Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

lives, our old roles. We’d find them too restricting, too limited.”
    “Now there’s a frightening thought,” said Jesamine. “After all we’ve been through, I’m still me; aren’t I? I still feel like me. And yet . . . I can feel the changes the Maze made in me still working. Both of us are already much more than we used to be. When does the process stop? Does it ever stop? Are we going to end up Terrors, like Hazel? I don’t want to be a monster, Lewis! I don’t want to stop being me!”
    Her voice rose, growing harsh and frightened. Lewis was quickly at her side, holding her in his arms. “Hush, hush, love. We’re not going to end up like Hazel. She was left alone, and half crazy. We have each other.”
    “But what if we lose each other, Lewis? What if one of us dies in this war, and one of us is left alone, and half crazy? What then?”
    “You’re being far too optimistic,” Lewis said dryly. “The odds are that all of us will be killed in the rebellion, and then we’ll never have to worry about any of this.”
    “Oh, ho ho ho,” said Jesamine. “Deathstalker humor.”

    Not all that far away, as hyperspatial travel went, the Emperor Finn’s fleet was approaching the estimated position of the rebel fleet. The Imperial fleet was huge, made up of every fighting ship Finn could spare, all crewed by experienced fleet officers, backed up by hard-core Pure Humanity and Church Militant fanatics. Finn would have liked more of his own people in charge, but this battle was too important to be trusted to the loyal but limited zealots he’d used to infiltrate the fleet command structure. The Imperial fleet’s orders were very simple. Stop the rebel fleet before it got anywhere near Logres, at whatever cost, and crush the rebellion before it got properly under way. No surrender, no prisoners, no quarter. Just dead ships, blazing and tumbling in the long night, and a victory so terrible it would crush the spirits of anyone who even thought of standing against the Emperor Finn.
    The rebel fleet had been easy enough to locate. Finn knew Lewis would go home to Virimonde; he’d always been the sentimental sort. And so the Imperial fleet sat and waited, hidden in hyperspace behind state-of-the-art stealth screens, until the signal stopped coming from the transmutation engines around Virimonde. Now the huge army of Imperial starcruisers were moving in on their unsuspecting victims, and readying themselves for battle. The captains were resolute, the crews highly trained and motivated. Finn had put together the biggest concentration of firepower since Lionstone’s time.
    All the ships maintained strict comm silence. Ostensibly to maintain the element of surprise, and to prevent rebel spies from passing intelligence, but mainly so that the Imperial crews wouldn’t be exposed to details of Owen Deathstalker’s miraculous return. There were rumors of course, you couldn’t stop rumors, but Finn wasn’t taking any chances. The captains could talk to each other on a heavily protected channel, but that was all. That was enough.
    The Heritage , still recovering from her encounter with the Terror at Usher II, was now a part of the Imperial fleet. Both ship and crew were in urgent need of some downtime and repair, but . . . duty called. Captain Ariadne Vardalos sat wearily in her command chair, studying the makeup of the Imperial fleet on her viewscreen. As one of the last ships to join the fleet, she had a lot of catching up to do. She wasn’t all that pleased with what she saw. The layout had a distinct air of improvisation. But then, it had been a long long time since anyone had fought a major space battle. She switched to a representation of the rebel fleet’s structure, according to the most recent information, and shook her head slowly.
    “I know most of those ships,” she said to her second-in-command, Marcella Fortuna. “I was at the academy with some of their captains! How could so many good people have turned traitor?”
    Fortuna shrugged uncomfortably. “Hard to say, Captain. No one ever considers themselves a traitor. We’re all the heroes of our own stories.” She considered the matter for a while, turning it over in her slow, methodical mind. “Must be something to do with Owen’s return. If that was a Shub trick, as the Emperor insists, maybe the AIs brainwashed all those people.”
    Captain Vardalos scowled. “I know these people . . . If I could just talk to them, I know I could talk