Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

“Dangerous …” he echoed. “How do you know?”

“I can feel it in the Force.” She laced her fingers together into a bridge upon which she rested her chin, and smiled up at him. “The question is, how did you know?”

He squinted at her, then turned his head to frown back out into the crater. How did he know? He sat in the shade of the ruined accessway wall, and thought about it.

Weeks of trekking had thinned and hardened his body, carving him into knotted rope and tanned leather. His hair had grown out in unruly curls, now streaked with blond by the harsh ultraviolet of the blue-white sun. His thin, itchy teenager’s beard had filled in, wiry, darker than his hair. He could have dug up some depilatory creme from an abandoned refresher along the way, or even a blade sharp enough to shave with, but he hadn’t bothered. The beard protected his cheeks and jaw from sunburn.

He could have picked up clothing, too, if he’d wanted it—he wore a pair of tough boots he’d found—but no regular clothing could be as durable, or as useful, as the robeskin. Warm at night, cool during the day, self-cleaning, it even healed itself when it ripped. Beneath the robeskin, he wore the breechclout Vergere had fashioned for him. After he’d found the boots, he’d plaited strips torn from the robeskin to make himself a pair of self-cleaning socks that never wore out.

The robeskin had proven useful in other ways, as well: across his back he wore a sizable knapsack, similarly plaited. The strips had healed in place, making a living pack that never broke or wore out; like a muscle, the knapsack seemed to get stronger the more he used it. He carried it stuffed with as much food as would fit. One three-day stretch where they had been unable to scrounge a meal had cured him of any trust in his luck.

Food was available, if one looked hard enough: mostly breadmeal, sugar-yeast preserves, and the freeze-dried protein squares that had been staples of the downlevel dwellers. Maybe it didn’t taste good, but none of that stuff ever spoiled. Unlike during the planet’s former life as Coruscant, water was plentiful; hardly a day passed without a rain squall, and fresh pools were easy to find among the rubble and wreckage.

Sometimes they had wandered deep in the gloom of the lower levels, creeping along rickety walkways or down corridors slick with granite slug trails, as though this were still the planet on which he’d grown up; sometimes those lower levels opened unexpectedly upon immense open swaths where gargantuan buildings had collapsed, becoming vast valleys that teemed with alien life, and they were forced to pick their way across a dangerously chaotic surface of Vonglife-covered rubble.

Though the Yuuzhan Vong had altered the planet’s orbit—the sun, formerly a searing pinpoint, was now close enough that it showed a clear disc nearly the size of Jacen’s fingernail at arm’s length—they seemed to have left the planet’s rotation alone, as near as he could tell; his own circadian rhythms, conditioned by a lifetime in Galactic City, seemed to match the day–night cycle of Yuuzhan’tar well enough.

Vergere had seemed perfectly content to let Jacen set the pace and direct the journey. She never again so much as asked where they were going. They ate when he was hungry, and rested when he was tired; when he was neither, they walked. If Vergere ever slept, Jacen didn’t see her do it. She would seem to settle into herself from time to time, and was capable of remaining immobile for hours; but whenever he would move or speak she was alert as though she’d been standing continuous watch.

Also in his knapsack he carried a few useful items they’d scrounged: a glow rod, a pair of electrobinoculars, a handful of power cells and his prize, an MDS personal datapad. Though it was ancient—a 500 series, hopelessly obsolete—and most of what it was loaded with seemed to be instructional games, simplified image generators, and other kid stuff, there was one useful program: an interactive holomap of Coruscant.

Every few days, he’d managed to find an intact PDD terminal—buried deep within the midlevels of a half-ruined building, or sheltered under a slab of fallen wall, once even hanging by its access cable on a twisted steel walkway that led to empty air, the building to which it had connected having collapsed entirely. Public Data Display terminals are extremely durable, designed to absorb a lot of abuse—they have to—and some of the PDDs he found still worked, or could be kicked to life after jacking in one of his spare power cells. Then he could upload the PDD’s location into the YOU ARE HERE function of the datapad’s holomap, tracking his progress.

What he would do when he arrived, he didn’t know. There probably wasn’t anything left but a vast mound of wreckage like the ones across which they scrambled every day. He didn’t even really know why he was going. He had no plan, only a destination.

A destination was enough.

He pulled the electrobinoculars out of his knapsack and powered them up. Something about the Vonglife down in the crater bothered him. He wasn’t sure what it was, couldn’t be sure; even after weeks in the Nursery and weeks more on Yuuzhan’tar, he was far from an expert.

He’d avoided contact with the Vonglife whenever possible; much of it had unpleasant properties—the tea-smelling purple sap that had bled from the duracrete moss, for example, had turned his hands into masses of blistered welts for three days. Over the weeks of the trek, he’d found that the Vonglife had a certain pattern: it grew in vast patches, surrounded by rings of starkly bare rubble. Near the center of each patch, he could usually spot one of the ecogenerating biomachines that the shipseeds had scattered across the planet, churning out spores or seeds or sometimes even living creatures.

He and Vergere