Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny

might just start unraveling around us. As long as reality continues undisturbed, I think we can assume the baby is still safely sleeping. Wulfs probably just being precious; keeping us waiting till he's ready to talk to us. He never did have much use for humans."
    "Well, we did wipe out all his species but him." said Hazel. "That had to make an impression. Giles was the only human the Wolfling ever had any time for. And you killed him."
    "Quite," said Owen. "Let us hope very fervently that Wulf doesn't bear grudges.
    In the meantime, we'd better change our clothes. Our present attire, apart from being decidedly bloody and tattered from our time among the Blood Runners, is entirely unsuitable for the chill of the caverns of the Wolfling World."
    "You know, you can be really fussy, sometimes," said Hazel, following Owen reluctantly into the cramped lounge area behind the bridge. "I mean, the Wolfling isn't going to care what we look like."
    "I care," said Owen firmly, opening the clothes locker and rooting dubiously through the limited selection. "I am the Deathstalker, and I will not appear before the Wolfling looking like some tramp. It's a question of dignity."
    Hazel sniffed, loudly, and decided to reject the first three things Owen showed her, on principle. There wasn't that much choice, really, the locker's stock being limited to what Moon and Owen had been able to acquire from Saint Bea's Mission and the original Church ship, but eventually Owen and Hazel settled on suitable clothing they could both live with, topped with heavy cloaks to keep out the cold. Hazel paused briefly as Owen swung his cloak about him, and admired himself in the locker's full-length mirror. The hackles on her neck were
    standing up. She'd seen Owen in that cloak before; on the two occasions when he'd appeared suddenly out of nowhere, first to save her life in the Standing on Virimonde, and then again later in the Mission to try and warn her about the Blood Runners. He'd been wearing these very clothes, but had looked tired and hurt and desperate. A slow chill wrapped itself around Hazel's heart as she began to understand what that meant, what it had to mean…
    She might have said something, but suddenly every alarm on the bridge went off at once. Owen and Hazel ran back onto the bridge and bent over the control panels, looking for trouble. Nothing was obviously wrong, until Owen thought to check the sensor readings.
    "It's a proximity warning," he said slowly. "Something's coming our way…
    something big. And it's moving bloody quickly."
    "Could it be Silence, on the Dauntless?" said Hazel, one hand dropping automatically to the gun at her hip.
    "I don't think so. The sensor readings make no sense at all. I'm switching to long range. That should put something on the viewscreen."
    Shapes began to appear on the screen, and Owen sucked in a sharp breath. Hazel was strangely silent, moving to stand as close as she could to Owen. On the viewscreen, great shapes were gathering beyond the Wolfling World like vultures over something dying. Huge ships, the size of mountains or small moons, with insane structures and convoluted shapes that sucked the eye in uneasy directions. There seemed no real edge or end to them, as though they were still, always, just dropping out of hyperspace into normal reality. And between and around these awful ships, strange monstrous shapes; alive, aware, and completely unprotected in the cold vacuum of space. Some were almost as big as the ships, vast alien creatures with eyes like spotlights, and barbed tentacles that
    stretched for miles. There were claws and teeth and staring eyes in repulsive entities the size of cities, that shouldn't, couldn't, exist. They shone with their own unhealthy light, vast shapes and horrid creatures without number, gathering silently on all sides of the beleaguered planet.
    The Recreated had come to the Wolfling World.
    "Jesus," said Hazel softly. "We are in deep shit. Look at the size of those things… This just isn't possible… I mean, how do they even survive out there without ships?"
    "This is where they live," said Owen. "Their home. Maybe they don't need ships, here. But there's something… wrong, about those monsters. There's no way they evolved in open space. Claws, tentacles, and eyes are planetary aspects. They must have evolved on some world, originally."
    "Typical historian," said Hazel, without heat. "I don't give a damn about the Recreated's past, I want to know