Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

lie. The truth is always bigger than the words we use to describe it.”

“I knew it! This is some kind of trick!”

“Yeah. But not on you.”

Ganner shook his head wordlessly. He couldn’t connect this Jacen to the cheerful dark-haired kid he used to know. He suffered an instant of wild hope: maybe Jacen wasn’t Jacen—maybe this traitor who had promised to murder him was some kind of impostor, some kind of clone, something force-grown in a Yuuzhan Vong shaper’s vat—

“Uh, Jacen? You are you, aren’t you?…” Ganner grimaced. That sounded stupid, even for me.

“No,” said the man who looked like a sad, grown-up Jacen Solo. “I’m not. But I was.”

“I don’t understand.”

He sighed. “Thinking of me as Jacen Solo,” he said distantly, “will only get in your way. I was the boy you knew, Ganner, but I’m not the boy who knew you.”

“But you’re alive.” Ganner shrugged into the robe, and smoothed it down. “That’s the only thing that counts. I found you. After all this time. That’s the important thing. You’re alive.”

“No.”

“Yes it is,” he insisted. “You have no idea how important—you have no idea what it’ll mean to the New Republic that you’re alive! What it’ll mean to Jaina—”

“But I’m not.”

Ganner blinked.

Jacen only looked sad.

“I don’t understand,” Ganner said.

“I can’t help that.”

“But, but, but, Jacen, come on, don’t be ridiculous—”

That dark distance captured his eyes altogether. “I’ve been dead for months, Ganner. I died not long after Myrkr. I just haven’t gotten around to lying down, yet.”

A chill trickled the length of Ganner’s spine. “You’re … dead?”

“That’s right,” Jacen said. “And so are you.”

   Some of Jacen’s quick-sketched explanation made sense. The planted rumors leading to the “trap” on the camp ship had never really been intended to catch anybody; Jacen had only been stalling for time. As weeks passed with no results, Jacen hoped Nom Anor would lose patience and pull him out of there. If he’d really wanted to catch Jaina, all he would have had to do was reopen the Force-bond that had linked them since birth. Nothing in the galaxy would have stopped her from finding him.

“Nothing in the galaxy stops Jaina from doing pretty much whatever she decides to do. So I have to hold that part of myself shut down. If she finds out I’m alive, she’ll come for me—and that’ll just get her killed, too. Like Anakin. And me.” That strange sadness leaked back onto his face. “And you.”

Ganner let that pass. It was clear that Jacen wasn’t firing on all thrusters—and after what he must have been through, Ganner couldn’t blame him. “What if she had shown up on the camp ship after all?”

Jacen’s eyes closed and opened again, a motion too slow and deliberate to be called a blink. “Then I’d be having this conversation with her. And you’d have the chance to live to a ripe old age.”

Jacen had felt Ganner coming days before he arrived, and had done everything he could—under the circumstances—to discourage him. The freezing dread, the growing conviction that he was going to his death, finally even the outright compulsion to turn and run, had all been Jacen’s doing, reaching through the Force to push Ganner away.

“But nothing worked.” Jacen sighed and shook his head. “If you weren’t so bloody brave, you might have lived through this.”

“Uh … yeah. Right. I guess,” Ganner said hesitantly. “But—uh, Jacen? You do understand that I’m not really dead, don’t you?

“You’re the one who needs to understand, Ganner. You are really dead. When you came back to the chamber in the camp ship: that’s what killed you.” Jacen sagged exhaustedly against the wall, and rubbed his reddened eyes. “The warriors who were with me were going to slaughter you on the spot. The only way you could have escaped is if I’d helped you—and if I had, if I’d shown them I was still a Jedi at heart—the pilot would have triggered the dovin basal and wiped out the whole ship.”

“And themselves along with everybody else?”

“Suicide missions are an honor for the Yuuzhan Vong. That stuff about the Blessed Release? That’s not just dogma. They really believe it.”

And the sad, dark distance in his stare made Ganner wonder if maybe Jacen believed it a little himself.

“We’ve both been dead for a long time, Ganner. And today—” Jacen drew new strength from somewhere. He pushed himself off the wall and stood like a man who knew fatigue only by reputation. “Today is the day we stop breathing.”

Ganner scrubbed at his face as though he could massage understanding in through his skin. “Then why not just let them kill me?”

“Because I need you. Because I can use you. Because we both have a chance to make our deaths count for something.”

Jacen explained that the “sacrifice” was a sham. It was nothing more than an excuse to get into what he called the Well of the World Brain. Ganner understood this “world brain” to be some kind of organic planetary master computer, shaped by the Yuuzhan Vong to manage the ecology of their re-created homeworld. Jacen had been racking his brains for weeks, trying to figure out a way to get inside the Well, which was some kind of reinforced bunker, a sort of impenetrable skull designed to protect the World Brain from any possible harm. The Yuuzhan Vong—especially Nom Anor, who was Jacen’s control—hadn’t let him anywhere near the place. They didn’t entirely trust that Jacen’s “conversion” was real.

Ganner understood. He didn’t entirely trust that it wasn’t.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for a chance to steal ten minutes alone in the Well of the World Brain. You, Ganner—your ‘sacrifice’—you’re my key in the door to the Well. All I need is to get in there.”

“What’s so important about this world brain? What are you going to do once you’re in there?”

Jacen stood very, very still; his face settled into an unbendable durasteel determination that was pure Skywalker.

“I am,” he said with quiet, absolute conviction, “going to teach the Yuuzhan Vong a lesson about