Deathstalker Return (11 page)

Rose Constantine, on the other hand, gloried in the bad odds. It had been a long time since she’d had any real challenge to her abilities. And while killing aliens in the Arena was fun, nothing satisfied her like the murder of men. Her heart sang as she danced among the screaming troops, and if she wished for anything it was for a higher standard of fighter among the troops. Some actually turned and ran rather than try to face her. She killed them too, of course, but it wasn’t the same. She had her standards, after all.

Saturday romped among the soldiers, claws and jaws soaked in blood. He was huge and fast and strong, and the humans died so prettily. And best of all, there was no one here to tell him not to eat his kills afterwards. Human meat tasted just as good as he’d always known it would.

Brett watched it all from among the trees, shaking and shuddering. He would have liked to run, but there was nowhere to run to. So he used Rose’s disrupter to snipe from concealment when he thought he had a clear shot, and otherwise did his best not to be noticed. He was muttering to himself almost continuously now, a high-pitched querulous yammer that made no sense even to him. He didn’t belong here. He wasn’t a fighter. His stomach hurt.

Hit and run, kill the enemy and vanish into the trees, all the time edging towards the
Hereward.
They were all getting tired now, except possibly Saturday. Even Rose was slowing, the punishment she’d taken from Carrion finally catching up with her. But still they fought on—even Brett now. With so many armed troops running wildly in the forest, nowhere seemed safe to hide anymore, so he drew his sword and did his best to look dangerous. Inevitably, his luck ran out sooner rather than later. Three burly troopers cut him off from the others and advanced on him smiling, with drawn swords and force shields buzzing on their arms. Brett screamed for help and looked frantically around for an escape route, but they had him surrounded.

So he threw himself at them with all the rage and terror of a cornered rat, all vicious speed and precious little skill. He caught one marine by surprise and stabbed him in the groin, and then had to retreat quickly as the other two closed in on him. He swept his sword widely back and forth in front of him, and almost dropped it. One of the troopers laughed. Brett swore, and cried angry, frustrated tears. He threw his sword on the ground and put both his hands as high into the air as he could. He wasn’t a fighter, and he was a fool ever to think he could be. But the marines just kept coming, grinning nastily now, and Brett remembered Finn’s words on the base viewscreen:
You will not accept any form of surrender.
They were going to kill him anyway.

Brett lost his temper. He lashed out with his esp, and his power of compulsion slammed into the mind of the trooper nearest him. And then it was the easiest thing in the world for Brett to make that trooper shoot his companion. Hit at point-blank range, the marine was dead before his body hit the ground. The controlled man just stood there, his face blank, while Brett snatched up the sword he’d thrown away and ran the man through.

Brett stood there awhile, breathing hard, looking at the three marines he’d killed. His head ached, his nose was bleeding, but he was alive and they weren’t. Brett laughed briefly—a soft, disturbing sound—and then he walked openly through the trees, sending his psionic compulsion out before him, and no one could see him. His headache grew steadily worse, and he could feel blood trickling from his nose and welling up from under his eyelids, but he was just too angry to care. Every now and again, he’d reach out with his mind, and one marine would kill another for no reason, and Brett would laugh again. If he’d had time to think, he might have realized this wasn’t like him at all, but that wouldn’t occur to him until much later.

 

 

Back at Base Thirteen, the man called Carrion was still studying his viewscreens and considering his options, when another man appeared out of nowhere. Carrion felt his presence immediately and spun round, and then he saw who it was and smiled.

“I should have known. With so much of the past repeating itself, it was inevitable that you’d turn up eventually. Hello, John. You’re looking good, for a dead man. Why is it you only ever come to see me when you want something?”

“Hello, Sean,” said John Silence. “It has been a long time, hasn’t it? You know, you’re all that’s left of my past now. Everyone else I knew from the old days is either dead or missing. But still you and I go on, too stubborn to quit and call it a day.”

“You’re the only part of my human past that I still care to remember,” said Carrion. “We’re still bound together, by all the things we did and shouldn’t have done. What do you want this time, John?”

Silence indicated the viewscreen showing Lewis and his companions cutting their way through a stubborn group of marines. More troops were coming up on them from behind, but Lewis hadn’t seen them yet.

“You have to help them, Sean. This new Deathstalker and his rag-bag friends are perhaps the last hope the Empire’s got. The Terror is come at last, and all Humanity is threatened with extinction.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” said Carrion, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Silence considered the viewscreens. “Imperial troops on Unseeli again. Marines and war machines and gravity barges. Blasted open clearings and broken trees, and good people threatened with death for no good reason. We can’t let this happen again, Sean. You heard the Durandal’s secret orders. The Empire didn’t commit this kind of firepower here just to take care of a few traitors. The new regime is using Unseeli as a testing ground. Somewhere to try out their new shock troops and their new battle plans. They must be stopped. They won’t be happy until all the Ashrai are dead and gone and Unseeli is an Empire world again. A symbol of the new order. You have to help the Deathstalker, while you still can. The Ashrai can defend their world, but the Deathstalker is the key to defeating the Durandal, and all the bad things that are coming. A Deathstalker always is. You can’t let him die here.”

Carrion considered the viewscreen before him. When he looked round again, he was alone in the lobby.

 

 

Lewis leaned heavily against the thick bole of a golden tree, panting for breath. His sword hung down from his hand, too heavy to lift for the moment. Blood dripped from his dented and scored armor, some of it his own. He looked around him, but all the troops he could see were dead. He could hear more of them crashing back and forth in the trees and shouting incoherently to each other, but most seemed to be moving away. Jesamine was sitting on the ground beside him, her shoulders slumped with exhaustion. Lewis was worried about her. She wasn’t built for this.

Brett and Rose were sitting together, not far away. Rose had a cloth in her hand, and was using it to wipe the blood off Brett’s face with slow, careful movements, as though she’d never done anything like that before. Brett sat very still, and let her.

A little farther away, Saturday was eating something with great enjoyment. None of the others looked at him.

Lewis looked up at the sky, where the Ashrai were still circling. “Damn them,” he said quickly. “We’re here for them too. Why won’t they help? Don’t they know the Terror will come for them too, if we can’t stop it? We can’t die here, not so early in our quest . . .”

“They know,” said Jesamine. “They just don’t care. All they care about is killing humans, continuing their war, which should have ended centuries ago.”

“If only I could have made Carrion listen . . .” said Lewis.

“Oh, hell,” said Jesamine, clambering unsteadily to her feet. “I may not be much of a fighter, but if there’s one thing I’ve always been able to do, it’s make people listen.”

She glared up into the sky at the soaring Ashrai, took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and sang. On some level, she could still hear the song of the trees and the Ashrai, the song of Unseeli, and now she answered it with a song of her own, a harmony and a counterpoint; the song of Humanity. Her voice rang out clear as any bell, cutting effortlessly across the clamor of the surrounding troops. She sang, her voice proud and true, with words and melodies from a dozen songs—from all the operas she’d ever sung in her long career—and it seemed like the whole world stopped to listen to her.

And the Ashrai sang back to her, their voices joining and combining, forming a glorious whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Jesamine Flowers sang, and the Ashrai answered, and the two songs joined to become one. Jesamine stopped singing, and so did the Ashrai. And in that echoing silence, the Ashrai dropped out of the glowing sky and fell upon the Imperial troopers surrounding Lewis and his people. The marines cried out in shock and horror as the Ashrai came sweeping between the towering trees with almost supernatural grace, and were upon them before they could even aim their weapons. Everywhere in the metallic forest, marines screamed and died, and Jesamine watched, with tears in her eyes, the ugly results of such a beautiful song.

 

 

Carrion watched it all on his viewscreens, and felt a great weight lift from his heart as the decision was made for him. He should have remembered that Deathstalkers always got their own way, eventually.
Ah, well
, he murmured, and walked out of Base Thirteen. He lifted his feet from the ground and flew up through the diffused light, punching through the heavy cloud layer and on out into space. He didn’t feel the cold and he didn’t need to breathe, and energy crackled up and down the length of his power lance, that ancient banned weapon. He concentrated and his speed increased, until the first starcruiser loomed swiftly up before him. Carrion smashed through the ship’s force shields like they weren’t even there, and then hammered his way through the many layers of steel in under a second before bursting out the hull on the other side. He swung around and hit the ship again, targeting the engines this time, punching holes through the steel decks with joyous ease. Explosions rocked the starcruiser as he hung a way off in space, and he smiled in the cold and the dark as the
Heracles
slowly tore itself apart, the long steel ship blossoming into bright actinic flames, and the screams of the dying went unheard in the vacuum of space. Carrion turned his back on the stricken ship as it began its slow descent from orbit, falling slowly but inevitably to its death.

The other starcruisers were slowly turning and maneuvering to face Carrion as he flew effortlessly towards them. They opened up with every gun they had, the disrupter cannon operated by the very best tracking systems, releasing enough destructive energies to take out a dozen ships, let alone one man, unarmed and unprotected. But he was Carrion, and he had been through the Madness Maze, and he had faced the Recreated. He was human and Ashrai and so much more. And in the end, nothing was left of the five starcruisers but a few radioactive shells, tumbling slowly end over end into the fiery grasp of Unseeli’s welcoming atmosphere.

Carrion hung alone in space, looking down on his adopted world, and thought of many things.

 

 

John Silence walked unhurriedly through the shimmering metal forest, and where he looked, war machines exploded. He looked up, and where his gaze fell upon them, gravity barges malfunctioned and fell out of the sky, impaling themselves on the tops and branches of the metal trees, or falling in flames to the gray ground below. Violent explosions sounded all through the forest as the Imperial advance slowed and stopped. Troops ran screaming rather than face him, only to meet the Ashrai, deadly and unstoppable, taking back their world from those who would despoil it. They generated localized psistorms wherever they went, altering probabilities so that weapons malfunctioned and accidents happened and men fell dead from strokes and embolisms and heart attacks. Finn’s people had no espers to protect them, only a handful of easily overwhelmed esp-blockers.

And of course, there was Lewis Deathstalker and Jesamine Flowers, Rose Constantine and Brett Random, and the reptiloid Saturday, and no man could stand against them either.

Finn Durandal sent an army to Unseeli. Religious fanatics, Pure Humanity to a man, trained soldiers. And in the end, they never stood a chance, because the Ashrai weren’t interested in accepting surrender either. Men had come to Unseeli with death on their minds, and that was what they found.

Lewis Deathstalker and his companions finally returned to the clearing in which they’d left the
Hereward.
It seemed very still and quiet. You’d never know a terrible war had been fought only a short distance away. Lewis and Jesamine nodded to Rose and Brett, and then they all looked in disgust at Saturday as he gnawed on what was very obviously the remains of a human leg. The reptiloid realized they were all glaring at him, and generously offered to share his meal with the others. He was honestly puzzled when they all loudly declined. He shrugged, and casually cracked open the long bone to get at the marrow. Lewis looked away, desperate for something else to concentrate on. All around, there were loud creakings and groanings as the damaged metal trees slowly regenerated, repairing the harm done to them. Soon there would be no traces left to show that Humanity had ever come to Unseeli. Lewis thought he could live with that.