"It doesn't matter. You can't fight the dark with the dark."
that's uncle luke talking. fighting the dark was his job. the yuuzhan vong aren't dark. they're alien.
"And I can't seem to make myself fight them."
who says you have to?
Jacen's head snapped up. "You do. Everyone does. What other answer is there?"
why are you asking me? Anakin had lost his playful crooked smile, and he'd moved close enough that Jacen could reach out and touch him. If he could make himself move his hand. If there had been anything there to touch. The despair that pinned him to his seat swelled into a black hole of hopelessness that sucked air from his chest.
"Who else can I ask? What can I do? What am I supposed to do now?" He sagged, shaking. "I've completely lost it, haven't I? Here I am, arguing with a hallucination. You don't even exist!"
does it matter? you're not that easy to get through to, big brother. i have to take any means available.
"How can it not matter?" Jacen suddenly shouted. "I need... I need... I don't know what to believe! I don't know what's real anymore!"
on the seedship, i was a force projection. then i was telepathic bait. now i'm a hallucination. that doesn't mean I'm not me. why does everything have to be one or the other?
"Because it does! Because things are either one thing, or something else! That's the way it is! You can't be fake and real at the same time!"
why not?
"Because--because you can't, that's all!"
the force is one, jacen. it encompasses all opposites. truth and lies, life and death, new republic and yuuxhan vong. light and dark and good and evil. they're all each other, because each thing and everything is the same thing. the force is one.
"That's a lie!"
yes. and it's the truth.
"You're not Anakin!" Jacen shouted. "You're not! Anakin would never talk like that! Anakin would never believe that! You're just a hallucination!"
okay. i'm a hallucination. that means you're talking to yourself. that means what i'm saying is what you believe.
Jacen wanted to howl, to rage, to leap from his chair and fight--something.
Anything. But the black hole ate his breath, his strength, his anger; it swallowed even the universe of hate, and ended up emptier than it had begun.
Where all his hope, all his love, all his certainty had ever been now gaped a cold void, filled only with the blank inanimate hunger of vacuum, and Jacen collapsed. He didn't even have the strength to cry.
He fell into the black hole. Eons passed, or nanoseconds. Within the black hole, there was no difference between the two. Stars condensed from intergalactic hydrogen, ignited, fused, burned heavy metals, shrank to white dwarfs that faded to brown, all between one breath and the next. Eternity within the dark. Information infell across the event horizon: a voice. He knew the voice, knew he should not listen--but he was not just in the black hole, he was the black hole, capturing everything, holding it forever.
"What is real? What is illusion? Where is the line between truth and lie? Between right and wrong? It's a cold and lonely place, Jacen Solo: the void of not knowing."
He didn't answer. A black hole can't reply. An event horizon is the ultimate valve: anything at all can pass through in one direction, nothing at all in the other. But the infalling voice triggered this black hole into quantum decay. His personal event horizon shrank in an instant to a point mass in the middle of his chest...
And Jacen opened his eyes.
"Vergere," he said dully. "How did you find me?"
She had settled feline-like upon the Solo dining table, arms and legs folded beneath her. She stared at him with interstellar eyes. "I do not share our masters' prejudice against technology. Portions of the planetary database survive in memory cores. Discovering the home address of the former Chief of State was no great trick."
"But how did you know? How did you know I'd come home? "
"It is an instinct of all pack animals: the mortally wounded crawl back to their own dens to die."
"Wounded?"
"With the greatest wound a Jedi can suffer: freedom."
Another riddle. He had no strength for riddles.
"I don't understand."
"When you always know what is right, where is freedom? No one chooses the wrong, Jacen Solo. Uncertainty sets you free."
Jacen thought about that for a long time.
"Die at home," he murmured. "Some home. Have you seen this place? Jaina's room is full of some kind of plant that tried to eat me. The kitchen looks like a coral reef. My collection..." He could only shake his head. "This isn't my home."
"Neither are you going to die," she said cheerfully. "Have you forgotten? You're dead already. You have been these many months; you have nearly completed your passage through the lands of the dead. Now is time not for death, but for new life. You are healed, Jacen Solo. Arise and walk!"
Jacen sank lower in the chair, staring blindly up through the tangle of arachnoid cables. "Why should I?"
"Because you can, of course. Why else would anyone bother to get up?"
"I don't know." He closed his eyes again. "It doesn't matter whether I get up or sit here until I starve. Nothing matters. Nothing means anything."
"Not even your brother's death?"
He shrugged listlessly. Life, death--all was one. One with the Force.
He said, "The Force doesn't care."
"Don't you care?"
He opened his eyes. Her gaze had the peculiar, almost humorous intensity he'd seen in the Embrace chamber, in the Nursery, at the crater. But he was too tired, too broken, to puzzle through whatever she might want him to discover.
"Whether I care doesn't matter, either."
Corners of her mouth tricked up and down. "Does it matter to you?"
He stared at his hands. After a long, long silence, he sighed. "Yes. Yes, it does." It never occurred to him to lie to her. "But so what? Sure, I care--but who am I?"
She gave a shrug so subtle it was almost a shiver. "That's always been the question, yes?"
"But you never have an answer--"
"I do have an answer," she said kindly. "But it's my answer, not yours. You will find no truth in me."
"You keep telling me that." Bitter ashes rasped in the back of his throat. "Or in anybody else, either, I guess."
She said, "Exactly."
A high buzzing whine rose in his ears, skirling around his head like an angry sparkbee trapped inside his skull. "Then where is the truth supposed to be?" he asked blurrily. "Where? Tell me. Please." He could barely hear his own voice over the buzz in his ears. It grew to a roar.
She leaned forward, smiling, and the roar drowned what she said, but he could read the words from her lips.
Ask yourself where else can one look.
"What?" he gasped faintly. "What?" As the roar became a storm inside his head, pounding away all words, all hope of sense, she gathered her four opposable forgers into a point and lightly tapped his chest--right on the center, right over the void left by the slave seed, right over the point mass of his own personal event horizon--as though knocking on a door.
Down in that void, there was quiet. There was calm: the eye of the storm inside him. He threw his mind into the calm, quiet void, let the quiet calm swell to envelop everything he was. The storm blew away. The black hole swallowed itself. He was not alone in the quiet calm. Here was the Force: the living connection that bound him to everything that is, that ever has been, that ever will be. Here too was the Vonglife: from the dim satisfaction of the blue puffball basking in the warmth of his and Vergere's body heat, to the industrious concentration of the arachnoids that skittered through their growing web... to the balanced readiness for instant violence of twelve Yuuzhan Vong warriors who now filed into the room--And the breathless anticipation of triumph that shone through Nom Anor, as he entered behind them.
Yuuzhan Vong warriors. Twelve of them. Armed. And Nom Anor. The warriors spread out in a shallow arc.
Jacen regarded them steadily, without alarm. Here in the quiet calm of his center, there was no such thing as surprise, no such thing as danger. There was only him, and all of them, and the universe, of which each was a small interlocking component.
He looked at Vergere in wonder. He understood now, where he never could have before.
She had not said Ask yourself where else can one look.
She had said: Ask yourself. Where else can one look?
Nom Anor paced forward, hands clasped to each other within the voluminous sleeves of a floor-length robeskin so black it gleamed. Jacen could see his own reflection distorted in its glossy surface.
Nom Anor, Jacen thought, is standing in our dining room.
"The meaninglessness and despair from which you suffer," Nom Anor said silkily, "is the inevitable result of your bankrupt religion. This Force of yours, it has no purpose. It merely is what it is: corrupt with the rot that infects this whole galaxy. Full of lies and illusions, petty jealousies and betrayal. But there is purpose in the universe. There is a reason to get up, and you can find it. I can share it with you."
He's been listening, Jacen thought. Of course. Vergere would have led him here.
"Now is the time," Nom Anor continued, "for you to leave behind your useless Force. Now is the time to leave behind your life's darkness and delusion. Now is the time to take your place in the pure light of Truth."
Jacen's voice seemed to echo around him, as though the calm, quiet void from which he spoke was a vast cavern. "Whose truth?"
"Your truth, Jacen Solo," Nom Anor said with a flourish. "The truth of the God you are!"
"The God I am...?"
From within one of those voluminous sleeves, Nom Anor produced a lightsaber. All twelve of the warriors tensed, their faces twisted into masks of loathing, as he triggered the blade and stepped forward. Brilliant purple energy sliced through the arachnoid webs; Jacen watched without expression as Nom Anor swiftly and efficiently carved away the spit cables that had webbed him into the chair.
The executor released the activation plate and knelt at Jacen's feet. He lowered his head in obeisance, and offered up the deactivated lightsaber to Jacen on outstretched palms. Jacen recognized the handgrip's design.
It was Anakin's.
He looked at Vergere.
She returned his gaze steadily. "Choose, and act."
Jacen saw with preternatural clarity the choice he was being offered.
The opportunity. Anakin's lightsaber. Anakin had made it. Anakin had used it. It had changed him, and he had transformed it. Its crystal was not like those of other lightsabers, but was a living Vonglife gem. Part Jedi. Part Yuuzhan Vong, he thought. Almost like me. They were offering him Anakin's life: his spirit, his skill, his courage.
His violence.
Jacen had first used a lightsaber in combat at the age of three. He was a natural. And now he could feel the Yuuzhan Vong. And the Force was with him. He could follow Anakin's path. He could be pure warrior. He could be even greater than his brother had been: with the dark power he could command, he could surpass any living Jedi, even Uncle Luke. Surpass even the Jedi Knights of old. He could be the greatest sword of the Force who had ever lived.
More: He could avenge his brother with the weapon his brother had forged.
I could pick that up, he thought, and kill them all. Is that who I am? Is that who I want to be? He looked at Nom Anor.
The executor said, "Take up the blasphemous weapon and slay--or choose life. Choose to learn the Truth. Choose to teach the Truth: to share Truth with your people. Let me teach you the truth you can share: the truth of the God you are!"
Jacen reached for the lightsaber, but not with his hand. The handgrip seemed to levitate, bobbling in the air above Nom Anor's palms--then it flipped away, hurtling toward Vergere. She caught it neatly, and set it on the table at her side. He stared at her, and not at her--he gazed at his own reflection on the glossy black curves of her bottomless eyes. He gazed silently, expressionlessly, until he felt himself reflect the reflection: he became pure surface, gleaming over an infinite well of darkness. A mirror for every image of night. He filled himself with stillness; when he was so still that he could feel the universe wheel around the axis he had become, he stood up.
Nom Anor hissed soft triumph. "You will become a star, a sun, the Sun--and you will fill the galaxy with the Light of the True Way
."
"All right," Jacen said.
A cold, still surface, flawless: unrippled by weakness, or conscience, or humanity.
"Why not?"
PART THREE
THE GATES OF DEATH
ELEVEN
TRAITOR
For the sake of argument, suppose the conquest of Coruscant has caused casualties on an unimaginable scale. Suppose ten billion people died in the Yuuzhan Vong bombardment--Suppose twenty billion more were killed in the groundquakes that accompanied the alteration of the planet's orbit... Suppose another thirty billion have since starved to death, or been killed by Yuuzhan Vong search-and-destroy teams, or have been poisoned, or eaten, or otherwise died from contact with Vongformed life...
Suppose an additional forty billion have been enslaved, or interred, or otherwise held captive by the Yuuzhan Vong. These supposed numbers are exactly that: pure supposition. Imaginary.
Even when Coruscant's planetary database had been intact, the global census had been mostly guesswork. In the wake of the conquest, there was no practical way to number the missing and the dead. One hundred billion is an unreasonably high figure--probably outrageously inflated--but even so--Subtract these casualties from the preconquest population of Coruscant. There are nine hundred billion people left over.
Nine.
Hundred.
Billion.
Survivors can be a weapon, too. The camp ships had been popping out of hyperspace for months now. No one could predict when, or in what star system, the next would arrive. The camp ships were kilometers thick, roughly globular, vast random glued-together masses of hexagonal chambers that ranged from the size of a footlocker to the size of a carrier's flight deck. The ships might have been some kind of plant, a vegetal species specially bred by the Yuuzhan Vong; they might have been agglomerate exoskeletons abandoned by gargantuan interplanetary animals. Analysis of sensor data showed clear indications of dovin basal-like gravity fields around the hyperspace exsertion points; and mere seconds after each ship's appearance, there would follow a new gravity-distorting burst.
Some New Republic analysts thought these secondary bursts were dovin basals collapsing into self-generated point masses. Others claimed that the secondary bursts were the signatures of whatever dovin basal-like creatures had served as the engines of the camp ships, vanishing back into hyperspace to return to their starting point. This much was certain: these ships came at random, infalling through inhabited star systems. These ships had no food supplies, life support, or usable engines. All these ships had was people. Millions of people. Hundreds of millions: survivors from the conquest of Coruscant. Each populated system that unexpectedly found itself the custodian of a camp ship faced a stark choice: it could further strain its war-burdened resources to house and feed the refugees, or it could let them die: smother, or starve, die of thirst, freeze, or slowly cook in their own waste heat. The ships could be simply ignored--left to drift between planets, frozen mausoleums eternally commemorating that stellar system's callous, lethal neglect of a hundred million lives.
No world of the New Republic could face collective guilt on that scale; if they could, they never would have been admitted to the Republic in the first place. No one knew if any camp ships had been jumped to uninhabited systems. No one wanted to think about that.
Some Jedi explored, feeling with the Force through vast dust-swept reaches; but there had never been many Jedi in the first place, and the few who remained had little time to spare from the war. Planetary and system-wide governments mounted no searches. They couldn't afford to.
&n
bsp; They didn't have the resources to support the refugees who had ended up in their laps already; to search for others would be not only useless, but insane.
Despite painful shortages of both raw materials and technical expertise, the New Republic systems did what they could. To construct cities big enough to shelter hundreds of millions of people was clearly impossible in the wartime economy, but there was another option. The ships were roomy, and held air against the vacuum of space. So the refugees were kept where they were, while the host systems did their best to supply the overcrowded ships with waste and water recycling, atmosphere scrubbing and replenishment, light, and food.
They became orbital refugee camps. Hence the name. Life in the camp ships was hard. Even in the wealthiest systems, every camp ship's food had to be rationed at the brink of starvation; even the best recyclers couldn't remove from the water the growing taste of having been used, again and again. Cramped, dirty, stinking: atmosphere plants overloaded with sweat and breath and other variously noxious effluents of a thousand species, atmosphere saturated with enough carbon dioxide to give the entire population continuous thudding headaches--those species, at least, that had heads. Even photosynthetics suffered, despite the oversupply of carbon dioxide, since they were forced to rely on dim, intermittent artificial light. Everyone suffered, and very, very few were allowed to leave.
No one talked about the real reason the refugees were sequestered aboard the camp ships.
It was this: interplanetary space was the ideal sanitary cordon. Many worlds had received, courtesy of the Yuuzhan Vong, unpleasant surprises along with refugees allowed dirtside. All refugee populations included unguessable numbers of spies, saboteurs, Peace Brigaders, collaborators of all sorts...
And sometimes worse.
Ganner Rhysode had spent weeks chasing the rumor. He'd heard it from a tramp navigator in a tavern on Teyr, who'd gotten it from a dock steward at the spaceyard on Rothana, who'd been talking to a freighter pilot on the Sisar Run, who'd heard a casual mention from a customs inspector in the Sevarcos system, or maybe it was the Mantooine, or Almania; the inspector had heard it from a friend in the fleet whose cousin was a civilian volunteer on the camp ship at Bothawui.
Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor Page 17