Deathstalker Honor

a smile. Static sparked around the head like a splintered halo.

The Mater Mundi had found a new way to manifest.

'Hi,' said Diana, fighting to control her chattering teeth. 'Good of you to drop by.'

You've been asking questions, said a voice in her mind like grating teeth, like hissing pipes, like children crying. You must stop.

'Then stop me,' said Diana. 'If you can.'

I will if I must. Do not mistake my forbearence for weakness.

'Bullshit. If you could have done anything, you'd have done it by now. But you can't. You made me so much more than I was, and you can't take it back. The best you could manage was this sending, this metal golem to intimidate me. I've seen scarier mobiles in children's nurseries.'

I can break you, child.

And Diana was back in Wormboy Hell, naked, in the dark, crawling in her own piss and shit and vomit, while Wormboy played awful, sadistic mind games, torturing her again and again until she destroyed her own voice through constant screaming.

No, said Diana. Get out of my mind, you bitch.

And she was back in the records room again, shivering and shaking, the taste of imminent vomit in her mouth. She glared at the metal construct, her mouth stretched in something that was as much a snarl as a smile. Her rage warmed her, driving out the cold. And when she spoke, she was Jenny Psycho again.

'That shit won't work with me. That was the past. I'm stronger now, stronger than I ever dreamed of. Maybe stronger than you ever dreamed of. You can't stop me. No one can stop me. I'm going to find out who and what and where you are, and then I'll make you pay for all the poor bastards whose lives you destroyed.'

I did what was necessary. I did what you wanted. I made the rebel victory possible.

'For your own reasons. Now get the hell out of here. Before I decide to test just how strong you made me.'

How sharper than a serpents tooth it is to raise an ungrateful child.

The presence was suddenly gone, and the cold went with it. The metal golem was empty, just an abandoned shell. Diana all but collapsed back into her chair. One of them had been bluffing, but she wasn't sure which. Apparently the Mater Mundi hadn't been sure either. Still, Diana thought, she must be getting closer to the truth if the Mater Mundi was prepared to go to such lengths to try to warn her off. With anyone else it would probably have worked. Diana looked at the metal and plastic shape still towering over her and shivered again. Now that she had time to think about it, it really had been pretty scary. She couldn't help wondering if that was how other people felt in the presence of Jenny Psycho.

'Damn,' she said finally, in a perfectly steady voice. 'How the hell am I going to explain this mess to the head of the House?'

Captain Silence led his old friend and enemy, the man called Carrion, through the packed shining steel corridors of the starcruiser Dauntless. It had been a long time since Carrion had been on a starship. He'd spent the last twelve years living alone on the planet Unseeli, also known as Ghostworld, his only companions the restless spirits of the murdered alien Ashrai. After so much comforting solitude, the crowds of bustling men and women crewing the starcruiser made him uneasy. Particularly since he knew most of them would cheerfully kill him, given the chance. They turned their heads away as they passed, their mouths silently forming curses and obscenities, and he could feel angry stares burning into his back. Carrion held his head high and walked on beside Silence as though he noticed nothing, felt nothing.

'Been a few changes since you were last on a starcruiser,' said Silence. 'Nothing too drastic, though. There's a file in your personal computer that will bring you up to date. But you'd better be a quick study. We're leaving orbit in six hours.'

'Why the rush?' said Carrion, his voice calm and unmoved as always. 'The Darkvoid's not going anywhere.'

'But whatever's in there might not stay in there much longer. You heard Half A Man. He called them the Recreated. Aliens who died and brought themselves back to life. Spooky. If true.'

'You doubt the word of one of Humanity's greatest heroes?'

'If the first Half A Man was a fake and a liar, who's to say this new one isn't as well? But we can't take the chance, with something as potentially dangerous as the Recreated. Someone has to check it out, and my ship and crew have more experience with the Darkvoid than most.'

'The idea of the Recreated is not without precedent. You gave the order that wiped out the Ashrai, but they survived, in their way.'

Silence grunted noncommittally. 'They're your ghosts. You keep them under control. I'm putting you in Frost's old cabin. Since you're officially an Investigator again, it's yours by right anyway.'

'I know you and she were close. I regret your loss.'

'You never liked her. She represented everything you hated about the Empire.'

'I respected her. She was a warrior.'

'Whatever. She was a good soldier. I honor her memory.' Silence paused, considering his words. 'Don't let the crew's attitude get to you. They'll come around once they've seen you work.'

'I doubt it, Captain. I am a traitor. I betrayed my fellow crew and my own species to join the alien Ashrai in their war against Humanity. Not that it did them any good in the long run. Still, I'm Humanity's worst nightmare, an Investigator who went native. A traitor, proud of his treason.'

'You had your reasons,' said Silence.

'Just as you did when you gave the order to scorch Unseeli and destroy everything that lived on that world.'

'You've never forgiven me for that, have you?'

'No, Captain. We've both done too much for forgiveness to mean anything.'

'You've been Pardoned,' said Silence. 'Reinvested as an Investigator in return for your joining this mission into the Darkvoid. The crew knows that. And they'll respect your work and authority, or I'll kick their backsides till they do.'

'I didn't ask for a Pardon,' said Carrion. 'I have not repented or reformed. I am the last of the Ashrai, and their legacy lives on within me. I'm here… because I have nowhere else to be now that the metallic forests are gone.'

'You're here because I asked you,' said Silence. 'Because I needed you. Because you're my friend.'

'Perhaps. There is bad blood between us, John. The two men we used to be, the men who were friends, are a long way off in the past, so far from us I can barely see them. We're different people now.'

'Perhaps, Sean. Time changes everyone. It's not many who end up the people they thought they'd become. We all look back from time to time, and wonder how the hell we got here from there.'

'I chose my path,' said the man called Carrion. 'I regret nothing.'

'Die, you bastard traitor!'

A crewman stepped suddenly out of an alcove, aimed a disrupter point-blank at Carrion's chest, and pressed the stud. There was no time to dodge, and nowhere to go in the narrow corridor. Even Silence, with all his more than human speed and reflexes, couldn't do anything to stop what was happening. The disrupter's energy beam crossed the few feet between the crewman and Carrion in less than a second. And a blazing energy field radiated from Carrion's power lance and absorbed the disrupter blast without flinching. There was a reason why power lances were banned through the Empire, their very possession a death sentence. They amplified an esper's power to the point that he was literally unbeatable in battle. And Carrion was no ordinary esper.

For a long moment nobody moved. The crewman stood frozen in place, his discharged gun still pointing at Carrion, his mouth hanging open. Carrion stared back at him impassively. Silence's hand still hovered above his holstered gun. And then the crewman sobbed suddenly, his face twisted with rage, and he grabbed for the sword at his side. Silence moved quickly forward, grabbed the crewman by the shirt front, and slammed him back against the steel bulkhead behind him. All the breath went out of the crewman, his face went slack, and his hands hung limply at his sides. Silence growled into the man's face, and then turned to look at Carrion, who hadn't moved an inch, as calm and apparently relaxed as always.