Traitor, Matthew Stover [spicy books to read .txt] 📗

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 tubeskin. 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 prickled 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 scum-stained pools and fetid belching quagmires rose higher and higher and higher until he had to squint against the actinic blue-white pinprick 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 shield 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 grass 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 assured 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 tauntaun hide. The pair of warriors followed, impassive 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