Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny

thrown at you. So; if you will agree to fight on the front lines, as Humanity's defenders, Parliament is prepared to offer you both official Pardons for the crimes and atrocities you perpetrated on the planet Loki, against the rightly appointed government there."
    "I gave all the orders," said Random. "The responsibility is all mine. But since I've done nothing wrong, your offer of a Pardon is basically irrelevant. I'm proud of what I did on Loki. Still, much as I hate to agree with you on anything, you're right on one thing. We are needed. We might just be able to tip the balance. And with Owen and Hazel gone, we're the last of the Maze people. We have a duty to use our powers in the defense of Humanity."
    "Hold everything," said Ruby in an aside, "what's all this we stuff? I've never admitted to a single obligation in my whole life, and I'm not about to start now."
    "You mean you don't want to fight the bad guys?" Random asked, turning to her.
    "Of course I want to fight! I always want to fight! I just like to be asked, that's all."
    "I'll ask you later. Over several large drinks. For now just follow my lead, nod and smile in the right places, and concentrate on planning some really nasty tactics we can use against the bad guys, while I deal with Gutman."
    "Why can't I deal with Gutman?"
    "Because you'd lose your temper in under two minutes and kill him horribly."
    "Good point."
    And then the viewscreen suddenly came to life again, with a new report coming in. Gutman frowned as he listened to something on a secure channel on his comm implant. "We're getting live feed from… Virgil III, the latest planet infected with the new plague. No ships are allowed past high orbit, but they've sent down probes to take a look at what's happening."
    Automated probes swept through the streets of what had once been a human city.
    The air was full of inhuman screams and shrieks and howls. No transport was running, though some automated machinery continued here and there, to no purpose anymore. Some buildings had been set on fire by their occupants, and thick black smoke drifted on the disturbed air. And in the streets, running or stumbling or crawling—monsters. Things that had once been people, but were no longer. Men and women had been transformed by the plague into nightmare shapes of jutting bone and hideously stretched skin. Strange new organs had formed on the outside of their bodies, black and pulsing, with inhuman properties and purposes. Long curving horns strung with strings of neurons glistened on elongated heads, and legs had three or four joints. Human growth gone mad, without restraint or reason. Monsters lurched and stumbled through the streets, with insect eyes and too many limbs, tormented by inhuman hungers and desires. They growled and slobbered and cried in unknown languages, using sounds beyond or beneath human comprehension. Occasionally a long tentacle would whip up from a shadowed alleyway to snatch a probe from the air and crush it.
    Some of Virgil III's people had progressed even beyond that. After the monsters came the next, and most feared, stage of the plague: meltdown. The body lost all shape and structure, collapsing into liquid, protoplasmic goo. There were whole cities now on abandoned worlds where nothing moved but great tides and rivers of
    accumulated slime; whole populations reduced to little more than massive amoebas.
    That was the new plague, the transformation disease, and its inevitable end.
    There was no cure, no idea as to its origin or nature or how it spread. The only effective answer was planetary quarantine. So far, seven planets had had to be abandoned to their fate. Volunteers had gone in to help, protected by impenetrable energy screens. Most went mad. The plague appeared spontaneously, with no obvious cause or carriers, and no clear link with any of the other affected planets. An unnatural disease, of tech run wild; nanotech. Individual machines the size of molecules, that could remake a living organism from within.
    The one technology too awful and too dangerous even for the old Empire to use.
    The viewscreen shut down, and the monsters thankfully disappeared. No one felt like saying anything. Some people were being sick. Random frowned.
    "There's no question this is nanotech?"
    "None," said Gutman.
    "Then the answer's obvious. Someone has to reopen Zero Zero."
    The people around him flinched back from the last two words as though he'd spat at them. Some made the sign of the