Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

you?”
    “No . . . I thought she was going to, but in the end she just looked at me, and vanished. Why would an angel reveal herself to me? I’m not anyone special. Perhaps it was a portent, to show that I have a great destiny ahead of me!”
    “Perhaps you have,” said Owen. “I knew a Giles once. He was a great warrior. Good luck with your hunt, Giles. I have to be going now.”
    And he vanished, right in front of Giles, enjoying the look of surprise on the boy’s face. Once again Owen let go of his hold on time, and the galaxy spun around him as he plunged back into the past again, following Hazel. He had a long way to go, and even longer before he could allow himself to rest.
    Back in the woods, the boy who would one day become Giles Deathstalker shrugged easily, accepting the miraculous the way children do, and then he was off on the hunt again, running with a happy heart through the shadowed woods with his beloved dogs.

CHAPTER FOUR

    HERE BE MONSTERS
    U sher II was a mistake. A planet that should never have happened, a miserable lump of rock hanging out in a bad neighborhood. To be exact, it hung right in the middle between two suns, held in place by an unlikely combination of gravity and other badly misunderstood forces. It did not revolve, or orbit, or do anything else particularly interesting. Made up almost entirely of rock and crystal, it had no ecosystem, and never would. Life had been given up as a bad idea long ago, and so it would have stayed, until the Empire found it and discovered its peculiar electromagnetic conditions made it the perfect place to assemble stardrive engines. And so hundreds of scientific bases and factories were built all over Usher II, protected by some of the most powerful force shields ever created. People lived on Usher II now, but never for long. It was just too damned depressing a place to stay for long. The double suns burned fiercely, constantly, like two great glaring eyes, and there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Turnover among the scientists and the families was high, despite every incentive the Empire could come up with, but as long as the stardrives kept rolling off the line, no one cared. Usher II was still a place to get rich in a hurry, doing work no one else wanted to do.
    (Usher I was more of a moon than a planet. It rushed around the two suns in a figure-eight orbit that made no sense whatsoever, a pockmarked piece of rock with no discernable worth or qualities.)
    And now two Imperial starcruisers had come to Usher II, the Heritage and the Hook , hanging way back from the binary suns, studying Usher II from what they fervently hoped was a safe distance. The Terror was coming, and they were there to witness the death of a world. The cities and bases should have been evacuated long ago, but the stardrive factories were far too important to be just abandoned, and so scientists’ families were held hostage to keep the factories working until the very last moment. Now that moment had come, and everywhere civilian ships were rising from Usher II in their thousands, in one last desperate bid for escape. In the cities, riots had broken out, as the remaining population discovered there weren’t enough ships to go round, and they weren’t going anywhere. The Emperor Finn had given orders that all deserting civilian ships should be shot down, to encourage everyone else to keep working, but neither the Heritage nor the Hook had the heart to obey such orders. It was too late for things like that now. Anyone could see that.
    Captain Ariadne Vardalos sat stiffly in her command chair on the bridge of the Heritage , and watched the fleeing ships and the riots and the death songs of a population. There was nothing she could do. She had her orders. The Heritage was not there to help, or even offer comfort; her only mission was to strike a blow at the Terror, and hopefully survive long enough to observe the results. Sitting alone in the starship’s cargo bay was an alien tech-derived superweapon that might or might not be the key to stopping the Terror’s herald in its tracks. The herald always came first. The Heritage ’s sensors had already picked it up, heading slowly but inexorably towards Usher II and its two suns.
    Captain Vardalos was a medium-height, rangy woman with olive skin and long dark ringlets surrounding a thoughtful face. She’d been a starship captain for forty years, and never wanted anything else. She was a member of Pure Humanity and Church