Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [128]
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PROLOGUE
THE EMBRACE OF PAIN
Outside the universe, there is nothing.
This nothing is called hyperspace.
A tiny bubble of existence hangs in the nothing. This bubble is called a ship.
The bubble has neither motion nor stillness, nor even orientation, since the nothing has no distance or direction. It hangs there forever, or for less than an instant, because in the nothing there is also no time. Time, distance, and direction have meaning only inside the bubble, and the bubble maintains the existence of these things only by an absolute separation of what is within from what is without.
The bubble is its own universe.
Outside the universe, there is nothing.
Jacen Solo hangs in the white, exploring the spectrum of pain.
In the far infrared, he finds cinders of thirst that bake his throat. Higher, up in the visible wavelengths, gleam the crimson wire-stretched ligaments that sizzle within his shoulders; grinding glass-shard screams howl from his hip joints like the death shrieks of golden Ithorian starflowers. There is green here, too—bubbling tongues of acid hungrily lick his nerves—as well as lightning-blue shocks that spasm his overloaded body into convulsion.
And higher still, now far beyond the ultraviolet betrayal that brought him here—the betrayal that delivered him into the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong, the betrayal that gathered him into the Embrace of Pain, the betrayal by Vergere, whom he had trusted—he finds silent shattering gamma-ray bursts sleeting into his brain.
Those gamma-ray bursts are the color of his brother’s death.
Anakin, he moans, somewhere deep within himself. Anakin, how can you be dead?
He has faced deaths in his family before; more than once, he thought Jaina lost, or his father, or mother or Uncle Luke. He has grieved, mourned them—but it was always a mistake, it was a misunderstanding, sometimes even a deliberate trick … In the end, they always came back to him.
Until Chewbacca.
When the moon crashed on Sernpidal, it shattered not only Chewbacca’s life but also the magic charm that had always seemed to guard them all. Something in the universe has tilted to one side and opened a gap in reality; through that gap, death has slipped into his family.
Anakin …
Jacen saw him die. Felt him die, through the Force. Saw his lifeless body in the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong. Anakin didn’t even fade.
He only died.
In one impossible instant, Anakin ceased to be the brother Jacen played with, teased, looked after, played tricks on, fought with, cared for, trained with, loved—and became … what? An object. Remains. Not a person, not anymore. Now, the only person who is Anakin is the image Jacen carries in his heart.
An image that Jacen cannot even let himself see.
Each flash of Anakin—his reckless grin so like their father’s, his eyes smoldering with fierce will mirroring their mother’s, his effortlessly athletic warrior’s grace, so much like Uncle Luke’s—these are the gamma bursts that burn the marrow of his bones, that cook his brain until its boil threatens to burst his skull.
But when he looks away from Anakin, there is nothing to see but pain.
He cannot remember if he is on a ship, or still planet-bound. He finds a vague memory of capture aboard a Yuuzhan Vong worldship, but he’s not sure if that happened to him, or to someone else. He cannot remember if such distinctions mean anything. All he knows is the white.
He remembers that he’s been captured before. He remembers Belkadan, remembers his vain dream of freeing slaves, remembers the blank terror of discovering that his Force