Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

among the ghosts, peering into faces. Most seemed tired, worn down, struggling under the weight of some great burden. Many of the ghosts were incomplete, lacking important details, or even faces. As though they were memories, worn away by countless years. The slow erosion of time, like water dripping on a rock. Corcoran thought he was on the edge of understanding something there, but it had nothing to do with his need for revenge, so he let the thought go. He strode on through the stone corridors, walking right through the ghosts, as though daring someone or something to come and stop him. He needed something he could hurt, punish, destroy. He ached to get his steel hands on the Terror.
    It seemed to him that he spent a long, long time walking through the stone corridors, though he wasn’t sure time worked normally here any more than space did. He tried to walk through the walls, but they rejected him. They were stronger, perhaps realer, than he was. He stopped before one wall, and willed the scarlet armor back from one hand so he could touch the stone directly with his fingertips. It didn’t feel like stone . . . It felt . . . alive. Corcoran’s unbalanced mind slammed through a series of insights and certainties and the answer blazed in his mind.
    He’d found the Terror. He was walking through it.
    The endless maze of stone corridors was the physical presence of the Terror, in this place that was not a place, the many branching twists and turns like the intricate crennelations of the brain. The Terror had made the maze to house itself. And now here he was, swallowed up in the stone guts of it. Rage burned through Donal Corcoran, and he lashed out with all his ship’s weapons. Disrupter beams lashed out from his extended crimson hands, splashing harmlessly against the stone walls, because all the power of Donal Corcoran and the Jeremiah , the man made mad and the maddened ship, were as nothing compared to the vast and ancient insanity of the Terror; nothing, nothing at all. A very small part of the Terror became aware of the intruder within, and examined him, spiking Corcoran with its will, like a butterfly impaled upon a pin. His life flashed before the Terror’s eyes, but like so many others he was not what was required, needed, searched for. So the Terror ate him and his ship up, consumed their energy to fuel the never-ending quest, and that was the end of Donal Corcoran and the Jeremiah .

    On its way back from the debacle at Usher II, the Heritage was interrupted by new orders. Captain Vardalos protested that she had an urgent report to make to the Emperor, only to be told that these new orders came directly from Emperor Finn. Vardalos protested further that her ship and her crew were both in desperate need of some serious downtime, but she was overruled. All hell had broken loose over Haden, home of the Madness Maze. The AIs of Shub had taken control of the planet, and claimed the Madness Maze for their own. Haden was now very thoroughly surrounded by more Shub ships than anyone could ever remember seeing in one place at one time before, and every Imperial starcruiser was needed at Haden right damned now.
    (No one said anything about the previous fleet that went to Haden and went rogue. No one needed to.)
    By the time the Heritage got to Haden, limping a little from all its injuries, it seemed like half the starcruisers in the Empire were standing off Haden, facing a vast array of Shub ships, some of them the size of small moons. No one had started anything yet, but the atmosphere was tense beyond bearing. Not least because Shub wasn’t answering any calls at all. Captain Vardalos reported in to the fleet admiral, and was quickly brought up to speed. The Emperor Finn was determined to regain control of the Maze, or at least keep it out of Shub’s hands, but he was unwilling to start a shooting war that might end up damaging the Maze. (He was quite happy to destroy it rather than let Shub have it, but he was pretty sure shooting at the Maze was a bad idea. It might shoot back.) The Shub ships were heavily armed, but as yet seemed content to hold position around Haden, behind their incredibly powerful force shields. A lot of people remembered how deadly the Shub ships had been, back in the bad old days when the AIs had been the official enemies of Humanity.
    Captain Vardalos and the Heritage took up position, and waited for further instructions.

    Down below, the blue steel robots of Shub contemplated