Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

still urging them on, screaming threats and promises and curses, but the situation had changed and the guards knew it. There were enough of them that they were bound to bring her eventually, but they all knew a hell of a lot of them would die doing it. And no bonuses or threats were worth that. So they hesitated, and as they did, Evangeline clambered aboard her gravity sled and took off, leaving them all behind. No one even shot at her. She laughed shakily, not daring to relax just yet, but finally starting to hope the worst was over. She hadn’t been sure she could bring it off. Deep down she’d still thought of herself as the helpless victim, never really believing she could defeat Gregor.
    She’d gone because she had to, to rescue her friend, and because she was tired of being afraid. But she’d done it. She was shaking from head to toe as reaction set in. She remembered fighting the guards and smiled disbelievingly. The underground had trained her, as it trained all its agents, but she’d never had occasion to use any of it in anger. Presumably her time with Finlay had affected her more than she’d realized. Finlay. She was going home to Finlay now, and he’d be so proud of her. He’d take her in his arms and hold her tight, and the long nightmare of her past life would finally be over. It seemed to her that she’d forgotten something, something important, but she didn’t care. She was going home. The wind
    whipped coldly past her bare skin, and she giggled suddenly at the thought of what an awful sight she must present.
    But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except being safe at home with Finlay, and her friend Penny, and her friend Wax. Maybe they’d have a party when she got back. And then, maybe she’d sleep for a week. Or two.
    *
    Valentine Wolfe, as always not entirely in his right mind, sat at his ease in a very comfortable chair on the bridge of his ship, the Snark, and orbited the planet Loki, fabled world of storms. He was studying the viewscreen before him as it displayed the endlessly changing atmosphere of the Rim world below.

    Glorious patterns revealed themselves to his dilated eyes, complex and fascinating, endlessly reforming, endlessly charming. He’d been watching the storms for some time, secure behind the finest cloaking device Shub could provide, invisible to all below. Valentine had never believed in hiding his dark light behind a bushel, but with so many people sworn to kill him on sight, he had no choice but to take all possible precautions. He smiled dreamily. It wasn’t his fault if people couldn’t take a joke. He’d been in high orbit for over an hour, waiting patiently for the summons he’d been promised. Somewhere beneath all the storms and dramatic weather systems that had made Loki infamous as the most unpleasant and disagreeable colonized world in the whole Empire, in one of Loki’s sturdy and permanently battened-down cities, traitors to the Empire were gathering, and wanted him to join them. They didn’t see themselves as traitors, of course. Traitors never did. Instead they hid behind words like patriotism, necessity, practicality. Valentine had never needed the comfort of euphemisms. He knew what he was, and gloried in it. Beneath his present calm exterior, several very powerful psychotropic drugs were battling it out for dominance. The end result of decades of determined drug experimentation had left him with a system that could ignore doses strong enough to kill a normal man, or drive him utterly mad. So these days Valentine had taken to dosing himself with several substances at once, and letting them fight it out amongst themselves. It was a form of Russian roulette, the possibility of sudden death merely adding a taste of decadence that Valentine found utterly irresistible.
    Everyone was after him. Everyone wanted to kill him. And Valentine couldn’t have been happier. He had forsworn Humanity and allied himself with Shub, and didn’t give a damn. He had always taken pride in being able to see all sides of an argument, sometimes simultaneously, while agreeing with none of them.
    All that mattered was the quest, the search for the ultimate high. And the chance to trample over absolutely everything and have all that lived bow down to him. He just wanted to be God. Was that so much to ask? His contact with Shub, the planet the rogue AIs had made, had gone more easily than he’d thought. In return for being Shub’s agent in the worlds of men, a