Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

against the dark, vast as countries and as intricately shaped as snowdrops. They shone so very brightly, with all the colors of the rainbow, as though the whole world had been studded with precious jewels. Auroras of smooth, soothing colors wrapped the world, as though to keep it safe from all harm.
    On the other hand, Owen couldn’t help noticing that the planet was surrounded by all kinds of orbiting junk. Satellites of every shape and size, built with function rather than aesthetics in mind, formed a metal ring around the world. Huge stardocks held half-built starships, assembled in orbit because they were too big to ever leave the ground. And everywhere Owen looked, starships came and went, in their thousands and their hundreds of thousands, flashing past him like so many fleeting thoughts or intentions. Golgotha had never known so much traffic, even at the height of its power. Owen focused his mind on a few ships at random, studying them carefully, but none of them resembled any configuration he was familiar with.
    He realized he still didn’t feel any need to breathe. How much had he changed already? Was he doomed to continue to change, until he became another Terror, at the last? He felt stronger, more powerful, but still . . . human. And yet, if he was changing, could he hope to understand or appreciate the extent of the change from the inside? Would he even notice as his humanity fell away? Panic surged up, and he pushed it ruthlessly back. Human is as human does. As long as he still cared about Hazel, and hoped to put a stop to what she had become, he was still human enough.
    (And yet, where had the power come from, that had made his long trip through time possible, and filled him now? Why wasn’t he feeling drained, like before? Owen decided very firmly that he’d think about that later. He had other, more important things on his mind right now.)
    Hazel had definitely stopped her plunge back through time at this point. For what purpose, or for how long, he couldn’t tell. He could feel the trail start up again, heading even further back into the past, but he was curious as to why she’d chosen to stop here. Roughly a thousand years would put him in the time of the First Empire, before it declined and fell, for reasons long forgotten. His old historian’s instincts kicked in, at the possibility of seeing the legendary First Empire in its prime and perhaps even discovering some clue as to why it fell so far, and so hard. Perhaps the greatest mystery in Humanity’s long history. Owen laughed soundlessly in the vacuum. This was the kind of opportunity he’d dreamed of, in his younger days. He’d come a long way, to end up back at his beginnings. He reached out with his mind, trying for some sense of what lay in wait on the planet below, but the cities blazed with life: billions upon billions of minds roaring in a constant bedlam. It was just too big, too complex, for him to understand, even in his new changed state. He found that oddly comforting.
    While he was busy thinking all this, half a dozen orbiting satellites had detected his sudden presence, and were now homing in on him. They moved slowly in his direction, great rough metal shapes bristling with energy spikes and sensors, each one the size of a starship. They took up a preprogrammed position around Owen, and then all their metal spikes blazed with crackling energies, forming a scintillating cage around him. He looked up startled, as the trap closed, flinching back despite himself from the sheer power hammering on the vacuum all around him. The wild searing energies held enough power to light a city for a month. He could sense it. Just being this close to so much raw energy would have been enough to fry any normal creature. Owen cautiously probed the satellites with his mind, but there was no trace of even the simplest AI; only the basic binary codes of standard computers. Owen considered his situation thoughtfully. He could easily escape the trap by just dropping back into the time stream, but he was curious as to who had placed such a brutal trap in orbit, and why. He had a strong feeling it probably had something to do with Hazel.
    So he waited patiently, turning slowly this way and that in the vacuum by a simple effort of will, until finally someone came to inspect what their sprung trap had caught. At first all he could see were two small bright lights heading towards him, but they grew quickly in size. He’d been expecting some form