Deathstalker Return

by Simon R. Green

  He went laughing into battle, but he really should have known better. It's hard to hide anything from thousands of telepaths and remote viewers working in unison. They knew about Finn's attack force the moment it began assembling, and they already had a response worked out. They'd been waiting for the Durandal to turn his attentions towards them. Every esper in the Empire now lived on New Hope. All the others were dead, hunted down and killed by Pure Humanity mobs. So now all the espers that were came together and united in the oversoul, and it gathered itself for battle, to strike the first blow against an Empire that had turned bad and vicious, like a mad dog.

  Crow Jane—telepath, warrior, and devious thinker—strode back and forth across the landing pads at the edge of the floating city, broadcasting orders in all directions as she organized New Hope's defenses. Her mind was plugged in to the intricate lattice of thoughts that made up the oversoul's operations division, and decisions flashed back and forth in the mass consciousness, faster than lightning and more vivid, changing and adapting in an instant as conditions in and around the city changed. Crow Jane made up her mind, and immediately men and women rushed to new assignments, ready for the fight. Around her, she could sense pokers and pyros and precogs working calmly at their part of the plan, and she wouldn't let herself worry about them. Everyone knew what they were doing. There were no clashes or contradictions or misunderstandings in the oversoul, and no regrets, either. They would do what they had to.

  Every individual was the oversoul, in every way that mattered.

  Crow Jane was a tall, statuesque brunette wearing sweeping black silks under a battered leather jacket, and a bandolier of silver throwing stars. She wore a sword and a disrupter on her wide hips, and both weapons had seen a lot of use in their time. Crow Jane had a pale face, jet black lips, heavy eye makeup and a disturbing smile. She'd been trained as a battle esper on Madraguda, fighting against the Raw Shark terrorists during the Quantum Inferno affair, and the oversoul believed in making good use of every individual's talents. Crow Jane's main talent was for organizing mayhem.

  One hundred and twenty espers assembled silently and efficiently before her, weighed down with battle armor and guns and explosives, and she smiled upon them like some ancient and awful death goddess.

  "You all volunteered, and you all know the score. The Durandal and his bastard army of fanatics will be here soon, and you have to buy the oversoul time, to do what it must. So get out there, cause chaos, run rings around them, and kill as many as you can, but above all keep them occupied. They mustn't suspect what we have planned until it's far too late. Given the size of the attacking force, it's more than likely that I won't be seeing most of you again. The oversoul will do its best to gather your minds into itself as your bodies are destroyed, but that may not be possible. The Icarus Working must come first. There's still time for anyone to back out, if they don't think they're up to this." She looked around, but no one said anything. They didn't have to. There were no secrets in the oversoul. Crow Jane smiled on them all, and let her pride and honored esteem wash briefly through their minds. "All right, go and cause some trouble, you glory-seeking weirdos."

  She felt their silent laughter in her mind as one by one they rose up into the air, ascending under the power of their own minds, so many angry angels rising up to smite a hated enemy. Crow Jane watched them go, the gusting wind tangling in her long black hair and blowing tears from her eyes, till they were all out of sight.

  The espers flew through the cold thin air, protected from the harsh enviroment by the power of the oversoul. Far below, the world turned slowly, ignorant of the bitter war about to be fought in the heavens. There was no aerial traffic, none of the usual freight wagons that cruised the high altitudes; Finn had had it all diverted. He didn't want any witnesses to what he was about to do. His would be the only record of what happened here tonight; an official record, carefully edited to make him and his people look good, and make the espers look like monsters. The espers knew that, knew the terrible things Finn had planned for them, and flew on anyway. Memories of Lionstone's Empire still existed withm the oversoul, and what one knew, everyone knew. The espers flew faster, sworn to fight and die to the last man and woman, to ensure that New Hope would not fall again.

  Finn's fleet appeared over the curve of the horizon, and the espers smiled as they saw their enemies for the first time. Psionic energies crackled around them like harnessed lightnings. One hundred and twenty of them, set against gravity barges with the firepower of star-cruisers, and gravity sleds beyond counting. The espers increased their speed, the chill wind whipping past them now. The foremost gravity barge targeted them with its tracking computers and the disrupter cannon opened fire. Energy beams seared through the space where the espers had been only a moment before. They scattered, streaking through the air in sudden zigzags, changing tack again and again, confusing the barge's battle computers with studied randomness. And then the espers were in and among the fleet, and the barges couldn't fire for fear of hitting each other. The armed men riding the gravity sleds opened fire with their weapons, but the espers were here and there and gone again, darting in and out of sight, flying too fast to be hit, too fast even to be anticipated. They couldn't be heard over the roar of engines, but they were singing their battle song and their death song, which were one and the same. Singing joyfully, the espers went to war.

  They flashed between and among the slower-moving gravity sleds, tricking the riders into shooting each other, and occasionally darting in close enough to tip the riders overboard, so that they fell screaming to their death far below. Energy weapons discharged all around the espers, but they blocked the crackling energy beams with the force of their minds, and sent them ricocheting back. Pure Humanity soldiers were thrown from their sleds, or burst into flames, so that their sleds spiraled slowly away from the fleet, heading earthwards with their scorched and charred burdens. Psychokinetic energies howled through the thin air, and sled engines blew apart. Sleds and riders fell like stones. Hand weapons exploded, blowing the hands and arms off their users. Hearts stopped, lungs flattened, brains crushed inside their skulls. The espers were running loose in the heart of the fleet now, and blood and death and screams accompanied them.

  Some espers were shot and killed, of course, dropping through the air like burning birds. Given the odds against them, it was inevitable. But they'd known that going in.

  And when they'd done all the damage they could, and their numbers had dropped to the danger point, the surviving espers threw themselves at the hulking gravity barges, darting and dodging past the withering defensive fire, and slammed into the exposed engine vents at the rear of the barges, where they detonated themselves like psionic grenades. Massive explosions rocked the targeted barges. Steel hulls shattered, and waves of fire swept through crowded corridors. Some began slow, controlled descents back to earth, while they still could. But even after the hundred and twenty espers had dashed themselves against Finn's fleet and given it everything they had, including their lives, the main bulk of the fleet still pressed on, not even slowed. It was just too big to be turned aside by individuals, no matter how brave.

  The whole battle was over in less than half an hour. The fleet thundered on, towards the floating city.

  On the landing pads of New Hope, Crow Jane saw the last esper mind of the attacking force gutter and go out, as she quietly sang the last few words of the battle song along with it. The oversoul hadn't been able to save any of the minds. The Icarus Working was just too important to risk a lapse in concentration, even for a moment. Crow Jane could feel it assembling in the back of her mind, like a great engine slowly coming to life.

  A slight and diffident figure appeared suddenly beside her, and she jumped despite herself. The Ecstatic called Joy was the only person on New Hope who wasn't a part of the oversoul. Not least because the oversoul didn't want anything to do with his mind. The last of his kind, Joy's brain had been surgically altered so that he lived in a state of constant o
rgasm. Theoretically, he was capable of accessing all kinds of altered states of consciousness, seeing the past and the future as well as the present; but mostly he just smiled a lot and said things that made sense only later, if then. He nodded companionably to Crow Jane, as she recovered her composure. Perhaps his eyes were sad too. It was hard to tell, over that smile. He looked out into the sky, as though he could see the fleet coming.

  "Something is dying," he said softly. "Something is being born. The world turns, and something awful turns in its sleep, waiting to be summoned. We will all fly to glory. Nothing is ever forgotten, nothing is ever lost. The man with the sundered mind will be here soon. It's going to rain tomorrow."

  Crow Jane looked at him, too tired even to be properly exasperated. She would have liked to dig into his thoughts and drag out what he was really talking about, but knew better than to try. The few es-pers who'd tried to penetrate the Ecstatic's mind had staggered away dazed and giggling and speaking in tongues. The few glimpses they got of his mind's workings, past the never-ending thunder of pure pleasure, baffled and disturbed them. Whole new ways of thinking that made no sense at all—or perhaps so much sense that the normal mind couldn't accommodate them. But sometimes Joy knew things, and sometimes he said things that mattered, so the oversoul let him stay. It had a strange feeling it was going to need the Ecstatic.

  "They'll be here soon," said Crow Jane, just to be saying something. "Stupid bastards. Don't they know that by attacking us, they're cutting their own throats? We were supposed to be the Empire's early warning system, to guard against the coming of the Terror. With us gone, the next world in its path will get no warning at all."

  "You could still monitor the situation, in exile," said Joy, drifting very close to sanity for a moment.

  "Why should we?" said Crow Jane, her mind still full of death songs. "Let Humanity die. Let all the stupid bastards die."

  "The Terror comes for us all," observed Joy, swaying slightly from side to side. "Wide-eyed and terrible, endlessly howling, a lamentation in the night."

  Crow Jane ignored him. She could feel the Icarus Working coming together in the back of her head, but something was wrong. Something was… missing. Crow Jane felt a lurch in the mass consciousness of the oversoul, as though a foot had reached down for a step that wasn't there. A vital component wasn't where it should have been. Jenny Psycho, the last living soul to be touched by the Mater Mundi and raised to greatness, the most powerful single mind in the over-soul, wasn't there. She'd stepped out, gone away, vanished without even leaving a note to say when she'd be back. Crow Jane shared the shock and astonishment radiating through the oversoul. Jenny Psycho's power had been a vital ingredient of the Icarus Working. It could still go ahead—even now, a thousand minds were busy calculating the necessary changes—but suddenly the whole thing had become a hell of a lot chancier.

  And then the Durandal's fleet appeared on the horizon, and there was no more time. Crow Jane sank into the welcoming embrace of the oversoul, one mind becoming many, as every esper on New Hope joined into a single magnificent effort of will. The whole city blazed with light, brilliant and blinding, and even miles off in the distance everyone in Finn's fleet cried out and had to turn their eyes away. The floating city, ten miles wide and five high, began to shake. Millions of minds concentrated as one, and New Hope shook and shuddered as slowly, slowly, it began to rise. A great psionic pressure thundered on the air—a mental presence so strong that people all over Logres could feel it. The city of New Hope rose up through the rapidly thin-ning air, moving faster and faster, surrounded by its own shimmering force field, all of this power generated solely by esper minds working in unison. Far below, helpless on his gravity sled, Finn Durandal watched his prey escaping, and howled with rage. Even his armored gravity barges couldn't follow where New Hope was going. New Hope emerged from Logres's atmosphere and moved into orbit, leaving the world behind. The whole city glowed fiercely, a new star in the night.

  The Icarus Working.

  Left behind, Finn Durandal yelled into his comm net for the nearest starcruisers to change course and intercept the fleeing city. But the only ship in range was the Hammer. It moved ponderously round the curve of the world, heading for New Hope. It had barely moved into sensor range when all its systems failed. Computers crashed, backups aborted, and everything that could go wrong did. Life support systems collapsed, lights flickered on and off, the artificial gravity failed, and sudden fires broke out all through the ship. The Hammer drifted further and further off course, and began the slow fall towards Logres. It had flown too close to the new sun in the heavens, and its wings had burned.

  The oversoul concentrated one last time, and New Hope disappeared—hidden, undetectable behind its own stealth shields. The oversoul looked upon its works, saw them to be good, and considered where to go next.

  While the oversoul was still planning its escape from Logres, Donal Corcoran was planning his escape from the asylum he was being held in. Corcoran was the first man to have looked upon the face of the Terror—at a great distance, and via his ship's sensors—but he had looked upon the face of the Medusa, and the experience had marked him forever. He no longer thought as other men did. Medication didn't affect him, even in what would have been toxic doses for anyone else. He didn't eat or drink anymore, and he hadn't slept in months. He still wore his old spacer's uniform, now ragged and filthy, and he hadn't shaved or washed or even combed his hair since he'd been dragged screaming from the bridge of his ship in a strait-jacket. He was being kept in a high-security asylum disguised as a country house, while doctors and scientists studied him from as safe a distance as possible.

  But Donal Corcoran had had enough of that. He plotted awful revenges against the Terror, for what it had done to him, and for that he needed to be free.

  Part of his disturbed mind was always in contact with the Terror. As though it had taken part of his mind with it when it disappeared back into the place it came from, the place that wasn't a place. The Terror was always there on the edges of his thoughts, like a nightmare waiting to begin. Sometimes he thought it could see him too, and the thought made him whimper and bite his fingers. But he could see the place the Terror came from, even when it wasn't there; a space beyond space. It was as real to him as the place that imprisoned him. It drew and terrified him, like a hunger for poisonous things.

  It was his way out.

  So one evening when the shadows seemed particularly dark and restless, Donal Corcoran went walking through the grounds of the country house. The lawns were a vivid green, newly wet from the sprinklers. Wide blooming flowers perfumed the air with their scent, and the trees were very solid, but none of it was real, any more than the house was really a house. The house was an asylum, and the grounds were mostly holo images, backed up by sound recordings and programmed smells. Donal could see right through them when he chose, though of course he never told the doctors that. Sometimes he could see right through them too. Donal went walking, stopping now and then to count and recount his fingers, because he had to keep checking the details of the few things he still believed in. Certainty had deserted him, blown away by the Gorgon's gaze. He couldn't trust anything anymore, except his own intentions. He giggled like a small boy contemplating a particularly clever bit of mischief, and moved his changed mind in certain unusual ways. And as he changed his mind, the world changed around him. He walked out of the illusionary garden and into a place that only looked like a place. It was cold and dark, like an endless stone corridor buried deep, deep below the ground, stretching away in every direction, including some he couldn't even name. It smelled of dead roses and a woman's sweat, and he could hear a baby crying in the distance but he knew it wasn't really a baby. A great Word hung unspoken on the air, held at bay by the implacable will of a woman wailing for her demon lover. The sorrow of it would have broken Donal's heart, if he still had one. He chose a direction and walked back into the world that everyone else agreed was real. In front of him was the door
to his psychiatrist's office. Dr. Oisin Benjamin. Donal smiled a not particularly nice or even sane smile. He pushed open the door without knocking, and strolled into Dr. Benjamin's office.

  The doctor looked up from his desk, startled, and moved his hand automatically to cover the notes he was writing. Dr. Benjamin was a great one for writing notes. He didn't look especially pleased to see his star patient. Donal sat down in the visitor's chair and crossed his legs casually.

  "Donal," said Dr. Benjamin, trying to sound pleasant and not at all nervous. "How did you… You're not supposed to be here, Donal. My appointments are over for the day. Why don't I ring for an attendant, to escort you back to your quarters…"

  He was already reaching for the hidden alarm button, to summon his bully boys in white coats, when Donal launched himself out of his chair. He threw himself across the top of the desk, merrily scattering important papers, and grasped Dr. Benjamin by the throat. The two of them fell backwards and crashed to the floor with Donal on top, straddling the doctor's chest. Dr. Benjamin struggled but couldn't break free, pinned down by Donal's wright. He opened his mouth to yell for help, and Donal hit him lightly in the face. There was a loud crack as the doctor's nose broke, and blood flew from his smashed mouth.

  "Sorry about that," said Donal. "Guess I don't know my own strength these days." He paused, trying out various expressions on his face to see which would impress the doctor the most. "Now, be still. I'm here for a little chat. One last pleasant conversation before it's time for me to go. You should be pleased, Doctor, you've been trying to get me to open up to you for ever so long, haven't you? Trying to get inside my head, to see the world as I do. Not a good idea, Dr. Benjamin. Trust me on this, if nothing else. Where I am, it is always cold and dark and someone's crying. It might even be me. I hear the voices of all those who died on the Rim Worlds, whispering around the edges of my thoughts. They don't like being dead again. And I can feel the Terror, moving slowly towards us, coming for us all. I want to run in every direction at once, but even more than that I want revenge. I want my thoughts to be my own again. I want my life to make sense again. I want my old life back! That's not so much to ask, is it? I'm going to destroy the Terror, for what it's done to me. And I can't do that while I'm still here. So I'm off. Things to do, things to do… But before I go, good Dr. Benjamin, I have a present for you. One last gift, to help you understand what's going on in my head."