Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

under light speed. It caught everyone by surprise, because no one was looking for it.
    Why should they? It shot past the seven populated worlds without slowing, before they even knew it was there, and plunged into their sun. And that should have been the end of it. It should have been destroyed, annihilated in a moment in the hottest fires of all. Instead, it made itself at home in the heart of the sun, basking in the unimaginable heat, and incubated there. Growing, becoming. It absorbed the sun's energies, eating it up, gathering fuel for its mission, and when it was ready it hatched, and a swarm of hateful black creatures that might have been alive or might have been machines or something entirely other, came flying out of the sun's flames and descended on the seven populated planets like so many
    horrid angels. Or devils.
    There were millions of them, each of them subtly different, intricate malevolent shapes like Hell's snowflakes, with hundreds of eyes and even more sharp cutting edges. They formed thick living rings around the targeted planets, endless numbers of them, fighting and jostling for position at barely sublight speed. On the surface of the planets below, machines malfunctioned, computers were thrown off line, and AIs spoke gibberish. Planetary defenses failed to operate. The swarm descended, screaming in anticipation as they plunged into the planets' atmosphere, and everyone who heard that scream went insane. There was no recording of the sound; it was too big, too alien, too terribly other for technology to capture. But people could hear it, and the endless uninterrupted scream drove everyone instantly, violently insane . . .
    Men and women and children howled with unbearable mental agony and destroyed everything around them. They tore down their homes and set fire to their cities. And then they turned on each other, killing friends and strangers and family with equal ferocity, not because they wanted to, but because they were driven to it. By the never-ending scream of the swarm that flew above them, circling and circling the planet like vultures waiting for something to die. On seven worlds, seven entire populations Went insane and slaughtered each other in the ruins of their burning cities. There was no defense against the maddening howl of the swarm. Blood flowed. Millions, and then billions, lay dead and dying.
    And then, finally, the Terror appeared. Space opened, torn apart by unnatural forces, and from a place where nothing comes from, came something the size of a world. It was alive and aware and utterly hideous, but once again mere human technology was incapable of capturing and recording all that it was.
    It existed in more than three spatial dimensions, its details fading in and out, as though reality itself wasn't strong enough to encompass all of it, to hold all of the Terror at once. There was something that might have been eyes, dark and awful, vaster than oceans and more deep. And a great mouth that opened and opened, till it seemed the Terror might swallow the burning planets whole.
    Instead the Terror fed, on the madness and the suffering and the destruction. On the Hell its children had made for it. The people fell and lay still, all that they were and might have been, consumed in a moment.
    The Terror. In the end, there was nothing left but seven burning worlds, orbiting a shrunken sun. The swarm died then, dropping from the skies into the flames like angels whose wings had been torn from their backs, like devils going home because their work had been done. The Terror didn't need them anymore. Its eyes and mouth were gone, if they had ever really been there. Space ripped apart again, with a sound like something dying or giving birth, and the Terror returned to wherever it had come from.
    Only one dark shape remained, the single ugly progenitor that had come from beyond the Rim, from the dark spaces, to dive into the sun and begin it all. The Terror's unstoppable herald, heading relentlessly on into the Empire, towards the next set of populated worlds, and eventually, on a line that would bring it right to the heart of Humanity. To the homeworld itself; Logres. At sublight speed it would take centuries to get there, but it was coming.
    The Terror was coming.
    There were no more records. Lewis watched the worlds burning on the great viewscreen before him, seven planets where nothing lived anymore, and his mind reeled. So many dead, so many lost to agony and despair .. • He felt