Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

conceivable color and texture of life, shaped by a skeleton built of duracrete and transparisteel.

“Ganner, can you stand?” he asked softly. “You don’t have to walk. Just stand. I need to do something else right now.”

Ganner clenched every ounce of his will to swallow the rising tide of his shame and self-disgust. He drew on the Force to hold himself upright, and for the strength to steady his voice. “Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. I’m okay, Jacen,” he lied, then made himself say, “Thanks.”

Jacen flashed him a hint of that quick Solo smile. “You’d do the same for me.”

As if I’d ever have to, Ganner thought, but held his tongue.

Solemnity settled back over Jacen’s features like a mask. He turned to face the assembled thousands, and lifted his arms. “I am Jacen Solo! I am human! I was a Jedi!” His voice boomed out like artillery fire, and the echoes came back in Yuuzhan Vong: Nikk pryozz Jacen Solo! Nikk pryozz human! Nikk pr’zzyo Jeedai!

“I am now a servant of the Truth!”

How he said that made Ganner suddenly scowl; for someone who was only playing a part, Jacen sounded unsettlingly sincere—

Ganner felt a surge in the Force like a vast rushing wind; it passed him without touching him. The Great Door swung inward, to reveal the shadowed reach of the Atrium beyond, and the cavernous mouths of the Grand Concourse to either side.

Jacen turned his palms upward as though reaching for the braided arch of impossible color that was the Bridge overhead.

“WITNESS!” he thundered. The echo cried: Tchurokk!

“WITNESS THE WILL OF THE GODS!”

Before the echo finished roaring Tchurokk Yun’tchilat, Jacen had already turned and walked briskly through the Great Door; a swirl of the Force drew Ganner after him. Nom Anor and the Shaper Lord made to follow, along with the priests and the vanguard band, but as soon as Ganner was clear of the doorway, Jacen turned and made a small gesture that Ganner felt as another swift, incredibly powerful rush in the Force.

The Great Door boomed shut.

Echoes faded. Slowly.

The Atrium had become a vast cavern of living yorik coral.

The immense statues that had once represented the varied species of the New Republic had become unidentifiable, misshapen pillars like boils of old lava. Shadows huge and black masked every fold of coral, and the mouths of the Grand Concourse to either side yawned bottomless depths of night; the sole light—a pulsing, sulfurous glow mingling reds and yellows—leaked into the Atrium from an archway opposite the Great Door.

“What’s making that light? And, and, and, wait—” Ganner said numbly. “I don’t remember any door there—that was, uh, the Information Services office, wasn’t it?…”

“Maybe you’ve noticed: things have changed.” Jacen was already trotting toward the archway. “Follow me. We don’t have much time.” Ganner stumbled after him.

The arch led to nearly half a kilometer of yorik coral tunnel. The roof and sides formed a rough semicircle, a little less than five meters wide at the base and the same in height. Pulsing red-orange light filled the far end, flaring sometimes to an eye-burning yellow. “How are you doing?” Jacen asked as he jogged along; Ganner was lagging, breathing hard. “Keeping up okay? You need any more help?”

“I’m … I am—” not going to screw this up, Ganner swore to himself. “—okay. I’m okay. I’m right behind you.”

The tunnel’s roof opened to a vast cavernous red-lit space overhead, and the walls, too, fell away; the tunnel’s floor became a cantilevered bridgeway out to a circular platform ten meters across, which hung unsupported in great swirls of sulfurous mist that burned Ganner’s throat and scoured tears from his eyes.

“What is this place?”

“Look around,” Jacen said grimly. If the scorching heat or brimstone-reeking fog bothered him at all, he didn’t show it. He seemed to be listening for something. “Give me a minute. I have to concentrate.”

Ganner barely heard him. He gaped, turning in a slow, dumbfounded circle.

This used to be the Senate’s Grand Convocation Chamber.

A hundred meters below, where once had stood the pillar of the Chief of State’s Podium, there now boiled a great pool of glowing slime; huge bubbles roiled to the surface, bursting into flares of scarlet and starflower yellow—it was from this pool that the light came.

Rising around the pool, a gargantuan bowl of yorik coral climbed the staggered rank upon rank of Senatorial platforms, slowly scaling the walls toward the dim, shadowed vault of the ceiling.

And down in that pool of glowing slime, a vast fleshy bulge moved, breaching the surface in a slick black curve before submerging once more.

Ganner jolted back from the edge. “Gyahh—! Jacen, there’s something down there!”

“Yeah.” Jacen stepped to the front edge of the platform. “Don’t worry. It’s a friend of mine.”

“A friend?” Ganner looked down again—and again the creature breached: black, bloated, a ghastly stomach turned inside out, swollen with malice. A yellow eye the size of an X-wing glared up at them, blinking, wiped by a triple layer of transparent eyelids that slid across its surface at different angles to scrape it free of slime.

Then a second eye appeared, blinked, and fixed on them: a parallax, for ranging. A spray of tentacles shot upward from the slime.

Ganner threw himself backward as tentacles hissed through the fog around them, impossibly flexible ropes of muscle slicing the air so fast he couldn’t even tell how many there were. Tentacles slammed against the platform, knocking Ganner half off his feet, chipping away head-sized hunks of coral.

Jacen never moved.

“This—uh, friend of yours,” Ganner said shakily. “It doesn’t seem too happy to see you …”

“Yeah, well, I can’t say I’m surprised. The last time we saw each other, I was trying to kill it.”

“To kill—uh, your friend?” Gazing downward in a daze of horrified revulsion, Ganner tried a laugh; it came out too high, too tight, too close to a hysterical giggle. “How do you treat your enemies?”

Jacen cocked his head, his brown eyes suddenly thoughtful, then he shrugged. “I don’t have any enemies.”

“What?”

Jacen pointed at an angle, down across the