Star Wars - [New Jedi Order 13] - Traitor (by Matthew Woodring Stover)

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Star Wars

The New Jedi Order, Book 13

Traitor

by Matthew Woodring Stover

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Ch'Gang Hool; master shaper (male Yuuzhan Vong)

Ganner Rhysode; Jedi Knight (male human)

Jacen Solo; Jedi Knight (male human)

Nom Anor; executor (male Yuuzhan Vong)

Tsavong Lah; warmaster (male Yuuzhan Vong)

Vergere (female Fosh)

PROLOGUE

THE EMBRACE OF PAIN

Outside the universe, there is nothing. This nothing is called hyperspace.

A tiny bubble of existence hangs in the nothing. This bubble is called a

ship.

The bubble has neither motion nor stillness, nor even orientation, since

the nothing has no distance or direction. It hangs there forever, or for less

than an instant, because in the nothing there is also no time. Time, distance,

and direction have meaning only inside the bubble, and the bubble maintains the

existence of these things only by an absolute separation of what is within from

what is without.

The bubble is its own universe. Outside the universe, there is nothing.

Jacen Solo hangs in the white, exploring the spectrum of pain. In the far

infrared, he finds cinders of thirst that bake his throat. Higher, up in the

visible wavelengths, gleam the crimson wire-stretched ligaments that sizzle

within his shoulders; grinding glass-shard screams howl from his hip joints like

the death shrieks of golden Ithorian starflowers.

There is green here, too--bubbling tongues of acid hungrily lick his

nerves--as well as lightning-blue shocks that spasm his overloaded body into

convulsion. And higher still, now far beyond the ultraviolet betrayal that

brought him here--the betrayal that delivered him into the hands of the Yuuzhan

Vong, the betrayal that gathered him into the Embrace of Pain, the betrayal by

Vergere, whom he had trusted--he finds silent shattering gamma-ray bursts

sleeting into his brain. Those gamma-ray bursts are the color of his brother's

death.

Anakin, he moans, somewhere deep within himself. Anakin, how can you be

dead?

He has faced deaths in his family before; more than once, he thought Jaina

lost, or his father, or mother or Uncle Luke. He has grieved, mourned them--but

it was always a mistake, it was a misunderstanding, sometimes even a deliberate

trick...

In the end, they always came back to him.

Until Chewbacca.

When the moon crashed on Sernpidal, it shattered not only Chewbacca's life

but also the magic charm that had always seemed to guard them all. Something in

the universe has tilted to one side and opened a gap in reality; through that

gap, death has slipped into his family.

Anakin... Jacen saw him die. Felt him die, through the Force. Saw his

lifeless body in the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong. Anakin didn't even fade. He only

died.

In one impossible instant, Anakin ceased to be the brother Jacen played

with, teased, looked after; played tricks on, fought with, cared for; trained

with, loved--and became... what?

An object.

Remains.

Not a person, not anymore. Now, the only person who is Anakin is the image

Jacen carries in his heart. An image that Jacen cannot even let himself see.

Each flash of Anakin--his reckless grin so like their father's, his eyes

smoldering with fierce will mirroring their mother's, his effortlessly athletic

warrior's grace, so much like Uncle Luke's--these are the gamma bursts that burn

the marrow of his bones, that cook his brain until its boil threatens to burst

his skull. But when he looks away from Anakin, there is nothing to see but pain.

He cannot remember if he is on a ship, or still planetbound. He finds a

vague memory of capture aboard a Yuuzhan Vong worldship, but he's not sure if

that happened to him, or to someone else. He cannot remember if such

distinctions mean anything.

All he knows is the white.

He remembers that he's been captured before. He remembers Belkadan,

remembers his vain dream of freeing slaves, remembers the blank terror of

discovering that his Force powers meant nothing against the Yuuzhan Vong; he

remembers the Embrace of Pain, remembers his rescue by Uncle Luke.

Master Luke.

Master Skywalker.

He remembers Vergere.

Remembering Vergere brings him to the voxyn queen, and the voxyn queen

sends him slithering back down a despair-greased slope to Anakin's corpse.

Anakin's corpse floats on a burning lake of torment far deeper than anything

that can happen to Jacen's body.

Jacen knows--intellectually, distantly, abstractly--that once he lived

outside the white. He knows that he once felt happiness, pleasure, regret,

anger, even love. But these are only ghosts, shadows murmuring beneath the roar

of pain that fills everything he is, everything he will ever be; the simple fact

that the white had a beginning does not imply that it will have an end.

Jacen exists beyond time. Where Jacen is, there is only the white, and the

Force.

The Force is the air that he breathes--a cool whisk of sanity, a gentle

breeze from a healthier world--though he can no more grasp its power than he

might hold on to the wind. It surrounds him, fills him, accepts his suffering,

and sustains his sanity.

It whispers a reminder that despair is of the dark side, and that ceaseless

murmur gives him the strength to go on living. Distantly on that cool breeze he

feels a knot of anger, of black rage and hurt and despair clenching ever harder,

compressing itself to diamond and beyond, crushing itself back into carbon

powder--he feels, through the bond they have shared from birth, his twin sister

falling into the dark.

Jaina, he begs in a quiet corner of his heart.

Don't do it.

Jaina, hold on...

But he cannot let himself touch her through the Force; he cannot ask her to

share his torment--she is in so much pain already that to suffer his would only

drive her darker yet. And so even his twin bond has become a source of anguish.

Jacen has become a prism, reintegrating the glittering spectrum of pain

into pure blazing agony. Agony is white. Snow-blind in an eternal Hoth ice-noon

of suffering, Jacen Solo hangs in the Embrace of Pain. The touch of a hand along

his jaw leaked time into the white. This was not a human hand, not Wookiee, not

family or close friend--four fingers, mutually opposable, hard-fleshed as a

raptor's talons--but the touch was warm, and moist, and somehow not unfriendly.

Pain retreated toward the back of his mind until he could think again, though he

felt it lurking there, waiting. He knew that it would overtake him again, would

break in waves across him, but for now...

The tides of agony rolled slowly out, and Jacen could open his eyes. The

hand that had brought him out of the white belonged to Vergere. She stood below

him, looking up with wide alien eyes, her fingers light upon his cheek. Jacen

hung horizontally, suspended facedown two meters above a floor of wet, slick-

looking greens and browns--its surface corded, viny, as though with muscle and

vein. The walls oozed oily dampness that smelled darkly organic: bantha sweat

and hawk-bat droppings. From the darkness above swung tentacles like prehensile

eyestalks, ends socketed with glowing orbs that stared at him as the tentacles

wove and danced and twisted about each other. He understood: the enemy was

watching. Something that felt like claws, sharp and unyielding, gripped his

skull from behind; he could not turn his head to see what held him.

His arms were drawn wide, pulled to full extension and twisted so that his

shoulders howled in their sockets. A single strong grip crushed his ankles

together, grinding bone on bone...

Yet the greatest pain he now suffered was to look on Vergere and remember

that he had trusted her. She withdrew her hand, clenching and opening it while

she stared at it with what, on a human, might have been a smile--as though her

hand were an unfamiliar tool that might turn out to be a toy, instead.

"Among our masters," she said casually, as though continuing a friendly

conversation, "it is not considered shameful for a warrior in your position to

pray for death. This is occasionally granted, to honor great courage. There are

some on this very ship who whisper that your action against the voxyn queen has

earned this honor for you. On the other hand, our warmaster claims you for his

own, to be a sacrifice to the True Gods. This, too, is a very great honor. Do

you understand this?"

Jacen understood nothing except how much he hurt, and how terribly he had

been betrayed.

"I..."

Speaking tore his throat as though he coughed splinters of transparisteel.

He winced, squeezing shut his eyes until galaxies flared within them, then

gritted his teeth and spoke anyway. "I trusted you."

"Yes, you did." She opened her hand, turning her quadrifid palm upward as

if to catch a falling tear, and smiled up at him.

"Why?" Jacen could not find his breath to give answer; and then he found he

had no answer to give. She was so alien... Raised on Coruscant, the nexus of the

galaxy, he had no memory of a time when there had not been dozens.... hundreds,

even thousands... of wildly differing species in sight whenever he so much as

peeked out the holographic false window of his bedroom.

All space lanes led to Coruscant. Every sentient species of the New

Republic had had representatives there. Bigotry was utterly beyond him; Jacen

could no more dislike or distrust someone simply because she belonged to an

unfamiliar species than he could breathe methane. But Vergere... Body compact

and lithe, arms long and oddly mobile as though possessed of extra joints, hands

from which fingers opened like the gripping spines of Andoan rock polyps, back-

bent knees above splay-toed feet--he was acutely, overpoweringly aware that he

had never seen any of Vergere's kind before.

Long bright eyes the shape of teardrops, a spray of whiskers curving around

a wide, expressive mouth... but expressive of what?

How could he know what the arc of her lips truly signified? It resembled a

human smile, but she was nothing resembling human. Perhaps her species used the

crest of iridescent feathers along her cranial ridge for nonverbal signals:

right now, as he stared, feathers near the rounded rear of her oblate skull

lifted and turned so that their color shifted from starlight silver to red as a

blaster bolt.

Was that what corresponded to a smile? Or a human's deadpan shrug? Or a

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StarWars TheNewJediOrder,Book13 Traitor byMatthewWoodringStover DRAMATISPERSONAE Ch'GangHool;mastershaper(maleYuuzhanVong) GannerRhysode;JediKnight(malehuman) ...

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