Star Wars_ Traitor Part 16

NINE.

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST.

Ever deeper, ever darker, farther and farther below even the memory of light--Jacen staggered out from a downlevel stairwell onto some forgotten catwalk, gasping. Had he been running for hours? For days?

His legs refused another step, and there was no reason to force them.

No matter how far or fast he fled, he could never outrun himself.

The ancient duracrete floor of the catwalk, rotten with age and neglect, collapsed beneath his weight; a frantic grab onto a lichen-crusted rail left him hanging by one hand over a hundred-meter drop. This shaft might once have been a dump for wrecked air taxis: twisted, rust-eaten metal tangled together below, a heap of curving knife edges and torn jagged points.

He hung there for a moment, imagining a long, long plunge, a slicing, ripping impact, a flash of colorless fire... Maybe he should just let go. Maybe this was his only answer to the darkness inside him.

Maybe he wouldn't even scream on the way down. There was only one way to find out.

His fingers loosened.

"Jacen! Hey, Jacen! Over here!"

He knew the voice. He could not remember ever not knowing this voice; it was as familiar as his own. The voice was a trick--he knew it was a trick, it had to be, he'd been tricked this way before but he could not make himself ignore it. With the deliberate caution of an experienced climber in a tricky traverse, he reached up and grabbed the rail with his free hand, so that he had enough strength to hold on while he turned his head to look. On a smog-blackened balcony jutting just below the far end of the gangway, stood Anakin.

Jacen muttered, "You're not real."

"Come on, Jacen!" Anakin waved, and beckoned. "This way! Come on!

You'll be safe here!"

Jacen closed his eyes. There was no such thing as safe.

"You're not real." When he opened them again, Anakin was still there, still beckoning, wearing a loose-fitting tunic and pants in the Corellian style, lightsaber hung loosely at his belt. He waved Jacen on, jittering with urgency.

"Jacen, come on! What's the matter with you? Let's go, big brother, let's go!"

"I saw you die," Jacen said. He opened himself to the throb of the Force around him; the red tide swelled within his chest, but he pushed it down, focusing tightly, reaching out with his feelings...

Uncle Luke had told, sometimes, of getting guidance from his dead Master, the legendary Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi. He had told of seeing his Master, hearing his voice, feeling him in the Force, long after Ken.o.bi's death...

Jacen could see Anakin. Could hear his voice. But when he reached toward his brother through the Force, he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

"Two out of three," Jacen said through his teeth. The red tide roared into his ears. He clenched his teeth together to lock his voice in the back of his throat. "Two out of three makes you Vong."

"Jacen! What are you waiting for? Come on!" He could put up with a lot. Had put up with a lot. More than anyone should ever have to.

But to have some Yuuzhan Vong masque himself as Anakin... The red tide gathered in a wave of power that spun him into an effortless rising somersault, flipping high above the crumbled catwalk. He landed balanced upon the rope-thin rail, his feet rock-steady, his arms loose, nerveless at his sides. His power would not let him fall.

The shadow worm in the center of his chest shouted for blood. Two out of three makes you dead.

"All right," the shadow worm rasped through Jacen's mouth. "Wait there.

I'm on my way."

He ran along the rail lightly, swiftly, a drumbeat of murder in his heart drowning any thought of the long fall below; he was at the catwalk's end in seconds, but Anakin had already darted through the balcony door into the building. Jacen spread his arms and let his rage uphold him as he fell forward, kicking off the rail, gliding over the hundred-meter drop onto the balcony. He landed in a crouch, skidding, left hand splaying onto a smooth cold layer of slime that coated the balcony. Hawk-bats burst out of the doorway, shrieking and clawing, a wheeling cloud of leather and fur and talon. Jacen made a fist: an instant gale howled around him, sending the hawk-bats scattering, tumbling helplessly away into the darkness.

He sprang forward, eating ground like a sand panther running down a paralope, bounding through the ink-black interior of the building with the Force to guide him around and over obstacles. A flash of booted feet disappearing through a doorway into a globe-lit corridor drew him onward.

He reached the doorway in one long Force-boosted leap.

Impossibly, Anakin was already a hundred meters away, at the far end of the corridor, looking back over his shoulder.

"Come on, Jacen! You have to run! Follow me!"

"Count on it." Jacen burst into a sprint; the Force lent wings to his heels, driving him inhumanly fast, and faster, and faster still. He covered the hundred meters in an eyeblink, and found Anakin still well ahead, still looking back, beckoning, urging him onward.

Jacen ran. The pursuit became a dream of flight, of effortless leaps, feet only skimming the floors beneath. The Force rolled through him, a crimson river sweeping him onward, beyond the sterile precincts below the crater. The river not only fed him strength, it spoke the structure of the buildings through which he raced directly into his mind: he could feel twists and turns and doorways ahead and behind, could feel where his path might be blocked with rubble or where the floor might not support his weight. It whispered girders and beams, transparisteel and duracrete beneath the Vonglife that thickened around him, Vonglife growing to a riot of shapes and colors, fibrous and fleshy, that clung to walls and ceilings and sprang from floors, Vonglife he could see and smell and touch, but that still wasn't real, couldn't be real, not to Jacen, not now, because it didn't shape the flow of the crimson river. It didn't exist in the Force, and so for Jacen it didn't exist at all.

Right up until he ran into a corridor that snapped closed behind him like the maw of a s.p.a.ce slug. He skidded to a stop. The floor and walls were warm, body temperature, ridged with cartilaginous rings that glowed a sickly bioluminescent green. The ends of the corridor felt open- -in the Force, there was nothing around him save wide-open s.p.a.ce--but to his eyes, the corridor was closed at both ends by flaps of striated flesh like muscular valves.

Anakin was nowhere to be seen. Panting dry rage, Jacen turned his mind toward that void in the center of his chest where the slave seed had once been. The Force faded from his consciousness; the structure of the broken buildings around him faded into the same nonexistence from which the Vonglife now emerged--but even as the nature of this corridor leaked into his mind, he found he still couldn't feel Anakin. Maybe it wasn't just in the Force that be didn't exist, Jacen thought. Hawk-bats had scattered in panic when he'd leapt to the balcony..

. why hadn't they reacted to Anakin? In the cold smooth slime that had coated the balcony's surface, there had been no footprints. Suckered.

He'd let the red tide drown his brains.

I've been had. With a crackle of deforming cartilage, the ring closest to the mouth of the corridor squeezed shut, then the next and the next and the next. Jacen frowned, struggling to correlate this with what he sensed through the remnants of the slave seed-web: no malice, no blood l.u.s.t, nothing aggressive at all, only a kind of pleasurable contentment, a happy relish pulsing around him--then the contraction of the rings reached him, crushing him off his feet, squeezing him along the corridor like a glop of vegitein in a null-g foodpaste tube, and he understood.

The contraction of the rings wasn't an attack, it was a peristaltic wave.

This wasn't a corridor. It was a throat. Jacen knelt, shuddering, eyes squeezed shut, hands splayed on the flesh-warm floor. After the valve at the end of the corridor had dilated to let him squirt through, it had sealed itself behind him with a wet, meaty slap. He tried not to listen to the screaming. please somebody please please somebody HELP ME...

The screaming was another trick.

Probably. please oh PLEASE help me I don't want to do this I don't want to DO this can't you HELP ME PLEEEEEEASE...

It had to be a trick. The floor had the grainy smoothness of water-worn limestone, all grays and browns, pocked and pimpled with mineral deposits dissolved in the fluids dripping from overhead along down-reaching irregular nipple-cones like stalact.i.tes. Some of them wore the iridescent sheen of travertine. Scattered clots of bioluminescent growths shed a soft yellow-green glow--these could have been some kind of cave moss, or phosph.o.r.escent fungus. To the eye, this place was a typical cavern of porous limestone, hollowed by the erosion of a vanished underground river.

That's why Jacen had his eyes closed. Because he knew it wasn't.

It was a stomach. It was the belly of the beast that had swallowed him. With his eyes open, the dissonance between what he saw and what he felt had spun his brain into dizzy retching nausea; even with his eyes closed, even driving his consciousness down into the hollow center of his chest, the shimmering discord was twisting his mind inside out. He could feel the beast as though he were the beast throat and stomach and chilly semisentient satisfaction at having lured another victim... but he could still feel his own body, still feel the bruises left by the cartilage rings of the throat, the sting of one elbow where he had skinned it skidding through the beast's pyloric valve, the ache in his swelling knee that he did not remember twisting while he'd chased the phantom Anakin, the hot rasp of his own breathing, and the cold empty fullness in his stomach, which was inside the belly of the beast, which was the belly of the beast, because the beast and he were one.

He had swallowed himself.

...please oh PLEASE why why WHYYYY please I don't want to die like this you have to help me HELP me you have to HELP MEEEEEE...

The voice sounded human. Female. Raw, ragged, sobbing with exhausted terror. It sounded absolutely real. As real as Anakin had looked. He wouldn't fall for it again. Many kinds of Vonglife used forms of telepathy, from yammosks to villips--even coralskippers reportedly had a mental bond with their pilots. It was obvious to Jacen now: this great cavern beast was a sessile Vonglife predator that had developed a specialized variety of telepathy to lure victims into its mouth. The hallucination of Anakin was only a side effect: any victim would see someone or something they'd instinctively trust to lead them to safety.

They would follow blindly, trusting, and be consumed.

The irony was bitter: the shadow worm that coiled through his chest had defended him from that false trust, while the rage that fed the worm had sent him headlong into the cavern beast's mouth anyway. This, Jacen reflected in his first clear thought since falling into the dark, is going to be an ugly way to die.

But that was okay. Dying was okay; he didn't mind. Better to die than to live with the darkness inside him. At least it would be over. He could just kneel here and wait to die...

If only it were quiet.

please help me please aaaaAAAAAA...

The phase transition of terror into raw agony jolted Jacen's eyes open, and he lurched to his feet. He couldn't listen to this, trick or not. He knew too much about pain.

"Shut up," he growled, low in the back of his throat. "Shut up shut up shut up." The screams echoed through a puckered gallery mouth that yawned a few meters to his left: a tunnel beyond led down, dropping away into the yellow-green gloom. Jacen stumbled drunkenly on the slope. The screams continued: wordless now, bleak, animal, edged with despair.

The tunnel led deeper and deeper, turning upon itself in a long loose spiral, opening at last into another cavern vastly larger than the first, a cavern dank, dim, the bioglow that had lit the throat and the chamber above only shimmering faintly through the mouths of other tunnels that opened around the walls. White swirls of mist curled through the air...

no, not mist, Jacen discovered as he entered the cavern, but smoke: eye-burning, chokingly harsh, tasting of acid. The floor of this cavern was ruggedly uneven, dimpled as though it were only a thin skin over bowls big enough to swim in; the bowls tapered steeply downward, bottoming in upcrumpled hummocks of stony flesh like lips of refresher-sized mouths.

He coughed, batting smoke away from his face, and staggered toward the screams, following a winding course balanced on the thin curving rims where the bowls met edge to edge. Deep in the cavern, one of those mouths had pursed around a girl. Jacen paused above her, balanced on the warm stone bowl rim. She looked as real as Anakin had: real from her tangled, matted hair to the tear-streaked dirt that smeared her face. Only her head and one arm protruded from the tight-sealed lips that held her, and when she saw him above she reached for him, fingers straining helplessly, eyes white with pain and fear.

"Please whoever you are PLEASE you have to HELP ME please it's EATING me, it's, it's, it's eating me ALIVE--"

He knew what those puckered lips were, now. The cavern above was actually only a crop, or a gizzard; the real stomachs were behind those mouths at the bottoms of the bowls below. That's why the cavern beast was showing him a girl down there. She was bait.

"Shut up," Jacen whispered. "You're not real. Shut up." All he wanted was a quiet place to die. Was that too much to ask? Hadn't he earned that? Why did everything have to be so hideous, so gruesome, so just plain rotten all the time? Couldn't he even die in peace? Did the whole universe hate him? There's only one answer when the universe hates you, whispered the shadow worm from the base of his skull. Hate it back.

So he did. It was easy. He hated the universe. Hated everything about it: all the pointless suffering and empty death and all the stupid mindless mechanical useless laws and all the squirming blood-smeared ignorant life, hated the stony flesh under his feet and the air that he breathed, hated himself, hated even the hate he felt and suddenly he wasn't tired anymore, he wasn't confused anymore, everything was simple, everything was easy, everything made sense because hate was everything and everything was hate, and he didn't want to die anymore.

All he wanted was to hurt someone. He looked down at the screaming girl.

He hated her. She wasn't even real. Like a dream. He could do whatever he wanted. Anything. His heart thundered, and his breath came short and hot. Anything. Power raged through him as though a dam had burst in his chest. He smiled, and stretched forth his hand, and made a fist.

The Force stifled her screams to a shocked choke. Through the Force he could feel her terror, feel the savage burning of digestive acids slowly dissolving her skin; in the Force he could feel power, real power, power enough to crack her skull like a pterosaur egg, power enough to...

Wait, begged his last shred of sanity. Wait... He could feel her...

in the Force?

"Oh..." he whispered. His knees buckled. "Oh, oh no, oh please no..."

His hatred and his strength failed together. He pitched forward, his boots losing purchase on the rim, and he tumbled down the inner curve of the bowl to splay tonelessly beside the stomach-mouth. He might have just lain there, just let himself pa.s.s out, let himself sleep until the mouth beside opened again to close around him, instead, but a hand, a girl's hand, a real hand belonging to a real girl, clutched desperately at his robeskin, yanking him awake, and her shriek scorched his ears.

"HELP me you have to HELP ME you have to help me..."

"Sorry," Jacen mumbled, blinking rapidly, trying to make his eyes focus, struggling weakly to rise. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't know..."

His vision cleared, and he saw her, really saw her, for the first time.

He saw that her hair had once been long and flowing and golden blond under its coating of greasy dirt; he saw that her eyes were blue, and her face a delicate oval; he saw that... She's barely even my age.

And if I don't do something RIGHT NOW, she won't get any older. He couldn't trust his legs to support him; he swung himself around to brace his feet against the crumple of stomach-lips, and took her wrist in both hands.

He pulled hard, hard as he could, hard enough to make her begging turn to a yelp of pain...

"You're breaking my ARM please you have to get up, you have to pull me UP.. ."

Get up? He didn't have the strength to stand. He didn't have the strength to save her. He had only strength enough to hurt her even more.

And to torture her final minutes with empty hope. He could barely imagine what she must have gone through, to miss the evacuation of Coruscant, to survive the bombardment, and the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong. To have lived through the shattering transformation of her world into theirs: the tearing of a whole planet from its...o...b..t. To have hidden in constant terror all these weeks and months in the downlevel shadows, desperately avoiding the conquerors. And when the cavern beast had led her down its throat...

Her heart must have been bursting with relief and joy. She had finally found sanctuary--Then she had found that the only real sanctuary is death. And how she would come to that death: eaten alive, digested while still awake and aware. And when she had looked up to see him on the rim above her, an explosion of sudden hope. Because she couldn't know that the man who had come to her rescue was a broken ex-Jedi, tainted with darkness, half mad with suicidal despair. How had he ended up so useless?

The simple unfairness of it made him angry. Why should he be the one who has to watch this girl die? He'd never asked to be a hero. He'd never asked for power. From the very day he was born, the whole galaxy had been watching him, waiting for him to do something great, something that would live up to the legend of his ill.u.s.trious parents, of his legendary uncle.

He couldn't even live up to his own legend. Such as it was. And there had been plenty of people who had enjoyed that, hadn't there? There had been plenty of dirty sn.i.g.g.e.ring people who got plenty of dirty sn.i.g.g.e.ring satisfaction out of calling him a coward behind his back, and not one of those nasty vicious sn.i.g.g.e.ring creeps had even once had to feel what it was like to hang in the Embrace of Pain, or toil hopelessly to save a few lives in the Nursery, or be forced to face the black-hearted indifference that was the real truth of the universe...

Anger blossomed within him, surged and swept him away in the familiar red tide, but this time he didn't fight it, didn't struggle and thrash and drown himself in its current.

He welcomed it. In the red rising tide, he found all the power he needed.

TEN.

HOME FREE.

Home. The Solo apartments, not far from the ruined hulk of the Imperial Senate, still stood nearly intact. Home was where Jacen had been heading ever since he'd woken up under the Bridge. Where else did he have to go?

Is anything better than finally finding your way home? One thing he'd never asked himself: once he got home, what then? He'd been half expecting, all these weeks, that reaching the place where he'd grown up would mean something: that he'd find some kind of safety there.

Some kind of answers. As though if he could only lie down for a nap in his own bed, he'd wake up to find that the nightmare he'd lived--losing his family, his youth, his faith--had been only a hypnoid fantasy sparked by teenage hormones and an undigested dinner. Is anything worse than finally reaching home, and finding that you're still lost? He'd been lost at home for hours by the time Anakin walked in. Jacen sat in his place, in the chair he'd always used at the dining table on those rare occasions when the whole family had been together: to the left of his mother's chair, next to Jaina, who'd always sat at his father's right.

Across the table, Anakin always used to sit next to the specially designed Wookiee-sized chair for Chewbacca. Jacen tried to summon memories of those happy family times--tried to hear Chewbacca's half-howled laughter, tried to see his mother's struggle to maintain a disapproving glare at one of his father's slightly risque stories, tried to feel Jaina's elbow in his ribs or a surrept.i.tious glop of orange protato flipped at him by Anakin when their parents weren't looking--but he couldn't.

He couldn't fit those images into this dining room. The dining room was different now. A slickly glistening blue glob of puffb.a.l.l.s--some sort of fungus colony--had enveloped Chewbacca's chair and a quarter of the dining table; pale yellow tendrils rooted it to the leafy purple underbrush that had sprouted from the floor. The table itself had cracked in the middle, buckling beneath some kind of bloodred taproot the size of a Hutt that had broken through the ceiling and seemed determined to drill its way through the floor as well. The walls were draped with multicolored creepers that served as habitat for a variety of hand-sized creatures resembling scaled, warm-blooded spiders.

Jacen was pretty sure they were warm-blooded; at least, their clawed seven-toed feet felt warm as they ran down his arms, up his chest, and across the back of his shoulders. He'd blink once in a while, when one would scamper over his face, but that was his only motion. He could have moved, if he wanted. He just couldn't come up with a reason to. The arachnoid creatures spat some kind of mucuslike secretion, globs of thick gla.s.sy saliva that stuck tenaciously to whatever it touched, with the sole exception of the arachnoids themselves. While it was still wet, their prehensile feet stretched and spun and drew the saliva out into thick glistening ropes that tightened and turned translucent as they dried, filling half the Solo dining room with a frosted fibrous web.

Jacen was pretty sure that this web was intended to bind him to this chair--that these arachnoids had some vague presentient plan to eventually eat him. He could have broken free without much effort, earlier, before the web had grown strong.

He hadn't. Even now, a shrug of his anger could scatter the arachnoids and flashburn their web into nonexistence. But he couldn't think of a reason why he should bother. Anakin walked through the web strands as though they didn't exist. He wore a dark vest over a loose tunic, and close-fitting breeches in the Corellian style. He hooked his thumbs behind a wide leather belt, his right near an empty clip where his lightsaber should have been, and gave Jacen a crooked smile so much like Han's it brought tears to his eyes.

"What's are doin', big brother?"