Deathstalker Coda (51 page)
Authors: Simon R. Green
“You stay put. I’ll take care of the scumbags.”
He rose up and started towards the New Frontier enforcers. They saw him coming, and some trained their guns on him. Owen smiled coldly, and his power snarled and crackled on the air around him. Bullets ricocheted harmlessly away from his force shield. All the other guns trained on him, and Owen slapped the fanatics down with a single thought. They hit the ground hard, dropping their weapons. It was suddenly very quiet in the great cavern, the last echoes of gunfire fading quickly away. The Light People clustered on the ceiling again, apart from Lucifer, who settled on the ground beside Owen, and looked at him searchingly. He was about to say something, when Hellen came running forward to embrace him. And one of the fanatics on the floor pulled a gun from a hidden holster, and shot at Lucifer. The bullet punched through the wing he had wrapped around Hellen, and killed her instantly. She slipped bonelessly out of Lucifer’s grasp, as he stood, shocked. Owen howled with fury and gestured sharply at the fanatic. His head exploded in a shower of blood and bone, and the other fanatics cried out in horror until Owen yelled at them to shut up.
He knelt beside Hellen to check, but he knew she was dead. Lucifer stood beside him.
“She is gone.”
“Yes.” Owen rose up from her side, and turned to look at Lucifer. “How’s your wing?”
“It will heal.”
“Why didn’t you use your powers to protect her?”
“We do not interfere. It is our way. Our principle.”
“She was your friend!”
“Yes. She was. You killed that man, Owen.”
“I should kill all of them. They would have killed all of you.”
“We would rather all die, than kill another.” Lucifer turned his back on Owen, and walked away.
“Then who would spread your damned warning?” Owen yelled after him.
“It is time for us to leave,” said Lucifer, not looking round. “We cannot stay here any longer, and be responsible for more violence, more deaths. Perhaps a few of us will stay behind, hidden from sight, to observe and watch over Humanity as it builds its Empire. As a species, you show potential. You may yet evolve into something worthwhile.”
“You should have helped Hellen,” said Owen.
“We couldn’t even help ourselves,” said Lucifer.
He gestured at the fanatics lying shocked and terrified on the floor, and they rose quickly to their feet and ran out of the cavern, shoving at each other in their haste to get into the tunnel and away. Lucifer looked back at Owen.
“Before we go, one last piece of information. It is possible that we have encountered your friend Hazel, the object of your pursuit through time. She appeared here, in this place, a few weeks ago—drawn to our presence. I think we intrigued her. She manifested only as a mental impression, wrapped in a field of unfamiliar energies. She did not seem . . . human. Her presence reminded us a little of who and what we used to be. She scared us. There was nothing of restraint or passion in her. She had amassed power at a frightening rate while plunging back through time, draining it from the lives and worlds she passed. It seemed to us that there was no limit to how much power she might drain, or what she might become.”
Owen nodded. He knew he had been draining energy from somewhere, to power his continuing passage through time, and now he knew where from. That extra power was why he was able to do all the things he’d never been able to do before. The concept appalled him. There was a very old name for creatures that lived by draining life from others. But he knew the truth wouldn’t stop him; nothing would now. He had to go on, either to stop Hazel becoming the Terror, or to find a way to deal with the Terror in the future.
He didn’t tell Lucifer that Hazel would eventually become the Terror. It would only have upset the Illuminati.
“Before you go,” he said flatly to Lucifer, “there’s something I want you to do. Something to help Humanity and at the same time preserve your warning. You said Humanity might evolve into something better; but I’m here to tell you that’s not going to happen by the time the Terror finds them. Unless you and I give them a helping hand. Together we’re going to build something; create something that’s never existed before. Something to give at least a few people a fighting chance. It will be called the Madness Maze. And if you ever consider saying no, just think of Hellen, who died because you wouldn’t help her. And remember what I did to the New Frontier fanatic.”
And so, under Owen’s specific instructions, the Illuminati created the Madness Maze. On learning what it was to be, and what it was supposed eventually to do, they decided it would be far too dangerous to create or leave on Hearth, so they took Owen with them through their secret silver tunnels to a planet on the other side of the galaxy. And only Owen knew that one day the world would be called Haden. In a cavern deep below the surface of the world, lit only by the flickering rainbow glow of the Light People, they brought into being the Madness Maze, creating it through a group effort of concentrated will, focused through Owen’s mind and power. And when they were finished, it looked just like he remembered it.
Owen looked at it, and thought for a long while.
By creating the Maze, I have made tomorrow possible. I have made the Terror possible. But the Light People might have created it anyway, at some point. At least this way I get to put my stamp on it. And without the Maze we could never have brought Lionstone and her Empire down. Perhaps if I hadn’t done this, Hazel would never have been able to become the Terror, and all those worlds and civilizations would still be alive. Or perhaps someone or something else would have become the Terror, and then Humanity would have no defense against it.
I don’t know. The Maze is woven irretrievably throughout human history. Do I have the right to unravel such a knot? No; we need the Maze, and in the end, that’s all that matters.
And if I’m wrong?
Then I’m wrong.
The Illuminati fluttered around the thing they’d made, studying it and considering its possibilities. Lucifer settled down beside Owen, and looked at him doubtfully.
“What is the purpose of this device, Owen?”
“Hope,” said Owen. “And maybe transcendence.”
“Then let us all hope that by the time Humanity gets out this far, they will be worthy of what we have left them.”
Owen said nothing.
“We patterned the structure of the Madness Maze on your brain,” said Lucifer. “We found its intricacies fascinating. Human, but not just human. Is there something you’re not telling us, Owen?”
“There’s a hell of a lot I’m not telling you,” said Owen. “And if you’re wise, you’ll leave it that way.”
Owen looked at the Maze, and wondered how much of it was shaped by his memories of it; from his past, but the Light People’s future. Certainly his involvement in its creation explained why the Maze had always worked best for Deathstalkers. He had paid special attention to the construction of the core at the heart of the Maze, preparing it to protect and sustain the child that would one day come to it. Giles’s infant son; the Darkvoid Device.
What is this for?
Lucifer had asked.
Lucifer had asked.
The hope of Humanity,
Owen had said.
Owen had said.
It’s a bit small, isn’t it?
Yes.
When Owen was satisfied that the Madness Maze was complete, he then worked together with the Illuminati to create a guardian for the Maze: a single shape-changing creature derived from Owen’s own altered genetic makeup. (He had decided a shape-changer would be best able to hide and protect itself in all the long centuries it would have to survive.) He had to reassure the Illuminati that they weren’t creating some kind of living weapon, and so agreed to their demands that it be programmed only as an observer and messenger, and strictly nonviolent.
The finished creature was an exact duplicate of Owen, though it had no personality of its own, as yet. Just a series of instructions and duties, and the instinct to survive. Owen had to smile, thinking of what it would become, after centuries of being other people.
“When you first meet me, in the Maze, many years from now,” he said to the creature. “Don’t recognize me. Or tell me any of this. It would only upset me, and distract me from all the things I must do.”
“Understood,” said the creature. “I will remember.”
“Yes,” said Owen. “I know you will.”
And he also gave the shape-changer his ring, the black-gold ring that was the sign and symbol of Clan Deathstalker authority, to be given to his descendant Lewis Deathstalker, at a specific time and place. Owen was concerned that Lewis might be so far removed from the direct Deathstalker bloodline that the Maze might not recognize and receive him. Owen felt naked and strangely lost without the ring, but Lewis needed (or would need it) more than he did now. It still felt like giving up yet another part of his human past. His human soul.
He tried to think if he’d forgotten anything, but he couldn’t remember.
So he said good-bye to Lucifer and the other Illuminati, wished them well, and dropped out of the present again, plunging back through time in his endless pursuit of Hazel d’Ark.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MONSTERS OLD AND NEW
T
here were no ELFs anymore. They were all dead and gone, absorbed and murdered by a greater mental force, just as they’d always feared. Only their destruction came not from their most hated enemy, the mass-mind of the oversoul, but instead from their own allies and founders, the uber-espers. They had turned on the ELFs, overwhelmed their defenses, and ate up their minds, their personalities, so that not one trace of the rogue espers now remained. Now there were just the uber-espers, those old and terrible monsters, and the armies of thralls they commanded. Five grotesque, abhuman minds, operating hundreds of thousands of thrall bodies.
here were no ELFs anymore. They were all dead and gone, absorbed and murdered by a greater mental force, just as they’d always feared. Only their destruction came not from their most hated enemy, the mass-mind of the oversoul, but instead from their own allies and founders, the uber-espers. They had turned on the ELFs, overwhelmed their defenses, and ate up their minds, their personalities, so that not one trace of the rogue espers now remained. Now there were just the uber-espers, those old and terrible monsters, and the armies of thralls they commanded. Five grotesque, abhuman minds, operating hundreds of thousands of thrall bodies.
The Shatter Freak. The Spider Harps. Screaming Silence. The Gray Train. Blue Hellfire.
Old minds, old demons, older by far than most people realized. The uber-espers had been waiting and plotting and planning from the shadows of the Empire for untold centuries. When you expect to live forever, you can afford to take the long view. Lesser evils came and went, but the uber-espers endured, and now their time had come. They had spent centuries deciding what they would do, and how they would do it, arguing constantly among themselves of course, but never doubting that one day they would see all Humanity bow down before them.
They were forced into hiding for many years, held down first by the Mater Mundi’s authority, and then by fear of Owen Deathstalker and the other Madness Maze survivors, and finally by a Golden Age that was just too sane and stable to allow them any foothold. But now, everything had changed. The old adversaries were gone, the Golden Age had proved rotten at the core, and there was no one left on Logres to stop them from doing all the awful things they’d dreamed of doing. The Emperor’s hold had been weakened, the oversoul and the Maze people had all gone away, and the uber-espers . . . had made themselves like unto gods. With hundreds of thousands of thralls forming a great energy pool, the uber-espers finally felt strong enough to do anything they wanted. And so they did.
They launched their first attacks against the Emperor Finn’s vastly overextended armed forces. There weren’t that many left outside of the Parade of the Endless; just a few battalions shuttling back and forth between the other main cities, maintaining order through dramatic shows of force. A few dozen war wagons and battle cruisers, dug up relics from Lionstone’s time, great dusty steel beasts hovering in the skies, dependent more on reputation than firepower. All of them easy targets for psi storms that came raging out of nowhere, without warning. The uber-espers blew the war machines apart from a distance, ripping apart steel bulkheads with their thoughts and overloading the engines till they blew. Psychokinetic attacks crushed the heavy metal ships in invisible fists, while psionic energies wiped computers and hexed tech. Force shields collapsed and guns wouldn’t work. Men on the ground cried out in shock and horror as blazing gravity barges fell ponderously out of the sky, and gravity sleds slammed against each other like toys in the hands of insane gods. Black smoke billowed up from the crippled remains of Finn’s armored forces.
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