Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

they’d buried it deep, where maybe even the current leaders couldn’t find it anymore. Something had frightened them. And given some of the things the underground did still maintain in the records, whatever they had found out about Our Mother of All Souls must have been pretty damn unpleasant. Or dangerous.
    Espers had been first created through genetic engineering just under three centuries ago. A happy accident, the unexpected result of experiments intended to produce something else entirely. It took some time to stabilize the process so that specific abilities would breed true; as telepaths, pokers, pyros etc.
    After that it was just a question of establishing quality control, so the end result could be successfully marketed. Espers weren’t human. They were property, like clones. The end result of Empire science.
    No one objected. Or at least no one that mattered. Once the esper underground was founded, sometime later, its leaders tried many paths, some more successful than others. One of their more disturbing notions had been their attempt to secretly gengineer existing espers into some form of super-esper that could be used as weapons in the great struggle. Espers capable of wielding more than one ability, or even manifesting new, undreamed-of powers. Espers who would burn so brightly they could outshine the sun. There were objectors, but they were shouted down. This was war, after all. At first there was no shortage of volunteers, but these quickly tailed off as it became clear the end results were almost entirely negative. The scientists couldn’t produce super-espers. Only monsters, physical and mental, horrible beyond bearing. The underground destroyed all they could, and did something else with the others. No one knew what. The files were hidden away where no one could find them. Until Diana came along. Little solid evidence remained of what the esper scientists had created in their hidden laboratories, just a list of names. The Shatter Freak, Blue Hellfire, Screaming Silence, The Gray Train, The Spider Harps. And one final name, attached to a date so old it predated the esper underground by centuries. A familiar name.
    Deathstalker.
    Diana still wasn’t sure what to make of that. She’d tried cautiously raising the subject with Owen, but he just sat there for a while, looking very thoughtful, and then clammed up entirely. She tried reason, and threats, but neither of them got her anywhere. Even Jenny Psycho didn’t have what it took to pressure Owen Deathstalker.
    Diana scowled. The Maze people worried her. Human beings shouldn’t be able to do the things these
    people did so casually. And all the signs were that they were still growing stronger, with no clear end in sight. Perhaps in time they might become something like the Mater Mundi—certainly they were all a long way down the road to leaving humanity behind.
    Diana had talked to them all, at one time or another, about the Madness Maze, but they didn’t have much to say. The one thing they did agree on was that the Maze was gone, destroyed by her father, Captain Silence. So Diana went to him for answers, half convinced by then that the Mater Mundi might have been someone who’d passed through the Madness Maze centuries earlier. The same double initial might even be some kind of clue. But Silence couldn’t tell her much either, except to say he’d only gone partway through the Maze before retreating. He was developing strange abilities himself, but wouldn’t discuss them. He did say he’d seen the Maze kill many members of his crew who’d entered the Maze with him, in hideous, nightmarish ways.
    An esper disappeared, air rushing in to fill the vacuum where he’d been. A marine fell into a solid metal wall and disappeared into it. Two marines slammed into each other and ran together like two colors on a pallette, their sticky flesh intermingling beyond any hope of separation. Something horrible appeared out of nowhere; a tangle of blood and bone and viscera that might have been human once. Heads exploded, flesh melted and ran like water, and all around human voices laughed and screamed their sanity away.
    The Madness Maze took a few ordinary men and women and made them superhuman. But it killed a hell of a lot more.
    Diana never asked her father why he destroyed the Maze. If he did it because he believed its existence threatened all Humanity, or to deny it to the rebels, or just because it had killed so many of his crew. She was