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

had once spent most of a day watching hundreds of unnamable herd beasts stumble out into the light from the cavernlike mouth of one of these biomachines. Slow-moving bovine sexapeds, they would blink stupidly at the unfamiliar sun, gathering themselves instinctively into herd groups before shuffling off to begin cropping vegetation. No sooner had they begun to eat than they began to grow—so quickly that Jacen had been able to watch them mature over the course of the day. And for every fifty or hundred of the sexapeds, the biomachine had produced a predator, from huge bipedal lizardlike creatures with knife-tipped facial tentacles instead of teeth, to groups of fierce insectile pack hunters no larger than Gupin.

He and Vergere had seen the Yuuzhan Vong themselves now and again, and not only shapers tending their new planet. Warriors patrolled even the midlevels, armed, shivering with disgust at the machines through which they were forced to march. For a time, Jacen had wondered if they might be searching for him personally, but as their trek lengthened they began to come across signs that he wasn’t the only fugitive lurking in the deep shadows below the zone of destruction: fresh tracks in the dust, caches of food recently picked over, wreckage cunningly arranged to look random while it concealed hiding places within. Three or four times, he even caught glimpses of other humans, darting furtively from cover to cover, always at night, always cautious about exposing themselves even to the light of the Bridge. They could have been refugees, people left behind and forgotten in the chaos of the evacuation; they could have been lifelong midlevel dwellers, avoiding contact with the upper world by instinct; they could have been slaves escaped from the seedship. Jacen didn’t know. He never planned to find out. He avoided them.

They were attracting the attention of the Yuuzhan Vong.

He didn’t know if the Yuuzhan Vong had any use for slaves on their new homeworld, or if whatever people they caught were executed on the spot. This was something else he planned never to find out.

The Vonglife that clung to the inner curve of the crater looked different from any he’d encountered so far. He twiddled the autozoom on his electrobinoculars, to flip the enhanced image back and forth between a wide-angle overview and tightly focused close-ups of individual plants. The foliage was patchy and strange, and its coverage was unexpectedly poor; everywhere he directed the electrobinoculars, he found streaks of rusting durasteel and hunks of rubble, as though the Vonglife struggled here with an environment too hostile for it to flourish. The mosses, so brilliantly colored everywhere else, here were nondescript grays and browns and murky greens; the ferns that elsewhere formed towering jungle canopies were here stunted, twisted, curling randomly, fronds dull and streaked as though coated with dust.

Dialing back the magnification, he swept the vertical tower of the thunderhead that rose from the crater’s midpoint. Its gray-black base looked as flat as its dazzling white anvil, and the whole column twisted as it rotated slowly, as though the cloud couldn’t quite decide if it might want to become a massive Coriolis storm.

All this looked plenty threatening, he allowed, but not enough to explain the smothering dread that crushed his chest when he so much as thought about going down there. “All right, I give up. What is it about this place? What makes it so dangerous?”

Vergere touched his arm, and with a gesture directed his attention toward a thicket of what looked like coniferous shrubs—though the electrobinoculars’ range and azimuth display indicated the smallest of them stood more than ten meters tall. On the slope around the thicket, a small herd of agile hoofed reptilelike creatures sprang from rock to rock, cropping nervously at the sparse moss. An instant later he found out what had been making them so nervous: one of those massive bipedal tentacle-faced predators lunged out of the shrub thicket with astonishing speed. It seized the nearest of the hoofed reptilians in powerful prehensile forepaws, its blade-tipped mouth-tentacles stabbing and sawing to swiftly slay and disjoint the captured animal, carving it into bite-sized hunks. As the rest of the herd bounded away, the predator settled down in the slanting sunlight to devour its kill.

“That is why this place is so dangerous,” Vergere said with a hint of a challenging smile. “It is filled with what you would call the dark side. I should say: the dark side is very, very powerful here, more powerful than anywhere else on this planet. As powerful, perhaps, as it is anywhere in the galaxy.”

Jacen lowered the electrobinoculars, blinking. “That’s not the dark side,” he said. “A predator hunts to feed itself and its family. That’s just nature.”

“And the dark side isn’t? I thought the danger of the dark side was that it is natural: that’s why it’s easier than the light, yes?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Is what you have seen not the exemplar of the dark side? Is this not what you fear so much: aggression, violence, passion?”

“You want to know what the real dark side would look like? If that predator had slaughtered the entire herd, just for the fun of it. For the joy of killing.”

“Do you think this predator takes no joy in its successful kill?”

Jacen looked again through the electrobinoculars, watching for a moment as the predator seemed to shiver with delight in its meal. He didn’t answer.

“Kill one, it’s nature, kill them all, it’s the dark side?” Vergere went on. “Is the line between nature and dark side only one of degree? Is it the dark side if that predator kills only half the herd? A quarter?”

He lowered the electrobinoculars once more. “It’s the dark side if it kills more than it needs to feed itself and its family,” he said, heating up. “That’s the line. Killing when you don’t need to kill.”

Vergere cocked her head. “And how do you define need? Are we talking about the line of starvation, or simple malnutrition? Is