Star Wars: Traitor by Matthew Woodring Stover

Author:Matthew Woodring Stover
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Solo, War stories, Space warfare, Space Opera, Star Wars fiction, Traitors, General, Science fiction, Fantasy, Adventure, Life on other planets, Jacen (Fictitious Character), Fiction, Science fiction stories
ISBN: 9780345428653
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2002-07-30T07:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

INTO THE DARK

Lightning blazed overhead, and thunder slammed the crater floor hard enough to shake the ground. Shivering, Jacen pressed himself into a broken corner that had once been the interior of a fashionable refresher.

Icy rain streamed down his spine, and pellets of hail stung his skin.

He clenched his jaw so that his teeth wouldn't chatter. The Yuuzhan Vong were coming. Whole squads of warriors had come bounding over the crater's rim before Jacen and Vergere had made it even halfway down the inner slope. The warriors had leapt recklessly from slab to rock to rubble, gaining rapidly. Jacen could not possibly have matched their speed; in the service of the True Gods, injury or maiming--even death--is a warrior's fondest hope. He didn't know how long he'd been waiting here, shivering in the icy rain. Vergere had told him to wait, had told him she could find an escape route, but she had to hunt for it and she could move faster alone. Though she had not said the words, had not asked him to, Jacen trusted her.

What choice did he have? Oh yeah, sure, I'm free, he thought sourly.

Some freedom. The rain, the hail, the bitter wind, they were bad.

The waiting was worse. Worst of all was that he could feel the Yuuzhan Vong closing in. The center of his chest was hollow: an empty space where the slave seed once had been. If he changed his breathing, if he closed his eyes, if he thought about that hollow--directed his attention into the emptiness at his center-- somehow that brought another sense to life.

He couldn't have described the feeling; there were no words, exactly, for how it felt. The slave seed had sent fibers throughout his body, had woven itself into his nervous system until those fibers were an inextricable part of who he was--but those fibers vibrated to a life foreign to this galaxy.

He just knew... He could feel the Yuuzhan Vong swarming down the crater's slopes, could feel them slogging through the thunderstorm in the crater's center. He felt the sizzle of alien stress hormones coursing alien veins.

He felt one's shortness of breath as a warrior slipped around a blind corner that might hide a fugitive Jedi; he felt one's black rage at the death of comrades in the Nursery, and his heart echoed with another's savage lust for vengeance. He felt the shocking, nauseating nonpain that slammed up a leg from an ankle broken by an unlucky shift of rubble, and he felt the frustration of a warrior ordered to remain behind to tend some clumsy brenzlit's broken ankle while he burned to leap forward, to hunt and find and slay. He felt them all. Like he was all of them, and all of them were him. At the same time.

And more: he felt the crush of tender fronds under hard hot boot heels.

He felt the primitive distress of moss when half a struggling colony was scraped off a broken door by the stumble of a warrior against it.

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