Deathstalker Rebellion

probably wouldn't bother the Ghost Warriors much, but it would play hell with everyone else. Silence was suddenly very glad he'd kept his hard suit on.

He rounded a corner and came upon a heaving mob of human defenders, struggling to contain a large group of Ghost Warriors. There were wounded and unmoving bodies sprawled everywhere, but in the midst of the living dead men, holding their attention almost single-handedly, was a defiant figure in a battered hard suit, swinging a long sword with both hands. Silence grinned so hard it hurt. He didn't need to see the suit's colors to know who was behind that featureless helmet. No wonder he'd still been able to feel her presence. When the Ghost Warriors teleported their people off the Champion, they'd brought Frost with them! Probably unwilling to give up such an important specimen. Silence roared his Clan's battle cry and threw himself into the heart of the battle, hacking left and right with vicious sweeping arcs. He cut a path through the dead, unfeeling flesh, laughing as he went, until he was able to put his back against that of the armored figure. They fought well and fiercely, and the Ghost Warriors couldn't get anywhere near them.

'Hi,' said Frost's voice in his ear. 'Miss me?'

'Not for a minute,' said Silence. 'I knew you were too cussed to die.'

'That is what it was all about, you know,' the Investigator said casually in between blows. 'Use the Champion to pull us in, distract us with strange voices, and then take over the Dauntless. With you and I as Ghost Warriors, carefully preserved and disguised, Shub could have used us to get in striking range of the Empress herself. Which is presumably why they saved me when the Champion went up. Crafty inhuman bastards. I'm quite impressed.'

Silence was too busy to reply. Captain Pearce had turned up again, his head still at an angle, but as determined as ever. He had an old-fashioned disrupter in his hand, but Silence slapped it out of his grasp with a swift, casual movement. The two Captains went head to head, the living and the dead, swords soaring as they slammed together and sprang away, inhumanly fast. Pearce had a strength and speed beyond anything a living man could normally produce, but Silence had been changed in the Madness Maze, and he wasn't merely human anymore, either. The hard suit's servomechanisms strained to keep up with him as he swept aside Pearce's attack and defenses alike and dueled him to a standstill. He lifted his sword and brought it down in one blindingly swift movement, and the heavy blade hammered into Pearce's skull, sinking deep into his head till it finally jarred to a halt on an eyesocket. Pearce convulsed as his sundered computer implant crashed and fell apart. Silence jerked his sword free, and Pearce fell twitching to the floor.

There were still more Ghost Warriors. Silence fought on, back-to-back with Frost, cool and calm and quite collected. Strength and speed burned within him, and he felt like he could fight forever. He was linked with Frost again, on every physical and mental level, fighting in that calm twilight state when the sum of the two of them was far greater than their separate parts. And suddenly, there was no one left to fight. The Ghost Warriors lay broken and decapitated all around, and the surviving crew members were wildly cheering their Captain and their Investigator. Which had to be something of a first for Frost, Silence thought as he looked serenely around him. Usually, people cheered Investigators only when they were leaving. He turned to look at Frost, who had turned at the same moment to look at him. They reached up and took off their helmets, and their eyes met in a moment of understanding and appreciation that could never be unsaid or forgotten.

'We're not even breathing hard,' Silence said quietly. 'What are we becoming?'

'Better,' said Frost.

'Inhuman, perhaps.'

Frost shrugged as best she could inside her suit. 'Humanity's overrated sometimes.'

Silence was still trying to come up with an answer to that, which didn't involve raising his voice, when Stelmach's voice sounded in his ear again. The Security Officer sounded very upset.

'Captain! There are Ghost Warriors all over the ship! Hundreds of them!'

'Tell me something I don't know,' said Silence. 'Are we holding our own against them?'

'Barely. We're afraid to use our disrupters much, but they're not. The largest group is heading for the bridge, despite everything we can do to slow them down. We've only got one chance. From my work with controlling the Grendel aliens, I'm pretty sure the computers controlling the Ghost Warriors must have a central control mechanism, separate from the bodies it moves. Some mechanism they brought with them when they teleported over from the Champion. A single cybernetic mind running its meat puppets. I've had Communications scanning the comm channels for unauthorized transmissions, and we've detected one hell of a powerful signal coming from the main hangars in Epsilon section. That's got to be it.'

'Good work, Stelmach,' said Silence. 'The Investigator and I are on our way. Send as many men as you can after us. If we fail, defend the bridge till it's obvious there's no hope, and then hit the self-destruct. Whatever happens, this ship and its crew is not to fall under Shub's control.'

'Understood, Captain. Good luck.'

He broke contact, and Silence and Frost headed for the elevators.

'If I didn't know better,' said Frost, 'I'd swear he's becoming almost human.'

'He says much the same about you,' said Silence.

They discarded their cumbersome hard suits for greater speed and made their way down to the Epsilon hangars without much trouble. The Dauntless was a much bigger ship than the Champion, and the Ghost Warriors were spread thin, trying to cover too many areas at once. Silence and Frost cut them down when they had to and avoided the rest. They didn't want the enemy to know they were coming. There were a dozen entryways into the Epsilon hangar area, and only a few of them were signposted. Silence and Frost used one of the least obvious and emerged onto a high narrow walkway overlooking the bay without anyone knowing they were there. Some fifty feet below, the Ghost Warriors had cleared a space among the piled-up supply crates, and now a dozen dead men holding disrupters stood guard over an intricate glass and crystal mechanism that glowed with an uncomfortably bright light. Silence pursed his lips thoughtfully and glanced at Frost.

'Even with our new abilities, there's no way we can get to that device without being seen or heard, and that many disrupters makes me nervous. Even if they don't hit us, they could hit the hull. We could wait for reinforcements, but with all that cover to hide behind, they could hold off a small army indefinitely. And we are running out of time.'

'If you can distract them,' said Frost, 'I can blast that device with my disrupter.'

Silence raised an eyebrow. 'From here?'

'Of course.'

Silence thought about it, but shook his head. 'No. Odds are it's protected by a force Screen of some kind. I would. And if you fire and fail, we'll have given away our position for nothing. I've got another idea.'

Frost looked at him. 'This doesn't involve us throwing ourselves away in a grand gesture, does it? I've already tried that, and I wasn't too keen about it the first time.'

'This is simpler. I'm suggesting we use our minds for a change. It's not just our bodies that were changed in the Madness Maze. The strain or excesses of nearly dying on the Champion seem to have pushed me another step up the ladder. You, too, probably. We're more than we were. Listen. Concentrate. Can you hear what I'm hearing?'

Frost frowned, listening. The hangar bay was quiet, the Ghost Warriors standing silently on guard. In the stillness she could hear Silence's breathing and her own, and then, very quietly below it all, she sensed as much as heard a low pulsing that rose and fell in sudden spikes. And inside that sound, which wasn't really a sound, she could hear a voice murmuring, cold and inhuman and horribly perfect.

'Damn,' said Frost. 'It's the machine. I can hear it thinking. Giving orders. It's not a language or any computer code that I'm familiar with, but somehow I can still understand it. This is the signal Stelmach detected from the bridge, the voice that pulls the Ghost Warriors' strings.'

'Yes,' said Silence. 'It is. Apparently, we're becoming espers, along with everything else. But we can do more than listen. Frost. We can hurt it. Concentrate on the link between us.'

He reached out clumsily to her with his mind, and she came to him. Their thoughts mixed and meshed, jumbling together, and then suddenly they both came into focus, sharp and brilliant, and their minds slammed together and merged to become a whole that was far greater than the sum of its parts. It leapt up and out from the cramped confines of their bodies and struck at the thinking machine in a lightning flash of roaring energies. The force field didn't even slow it. The machine howled horribly, feeling its destruction without ever knowing what or