Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

its slow, certain journey to its next target.
    The Heritage destroyed the few remaining sensor drones. There was no telling what they were now, or what they might do, after being touched by the Terror. Captain Vardalos said her silent good-byes to the captain and crew of the Hook , and turned her ship around. She had a report to make to Emperor Finn.

    The Jeremiah wasn’t anywhere near Usher II anymore. When the Terror abandoned normal space for somewhere else, the Jeremiah followed it. Donal Corcoran had studied the herald and its work from his unique viewpoint, and had slowly come to realize that the herald wasn’t in fact a separate thing from the Terror; rather, it was one small part of a greater thing, a permanent intrusion of the Terror into normal space from somewhere else. Even the Terror, that great and awful face that ate planets, wasn’t the real thing, the whole thing. It was just a more powerful intrusion into real space. Attacking the face would do no good. Corcoran wanted vengeance on the whole thing, wherever it might be.
    And because his mind was forever linked to the Terror, Corcoran could sense where the face went when it vanished. Like hyperspace, it was just another direction to move in, only much farther. Where the Terror could go, he could go, and so the madman and his mad ship left the universe behind, to go to a place that was not a place, outside or inside reality. The process felt like dying, and Corcoran embraced it. Anyone else, anyone merely human, would have been destroyed, unmade, by the transition; but Donal Corcoran was both more and less than human now.
    When he appeared again, he was standing in what seemed to be a great maze of stone corridors. He felt more focused, and yet more fragile, his thoughts slipping through his fingers like fishes in a stream, his every insight quick and clean and diamond sharp. He looked slowly around him. People didn’t belong here, in a place like this. He knew that, and didn’t care. He had come to one of the places where life that was not life existed like rats in the walls of reality. His mind stretched out, embracing his new situation. The stone corridors radiated away in every direction for far farther than he could sense, possibly on towards infinity, endlessly crossing and recrossing each other.
    The Jeremiah had reconfigured itself into the suit of armor he was now wearing. The bloodred, red-hot, armor encased him utterly, from crown to toe. His skin scorched and blackened where the hot metal touched it, and Corcoran savored the pain, using it to focus his thoughts. The sensors in the armor told him that he had come to a place without gravity, atmosphere, or discernable properties. Corcoran shrugged mentally, and acted as though they were there anyway. He was quite sure he was the only living thing in the stone corridors, but he called out anyway, the armor amplifying his voice. There was no reply; only a silence that seemed to go on forever. Corcoran took a close look at the stone walls. There were no signs of construction, no sense of design or purpose. The stone maze didn’t feel like a place to him; more like the impression of a place, a memory of a location.
    Corcoran wandered through the corridors, wrapped in what had once been his ship. Any direction seemed as good as any other, but none of them led him anywhere except to more corridors. His mind, now completely divorced from conventional reality, began to grow fuzzy round the edges. He was actually a little relieved when he encountered the ghosts. There were hundreds of them, all of the same man, in different clothes and apparently from different times in his young life. The ghosts couldn’t hear or see him; they were driven, desolate figures moving through brief but endless loops of time, repeating short segments of life over and over again, without end. Corcoran didn’t recognize the man, though he did wonder vaguely whether it might be all that remained of a previous visitor. Was that what this place did to people?
    Corcoran concentrated his altered mind on one of the ghosts, trying to force sense and meaning out of it, and a quiet voice whispered a name in his ear. Owen Deathstalker . . . Corcoran was beyond being surprised by anything anymore, but still that name stopped him dead in his tracks. What could have brought the old legend, the fallen hero, to this awful place? Was this where Owen had disappeared to, after the defeat of the Recreated? Corcoran walked slowly