Star Wars_ Traitor Part 4

"In your hand. Is that some kind of weapon?"

Her crest flattened and spread again, its green now s.h.i.+mmering with yellow highlights.

"Why would I carry a weapon? Am I in danger?"

"I..." Jacen rubbed his eyes. Now only a blur hung from her fist; had he seen what he thought he saw?

"Probably just a trick of the light," Vergere said. "Forget about it. Come with me."

He stepped through the hatch sphincter. The corridor had somehow changed; instead of the resin-smoothed yorik coral pa.s.sageway he had glimpsed when Vergere would come or go, he now stood inside one end of a tunnel--or a tube. The floor was warm and soft, fleshy, and it pulsed faintly beneath his bare feet.

A pair of tall, impa.s.sive Yuuzhan Vong warriors stood outside in full vonduun crab armor, right arms thick with the coils of their amphistaffs.

"Pay no attention to them," Vergere said lightly. "They speak no Basic, nor have they tizowyrms to translate--and they have no idea who you are. They are here only to ensure that you cause no mischief. Don't make them hurt you."

Jacen only shrugged. He looked back through the closing sphincter.

He was leaving a lot of pain in that room.

He was bringing a lot of pain with him.

Anakin... Every time he blinked, he could see his brother's corpse on the inside of his eyelids. It still hurt. He guessed it always would.

But pain didn't mean so much to him anymore.

He fell in at Vergere's side as she stalked away along the slick warm tunnel; it was valved like the inside of a vein.

The warriors followed.

Jacen forgot about the hook of bone.

It had probably been just a trick of the light.

Jacen couldn't find a direction or a pattern in the route they walked, through endless tangles of fleshy tubes that seemed to branch and coil and knot themselves at random. Light filtered through the walls from outside, vividly illuminating striated arterial cl.u.s.ters in the tubes'

translucent skin. Valves before them opened at Vergere's touch; valves behind closed by themselves.

Sometimes the tubes contracted until Jacen had to walk hunched over, and the warriors were forced to bend nearly double.

Sometimes they were in large tunnels that flexed and pulsed as though pumping air; a constant breeze huffed at their backs like the breath of a well-fed watchbeast.

The tube-skin vibrated like a huge slack drumhead, making the air hum and rumble, sometimes so low that Jacen could only feel the sound with his hand against the skin wall, sometimes louder, higher, scaling up to a tidal roar of a thousand voices moaning and shouting and screaming in pain.

Often they pa.s.sed hatch sphincters like the one that had sealed the Embrace of Pain; sometimes these might be open, revealing chambers floored with gra.s.sy swamp, woody trunks branching above brownish muck, globular yawns draped with coc.o.o.ns of alien pupae, or caverns vast and dark where tiny flames of crimson and chartreuse, of vivid yellow or dim, almost invisible violet floated and gleamed and winked like eyes of predators gathered in the night to watch prey huddled around a campfire.

Rarely Jacen caught glimpses of other Yuuzhan Vong: mostly warriors, whose unscarred faces and unmutilated limbs hinted at low status, and once or twice even a few of the shorter, squattier-seeming Yuuzhan Vong, each wearing some kind of living headdress that reminded Jacen of Vergere's feathered crest. These must be shapers; Jacen remembered Anakin's tale of the shaper base on Yavin 4.

"What is this place?" Jacen had been on Yuuzhan Vong s.h.i.+ps before, and he'd seen their planetside installations at Belkadan: sure, they had been organic, more grown than built--but they had been comprehensible.

"Is this a s.h.i.+p? A s.p.a.ce station? Some kind of creature?"

"It is all those, and more. The Yuuzhan Vong name for this--s.h.i.+p, station, creature, what you will--translates as 'seeds.h.i.+p.' I suppose a biologist might call it an ecospheric blastoderm." She pulled him close and lowered her voice as though sharing a private joke. "This is an egg that will give birth to an entire world."

Jacen made a face like he tasted something foul.

"A Yuuzhan Vong world."

"Of course."

"I was on Belkadan. And Duro. There was nothing like this.

To do their--what would you call it? Vongforming? - - they just sprayed gene-tailored bacteria into the atmosphere..."

"Belkadan and Duro are no more than industrial parks," Vergere said. "They are s.h.i.+pyards producing war materiel.

They will be used up, and abandoned. But the world transformed by this seeds.h.i.+p--it will be home."

Jacen felt weak. "Home?"

"A planet can be described as a single organism, a living creature with a skeleton of stone and a heart of molten rock.

The species that inhabit a planet, plant and animal alike, from microbe to megalossus, are the planet-creature's organs, internal symbionts, and parasites. This seeds.h.i.+p itself is composed mostly of incubating stem cells, which will differentiate into living machines--which will in turn construct an entire planet's worth of wildlife with vastly accelerated growth. Animals will mature within a few standard d ays; whole forests within weeks. Mere months after seeding, the new world will bear a fully functioning, dynamically stable ecosystem: the replica of a planet dead for so many thousand years that it is barely a memory."

"Their homeworld," Jacen muttered. "The Yuuzhan Vong. They're making themselves a new homeworld. That's what this is."

"You might call it that." Vergere stopped and gestured to one of the warriors. She touched a spot on the tube-skin. The warrior stepped forward and twitched his right arm; his amphistaff uncoiled into a blade that ripped a long, ragged slash through the wall. The lips of the slash seeped milky fluid. Vergere pulled one lip aside as though holding open a curtain. She made a slight bow, beckoning Jacen to step through.

"I would call it a work in progress," she said. "Rather like you."

Darkly swamp-smelling fog gusted into the tube, warm and thick and smoke-roiling. Jacen snorted. "Smells like the plumbing broke in your barracks refresher. What's this supposed to teach me?"

"There's only one way to find out."

Jacen pushed through the gap, into air smotheringly thick with rot and excrement and hot wet mold. Sweat p.r.i.c.kled out over his skin. The milky fluid-blood from the gap trailed pale sticky strings that clung to his hair and his hands. He scrubbed at them with the robe, but the milk liked his skin better than the fiber.

Then he looked up, and forgot about the milk.

This was where the screams had been coming from.

He stood in a world turned inside out.

The tunnel at his back made a knotted hump like a varicose vein across the crest of the hill. From up here, Jacen had a clear vantage over a boil of swamp and jungle all the way to the horizon.

But there was no horizon.

Through storm-swirls of stinking fog, an endless bowl of sc.u.m-stained pools and fetid belching quagmires rose higher and higher and higher until he had to squint against the actinic blue-white pinp.r.i.c.k that was this place's sun. Then a rift parted the fog above, and he could see beyond the sun: other swamps and jungles and ridges of low hills sealed shut the sky. Blurred in the regathering mist, it seemed that vast creatures roamed those hills in disorganized herds-- but then the mist thinned again, and the scene snapped into perspective.

Those creatures weren't huge; they were human.

Not just human, but also Mon Calamari, and Bothan and Twi'lek, and dozens of other species of the New Republic.

Those hills overhead were only a klick away, maybe a klick and a half. The "sun" must have been some kind of artificial fusion source, probably not much bigger than Jacen's fist. He nodded to himself; with the fine gravity control wielded by dovin basals, it wouldn't be much of a trick to contain a fusion furnace.

Filtering out damaging radiation would be trickier, though.

He couldn't guess how they managed it without s.h.i.+eld technology; he'd never been technical. His gift had been with animals. For that kind of question, he'd just ask Jaina, or Anakin...

He shook himself, and ground his teeth together until the pain ebbed.

Now he could pick out Yuuzhan Vong among the groups: some warriors- -not many--but hundreds and hundreds of what he guessed must be shapers, moving in slow and purposeful paths, taking soil and water samples, collecting leaves and strips of bark, stems, and handfuls of algae, paying no attention at all to what he'd originally taken for herds.

Those herds...

If he'd still had the Force, he would have felt the truth instantly.

Those are slave gangs.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" Vergere said from beside him.

Jacen shook his head.

"Madness," he answered. "I mean, look at this..."

He swung a hand toward a nearby bog. Along its bank, a crew dug savagely with crude shovels, howling as they threw muck and vegetation and dirt in all directions, trying to excavate what would probably have been some kind of drainage ditch, while another howling gang worked just as savagely to fill the ditch in once more. A little farther away, a knot of shouting, swearing people stuck grain cuttings into the mud, while a handful of others followed behind, moaning through streams of anguished tears while they stamped the cuttings flat.

The sphere was filled with similar useless struggle: stone cairns being simultaneously built up and torn down, fields being packed flat with rolled stone while still being plowed, saplings being planted and chopped down, all by half-naked slaves staggering with exhaustion, some cursing, some sobbing, the rest only bellowing and shrieking wordless animal pain.

Even where there was no struggle, the slaves lurched from task to task as though pursued by invisible clouds of stinging insects; a man digging a hole might suddenly spasm as if he'd touched an open power bus, then clamber out to half build a dike, then jerk again and stumble away to uproot marsh gra.s.s by the handful and scatter it randomly to the wind.

"This, this insanity..." Jacen hugged himself, swallowing hard, his breath shallow against a retch that twisted his guts. "How can you call this magnificent?"

"Because I see beyond what it is, to what it shall become." Vergere touched his arm. Her eyes danced. "Follow me."

Coils and knots of veins made footholds up the outer skin of the tunnel. Vergere sprang from one to the next with a.s.sured agility, then waited at the crest while Jacen struggled painfully up to join her. The thick reeking air had him gasping, drenched with sweat, half smothered as if he'd been wrapped in a blanket of wet taun-taun hide. The pair of warriors followed, impa.s.sive and deliberate.

"But what is this place for?" Jacen waved a hand at the pandemonium. "What does this have to do with Vongforming a planet?"

"This?" Vergere's head tilted in a way that Jacen had learned to interpret as a smile. "This is a playground."

"A playground?"

"Oh, yes. Is this not what playgrounds are in the New Republic--a place for children to learn the boundaries of behavior? One learns to fight in playground scuffles; one learns politics in playground cliques.

It is on the playground that one is initiated into the madness of mobs, the insidious mire of peer pressure, and the final, unthinkable, inarguable unfairness of existence--that some are smarter, others stronger or faster, and no force at your command can make you better than your gifts."

Her gesture encompa.s.sed the entire sphere. "What you see around you is the work of powerful, undisciplined infants... playing with their toys."

"These aren't toys, Jacen blurted, appalled. "These are living beings-- humans, Bothans..."

"I will not argue names with you, Jacen Solo. Call them what you will. Their use remains the same."

"What use? What possible value could anybody get out of this...

this pointless suffering?"

Vergere shook her head pityingly.

"Do you think a process so complex as re-creating an entire planetary ecology can be entrusted to chance? Oh, no no no, Jacen Solo.

There is learning involved. Education. Trial and error... more error than not, of course. And practice. Practice, practice, practice."

She opened a hand like a service droid offering a table in a fancy restaurant, indicating a large pond not far from the base of the hill where they stood. An island bulged from the pond's middle, a huge hulking mound of slick, waxy hexagonal blocks like sealed birth chambers in a hive of Corellian wine-bees--except each of these chambers was large enough to swallow the Millennium Falcon.

A ring of Yuuzhan Vong warriors circled the pond, facing outward with weapons at the ready as though to defend it against unexpected attack; another ring of warriors held the sh.o.r.e of the central island itself. Dozens or hundreds of shapers clambered among the blocks, bearing bundles and implements and jiggling sacs of liquid. Occasionally one of the shapers would use an implement to pierce the plug at the end of one of the blocks, pa.s.sing either a bundle or a liquid-filled sac within before sealing the block again, and Jacen realized that his wine-bee a.n.a.logy had been unexpectedly apt.

Those huge hexagonal blocks must contain some sort of living creatures-- something already huge, perhaps the pupal forms of unimaginable giants...

"What are they?" he breathed.

"The real issue is not so much what they are, as what the single one that survives to maturity will become."

Again she smiled, and her crest bloomed vivid orange.

"Like all complex creatures," she said, "the Yuuzhan Vong homeworld will require a brain."

The creatures were called dhuryams.

Related to yammosks, dhuryams are fully as specialized as the giant war coordinators, but bred for a different, much more complex type of telepathic coordination. Bigger, stronger, vastly more powerful, dhuryams are capable of mentally melding many, many more disparate elements than the greatest yammosk that ever lived. A dhuryam will be responsible for integrating the activities of the Vongforming organomachines. The dhuryam will be less a servant than a partner: fully intelligent, fully aware, capable of making decisions based on a constant data flow streaming in from the entire planetwide network of telepathically linked creatures, to guide the planet's transformation flawlessly, without any of the chaotic-system fragility that plagues natural ecologies.

When Vergere had finished describing them, Jacen said slowly, "These slave gangs--you're saying they're being mentally controlled?"

Vergere nodded. "You may have noticed the lack of guards, with the exception of the dhuryam hive itself. And those are there only to prevent the dhuryams from using their slaves to murder their siblings."

"Murder...?"

"Oh, yes. Behaviors can be bred, but skills must be learned.

Much of what the dhuryams are doing here is learning play--not unlike a pilot training in a flight simulator. Here they hone their skills, of mental mastery and the coordination of many disparate life-forms, that one of them will later use as the World Brain."

"One of them..." Jacen echoed.

"Only one. The games these children play are more than serious.

They are deadly. These infant dhuryams know already the basic truth of existence: win or die."

"It's so..." Jacen's fists clenched helplessly. "...so horrible."

"I would call it honest." She smiled up at him, friendly, cheerful, untouched by the horror around them. "Life is struggle, Jacen Solo. It has always been so: an unending savage battle, red in tooth and claw...