Star Wars_ Traitor Part 25

The Shaper Lord's mouth-tentacles braided themselves into a shape subtly obscene. Nom Anor looked away. He was about one second away from ripping those ridiculous tentacles right off that smug smirking bureaucrat's face, and eating them...

A few strides down the causeway, among the milling crowd of priests and warriors, he saw Vergere. She met his eye, and with a twitch of her head motioned for him to follow. Oh, he'd follow all right, he thought as he excused himself and paced after her. He had some choice words for that little creature..

She moved well downslope into the blue-white sunlight, and stopped with one hand holding a leafy vertical branch of the road trees. Nom Anor was already snarling by the time he reached her.

"Do you know what your 'student' has done? That sniveling traitor has betrayed us--and it's all your fault!"

"Perhaps it is." Her fluting voice was cheerful as ever. "But let us be clear on the issue of fault, eh, Executor? What is important is not whose fault this truly is; all that matters is whom Tsavong Lah will choose to blame for it, yes?"

Nom Anor pulled fleshless lips back over needle-sharp teeth. He could imagine all too well what Tsavong Lah would do, once word of this disaster reached his fanatic ears. "And why do you come to me now?"

"Because you should take me with you."

He went absolutely still.

"Take you with me?" he asked with studied blankness. "You'll need me. I saved the life of Luke Skywalker's wife. With me at your side, the New Republic might not simply shoot you on sight."

Nom Anor admitted silently that she might have a point, but his face revealed nothing.

"You think I have--some sort of escape plan?"

"Executor, please," Vergere chided knowingly. "You always have an escape plan. This time, you have something even better: a secret coralcraft, grown below the Well."

"I... I... I have nothing of the sort!" How could she possibly know? A concealed accessway on the far side of the Well--that would open only to him-- led to the coralcraft he'd bribed a shaper to seed months ago, during the earliest stage of the Galactic Senate's conversion into the Well of the World Brain. "You cannot possibly think..."

"Executor, again: please. Are you the only one who can bribe a shaper? And all the tending and care of your secret coralcraft, while it matured..."

"Hsst! Enough!" He glanced back over his shoulder up the causeway.

Though the commander had turned away to observe the battle, Ch'Gang Hool still watched Nom Anor expectantly. To leave now would be too suspicious- -he might never make it.

Vergere seemed somehow to read his mind.

"Executor, if we do not flee now, there will be no flight at all.

There will be no ship." She stood on tiptoe to lean close to him, and whispered, "Jacen Solo will steal it."

The surface of the slime pool closes over Jacen Solo like lips, warm as blood.

He does not feel it. Knotted ropes of tentacles stretch wide his arms, bind close his legs, circle garrote-tight his throat. Their coa.r.s.ely scaled hide rasps blood through his skin, blood that trails him in a fractal tree-spiral gelled motionless in the slime. Tentacles twist him and turn him and bend him, pulling him deeper through the slime that fluoresces yellow-gold and scarlet around him, blazing colors that shift with his motion and surge from contact with the heat of his body. He does not see them. At the deepest depths of the slime pool, the tentacles hold him face-up, his back to a ring of jagged rubble; that ring of rubble once had been the base of the Chief of State's Podium from which his mother had so often declaimed.

The tentacles gather him in, gather him up, toward a body vast and billowing, black curves of flesh bulging between translucent green sheets and ropes of viscera. The tentacles spring from a fleshy ring around a mouth gaping and hungry, and from either side of that emptily chewing maw stare immense eyes that glow yellow with suspicious malice. Jacen does not notice. His attention is filled with the hollow in his chest. His empty center rings with anger and mistrust and hungry triumph: the emotions of the World Brain, which has caught the former friend who tried to murder it. The former friend it had trusted, and by whom it had been betrayed. Mobile teeth like swords protrude from humps of muscle like multiple tongues, and begin to circle and clash within the tentacle-ringed mouth. Jacen can answer only with regret and sadness.

Yes. I betrayed you. I taught you to trust, and I taught you what it means to trust a traitor. He cannot teach it forgiveness. He has not learned that lesson yet himself: there is too much he will never forgive.

The tentacles contract, drawing him into the gaping maw, and the sword-teeth close upon his flesh. He does not recoil in fear. He does not resist. He does not struggle.

Instead, he opens himself. In his most secret center, that gap in his being that once fed him pain, he offers an embrace. Into the hollow in his center, he pours compa.s.sion. Absolute empathy. Perfect understanding. He accepts the pain he caused the dhuryam with his betrayal; he shares with the dhuryam the pain that betrayal had caused him. He shares with the dhuryam all his experience with the spectrum of life: the featureless whiteout of agony, the red tide of rage, the black hole of despair, the gamma-sleet of loss... and the lush verdure of growing things, the grays of stone and duracrete, the glisten of gemstones and transparisteel, the blue-white sizzle of the noonday sun and its exact echo in a lightsaber's blade.

He shares how much he loves it all: for all these things are all one thing: pain and joy, loss and reunion, life and death. To love any is to love all, for none can exist without every other. The Universe. The Force. All is one. The Yuuzhan Vong and the species of the New Republic.

Jacen and the World Brain.

When I betrayed you, I betrayed myself. When I killed your siblings, I killed pieces of myself. You may kill me, but I will live on in you. We are One.

And Jacen cannot tell if those words come from him to the World Brain, or from the World Brain to him, for Jacen and the World Brain are only different faces of the same thing. Call it the Universe, or the Force, or Existence: those are only words. They are half truths. Less.

They are lies. The truth is always greater than the words we use to describe it.

The skirl of lightblade along amphistaff, a thrusting bind that sizzles disintegrating energy through the web of skin between a Yuuzhan Vong thumb and forefinger where hand meets amphistaff...

A wind-whirl of airborne somersault over the heads of two warriors lunging side by side, and their boneless collapse as a single lightsaber slash opens the napes of two necks and unstrings their limbs... The astonished blink of a warrior's eyes as an amethyst shaft of energy spears into his open mouth, angling upward to burn open a three-centimeter-wide tunnel from his hard palate through the roof of his skull-... Of such brief flickers is built the death of Ganner Rhysode. - - burned-milk reek of Yuuzhan Vong blood sizzling into smoke on his blade-- - - lines of burning ice that are the slices left in his flesh by amphistaffs-- - - cold flame of amphistaff venom consuming his nerves...

These are mere flicks of melody in Ganner's symphony of the Force. The Force does more than give him strength, more than lift him, spin him: the Force surges though his veins to tune his heart to the rhythm of the Universe. He has become the Force, and the Force has become him. He is not directly aware of the sequence of his death; time vanished along with fear, and doubt, and pain in that eternal second when he surrendered his self-command.

Standing in the archway, waiting for the Yuuzhan Vong, Ganner realized that this, right now, right here, was what his whole life had been for. The day of his birth set his feet upon this path; every triumph and tragedy, every foolish stunt and humiliation, each random useless twist of cruel fate built a pressure within him, piled up in tidal surge behind the dikes of his control. Those dikes had been built by his parents, trying to smooth the rough edges of his arrogance; they had been built by the mocking laughter of his playmates, when they jeered his every attempt to impress them; they had been built even by Luke Skywalker's Jedi training...

"A Jedi doesn't show off, Ganner. Fighting is not a game. For the Jedi, combat is failure. It is a tragedy. When blood must be shed, a Jedi does so quickly, surgically, with solemn reverence. With grief." Ganner tried for so long, tried so hard to be what everyone told him he was supposed to be, tried to control his flair for the dramatic, for the elegant, the graceful, the artistic, tried to be a good son, a good friend, a humble man, a good Jedi... But in the archway, he finds the end of trying. There is reason no longer to resist the truth of himself.

Playacting the hero's part is not only permissible--It is necessary. To hold the archway it is not enough to merely wound and kill, is not enough to be calm, and surgical, and grieving. To hold the archway, he must not only slaughter, but slaughter effortlessly, carelessly, laughingly.

Joyfully. To hold the archway, he must dance and whirl and leap and spin, calling out for more opponents. More victims. He must make them hesitate to face him. He must make them fear. He had spoken the words: he had found a magical incantation to crack the dikes within him and unleash the flood.

None shall pa.s.s. He wields the blade of a fallen hero, but now he is the hero, and it is others who fall. He is rising. The Force thunders through him, and he thunders through the Force. Letting slip the bonds of control, leaving aside conscious thought, answering only the surge of his pa.s.sion and his joy, he finds power undreamed of. He has become the battle. He is not directly aware of the corpses that litter the tunnel, that his feet nimbly avoid of their own accord. He is not directly aware of the warped sheets of durasteel that he has drawn from the wreckage of the Great Door, sheets that spin and tumble around him to become anvils for the hammer of thud bugs and shields to shelter his flanks. He is not directly aware of the coral-embedded statues from the Atrium that he has caught in his Force-powered dance, immense figures of the species of the New Republic that seem to come to life to fight in his cause, statues that lumber and rock and fall, crushing dozens and hundreds, remaking Atrium into abattoir.

No more is he aware of the texture of the coral that lines the walls, or the quality of the light, or the number of his opponents.

Has he faced a dozen? A hundred? How many have been pulled back to safety after taking disabling wounds? How many lie dead in the brimstone smoke? He doesn't remember, for there is no memory. There is no past.

There is no future. He is not even aware of himself. Nor of the Yuuzhan Vong. He has become the warriors he fights, slaying himself with each who falls. There is no longer any such thing as a Ganner Rhysode; there are no more Yuuzhan Vong, no more Jedi. There are only the dancers, and the dance. The dance is all there is: from whirl of quarks to wheel of galaxies, all is motion. All is dance. All is.

Nom Anor motioned for Vergere to wait while he took one last quick look around. Before him rose the coral mountain of the Well. The half-finished thorn maze towered behind, empty of shapers--they'd all probably been drawn to the Well's front by the noise of the battle. Distant explosions popped in stuttering arrhythm, punctuated by fainter shouts.

Satisfied that they were un.o.bserved, Nom Anor pulled aside a soft, mosslike sheet of false coral to reveal a hatch sphincter's nosetongue.

He stuck his hand inside it, still glancing around nervously while the nosetongue tasted and a.n.a.lyzed the enzymatic secretions of his skin. A second later it recognized him, and a larger curtain of false coral nearby suddenly dimpled as a small concealed hatch sphincter opened behind it.

He motioned for Vergere to follow, and went in. Yorik coral gave way to age-grimed duracrete; the corridor became a labyrinth. As they threaded their way along, Nom Anor congratulated himself on the cleverness of his escape plan. No one had been within the Well except master shapers and their a.s.sistants since its initial conversion had begun; no one was willing to risk the homicidal wrath of Ch'Gang Hool--except for one shaper whose greed had overcome his cowardice. Of all the Yuuzhan Vong, only that shaper and Nom Anor himself had been aware that immense chambers--once the offices of the Old Republic's Chancellor--lay below the World Brain's pool. These chambers were blasted and broken.

Damaged in the destruction of the Senate above, they had never been repaired. Nom Anor picked his way over mounds of rubble and through a jungle of twisted durasteel and dangling cable, leading Vergere through the wreckage. Down here some of the New Republic glow globes still functioned; they had not been destroyed as heresies because only Nom Anor and his pet shaper had known of their existence. He pulled himself over a bent girder, and there it was: long and sleek, sculpted for atmospheric speed, twinned dovin basals--one for motion, one for defense-- surfaces angled to deflect sensors, flat matte black, nonreflective to defeat visual targeting.

The shaper who had grown it had guaranteed this coralcraft would be as fast as any in the Yuuzhan Vong fleet; Nom Anor had used the concealed hatch sphincter above to secretly visit the craft on several occasions while it grew, so that its pilotbrain could be imprinted with Nom Anor's mental signature. While visiting, Nom Anor had often amused himself by contemplating how he had found a new use for the chambers that had once belonged to the legendary Palpatine...

The defensive dovin basal would collapse a tunnel through the duracrete and yorik coral alike, opening it like a gate to the sky. The pilotbrain was trained with the necessary recognition codes to pa.s.s the fleet cordon around the planet, and had coordinates for the jump into New Republic s.p.a.ce already memorized.

Once inside, nothing could touch him. Once inside, he would be safe.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" he murmured as he put his hand to the coralcraft's nosetongue.

Its hatch gaped wide, instantly obedient. "This is the result, Vergere, of contingency planning. I never a.s.sume success. This is why I always survive.

I always have a contingency plan, to cover any possible disaster..."

"Do you always?" Something in her voice froze him in place. "Any possible disaster?" Before he could even draw breath to ask what she meant, his unspoken question was answered by a sickeningly familiar sound--snap-hiss hummmm.

Slowly, glacially, afraid of what he'd see but unable to stop himself, Nom Anor turned toward a new light in the ruined office: light that sizzled green and struck white highlights off the black curves of his coralcraft. To find himself staring into the terminal curve of a lightsaber's blade, one centimeter from his nostrils.

"A lightsaber is an interesting weapon," Vergere said conversationally. "A blade unique in the history of warfare. A paradox, not unlike the Jedi who wield it: those peaceful warriors, who kill in the service of life. Have you ever noticed?

The blade is round. It has no edge. But it is a lightsaber--which means it is nothing but edge. There is no part of this blade that does not cut. Curious, yes? Symbolic, one might say."

"What?" His mouth opened, closed, opened again. He wanted to ask what she was doing. He wanted to ask where she had gotten a lightsaber.

He wanted to ask any number of things, but all that would come from his mouth was "What?"

Again, Vergere seemed to read his mind. "It's Jacen's," she chimed cheerfully. "I think he might want it back, don't you?"

"You can't..."

"Yes, I can." She nodded toward the gloom beyond the coralcraft. "I should be able to cut my way into the Well easily enough."

"If you kill me..." Nom Anor began desperately. "Kill you? Don't be silly." Cables from the dangling jungle of wreckage suddenly writhed to life, whipping through the air to bind Nom Anor's limbs. They wrapped him tightly enough to squeeze a gasp from his lungs, then tied themselves in hideously complex knots. Vergere watched all this happen--made it happen, Nom Anor realized--with a humorous expression on her face and a bright orange flare of her crest. "If I want you dead, all I have to do is leave you behind. Tsavong Lah will take care of the rest."

"But you can't leave me behind," Nom Anor said. He was beginning to recover his self-possession. "You can't fly my craft. It's imprinted on me! Only I can.. ."

"That may be true," she allowed. "But I doubt it. Your coralcraft is, after all, a living creature--and Jacen, you may have noticed, has a certain gift for making friends."

"You... he...you're mad! This can't be happening!"

"Executor," she said severely, cutting him short with a twitch of the lightblade, "didn't I say Jacen Solo will steal your ship?"

Nom Anor could only gape.

"When will you learn," she asked, shaking her head in mock sadness, "that everything I tell you is the truth?"

Abruptly, the dance falters, stumbles, begins to limp. There is no one left to fight. Ganner sways, dizzy, dying, poisoned with amphistaff venom from scores of wounds. His blood paints the floor beneath his boots and the walls of the tunnel around him. Only the Force holds him upright.

A grinding rumble approaches, and soon he can see what makes this sound, what produces these tremors he feels shaking the floor: something huge and dark, trundling on curving knotted legs like b.u.t.tresses, splayed claws flattening Yuuzhan Vong corpses heedlessly as it approaches. Its bulk is mailed with vast plates of horn, and a vast head swings slowly from side to side like an AT-AT's control cabin in hunter-killer mode.

Its ma.s.sive jaws drip flame. Warriors advance along its flanks. I guess it was inevitable, Ganner thinks with a twinge of melancholy.

Sooner or later, the bad guys always bring up their armor. This is about to be over; he cannot face such a beast supported by infantry--and yet the Force offers him one last trick.

Though the Force is blind to the warriors and the tank beast and the coral around them all, in it Ganner can feel the duracrete walls of the Senate, which form the Well's skeletal structure; he can feel that the tunnel had been cut through any number of load-bearing members--he can feel that the duracrete around him is crazed with stress fractures, half broken already, and sagging under the unimaginable tons of the coral that surrounds it. Ganner smiles. The tank beast roars a gout of concentrated acid; with the Force, Ganner angles a shard of the Great Door to form a durasteel shield that sluices the acid to one side, so that it splashes to one wall.

Coral smokes, dying, liquefying instantly. The shard of the Great Door begins to melt. Blast bugs zing toward him from the warriors, and the melting shard dances before him, deflecting them into the acid-burned wall. Their explosions splash liquid coral and duracrete splinters. Above their heads, the building groans. Warriors flinch, glancing upward in sudden fear. The tank beast howls.

Ganner laughs. The Force is with him, and he has become once more the dancer.

He has become the dance. With the Force, he reaches into the duracrete around them all, and he begins to shove.

Jacen was surprised by life. The teeth of the World Brain had not closed upon him.

Its tentacles had not ripped the flesh from his bones. He had not drowned in the slime pool, asphyxiating on phosph.o.r.escent goo. No Yuuzhan Vong warriors swarmed around him to drag him from the slime and carve the life from him with amphistaffs.

Instead, a bubble of air had formed around him, and tentacles had cradled him like a sleeping child, and lips had closed over sword-edged teeth to touch him with a kiss. Because he was the World Brain, and the World Brain was him, and each was everything else, and Jacen had learned that one can meet the Universe and all its irrational pain--which means meeting oneself--with fear, or with hatred, or with despair. Or one can choose to meet it with love. Jacen had chosen.

But still, he was astonished to discover that the Universe could love him back.

At the far end of an infinite distance--which was the same as right here-- he felt an oceanic roll of the Force gathering an interstellar fortissimo of symphonic joy; at the same time, within the hollow at his center, he felt rage and pain and fierce hot combat, and he understood another reason why he was still alive.

Ganner... He reached out with his feelings and gathered power from across the Universe. Tentacles fell away from his arms and legs, and the air bubble around him collapsed. He brushed the World Brain lightly with his fingertips: a good-bye to a friend. Then Jacen Solo shot from the slime pool as though fired from a torpedo launcher. He burst into the brimstone smoke, his robe blazing with slime that trailed from him in shining ropes and dripped like falling stars; he sailed over the slime pool to alight at the bowl rim, where the coral met the bare durasteel of a Senate platform. He lifted his head, fixing his gaze upon the cantilevered bridgeway that stuck out into the Well like a tongue, a tongue from a mouth that belched smoke and scarlet flame and the amethyst lightning of a lightsaber biting flesh. And he could hear a human voice up there. He could not make out words, but the tone was unmistakable.

Ganner was laughing. Deep in the Force, Jacen seized that bridgeway with the hands of his mind. One long, smooth tug would lift him to it, and he could reach Ganner's side, and join in his fight, stand at his shoulder against the Yuuzhan Vong...

"Jacen, wait."

The words were spoken not loudly, but so perfectly resonant that they chimed in his ear as though the speaker were at his side. And she might as well have been: in the Force he felt an invisible hand take his shoulder. He nodded to himself. "I should have known, somehow. I should have known you'd be here."

Vergere stood only a few meters above and to his right, on the coral-draped Senate platform that had once belonged to the delegation from Kashyyyk.

"Come, Jacen. Your sojourn in the lands of the dead is at an end.

It is time once more to walk the bright fields of day."

Instead of answering, he turned back toward the bridgeway above--but her Force grip tightened on his shoulder. "You cannot save him, Jacen. All you can do is die with him. He has chosen this destiny. The only aid you can offer is to honor his choice. You stand at the very gates of death; life lies before you. If you turn back now--even for a single glance over your shoulder--you are lost."

"What do you want me to do? I won't leave him! I won't!" He turned on her.

A wave of trembling started at the back of his neck and shivered out through his arms and down his legs. "I can't let people keep giving their lives for me!"

"He does not give his life for you. He gives your life to you. Will you refuse the gift of a dying man?"

"I can't... Vergere, I can't just..."

"In the story of your life, is this your best ending?"

He reached into the Force and gave a wrenching shove that twisted him free of her grip.

"I won't leave him." She shrugged. "Then you'll be wanting this."

She tossed something down to him. It spun lazily through the air, flashing silver in the slimelight; he caught it instinctively.

It was a lightsaber. It was his lightsaber. It felt strange in his hand. Weird. Alien. He had not seen it since the death of the voxyn queen. The last time he'd held it, he'd been somebody else. A boy. A sad, conflicted boy, searching desperately for anything he could be sure of, willing to die on a sure nothing rather than live for an uncertain something.

She said, "Choose, and act."