Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [92]
It wasn’t fear that was making him sick. He was afraid to die, sure, but he’d faced that fear before—without this knee-buckling nausea.
He clutched the handgrip of Anakin’s lightsaber up his sleeve; only that smooth solidity let him keep a composed expression on his face instead of puking down the front of his robe.
Maybe part of what was making Ganner sick was the world itself.
He’d thought he’d be ready for his first view of Coruscant; he’d heard dozens of tales about it from the refugees on the camp ships during his investigation. He’d heard about the insanely prolific jungle that patched the ruined planetary city. He’d been told about the dazzling orbital rings that some of the refugees called the Bridge. He knew that the Yuuzhan Vong had altered Coruscant’s orbit to bring it closer to its star.
But knowing these things was entirely different from walking out of cool shadow into a blue-white noon that jammed needles into his eyeballs and pounded sweat from his hairline, sweat that trickled into his mouth, his ears, trailed like a river down his spine and made his leggings stick to his knees. The air was as humid as a Priapulin’s breath, and smelled like the whole planet had been a monkey-lizard den that somebody had buried in rotting honeyflowers.
The processional spiraled through a titanic hedge maze that was still growing, knitting itself into place around them, huge curving walls of interwoven branches that sported needle-pointed thorns ranging from half a centimeter to as long as Ganner’s arm. Thousands of Yuuzhan Vong of unknown caste clambered up and down and across these walls, festooning them with brilliantly colored epiphytes and flowering vines, hanging living cages and nests occupied by a bewildering variety of creatures so alien Ganner couldn’t even really see them clearly: his eyes kept trying to interpret them as insects or reptiles, rodents or felines or some other type of animal with which he was already familiar, when these were really nothing like anything he’d ever seen before.
He caught some of Jacen’s explanation, that this hedge maze would serve a dual purpose: not only was it a ceremonial avenue, but it would also double as an antipersonnel defense surrounding the all-important Well of the World Brain if Yuuzhan’tar were ever invaded. When mature, the hedge thorns would meet overhead, forming a tunnel twenty meters high and thirty wide, hard as durasteel, fireproof, and resilient enough to minimize the effects of explosives—and the thorns would contain a neurotoxin so potent that a single prick could destroy the central nervous system of any unfortunate creature who touched one. Groundborne invaders would be forced to trace the same route along which the processional now marched, facing dozens of ambush points along the way.
Occasionally, through gaps in the half-completed maze, Ganner could catch glimpses of their destination.
Enveloping the Well of the World Brain was a mountain of yorik coral half a kilometer high, spreading in a shallow dome nearly two kilometers across. Even buried, the shape that underlay the coral mountain was, to anyone who’d ever been to Coruscant, unmistakable.
Ganner knew exactly what it used to be. That might have been part of what was making him feel sick, too.
The Well of the World Brain used to be the Galactic Senate.
The Senate had come through the planetary bombardment with only cosmetic damage; its original architect, a thousand years before, had claimed that any weapon powerful enough to destroy the Galactic Senate would crack the planet itself. While this was a boastful exaggeration, there was no doubt that the Galactic Senate was one of the most durable buildings ever designed. Even the total destruction of the original Senate Hall ten years before had left the structure itself barely damaged; the Grand Convocation Chamber of the New Republic