Deathstalker 01 - Deathstalker

supercharge his mind and body, breaking the AI's control in a moment. He stepped back from Random and lowered his gun.
    Hazel threw herself at Ruby in one last desperate attack, but Owen reached out through their mental link and stopped her in mid-thrust. His mind, linked with
    the others, had become clear and lucid, shining and brilliant. Owen reached out in a new direction he could sense if not see, and suddenly he was somewhere else, and Ozymandius was there with him. It was a strange place, without identifiable shape or form, but he was the light and the AI was the dark. Owen shone like the sun, bright and piercing, and the AI's darkness surrounded him like the endless starless night of the Darkvoid, thick and smothering. But Owen was not alone. His friends were with him, and together they were so much more than they had been. The light blazed bright and brighter, and the darkness fell back before it, growing gray, paler and paler, until it was nothing more than a thin shadow, fading away to nothing at all. And if Owen heard a last despairing cry of his name in the AI's voice, he payed it no heed, and there was only the light, shining on and on forever.
    And then the light was gone, and the link was broken, and Owen fell back alone into his body. He awoke reluctantly, in fits and starts, to find himself lying on the floor of the Maze with Random kneeling beside him. He turned his head slowly to see Hazel lying on her back not far away, twitching and shivering, while Ruby hovered uncertainly over her.
    Owen sat up slowly and carefully. His body felt like his own again, but as though he'd returned to it after a long absence somewhere else. Memories of the mind link were already becoming confused and scattered, like a fading dream, and Owen was content to let that happen. It had been too big, too complex, too frightening for him to stand for long, and he chose quite deliberately to forget it.
    "What happened?" said Random. "What was that? I've never felt anything like it."
    "It's over," said Owen. "Don't think about it."
    "What about the AI? Is its contact broken?"

    "Yes. Ozymandius is dead. I killed him."
    "He was just a machine," said Giles, looking down at him.
    "He was my friend," said Owen, and he turned his face away from them.
    "What do you mean, we've lost contact with the Dauntless?" Captain Silence glared at his Security Officer, V. Stelmach, who stood very stiffly to attention. Investigator Frost stood at her Captain's shoulder and added her own not inconsiderable frown to his. Stelmach stared straight ahead, carefully looking at neither of them.
    "I mean all communication with the ship has been severed, Captain. Our comm implants still work down here, under the planet's surface, but everything else is being blocked."
    Silence scowled unhappily. He didn't like being cut off from his ship, and thereby the Empire, particularly in as volatile a situation as this. It felt like anything could happen down here, buried deep in the guts of the planet.
    Comm signals routed themselves through hyperspace and were therefore normally instantaneous, no matter where you were in the Empire or who you were talking to. Now Stelmach was saying something on or in this graveyard of a planet was blocking those signals. Which was supposed to be impossible. Silence's scowl deepened. He hadn't liked coming into the Dark void in the first place, and he'd liked having to go dirtside with hardly any advance intelligence of the situation even less, especially once he'd been informed of the planet's history.
    But the Empress' orders had been very clear. She wanted him there, on the ground, so that he could make instant policy decisions as and when necessary.
    The Empress had been giving him a lot of orders he hadn't liked just recently.
    He could have reached the planet a lot sooner if he hadn't had to detour to pick
    back up Stelmach and his new pet, and then the Lord High Dram, his own imposing self. In fact, if he hadn't had to stop for them, he could have arrived at the Wolfling World only a few minutes' after the rebels' ship and might even have managed to stop the rebels going into the Madness Maze. Whatever the hell that was. Still, he didn't think he'd tell the Empress that. He didn't think she'd take it kindly.
    Dram hadn't been too much trouble. He kept to himself on board ship, barely leaving his quarters, and even though he'd insisted on coming down dirtside with the rest of them, he was careful to keep out of everyone's