Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [70]
It’s all right. You’ll be all right, he had told her. The robeskin will take care of you. It would not only absorb and eliminate the leftover acids, but also eat necrotic skin on her burns and probably save her from serious infection, even gangrene.
He hadn’t told her that, of course; despite the darkening thunder of the Force rolling through him, he hadn’t been thoughtlessly cruel enough to tell her—after what she’d been through—that the clothing he had given her was already eating parts of her flesh.
And then, clad only in his breechclout, he had looked up and seen the others. The cavern-beast people, fifty-odd of them. Some of them had blasters.
Some of the blasters had been pointed at him.
“It was so—so sick. I couldn’t believe it.” Jacen shook his head. “I didn’t want to believe it.”
Anakin stared at him patiently.
“Worse than Peace Brigaders. Worse than anything I can think of.” Jacen shut his eyes against the memory. “They were living in there.”
The cavern beast was a conservative predator: if its telepathic bait captured more animals than it needed for food, captured survivors could live for a considerable while inside. The moisture that had dripped continuously from the “stalactites” was actually an internal food reserve, analogous to a human’s stored fats and glycogen, that could both hydrate and nourish creatures in the cavern beast’s multiple crops. The cavern beast processed waste matter ultra-efficiently, extracting nutrition from its captives’ feces and water from its captives’ urine, and the body heat given off by captives helped the cavern beast regulate its internal temperature. When it needed the extra nutrition of a living body, it could squeeze one of its inhabited crops, forcing captives down the gullet to the stomach chamber.
“They were mostly downlevel refugees who’d missed the evacuation—but some of them were escaped slaves, from the seedship. The Yuuzhan Vong are familiar with cavern beasts, and they avoid them; it wouldn’t surprise me if these were the original unshaped baseline from which they bred their worldships, like the one where you … the one at Myrkr.” He coughed, obscurely embarrassed. “Sorry.”
it’s okay, jace. Anakin’s grin was easy, friendly. don’t worry about me. i’m not sensitive.
Jacen nodded. “I guess I am, though.”
you always were. go on.
Jacen sighed sadly, but anger began to trickle through his guts again. “So it makes a perfect hiding place from the Yuuzhan Vong patrols. The cavern beast hides them, gives them shelter, water, food—sometimes it lures in animals that can be killed and eaten, or traps a refugee who’s carrying a stash of protein squares or whatever. There’s only one problem. Every once in a while it gets hungry. Sometimes there’s an animal or two that can be thrown to the stomachs.”
Jacen swallowed and looked at the ceiling. Brilliant green fingers of moss had crept in through the crack forced open by the immense taproot. “And sometimes—” His voice came out thick, hoarse with remembered fury. “—sometimes there isn’t.”
Anakin nodded gravely. the girl.
“Yeah, the girl. They had a rule: last to arrive is first to go. First to go … in. The girl had gotten there only a few hours before me. But some of them—the ones who did that to her—” His breath went hot, and his vision began to haze subtly red. “Some of them had been in there for weeks. Weeks, do you understand? Do you understand what they were doing? How many—how many people—” He had to stop, panting, until he could force the rage back down below his throat.
Anakin watched him expressionlessly.
Finally, he could go on. “They