Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny

"Trying to take everyone's burdens on your shoulders. Jack Random was responsible for his own life, and his own madness at the end. Ruby too.
    Whatever they did, and whatever end they came to, it was by their own choice and their own will. Just like us, when our times comes. To believe anything else diminishes them, and us."
    Owen looked at her. "Our time? Have you been having those precognitive dreams again? Is there something about our being here I should know?"
    "No," said Hazel firmly. "We have enough real threats to worry about without bringing in my dreams. Make yourself useful for a change; see if you can raise the Wolfling down below. We're really vulnerable here in orbit, if there are any of the Recreated left in the Darkvoid."
    Owen nodded, and turned to the comm panels. Hazel watched him, scowling, and wondered why she was so reluctant to tell him about the dream she'd once had of her future. Of standing alone on the bridge of the Sunstrider II, while all hell broke out around her. Huge alien forces attacking from every side, strange ships and awful creatures beyond counting, nightmares let loose in the waking world, blowing the Sunstrider II apart for all its shields and defenses. Fires burning the length of the ship, alarms sounding endlessly, and the ship's guns firing again and again and again. Below her, the Wolfling World. And no sign of Owen anywhere.
    Now she'd come at last to the place of the dream, but the details were no longer
    accurate. Sunstrider II was destroyed, crashed on the leper world of Lachrymae Christi. All that remained of that ship was its unique stardrive, built into a hijacked Church ship. The new Sunstrider III didn't even have any guns. So the dream was now impossible. She was safe from the overwhelming horror she'd felt, of the terrible inevitable doom she'd felt closing in around her. And no trace of Owen anywhere… The dream was clearly now just a dream. That was why she kept quiet about it, or so she told herself. But the Wolfling World lay cold and silent beneath the ship, like a pale ghostly harbinger of bad things to come.
    We are the last of the Maze people, she thought tiredly. The last of the great rebel leaders. And just maybe the last hope of Humanity. Why does destiny always land most heavily on the shoulders of those who feel least able of handling the burden?
    She looked around suddenly when a familiar voice spoke from the viewscreen, and it wasn't the Wolfling. The screen was now filled with the head and shoulders of Diana Vertue. She looked tired and strained and subtly different, and it took Hazel a moment to realize that Diana didn't look like herself anymore. Her mouth was a grim flat line, and her eyes were dangerously dark and staring. A disturbing sense of menace and barely channeled madness surrounded her like a halo of flies. She looked like her old self; the deadly esper saint, Jenny Psycho.
    "It's all gone wrong," she said sharply. Her voice was painfully rough and harsh again, sounding just as it had when she damaged her throat screaming her sanity way in Wormboy Hell. "We hit the Recreated fleet with everything we had, and barely slowed it down. I helped the massmind of the Mater Mundi join with the AIs, and together we tried to force mental contact with the Recreated; to shock
    them awake and sane, as we did with Shub. But it didn't even come close to working. Contact… wasn't possible. The Recreated are too strong… too angry, too insane… too strange. It was like staring into a sun that never stops screaming.
    Whatever the Recreated are, they're far beyond anything we can hope to comprehend or deal with.
    "The Mater Mundi is in shock, blasted back into its component parts, reeling on the edge of sanity. No use to us, at least for the time being. Just touching the edges of such deranged fury was enough to shatter the esper union. I had to become Jenny Psycho again, in self-defense. It was the only way to deal with such a threat to my… soul. If I think too much about what I… saw, and felt, I think I'd start screaming too, and never stop. Shub came off best, because they couldn't manage any kind of contact; the sheer weirdness of the Recreated had no common ground with their logic. That protected the AIs from the psychic backlash. Right now, everyone who can fly a ship or aim a gun is charging down the throat of the Recreated fleet, weapons blazing. We're trying to slow them down, to buy you some time to pull one last miracle out of the hat.