out.'
'Too noisy. Even if it didn't set off a whole mess of alarms, which it probably would.'
'All right,' said Hazel impatiently. 'What do you suggest?'
Owen smiled at her, stepped forward, and kicked the door in. The lock shattered, the solid steel denting deeply under his boot, and the whole door tore itself away from its hinges and fell to the floor of the room beyond with a satisfyingly heavy clang. Hazel looked at Owen.
'Show-off.'
They stepped over the door and into the lab, guns in hand, but there was no one coming to meet them. The only occupant of the vast room was a technician in a grubby smock seated before a computer terminal, the jack plugged into the back of his neck. Owen and Hazel lowered their guns. The cyberjock was so lost in his own world they could have shot him and he wouldn't have noticed till he unplugged. They looked around them, trying to make sense of the masses of tech and machinery that filled most of the laboratory.
The room was huge. Owen thought vaguely it might have been a wine cellar once. Unfamiliar machinery was bulked together in groups, taking up most of the floor space, their tops almost brushing the ceiling. None of it looked particularly subtle. It was mostly crude mechanical constructions (hence the need for a jack-in rather than using comm implants) designed for crushing and grating and sorting the materials presented to them. Owen turned slowly around, tracing the path of the materials. Tubing led away from the larger machines, stapled to the stone walls, crisscrossing each other in a riot of color coding. They delivered whatever they were carrying to a complicated filtration system, which in turn steadily dripped its end result into a series of unlabeled containers. Everything else was straightforward computer-monitoring equipment. He looked across at Hazel, who shrugged, which was pretty much what he'd expected. So, when in doubt, ask someone. Loudly.
Owen strode over to the lab technician, happily communing unawares with his computers, ripped the jack out of the back of his neck, spun him around in his chair, and stuck his gun up the man's nose. It took a moment for the tech to realize what was happening, dazed by his sudden exit from the computer systems, and then his eyes focused on Owen's face and he looked even more upset, if that was possible. Owen smiled nastily at him, and the tech actually whimpered. Hazel moved in from the other side and gave him her best menacing glower, and the man all but wet himself. Owen began to feel like he was bullying a puppy, but ruthlessly suppressed the thought. This was one of Valentine's people, and therefore guilty by association.
'Hi there,' Owen said to him, not at all pleasantly. 'I'm Owen Deathstalker, the nightmare made flesh to your right is Hazel d'Ark, and you are in deep doo-doo. Answer my questions fully and accurately, and you might just live long enough to stand trial. Nod if you're with me so far.'
The technician nodded as best he could with a gun up his nose. All the color had disappeared out of his face the moment Owen mentioned his name, and cold beads of sweat were popping out on his forehead. Owen was secretly impressed. He hadn't realized he was that frightening.
'Who are you?' he growled to the tech. 'And what is the purpose of all this machinery? Overview first, then the details.'
'I'm Pierre Trignent, my Lord,' said the technician quickly, his voice little more than a whisper. 'Please, I'm just a little fish. I'm nobody. You want the ones who give me orders. I just do what I'm told.'
'We'll get to them,' said Hazel. 'Now, answer the man's question. What are you doing here?'
Trignent swallowed hard, lowering his eyes. He was going to lie. Owen could feel it. He leaned forward so his face was right in front of his victim's. The tech tried to shrink back in his chair, but there was nowhere to go.
'If you lie,' said Owen, 'I'll know it. I can always get the answers from someone else if I have to, but I guarantee you won't be around to see it.'
'Yes, my Lord, but…'
'I'm not a lord anymore. But I'm still a Deathstalker. Now, tell me everything you know or I'll show you what that means.'
'This is a processing and refining plant, my… sir Deathstalker. We take in the raw material, break it down into its basic chemical components, siphon off the desired residues, and store it for later transport off-planet.'
'But what's the raw material?' Owen said impatiently. 'And what the hell is the end product?'
'The esper drug,' said Trignent reluctantly. 'We're manufacturing the esper drug.'
Owen and Hazel looked at each other. They'd heard about the esper drug during their time with the esper underground, but its composition was supposed to be a secret. Still, if anyone was going to dig up a new drug, it would be Valentine. And setting up production on Virimonde was a good way to keep it secret. Parliament had discovered his presence only by accident. Owen nodded slowly. He was following the trail so far. But none of it explained why the technician should still be so scared…
'What's the raw material?' said Owen. 'What are you refining the esper drug from?'
'Please,' said Trignent. He started to cry. 'Please understand. I just follow orders. They'd kill me if I didn't.'
'I'll kill you if you don't answer me! What's the raw material?'
'The dead,' said Pierre Trignent. 'The dead of Virimonde.'
After that it was very quiet for a long moment. Apart from the slow, steady sounds of the rendering machinery, chewing up the latest batch of raw material.
Owen's eyes squeezed shut, but he could still see what he now recognized as crushing and pulping machinery. He could still see his dead people, stacked like logs, kept frozen so they'd keep until they were needed. His eyes opened again, and the technician took one look at the cold rage building there and began talking very quickly, almost babbling, as though relieved to finally be able to tell somebody.
'The Lord Wolfe came here because there were so many bodies just waiting to be harvested. The esper drug has always been derived from human tissues, just as the esp-blockers come from dead esper brain tissues, but you need a lot of… the basic material to produce just a small amount of the end product. That's why the esper drug has always been so rare, so secret. The Lord Wolfe saw an opportunity for mass production here and took advantage of it. He's processed hundreds of thousands of the dead and produced more of the drug, and in a purer form, than was ever possible before. It's really quite a simple process once it's been set up. There's just me, and a handful of others, to keep an eye on things. Please, I'm nobody. I just did as I was told—'
'You have been overseeing the destruction of my people, to produce a drug so addictive it enslaves all who use it,' said Owen, and his voice was very quiet and very dangerous. 'I have seen horror in my time, in many wars, on many battlefields. I have waded through blood and offal, killed till my arms ached, and seen the slaughter of the good and the bad, but never have I encountered anything as cold-blooded as this. The destruction of the dead… to produce a poison for the living. Turning Humanity itself into a product. Oh, my people… my people…'
He turned away, his shoulders heaving, and Hazel went after him. Trignent saw his chance and made a run for the door. And Owen Deathstalker looked around, tears in his eyes, and shot the man in the back. The energy beam punched a hole through Trignent's back and out his chest, slamming him against the door frame. He clung there for a moment, already dead, and then crumpled slowly to the floor. Owen shook his head slowly back and forth, as though trying to deny what he'd been told. Hazel moved in close beside him, but he waved her away. There wasn't room in him for anything but horror and sorrow and a rage to strike back at the cause of his pain.
'I shouldn't have shot him,' he said finally.
'He was as guilty as all the others.'
'Yes. But that wasn't why I killed him. I did it because I needed to hurt someone. Punish someone. Apart from myself. They were my people. I should have been here to protect them.'
'Oh, let it go, Owen! You were outlawed. Banished. Get over it. Everyone here turned their backs on you.'
'It doesn't make any difference. They were my responsibility. Oz?'
'Yes, Owen?'
'Shut this obscenity down. All of it. Whatever it takes.'
'Yes, Owen.'
'Now,' said Owen Deathstalker. 'Let's go find Valentine and his cronies. And kill them all.'
When the head of Valentine Wolfe's security people appeared, somewhat nervously, on the viewscreen in the great hall to alert Valentine that, in order, two strangers had somehow appeared in the flyer caves under the Standing, been identified as the legendary Owen Deathstalker and the infamous Hazel d'Ark, who then somehow made their way into the castle proper despite all the security safeguards, and could be, well, anywhere right now,
