Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

stream of alternates could appear, for as long as they were needed, or for as long as Hazel d’Ark could stand it.
    She knew the effort was killing her, and didn’t give a damn. She would save the lepers, not so much because she cared about them, but because Owen had. She knelt beside him, her strength seeping out of her like blood from an opened vein, and put one gentle hand upon his shoulder. She’d come this far with Owen Deathstalker, and if she had to follow him into the lands of the dead, she could do that too.
    Someone was calling her name. Over and over, in a strange buzzing voice. She turned her head slowly and saw Tobias Moon kneeling beside her. “We can’t win this way!” he said urgently. “There’s too many of them. But seeing you use your power has shown me how to use mine. I know what to do. Trust me!
    Reach out to me, and we can win this fight a different way!”
    “How?” said Hazel.
    “The Red Brain,” said Moon. “It isn’t in the jungle. It is the jungle.” And his mind reached out to hers and made contact. And through her Moon touched all the other Hazels. Bonnie and Midnight were there too, and Owen, somehow. They all joined together, melding and merging, becoming something far more powerful than the sum of their parts. They reached out and gathered up all the living minds in the Mission, from the sickest leper to Saint Bea herself. And together they turned outward, forged into one force, one thought, and touched the Red Brain—the gestalt consciousness of all the plant life on Lachrymae Christi.
    The jungle, millions of square miles of it, was all one connected body, and its mind was the Red Brain.
    This was what the Hadenmen had come in search of, what Shub had sent the Grendels to seize or control or destroy. A whole new form of consciousness, unknown anywhere else in the Empire. A mind the size of a world. The Red Brain’s thoughts were slow, moving with the rhythm of day and night, and the turning of the seasons, endlessly dying, endlessly living, immeasurably old. Alone for millennia, until the new mind touched it. Friendship was new, and joy, at being alone no longer, but it learned need and necessity too, and stretched out its vast and mighty body to help its new friend.
    The jungle around the Mission erupted into movement, driven at a speed it had never known before.
    Trees uprooted themselves and fell across the fallen Mission wall. And across these bridges the jungle advanced and fell upon the Grendels. Barbed flails and crawling vines wrapped themselves around the aliens and tore them apart. Deadly plants with gaping maws and hideous strength erupted out of the broken ground of the compound, called up from deep below by the jungle’s need. Grendels were swallowed up or ripped to pieces, unable to stand against the will of the jungle. The aliens turned and tried to flee, but once they left the Mission, huge, sucking pits appeared under their feet and dragged
    them down. And only a few minutes after it had begun, the jungle grew still again, no more Grendels left to kill.
    The Red Brain and the mass human mind touched again. Far, far in its unimaginable past there had been a time when it was not alone, but that was so long ago it was more instinct than memory. But having been alone for so long, it was overjoyed to have companionship again, and it begged the human mind not to abandon it. For all its age, it was really only a child. The human mind reassured it. There were espers among the lepers. Communication would be possible now that they both knew what they were looking for. And now that the Red Brain had showed its strength, Haden and Shub would never dare come again. The human mind looked around the Mission, sorrowing over its many dead, and then fell back into its many bodies. There was much work to be done.
    After that it was mostly a case of clearing up. Much of the Mission would have to be rebuilt, but this time the jungle would help. Once again bodies had to be cleared up and identified, and Saint Bea worked long hours in her infirmary, healing the sick. And if sometimes she laid her hands on a helpless case and whispered a quiet prayer, who could blame her? Especially when so many of them lived.
    Owen Deathstalker woke up in the infirmary, astonished to be alive. Bonnie and Midnight lay in beds on either side of him, and Hazel took turns sitting with each of them. The link with the Red Brain, and its immense mental strength, had saved them, pulling them