Star Wars_ Traitor Part 19

"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 G.o.d you are!"

"The G.o.d 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 surpa.s.s any living Jedi, even Uncle Luke. Surpa.s.s 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 G.o.d 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...o...b..t...

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 hypers.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.ses 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.

a.n.a.lysis of sensor data showed clear indications of dovin basal-like gravity fields around the hypers.p.a.ce exsertion points; and mere seconds after each ship's appearance, there would follow a new gravity-distorting burst.

Some New Republic a.n.a.lysts thought these secondary bursts were dovin basals collapsing into self-generated point ma.s.ses. 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 hypers.p.a.ce 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.

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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ceyard 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. Ganner had laboriously backtracked each link, chasing across what was left of the New Republic, through weeks in hypers.p.a.ce and day after day after day of playing "Have you seen--?" with bored clerks and hostile freight loaders, suspicious bureaucrats and sarcastic corridor kids. By the time he reached the numbered curtain that pa.s.sed for an apartment door inside the million-celled honeycomb of the camp ship, he was so tired he couldn't even remember what system he was in.

The number on the curtain was in three parts, giving the coordinates of the chamber's location as measured from the center of the rough globe of the camp ship; in a ship lacking anything that resembled decks--or even straight lines-- three-dimensional coordinates were the only practical addresses these chambers could have. This particular chamber was remote, nearly at the hull, on the side opposite that which the tide-locked ship turned toward the world it orbited. It was--as Ganner had wryly reflected when he had learned the chamber's coordinates- -on the dark side.

Ganner didn't look much like Ganner these days: gone was the flashy blouse and tight leather trousers, the gleam of gold piping, the tall, immaculately polished boots. Instead, he wore a shapeless tunic of nondescript brown fabric over baggy gray leggings that hid his boots--now scuffed, and bearing the dirt of dozens of worlds. Gone, too, was the devastating smile and the dashing glint in his clear blue eyes; he'd even let a scruffily curling beard muddy the clean sharp lines of his cla.s.sic jaw. This wasn't exactly a disguise. He'd made no secret of his ident.i.ty; on the contrary, he wielded his ident.i.ty as a weapon, to cut through tangled kilometers of bureaucratic red tape that would have kept him off the camp ships. But he was different as he could get from the Ganner he had always been. Being that old Ganner had done him far too much damage.

Here, for example, outside the chamber: the old Ganner would have swept aside the curtain with a flourish and posed, dramatically backlit, in the doorway.

He would have coolly announced himself and asked his questions, counting on his imposing height and intimidating glare, his reputation, and his sheer gutsy dash to bully out the answers he needed. Now, instead, he leaned back against the pebbly wall beside the door and let himself slide down.

He settled in, sitting, as though he were just another refugee, taking a nap at the side of a corridor. He let his head drift forward and his eyes fall closed while he reached into the Force, seeking feelings from the chamber beyond. This could be a trap, and he was done with taking foolish chances.

Caution was his byword, now, and un.o.btrusiveness his best defense.

He felt humans inside the chamber; with enough Force presence that there might have been five of them--as he'd been told there would be, by the harried data clerk who'd accessed their file on the temporary, obsolete, and overloaded central server that held the sketchy records compiled by this camp ship's volunteer administrators--but Ganner couldn't quite resolve the Force sensation into distinct individuals.

He frowned, squeezing his eyes more tightly shut, concentrating. It was almost as though inside this chamber there was one person with five different personalities... or that all five of them partic.i.p.ated in some kind of group consciousness. That would be rare in humanity, but hardly impossible. The galaxy had sp.a.w.ned dozens, if not hundreds, of minor variations on the human theme; Ganner knew he hadn't seen them all. And the unknown, he had learned through bitter experience, was always dangerous. Often deadly.

His little half joke about this chamber being on the dark side didn't seem funny anymore. He had a feeling he was about to get himself killed.

He sighed, and got up. From the moment he had begun chasing this rumor, he had sort of, somehow, half known he would end up like this: alone, no backup, no one even knowing enough about where he was to mount a search for him when he did not return. It'd taken him two days just to walk this deeply into the camp ship. No one would ever know what had happened to him. Well, one person would be able to guess... but he didn't think she'd care. He remembered the dark flame in Jaina's eyes when he'd told her of the rumor.

"Another stupid lie," she'd said. "And you're an idiot for believing it."

He'd tried to explain that he didn't actually believe the tale; he just thought it should be checked out. He'd tried to tell her how important this could be to the morale of the whole New Republic.

"Don't you get it? He's a hero. It'd be like--like he rose from the dead, Jaina! It'd be magical--it'd be a miracle! It'd give us hope again."

"We don't need hope," Jaina had told him. A grim set had hardened the once soft curve of her jaw ever since Myrkr. "We need more ships. We need better weapons. And we need Jedi. We need to keep on fighting.

We don't need you wasting everybody's time on fantasies."

Ganner had persisted. "But what if it's not a fantasy? Your mother still claims he's alive..."

"My mother," Jaina had said, a slow, ancient weight on her words, a weight too vast, too old for a teenage girl, "lost both her sons on the same day. She hasn't gotten over it. She probably never will."

"She has a right to know..."

"I'm not arguing with you, Ganner. I'm telling you. Keep your fat yap shut. I don't want anything about this getting back to Mom. To raise her hopes and then crush them again would break her. If you do, I'll break you."

"But, but Jaina..."

She had leaned close to him then, and that dark flame in her eyes had burned so hot that Ganner took a step back.

"Don't think I won't, Ganner And don't think I can't."

He didn't answer. He believed her.

She said, "The Vong kept Jacen alive after they captured him. For a long time. They kept him alive so they could hurt him. I could feel it. I never even told Mom and Dad what they put him through. What happened to Anakin... that was better. That was clean." Tears had sparked in her eyes, but her voice was hard enough to cut transparisteel. "I felt Jacen die. In one instant, he was... he was just gone. Blasted out of existence like he'd never existed at all. I felt it. If he were alive, I wouldn't need you to come and tell me about it! I'd know!"

Her hands had clenched to fists, white-knuckled, pressed against her sides, and her lips drew back over her teeth. "Don't talk to me about this--this garbage ever again. And don't talk to anyone else, either.

Anyone. If I find out you've so much as looked in a mirror and told yourself, I will hurt you. I will teach you things about pain that no one should ever have to learn."

Ganner had stood and stared, gaping, dumbstruck at the hurt and the pure black rage that beat against him through the Force. What had happened to her? There had been some rumors...

"Hey, Jaina, it's okay," he'd said. "I won't tell anybody, I promise.

Don't get mad..."

"I'm not mad. You haven't seen mad. You better hope you never do."

She had folded her arms and turned her back to him. "Get out of my sight."

Ganner had walked unsteadily away, shaken. Jaina had always held herself so together, had always been so competent, so in control, that it had been easy to forget that she'd lost both her brothers that day, too.

Had lost her twin: the brother who'd been half of all she was.

Later--much later--he reflected: Well, y'know, I only promised I wouldn't talk about it. I never promised I wouldn't look into it.

That was when he had set out. Alone.

The old Ganner might have done the same, he occasionally thought with a certain melancholy resignation. It would have made a great story, a story about the kind of Jedi Ganner had always wanted to be: the lone hero, searching the vast reaches of the galaxy on a quest he cannot share, braving unimaginable dangers and facing incalculable odds.

That had been Ganner's fantasy self: the cool, calm, dangerous hero, the kind people trade stories about in voices hushed with awe, and all that adolescent c.r.a.p. Vanity, that's what it was: pure vanity.

Vanity had always been Ganner's fatal weakness. Nothing wrong with being a hero--look at Han Solo, or Corran Horn. Nothing wrong with wanting to be a hero: Luke Skywalker often talked about his youthful dreams of adventure, and look how he turned out. But when you start trying to be a hero, you're in a whole galaxy of trouble.

l.u.s.t for glory can become a sickness: a disease that bacta cannot cure.

In its final stages, it's all you can think about. At the end, you don't even care about actually being a hero. You just want people to think you are. The old Ganner Rhysode had suffered from that style-over-substance disease. He'd had as bad a case as any he'd ever seen. It had nearly killed him. Worse: it had nearly driven him dark.

In unguarded moments he still found himself drifting back to those dangerous dreams. Just thinking about it could give him the shudders.

He had worked very hard to squeeze his l.u.s.t for the admiration of others into a small, quiet voice, and he hoped one day to silence it forever.

So he had set about his quest quietly. Inconspicuously.

Anonymously.

Making sure the tale did not spread. He had to be sure he was doing this for the right reasons. He had to be sure he wasn't suffering a relapse into the glory sickness. He had to be sure he chased this rumor only because it was the right thing to do. Because the New Republic desperately needed any glimmer of hope. Because Jaina did.

Every time he remembered that dark flame in what had once been soft brown eyes, he felt another blow on a spike driving into his chest.