Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [0]
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All rights reserved. Used under authorization. Excerpt from Destiny’s Way by Walter Jon Williams copyright © 2002 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All rights reserved. Used under authorization.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-79555-7
v3.1
for the teachers
DRAMATIS
PERSONAE
Ch’ Gang Hool; master shaper (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Ganner Rhysode; Jedi Knight (male human)
Jacen Solo; Jedi Knight (male human)
Nom Anor; executor (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Tsavong Lah; warmaster (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Vergere (female Fosh)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Dramatis: Personae
Prologue: The Embrace of Pain
Part One: Descent
Chapter One: Cocoon
Chapter Two: The Nursery
Chapter Three: The Garden
Chapter Four: The Will of the Gods
Chapter Five: Seedfall
Part Two: The Cave
Chapter Six: Home
Chapter Seven: The Crater
Chapter Eight: Into the Dark
Chapter Nine: The Belly of the Beast
Chapter Ten: Home Free
Part Three: The Gates of Death
Chapter Eleven: Traitor
Chapter Twelve: The Light of the True Way
Chapter Thirteen: Glory Sickness
Chapter Fourteen: Path of Destiny
Epilogue: Lessons
About the Author
Also by this Author
Introduction to the Star Wars Expanded Universe
Excerpt from Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Destiny's Way
Introduction to the Old Republic Era
Introduction to the Rise of the Empire Era
Introduction to the Rebellion Era
Introduction to the New Republic Era
Introduction to the New Jedi Order Era
Introduction to the Legacy Era
Star Wars Novels Timeline
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