Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

blond woman with a pale face and sharp blue absolutely crazy eyes.
    She looked like she was about to jump right out of the screen and bite everyone's throats out. She looked like she'd taken everything fate could throw at her, and then spit in fate's face and laughed. This was a woman who'd had two names, both of them equally feared and respected.
    "Diana Vertue," said the gray man. "Captain Silence's daughter. Also known as Jenny Psycho. Once a manifest of the Mater Mundi, she became an uber-esper in her own right, one of the most powerful minds of her time. She helped form the oversoul. She taught the AIs of Shub their true nature, and fought the Recreated to a standstill, buying time for Owen to save us all. She was assassinated, one hundred and
    eighteen years ago, at the first great rebellion of the ELFs. There were rumors of super-esper involvement; The Shatter Freak and The Gray Train. Certainly no ordinary combination of espers could have brought her down. She was betrayed by those she had reason to trust, and her body was utterly destroyed. Rogue energies still flare and burn on the spot where she fell. It is said her mind still lives on, as a part of the oversoul. That she can still be contacted, through them. Or perhaps it is just that espers also need comforting myths to sustain them."
    There was no mistaking the next figure on the screen. The subtly inhuman face, the glowing golden eyes.
    The cyborg, the augmented man, the old Enemy of Humanity; the man-machine with the mark of Cain upon his brow. The Hadenman; Tobias Moon. He didn't look that special, until you came to the face, and the eyes. Just looking at them made Lewis's hair stand up on the back of his neck. No one had made a cyborg of any kind in hundreds of years, and all because of what the Hadenmen had done in their time.
    All long gone now, they were the boogeymen of the modern age, the stuff of nightmares and the villains of a thousand adventure vid serials. Fractious children were told to go to sleep or the Hadenmen would get them. Tobias Moon was the last of them, and only a minor legend, barely remembered, omitted from all the official versions because his presence was just too disturbing.
    Robert and Constance hadn't wanted Humanity to know they owed their present freedoms in part to a Hadenman.
    "Tobias Moon," said the whispering voice. "The Hadenman who died, and returned to life. The cyborg who rejected his own people to become Owen's friend and ally. Who sought so very hard to find the Humanity within him. Perhaps the only living survivor of all those who passed through the Madness Maze. It is said he can still be found on what was once a leper colony, deep in the sentient jungles of Lachrymae Christi. A hermit for two centuries now, he is the sole means whereby the colonists of the planet can communicate with the living consciousness of the world; the Red Brain. People who go looking for Tobias Moon without good reason tend not to come back."
    "So he was real," said Lewis. "I often wondered. There are so many versions of the story, especially once you start really digging, and so many apocrypha. And it didn't seem exactly likely; a Hadenman, fighting/or Humanity."
    Jesamine nodded. "He gives me the creeps, just looking at him. Why did this version of the legend have to be true? I much prefer the one where Owen raises an army of dragons to fight against the Recreated."
    "No," said the gray man. "That was Carrion, and the Ashrai."
    Lewis and Jesamine looked at him.
    "Who?" said Lewis.
    "What?" said Jesamine.
    The next figure on the screen was a more familiar sight. A tall, lean man with a thickening waist and a receding hairline. He wore an old-fashioned uniform, of an Imperial Fleet Captain. He looked like a man used to giving orders, and a man used to being obeyed. Lewis recognized him at once from the scenes Shub had shown him.
    "Captain John Silence," said the gray man. "He worked with King Robert and Queen Constance to build the Golden Age, though he never approved of the myth-making process. He dropped out of public sight just over a hundred years ago, when people started worshiping his statues. The Shadow Court sent a
    whole army against his isolated country house, and burned it down with him in it. They couldn't find enough of his body to bury, but they collected some ashes and scattered them across the Victory Gardens in the Parade of the Endless. One of the few officers who served the Empress Lionstone loyally to the end,