Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny

enough. The thick lips leered. "I'm tired of being the Prince of Peace. I think this will be much more fun. I'll just hold you here till your shields go down, and then you'll be mine, to make and remake as the whim takes me. I'll stir my sticky fingers in your flesh, and mold you into your worst nightmares. You'll be my playthings, forever and ever and ever."
    "He could do it," said Morrell, his face white and desperate. "I can't break his hold on my mind. Oh God… Captain; do something!"
    Silence turned to Carrion. "Call the Ashrai. See if they're still angry."
    "They're already here," said Carrion, smiling a very dark smile.
    Huge forms came plunging down from above, gargoyle faces roaring their rage in a sound almost too loud to be borne. The Devil snarled, and threw demons at them with a wave of a clawed crimson hand. The huge forms slammed together, filling the dark sky. More and more demons formed out of nothing, created by Marlowe's nanos. Silence and Carrion looked at each other. Almost against their will, their altered minds reached out to each other, and came together in a fusion that was far greater than the sum of its parts. Morrell cried out, and had to look away, hiding behind his strongest shields for fear of being blinded by the light their fusion was generating. Silence and Carrion struck out at the Devil, and it was only the work of a moment for their more powerful will to snatch control of the nanos away from Marlowe. He really wasn't much of a telepath, and he'd been alone so long with no one to challenge his will.
    He screamed as Hell flickered out and was gone, like a blown-out candle. Silence and Carrion and Morrell stood on a bare rock plain, facing a man already crumbling and falling apart. Only the nanos had kept him alive, and now they were deserting his body like rats leaving a sinking ship. He became dust and less than dust, and blew away on a gusting wind. Above, the sky was clear of Ashrai and demons. Silence and Carrion separated their thoughts, and looked away from each other, embarrassed by the enforced intimacy of their sharing. They could have retained control of the nanos, but chose not to. They had come far enough from humanity as it was. They had enough damnation on their souls already without adding further temptation.
    "Well," said Morrell, just a little breathlessly. "That was… interesting. Can we get the hell out of here now, please, Captain?"
    "We might as well," said Silence. "This mission is a bust. There's nothing here we dare let loose. No one can be trusted with this kind of power. I'd recommend scorching the world from orbit, if I thought it would do any good, but the nanos might survive even that. So we leave the genie in the bottle, until Humanity's evolved into something wise enough to use it correctly."
    "And we lost Barron," said Carrion. "I brought him here. He trusted me. He should have remembered I was always a bird of ill omen."
    Silence looked around at the empty rocky plain. "I wonder what the nanos will make of this place, now they no longer have a human mind to guide or limit them.
    Might be worth coming back here in a few centuries, just to see what kind of world the nanos make."
    He put in a call to the pinnace waiting in orbit, and it came down and hovered above the rocky ground as the landing party took turns to jump awkwardly up into the open airlock. Silence was last off, as Captain. He took one last look back, and off in the distance he thought he saw Barron, standing alone, waving goodbye. Silence turned his back on Zero Zero, and let the pinnace take him back to the Dauntless, and his duty.

Chapter 4
    From the Undermind to the Oversoul
    Once upon a time, she was just an esper named Diana Vertue, but things had become rather complicated since then. As Jenny Psycho she'd been a hard-core terrorist and a saint of the Mater Mundi, but she'd outgrown both those roles.
    She'd gone looking for the truths of her existence, the meaning and purpose behind the events that had shaped her life, and unfortunately for her, she found them. Now she was just an esper on the run, hiding out in what used to be Finlay
    Campbell's old bolthole; a single cramped apartment in the warrens under the Arenas. The place was a mess, but she couldn't seem to raise the strength of purpose to do anything about it. She lay on her back on the unmade bed, wearing dirty sweat-stained clothes because she had nothing to change into, staring up at the ceiling above her, seeing