Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [96]
“I’m … I am—” not going to screw this up, Ganner swore to himself. “—okay. I’m okay. I’m right behind you.”
The tunnel’s roof opened to a vast cavernous red-lit space overhead, and the walls, too, fell away; the tunnel’s floor became a cantilevered bridgeway out to a circular platform ten meters across, which hung unsupported in great swirls of sulfurous mist that burned Ganner’s throat and scoured tears from his eyes.
“What is this place?”
“Look around,” Jacen said grimly. If the scorching heat or brimstone-reeking fog bothered him at all, he didn’t show it. He seemed to be listening for something. “Give me a minute. I have to concentrate.”
Ganner barely heard him. He gaped, turning in a slow, dumbfounded circle.
This used to be the Senate’s Grand Convocation Chamber.
A hundred meters below, where once had stood the pillar of the Chief of State’s Podium, there now boiled a great pool of glowing slime; huge bubbles roiled to the surface, bursting into flares of scarlet and starflower yellow—it was from this pool that the light came.
Rising around the pool, a gargantuan bowl of yorik coral climbed the staggered rank upon rank of Senatorial platforms, slowly scaling the walls toward the dim, shadowed vault of the ceiling.
And down in that pool of glowing slime, a vast fleshy bulge moved, breaching the surface in a slick black curve before submerging once more.
Ganner jolted back from the edge. “Gyahh—! Jacen, there’s something down there!”
“Yeah.” Jacen stepped to the front edge of the platform. “Don’t worry. It’s a friend of mine.”
“A friend?” Ganner looked down again—and again the creature breached: black, bloated, a ghastly stomach turned inside out, swollen with malice. A yellow eye the size of an X-wing glared up at them, blinking, wiped by a triple layer of transparent eyelids that slid across its surface at different angles to scrape it free of slime.
Then a second eye appeared, blinked, and fixed on them: a parallax, for ranging. A spray of tentacles shot upward from the slime.
Ganner threw himself backward as tentacles hissed through the fog around them, impossibly flexible ropes of muscle slicing the air so fast he couldn’t even tell how many there were. Tentacles slammed against the platform, knocking Ganner half off his feet, chipping away head-sized hunks of coral.
Jacen never moved.
“This—uh, friend of yours,” Ganner said shakily. “It doesn’t seem too happy to see you …”
“Yeah, well, I can’t say I’m surprised. The last time we saw each other, I was trying to kill it.”
“To kill—uh, your friend?” Gazing downward in a daze of horrified revulsion, Ganner tried a laugh; it came out too high, too tight, too close to a hysterical giggle. “How do you treat your enemies?”
Jacen cocked his head, his brown eyes suddenly thoughtful, then he shrugged. “I don’t have any enemies.”
“What?”
Jacen pointed at an angle, down across the Well. “See that platform—the one sticking out under that fold of coral? That’s the platform for the Kashyyyk delegation. They like manual doors. I know you’re not as strong as a Wookiee, but with the Force you should be able to get them open.”
“Down there?” Ganner clutched his guts again. “You want me to go in there?”
“Listen: straight back on your right you’ll find the Kashyyyk Senator’s private office. There’s a turbolift shaft behind a concealed door by his desk. Just slide down the inside of the shaft; it’ll take you right into the tunnels.”
Tunnels? A secret turboshaft? When was Jacen going to start making sense? “What would the Wookiees be doing with a secret turboshaft?”
“I think all the delegates’ offices had them: They go into concealed tunnels that are full of shielded conference rooms for secret meetings and stuff. They even connect with Fey’lya’s offices in the Imperial Palace.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Ganner,” Jacen said