Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [54]
“That is why this place is so dangerous,” Vergere said with a hint of a challenging smile. “It is filled with what you would call the dark side. I should say: the dark side is very, very powerful here, more powerful than anywhere else on this planet. As powerful, perhaps, as it is anywhere in the galaxy.”
Jacen lowered the electrobinoculars, blinking. “That’s not the dark side,” he said. “A predator hunts to feed itself and its family. That’s just nature.”
“And the dark side isn’t? I thought the danger of the dark side was that it is natural: that’s why it’s easier than the light, yes?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Is what you have seen not the exemplar of the dark side? Is this not what you fear so much: aggression, violence, passion?”
“You want to know what the real dark side would look like? If that predator had slaughtered the entire herd, just for the fun of it. For the joy of killing.”
“Do you think this predator takes no joy in its successful kill?”
Jacen looked again through the electrobinoculars, watching for a moment as the predator seemed to shiver with delight in its meal. He didn’t answer.
“Kill one, it’s nature, kill them all, it’s the dark side?” Vergere went on. “Is the line between nature and dark side only one of degree? Is it the dark side if that predator kills only half the herd? A quarter?”
He lowered the electrobinoculars once more. “It’s the dark side if it kills more than it needs to feed itself and its family,” he said, heating up. “That’s the line. Killing when you don’t need to kill.”
Vergere cocked her head. “And how do you define need? Are we talking about the line of starvation, or simple malnutrition? Is it the dark side if they only eat half the slain animal? Does a predator partake of the dark side if its family is a few kilos overweight?”
“It’s not about that—”
“Then what is it about? Are we back to why? Does intention always trump action? It’s not the dark side for that predator, say, to slaughter the entire herd and leave them to rot, so long as it thinks it needs them for food?”
“It’s not that simple,” Jacen insisted. “And it’s not always easy to describe—”
“But you know it when you see it, yes?”
He lowered his head stubbornly. “Yes.”
Vergere uncoiled her fingers toward the blood-smeared predator on the slope below. “You didn’t this time …”
Jacen’s answer was interrupted by a shattering thunder-burst that sounded like the whole sky had exploded.
He yelped and threw himself against the wall at his back. Rubble slid and shifted in the crater wall above; an avalanche of duracrete hunks and twisted support beams poured over the lip of the wall to slam the notch’s floor centimeters from Jacen’s knees. Another crash blasted through the sky, and another; he turned sideways to the wall and tucked his head, hands doubled to protect the back of his neck against the pounding of debris. More blasts sounded, but the crater no longer shook, and Jacen risked a glance upward.
“What was that?”
Vergere pointed into the limitless purple above the arch of the Bridge. “There.”
“I don’t see anything—”
“Jacen—” She waved a hand at the electrobinoculars that hung, forgotten, around his neck.
He yanked them to his eyes, aiming where she had pointed. The autofocus sharpened an image, and one of his father’s Corellian curses snuck through his lips. Those explosions hadn’t been explosions, and they hadn’t been thunder.
They’d been sonic booms.
Yorik coral vessels the size of the Millennium Falcon whipped through broad looping arcs