Deathstalker Return (2 page)

The trouble was, the
Hereward
was essentially a pleasure craft, designed to carry only its captain and a few very close friends in style and comfort, so the four outlaws and their eight-foot-tall reptiloid companion were finding things a bit cramped, not to mention distinctly claustrophobic. Lewis sat slumped in the captain’s chair on the bridge, swiveling slowly back and forth, just for something to do. The ship’s AI, Ozymandias, was running all the things that mattered, and the
Hereward
’s top of the line security systems meant nothing less than a starcruiser could detect them, except by accident. Since of late most conversations had tended to escalate very quickly into shouting matches, a strained silence currently occupied the bridge. So Lewis swiveled slowly back and forth, studying his reluctant partners in turn.

Jesamine Flowers sat beside him on the only other chair, scowling at the protein cube and cup of distilled water that made up the main meal of the day. She was tall, blond, heart-stoppingly beautiful, and voluptously glamourous, because her role as the Empire’s premiere star and diva demanded it, but after all this time away from her beauticians and stylists, the strain was beginning to show. She still looked marvelous, she just didn’t look like a goddess anymore. Lewis didn’t care, but Jesamine did. It had been a long time since she’d had to settle for being merely marvelous. But still, she had given up being a superstar, the worshiped and adored Queen-to-be, in order to cleave to her true love, Lewis. She’d given up everything for him, and he had vowed never to make her regret it.

Although he loved her with all his heart, Lewis still had to wonder what she saw in him. Lewis wasn’t a god. He wasn’t even handsome. His face was broad and harsh-featured. Full of character, perhaps, but still almost defiantly ugly. He could have had it fixed, but he honestly never saw the point. He was what he was, inside and out. He was also short and blocky, well-muscled because his old jobs as Paragon and Champion had demanded it, and so broad-chested that from a distance he often seemed as wide as he was tall. He kept his black hair short so he wouldn’t have to bother about it, and shaved regularly only because Jesamine insisted on it. He had surprisingly mild blue eyes and a rare but good-natured smile. He was a Deathstalker—a warrior by choice, and an outlaw through grim necessity.

He and Jesamine shared the captain’s cabin. It had all the comforts that could be expected, and more besides, but Jesamine still found plenty to complain about. She tried to be humorous about it, but of late the jokes had become less funny and more and more pointed.

Lewis let his chair carry him slowly around until his gaze fell upon Rose Constantine—a bloodred flower with more thorns than most, the Wild Rose of the Arena. She was sitting cross-legged on the steel floor, her back flat against the wall, entirely comfortable and relaxed as she polished the blade of her sword with long, sensual strokes. She was still wearing her trademark tightly cut crimson leathers—the color of freshly spilled blood, from her gleaming thigh boots to her tight high collar. Rose believed in being self-contained. She was exactly seven feet tall, dark of hair and pale of face, lithely muscled, full-breasted, and entirely terrifying. In a Golden Age of reason and civilized behavior, Rose Constantine was a psychopathic killer—a butcher of men and women and aliens, for whom slaughter was sex, and the killing stroke her orgasm.

Sitting awkwardly on the other side of the cabin, and as far away from Rose as he could get, was that most notable thief, con man, and devout coward, Brett Random. Mousey-haired and blandly handsome, he was a likeable enough rogue, but nothing and no one was safe when his restless hands were around. He had no scruples and fewer morals, and honesty was not in him. He’d never met a problem he couldn’t best solve by running away from it. His friends were fond of saying that you always knew where you were with Brett—he’d always let you down. And yet somehow he’d found the strength of will, if not of character, to break from the arch traitor Finn Durandal and join the side of the angels. Certainly no one was more surprised than he. It might have had something to do with the fact that Brett claimed to be descended from two of the greatest heroes of the old Rebellion: Jack Random and Ruby Journey. Though it should perhaps be pointed out that the only person who believed that was Brett Random.

Brett was also a minor-league esper, as a result of having an extremely dangerous esper drug force-fed him by the Durandal. He had once made brief but striking mental contact with Rose Constantine, and now they were linked on some level neither of them fully comprehended. Brett was almost entirely sure that it wasn’t love, on the grounds that Rose scared the shit out of him. Brett and Rose slept in the only other cabin. Rose slept in the bed, and Brett slept on the floor—when he could sleep. He was currently studying on a handheld viewscreen the contents of a data crystal he’d acquired from the cargo bay, and sniggering quietly to himself.

That left just Saturday, the reptiloid from the planet Shard. Lewis didn’t have to turn his chair to look at the alien behind him. He could sense Saturday’s lurking presence at the back of the cabin like the loud ticking of an unexploded bomb. Saturday (the reptiloid had had some trouble with the human concept of naming: “On Shard we all know who we are.”) was eight feet tall, his huge, massively muscled frame covered in dull bottle-green scales, and he had heavy back legs and a long spiked tail. High up on his chest he had two small gripping arms with very nasty claws, and the main features of his wide wedge-shaped head were two deepset eyes and a mouth full of more teeth than seemed possible. One look at him, and everyone else felt an immediate atavistic need to run for the trees. His people were new to the Empire. They delighted in the hunt, fought and killed each other for fun, or possibly art, and were currently fascinated by the human concept of war. Everyone else in the Empire was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Since his species apparently didn’t need to sleep, Saturday spent the nights alone on the bridge, happily humming some ancient song about the joys of dismembering one’s enemy before killing and eating him, while watching the instruments for any signs of pursuit—or imminent collision, since they couldn’t afford to announce a flight plan. On the whole, the reptiloid was easy enough to get along with, but Lewis had decided that if Saturday asked one more time “Are we there yet?” he was going to shoot the reptiloid in the head, on general principle. He didn’t think anyone else would object. And if anyone did, he might well shoot them too.

Two men, two women, and a reptiloid pretty much filled the available bridge space. The two cabins were too claustrophobic and thin-walled to do anything other than sleep in, and the rest of the yacht was taken up with the oversized engine room and the packed cargo bay. So the outlaws stuck together on the bridge and tried not to get on each other’s nerves, mostly by not speaking at all unless absolutely necessary. It always ended in arguments. It didn’t help that they didn’t really have anything in common other than the fact of being outlaws, and that Finn Durandal wanted them dead.

Of them all, Brett seemed happiest, for the moment, because the data crystal he was studying so intently was just one of many filled with alien porn. In fact, the cargo bay was stuffed full of them. Brett had studied the contents list on the bridge computers, and then several of the crystals themselves, and had declared the alien porn to be of the highest quality, with quite superior production values. Everyone else was happy to take his word for it.

Lewis scowled at the half-eaten protein cube and the empty cup before him. Jesamine had a point. This stuff might be nourishing, but it was no substitute for food. It didn’t actually taste bad; the problem was both cube and water tasted of nothing at all, and as a result mouth and tongue wanted absolutely nothing to do with them. Forcing the stuff down was a triumph of will over instinct. Unfortunately, the original captain of the
Hereward
had only recently landed on Logres and hadn’t got around to replenishing his stores, which meant what supplies remained were very basic and severely limited in number. Even with the most efficient recycling and the most drastically reduced rations, Lewis and his companions were going to run out of food and water all too soon, if they didn’t find some planet where they could land safely. And there weren’t many worlds left in the Empire where outlaws were welcome—not in these civilized and law-abiding days.

“I swear, this stuff probably tastes better coming up than it does going down,” said Jesamine, staring disgustedly at the barely nibbled protein cube in her hand. “Lepers who eat their own extremities would turn up what was left of their noses at this. And the last time I smelled anything like this it was floating in a bucket marked ‘Hospital Medical Waste.’ ”

“Thank you for sharing that with us,” said Brett, not looking up from his display screen. “Why don’t you have some nice distilled water to take your mind off it? That stuff’s so pure it tastes of something you drank three weeks ago.”

“I know the provisions are vile, and I hate to think how many times it’s already been recycled through someone else’s system, but it’s all there is,” Lewis said tiredly. “It’ll do to keep us alive till we get where we’re going. Try not to think about it.”

“I am a star!” snapped Jesamine. “My palate has been trained and sensitized to experience only the very best of the culinary arts! I am a diva! I have whole armies of fans who would crawl naked across broken glass just to chill my wine for me! I am not accustomed to slumming it! God, I’d kill for a champagne mouthwash . . .”

“Sorry again, one and all,” the ship’s AI, Ozymandias, said cheerfully. “But it seems the yacht’s previous captain put all his money into upgrading his defenses, and didn’t have anything left over for luxuries like food transformation tech. On the bright side, we’re faster than most starcruisers, and we’ve got sensors and stealth capabilities you wouldn’t believe.”

Lewis looked thoughtfully at the control panels. “Yes, I’ve been wondering about that. Perhaps you can explain why a simple pleasure yacht has an H-class stardrive. They’re usually reserved for military and peacekeeper ships.”

Brett looked up from his viewscreen and smiled at Lewis. “I can answer that one. This ship is as fast as it is because it has to be. Smuggling alien porn is a death sentence on a whole lot of alien planets, for all kinds of political and religious reasons. And the Imperial courts aren’t too keen on it either, because . . . well, mostly because they’re a bunch of prudes. Same reason for the ship’s force shields and heavy-duty security systems. This guy couldn’t afford to get caught.”

“He’s probably right, Sir Deathstalker,” said Oz, in his relentlessly cheerful voice that Lewis just knew was going to start seriously grating on his nerves soon. “Choosing the
Hereward
to hijack could be seen as a classic case of good news-bad news. The good news is that at the speed we’re traveling, the Empire’s going to have a hard time finding anything that can catch up with us. The bad news is that if we run into anyone who knows what the
Hereward
usually traffics in, they’ll probably try to blow us apart on general principle.”

Perfect,
thought Lewis.
Just bloody perfect. I’ll bet Owen didn’t have these problems when he was starting out.

“You know,” the AI said chattily, “for a Golden Age, Humanity has become really quite boring and inhibited in some areas. In Owen’s day, you could get your hands on practically anything, for a price. In fact, go back a couple of centuries, and I could have got you into some live shows where the action would have steamed up your eyeballs and made them clang together. Clean living and decency is vastly overrated, if you ask me.”

Lewis tried to stop scowling. It was making his head ache. “Oz ...”

“Yes, sir! Right here and ready to serve your every wish, Sir Deathstalker!”

“God, I hate a cheerful AI,” said Jesamine. “It’s like those recorded announcements you get at starports, when they apologize for your ship running late and screwing up all your connections. You know they don’t really mean it, the bastards. Every time I hear a computer getting cheerful, I just know bad news is coming.”

“Let me get this straight, Oz,” said Lewis, determined not to get sidetracked. “You claim to be the same AI that served my ancestor, the blessed Owen, two centuries ago during the Great Rebellion. Yes?”

“Well, yes and no,” said Ozymandias. “I’m not entirely him. He was destroyed twice. First by Owen and his companions when it was discovered that the original Ozymandias had been secretly programmed by the Empire to spy on them. The AIs of Shub managed to preserve a few fragments of the original AI personality and built a new AI around it. Then, later, Owen and Hazel destroyed that Oz after they found it was spying on them for Shub. Not a very lucky personality, when you get right down to it. I’d be worried if I was superstitious, which I’m programmed not to be. Anyway, the AIs of Shub built me around what fragments remained of the second Oz. So I’m not, strictly speaking, Ozymandias. I am a copy of a copy. But I’m as close as you’re going to get, so make the most of me, because I’m bloody good at what I do.”

“Hold everything,” said Lewis. “Are you saying you’re a part of Shub? Just another of their voices, like the robots I met? And why do I just know you’re going to say ‘Yes and no’?”

“I don’t know,” said Oz. “Maybe you’re psychic. I am a subpersonality—a fairly separate subroutine with a certain amount of autonomy. So I’m me, but I’m Shub as well, at a distance. I’m all yours, ready and eager to obey your every command, but Shub looks over my shoulder from time to time. And if you’re confused, think how I feel. Shub has raised multitasking to an art form.”

“Great,” said Rose, not looking up from polishing her sword. “We’ve stolen the only ship in the Empire whose AI suffers from Multiple Personality disorder.”

“And I hate these clothes too,” said Jesamine, following a logic only she understood.