Deathstalker 01 - Deathstalker

planet. And it's a big bastard, too. Its sensors immediately discovered the Standing, and the castle has been forced to
    raise its shields. If it were to drop them long enough to transfer any of you back on board, I have no doubt the Dauntless would immediately reduce the Standing to a great many pieces of interestingly shaped rubble. So the shields are staying up."
    "Never mind protecting your silicon ass!" said Ruby. "Get us the hell out of here! Do something!"
    "What would be the point?" said Giles. "Where could we go that they wouldn't follow us? Our only hope is to pass through the Maze and wake the Hadenmen.
    Don't tell me you're afraid, bounty hunter?"
    "All right, I won't tell you, but someone's bound to notice. Only the foolish and the dead are never afraid, and I have no intention of becoming either. There are too many unknowns here. I don't like the odds."
    "I've faced worse odds than this in my time," said Random. "Of course, I got my ass kicked quite a few times. You stick with me, Ruby. I'll hold your hand if things get scary."
    "You so much as lay one finger on me," said Ruby coldly, "and I will personally cut it off and make you eat it. Same goes for anyone else."
    "I believe her," said Owen, and Hazel nodded solemnly.
    "Enough talk," said Moon. "My people are waiting."
    He strode forward into the entrance of the Madness Maze and was immediately lost to sight. The others watched, half-tensed for some angry reaction within the Maze, but the moment dragged on and nothing happened. They all looked at each other, but there was nothing left to say, so one by one they entered the Maze, until they were gone, with nothing to show they had ever been there.
    Owen Deathstalker entered the Maze cautiously, disrupter in one hand, sword in the other. Up close, the bright shimmering of the steel walls was almost
    painful, no matter how he scrunched up his eyes. Static sparked on the air around him and rustled in his hair. It was bitter cold in the Maze, and his breath steamed on the air before him. He shivered despite himself and immediately looked back, ready to make some remark so his companions wouldn't think he was shivering from fear, and only then realized he was completely alone. He quickly retraced his steps, but although he had only made a few twists and turns in the Maze, he couldn't find his way back to his friends or the entrance. He called out, and his voice echoed loudly in the silence, but there was no reply. He started to shout again, then stopped himself. He had a strong feeling someone or something was listening, and it wasn't any of his companions.
    He activated his comm implant and subvocalized his message, just in case.
    "This is Owen. Can anyone hear me? Can anyone hear me? Please respond. Oz, can you hear me? Oz, are you there?"
    There was no sound at all over his implant, not even static. He was on his own.
    He scowled, hefted his gun and his sword, and moved on, heading deeper into the Maze. At first he checked the floor for hidden trapdoors and the walls for hidden mechanisms, but slowly it came to him that the Maze's secrets would be more subtle than that. He tried taking only left-hand turns, and then left followed by right, but finally he made his choices at random in response to some deeper, more receptive instinct.
    Time passed, until he had no idea of how far he'd come or how far the Maze stretched. He forgot about the Imperial starcruiser, or even why he'd entered the Maze in the first place. There were only the steel walls and the twists and turns of the path, leading him remorselessly on toward something momentous. It seemed to him he could hear breathing, slow and steady and gigantic, gusting
    about him like a warm, wet breeze. And above and beyond that, the regular distant thudding of an enormous heart. Neither of them were in any way real, and he knew it; it was just his mind trying to interpret something new in ways he could understand. The feeling of being watched was stronger than ever, only there was more to it than that. It was as though the Maze was somehow alive and aware of his presence in it. Not like a rat in a scientist's test, or an antibody in a bloodstream, but more as though he was the final component in an equation that had never before been completed. He put his sword and gun away and wandered on, drawn by something, or the promise of something, he could not name.
    He saw faces and heard voices, there were lights and sounds, and images from his past surged