Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

Silence, and commanded the Empire to prepare; the Terror had finally come for them all.
    Lewis used his comm implant to access the House's official records and brought himself up to date on what had happened while he was away, all the time watching the awful scenes on the viewscreen along with everyone else. Watching while planets burned on the edge of the Empire.
    It started, as so many bad things did, out on the Rim. Out on the far boundary of the Empire, where civilization ends and the endless night begins, lay a small group of unimportant planets that two centuries before had been a part of the legendary and infamous Darkvoid. Swallowed up by the dreadful Darkvoid Device, the populations of those worlds had become monsters; the Recreated. They were rescued and restored to their humanity by the blessed Owen, given life and sanity and peace of heart again. For two hundred years. Until the Terror came. Poor bastards, Lewis thought helplessly. You just couldn't get a break, could you?
    The Terror came out of the dark unknown spaces beyond the Rim of Empire, from the vast and unknowable outer reaches. There was no warning, no premonition; just the Terror coming out of nowhere to fall on the undefended planets like a wolf upon the fold. Out of the billions of innocent souls who once lived on those seven worlds, only one man now survived; Donal Corcoran, heading for the safety of the inner systems as fast as his small ship, The Jeremiah, could carry him. What he saw drove him out of his mind, so that he screamed and weeped and shuddered uncontrollably as he contacted the authorities, to try and tell them what he'd seen, and what had happened, on the day the Terror finally reached the Empire.
    He'd just happened to be leaving orbit after a fairly successful trading run to the planet Iona, when the Terror arrived. He ran, accelerating with everything his ship's engines could give him, until he was fast enough and far enough away from the planet's gravity well to drop into the safety of hyperspace. No one blamed him. Running was the only sane thing to do. While his ship was still building up speed, Corcoran dropped all his sensor drones behind him, to record what was happening. Some of the drones were still transmitting now, through The Jeremiah's computers, showing what the Terror had done to seven helpless planets and their populations. The drones were dying, one by one, their information streams cutting in and out. Apparently just their continued proximity to the Terror was enough to distort and mutate their systems. Those that weren't dying were becoming something else, and no one knew what.
    The Jeremiah hadn't escaped unscathed, either. Systems were breaking down all over the ship, scarred by the gaze of the Medusa. And Donal Corcoran, once a simple trader, was now a wild-eyed crazy man, prophesying doom. He kept breaking into the drones' transmissions, to scream and shout and weep over what he'd seen. Just one look at the Terror had been enough to unhinge his thoughts, and fracture his reason. Tragically, he was still just sane enough to know how much he'd lost. You couldn't look into the devil's eyes and hope to come away unmarked. The nearest Fleet starcruiser had been sent to intercept his path and pick him up, but the Rim was a long way off, even for the new H class stardrives. No one patrolled the Rim anymore. There was no need. Nothing ever happened out there, so far from the heart of civilization. And there hadn't been a threat from beyond the Rim since the blessed Owen's day.
    No one ever really thought the Terror would come in their lifetime .. .
    One by one the sensor drones were shutting down, overwhelmed by the awful energies radiating from the seven burning worlds out on the Rim. It didn't matter. There was no point in going there, no one left to rescue. And the Terror wasn't there anymore. It had moved on, heading on a slow straight line right for the densely populated planets at the heart of the Empire.
    Lewis called up the House's records of the events leading up to the Terror. Recorded images filled his eyes, channelled down his optical nerves; a combination of the planets' news channels, security systems, and individual recordings. A short history of the coming of the end. Lewis felt angry and sick and helpless, and his lips pressed so tightly together they were entirely white.
    It started simply enough. Something came out of the darkness beyond the Rim, out of the empty spaces, traveling at just