Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

to read his mind. “It’s Jacen’s,” she chimed cheerfully. “I think he might want it back, don’t you?”

“You can’t—”

“Yes, I can.” She nodded toward the gloom beyond the coralcraft. “I should be able to cut my way into the Well easily enough.”

“If you kill me—” Nom Anor began desperately.

“Kill you? Don’t be silly.” Cables from the dangling jungle of wreckage suddenly writhed to life, whipping through the air to bind Nom Anor’s limbs. They wrapped him tightly enough to squeeze a gasp from his lungs, then tied themselves in hideously complex knots. Vergere watched all this happen—made it happen, Nom Anor realized—with a humorous expression on her face and a bright orange flare of her crest. “If I want you dead, all I have to do is leave you behind. Tsavong Lah will take care of the rest.”

“But you can’t leave me behind,” Nom Anor said. He was beginning to recover his self-possession. “You can’t fly my craft. It’s imprinted on me! Only I can—”

“That may be true,” she allowed. “But I doubt it. Your coralcraft is, after all, a living creature—and Jacen, you may have noticed, has a certain gift for making friends.”

“You—he—you’re mad! This can’t be happening!”

“Executor,” she said severely, cutting him short with a twitch of the lightblade, “didn’t I say Jacen Solo will steal your ship?”

Nom Anor could only gape.

“When will you learn,” she asked, shaking her head in mock sadness, “that everything I tell you is the truth?”

   Abruptly, the dance falters, stumbles, begins to limp.

There is no one left to fight.

Ganner sways, dizzy, dying, poisoned with amphistaff venom from scores of wounds. His blood paints the floor beneath his boots and the walls of the tunnel around him.

Only the Force holds him upright.

A grinding rumble approaches, and soon he can see what makes this sound, what produces these tremors he feels shaking the floor: something huge and dark, trundling on curving knotted legs like buttresses, splayed claws flattening Yuuzhan Vong corpses heedlessly as it approaches. Its bulk is mailed with vast plates of horn, and a vast head swings slowly from side to side like an AT-AT’s control cabin in hunter-killer mode. Its massive jaws drip flame.

Warriors advance along its flanks.

I guess it was inevitable, Ganner thinks with a twinge of melancholy. Sooner or later, the bad guys always bring up their armor.

This is about to be over; he cannot face such a beast supported by infantry—and yet the Force offers him one last trick.

Though the Force is blind to the warriors and the tank beast and the coral around them all, in it Ganner can feel the duracrete walls of the Senate, which form the Well’s skeletal structure; he can feel that the tunnel had been cut through any number of load-bearing members—he can feel that the duracrete around him is crazed with stress fractures, half broken already, and sagging under the unimaginable tons of the coral that surrounds it.

Ganner smiles.

The tank beast roars a gout of concentrated acid; with the Force, Ganner angles a shard of the Great Door to form a durasteel shield that sluices the acid to one side, so that it splashes to one wall. Coral smokes, dying, liquefying instantly. The shard of the Great Door begins to melt.

Blast bugs zing toward him from the warriors, and the melting shard dances before him, deflecting them into the acid-burned wall. Their explosions splash liquid coral and duracrete splinters.

Above their heads, the building groans. Warriors flinch, glancing upward in sudden fear. The tank beast howls.

Ganner laughs. The Force is with him, and he has become once more the dancer.

He has become the dance.

With the Force, he reaches into the duracrete around them all, and he begins to shove.

   Jacen was surprised by life.

The teeth of the World Brain had not closed upon him. Its tentacles had not ripped the flesh from his bones. He had not drowned in the slime pool, asphyxiating on phosphorescent goo. No Yuuzhan Vong warriors swarmed around him to drag him from the slime and carve the life from him with amphistaffs.

Instead, a bubble of air had formed around him, and tentacles had cradled him like a sleeping child, and lips had closed over sword-edged teeth to touch him with a kiss.

Because he was the World Brain, and the World Brain was him, and each was everything else, and Jacen had learned that one can meet the Universe and all its irrational pain—which means meeting oneself—with fear, or with hatred, or with despair.

Or one can choose to meet it with love.

Jacen had chosen.

But still, he was astonished to discover that the Universe could love him back.

At the far end of an infinite distance—which was the same as right here—he felt an oceanic roll of the Force gathering an interstellar fortissimo of symphonic joy; at the same time, within the hollow at his center, he felt rage and pain and fierce hot combat, and he understood another reason why he was still alive.

Ganner—

He reached out with his feelings and gathered power from across the Universe.

Tentacles fell away from his arms and legs, and the air bubble around him collapsed. He brushed the World Brain lightly with his fingertips: a good-bye to a friend. Then Jacen Solo shot from the slime pool as though fired from a torpedo launcher.

He burst into the brimstone smoke, his robe blazing with slime that trailed from him in shining ropes and dripped like falling stars; he sailed over the slime pool to alight at the bowl rim, where the coral met the bare durasteel of a Senate platform. He lifted his head, fixing his gaze upon the cantilevered bridgeway that stuck out into the Well like a tongue, a tongue from a mouth that belched smoke and scarlet flame and the amethyst lightning of a lightsaber biting flesh.

And he could hear a human voice up there. He could not make out words, but the tone was unmistakable.

Ganner was laughing.

Deep in the Force, Jacen seized that bridgeway with the hands of his mind. One