Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [83]
Ganner’s mouth dropped open. His fingers loosened as his hands fell to his sides; his lightsaber’s blade vanished and the handle clattered on the floor.
When he could finally speak, the only word that could pass through his nerveless mouth was “Jacen …”
“Hi, Ganner,” Jacen said tiredly. He reached into his sleeve and withdrew a small pouch, which he teased open, turning it inside out as he drew it over his hand like a mitten, revealing a small fabric pad that had been inside the pouch. He tossed it to Ganner. “Here, catch.”
Ganner was too astonished to do anything other than catch it reflexively. The pad was damp to his touch, and warm with Jacen’s body heat. “Jacen? What’s going on?”
Numbness gathered in the center of his palm, and began to climb his wrist. He frowned down at the pad in his hand. “What is this?”
“The tears of a friend of mine,” Jacen said. “They’re a contact poison.”
“What?” He stared. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I don’t have much sense of humor these days.” Jacen peeled the pouch off his hand and tossed it aside. “You’ll be unconscious in about fifteen seconds.”
Ganner’s hand was already dead, and his right arm hung limp; the numbness washed into his chest, and when it touched his heart it shot throughout his body. He pitched forward, unable even to lift an arm to break his fall—but Jacen caught him and lowered him gently to the floor.
“Wake the villip,” Jacen said to one of the others—Yuuzhan Vong warriors, Ganner now knew they must be. “Tell Nom Anor that our trap has failed. Other Jedi will follow this one. We must return home.”
Nom Anor? Return home? Ganner thought as darkness closed in around his mind. They’ve done it. They got Jacen.
They’ve turned him.
One of the warriors barked in their harsh tongue.
Jacen shook his head. “No. We’ll take him with us.”
Cough hack snarl—
“Because I say so,” Jacen answered. “Do you dare dispute my word?”
With a final convulsion of his will, Ganner reached out through the Force and seized his lightsaber, lifting it with his mind, squeezing its activation plate to snap the blade to sizzling life. One of the warriors barked a warning in their guttural tongue.
Jacen gestured, and Ganner felt a stronger mind than his take hold of the lightsaber and wrench it from his control. The lightsaber’s blade vanished.
The handgrip bobbed gently in the air between Jacen and the warriors.
“Do not soil yourself by touching the blasphemous weapon,” Jacen said.
The last thing Ganner saw as darkness swallowed him was an amphistaff snaking out from Jacen Solo’s sleeve, to slice the handle of Ganner’s lightsaber neatly in half.
“We will take this pathetic excuse for a Jedi to Yuuzhan’tar,” Jacen Solo said. “Then we’ll kill him.”
Inside a camp ship, a chamber moved. This chamber had been grown specially, bred into this particular camp ship for this particular purpose. It had appeared to be just another chamber within the million-celled honeycomb—but now it cast itself loose and slid along under the camp ship’s hull like a parasite digging its way out through an animal’s skin.
This particular chamber enclosed a pod of yorik coral that had its own dovin basal. This dovin basal could have been used in either of two ways. With one command, it could have generated a gravity field intense enough to crush the entire camp ship into a point mass smaller than a grain of sand; but it had been given the other command, and so it would drive the chamber and its occupants across the galaxy.
The skin of the camp ship developed a small boil. This boil bulged on the ship’s dark side. When it burst, it spat forth the chamber, which instantly streaked away, accelerating frantically into hyperspace, heading for Yuuzhan’tar.
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