"You coming, or what?"
"Of course." Vergere appeared at the stairtop behind him, smiling broadly in the Bridgelight. "I was only waiting for you to ask."
SEVEN
THE CRATER
"This is Jacen Solo?" The master shaper, Ch'Gang Hool, stared in open horror at the image in the dwarf viewspider's sac of optical jelly. A cluster of long, delicate tentacles implanted at the corner of his mouth twitched, knotting and unknotting itself, before reaching sinuous feelers upward to continue its jittery, nervously obsessive preening of the master shaper's starburst headdress.
"This--this is the Jacen Solo of Duro? The slayer of the voxyn queen? The Jeedai sought by Tsavong Lah?"
"It is."
"And this is the same Jeedai who sparked the slave revolt that came within a crizt of destroying the seedship? The slave revolt that killed hundreds of our holy caste? The slave revolt that spat vicious infidel scum across my pristine planet?"
"Your planet, Master Shaper?"
"The shaping of this world is my honor, and my task!" Ch'Gang Hool snarled. "Until that work is done, every living thing in this stellar system answers to my will--even the fleet! Even the World Brain! If I choose to call this planet mine, who dares argue? Who? You?"
"Oh, not I." A long forefinger tipped with curved talon tickled the dwarf viewspider on its control node, enlarging the image of Jacen Solo until the Jedi's head filled the optical sac. "For argument, I think you'd have to try him."
"How did he come to be here? How has he survived? It has been weeks since seedfall! This dangerous Jeedai has been running loose all this time? Where has he been? Why have I not been informed?"
On the far side of the dwarf viewspider, Executor Nom Anor brandished his imperturbable needle-toothed smile. "The warmaster orders that you bend all available resources toward his apprehension."
"Orders, does he?" Ch'Gang Hool's headdress bristled aggressively. "Until he comes to take possession of this world, I am the ultimate authority here! We'll see about his orders!"
"Call it a suggestion, if you like." Nom Anor leaned forward, opening his hands, the perfect image of friendly reasonability. "Nonetheless you are, as you say, responsible for the shaping of Yuuzhan'tar. I now have brought to your official attention that loose upon this planet's surface is this exceptionally dangerous Jedi; a Jedi who single-handedly--what was your phrase? Ah, yes--came within a crizt of destroying the seedship." Nom Anor settled back upon the pod beast, enjoying the ripple of its muscle beneath him as it adjusted its shape to support his new posture.
Really, these shapers had it good--too good for their own good, he thought. Perhaps that was why he found it such a pleasure to spin this one up. "How you meet this clear and immediate threat is--of course--entirely up to you."
Ch'Gang Hool scowled. "I have never yet heard adequately explained how this dangerous Jeedai came to be aboard the seedship in the first place..."
"Direct all inquiries to the warmaster," Nom Anor advised airily. "I am certain he'll be happy to take time out of fighting the war to answer your slightest, silliest concerns."
"Is it slight, that the Jeedai who slew our voxyn queen is at large upon our homeworld?" Ch'Gang Hool shook his eight-fingered master's fist at the executor. "Is it silly, to be alarmed to find we have been infiltrated by the single most dangerous enemy of our entire people?"
"Just between you and me and the viewspider, here," Nom Anor said agreeably, "what's slight is your niggling about some imaginary insult to your authority. What's silly is worrying about how Jacen Solo got here; you should be vastly more worried about what he is doing right now."
Rising blood pressure blued the master shaper's face. "Where is he? You know, don't you?"
"Of course." Again, Nom Anor displayed his needle-pointed smile. "I was only waiting for you to ask."
There was something wrong about this crater. Jacen backed up along the notch in the crater's rim wall, frowning. Vergere, a few paces beyond, stopped when she sensed Jacen was no longer following, and she looked a question back at him. He shook his head.
"I have a bad feeling about this." The outer slope of the crater was a scree of rubble, spilling off exposed structural members of what had once been government offices; this section of the crater's rim had been a weight-bearing wall several kilometers high. The multicolored ferns and mosses covered it as though it were natural ground, but their roots were too shallow to bind the rubble solidly in place. They'd had to climb slowly, with Vergere in the lead.
Jacen couldn't know if his next step might fall on a loose chunk of duracrete and trigger an avalanche, or send him tumbling through a crust of fibertile into some semi-intact room below. Vergere never explained how she was always able to find the safest path; Jacen assumed she was using some kind of Force-sense.
The notch had once been part of a vehicle accessway, possibly an air taxi stand; three meters or so of its reinforced sidewalls had survived the destruction of the surrounding building. Jacen settled into their shade, just deep enough that he could see down the crater's inner slope, and sat on a speeder-sized hunk of lichen-crusted wreckage. This crater...
It was big enough to swallow a Star Destroyer without a trace. Big enough to lose the seedship in. It dropped forever away from them in a flattening curve, its bottom lost in black shadow: shadow cast by a billowing column of cloud that stretched up to a flat anvil top.
The cloud darkened as it descended, reaching deep into the crater, licking itself with forked tongues of lightning. Thunder rumbled up from below, and the air crackled with negative ions. Jacen swallowed.
"I have a bad feeling about this," he repeated. "And well you should."
Vergere hopped back to him, and settled onto the lichen beside him. "No place on this planet is more dangerous."
"Dangerous..." he echoed.
"How do you know?"
"I can feel it in the Force."
She laced her fingers together into a bridge upon which she rested her chin, and smiled up at him. "The question is, how did you know?"
He squinted at her, then turned his head to frown back out into the crater.
How did he know? He sat in the shade of the ruined accessway wall, and thought about it. Weeks of trekking had thinned and hardened his body, carving him into knotted rope and tanned leather. His hair had grown out in unruly curls, now streaked with blond by the harsh ultraviolet of the blue-white sun. His thin, itchy teenager's beard had filled in, wiry, darker than his hair. He could have dug up some depilatory creme from an abandoned refresher along the way, or even a blade sharp enough to shave with, but he hadn't bothered. The beard protected his cheeks and jaw from sunburn. He could have picked up clothing, too, if he'd wanted it--he wore a pair of tough boots he'd found--but no regular clothing could be as durable, or as useful, as the robeskin.
Warm at night, cool during the day, self-cleaning, it even healed itself when it ripped. Beneath the robeskin, he wore the breechclout Vergere had fashioned for him. After he'd found the boots, he'd plaited strips torn from the robeskin to make himself a pair of self-cleaning socks that never wore out. The robeskin had proven useful in other ways, as well: across his back he wore a sizable knapsack, similarly plaited. The strips had healed in place, making a living pack that never broke or wore out; like a muscle, the knapsack seemed to get stronger the more he used it. He carried it stuffed with as much food as would fit. One three-day stretch where they had been unable to scrounge a meal had cured him of any trust in his luck.
Food was available, if one looked hard enough: mostly breadmeal, sugar-yeast preserves, and the freeze-dried protein squares that had been staples of the downlevel dwellers. Maybe it didn't taste good, but none of that stuff ever spoiled. Unlike during the planet's former life as Coruscant, water was plentiful; hardly a day passed without a rain squall, and fresh pools were easy to find among the rubble and wreckage. Sometimes they had wandered deep in the gloom of the lower levels, creeping along rickety walkways or down corridors
slick with granite slug trails, as though this were still the planet on which he'd grown up; sometimes those lower levels opened unexpectedly upon immense open swaths where gargantuan buildings had collapsed, becoming vast valleys that teemed with alien life, and they were forced to pick their way across a dangerously chaotic surface of Vonglife-covered rubble.
Though the Yuuzhan Vong had altered the planet's orbit--the sun, formerly a searing pinpoint, was now close enough that it showed a clear disc nearly the size of Jacen's fingernail at arm's length--they seemed to have left the planet's rotation alone, as near as he could tell; his own circadian rhythms, conditioned by a lifetime in Galactic City, seemed to match the day-night cycle of Yuuzhan'tar well enough.
Vergere had seemed perfectly content to let Jacen set the pace and direct the journey. She never again so much as asked where they were going. They ate when he was hungry, and rested when he was tired; when he was neither, they walked. If Vergere ever slept, Jacen didn't see her do it. She would seem to settle into herself from time to time, and was capable of remaining immobile for hours; but whenever he would move or speak she was alert as though she'd been standing continuous watch.
Also in his knapsack he carried a few useful items they'd scrounged: a glow rod, a pair of electrobinoculars, a handful of power cells and his prize, an MDS personal datapad. Though it was ancient--a 500 series, hopelessly obsolete--and most of what it was loaded with seemed to be instructional games, simplified image generators, and other kid stuff, there was one useful program: an interactive holomap of Coruscant.
Every few days, he'd managed to find an intact PDD terminal--buried deep within the midlevels of a half-ruined building, or sheltered under a slab of fallen wall, once even hanging by its access cable on a twisted steel walkway that led to empty air, the building to which it had connected having collapsed entirely. Public Data Display terminals are extremely durable, designed to absorb a lot of abuse--they have to--and some of the PDDs he found still worked, or could be kicked to life after jacking in one of his spare power cells. Then he could upload the PDD's location into the YOU ARE HERE function of the datapad's holomap, tracking his progress.
What he would do when he arrived, he didn't know. There probably wasn't anything left but a vast mound of wreckage like the ones across which they scrambled every day. He didn't even really know why he was going. He had no plan, only a destination.
A destination was enough.
He pulled the electrobinoculars out of his knapsack and powered them up. Something about the Vonglife down in the crater bothered him. He wasn't sure what it was, couldn't be sure; even after weeks in the Nursery and weeks more on Yuuzhan'tar, he was far from an expert.
He'd avoided contact with the Vonglife whenever possible; much of it had unpleasant properties--the tea-smelling purple sap that had bled from the duracrete moss, for example, had turned his hands into masses of blistered welts for three days. Over the weeks of the trek, he'd found that the Vonglife had a certain pattern: it grew in vast patches, surrounded by rings of starkly bare rubble. Near the center of each patch, he could usually spot one of the ecogenerating biomachines that the shipseeds had scattered across the planet, churning out spores or seeds or sometimes even living creatures.
He and Vergere had once spent most of a day watching hundreds of unnamable herd beasts stumble out into the light from the cavern-like mouth of one of these biomachines. Slow-moving bovine sexapeds, they would blink stupidly at the unfamiliar sun, gathering themselves instinctively into herd groups before shuffling off to begin cropping vegetation. No sooner had they begun to eat than they began to grow--so quickly that Jacen had been able to watch them mature over the course of the day. And for every fifty or hundred of the sexapeds, the biomachine had produced a predator, from huge bipedal lizard-like creatures with knife-tipped facial tentacles instead of teeth, to groups of fierce insectile pack hunters no larger than Gupin.
He and Vergere had seen the Yuuzhan Vong themselves now and again, and not only shapers tending their new planet. Warriors patrolled even the midlevels, armed, shivering with disgust at the machines through which they were forced to march. For a time, Jacen had wondered if they might be searching for him personally, but as their trek lengthened they began to come across signs that he wasn't the only fugitive lurking in the deep shadows below the zone of destruction: fresh tracks in the dust, caches of food recently picked over, wreckage cunningly arranged to look random while it concealed hiding places within.
Three or four times, he even caught glimpses of other humans, darting furtively from cover to cover, always at night, always cautious about exposing themselves even to the light of the Bridge.
They could have been refugees, people left behind and forgotten in the chaos of the evacuation; they could have been lifelong midlevel dwellers, avoiding contact with the upper world by instinct; they could have been slaves escaped from the seedship. Jacen didn't know.
He never planned to find out. He avoided them. They were attracting the attention of the Yuuzhan Vong. He didn't know if the Yuuzhan Vong had any use for slaves on their new homeworld, or if whatever people they caught were executed on the spot. This was something else he planned never to find out. The Vonglife that clung to the inner curve of the crater looked different from any he'd encountered so far. He twiddled the autozoom on his electrobinoculars, to flip the enhanced image back and forth between a wide-angle overview and tightly focused close-ups of individual plants. The foliage was patchy and strange, and its coverage was unexpectedly poor; everywhere he directed the electrobinoculars, he found streaks of rusting durasteel and hunks of rubble, as though the Vonglife struggled here with an environment too hostile for it to flourish. The mosses, so brilliantly colored everywhere else, here were nondescript grays and browns and murky greens; the ferns that elsewhere formed towering jungle canopies were here stunted, twisted, curling randomly, fronds dull and streaked as though coated with dust.
Dialing back the magnification, he swept the vertical tower of the thunderhead that rose from the crater's midpoint. Its gray-black base looked as flat as its dazzling white anvil, and the whole column twisted as it rotated slowly, as though the cloud couldn't quite decide if it might want to become a massive Coriolis storm.
All this looked plenty threatening, he allowed, but not enough to explain the smothering dread that crushed his chest when he so much as thought about going down there.
"All right, I give up. What is it about this place? What makes it so dangerous?"
Vergere touched his arm, and with a gesture directed his attention toward a thicket of what looked like coniferous shrubs--though the electrobinoculars' range and azimuth display indicated the smallest of them stood more than ten meters tall. On the slope around the thicket, a small herd of agile hoofed reptile-like creatures sprang from rock to rock, cropping nervously at the sparse moss. An instant later he found out what had been making them so nervous: one of those massive bipedal tentacle-faced predators lunged out of the shrub thicket with astonishing speed.
It seized the nearest of the hoofed reptilians in powerful prehensile forepaws, its blade-tipped mouth-tentacles stabbing and sawing to swiftly slay and disjoint the captured animal, carving it into bite-sized hunks. As the rest of the herd bounded away, the predator settled down in the slanting sunlight to devour its kill.
"That is why this place is so dangerous," Vergere said with a hint of a challenging smile. "It is filled with what you would call the dark side. I should say: the dark side is very, very powerful here, more powerful than anywhere else on this planet. As powerful, perhaps, as it is anywhere in the galaxy."
Jacen lowered the electrobinoculars, blinking. "That's not the dark side," he said. "A predator hunts to feed itself and its family. That's just nature."
"And the dark side isn't? I thought the danger of the dark side was that it is natural: that's why it's easier than the light, yes?"
"Well, yes, but..."
"Is what you have seen not the exemplar of t
he dark side? Is this not what you fear so much: aggression, violence, passion?"
"You want to know what the real dark side would look like? If that predator had slaughtered the entire herd, just for the fun of it. For the joy of killing."
"Do you think this predator takes no joy in its successful kill?"
Jacen looked again through the electrobinoculars, watching for a moment as the predator seemed to shiver with delight in its meal.
He didn't answer.
"Kill one, it's nature, kill them all, it's the dark side?" Vergere went on. "Is the line between nature and dark side only one of degree? Is it the dark side if that predator kills only half the herd? A quarter?"
He lowered the electrobinoculars once more. "It's the dark side if it kills more than it needs to feed itself and its family," he said, heating up. "That's the line. Killing when you don't need to kill."
Vergere cocked her head. "And how do you define need? Are we talking about the line of starvation, or simple malnutrition? Is it the dark side if they only eat half the slain animal? Does a predator partake of the dark side if its family is a few kilos overweight?"
"It's not about that..."
"Then what is it about? Are we back to why? Does intention always trump action? It's not the dark side for that predator, say, to slaughter the entire herd and leave them to rot, so long as it thinks it needs them for food?"
"It's not that simple," Jacen insisted. "And it's not always easy to describe..."
"But you know it when you see it, yes?"
He lowered his head stubbornly. "Yes."
Vergere uncoiled her fingers toward the blood-smeared predator on the slope below.
"You didn't this time..." Jacen's answer was interrupted by a shattering thunder-burst that sounded like the whole sky had exploded. He yelped and threw himself against the wall at his back.
Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor Page 12