Deathstalker Honor

'So soon?' said Owen. 'Hazel and I only just got back. We've hardly had any time together.'

'Maybe it's for the best,' said Jack kindly. 'We're becoming new people, moving apart, whether we want to or not. Strangers become friends, become strangers again. That's life.'

They talked a while longer, but they'd already run out of things to say. Jack and Ruby left. Owen stared into his glass. Hazel watched him do it.

'There's something I have to tell you,' Owen said finally. 'I'm getting married.'

Hazel's pulse jumped, but she kept her voice and face calm. 'Oh, yes? Anyone I know?'

'Constance Wolfe. It's an arranged marriage.'

'I thought that kind of thing disappeared with the aristocracy.'

'They're not really gone,' said Owen. 'And some of the old ways are still… valid.'

'It all seems… very sudden,' said Hazel.

'It took me by surprise,' Owen admitted. 'It was all Constance's idea. She had good reasons. I couldn't say no.'

'You always were easily talked into things. Do you… love her?'

'No! I hardly know her. But then, that's often the way with arranged marriages. I would have had to marry someone eventually. Someone of my class. It's the bloodlines, you see…'

'No,' said Hazel. 'I don't see. But congratulations, anyway. I suppose she'll be Empress to your Emperor.'

'I didn't want that either. But it seems… politically necessary. I can't say no. Not when so many of the alternatives would be so much worse.'

'We could run away,' said Hazel, looking into Owen's eyes for the first time. 'Leave this whole mess behind us. It would be just like the old times again—you and me, running from the Empire, nothing and no one to care about but ourselves.'

'It's tempting,' said Owen. 'But I can't. It's duty, you see. I've always understood duty. In the end, there are things more important than our happiness. And you never did say you loved me.'

'No,' said Hazel. 'I never did.'

They both waited a long time, but neither of them had anything more to say. So they sat together in the tavern, drinking their drinks, and trying to see their way through the darkening future ahead of them.

CHAPTER THREE

Shub

Daniel Wolfe passed through the dead, empty space of the Forbidden Sector in a stolen ship, heading for the cold metal hell that was Shub. He was alone and he was scared, but he wouldn't even let himself think of turning back. He had to go to Shub. That was where his father, Jacob, was, and his father needed him. Even if the old man was dead.

Perhaps especially then. Jacob Wolfe had died during the last great battle between the Wolfes and the Campbells, a bloody affair that had ended in the destruction of Clan Campbell. It had been a great victory, a triumphant end to a centuries-old feud, but Jacob hadn't lived to see it—cut down by an unseen hand in the midst of battle.

A good death for an old warrior, many said, as though that was a comfort. Daniel had mourned his late father, for many reasons, but more or less got over it. Until Jacob's missing body turned up in Lionstone's Court one day, standing on its own two feet, bearing a message for the Empress from the rogue AIs of Shub. Somehow they had obtained the missing corpse and rebuilt it into a Ghost Warrior, a metal presence within a human frame, run by computer implants. Shub spoke through its mouth, but Daniel had seen traces of his late father's personality in the Ghost Warrior, even though everyone else said that was impossible, and he had finally abandoned his Family and his beloved sister Stephanie to find the truth.

That meant crossing the dreaded Forbidden Sector to the unknown world of the rogue AIs, to Shub. Even though those who went there never came back alive.

There wasn't much in the Forbidden Sector. A few planets too far from the norm to be worth terraforming, a handful of dying suns, and a hell of a lot of space. Cold, empty, silent space. There was no comm traffic this far out on the Rim, no voices to fill the endless dark as Daniel's stolen ship pressed on. He felt very alone, so far from everyone and everything he knew, and he hated it. He'd never had to be alone before. For as long as he could remember, Stephanie had always been there, fiercely protective, doing all the thinking for both of them. Above and beyond that, their father had made all the important decisions, surrounding his youngest son with the security of perfectly planned days. And when Stephanie or Jacob weren't around, there was always the servants to keep him company, wait on his every whim, and remind him of what he was supposed to do next. There had been a wife too, but that had been an arranged marriage, and he spent as little time with her as possible. She was dead now, and he didn't miss her at all.

And now here he was, alone in the middle of nothing, the only living thing on a converted cargo ship, his only company a ship's AI called Moses. It tried hard, but it was programmed really only to deal with cargo manifests and the occasional dock crew. And since Daniel had stolen the ship from the Church, its few topics of conversation tended to revolve around official Church dogma, none of which interested Daniel in the least. So mostly he spent his days roaming the steel corridors and echoing cargo bays, keeping moving just to be doing something.

Sometimes he just stayed in his cabin, and sat in the corner, hugging his knees to his chest, and rocking silently to and fro.

He'd acquired his ship, the Heaven's Tears, on Technos III. Things had just gone terribly wrong for his Clan. The rebels had overrun his Family's stardrive factory and blown it to pieces, scattering and overwhelming a small army of Church troops in the process. So, Daniel reasoned, with the factory gone, he no longer had any Family responsibilities left on Technos III, and was therefore finally free to go looking for his dead father.

He made sure Stephanie was safe and then walked out on her, making his way fairly easily through the general chaos to the nearby landing pads, where the Church ships were docked. He chose one of the smaller vessels, pretty much at random, strode on board, and demanded that the skeleton crew hand over control of the ship to him. He was an aristocrat, after all, and they were just low-level Church technos. He was genuinely surprised when they told him to go take a hike, and shot the nearest techno in honest outrage. Having thus committed himself, Daniel cut down the other two with his sword while they were still reaching for their weapons.

He threw the bodies off the ship, sealed all the hatches, and took off without bothering to ask for clearance. And given the widespread chaos on all sides, no one bothered to challenge him. At the time, killing the three technos hadn't bothered Daniel at all. He'd needed the ship, and the technos had just been in his way. But as days turned to weeks alone on board the Heaven's Tears, he seemed to feel their presence more and more. He cleaned up all the bloodstains himself, as a kind of penance, but he still saw their faces in his dreams. At night, lying alone in his bed, he thought he heard noises in the corridor outside his cabin. He kept the door locked and slept with his light on. It was always night in space.

There wasn't much for him to do. The AI let Daniel do a few simple things, just so he'd have something to occupy his time. Because it was a Church ship, the recreational tapes were all strictly religious in nature. Daniel's main pastime was arguing with Moses over anything and everything, which rather upset the AI, who had been programmed to be friendly and agreeable. Daniel had Moses search its memory banks for everything it had on Shub, the rogue AIs, and the Forbidden Sector, but there wasn't much. Most of it was classified, under strictly need-to- know access codes, and even Daniel's aristocratic status couldn't break those.

So Daniel sat slumped in the command chair on his bridge and brooded over what little information he had. He was a big man, in his early twenties, with a great hulking frame he'd inherited from his father and a face that mostly tended toward a scowl or a sulk. He wore his long hair in a simple pigtail, and had only the set of clothes he'd run away in. The ship kept them fresh, but they were beginning to show the strain. In his constant search for something to pass the time, he'd reluctantly taken to working out regularly with improvised weights. He hated it