Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [35]
Dozens more thud bugs curve toward him, homing like concussion missiles as he sprints straight at the oncoming squads of heavily armed warriors. The nearest warrior thrusts his amphistaff at Jacen like a force pike. Jacen dives beneath its point, rolling forward on his shoulder, stabbing upward; his blade enters the warrior’s body at the joining of pelvis and thigh. The pursuing thud bugs denotate massively, scattering warriors like toy soldiers swiped away by the invisible hand of a giant child as Jacen’s momentum completes the roll, bringing him to one knee and driving the blade upward through the warrior’s groin and entrails and chest.
Only energy fields like its own can withstand the amphistaff’s edge; the shells of vonduun crabs are intricately structured crystal, reinforced by a field generated by power glands very similar to those of the amphistaff itself. But that field protects only the shell; beneath their shells, vonduun crabs are soft, and when Jacen’s blade slices through the crab’s field-nerve cable from the inside, the armor might as well be made of bantha butter.
A multiple blast bug detonation slaps the warrior forward, and Jacen’s blade shears through spine and armor alike to burst from the warrior’s back in a fountain of gore—and slices as well through the warrior’s blast bug bandolier. As Jacen rolls backward with the concussion and kicks free of the shuddering corpse, he grabs the severed bandolier. An instant later, he is up again, running, staggering, stumbling, deafened and half stunned by the explosions. Behind him, the warrior squads scramble and regroup. Jacen ignores them.
All his attention, all his concentration, all his will, is focused on the blast bug bandolier in his hand.
The bandolier is bleeding from its severed ends; dying, its sole wish is to release its children—the blast bugs locked in its linked belt of hexagonal germination chambers—so that they might fulfill their explosive destiny. Jacen can keenly feel its desire. In the emotional language of his empathic talent, he promises the ultimate satisfaction of this desire, if the bandolier will only wait for his signal.
Ahead, the remaining two squads draw themselves into a tight wedge, its point toward Jacen, its broad base covering the bacta-tank-sized tub that holds the shreeyam’tiz. As more blast bugs hum toward him from all directions, Jacen heaves the bandolier overhand like a proton grenade; it twists lazily, high through the stark noon.
With his empathic talent, he projects a pulse-hammer thrill of anticipation teetering over the brink to fulfillment, a shuddering surge of adrenaline that would roughly translate as—
Now!
The bandolier flares into a starshell over the base of the wedge at the same time as the blast bugs targeted on Jacen arrive in a thundering swarm, striking him and the ground and the warriors nearby indiscriminately, concussion bursts battering them all helplessly this way and that, ending with Jacen finally blown off his feet into a high spinning arc through the air.
As the inside-out world wheels around him in a darkening blood-tinged whirl, Jacen has time to feel the agony from his slave seed-web suddenly ease and to push an exhausted empathic invitation down through the slave seed. All right, my friend. Now it’s your turn.
The blood-tinged darkness swallows him before he hits the ground.
* * *
“There, you see?” Nom Anor nodded contemptuously toward the suddenly vivid image in the viewspider’s optical sac, showing Jacen lying unconscious, bleeding on the blast-shredded Nursery turf, still within his improvised armor of amphistaffs. “Your ‘greatest of all the Jedi’ has succeeded in killing a mere two or three warriors. A useless, weak fool—”
“You are not paying attention,” Vergere chimed. “I ask you again: let me go to him before we are