Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

slopes, could feel them slogging through the thunderstorm in the crater’s center. He felt the sizzle of alien stress hormones coursing alien veins. He felt one’s shortness of breath as a warrior slipped around a blind corner that might hide a fugitive Jedi; he felt one’s black rage at the death of comrades in the Nursery, and his heart echoed with another’s savage lust for vengeance. He felt the shocking, nauseating nonpain that slammed up a leg from an ankle broken by an unlucky shift of rubble, and he felt the frustration of a warrior ordered to remain behind to tend some clumsy brenzlit’s broken ankle while he burned to leap forward, to hunt and find and slay. He felt them all.

Like he was all of them, and all of them were him. At the same time.

And more: he felt the crush of tender fronds under hard hot boot heels. He felt the primitive distress of moss when half a struggling colony was scraped off a broken door by the stumble of a warrior against it. He felt the blank terror of a small family of burrowing, roughly mammalian creatures, cringing at the groundborne impact vibrations of so many running feet.

Accepting the warriors’ feelings, opening himself to their emotions, their sensations, he no longer felt the cold: Yuuzhan Vong metabolism, faster and hotter than human, turned the icy rain into a refreshingly astringent shower. The sting of hail became harshly intoxicating, like scratching an inflamed rash. And he was no longer afraid—

Not that he was afraid to die. He’d left fear of death behind on the worldship at Myrkr—but in the blasting thunderstorm, his body had cringed and shook, twisting away from imagined slashes of amphistaffs, bracing against impacts of imagined thud bugs, a biological reflex that took no account of his courage. But now—

Now, all he felt was a fierce rise of predatory joy as a warrior raised his amphistaff and crept toward a small white-robed human shivering in a corner at the meeting of two broken walls, and only when a tall shadow loomed through the curtain of rain right in front of him did Jacen realize that the small white-robed human who was about to die was himself.

Lightning blasted overhead as he twisted, and the amphistaff blade only scored his ribs before stabbing deep into the duracrete of the wall at his back. In the ringing darkness that followed the flash he let the knapsack drop off his shoulders, catching one strap as it fell; while the warrior yanked his amphistaff free, Jacen swung the knapsack two-handed and slammed fifteen kilos of cans and equipment into the warrior’s face. The warrior staggered backward and Jacen pounced, swinging again, landing solidly, buckling the warrior’s knees.

Jacen spun the knapsack overhand to smash the warrior straight down to the ground, but the warrior lifted his blade to parry, slashing the knapsack in half, scattering protein bars and canned synthmilk, shearing the electrobinoculars neatly in half and stabbing into the electronic guts of the datapad—which exploded into blue-white sparks that lit up the rain and scaled the length of the amphistaff to scorch the warrior’s hands.

The warrior hacked a glottal curse as his hands spasmed involuntarily. Smoking, the amphistaff fell limp to the ground between them. Jacen grimaced as pain bit his own hands, chewing its way up his arms—but it wasn’t his pain.

This was pain from the warrior’s burns.

When the warrior leapt to attack unarmed, Jacen met his attack effortlessly, pivoting slightly so that the warrior’s spiked boot missed him by a centimeter. The warrior skidded, caught himself, then twisted and fired a lightning punch overhand toward Jacen’s temple. Jacen tilted his head a fraction, and the punch only ruffled his hair.

“If you don’t stop,” Jacen said, “I’ll have to hurt us.”

The warrior snarled and swung his knotted fists. Jacen flicked the first punch aside; the second, he parried with an open palm as he stepped forward, swinging his own doubled arm, so that the warrior’s knuckles slammed into the point of Jacen’s oncoming elbow. The warrior howled as his knuckles shattered, and a blaze of alien pain ignited in Jacen’s arm: splintered bones stabbing through third-degree electrical burns.

“I can do this all day.” He could: the warrior might as well have been a part of Jacen’s own body. He could no more fail to meet an attack than one of his hands would miss the other in the dark. He would feel every scrap of whatever pain he inflicted, but so what? It was only pain.

And the rest—

He let himself go, moving light and easy, counters to every attack as clear and obvious and predictable as a form he’d done a thousand times: like training with Jaina, when their Force talents and their twin bond had made them practically one person. More warriors sighted the fight—the dance—and thud bugs snapped through the air, and Jacen actually felt he should apologize as he gracefully faked the warrior off balance and then took his outstretched arm and spun him into their path. The thud bugs hit him like hammers. Vonduun crab armor saved his life, but transferred enough hydrostatic shock to snuff his consciousness like a switched-off glow rod.

Jacen felt that, too: an eyeflash of blackout that staggered him.

When his eyes cleared, three warriors had him boxed.

Knowing how they would attack wouldn’t help; no one alive could move fast enough to dodge. The warriors slashed at him, amphistaffs lengthening with whipcrack speed. None of the blades even grazed him.

He had not moved.

To the nerve nodes that served as all three amphistaffs’ primitive brains, Jacen suddenly appeared to be a—small, disturbingly misshapen, but still unmistakable—amphistaff polyp; uncounted millennia of natural selection had hardwired amphistaffs against cutting polyps.

Well, that worked okay, Jacen thought. But once they drop them and come after me barehanded, I’m cooked.

So he attacked.

He took three running steps for momentum toward the one on the left and sprang into the air. The warrior’s instinctive reaction—to lift his amphistaff and spear