Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor

by Matthew Stover

  He had no need to elaborate; Vergere knew already that the genetic material that had gone into the creation of the seedship was irreplaceable: gene samples preserved through the incalculable millennia of the Yuuzhan Vong's intergalactic voyage aboard the worldships. Samples preserved from a homeworld so long vanished in the dust of history that not even its name survived.

  "Ease your mind, Nom Anor. Has not each step gone perfectly so far? "

  He scowled. "I distrust such easy victories."

  "But easy victories are proof of the True Gods' favor," Vergere said in that irritating chime, a tone that may or may not have been intentionally mocking; Nom Anor had never been able to decide. "To distrust victory smacks of blasphemy--to say nothing of ingratitude..."

  "Remember to whom you speak." The executor waved a dismissal. "Leave me. Maintain your vigilance. In fact, intensify it. These last few days before seedfall will be especially dangerous. Take no chances."

  "As you say, Executor." Vergere favored him with a millimetrically correct bow, then opened the chamber's hatch sphincter and climbed out.

  And Nom Anor, in his cautious, methodical way, took his own advice.

  As soon as Vergere left, Nom Anor sent a message by villip to the commander of a special detachment of warriors; this detachment had been brought aboard and specially trained for just such a moment as this. He issued a short string of orders. Before the end of the day, warriors in ooglith masquers would begin to infiltrate the other slave gangs in the Nursery. They would stay well away from Jacen Solo, conceal their presence, and wait.

  Before seedfall, there would be more than a hundred of them. And meanwhile, Nom Anor made a mental note to have his coralcraft fed, groomed, and prepped for sudden takeoff. He would take no chances.

  He had not survived so much of this war by underestimating Jedi.

  When the Devaronian died, Jacen thought, Okay, maybe I was wrong.

  He knelt on the hive-lake's verge. A mob of injured, wounded, and sick slaves surged and shouted around him, hands and tentacles and talons reaching for him, tugging at his robeskin. His robeskin had soaked up a lot of blood before Jacen had managed to tourniquet the stump of the Devaronian's arm; the Devaronian's silver-based blood was black as tarnish, and smelled of burned sulfur. From his link with the dhuryam through the slave seed in his chest, Jacen could faintly perceive his robeskin's primitive delight at the blood's unusual flavor. As weeks passed, Jacen and the dhuryam had learned to communicate more precisely, through the medium of the slave seed.

  Perhaps it was because the dhuryam, like its cousin the yammosk, was innately telepathic to a limited degree even with humans; perhaps it was because Jacen had long, long experience with empathic and telepathic communication.

  Perhaps it was because the slave seed's web of tendrils had become so intimately entwined with Jacen's nervous system that it was practically a part of his brain. Jacen did not trouble himself with explanations. Only results counted. He could now exchange information with the dhuryam, in the form of emotions and images. By using these in combination, they had developed a wide-ranging mutual vocabulary, but their connection had gone beyond this. As his bond with the dhuryam had deepened, Jacen had found he could tap into the dhuryam's own senses: with concentration, he could become as aware of the various life-forms within the Nursery as was the dhuryam itself.

  To reach the dying Devaronian, he'd had to fight his way through the mob of shouting, weeping, struggling slaves. Hundreds of them had gathered near the hive-lake, all hoping that Jacen might treat their wounds or illnesses. Many of the slaves had been driven here by other dhuryams, lashed by slave seed-web agony burning their nerves; though the other dhuryams had tried to develop medics of their own, they could neither find nor create other healers of Jacen's skill. His empathic bond with the slave seed let him use the dhuryams' own telepathic connections to feel the extent of wounds and diseases and internal injuries, and to treat them with an efficiency that would have astonished a trained meditech.

  At fast, his own dhuryam had tried to stop Jacen from treating slaves who belonged to its sibling-rivals; for nearly a day, Jacen and the dhuryam had gone back to their war of unendurable pain against unbreakable will. Through it all, Jacen had kept hearing Vergere's voice echo inside his head. Which are flowers? Which are weeds? she had said. The choice is yours. He had chosen. No agony at any dhuryam's command could unmake his choice. There are no weeds here. Every slave was a flower. Every life was precious. He would spend the last erg of his strength to save every one of them.

  There are no weeds here. He had built an aid station near the bank of the lake that surrounded the dhuryam hive-island. Since the domains radiated from the lake like sections of longitude, here was the place where slaves from rival domains could reach him while passing through the least amount of enemy territory. His own dhuryam had cooperated to the point of giving Jacen the occasional help of a few members of his slave gang, to gather medicinal mosses and herbs, supplies of clip beetles, and young robeskins that could be used for bandages.

  The Devaronian had been one of these temporary assistants. Jacen had sent him upland for a bundle of grain-bearing grasses that grew on a nearby hillock; when ground fine, these grains made an excellent coagulant, and were mildly antibiotic. The Devaronian had given a nod of his vestigial horns, offered a smile full of needle-sharp teeth, and set off willingly, without requiring any spurring from the dhuryam. Before he could return, the crowd of wounded had grown to a mob. Shoving matches broke out as the competing dhuryams set their injured slaves against those of other sibling-rivals; some of these shoving matches had turned starkly violent before Jacen could intervene.

  The Devaronian had been caught at the edge of one, and all that his hissing and sharp-toothed threat displays had accomplished was to get himself shoved off around the fringes of the mob. He couldn't fight back without dropping the bundle of grasses Jacen had sent him for, and the two stunted horns that curved from his forehead were far from intimidating. He had tried to skirt the mob by slipping around the hive-pond's shore, since the ring of Yuuzhan Vong warriors around it prevented the mob from extending in that direction. It was this that had killed him.

  Jacen didn't know if the Devaronian had stumbled, or slipped on the scummy reeds that lay flat at the bank of the pond, or if someone in the crowd had knocked into him or even purposefully shoved him. All he knew was that the Devaronian had gotten too close to the ring of warriors.

  He'd heard the harsh bark of a warrior's order at the edge of the pond, and he'd looked up in time to see a flicker of amphistaff blade conjure a jet of shimmering black blood. He had pushed and shoved and fought his way through the mob to find the Devaronian lying on his back in a scatter of the grasses he had carried, one hand clutching at the stump of his other arm.

  Jacen had done everything he could, which wasn't much. Before he could tie off the stump, the Devaronian was in deep shock; death had followed only a minute or two later. Jacen had had time to study the Devaronian's face: the bleakly pale hide, the spray of needle teeth behind thick leathern lips, the small forehead horns curving in growth rings that Jacen could count with his fingertips.

  He'd had time to gaze into the Devaronian's vivid red eyes, to read there a puzzled sadness at the useless, empty, arbitrary death that now swallowed him.

  That's when Jacen thought, Okay, maybe I was wrong. There were weeds here, after all. He lifted his head, and met the eyes of a weed.

  The warrior who had killed the Devaronian returned his gaze impassively, black-smeared amphistaff at the ready.

  Which are flowers? Which are weeds? It is not only your right to choose flowers over weeds, it is your responsibility. Vergere's words rang true. But Jacen doubted the truth he'd found in them was the truth she had intended. He discovered that he didn't really care what Vergere had intended. He had chosen.

  Expressionlessly, he rose and turned his back on the warrior and moved away into the mob.

  He'd decided who the
weeds were. You want gardening? he thought with icy clarity, just wait. I'll show you gardening. just you wait.

  FOUR

  THE WILL OF THE GODS

  A battered, barren world circled a blue-white spark of fusion fire.

  This world had seen the rise and fall of nation after nation, from simple provincial states to planetary confederations to interstellar empires and galactic republics. It had been the scene of a million battles, from simple surface skirmishes to the destruction of whole civilizations. It had been ravaged by war and reconstruction until its original environment survived only beneath sterile polar ice caps; it was the most artificial world of a galactic culture devoted to artifice. The whole planet had become a machine. This was about to change.

  Its new masters began by stealing its moons. Stripped from orbit by dovin basal gravity drives, the three smaller moons were steered well away, while the largest was pulverized by tidal stress created by pulses from other yammosk-linked dovin basals. A refined application of similar techniques organized the resultant mass of dust and gravel and lumps of hardening magma into a thick spreading ring-disk of rubble that rotated around the planet at an angle seventeen degrees from the ecliptic. This, while dramatic in itself, was only a prologue. Dovin basals had been grown on the planet's surface.

  The effect of gravity can be profitably described topographically, as an altered curvature of space-time. The dovin basals on the planet's surface altered the curve of local space-time in such a way that the direction of the planet's orbit became, roughly speaking, uphill. The planet slowed. Slowing, it fell inward, toward its sun.

  It got warmer. On its long slow fall toward its sun, the planet suffered a bombardment of small meteors, carefully sized and with their angle of atmospheric entry precisely calculated so that they would reach an average temperature sufficient to vaporize their primary mineral, without cracking it into its constituent molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. The primary mineral of these small meteors was a mineral only in the black chill of interplanetary space; by the time it reached the warming surface, it had lost its crystalline structure, and was simply water.

  For the first time in a thousand years, natural rain fell across the face of the planet. Once the planet had spiraled into its revised orbit, the dovin basals quieted, and space returned to its customary topography. The three remaining moons were moved back into new, more complex orbits, whose tidal effects would eventually braid the striated disk of rubble that ringed the planet into a permanent sky-bridge of rainbow lace. By the time the seedship fell back into normal space and moved toward an orbital intercept, the planet duplicated--in its gross elements of orbital length, rotation, moons, and rings--the eon-lost homeworld of the Yuuzhan Vong.

  It remained only to remake the surface, and bring Life to the shattered remnants of what once had been a single planetwide city, so that the planet could grow into the name it would bear: Yuuzhan'tar, the Creche of God.

  Coruscant was ready for seedfall.

  In the Nursery, it was the tizo'pil Yun'tchilat: the Day of Comprehending the Will of the Gods. In these last few hours before seedfall, teams of shapers fanned out through the dhuryams' domains, measuring, calculating, indexing, and evaluating. Each shaper team walked in company with a squad of towering, lanky warriors: heavily armored, weapons at the ready, glittering eyes scanning ceaselessly, moving with the ponderously sinister threat of reeks in mating season. Four squads guarded the shreeyam'tiz: a small, specialized subspecies of yammosk, this speeder-sized creature existed only to emit a powerful interference signal in the telepathic band used by yammosks and dhuryams alike.

  The squads had carried the barrel-bodied shreeyam'tiz into the Nursery in a huge basin filled with nutrient fluid. This was the first act of the tizo'pil Yun'tchilat, because each dhuryam knew that this was the day that would decide life or death. The shreeyam'tiz ensured that none of the dhuryams could use its slaves for any desperate act of sabotage or self-defense. These slave seeds are designed with a fail-safe: when telepathic contact with a dhuryam is severed, each slave seed automatically immobilizes its slave by driving him mercilessly toward its parent, the coraltree basal from which slave coral was harvested.

  Shrieking sudden inexplicable agony, the slaves scrambled for each domain's coraltree basal. Only actual physical contact with the coraltree basal could quiet a slave's pain; even the sick and wounded had dragged themselves over rocks and through swamps, howling. This organized the slaves into neat little clusters, keeping them safely out of the way until they could be most conveniently disposed of. To the slaves, it didn't matter which dhuryam won.

  None of them were supposed to live long enough to find out.

  Nom Anor glared at the image in the viewspider's sac of optical jelly. "Why doesn't he do something?"

  Vergere shrugged liquidly, and leaned to one side to get a better look through the viewspider's thicket of legs. "He is doing something. Just not what you expected."

  "He knows, doesn't he? He knows the slaves are to be killed?"

  "He knows." The image in the optical jelly was barely more than a shadow in a twilit mist. The shreeyam'tiz blocked the viewspider's image links along with the dhuryams' control; to maintain its view of Jacen Solo, it was forced to generate a shadow shape using the infrared-sensitive eyespots of the sessile polyps in the amphistaff grove.

  "He just stands there," Nom Anor growled. He shifted his weight, glowering at the image. "How can he simply stand? The agony...!"

  "Agony, yes. Suffering? Perhaps. He has learned much."

  "Is he hiding? Is that it?"

  Vergere shrugged again. "If so, he has picked the perfect spot." The shadow of Jacen Solo stood at the heart of the amphistaff grove.

  "And the polyps don't attack," Nom Anor muttered, gnawing absently on the edge of one knuckle. "They have slashed and slaughtered everyone within their reach for weeks: slave, warrior, and shaper alike. But this Solo--he's like one of those, what do you call them, trigger-birds, that sail along in perfect safety within the feeding tentacles of a Bespinese beldon."

  "Perhaps he and the polyps have reached some... understanding."

  "I do not find the prospect reassuring."

  "No? You should, Executor. It is for this that I have trained him, yes?"

  Nom Anor pulled his knuckle away from his mouth and squinted at her. "For this?"

  "Of course. Here, now, at the crisis point, at the Day of Decision, Jacen Solo does not stand with others of his kind. Despite the worst pain his nervous system can suffer, he has chosen to stand among the life-forms of an alien galaxy. Our galaxy, Executor. He has more in common with the masters than he does with the slaves, and he begins to recognize this."

  "Are you sure?"

  "He may have journeyed so far along the True Way

  already that the fate of slaves no longer concerns him."

  "I don't believe it," Nom Anor growled. "I don't believe it for a nanoblip. You don't know these Jedi as I do."

  "Perhaps not." Vergere's crest fanned a faintly self-amused green. "Does anyone?"

  Abruptly, Nom Anor reached into a head-sized bubble-den in the wall near his knee and grabbed a villip.

  "There is a slave in the amphistaff grove," he said into it. "Pick him up. Bind him and return him to my coralcraft."

  The villip whispered with the reply from the commander of Nom Anor's ooglith-masqued warriors. "I hear and obey, Executor."

  "As you value your father's bones, do not fail in this. This slave is a Jedi infiltrator who must not be allowed to disrupt the tizo'pit Yun'tchilat."

  "If he resists? "

  "I would prefer that he lives--but I do not require it. Do not risk damage to the seedship. Minimize any disruption."

  "I hear and obey, Executor. "

  Nom Anor commanded the villip to revert to its original form.

  "So." He turned again to Vergere. "As you say: our Solo Project has progressed well. The Nursery has served its purpose. We'd have to remove him before the
executions anyway; better to get it taken care of now, in case he still harbors any illusions of heroism. The ceremony must continue without any risk of interference. You should be planning the next phase of his training; you'll want to continue as soon as he's safely aboard my coralcraft."

  "My people, Nom Anor," Vergere said meditatively, "have a proverb about counting glitterflies when all one has is maggots."

  "What?" Nom Anor scowled. "What does that mean?"

  "I believe--" She nodded toward the viewspider's image sac. "--that you are about to find out."

  Jacen stands in the amphistaff grove, watching. The slave seed shrieks flame through every nerve in his body: sizzling commands for him to run, to scramble and sprint for the coraltree basal only thirty meters away.

  He burns in this fire, but is not consumed. The fire is an alembic that has distilled everything he is, has ever been, ever will be, into one eternal instant; like the white before it, the fire has washed away time. All of Jacen's time has become one single now, and the fire inside him feeds his strength. Out of the shadows, out in the blue-white glare of the Nursery's constant noon, four slaves suddenly step away from the nearest coraltree basal, letting its fronds drop from their hands. They do this casually, efficiently, without haste but with no wasted motion, and they glance toward the amphistaff grove, toward the deep shade where Jacen stands.

  They don't seem to be in pain. This, Jacen knows already, is because they're not really slaves. He wonders fleetingly if Anakin had felt this way: calm. Ready. Looking at the price he was about to pay, and deciding he'd gotten a bargain. Out in the blue-white noon, the four slaves press the sides of their noses, and the ooglith masquers they had worn peel apart, filaments unthreading from pores to leave smeared beads of blood like sweat. The masquers ripple and flow down the revealed warriors, then squirm away to vanish in the grass.

  The warriors walk toward the amphistaff grove. Jacen closes his eyes, and for one second he is among his family: his father's hand ruffles his hair, his mother's arm is warm around his shoulders, Jaina and Lowie groan and Em Teedee makes a sarcastic comment as Jacen tries one more time to tell a joke to Tenel Ka... But Chewbacca is not there. Neither is Anakin. The four warriors stop just beyond the fringe of the grove. Juvenile amphistaffs whip the air threateningly, and the polyps' groundmouths gape wide, mutely anticipating a rain of blood and flesh. One warrior calls out in harsh, guttural Basic: "Jeedai-slave, come out!"