Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

servants to keep him company, wait on his every whim, and remind him of what he was supposed to do next. There had been a wife too, but that had been an arranged marriage, and he spent as little time with her as possible. She was dead now, and he didn’t miss her at all. And now here he was, alone in the middle of nothing, the only living thing on a converted cargo ship, his only company a ship’s AI called Moses. It tried hard, but it was programmed really only to deal with cargo manifests and the occasional dock crew. And since Daniel had stolen the ship from the Church, its few topics of conversation tended to revolve around official Church dogma, none of which interested Daniel in the least. So mostly he spent his days roaming the steel corridors and echoing cargo bays, keeping moving just to be doing something.
    Sometimes he just stayed in his cabin, and sat in the corner, hugging his knees to his chest, and rocking silently to and fro.
    He’d acquired his ship, the Heaven’s Tears, on Technos III. Things had just gone terribly wrong for his Clan. The rebels had overrun his Family’s stardrive factory and blown it to pieces, scattering and overwhelming a small army of Church troops in the process. So, Daniel reasoned, with the factory gone, he no longer had any Family responsibilities left on Technos III, and was therefore finally free to go looking for his dead father. He made sure Stephanie was safe and then walked out on her, making his way fairly easily through the general chaos to the nearby landing pads, where the Church ships were docked. He chose one of the smaller vessels, pretty much at random, strode on board, and demanded
    that the skeleton crew hand over control of the ship to him. He was an aristocrat, after all, and they were just low-level Church technos. He was genuinely surprised when they told him to go take a hike, and shot the nearest techno in honest outrage. Having thus committed himself, Daniel cut down the other two with his sword while they were still reaching for their weapons.
    He threw the bodies off the ship, sealed all the hatches, and took off without bothering to ask for clearance. And given the widespread chaos on all sides, no one bothered to challenge him. At the time, killing the three technos hadn’t bothered Daniel at all. He’d needed the ship, and the technos had just been in his way. But as days turned to weeks alone on board the Heaven’s Tears, he seemed to feel their presence more and more. He cleaned up all the bloodstains himself, as a kind of penance, but he still saw their faces in his dreams. At night, lying alone in his bed, he thought he heard noises in the corridor outside his cabin. He kept the door locked and slept with his light on. It was always night in space.
    There wasn’t much for him to do. The AI let Daniel do a few simple things, just so he’d have something to occupy his time. Because it was a Church ship, the recreational tapes were all strictly religious in nature. Daniel’s main pastime was arguing with Moses over anything and everything, which rather upset the AI, who had been programmed to be friendly and agreeable. Daniel had Moses search its memory banks for everything it had on Shub, the rogue AIs, and the Forbidden Sector, but there wasn’t much.
    Most of it was classified, under strictly need-to-know access codes, and even Daniel’s aristocratic status couldn’t break those.
    So Daniel sat slumped in the command chair on his bridge and brooded over what little information he had. He was a big man, in his early twenties, with a great hulking frame he’d inherited from his father and a face that mostly tended toward a scowl or a sulk. He wore his long hair in a simple pigtail, and had only the set of clothes he’d run away in. The ship kept them fresh, but they were beginning to show the strain.
    In his constant search for something to pass the time, he’d reluctantly taken to working out regularly with improvised weights. He hated it with a passion, but he no longer had a convenient body shop to turn to when his muscles started sagging, and he had some vague idea he might have to fight his way in and out of Shub. As a result, he was in the best shape of his life, and felt pretty good about it. Doing something he hated made him feel virtuous. And he thought it was something his father would approve of. Only once had he been distracted in his search for his father. When war finally broke out all across the Empire, he watched