Deathstalker Rebellion (55 page)

“This is simpler. I’m suggesting we use our minds for a change. It’s not just our bodies that were changed in the Madness Maze. The strain or excesses of nearly dying on the
Champion
seem to have pushed me another step up the ladder. You, too, probably. We’re more than we were. Listen. Concentrate. Can you hear what I’m hearing?”

Frost frowned, listening. The hangar bay was quiet, the Ghost Warriors standing silently on guard. In the stillness she could hear Silence’s breathing and her own, and then, very quietly below it all, she sensed as much as heard a low pulsing that rose and fell in sudden spikes. And inside that sound, which wasn’t really a sound, she could hear a voice murmuring, cold and inhuman and horribly perfect.

“Damn,” said Frost. “It’s the machine. I can hear it thinking. Giving orders. It’s not a language or any computer code that I’m familiar with, but somehow I can still understand it. This is the signal Stelmach detected from the bridge, the voice that pulls the Ghost Warriors’ strings.”

“Yes,” said Silence. “It is. Apparently, we’re becoming espers, along with everything else. But we can do more than listen, Frost. We can hurt it. Concentrate on the link between us.”

He reached out clumsily to her with his mind, and she came to him. Their thoughts mixed and meshed, jumbling
together, and then suddenly they both came into focus, sharp and brilliant, and their minds slammed together and merged to become a whole that was far greater than the sum of its parts. It leapt up and out from the cramped confines of their bodies and struck at the thinking machine in a lightning flash of roaring energies. The force field didn’t even slow it. The machine howled horribly, feeling its destruction without ever knowing what or how, and then its center shattered into a million quiescent pieces, and collapsed upon itself. The Ghost Warriors fell to the floor and lay still, not even twitching. Their mind was dead. The mind that had been Silence and Frost split apart, and they fell back into their bodies. Their minds slowed, weighed down by flesh again, and they both immediately began to forget what it had been like to be more than human. They had to, or they would lose being human forever. And they weren’t ready to do that, just yet. They stood staring at each other for a long moment.

“We can’t tell anyone about this,” Silence said finally. “You know what they’d do to us.”

“We have a duty to inform our superiors,” said Frost. “Perhaps by examining us, they could find a way to duplicate the process.”

“More likely they’d kill us, by taking us apart to see what makes us tick. It wasn’t a human technology that changed us, made us what we are. And besides, Lionstone would order us destroyed the moment she heard about us. She’d never allow anything as powerful as us to exist in her Empire.

“We don’t have to decide right now. We can talk about it later. For the moment, how are we going to explain what happened here?”

“No problem,” said Frost. She drew her disrupter and blew apart what was left of the control mechanism, leaving nothing but a scorch mark on the steel floor. Frost put her disrupter away again. “A lucky shot. As simple as that.”

“Show-off,” said Silence, and activated his comm implant. “Bridge, this is the Captain. Status report, please. The Ghost Warriors are down, right?”

“I don’t know how you did it,” said Stelmach, “but according to the reports coming in, the Ghost Warriors just collapsed and gave up the ghost all over the ship. It’s over, and we won. Amazing. I wouldn’t have bet on it. I may faint.”

“Try to hang on till we get back to the bridge,” said Silence. “You did well, Stelmach. If you hadn’t theorized a central control device and tracked it down, they’d probably have been scooping our brains out with dull spoons by now. You’re a hero, just like the rest of your family.”

“Some hero. I didn’t volunteer to go over to the
Champion
with you.”

“There are different kinds of heroes,” said Silence. “What’s important is that you came through when it mattered. Silence out.”

Silence and Frost leaned on the walkway railing together, looking down into the hangar bay. The Ghost Warriors still hadn’t moved. Silence kept an eye on them anyway, just in case.

“I thought we were heading back to the bridge,” said Frost.

“In a minute,” said Silence. “After all we’ve been through, I think we’re entitled to a short break to get our breath back.”

“We do lead an interesting life,” said Frost. “At least this time we didn’t lose the ship.”

“Right,” said Silence. “I think we’re finally getting the hang of this hero thing.” He thought for a moment and then looked at Frost. “Do you really think those voices we heard at the beginning were part of the Shub trap?”

“Of course,” said Frost. “What else could they have been?”

Silence shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. It’s just … they seemed to be warning us, as much as anything.”

“But if they didn’t come from the
Champion
, where did they come from?”

“I don’t know. On the whole, I’d rather not think about it. The implications are too disturbing.”

“Ah, hell,” said Frost. “Everyone knows it gets strange out here on the Rim.”

The monitor screen spun a few fractals as its memory warmed up, and then the flaring colors resolved into a sharp holo image. A bleak, metallic horizon, crenellated here and there with shadowy trenches, deep craters, and looming hills of metal scrap, stretched away for miles before vanishing into the early-morning gloom. A dull red sun was rising reluctantly in a gray sky dominated by darkening clouds. The scene was unnaturally quiet, with not even a whisper from beast or bird or insect; the only sound was that of the rising wind, moaning and roaring in turn, as though gathering its strength for the storm to come.

The camera panned slowly right, and a huge factory complex appeared on the holoscreen. Given its great size and tall towers, and the many-colored lights blazing from its windows, it should have dominated the bleak scene, but somehow it didn’t. The surrounding area of fractured metals and accumulated scrap looked like the place where old factories went to die. The camera zoomed in slowly, so that the factory filled the screen. Armored guards could now be seen, watching coldly from their trenches and gun emplacements, and it quickly became clear that the factory was under siege from some unseen, ominous foe.

A single figure stepped into view before the camera, making his way carefully over the rutted metal surface. Mud and water had collected in the hollows and splashed up over his boots. He finally came to a halt, half filling the screen, and looked seriously into the camera. Even buried inside a thick fur coat he was clearly short and overweight, and above his ruddy face his flat blond hair was plastered to his skull. But his eyes were calm and his mouth was firm, and without quite knowing why, you felt you could trust him to tell you the truth about what he’d seen. The rising wind tried to ruffle his hair, flapping the long ends, but he ignored it.

“You’re looking at Technos III, early morning, early winter. The factor complex behind me, owned and run by Clan Wolfe, will shortly begin mass production of the new and vastly improved stardrive. The workers are dedicated, the management strong and decisive, and the small army of guards are trained, experienced, and utterly determined. Ideal conditions, one would have thought, for such an important venture. But this is Technos III, and things are different here.

“To begin with, while this planet has the usual four seasons, like any colonized world, the seasons here last only two days. Weather conditions therefore understandably tend to the extreme, not to mention the dramatic. In the spring it rains, a constant hammering monsoon that can deliver over an inch of rain in under an hour, every hour. In the summer it bakes, the bare sunlight hot enough to blister unprotected skin in minutes. In the autumn there are hurricanes and raging winds strong enough to pick up unsecured equipment and carry it for miles. In the winter it snows. Thick blizzards and heavy drifts bury the surface and anything else not protected by the factory’s force Screen. Exposure to the cold can kill in minutes. Blood freezes and lesser metals crack.

“These conditions are not natural. Those meddling computer terrorists, the cyberats, are responsible. They meddled with the planet’s weather satellites, and this changing hell is the result. I’m standing here outside the factory in the early hours of the first day of winter. The temperature has dropped thirty degrees in the last hour, and the winds are rising, giving warning of the blizzards to come. Soon I will have to return to the safety of the factory complex or risk death from a dozen natural causes. Empire technicians are working on repairing the weather satellites as a matter of urgency, and the word is we will have normal conditions restored soon. In the meantime the brave men and women of Clan Wolfe struggle valiantly to bring all systems on-line, so that mass production of the new stardrive can begin as scheduled and as promised. I will, of course, be here to show you the opening ceremony, live.

“This is Tobias Shreck, for Imperial News, on Technos III. Cold, bored, tired, pissed off, really really pissed off, and bloody hungry.”

The picture on the monitor screen disappeared, replaced for a moment by spinning fractals before one of the two men
watching it leaned over and turned it off. Tobias Shreck, also known as Toby the Troubador—PR flack for Clan Shreck—and as that stupid pratt who managed to really upset his Uncle Gregor and ended up freelancing on a hellworld like Technos III, straightened up and glared at the lowering sky. The darkening clouds were appreciably thicker now, and the gusting wind was so strong he had to brace himself against it. He huddled inside his fur coat, pulled out a filthy-looking handkerchief, and blew his nose noisily.

“I hate this place. The weather’s insane, the natives are as friendly as a serial killer on amphetamines, and there isn’t a decent restaurant on the whole damn planet. I should have known there had to be some underhanded reason for the Home Office’s eagerness to sign me up and offer me an immediate assignment.”

“Think positive,” said his cameraman, a tall gangling sort called Flynn, wearing a long heavy coat of assorted dead animals that still wasn’t long enough to accommodate someone of his great height. He had a deceptively honest face, only partly undermined by the holocamera sitting on his shoulder like a squat, deformed owl. He set about dismantling the lights that had shown Toby to his best advantage and carried on speaking with a blithe disregard as to whether Toby was still listening. “At least we’ve got nice warm quarters in the complex to hole up in. Those poor sods on guard duty are wearing thermal suits on top of their thermal underwear, and they’re still freezing their butts off. I hear if you fart out here, it rolls down your trouser leg onto the ground and breaks.”

Toby sniffed. “Those guards are highly paid mercenaries, highly trained in the art of rendering people down into their component parts in the shortest time possible, and therefore by definition not really human. And you can bet they’re being paid a damn sight more than you and I are. And the factory complex gives me the creeps. Most of the factory’s automated, and the clone workers who do everything the machinery can’t are even less human than the guards.”

Flynn shrugged, and his camera grabbed his shoulder with clawed feet to steady itself. “Clones aren’t employed for their social skills. They’ve been designed and conditioned to within an inch of their humanity to be the perfect work force, and nothing else. They’re here only because there has
to be a human decision-making presence at all times. Can’t just leave it to the computers. Not after the Shub rebellion.”

“We can cut the last few seconds from the tape,” Toby said heavily, turning away from the monitor. “Did I leave out anything important?”

“Not really. Technically, you should have mentioned that it was the Campbells who started the ball rolling here, before the Wolfes took it over. And you could have mentioned there are a few local problems with rebel terrorists, which will undoubtably be sorted out soon.”

“No I couldn’t,” said Toby firmly. “The Wolfes would only censor it. We don’t need any depth for an introductory piece. Leave it till the interviews, and I’ll try and bring it up then. Though you can be sure nothing even remotely good about the Campbells will make it into the final cut. Doesn’t make any difference. The Wolfes won the hostile takeover, and no one likes a loser. These days, the few surviving Campbells are about as popular as a fart in an air lock. Let’s get inside, Flynn. I can’t feel my fingers, and my feet aren’t talking to me. And the weather can turn extremely nasty in the blink of an eye when it feels like it. God, I wish I was back on Golgotha. Even attending Court was safer than this.”

“Why are you here?” said Flynn. “You never did get around to explaining just what you did to get Gregor Shreck his own bad self so mad at you.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” said Toby. “You haven’t even told me what your other name is.”

“One name is all a cameraman needs. Now, spill all the grisly details, or I’ll make you look really podgy on camera.”