Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

they told him useful, frightening things. Sometimes he laughed and sometimes he cried, and he counted his fingers over and over again. Horror was his constant companion, his life a nightmare from which he could never awaken.
    He could feel the Terror drawing closer, rising slowly up from some awful underworld, to surface in reality.
    He was a rogue, an unexpected factor, come for revenge. Looking for a chance to destroy the Terror, and perhaps himself. He stalked the shifting, changing corridors of the Jeremiah , surrounded by whispering voices that rose and fell but were never still. He couldn’t tell whether they came from the ship or his own mind. Sometimes he thought they were the voices of the dead, all the millions of lost souls who had died screaming to fill the Terror’s endless hunger, still crying out in protest. Sometimes he heard things and sometimes he saw things, and he prayed and prayed that none of them were real.
    The Jeremiah was alive; he knew that for sure. Animated and aware, transfigured in some strange way by the gaze of the Medusa, by the pitiless stare of the Terror. It was infected with madness, with the horror of uncertainty, and its interior and exterior were always changing, growing, mutating. For the moment, the Jeremiah was a long segmented silver worm, curled around itself, and its interior was composed of a soft, sweating metal studded and laced with unfamiliar machines. Corcoran didn’t need to know what they did. The ship followed his intentions, if not his commands. When he thought about it at all, Corcoran thought the Jeremiah was growing itself a new nervous system.
    There were shadows everywhere, filling doorways and sliding along the walls, though there was nothing to cast them. Corcoran kept a careful eye on them. New tech was always forming, drifting like dreams through the superstructure of the ship. Sometimes they had faces. There were no mirrors, or mirrored surfaces, anywhere on the ship. Corcoran wouldn’t allow it. He was scared he might get a clear look at what he’d become. Or, that he might look in a mirror and find nothing looking back at him.
    He called up a monitor screen, and one grew up out of the nearest wall, showing him Usher II hanging between its two suns, and the two Imperial ships holding their positions, and finally the herald moving silently through empty spaces. Corcoran hugged himself tightly, and whispered, Here be monsters . The dreaded warning old cartographers used to add when they came to the edge of things that could be mapped. He tried to laugh, but it was a dark, disturbing sound. Maybe it takes one monster to kill another , he said, or thought he said. He cocked his head to one side, and considered what it would be like, to stare the Terror in the face again. Just one indirect glance had been enough to do this to him. He knew he was mad. That was part of the horror. Was there a worse madness, beyond insanity?
    It didn’t matter. He would do what he had come here to do, whatever the cost. Part of him was trapped inside the Terror, and he wanted it back. He wanted to stop feeling what the Terror felt. The endless horror and loss that drove it on, the need that never ended . . .
    Donal Corcoran had come to sink his teeth in the Terror’s throat, to worry and to harry it, and pursue it all the way back to whatever Hell it came from.

    The herald appeared on the Imperial ships’ sensors, and they got ready to confront it. The herald always arrived ahead of the Terror, traveling through normal space at sublight speed. Its shape was indescribably ugly. Its distorted form made no sense at all. The Empire scientists’ best bet was that the herald was just a cross section of something bigger, and more awful. An intrusion into normal space of something that did not belong there. It appeared out of the darkness like a bad dream made solid, and headed straight for the nearest of the two suns.
    On board the Heritage , Captain Vardalos grimaced, sickened just at the sight of the thing, and ordered the cargo bay doors opened. The preprogrammed superweapon launched itself out of the bay like a bullet from a gun, as though it couldn’t wait to be about its destructive business. It accelerated away from the Heritage , its shape changing, unfolding and blossoming like some poisonous flower. It plunged into the sun the herald had targeted and disappeared from sight in the silver-blue glare. It should have been destroyed instantly, but it was still