Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [29]
He’d heard the harsh bark of a warrior’s order at the edge of the pond, and he’d looked up in time to see a flicker of amphistaff blade conjure a jet of shimmering black blood. He had pushed and shoved and fought his way through the mob to find the Devaronian lying on his back in a scatter of the grasses he had carried, one hand clutching at the stump of his other arm.
Jacen had done everything he could, which wasn’t much. Before he could tie off the stump, the Devaronian was in deep shock; death had followed only a minute or two later.
Jacen had had time to study the Devaronian’s face: the bleakly pale hide, the spray of needle teeth behind thick leathern lips, the small forehead horns curving in growth rings that Jacen could count with his fingertips. He’d had time to gaze into the Devaronian’s vivid red eyes, to read there a puzzled sadness at the useless, empty, arbitrary death that now swallowed him.
That’s when Jacen thought, Okay, maybe I was wrong.
There were weeds here, after all.
He lifted his head, and met the eyes of a weed.
The warrior who had killed the Devaronian returned his gaze impassively, black-smeared amphistaff at the ready.
Which are flowers? Which are weeds? It is not only your right to choose flowers over weeds, it is your responsibility.
Vergere’s words rang true. But Jacen doubted the truth he’d found in them was the truth she had intended. He discovered that he didn’t really care what Vergere had intended. He had chosen.
Expressionlessly, he rose and turned his back on the warrior, and moved away into the mob.
He’d decided who the weeds were.
You want gardening? he thought with icy clarity. Just wait. I’ll show you gardening.
Just you wait.
FOUR
THE WILL OF THE GODS
A battered, barren world circled a blue-white spark of fusion fire. This world had seen the rise and fall of nation after nation, from simple provincial states to planetary confederations to interstellar empires and galactic republics. It had been the scene of a million battles, from simple surface skirmishes to the destruction of whole civilizations. It had been ravaged by war and reconstruction until its original environment survived only beneath sterile polar ice caps; it was the most artificial world of a galactic culture devoted to artifice. The whole planet had become a machine.
This was about to change.
Its new masters began by stealing its moons.
Stripped from orbit by dovin basal gravity drives, the three smaller moons were steered well away, while the largest was pulverized by tidal stress created by pulses from other yammosk-linked dovin basals. A refined application of similar techniques organized the resultant mass of dust and gravel and lumps of hardening magma into a thick spreading ring-disk of rubble that rotated around the planet at an angle seventeen degrees from the ecliptic.
This, while dramatic in itself, was only a prologue.
Dovin basals had been grown on the planet’s surface.
The effect of gravity can be profitably described topographically, as an altered curvature of space-time. The dovin basals on the planet’s surface altered the curve of local space-time in such a way that the direction of the planet’s orbit became, roughly speaking, uphill.
The planet slowed. Slowing, it fell inward, toward its sun.
It got warmer.
On its long slow fall toward its sun, the planet suffered a bombardment of small meteors, carefully sized and with their angle of atmospheric entry precisely calculated so that they would reach an average temperature sufficient to vaporize their primary mineral, without cracking it into its constituent molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. The primary mineral of these small meteors was a mineral only in the black chill of interplanetary space; by the time it reached the warming surface, it had lost its crystalline structure, and was simply water.
For the first time