ferns that had screened his bower he found a short cliff stretching up two or three times his height, thickly carpeted with variegated mosses. Some kind of epiphyte clung to the cliff with knurled woody fingerclaws, draping long sprays of roots so fine they looked like wigs hung from hooks. Jacen dug his hands into the mosses and tugged, to see if they might support his weight so he could climb up and get a look around, but the moss pulled free almost without resistance, leaking purplish sap that smelled like tea and stained his fingers.

And the surface it had clung to—

Even cracked and stained with juices of unfamiliar plants, he could not mistake this stuff: this was what his whole world had been built from.

Duracrete.

This wasn’t a cliff. It was a wall.

“Oh …” He stepped back, hands dropping nervelessly to his sides. As though his dream closed in on him again, he couldn’t seem to breathe. “Oh, no, not really …”

He followed the wall a few meters to his left, where he saw clear sky through another screen of ferns. He parted the ferns, stepped through—

And found an alien world spread beneath him.

He stood on a ledge, one stride from a sheer drop that plunged more than a kilometer to a dazzlingly multicolored jungle of ferns similar to the ones that screened his bower. Patches of brilliant scarlet darkened to crimson, joined other patches of shimmering black or gap-spark blue, all shot through with curving streaks of shimmer like rivers of precious metals, and it all moved: shifting, rippling, rolling through a rainbow spectrum and back again as leaves and fronds and branches and vines all twisted in some wind he could not feel. Flying creatures flitted from point to point far below him, hunting just above the forest canopy, too distant for his eyes—unaccustomed to such vast spaces—to make out their details.

This jungle curved away over a topography too random, too jagged, too young to be real; valleys were bottomless chasms, shrouded in mist, joined by razorback ridges that intersected and parted again and doubled upon each other with no pattern any known geology could produce. Immense mountains rose in the distance: sharp spires, flat-sided and needle-topped, as though there had never come wind or rain to erode them. Some of these mountains had sides too steep even for this tenacious jungle of mosses and ferns. Where their bones were exposed, Jacen could pick out oddly regular patterns: squares, rectangles, all arranged rank upon rank, metric arrays in lines both horizontal and vertical. He squinted, frowning: those patterns were far too regular to be natural; they were mathematically precise. He had seen something like this before—

Thinking, he happened to glance upward … and forgot everything else, because that was his first sight of the Bridge.

From a razor-sharp, needle-pointed arc above the distant horizon, a mind-bending river of color swelled overhead. Following it, Jacen craned his neck back, and back, and back: a titanic spectrum, cascades of azure and incarnadine, of argent and viridian braided into an impossibly complex, impossibly vivid rainbow that filled a third of the sky before narrowing again to another knife-edged curve that vanished into the purple sky above the opposite horizon.

Jacen knew what it was; more than a few worlds in the New Republic sported planetary rings. And he also knew that none of those worlds had rings like this one. This would have been famous, legendary; for this view alone, such a world would have been renowned throughout the galaxy as a tourist destination. And if it was this vivid—this huge—even now, when its color must be washed out by the light of day and the purple of the sky, what must it look like after dark? He could barely imagine.

Looking upon it, he felt he understood something about the Yuuzhan Vong that had always puzzled him before. It was not uncommon for primitive species on ringed worlds to mistake the rings in their sky for magical bridges built by gods; even for Jacen, who was well aware of the physics behind what he saw, the sight produced a faint shudder of sympathetic awe. He could imagine all too clearly being one of a species that had evolved under such a sight: to them, such a Bridge could only be the work of gods. It would be impossible to doubt the