Deathstalker d-1

  Deathstalker

  ( Deathstalker - 1 )

  Simon R. Green

  Owen Deathstalker, last of his line, is a quiet man, a historian, remote from the stench of corruption and intrigue surrounding the Iron Throne at the heat of the galaxy-spanning, tyrannical Empire. And then, inexplicably, Deathstalker is outlawed, forced to flee from one end of the Empire to the other. And as he does so, he discovers that resistance is growing, everywhere, to the Iron Bitch on the Iron Throne.

  Deathstalker by Simon R. Green

  CHAPTER ONE

  Clash by Night

  It gets dark out on the Rim. Strange planets and stranger people can be found on the edge of Empire, where habitable worlds are few and civilization grows thin. Beyond the Rim lies uncharted darkness, where no stars shine and few ships go. It's easy to get lost out there, far away from everything. Starcruisers patrol up to the Rim, but there are never enough ships to cover the vast areas of open space. The Empire is growing too large, too cumbersome, though no one will admit it, or at least, no one who matters. Every year more worlds are brought into the Empire, and the frontiers press hungrily outward. But not on the Rim. The Empire stops cold there, dwarfed by the unplumbable depths of the Darkvoid.

  It gets dark out there. Ships disappear sometimes, and are never seen again. No one knows why. The colonized worlds make themselves as self-sufficient as they can and turn their eyes away from the endless dark. Crime flourishes on the Rim, unthinkable distances from the hub of the Empire's strict laws; some transgressions as old as Humanity, others newly birthed by the Empire's ever-growing sciences. For the moment the Empire's Starcruisers still keep a lid on things, dropping unannounced out of hyperspace to enforce the law with brutal efficiency, but they can't be everywhere. Strange forces are at work on the Rim, patient and terrible, and all it will take to set them off is a simple clash between two starships off the backwater planet of Virimonde.

  * * *

  In high orbit around Virimonde, the pirate ship Shard sailed silently through the long night, hiding itself from unfriendly eyes. Not a big ship, the Shard, built more for speed than endurance, and passed from hand to hand through a dozen owners and commands. Now she carried cloneleggers and body banks, and every man's hand was turned against her. Deep in the bowels of the ship. Hazel d'Ark, pirate, clonelegger and bon vivant, strode scowling through the dimly lit steel corridors and wished she was somewhere else. Anywhere else. The Shard wasn't a luxurious craft at the best of times, but with most of the ship's power diverted to maintaining the body banks, the old scut seemed even gloomier than usual. Which took some doing.

  Hazel d'Ark, last owner of a once noble name, came to the locked door that led to the cargo bay and stood waiting impatiently for the door's sensors to recognize her. Her mood was bad, bordering on foul, and had been ever since they dropped out of hyperspace six hours ago to take up orbit around Virimonde. Six hours of waiting for some word from their contacts down below. Something was wrong.

  They couldn't afford to stay much longer, but they couldn't leave either. So they waited. Hazel wasn't expecting any trouble from the planet's security people. The Shard might be old, but she had state-of-the-art cloaking devices, more than enough to fool anything the peasants had on Virimonde. Not that there was much the planet could do, even if it knew the pirates were there. Virimonde was a low-tech, agricultural world, with more livestock than people. Its only contact with the Empire was a monthly cargo transporter and an occasional patrolling starcruiser, neither of which was expected for some weeks.

  Hazel glared at the closed door before her and kicked the frame hard. The door hissed open, and she stepped through into the freezing cold of the cargo bay. The door locked itself behind her. A pearly haze misted the air and burned in her lungs. She shuddered quickly and turned up the heating elements in her uniform. The body banks needed the cold at a specific temperature to preserve and maintain their cargo of human tissues for cloning. Hazel looked quickly about her and then accessed her comm implant.

  "Hannah, this is Hazel. Acknowledge."

  "I hear you, Hazel," said the ship's AI. "What can I do for you?"

  "Edit the signals from the cargo bay's security sensors so it appears I'm not here."

  Hannah sighed. The Artificial Intelligence didn't have human emotions, but it liked to pretend. "Now, Hazel, you know you're not supposed to be in there. You'll get us both into trouble."

  "Do it anyway, or I'll tell the Captain about your personal video collection of his private moments."

  "I wouldn't have shown you those if I'd known you were going to use them to blackmail me. They're a perfectly innocent collection, after all."

  "Computer…"

  "All right, all right. I'm editing the sensors. Happy now?"

  "Close as I'll get. And Hannah—if I ever catch you snooping on my private moments, I'll perform a lobotomy on your main systems with a shrapnel grenade. Got it?"

  Hannah sniffed once, and broke off contact. Hazel smiled briefly. All the AIs the Captain could have chosen, and he had to buy a peeping torn. Somehow that was typical of the Shard and its luck. She looked about her at the long rows of body banks, huge and blocky, their dull metal sides smeared with frost and caked with ice. Ugly things, for an ugly business. The AI was quite right; she had no business in the cargo bay and no authority, either. Not that she gave a damn. Hazel d'Ark had a long history of not giving a damn, not to mention doing whatever she happened to feel was necessary and to hell with the consequences. Which was at least partly why she'd ended up an outlaw and a pirate.

  She moved slowly toward the nearest body bank, drawn by a curious mixture of revulsion and fascination. She'd had no illusions about what she was getting into when she'd signed on board the Shard as a clonelegger, but somehow it was different up close. The body banks were a source of life and longevity, but the spotless cargo bay still seemed to reek of death. Most of the lights were out, conserving energy. Never knew when you might need the extra power to make a run for it. Cloneleggers were not popular, either with the authorities or those who had a need for their services.

  Hazel walked slowly down the central aisle between the body banks. Visions of hearts and lungs and kidneys burned brightly in her mind's eye, pulsing with fresh crimson blood. She was sure they didn't actually look like that, preserved in the icy cold of the machines, but that was how she thought of them. Her fellow cloneleggers just referred to them as the merchandise, as casual as any butcher in a slaughterhouse. She stopped and looked around her, surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of human organs and tissues, enough to fill a dozen battlegrounds, and every one of them worthless. Contaminated beyond saving by a smuggled virus. That was what you got for making enemies in the clonelegging business.

  Not too long before, the Captain had come out ahead in a business deal with the Boneyard Boys, through his usual mixture of high risk taking and low cunning. Contracts the Shard had lusted after for years had fallen into their hands as though by magic. Hazel smiled grimly. They should have known better. Clonelegging was a cutthroat business. Sometimes literally.

  Clonelegging was illegal, a crime punishable by death, but that did nothing to slow down the flood of people ready and willing to make a living out of death. Officially, the use of cloned human tissues for transplanting was only allowed to the highest of the high, those with breeding and position and a not too small fortune. Couldn't have the lower orders leading long and healthy lives; there were far too many of them as it was, even with the newly colonized worlds opening up vast new territories for settling. Besides, it might give the lower orders ideas above their station.

  But unofficially, if you had enough money and knew the right (or more strictly speaking wrong) people, you could get whatever p
art of you was failing replaced, either by cloning your own tissues, or by illegally obtained organs from body banks. There was never any risk of rejection with a person's own cloned tissues, but surprisingly often the original organs turned out to have built-in defects, or there were other problems that made direct cloning impossible. That was when the bodysnatchers came into their own. And then no one was safe, living or dead.

  Most planets cremated their dead, by order of the Empress, to ensure that donor organs would only be available to the right sort of people, but backwater planets often cultivated illegal secret graveyards and mausoleums. Never knew when the crops might fail, or business turn bad, and you might need a little cash in the bank, so to speak. So the cloneleggers made the rounds, and everyone made a little money. The cloneleggers made a lot. Demand was high. All they had to do was maintain a full stocklist and wait for someone to come knocking tentatively at their door.

  Only it isn't always that simple. Cloning is a delicate business with all sorts of things that can go wrong. Cloning wears out an organ fast, and then it has to be replaced in stock. The body banks have a voracious appetite. And the hidden cemeteries are few and far between, often with exclusive contracts to one particular set of cloneleggers. So sometimes the bodysnatchers go out in disguise to walk among the living, looking for those who won't be missed too much. A shame, of course, but you can't make an omelet, and all that…

  When Hazel joined the Shards crew four planets back, the Captain had assured her they were graverobbers only. Except when things got really bad. Get in quick, dig up enough merchandise to fill the body banks, and then get the hell out of there before someone sold them out for an Empire reward. There's always someone. Only this time it had all gone wrong. The Boneyard Boys had got in first and contaminated the merchandise with a really vicious virus that hadn't shown up on any of the usual tests. Now every organ they had was worthless, and they had contracts to fill with people who weren't known for their patience or understanding.

  So Captain Markee had gone cap in hand to the Blood Runners out in the Obeah systems and begged a favor. Hazel still shuddered when she thought of what she and the rest of the crew had had to promise in return for the information the Blood Runners provided. Nothing could be allowed to go wrong with this deal. There were worse things than death.

  So the Blood Runners had put them in touch with people on Virimonde, out on the Rim, and the Shard had come to play the old game one more time. One last throw of the dice.

  Hazel wondered, not for the first time, how she'd come to this. It wasn't exactly what she'd had in mind for herself when she left her home planet ten minutes ahead of a restraining order and a lengthy stay in jail in search of excitement and adventure. Cloneleggers were the lowest of the low, the scum of the Empire. Even a beggar with leprosy would pause to spit on a clonelegger. People who walked in certain high circles liked to boast of their personal cloneleggers, as one might of an attack beast trained for the Arenas, but no one had a good word for them in open society. They were pariahs, outcasts, untouchables for daring to traffic in the trade that no one wanted to admit existed.

  Ha/e sighed tiredly. She'd leave the Shard in a moment, if she had anywhere to go. Hazel d'Ark, twenty-three years old, tall, lithely muscular, with a sharp, pointed face and a mane of long ratty red hair. Green eyes that missed nothing, and a smile so quick people often missed it if they weren't looking for it. She'd worked in one dirty job after another since leaving home, and it showed in the wariness of her stance and the naked suspicion in her scowl. She'd been a mercenary on Loki, a bodyguard on Golgotha and, most recently, part of the security forces on Brahmin II, which was where Captain Markee found her, running for her life. A superior officer had decided his rank entitled him to certain rights to her body, and not for cloning, either. Hazel d'Ark had disagreed. She'd decided a long time ago that she wasn't giving away anything she could sell. It came to blows and ended in tears, and Hazel went on the run again with the bastard's blood still dripping from her knife.

  At the time, a little discreet clonelegging had seemed like a definite career advancement. Low profile, low risk, the only hard work a little digging… perfect. Especially with so many people hot on her trail. Just lately, it seemed there was always someone looking for her with bad intentions. It was all her own fault; she knew that. She'd always had a tendency to wander into illegal deals in search of fast money, and only afterward discover what she'd let herself in for. But even though she'd done a lot of things in her time that she wasn't too proud of, kidnapping people and butchering them in cold blood for their organs had to be a new low, even for her.

  She didn't know if she could do it. She had a feeling it might be a matter of principle, something she wasn't exactly familiar with. But everyone draws the line somewhere. She ran through the options open to her. It didn't take long. She couldn't just announce her newfound integrity to her fellow crew members. Not unless she wanted to see the inside of a body bank the hard way. She could always jump ship; ride one of the escape pods down to the planet below and lose herself in the crowds. But Virimonde was a primitive place by all accounts, based around hard work and damn all luxuries. Not a good place to be stranded on the run. Especially when there are people looking for you on both sides of the law.

  Hazel d'Ark looked around her at the waiting body banks and shuddered, not entirely from the cold.

  What am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do?

  Lights flared around her as the ship's alarms went crazy. Hazel winced away from the sudden blare of sound, her hand dropping automatically to the gun at her side. Her first thought was a hull breach, but she quickly realized that if there'd been an explosive decompression in any part of the ship, she'd have felt its effects long before the sirens went off. She accessed the emergency channel through her comm implant, and a babble of voices filled her head. It only took her a moment to pick out the phrase battle stations, and then she was off and running. Someone had pierced the Shard's cloaking device, and that was supposed to be impossible for anything less than an Imperial starcruiser. And if the Empire had found them, there was a very real danger that Hazel d'Ark's career as a clonelegger was over before it had even begun.

  Just my luck, thought Hazel bitterly as she ran out of the cargo bay and headed for the bridge. Just my luck to get picked up for one of the few crimes I haven't actually committed.

  "Hannah, talk to me. How deep are we in it?"

  "I'm afraid you couldn't get much deeper without crouching," the AI said calmly through her implant. "An Imperial starcruiser has dropped out of hyperspace and taken up orbit around Virimonde. Their sensors brushed aside our cloaking devices in well under a second, and it didn't take them much longer to issue a challenge. I'm currently lying through my electronic teeth, but there's a limit to how long I can hope to bluff them. And I have a strong suspicion it isn't going to be anywhere near long enough for us to raise enough power to escape into hyperspace."

  "Couldn't we make a run for it in normal space?"

  "This is an Imperial starcruiser we're discussing. Hazel. They don't come much more powerful than this. They'd blast us into tiny glowing fragments before we even left orbit."

  "We've got shields."

  "They've got two hundred and fifty disrupter cannon and power to burn."

  "Can we fight them?"

  "If you really want to annoy them."

  "Dammit, there must be something we can do! You're the one with the immense intellect; think of something!"

  "You could always surrender."

  Hazel would have laughed sarcastically, but she was too short of breath. She pounded down the steel corridor, head I aching from the clamor of the alarm siren, and finally burst r onto the bridge and threw herself into her fire control seat. Whatever was going on, she was sure she'd feel a damn sight more secure plugged into the Shard's two disrupter . cannon. Theoretically, the AI was far more capable of aiming and firing the ship's disrupters, but what one AI could plan anothe
r could anticipate and match. Human unpredictability provided an edge no AI could deal with. Which is why there were always human gunners on every ship.

  Hazel meshed her mind with the computers through her implant and spread out through the fire systems, running quickly through the warm-up routines. Computer displays sprang up all around her, and a steady stream of information flowed through her thoughts. Hazel got her first real look at the starcruiser, and her heart sank. The Empire ship was a thousand times bigger, dwarfing the Shard like a minnow f next to a whale. The AI ran quickly through a list of the Imperial craft's capabilities, and Hazel's heart sank even further. Disrupter cannon, force shields, assault torpedoes… the Shard wouldn't stand a chance, but then, she'd always known that. The only thing big enough to take on a starcruiser was another starcruiser. Hazel swallowed hard and let her thoughts move cautiously through the two fire turrets. The cannon stirred restlessly at her touch, picking out targets of opportunity on the Imperial ship.

  Hazel's breathing had almost slowed to normal, but her anger took it away again as she studied the starcruiser. What the hell was it doing here? There wasn't one due for weeks, officially. It couldn't have come looking for the Shard; a handful of cloneleggers on a pirate ship weren't that important. Which was all very fine and logical, but the Imperial ship was still there, large as life and twice as deadly, its ranked cannon no doubt locked on the pirate ship and ready to fire at a moment's notice. Hazel scowled fiercely. They couldn't run, they couldn't fight, and they didn't dare surrender. Maybe they could make a deal… if they could think of something to bargain with. Her mind worked frantically, but came up with nothing. Unless Captain Markee had a whole pack of aces up his sleeve, the Empire ship had them cold.

  She looked across the bridge at the Captain. Terrence Markee was in his late forties; large and solid and reliable. He'd been a pirate all his adult life and loved every illegal moment of it. He dressed like a gaudy if somewhat dated dandy, all flashing silks and clashing colors, and affected an aristocratic accent he had no right to. At the moment he was scowling at his displays and growling a series of calm, quiet orders. Slightly reassured that at least one person on the bridge wasn't panicking, Hazel left her eyes drift round the cramped confines of the command area. Anything was better than looking at the Empire ship.