Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

it the dark side if they only eat half the slain animal? Does a predator partake of the dark side if its family is a few kilos overweight?”

“It’s not about that—”

“Then what is it about? Are we back to why? Does intention always trump action? It’s not the dark side for that predator, say, to slaughter the entire herd and leave them to rot, so long as it thinks it needs them for food?”

“It’s not that simple,” Jacen insisted. “And it’s not always easy to describe—”

“But you know it when you see it, yes?”

He lowered his head stubbornly. “Yes.”

Vergere uncoiled her fingers toward the blood-smeared predator on the slope below. “You didn’t this time …”

Jacen’s answer was interrupted by a shattering thunder-burst that sounded like the whole sky had exploded.

He yelped and threw himself against the wall at his back. Rubble slid and shifted in the crater wall above; an avalanche of duracrete hunks and twisted support beams poured over the lip of the wall to slam the notch’s floor centimeters from Jacen’s knees. Another crash blasted through the sky, and another; he turned sideways to the wall and tucked his head, hands doubled to protect the back of his neck against the pounding of debris. More blasts sounded, but the crater no longer shook, and Jacen risked a glance upward.

“What was that?”

Vergere pointed into the limitless purple above the arch of the Bridge. “There.”

“I don’t see anything—”

“Jacen—” She waved a hand at the electrobinoculars that hung, forgotten, around his neck.

He yanked them to his eyes, aiming where she had pointed. The autofocus sharpened an image, and one of his father’s Corellian curses snuck through his lips. Those explosions hadn’t been explosions, and they hadn’t been thunder.

They’d been sonic booms.

Yorik coral vessels the size of the Millennium Falcon whipped through broad looping arcs around the crater, tracing an impossibly complex rosette. And all of them spat bulbous objects like seedpods, colored the same purple as the sky, in a continuous stream.

Now the shell of one seedpod began to peel back like an Ithorian starflower opening toward the sun, revealing tangled wads of white filaments like silkweed. The silk unraveled swiftly, releasing its seeds to the wind, trailing long, long streamers of white fibers. Jacen spun the zoom wheel on the electrobinoculars, and one of those seeds snapped into focus, and it wasn’t a seed.

It was a Yuuzhan Vong warrior.

The white silk strands trailing above it snapped open into a parachute canopy. Soon all the seedpods had blossomed, dropping a round dozen warriors apiece—hundreds—thousands—

“Great.” Jacen lowered the electrobinoculars. “We’ve stumbled into their airborne infantry training camp. Could have been worse, huh? Could have been an artillery range—” “Jacen.”

There was a hard, cold darkness in Vergere’s voice that he’d never heard before. He went suddenly still, watching: an animal catching wind of a larger, faster predator.

She said, “This is no training exercise. They are hunting for you.”

Jacen swallowed. “I’m not going back,” he said hoarsely. “I’ve had enough of the Embrace of Pain for three lifetimes—”

“Oh, no fear of that.” Her usual sprightly cheer flowed back into her, straightening her back and curving her lips into a human-style grin. “They have no interest in your pain, Jacen Solo. These are the soldiers of the master shaper. If they catch you, they will kill you. Purely. Simply. On the spot.”

He squinted back up into the sky with only his unaided eyes; he could now just barely make out the thousands upon thousands of tiny purplish specks.

“All this?” he murmured. “All this, just for me?”

“You now get the first hint of how important you are.”

He met her gaze steadily. “Well, somebody thinks so, anyway. Any suggestions?”

Vergere nodded, turning away to gaze once more upward. “There seems to be an updraft from the crater; perhaps something to do with that strange storm. It’s blowing the pod troopers outward, toward the rim of the crater, and beyond.”

“So?”

“So: if you are to escape them, there is only one way you can go.”

Again, she unfurled a hand toward the interior of the crater.

“Down.”

EIGHT

INTO THE DARK

Lightning blazed overhead, and thunder slammed the crater floor hard enough to shake the ground. Shivering, Jacen pressed himself into a broken corner that had once been the interior of a fashionable refresher. Icy rain streamed down his spine, and pellets of hail stung his skin. He clenched his jaw so that his teeth wouldn’t chatter.

The Yuuzhan Vong were coming.

Whole squads of warriors had come bounding over the crater’s rim before Jacen and Vergere had made it even halfway down the inner slope. The warriors had leapt recklessly from slab to rock to rubble, gaining rapidly. Jacen could not possibly have matched their speed; in the service of the True Gods, injury or maiming—even death—is a warrior’s fondest hope.

He didn’t know how long he’d been waiting here, shivering in the icy rain. Vergere had told him to wait, had told him she could find an escape route, but she had to hunt for it and she could move faster alone. Though she had not said the words, had not asked him to, Jacen trusted her.

What choice did he have?

Oh yeah, sure, I’m free, he thought sourly. Some freedom.

The rain, the hail, the bitter wind, they were bad. The waiting was worse.

Worst of all was that he could feel the Yuuzhan Vong closing in.

The center of his chest was hollow: an empty space where the slave seed once had been. If he changed his breathing, if he closed his eyes, if he thought about that hollow—directed his attention into the emptiness at his center—somehow that brought another sense to life. He couldn’t have described the feeling; there were no words, exactly, for how it felt. The slave seed had sent fibers throughout his body, had woven itself into his nervous system until those fibers were an inextricable part of who he was—but those fibers vibrated to a life foreign to this galaxy.

He just knew …

He could feel the Yuuzhan Vong swarming down the crater’s