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

of plant, a vegetal species specially bred by the Yuuzhan Vong; they might have been agglomerate exoskeletons abandoned by gargantuan interplanetary animals.

Analysis of sensor data showed clear indications of dovin basal–like gravity fields around the hyperspace exsertion points; and mere seconds after each ship’s appearance, there would follow a new gravity-distorting burst. Some New Republic analysts thought these secondary bursts were dovin basals collapsing into self-generated point masses. Others claimed that the secondary bursts were the signatures of whatever dovin basal–like creatures had served as the engines of the camp ships, vanishing back into hyperspace to return to their starting point.

This much was certain: these ships came at random, infalling through inhabited star systems. These ships had no food supplies, life support, or usable engines. All these ships had was people.

Millions of people.

Hundreds of millions: survivors from the conquest of Coruscant.

Each populated system that unexpectedly found itself the custodian of a camp ship faced a stark choice: it could further strain its war-burdened resources to house and feed the refugees, or it could let them die: smother, or starve, die of thirst, freeze, or slowly cook in their own waste heat. The ships could be simply ignored—left to drift between planets, frozen mausoleums eternally commemorating that stellar system’s callous, lethal neglect of a hundred million lives.

No world of the New Republic could face collective guilt on that scale; if they could, they never would have been admitted to the Republic in the first place.

No one knew if any camp ships had been jumped to uninhabited systems. No one wanted to think about that. Some Jedi explored, feeling with the Force through vast dust-swept reaches; but there had never been many Jedi in the first place, and the few who remained had little time to spare from the war. Planetary and system-wide governments mounted no searches. They couldn’t afford to. They didn’t have the resources to support the refugees who had ended up in their laps already; to search for others would be not only useless, but insane.

Despite painful shortages of both raw materials and technical expertise, the New Republic systems did what they could.

To construct cities big enough to shelter hundreds of millions of people was clearly impossible in the wartime economy, but there was another option. The ships were roomy, and held air against the vacuum of space. So the refugees were kept where they were, while the host systems did their best to supply the overcrowded ships with waste and water recycling, atmosphere scrubbing and replenishment, light, and food.

They became orbital refugee camps. Hence the name.

Life in the camp ships was hard.

Even in the wealthiest systems, every camp ship’s food had to be rationed at the brink of starvation; even the best recyclers couldn’t remove from the water the growing taste of having been used, again and again. Cramped, dirty, stinking: atmosphere plants overloaded with sweat and breath and other variously noxious effluents of a thousand species, atmosphere saturated with enough carbon dioxide to give the entire population continuous thudding headaches—those species, at least, that had heads. Even photosynthetics suffered, despite the oversupply of carbon dioxide, since they were forced to rely on dim, intermittent artificial light.

Everyone suffered, and very, very few were allowed to leave.

No one talked about the real reason the refugees were sequestered aboard the camp ships.

It was this: interplanetary space was the ideal sanitary cordon. Many worlds had received, courtesy of the Yuuzhan Vong, unpleasant surprises along with refugees allowed dirtside. All refugee populations included unguessable numbers of spies, saboteurs, Peace Brigaders, collaborators of all sorts—

And sometimes worse.

   Ganner Rhysode had spent weeks chasing the rumor.

He’d heard it from a tramp navigator in a tavern on Teyr, who’d gotten it from a dock steward at the space-yard on Rothana, who’d been talking to a freighter pilot on the Sisar Run, who’d heard a casual mention from a customs inspector in the Sevarcos system, or maybe it was the Mantooine, or Almania; the inspector had heard it from a friend in the fleet whose cousin was a civilian volunteer on the camp ship at Bothawui.

Ganner had laboriously backtracked each link, chasing across what was left of the New Republic, through weeks in hyperspace and day after day after day of playing “Have you seen—?” with bored clerks and hostile freight loaders, suspicious bureaucrats and sarcastic corridor kids.

By the time he reached the numbered curtain that passed for an apartment door inside the million-celled honeycomb of the camp ship, he was so tired he couldn’t even remember what system he was in.

The number on the curtain was in three parts, giving the coordinates of the chamber’s location as measured from the center of the rough globe of the camp ship; in a ship lacking anything that resembled decks—or even straight lines—three-dimensional coordinates were the only practical addresses these chambers could have. This particular chamber was remote, nearly at the hull, on the side opposite that which the tide-locked ship turned toward the world it orbited.

It was—as Ganner had wryly reflected when he had learned the chamber’s coordinates—on the dark side.

Ganner didn’t look much like Ganner these days: gone was the flashy blouse and tight leather trousers, the gleam of gold piping, the tall, immaculately polished boots. Instead, he wore a shapeless tunic of nondescript brown fabric over baggy gray leggings that hid his boots—now scuffed, and bearing the dirt of dozens of worlds. Gone, too, was the devastating smile and the dashing glint in his clear blue eyes; he’d even let a scruffily curling beard muddy the clean sharp lines of his classic jaw.

This wasn’t exactly a disguise. He’d made no secret of his identity; on the contrary, he wielded his identity as a weapon, to cut through tangled kilometers of bureaucratic red tape that would have kept him off the camp ships. But he was different as he could get from the Ganner he had always been.

Being that old Ganner had done him far too much damage.

Here, for example, outside the chamber: the old Ganner