Deathstalker

Deathstalker by Simon R. Green

CHAPTER ONE

Clash by Night

It gets dark out on the Rim. Strange planets and stranger people can be found on the edge of Empire, where habitable worlds are few and civilization grows thin. Beyond the Rim lies uncharted darkness, where no stars shine and few ships go. It's easy to get lost out there, far away from everything. Starcruisers patrol up to the Rim, but there are never enough ships to cover the vast areas of open space. The Empire is growing too large, too cumbersome, though no one will admit it, or at least, no one who matters. Every year more worlds are brought into the Empire, and the frontiers press hungrily outward. But not on the Rim. The Empire stops cold there, dwarfed by the unplumbable depths of the Darkvoid.

It gets dark out there. Ships disappear sometimes, and are never seen again. No one knows why. The colonized worlds make themselves as self-sufficient as they can and turn their eyes away from the endless dark. Crime flourishes on the Rim, unthinkable distances from the hub of the Empire's strict laws; some transgressions as old as Humanity, others newly birthed by the Empire's ever-growing sciences. For the moment the Empire's Starcruisers still keep a lid on things, dropping unannounced out of hyperspace to enforce the law with brutal efficiency, but they can't be everywhere. Strange forces are at work on the Rim, patient and terrible, and all it will take to set them off is a simple clash between two starships off the backwater planet of Virimonde.

* * *

In high orbit around Virimonde, the pirate ship Shard sailed silently through the long night, hiding itself from unfriendly eyes. Not a big ship, the Shard, built more for speed than endurance, and passed from hand to hand through a dozen owners and commands. Now she carried cloneleggers and body banks, and every man's hand was turned against her. Deep in the bowels of the ship. Hazel d'Ark, pirate, clonelegger and bon vivant, strode scowling through the dimly lit steel corridors and wished she was somewhere else. Anywhere else. The Shard wasn't a luxurious craft at the best of times, but with most of the ship's power diverted to maintaining the body banks, the old scut seemed even gloomier than usual. Which took some doing.

Hazel d'Ark, last owner of a once noble name, came to the locked door that led to the cargo bay and stood waiting impatiently for the door's sensors to recognize her. Her mood was bad, bordering on foul, and had been ever since they dropped out of hyperspace six hours ago to take up orbit around Virimonde. Six hours of waiting for some word from their contacts down below. Something was wrong.

They couldn't afford to stay much longer, but they couldn't leave either. So they waited. Hazel wasn't expecting any trouble from the planet's security people. The Shard might be old, but she had state-of-the-art cloaking devices, more than enough to fool anything the peasants had on Virimonde. Not that there was much the planet could do, even if it knew the pirates were there. Virimonde was a low-tech, agricultural world, with more livestock than people. Its only contact with the Empire was a monthly cargo transporter and an occasional patrolling starcruiser, neither of which was expected for some weeks.

Hazel glared at the closed door before her and kicked the frame hard. The door hissed open, and she stepped through into the freezing cold of the cargo bay. The door locked itself behind her. A pearly haze misted the air and burned in her lungs. She shuddered quickly and turned up the heating elements in her uniform. The body banks needed the cold at a specific temperature to preserve and maintain their cargo of human tissues for cloning. Hazel looked quickly about her and then accessed her comm implant.

'Hannah, this is Hazel. Acknowledge.'

'I hear you, Hazel,' said the ship's AI. 'What can I do for you?'

'Edit the signals from the cargo bay's security sensors so it appears I'm not here.'

Hannah sighed. The Artificial Intelligence didn't have human emotions, but it liked to pretend. 'Now, Hazel, you know you're not supposed to be in there. You'll get us both into trouble.'

'Do it anyway, or I'll tell the Captain about your personal video collection of his private moments.'

'I wouldn't have shown you those if I'd known you were going to use them to blackmail me. They're a perfectly innocent collection, after all.'

'Computer…'

'All right, all right. I'm editing the sensors. Happy now?'

'Close as I'll get. And Hannah—if I ever catch you snooping on my private moments, I'll perform a lobotomy on your main systems with a shrapnel grenade. Got it?'

Hannah sniffed once, and broke off contact. Hazel smiled briefly. All the AIs the Captain could have chosen, and he had to buy a peeping torn. Somehow that was typical of the Shard and its luck. She looked about her at the long rows of body banks, huge and blocky, their dull metal sides smeared with frost and caked with ice. Ugly things, for an ugly business. The AI was quite right; she had no business in the cargo bay and no authority, either. Not that she gave a damn. Hazel d'Ark had a long history of not giving a damn, not to mention doing whatever she happened to feel was necessary and to hell with the consequences. Which was at least partly why she'd ended up an outlaw and a pirate.

She moved slowly toward the nearest body bank, drawn by a curious mixture of revulsion and fascination. She'd had no illusions about what she was getting into when she'd signed on board the Shard as a clonelegger, but somehow it was different up close. The body banks were a source of life and longevity, but the spotless cargo bay still seemed to reek of death. Most of the lights were out, conserving energy. Never knew when you might need the extra power to make a run for it. Cloneleggers were not popular, either with the authorities or those who had a need for their services.

Hazel walked slowly down the central aisle between the body banks. Visions of hearts and lungs and kidneys burned brightly in her mind's eye, pulsing with fresh crimson blood. She was sure they didn't actually look like that, preserved in the icy cold of the machines, but that was how she thought of them. Her fellow cloneleggers just referred to them as the merchandise, as casual as any butcher in a slaughterhouse. She stopped and looked around her, surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of human organs and tissues, enough to fill a dozen battlegrounds, and every one of them worthless. Contaminated beyond saving by a smuggled virus. That was what you got for making enemies in the clonelegging business.

Not too long before, the Captain had come out ahead in a business deal with the Boneyard Boys, through his usual mixture of high risk taking and low cunning. Contracts the Shard had lusted after for years had fallen into their hands as though by magic. Hazel smiled grimly. They should have known better. Clonelegging was a cutthroat business. Sometimes literally.

Clonelegging was illegal, a crime punishable by death, but that did nothing to slow down the flood of people ready and willing to make a living out of death. Officially, the use of cloned human tissues for transplanting was only allowed to the highest of the high, those with breeding and position and a not too small fortune. Couldn't have the lower orders leading long and healthy lives; there were far too many of them as it was, even with the newly