was there with him. It was a strange place, without identifiable shape or form, but he was the light and the AI was the dark. Owen shone like the sun, bright and piercing, and the AI's darkness surrounded him like the endless starless night of the Darkvoid, thick and smothering. But Owen was not alone. His friends were with him, and together they were so much more than they had been. The light blazed bright and brighter, and the darkness fell back before it, growing gray, paler and paler, until it was nothing more than a thin shadow, fading away to nothing at all. And if Owen heard a last despairing cry of his name in the AI's voice, he payed it no heed, and there was only the light, shining on and on forever.
And then the light was gone, and the link was broken, and Owen fell back alone into his body. He awoke reluctantly, in fits and starts, to find himself lying on the floor of the Maze with Random kneeling beside him. He turned his head slowly to see Hazel lying on her back not far away, twitching and shivering, while Ruby hovered uncertainly over her.
Owen sat up slowly and carefully. His body felt like his own again, but as though he'd returned to it after a long absence somewhere else. Memories of the mind link were already becoming confused and scattered, like a fading dream, and Owen was content to let that happen. It had been too big, too complex, too frightening for him to stand for long, and he chose quite deliberately to forget it.
'What happened?' said Random. 'What was that? I've never felt anything like it.'
'It's over,' said Owen. 'Don't think about it.'
'What about the AI? Is its contact broken?'
'Yes. Ozymandius is dead. I killed him.'
'He was just a machine,' said Giles, looking down at him.
'He was my friend,' said Owen, and he turned his face away from them.
'What do you mean, we've lost contact with the
'I mean all communication with the ship has been severed, Captain. Our comm implants still work down here, under the planet's surface, but everything else is being blocked.'
Silence scowled unhappily. He didn't like being cut off from his ship, and thereby the Empire, particularly in as volatile a situation as this. It felt like anything could happen down here, buried deep in the guts of the planet. Comm signals routed themselves through hyperspace and were therefore normally instantaneous, no matter where you were in the Empire or who you were talking to. Now Stelmach was saying something on or in this graveyard of a planet was blocking those signals. Which was supposed to be impossible. Silence's scowl deepened. He hadn't liked coming into the Dark void in the first place, and he'd liked having to go dirtside with hardly any advance intelligence of the situation even less, especially once he'd been informed of the planet's history. But the Empress' orders had been very clear. She wanted him there, on the ground, so that he could make instant policy decisions as and when necessary.
The Empress had been giving him a lot of orders he hadn't liked just recently. He could have reached the planet a lot sooner if he hadn't had to detour to pick back up Stelmach and his new pet, and then the Lord High Dram, his own imposing self. In fact, if he hadn't had to stop for them, he could have arrived at the Wolfling World only a few minutes' after the rebels' ship and might even have managed to stop the rebels going into the Madness Maze. Whatever the hell that was. Still, he didn't think he'd tell the Empress that. He didn't think she'd take it kindly.
Dram hadn't been too much trouble. He kept to himself on board ship, barely leaving his quarters, and even though he'd insisted on coming down dirtside with the rest of them, he was careful to keep out of everyone's way. Of them all, he seemed the least affected by the almost hypnotic pull of the Maze. It drew the eyes like a magnet, enigmatic and disturbing, but Dram treated it almost casually, as though he saw it every day. He was currently standing off to one side, wrapped in his long dark cloak, studying the entrance to the Maze that blocked their advance. He'd named it the Madness Maze, but had declined to say why, nor offer any further information about it. Silence could only assume the spy in the rebels' camp had been feeding Dram information that he hadn't felt obligated to share with the rest of his team.
Silence had no choice but to accept it. Nominally, he was in charge of the away team, but he had enough sense to deter to the Lord High Dram whenever it seemed advisable. Annoying the Empress' official Consort was not good for your career prospects, or even your chances of surviving to reach a pension. He looked at the Maze again, and the Maze looked back, keeping its secrets to itself. Frost had been all for charging straight into it, but Dram had said no. Politely, but very firmly. He said he wanted time to study the Maze first. Presumably he was still studying it, because he hadn't said a word since.
Silence transferred his attention back to V. Stelmach: Imperial Security Officer, the Empress' eyes and ears, and general pain in the rear. Partly because of his constant air of superiority, but mostly because of what he had with him. When the
Silence had seen one of these butchers at work before, slaughtering his men in the horrid city they'd discovered deep in the rotten heart of Grendel. A genetically-engineered killing machine, designed millennia before by an unknown race to fight an unknown foe. If God was good, they were both extinct, but their deadly legacy lived on in the Vaults under Grendel. Stelmach swore that this particular specimen was safe now, controlled by a cybernetic yoke that literally imposed correct thoughts on the creature and made it impossible for the ugly thing to do anything but follow orders. Silence wasn't convinced. New inventions always had bugs in them, and if the yoke did happen to break down, he didn't want to be anywhere near the alien when it happened. In fact, he didn't want to be on the same planet. He'd actually been tempted to disobey orders and refuse to have the horror on his ship, but in the end he had to agree. Firstly, because V. Stelmach spoke directly for the Empress, and you didn't disobey a direct order from Her Imperial Majesty if you wanted to live to see the coming dawn. And secondly, because if the Tomb of the Hadenmen really were to be awakened, he just might need the Sleeper to even the odds. He'd back the Grendel alien against practically anything, up to and including any army of killer cyborgs.
His own army, such as it was, was currently standing around waiting not particularly patient for the Lord High Dram to get his finger out and make up his damn mind: two full companies of Imperial marines, thirty-five battle espers and twenty Wampyr. The marines were muttering quietly among themselves, glancing at the Maze when they thought no one was looking, and passing around bottles of booze and battle drugs. The battle espers were looking at anything rather than the Maze and becoming increasingly twitchy. The Wampyr looked like the walking dead, but then they always did. They ignored the Maze, and Silence tried to tell himself it was only his imagination that they were looking increasingly hungry.
Silence sighed quietly. All this because of a handful of rebels. He still didn't understand what was so special about them, but they'd led him a hell of a chase before bringing him here, into the Darkvoid. To an almost legendary planet, to the Tomb of the Hadenmen and the Darkvoid Device itself. Silence had hoped he'd be allowed to kill them now and get it over with, but they'd offended and insulted the Empress, according to V. Stelmach, and that meant they had to be captured and brought back alive, if not necessarily intact, to stand trial on Golgotha. Killing them would have been kinder. And all this time he and his army were standing around, the rebels were getting further away and closer to the Tomb. He gestured wearily for Stelmach to rejoin his pet, and the Security Officer saluted briskly and strode away. Frost stirred at Silence's side, and he turned his head in her direction.
'What do you suppose that thing ahead of us is?' she said quietly. 'Just looking at it makes my head ache.'
'According to Dram, it's called the Madness Maze,' said Silence, careful to keep his voice low, too. 'Though when it comes to what that means, your guess is as good as mine. Dram might know, but if he does, he isn't telling. Much. It's apparently some kind of Hadenman defense to keep out intruders like us. Probably booby-trapped, but the espers should be able to spot them in advance. They'd better, I'm sending them in first. I was hoping I could use Stelmach to get direct orders from the Empress about entering the Maze, but it seems the comm systems are jammed, so all we can do is stand around with our thumbs up our asses until the Lord High Bloody Dram deigns
