Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

like body armor. “All right,” he said, calm, quiet, and slow. He held the eye of the middle-aged man and twitched the lightsaber; within the red-rimmed shadows cast upward on his face by the blade’s yellow glow, the man’s stare was as stony as ever. “Back up. Toward the door.”

The man’s stare softened into something like resignation, and he shook his head in sad refusal.

“I’m not bluffing,” Ganner said. “You and I are going to have a talk in the corridor. As long as nobody does something stupid, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t all live through this. Now move.”

Another twitch of the lightsaber, enough to shave a micrometer of skin off the man’s collarbone—and the man only sighed. “Ganner, you dope.”

Ganner licked his lips. He says that like he knows me. “You don’t seem to understand—”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” the man said tiredly. “We’re being watched. Right now. If I so much as step outside this chamber, a Yuuzhan Vong pilot watching us will trigger a dovin basal concealed not very far from here. It will take all of ten seconds for this whole ship to collapse into a quantum black hole. A hundred million people will die.”

Ganner’s mouth dropped open. “What—how—I mean, why, why would—”

“Because they don’t trust me yet,” he said sadly. “You shouldn’t have come back, Ganner. Now you can’t leave this room alive.”

“I got in easily enough—”

“Getting out is different. And even if you do get away, knowing only what you know already—”

“If I get away? Who’s holding the lightsaber here?”

“It’s not a bluff, Ganner. I only wish it was.”

Ganner could hear the conviction in his voice, and in the Force he felt truth behind his words. But I already know he’s stronger than me. He could be faking the truth I’m feeling, and I’d never know it. And even if it were true, he couldn’t get any of this to make sense—

He couldn’t begin to guess what might actually be going on, or what he should be doing about it.

“I’m telling you this,” the man went on, “because the same thing will happen if I am killed. In case my conscience tempts me to sacrifice myself. As I said, they don’t trust me yet.”

“But—but—” Ganner sputtered. That feeling of being in over his head thickened. He was drowning in it. Taking a two-handed grip on his lightsaber to keep the blade from trembling, he tried to recover control of the situation. “All I want,” he said, almost plaintively, “is to hear what you know about Jacen Solo. Start talking, or I’ll have to take the chance that you’re bluffing.”

The man looked at Ganner like he knew him, like he’d known him for years, like he saw through him with the melancholy perception of a disappointed parent. Again, he sighed. “Talking won’t help.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

Slowly, deliberately, without any hint of a threatening speed, he lifted a hand. He pressed a spot on the side of his nose, and his face split in half.

Ganner took an involuntary step back.

The man’s face peeled open like the rind of an Ithorian bloodfruit, thick meaty flaps pulling away from each other, taking with them his thinning lank hair, the defeated pouches under his eyes, the jowls that had thickened his jawline. A network of hair-thin filaments slowly retracted from the pores of the face revealed beneath, leaking blood.

Beneath the retracting masquer, the face Ganner saw was thin, chiseled, fringed with a raggedly scruffy beard, topped with blood-matted hair that might have been brown. Even through the streaks of blood and the distortion caused by the withdrawal of the masquer’s feeder filaments, Ganner knew this face—though it was a face too old, too lined with privation and pain, set with eyes too sadly experienced, to be the face he knew it was.

Ganner’s mouth dropped open. His fingers loosened as his hands fell to his sides; his lightsaber’s blade vanished and the handle clattered on the floor.

When he could finally speak, the only word that could pass through his nerveless mouth was “Jacen …”

“Hi, Ganner,” Jacen said tiredly. He reached into his sleeve and withdrew a small pouch, which he teased open, turning it inside out as he drew it over his hand like a mitten, revealing a small fabric pad that had been inside the pouch. He tossed it to Ganner. “Here, catch.”

Ganner was too astonished to do anything other than catch it reflexively. The pad was damp to his touch, and warm with Jacen’s body heat. “Jacen? What’s going on?”

Numbness gathered in the center of his palm, and began to climb his wrist. He frowned down at the pad in his hand. “What is this?”

“The tears of a friend of mine,” Jacen said. “They’re a contact poison.”

“What?” He stared. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I don’t have much sense of humor these days.” Jacen peeled the pouch off his hand and tossed it aside. “You’ll be unconscious in about fifteen seconds.”

Ganner’s hand was already dead, and his right arm hung limp; the numbness washed into his chest, and when it touched his heart it shot throughout his body. He pitched forward, unable even to lift an arm to break his fall—but Jacen caught him and lowered him gently to the floor.

“Wake the villip,” Jacen said to one of the others—Yuuzhan Vong warriors, Ganner now knew they must be. “Tell Nom Anor that our trap has failed. Other Jedi will follow this one. We must return home.”

Nom Anor? Return home? Ganner thought as darkness closed in around his mind. They’ve done it. They got Jacen.

They’ve turned him.

One of the warriors barked in their harsh tongue.

Jacen shook his head. “No. We’ll take him with us.”

Cough hack snarl—

“Because I say so,” Jacen answered. “Do you dare dispute my word?”

With a final convulsion of his will, Ganner reached out through the Force and seized his lightsaber, lifting it with his mind, squeezing its activation plate to snap the blade to sizzling life. One of the warriors barked a warning in