Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

and wire, he could see a walkway, far below, leading into the blank black-stained wall of a neighboring building.

Halfway down the first flight, he paused, sighing.

“You coming, or what?”

“Of course.” Vergere appeared at the stairtop behind him, smiling broadly in the Bridgelight. “I was only waiting for you to ask.”

SEVEN

THE CRATER

“This is Jacen Solo?” The master shaper, Ch’Gang Hool, stared in open horror at the image in the dwarf viewspider’s sac of optical jelly. A cluster of long, delicate tentacles implanted at the corner of his mouth twitched, knotting and unknotting itself, before reaching sinuous feelers upward to continue its jittery, nervously obsessive preening of the master shaper’s starburst headdress. “This—this is the Jacen Solo of Duro? The slayer of the voxyn queen? The Jeedai sought by Tsavong Lah?”

“It is.”

“And this is the same Jeedai who sparked the slave revolt that came within a crizt of destroying the seedship? The slave revolt that killed hundreds of our holy caste? The slave revolt that spat vicious infidel scum across my pristine planet?”

“Your planet, Master Shaper?”

“The shaping of this world is my honor, and my task!” Ch’Gang Hool snarled. “Until that work is done, every living thing in this stellar system answers to my will—even the fleet! Even the World Brain! If I choose to call this planet mine, who dares argue? Who? You?”

“Oh, not I.” A long forefinger tipped with curved talon tickled the dwarf viewspider on its control node, enlarging the image of Jacen Solo until the Jedi’s head filled the optical sac. “For argument, I think you’d have to try him.”

“How did he come to be here? How has he survived? It has been weeks since seedfall! This dangerous Jeedai has been running loose all this time? Where has he been? Why have I not been informed?”

On the far side of the dwarf viewspider, Executor Nom Anor brandished his imperturbable needle-toothed smile. “The warmaster orders that you bend all available resources toward his apprehension.”

“Orders, does he?” Ch’Gang Hool’s headdress bristled aggressively. “Until he comes to take possession of this world, I am the ultimate authority here! We’ll see about his orders!”

“Call it a suggestion, if you like.” Nom Anor leaned forward, opening his hands, the perfect image of friendly reasonability. “Nonetheless you are, as you say, responsible for the shaping of Yuuzhan’tar. I now have brought to your official attention that loose upon this planet’s surface is this exceptionally dangerous Jedi; a Jedi who singlehandedly—what was your phrase? Ah, yes—came within a crizt of destroying the seedship.” Nom Anor settled back upon the pod beast, enjoying the ripple of its muscle beneath him as it adjusted its shape to support his new posture. Really, these shapers had it good—too good for their own good, he thought. Perhaps that was why he found it such a pleasure to spin this one up. “How you meet this clear and immediate threat is—of course—entirely up to you.”

Ch’Gang Hool scowled. “I have never yet heard adequately explained how this dangerous Jeedai came to be aboard the seedship in the first place—”

“Direct all inquiries to the warmaster,” Nom Anor advised airily. “I am certain he’ll be happy to take time out of fighting the war to answer your slightest, silliest concerns.”

“Is it slight, that the Jeedai who slew our voxyn queen is at large upon our homeworld?” Ch’Gang Hool shook his eight-fingered master’s fist at the executor. “Is it silly, to be alarmed to find we have been infiltrated by the single most dangerous enemy of our entire people?”

“Just between you and me and the viewspider, here,” Nom Anor said agreeably, “what’s slight is your niggling about some imaginary insult to your authority. What’s silly is worrying about how Jacen Solo got here; you should be vastly more worried about what he is doing right now.”

Rising blood pressure blued the master shaper’s face. “Where is he? You know, don’t you?”

“Of course.” Again, Nom Anor displayed his needle-pointed smile. “I was only waiting for you to ask.”

   There was something wrong about this crater.

Jacen backed up along the notch in the crater’s rim wall, frowning. Vergere, a few paces beyond, stopped when she sensed Jacen was no longer following, and she looked a question back at him.

He shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

The outer slope of the crater was a scree of rubble, spilling off exposed structural members of what had once been government offices; this section of the crater’s rim had been a weight-bearing wall several kilometers high. The multicolored ferns and mosses covered it as though it were natural ground, but their roots were too shallow to bind the rubble solidly in place. They’d had to climb slowly, with Vergere in the lead. Jacen couldn’t know if his next step might fall on a loose chunk of duracrete and trigger an avalanche, or send him tumbling through a crust of fibertile into some semi-intact room below. Vergere never explained how she was always able to find the safest path; Jacen assumed she was using some kind of Force-sense.

The notch had once been part of a vehicle accessway, possibly an air taxi stand; three meters or so of its reinforced sidewalls had survived the destruction of the surrounding building. Jacen settled into their shade, just deep enough that he could see down the crater’s inner slope, and sat on a speeder-sized hunk of lichen-crusted wreckage.

This crater—

It was big enough to swallow a Star Destroyer without a trace. Big enough to lose the seedship in. It dropped forever away from them in a flattening curve, its bottom lost in black shadow: shadow cast by a billowing column of cloud that stretched up to a flat anvil top.

The cloud darkened as it descended, reaching deep into the crater, licking itself with forked tongues of lightning. Thunder rumbled up from below, and the air crackled with negative ions.

Jacen swallowed. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he repeated.

“And well you should.” Vergere hopped back to him, and settled onto the