Deathstalker 07 - Deathstalker Return

mouths. Kept alive by Donal's implacable will. Somewhere an alarm bell was ringing loudly. Someone had noticed Donal Corcoran wasn't where he was supposed to be. He crossed quickly to the door of the doctor's office, and then looked back at the two halves of his psychiatrist.
    "Now you know how I feel all the time," he said, and left.
    Donal Corcoran went walking through the corridors of the asylum, sometimes using the doors and sometimes not. More alarm bells were ringing now, and he could feel guards coming his way with all kinds of restraints and weapons. Sometimes Donal avoided them by walking through walls, and sometimes he just turned sideways from the world and they couldn't see him. He made his way out of the asylum and into the street. There was no one about. The guards were all inside, looking for him. Donal looked up into the sky and called to what was waiting. There was a pause, and then a long dark shape came plunging down out of the clouds to join him. It was sleek and silver and it knew him. His old ship, the Jeremiah, had escaped from its dock and come looking for him. It too had been touched by the
    Terror, and was more than just a ship now. The madman and his mad ship looked upon each other, and were glad. They belonged together. The ship hovered above him while he thought about what he should do, and when he stopped thinking he was on the Jeremiah's bridge. He could do things like that now. He gave the order, and his ship blasted off for orbit. The Jeremiah was a trader's ship, built for speed and treachery. Illegally fast and protected by state of the art stealth shields, there wasn't much on Logres that could catch or intercept it.
    Donal walked curiously through the shadowed corridors of the Jeremiah, and it seemed to him that the old ship looked somewhat different. It had changed since he last saw it. After the Imperial Navy had boarded his ship against his wishes, strapped him into a strait-jacket and dragged him away screaming, the Jeremiah had been piloted to Logres and held in a stardock for oberservation. Donal had known that, without having to be told—just as he knew that many of the scientists sent to study the ship had quit because of the nightmares it was giving them. But he hadn't realized his ship had changed as much as he had, wandering off along new and little-used paths.
    The steel corridors of the Jeremiah were now tall gothic arches, punctuated here and there with niches and crevices packed with fascinating things. Some of them looked almost alive. The ship's technology had grown, run wild, mutated. Strange new constructs, of no certain function, blinked at him from consoles with too many dimensions. Sometimes there was no lighting at all, but he could still see. The Jeremiah and he had been joined together by their experiences, on a level that nothing could break. The metal walls were comfortably warm under his touch.
    He returned to the bridge, and the main viewscreen showed him scenes of the damned, burning in Hell.
    They writhed and twisted, calling out silently for mercy that never came. Donal frowned, and the images disappeared. All through the ship, whispers had followed him, rising and falling like the sea, never ending, never still. He couldn't understand them yet, but he thought he might, in time. The Jeremiah had been forced awake and aware through its contact with the Terror; not just the AI but the whole ship. And it hurt. Like its master, it ached for revenge. Or perhaps they both just craved death, and the peace it promised. Either way, they would find the Terror, and drag it down with them into Hell if they could.
    As they were leaving orbit, they encountered the city ofNew Hope . The Jeremiah paused to match orbits, and the two vessels considered each other. The city of light and the starship holding darkness within. On the Jeremiah's bridge, the viewscreen activated itself, showing Crow Jane and the Ecstatic called Joy.
    "I know you," said Donal. "I watch the news, though I don't believe all of it. About time you got the hell out of there. It's only going to get worse, you know."
    "I know you, Captain Corcoran," Crow Jane said courteously. "I told them that place would never hold you, if you wanted out. Do you know where you're going?"
    "To the ends of the Empire, and beyond. Off the edges of the maps, and into the spaces marked Here Be Monsters. I have business there."
    Crow Jane turned to Joy. "You talk to him for a while. He sounds like your