Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [14]
The vessel of yorik coral slowed to intercept the sphere, angling toward one of the smooth fleshy expanses between the radiating fins. As it closed the final few meters, a docking claw like the chelicerae of a spider-roach extended from its nose and gripped the semi-elastic surface. A few moments passed while dovin basals shimmered space-time at each other, and the signals thus exchanged were interpreted by specially bred cousins of villips, which passed on the information to the creatures who served as the guiding wills of the two living structures: shapers of the Yuuzhan Vong.
The smooth plain to which the vessel had attached itself bunched into sudden landscape, gathering into a spasmic impact crater whose rim reached out and out and out. A hundred meters beyond the nether tip of the coral vessel, the rim became lips, the crater a mouth that closed around the vessel, slowly contracting to vacuum-fit itself to the vessel’s every angle and curve.
The sphere swallowed.
Within seconds, the place where the vessel had rested was once again a broad, smooth plain of semi-elastic flesh, featureless and warm.
Jacen opened his eyes as the hatch sphincter dilated. Vergere stood outside. She did not seem inclined to enter. “You’re looking well.”
He shrugged and sat up. He chafed the new scars around his wrists, where the Embrace of Pain had rasped away his skin. The last of his scabs had peeled off two sleeps ago. “I haven’t seen you for a while,” he said.
“Yes.” Vergere’s crest fanned an inquiring green. “How have you been enjoying your vacation from the Embrace? I see your wrists have healed. How do your shoulders feel? Your hips and ankles? Can you walk?”
Jacen shrugged again, looking down. He had lost track of how many times he had slept and awakened again since the Embrace of Pain had finally released him. While his body had knit, he had never been able to make himself do more than glance at the branches and tentacles and sensory orbs of the Embrace of Pain. They were still up there, coiled around each other in eel-basket knots, pulsing faintly. Waiting. He didn’t know why they had released him.
He was afraid that if he stared at them too long, they would remember he was here.
Vergere extended a hand. “Arise, Jacen Solo. Arise and walk.”
He met her gaze, blinking astonishment. “For real?” he asked. “You’re taking me out of here? For real?”
A liquid shrug rippled along her too-flexible arm. “That depends,” she said sunnily, “on what you mean by here. And what you mean by real. But to stay where you are, while this chamber is—I believe the Basic word is—digested, yes? This you would not enjoy.”
“Enjoy … Oh, right. I forgot,” he muttered. “I’m supposed to be having fun.”
“You mean you’re not?” She tossed him a crude robe that seemed to be woven of coarse, unbleached fiber. “Let’s see if we can find you a residence more entertaining, hmm?”
He forced himself to his feet and slipped the robe over his head. The robe was warm to the touch; it writhed gently as he struggled into it, fibers bunching and unbunching like sleepy worms. Putting it on hurt. Slower to heal than his skin, his shoulders and hip joints grated as though packed with chunks of duracrete, but he didn’t so much as grimace.
This was merely pain; he barely noticed.
She held something in her other hand: a baling hook of sun-yellowed bone, long and curved and sharp.
He stopped. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“In your hand. Is that some kind of weapon?”
Her crest flattened and spread again, its green now shimmering with yellow highlights. “Why would I carry a weapon? Am I in danger?”
“I—” Jacen rubbed his eyes. Now only a blur hung from her fist; had he seen what he thought he saw?
“Probably just a trick of the light,” Vergere