[PDD] Traitor (SPOILERS)
Posted: 2002-08-17 07:19am
Here you go, I loved this book BTW:
Pg. 10: "You have no business with the Force, nor it with you. Let you have the Force? The idea! It must be some kind of human thing-you mammals are so impulsive, so reckless: infants teething on a blaster. No, no, no, little Solo. The Force is much too dangerous for children. A great deal more dangerous than those ridiculous lightsabers you all seem to like to wave about. So I took it away from you."
Pg. 34: "The two are, in this case, more closely related than the warmaster might suspect. For a quarter of a standard century, the Solo family has dominated galactic affairs of all kinds. Even the warmaster of the Jedi is none other than Jacen Solo's uncle. This uncle, Luke Skywalker, is popularly considered to have singlehandedly created the Nev Republic by defeating an older, much more rational government called the Empire. And, I might add, it is fortunate for us that he did; the Empire was vastly more organized, powerful, and potently militaristic. Lacking the internal divisions we have exploited so successfully in the New Republic, the Empire could have crushed our people utterly in their first encounter."
Pg. 38: The vessel was not alone. These answering ripples had a direction; the dovin basals of the small vessel were sensitive enough to register the femtosecond-scale difference between the instant one dovin basal detected a wave of space-time and the instant that wave reached its twin.
Pg. 45: Those hills overhead were only a klick away, maybe a klick and a half. The "sun" must have been some kind of artificial fusion source, probably not much bigger than Jacen's fist. He nodded to himself; with the fine gravity control wielded by dovin basals, it wouldn't be much of a trick to contain a fusion furnace. Filtering out damaging radiation would be trickier, though. He couldn't guess how they managed it without shield technology; he'd never been technical.
Pg. 49: "Like all complex creatures," she said, "the Yuuzhan Vong homeworld will require a brain."
The creatures were called dhuryams.
Related to yammosks, dhuryams are fully as specialized as the giant war coordinators, but bred for a different, much more complex type of telepathic coordination. Bigger, stronger, vastly more powerful, dhuryams are capable of mentally melding many, many more disparate elements than the greatest yammosk that ever lived.
Pg. 56: His robe had healed weeks ago. Even the bloodstain was gone. He suspected that the robeskins lived on the secr~tions of the creatures who wore them: sweat, blood, sloughed skin cells, and oils. His was large and healthy, even though he continually ripped strips from it for bandages, both for himself and for the wounded slaves he treated; it always grew back to the original length within a day or two.
Pg. 60-61: "How—? " he gasped. "How could you possibly—"
"Didn't I tell you to keep that in place?" Vergere slapped the bandage flat again, then briskly tied it down with the strips she'd torn from Jacen's robeskin.
"Those tears—what are they? " Jacen asked, awed.
"Whatever I choose them to be."
"I don't understand."
"If you still had the Force, it would be obvious. Females of my species have very sophisticated lachrymal glands; even the Force-bund can—could-^alter their tears to produce a wide range of pheromonal signals and chemical intoxicants for use on our males. Using the Force, my control is very precise: I can match the molecular structure of my tears to my desire, whether that desire be a systemic cure for coornb-spore infection — or merely a potent topical antibiotic with instant steroidal properties."
Pg. 70: This was what he knew and understood: the answer for the Yuuzhan Vong was the same as the answer for himself.
There is no life without the Force. The human eye does not register electromagnetic energy outside the tiny band of frequencies called visible light-but even though you can't see them, those frequencies exist. The Yuuzhan Vong and their creations must participate in a part of the Force that is beyond the range of Jedi senses.
That's all. Jacen stood on the hillock, staring down at the dhuryam island with its ring of warrior-guards, and he thought, The Yuuzhan Vong aren't the only ones who participate in a part of the Force that is outside the range of fedi senses.
I do, too.
Pg. 79-80: Its new masters began by stealing its moons. Stripped from orbit by dovin basal gravity drives, the three smaller moons were steered well away, while the largest was pulverized by tidal stress created by pulses from other yammosk-linked dovin basals. A refined application of similar techniques organized the resultant mass of dust and gravel and lumps of hardening magma into a thick spreading ring-disk of rubble that rotated around the planet at an angle seventeen degrees from the ecliptic. This, while dramatic in itself, was only a prologue.
Dovin basals had been grown on the planet's surface.
The effect of gravity can be profitably described topographically, as an altered curvature of space-time. The dovin basals on the planet's surface altered the curve of local space-time in such a way that the direction of the planet's orbit became, roughly speaking, uphill. The planet slowed. Slowing, it fell inward, toward its sun.
It got warmer.
Pg. 89: Through his empathic connection, Jacen shows them the ground he recommends. Trusting their friend, the amphistaffs take his advice. He stretches forth his arms. The warriors can only stare in openmouthed awe as amphistaffs fall like leaves from the polyps at his back; as amphistaffs wriggle down the polyps' knobby leathern trunks and slither through the grass.
Amphistaffs twine about Jacen's ankles and climb his body like vines enveloping a forgotten jungle idol. They twist around his legs, his hips, his chest, coiling the length of his arms, shrouding his neck, curving up to embrace even his skull. The approaching squads of fully armed warriors slow uncertainly, not quite sure, now, how to attack. Because the vonduun crab is not the only creature that can resist the cut of an amphistaff blade.
Jacen brings his hands together before him, and offers the warriors a solemn bow. When he parts his hands again, a mature amphistaff stretches between them, blade and spike, fully envenomed. As is everyone of the seventeen amphistaffs that make up his armor.
Jacen says, "I'd like you all to meet some friends of mine."
Pg. 93: Jacen Solo sprints into battle.
As he runs, he makes an image in his mind. The amphistaff he carries matches itself to this image, coiling more than half its length around his forearm. An internal pulse from its linked chain of power glands generates an energy field that rigidifies its semicrystalline cell structure, locking it in that form: a meter of it extends from his right fist, tipped with a double-handspan blade. The same field that rigidifies the amphistaff extends a fractional millimeter beyond the blade, giving it an edge no thicker than an atomic diameter.
Pg. 94: Only energy fields like its own can withstand the amphistaff's edge; the shells of vonduun crabs are intricately structured crystal, reinforced by a field generated by power glands very similar to those of the amphistaff itself.
Pg. 166-167: Why would the Jedi Council... build its Temple upon... a nexus of the dark side?"
"Vergere, I-" He shook his head helplessly. "I have to go. I have to go before-before I..." hurt you again, he finished silently. He touldn't say it out loud. Not here. "I don't have time for guessing games."
"No guessing. . ." she said. "The answer is... simple.
They wouldn't." He went very, very still. "What do you mean? I can feel the dark side here. I touched the dark side, and it, and it, it touched me-"
"No. What you feel is the Force." Slowly, painfully, she lifted herself onto her elbows, and she met his blankly astonished stare. "This is the shameful secret of the Jedi:There is no dark side."
How could she lie here with smoke still rising from the shreds of her clothing, and expect him to believe this? "Vergere, I know better. What do you think just happened here?"
"The Force is one, Jacen Solo. The Force is everything, and everything is the Force. I've told you already: the Force does not take sides. The Force does not even have sides."
"That's not true! It isn't-" The red tide surged into his chest, reaching for his heart. Everything I tell you is a lie. This was only another of her lies. It had to be. If it wasn't- He couldn't let himself think it. He shook his head hard enough to make his ears ring. "It's a lie-"
"No. Search your feelings. You know this to be true. The Force is one."
But he could feel the dark side: he was drowning in it.
"Light and dark are no more than nomenclature: words that describe how little we understand."
Pg. 168: "What you call the dark side is the raw, unrestrained Force itself: you call the dark side what you find when you give yourself over wholly to the Force. To be a Jedi is to control your passion... but Jedi control limits your power. Greatness-true greatness of any kind-requires the surrender of control. Passion that is guided, not walled away. Leave your limits behind."
...
"If your surrender leads to slaughter, that is not because the Force has darkness in it. It is because you do."
Pg. 174: Jacen burst into a sprint; the Force lent wings to his heels, driving him inhumanly fast, and faster, and faster still. He covered the hundred meters in an eye blink, and found Anakin still well ahead, still looking back? beckoning? urging him onward.
Pg. 193: "I remember feeling them through the Force as their fake regret turned to real fear. I remember liking it."
They had fired on him, blaster bolts streaking scarlet through the greenish acid-fog. Laughing, Jacen had caught their blaster bolts with the palm of his right hand, effortlessly channeling away the destructive energies before they could do him harm. Flicks of his wrist had seized those blasters with the Force and tossed them negligently aside.
Pg. 193: While the Force had roared through his head, he'd reached down into the hollow center of his chest, into the void where the slave seed had been, and there he had found the dim semiconsciousness of the cavern beast. With the Force for power, he'd created a delusion: a simple conviction so deeply rooted in the cavern beast's murky mind that no evidence to the contrary could ever shake it.
Humans are poisonous.
Pg. 10: "You have no business with the Force, nor it with you. Let you have the Force? The idea! It must be some kind of human thing-you mammals are so impulsive, so reckless: infants teething on a blaster. No, no, no, little Solo. The Force is much too dangerous for children. A great deal more dangerous than those ridiculous lightsabers you all seem to like to wave about. So I took it away from you."
Pg. 34: "The two are, in this case, more closely related than the warmaster might suspect. For a quarter of a standard century, the Solo family has dominated galactic affairs of all kinds. Even the warmaster of the Jedi is none other than Jacen Solo's uncle. This uncle, Luke Skywalker, is popularly considered to have singlehandedly created the Nev Republic by defeating an older, much more rational government called the Empire. And, I might add, it is fortunate for us that he did; the Empire was vastly more organized, powerful, and potently militaristic. Lacking the internal divisions we have exploited so successfully in the New Republic, the Empire could have crushed our people utterly in their first encounter."
Pg. 38: The vessel was not alone. These answering ripples had a direction; the dovin basals of the small vessel were sensitive enough to register the femtosecond-scale difference between the instant one dovin basal detected a wave of space-time and the instant that wave reached its twin.
Pg. 45: Those hills overhead were only a klick away, maybe a klick and a half. The "sun" must have been some kind of artificial fusion source, probably not much bigger than Jacen's fist. He nodded to himself; with the fine gravity control wielded by dovin basals, it wouldn't be much of a trick to contain a fusion furnace. Filtering out damaging radiation would be trickier, though. He couldn't guess how they managed it without shield technology; he'd never been technical.
Pg. 49: "Like all complex creatures," she said, "the Yuuzhan Vong homeworld will require a brain."
The creatures were called dhuryams.
Related to yammosks, dhuryams are fully as specialized as the giant war coordinators, but bred for a different, much more complex type of telepathic coordination. Bigger, stronger, vastly more powerful, dhuryams are capable of mentally melding many, many more disparate elements than the greatest yammosk that ever lived.
Pg. 56: His robe had healed weeks ago. Even the bloodstain was gone. He suspected that the robeskins lived on the secr~tions of the creatures who wore them: sweat, blood, sloughed skin cells, and oils. His was large and healthy, even though he continually ripped strips from it for bandages, both for himself and for the wounded slaves he treated; it always grew back to the original length within a day or two.
Pg. 60-61: "How—? " he gasped. "How could you possibly—"
"Didn't I tell you to keep that in place?" Vergere slapped the bandage flat again, then briskly tied it down with the strips she'd torn from Jacen's robeskin.
"Those tears—what are they? " Jacen asked, awed.
"Whatever I choose them to be."
"I don't understand."
"If you still had the Force, it would be obvious. Females of my species have very sophisticated lachrymal glands; even the Force-bund can—could-^alter their tears to produce a wide range of pheromonal signals and chemical intoxicants for use on our males. Using the Force, my control is very precise: I can match the molecular structure of my tears to my desire, whether that desire be a systemic cure for coornb-spore infection — or merely a potent topical antibiotic with instant steroidal properties."
Pg. 70: This was what he knew and understood: the answer for the Yuuzhan Vong was the same as the answer for himself.
There is no life without the Force. The human eye does not register electromagnetic energy outside the tiny band of frequencies called visible light-but even though you can't see them, those frequencies exist. The Yuuzhan Vong and their creations must participate in a part of the Force that is beyond the range of Jedi senses.
That's all. Jacen stood on the hillock, staring down at the dhuryam island with its ring of warrior-guards, and he thought, The Yuuzhan Vong aren't the only ones who participate in a part of the Force that is outside the range of fedi senses.
I do, too.
Pg. 79-80: Its new masters began by stealing its moons. Stripped from orbit by dovin basal gravity drives, the three smaller moons were steered well away, while the largest was pulverized by tidal stress created by pulses from other yammosk-linked dovin basals. A refined application of similar techniques organized the resultant mass of dust and gravel and lumps of hardening magma into a thick spreading ring-disk of rubble that rotated around the planet at an angle seventeen degrees from the ecliptic. This, while dramatic in itself, was only a prologue.
Dovin basals had been grown on the planet's surface.
The effect of gravity can be profitably described topographically, as an altered curvature of space-time. The dovin basals on the planet's surface altered the curve of local space-time in such a way that the direction of the planet's orbit became, roughly speaking, uphill. The planet slowed. Slowing, it fell inward, toward its sun.
It got warmer.
Pg. 89: Through his empathic connection, Jacen shows them the ground he recommends. Trusting their friend, the amphistaffs take his advice. He stretches forth his arms. The warriors can only stare in openmouthed awe as amphistaffs fall like leaves from the polyps at his back; as amphistaffs wriggle down the polyps' knobby leathern trunks and slither through the grass.
Amphistaffs twine about Jacen's ankles and climb his body like vines enveloping a forgotten jungle idol. They twist around his legs, his hips, his chest, coiling the length of his arms, shrouding his neck, curving up to embrace even his skull. The approaching squads of fully armed warriors slow uncertainly, not quite sure, now, how to attack. Because the vonduun crab is not the only creature that can resist the cut of an amphistaff blade.
Jacen brings his hands together before him, and offers the warriors a solemn bow. When he parts his hands again, a mature amphistaff stretches between them, blade and spike, fully envenomed. As is everyone of the seventeen amphistaffs that make up his armor.
Jacen says, "I'd like you all to meet some friends of mine."
Pg. 93: Jacen Solo sprints into battle.
As he runs, he makes an image in his mind. The amphistaff he carries matches itself to this image, coiling more than half its length around his forearm. An internal pulse from its linked chain of power glands generates an energy field that rigidifies its semicrystalline cell structure, locking it in that form: a meter of it extends from his right fist, tipped with a double-handspan blade. The same field that rigidifies the amphistaff extends a fractional millimeter beyond the blade, giving it an edge no thicker than an atomic diameter.
Pg. 94: Only energy fields like its own can withstand the amphistaff's edge; the shells of vonduun crabs are intricately structured crystal, reinforced by a field generated by power glands very similar to those of the amphistaff itself.
Pg. 166-167: Why would the Jedi Council... build its Temple upon... a nexus of the dark side?"
"Vergere, I-" He shook his head helplessly. "I have to go. I have to go before-before I..." hurt you again, he finished silently. He touldn't say it out loud. Not here. "I don't have time for guessing games."
"No guessing. . ." she said. "The answer is... simple.
They wouldn't." He went very, very still. "What do you mean? I can feel the dark side here. I touched the dark side, and it, and it, it touched me-"
"No. What you feel is the Force." Slowly, painfully, she lifted herself onto her elbows, and she met his blankly astonished stare. "This is the shameful secret of the Jedi:There is no dark side."
How could she lie here with smoke still rising from the shreds of her clothing, and expect him to believe this? "Vergere, I know better. What do you think just happened here?"
"The Force is one, Jacen Solo. The Force is everything, and everything is the Force. I've told you already: the Force does not take sides. The Force does not even have sides."
"That's not true! It isn't-" The red tide surged into his chest, reaching for his heart. Everything I tell you is a lie. This was only another of her lies. It had to be. If it wasn't- He couldn't let himself think it. He shook his head hard enough to make his ears ring. "It's a lie-"
"No. Search your feelings. You know this to be true. The Force is one."
But he could feel the dark side: he was drowning in it.
"Light and dark are no more than nomenclature: words that describe how little we understand."
Pg. 168: "What you call the dark side is the raw, unrestrained Force itself: you call the dark side what you find when you give yourself over wholly to the Force. To be a Jedi is to control your passion... but Jedi control limits your power. Greatness-true greatness of any kind-requires the surrender of control. Passion that is guided, not walled away. Leave your limits behind."
...
"If your surrender leads to slaughter, that is not because the Force has darkness in it. It is because you do."
Pg. 174: Jacen burst into a sprint; the Force lent wings to his heels, driving him inhumanly fast, and faster, and faster still. He covered the hundred meters in an eye blink, and found Anakin still well ahead, still looking back? beckoning? urging him onward.
Pg. 193: "I remember feeling them through the Force as their fake regret turned to real fear. I remember liking it."
They had fired on him, blaster bolts streaking scarlet through the greenish acid-fog. Laughing, Jacen had caught their blaster bolts with the palm of his right hand, effortlessly channeling away the destructive energies before they could do him harm. Flicks of his wrist had seized those blasters with the Force and tossed them negligently aside.
Pg. 193: While the Force had roared through his head, he'd reached down into the hollow center of his chest, into the void where the slave seed had been, and there he had found the dim semiconsciousness of the cavern beast. With the Force for power, he'd created a delusion: a simple conviction so deeply rooted in the cavern beast's murky mind that no evidence to the contrary could ever shake it.
Humans are poisonous.
