Deathstalker Coda Page 19

  And perhaps it would take an alien-derived horror to stop the Terror.

  Unknown to either the Heritage or the Hook, a third starship was studying Usher II from a distance, and waiting for the Terror to arrive. Donal Corcoran, aboard the Jeremiah, had come a long way to satisfy his need for vengeance. The madman in his mad ship, undetected by the Imperial craft because both he and the Jeremiah had become too different, too other, to show up on even the strongest sensors. Corcoran and his ship had witnessed the first appearance of the Terror, at the planet Iona, and the experience had changed them both forever. Corcoran had escaped from a high security asylum on Logres to be here, at Usher II, because when the Terror disappeared after destroying Iona, it took part of his mind with it. Corcoran was linked to horror, and always would be. He followed that mental link to Usher II and now he waited for a chance to hurt the Terror, punish it, destroy it for what it had done to him.

  Corcoran roamed restlessly through the twisting corridors of his insane ship, a gaunt and haggard man, burning with a terrible energy that drove him on even as it used him up. He did not eat and he did not rest and he did not sleep, though sometimes he thought he dreamed. He had lost confidence in all the everyday certainties of reality, which meant he could sometimes walk through it, and even manipulate parts of it to serve his will. He had conversations with people he was pretty sure weren't really there, and they told him useful, frightening things. Sometimes he laughed and sometimes he cried, and he counted his fingers over and over again. Horror was his constant companion, his life a nightmare from which he could never awaken.

  He could feel the Terror drawing closer, rising slowly up from some awful underworld, to surface in reality.

  He was a rogue, an unexpected factor, come for revenge. Looking for a chance to destroy the Terror, and perhaps himself. He stalked the shifting, changing corridors of the Jeremiah, surrounded by whispering voices that rose and fell but were never still. He couldn't tell whether they came from the ship or his own mind. Sometimes he thought they were the voices of the dead, all the millions of lost souls who had died screaming to fill the Terror's endless hunger, still crying out in protest. Sometimes he heard things and sometimes he saw things, and he prayed and prayed that none of them were real.

  The Jeremiah was alive; he knew that for sure. Animated and aware, transfigured in some strange way by the gaze of the Medusa, by the pitiless stare of the Terror. It was infected with madness, with the horror of uncertainty, and its interior and exterior were always changing, growing, mutating. For the moment, the Jeremiah was a long segmented silver worm, curled around itself, and its interior was composed of a soft, sweating metal studded and laced with unfamiliar machines. Corcoran didn't need to know what they did. The ship followed his intentions, if not his commands. When he thought about it at all, Corcoran thought the Jeremiah was growing itself a new nervous system.

  There were shadows everywhere, filling doorways and sliding along the walls, though there was nothing to cast them. Corcoran kept a careful eye on them. New tech was always forming, drifting like dreams through the superstructure of the ship. Sometimes they had faces. There were no mirrors, or mirrored surfaces, anywhere on the ship. Corcoran wouldn't allow it. He was scared he might get a clear look at what he'd become. Or, that he might look in a mirror and find nothing looking back at him.

  He called up a monitor screen, and one grew up out of the nearest wall, showing him Usher II hanging between its two suns, and the two Imperial ships holding their positions, and finally the herald moving silently through empty spaces. Corcoran hugged himself tightly, and whispered, Here be monsters. The dreaded warning old cartographers used to add when they came to the edge of things that could be mapped. He tried to laugh, but it was a dark, disturbing sound. Maybe it takes one monster to kill another, he said, or thought he said. He cocked his head to one side, and considered what it would be like, to stare the Terror in the face again. Just one indirect glance had been enough to do this to him. He knew he was mad. That was part of the horror. Was there a worse madness, beyond insanity?

  It didn't matter. He would do what he had come here to do, whatever the cost. Part of him was trapped inside the Terror, and he wanted it back. He wanted to stop feeling what the Terror felt. The endless horror and loss that drove it on, the need that never ended…

  Donal Corcoran had come to sink his teeth in the Terror's throat, to worry and to harry it, and pursue it all the way back to whatever Hell it came from.

  The herald appeared on the Imperial ships' sensors, and they got ready to confront it. The herald always arrived ahead of the Terror, traveling through normal space at sub-light speed. Its shape was indescribably ugly. Its distorted form made no sense at all. The Empire scientists' best bet was that the herald was just a cross section of something bigger, and more awful. An intrusion into normal space of something that did not belong there. It appeared out of the darkness like a bad dream made solid, and headed straight for the nearest of the two suns.

  On board the Heritage, Captain Vardalos grimaced, sickened just at the sight of the thing, and ordered the cargo bay doors opened. The preprogrammed super-weapon launched itself out of the bay like a bullet from a gun, as though it couldn't wait to be about its destructive business. It accelerated away from the Heritage, its shape changing, unfolding and blossoming like some poisonous flower. It plunged into the sun the herald had targeted and disappeared from sight in the silver-blue glare. It should have been destroyed instantly, but it was still sending data back to the Heritage. Vardalos had a sick presentiment of how the herald would look, plunging into the sun to give birth to its awful progeny.

  There was a sudden explosion, which everyone on all three starships felt rather than saw or heard, and then the sun convulsed. It swelled unevenly, spitting out ragged solar flares millions of miles long, and then it collapsed in upon itself, shrinking impossibly quickly. The Heritage and the Hook shuddered, fighting to hold their positions as gravity waves fluctuated all around them. The sun became a red dwarf, hot and sullen, and then before it could collapse further into a black hole, all its compressed energy lashed out in a single terrible beam of light so bright that no one could look upon it. All the ships' viewscreens went blank instantly, overwhelmed.

  The searing energy beam hit the Terror's herald head-on, enveloping it in shimmering fires. A sun's entire life, compressed into one endless moment of unbearable force. And then the beam blinked out, exhausted, and the herald was still there, untouched. Only now it was headed towards the sole surviving sun.

  The Heritage and the Hook rocked behind their force shields, blind and helpless. Tech exploded and fires broke out in all the corridors and departments. Crewmen died in their seats as their consoles exploded, and smoke filled the air faster than the extractor fans could deal with it. Men and women ran frantically back and forth, doing what they could, while steel bulkheads buckled and whole sections had to be closed down and isolated, for the good of the ships. Somehow, both starcruisers held their positions. Captain Vardalos and Captain Randolph barked orders till their voices were hoarse, and slowly, gradually, the ships' systems came back on line. And they were able to see what had happened to Usher II,

  The planet had been devastated. It rocked in place before its sole remaining sun, no longer held between two equal forces. Solar flares had cooked the surface, and gravity waves had dug crevices thousands of miles deep. Earthquakes were still rippling across the surface. Cities blew apart as their force shields collapsed, showing briefly like firecrackers in the night. The cities died, and millions of people died with them. Usher II was coming apart at the seams. Even the last of the escaping civilian ships had been caught up and destroyed in the terrible forces unleashed by the superweapon.

  "So many dead," Vardalos said quietly. "And all for a weapon that didn't do a damn bit of good anyway."

  "You have to think of it as a mercy killing, Captain," said her second. "Consider what the herald and the Terror would have done to them." />
  "What have we come to?" said Vardalos. "When something like this can be seen as mercy?" She turned to look at her comm officer. "Are you picking up anything from the planet? Maybe something from the factories buried deep underground?"

  "I'm sorry, Captain." The comm officer didn't even look at his board. "Usher Two is as silent as the grave. No one made it through."

  "Then it's time for us to fall back, and let the Hook do her work. Second, what do the damage reports say? Can we get out of here?"

  "Main force shields are still holding, though severely depleted," said Fortuna. "Eighty percent of systems are on line, though large sections of the ship are no-go areas. Initial reports indicate… acceptable losses."

  Vardalos nodded slowly. "Then release the sensor drones, and deploy them as planned. Put as much power into the shields as you can, and shut down all ship's sensors. From now on, we don't look at anything directly, only via the drones. And let's hope the baffles the scientists installed work the first time. Second, move us out of here, as fast as we can go and still maintain contact with the drones. Our job's over. It's all down to the Hook now."

  As the Heritage slowly withdrew, and the herald closed in on the remaining sun, the Hook opened its cargo bay door, and dropped the single transmutation engine it had brought all the way from Logres. The engine took up an orbit around the dead planet, and released its powerful energies, transforming what remained of Usher II into a poisoned, radioactive cinder. In a reverse of its usual programming, which turned dross into gold, and lifeless rock into habitable worlds, the transmutation engine turned the corpse of Usher II into a contaminated abomination it was hoped would poison even the Terror.

  The herald ignored the process, and dived into the sun, to begin its slow incubation. Either it hadn't noticed what was happening to its target world, or it didn't care. The Heritage observed from a safe distance, forbidden to interfere any further. Finn wanted someone coming back alive and sane, to tell what had happened. Only the Hook was to remain behind, in harm's way, because that was what they had volunteered for.

  Captain Randolph watched the transmutation engine complete its deadly work, and then let it drift away. It had done all it could. Usher II was now so thoroughly contaminated on every level it was probably even dangerous to everyone on board the Hook, but that made no difference. He sat quietly, watching the one remaining sun, waiting for it to give birth to its awful children. The wait seemed to go on forever. He kept his comm systems open, just in case some of the civilian ships had survived, but there was only silence. Randolph prayed silently for the lost, and called down damnations on the Terror, for all the evil and sorrow it brought.

  Finally, the herald's deadly spawn erupted from the sun, an endless swarm of night-black shapes that might or might not have been alive. Millions of the terrible things shot out of the sun, all of them dark and razor-edged and individual as snowflakes. Maybe it was a cold day in Hell, after all. They assumed an orbit around the dead planet, forming dark rings, howling an endless scream that would have driven everyone insane, if there'd been anyone left on Usher II to hear it. The scream rang out on the bridge of the Hook, even with all sensor and comm systems shut down, as though the scream was more than just a sound, and existed to torment the soul as well as the mind.

  And then, there was the Terror.

  Space tore apart under the urging of an inhuman will, and from a place that was not a place came something that was bigger than a planet, and more ancient. The sensor drones began changing and mutating, struggling to become something that could cope with the data they were receiving. The Terror existed in far more than three dimensions, disturbing and overpowering the usual restrictions of reality. On the Hook's main viewscreen it appeared as a monstrous face, with eyes greater than oceans and far darker. A mouth slowly opened, a tremendous hungry opening that could have swallowed a moon. It fed on what remained of Usher II, while its dark spawn fell dying to the cracked and broken surface.

  Captain Randolph looked at last upon the ancient enemy, and knew that faith wasn't going to be enough. He wasn't prepared, could never have been prepared, to face such a thing as this. He'd seen recordings of its previous appearances, including a few he wasn't even supposed to know about, but the Terror was just… too big, too complex, and too awful for the human mind to cope with. Madness swept his reason aside in a moment, along with the rest of his crew. No one can stare into the eyes of the Medusa and hope to remain sane.

  Randolph arched in his command chair as though he'd been electrocuted. His eyes bulged, and his hands crushed the armrests. Habib was laughing, painfully and without humor, shaking uncontrollably. The crew on the bridge were screaming and crying and attacking their consoles. Rioting broke out in the Hook's corridors, as the crew turned upon each other, and themselves, and blood splashed across the shining steel walls.

  "It isn't the Devil," Randolph whispered. "It's God. God gone crazy, and devouring His own creation."

  "It didn't come here after lives," cried Habib. "It eats souls! We didn't save anyone. They're all lost. We're all lost."

  "Attack! Attack!" Randolph pounded his fists on the arms of his command chair. "Make it pay!"

  Enough of the crew still heard their Captain to get the ship moving. The Hook surged forward, firing all its weapons at once. On the Heritage, Captain Vardalos called on the Hook to turn back, but no one was listening now. The Hook hit the Terror with everything it had, and the Terror didn't even notice. Space tore apart again, and the force of that opening sent out ripples that destroyed the Hook in a moment. The Terror disappeared, space returned to normal, and all that remained was the dead husk of Usher II, and one heavily shielded starcruiser. And the herald, already setting out on its slow, certain journey to its next target.

  The Heritage destroyed the few remaining sensor drones. There was no telling what they were now, or what they might do, after being touched by the Terror. Captain Vardalos said her silent good-byes to the captain and crew of the Hook, and turned her ship around. She had a report to make to Emperor Finn.

  The Jeremiah wasn't anywhere near Usher II anymore. When the Terror abandoned normal space for somewhere else, the Jeremiah followed it. Donal Corcoran had studied the herald and its work from his unique viewpoint, and had slowly come to realize that the herald wasn't in fact a separate thing from the Terror; rather, it was one small part of a greater thing, a permanent intrusion of the Terror into normal space from somewhere else. Even the Terror, that great and awful face that ate planets, wasn't the real thing, the whole thing. It was just a more powerful intrusion into real space. Attacking the face would do no good. Corcoran wanted vengeance on the whole thing, wherever it might be.

  And because his mind was forever linked to the Terror, Corcoran could sense where the face went when it vanished. Like hyperspace, it was just another direction to move in, only much farther. Where the Terror could go, he could go, and so the madman and his mad ship left the universe behind, to go to a place that was not a place, outside or inside reality. The process felt like dying, and Corcoran embraced it. Anyone else, anyone merely human, would have been destroyed, unmade, by the transition; but Donal Corcoran was both more and less than human now.

  When he appeared again, he was standing in what seemed to be a great maze of stone corridors. He felt more focused, and yet more fragile, his thoughts slipping through his fingers like fishes in a stream, his every insight quick and clean and diamond sharp. He looked slowly around him. People didn't belong here, in a place like this. He knew that, and didn't care. He had come to one of the places where life that was not life existed like rats in the walls of reality. His mind stretched out, embracing his new situation. The stone corridors radiated away in every direction for far farther than he could sense, possibly on towards infinity, endlessly crossing and recrossing each other.

  The Jeremiah had reconfigured itself into the suit of armor he was now wearing. The bloodred, red-hot, armor encased him utterly, from crown to toe. His skin sco
rched and blackened where the hot metal touched it, and Corcoran savored the pain, using it to focus his thoughts. The sensors in the armor told him that he had come to a place without gravity, atmosphere, or discernable properties. Corcoran shrugged mentally, and acted as though they were there anyway. He was quite sure he was the only living thing in the stone corridors, but he called out anyway, the armor amplifying his voice. There was no reply; only a silence that seemed to go on forever. Corcoran took a close look at the stone walls. There were no signs of construction, no sense of design or purpose. The stone maze didn't feel like a place to him; more like the impression of a place, a memory of a location.

  Corcoran wandered through the corridors, wrapped in what had once been his ship. Any direction seemed as good as any other, but none of them led him anywhere except to more corridors. His mind, now completely divorced from conventional reality, began to grow fuzzy round the edges. He was actually a little relieved when he encountered the ghosts. There were hundreds of them, all of the same man, in different clothes and apparently from different times in his young life. The ghosts couldn't hear or see him; they were driven, desolate figures moving through brief but endless loops of time, repeating short segments of life over and over again, without end. Corcoran didn't recognize the man, though he did wonder vaguely whether it might be all that remained of a previous visitor. Was that what this place did to people?

  Corcoran concentrated his altered mind on one of the ghosts, trying to force sense and meaning out of it, and a quiet voice whispered a name in his ear. Owen Deathstalker . . . Corcoran was beyond being surprised by anything anymore, but still that name stopped him dead in his tracks. What could have brought the old legend, the fallen hero, to this awful place? Was this where Owen had disappeared to, after the defeat of the Recreated? Corcoran walked slowly among the ghosts, peering into faces. Most seemed tired, worn down, struggling under the weight of some great burden. Many of the ghosts were incomplete, lacking important details, or even faces. As though they were memories, worn away by countless years. The slow erosion of time, like water dripping on a rock. Corcoran thought he was on the edge of understanding something there, but it had nothing to do with his need for revenge, so he let the thought go. He strode on through the stone corridors, walking right through the ghosts, as though daring someone or something to come and stop him. He needed something he could hurt, punish, destroy. He ached to get his steel hands on the Terror.