Deathstalker (79 page)

“It’s gone after Moon!” said Hazel.

“Let it,” said Owen, sitting up and spitting blood from a split lip. “Moon’s probably the only one of us who could take it, anyway.”

And then the Empire forces were upon them, almost halved by the unexpected projectile weapons, but just that much more furious and determined. The rebels rose from their hiding places, discarded the guns as too dangerous to
use against force shields in close quarters, and went to meet the enemy sword in hand. At the end, it was what they knew and trusted. Steel rang on steel, and the air was full of the sound of conflict.

Owen found himself face-to-face with the Captain, and they circled each other cautiously, searching for an opening. Their blades slammed together and then sprang apart, and they went back to circling each other, their eyes cold and focused. Hazel and the Investigator stood toe-to-toe and hammered away at each other with their swords, neither giving an inch. Around these two conflicts, the surviving Wampyr attacked the remaining rebels with savage strength and speed, and were astonished to find themselves met with equal force and fury. Jack Random, Ruby Journey and Giles Deathstalker had survived the Madness Maze, and they were as inhuman now as the Wampyr themselves. The old Deathstalker moved among the Wampyr with deadly speed, black blood flying from his blade. He was the first and foremost Warrior Prime of the Empire, brought to the peak of his potential, and no one could stand against him. He cut a vicious path through his foes, human and inhuman, killing with impunity, unstoppable, in his element at last.

Random and Ruby stood back-to-back and fought on against a seemingly endless supply of enemies. Random felt like a young man again, strong and sure, his sword an extension of his will. It seemed to him he had never fought as well as he did now, but there were just so many Wampyr, and they were so very hard to kill. Ruby fought with a savage controlled fury, cutting and hacking and ignoring the occasional blade that got past her defenses. Random and Ruby were beyond pain or exhaustion now, fighting at the peak of their abilities, but in the end, it was not enough.

Gradually, foot by foot, they were driven apart and surrounded by their enemies, like two lone wolves in the midst of a pack of snapping dogs. Random fought on, bloody from a dozen wounds that would have stopped a lesser man, his face calm and determined. There were bodies all around him, and eventually the inevitable happened, and he stumbled over one. The Wampyr surged forward from every side, sweeping aside his sword, and they brought him down. He fell hard, still lashing out with his fists as sword after sword pierced his body.

Ruby saw him fall, and screamed in rage and pain. Of
them all, Jack Random had been the only one of the group she’d been impressed by. Her only hero. She would have died for Jack Random. She cut and hacked a path through the press of bodies, forcing the Wampyr back, to stand over Random’s unmoving form and defy the Empire to take him from her. A disrupter beam from behind hit her squarely between the shoulder blades, and she fell across Jack Random’s body and lay still. Her cloak burned steadily over the hole in her back.

Tobias Moon moved swiftly through the dead city of the Hadenmen and wondered that it seemed so strange to him. He had never seen the home of his people before, but even so he was a Hadenman and had expected something about the city to be familiar, even welcoming. Instead, he passed between towering ruins of metal and stone whose shapes made no sense to him, gathered together in patterns that defied analysis. He had been among Humanity too long and had adopted their sense of beauty and meaning. He’d have to forget much of what he’d learned, if he was to live among his own people again. If they would have him.

Finally the buildings and structures fell away, and he came at last to the Tomb of the Hadenmen. It stood alone in a great natural cavern: a vast honeycomb of silver and gold, thickly encrusted with ice. Within its countless cells, thousands of augmented men lay waiting in their endless sleep. Waiting for him to awaken them and unleash the Hadenmen upon Humanity again. Moon stared steadily at the massive Tomb and did not know what to do. Strange lights crawled back and forth among the individual cells, as though their occupants were dreaming fitfully of life, and Moon just stood there and watched them.

He always thought of himself as a Hadenman, because that was what people saw when they looked at him. They saw the golden glare of his eyes and heard the harsh buzz of his voice and kept their distance even as they talked to him. And so he lived among humans for many years, with them, but not of them. Never one of them.

He remembered little of his time among his own people in the last dying days of the Hadenman rebellion. He’d been quickened aboard ship, between planets, and his first memories were of fighting and battle on a world whose name he never learned. They lost that one and had to run for their
lives in sleek golden ships whose speed the Empire couldn’t match.

Not long after, Moon’s ship became separated from the main Hadenman fleet, and it was ambushed and shot down by Imperial forces. It crashlanded on Loki, and Moon was one of the few survivors. He spent some time in hiding, living like an animal on what he could find or steal. He soon found that there were some kinds of human who had a use for a warrior like him, and so he passed from master to master, and planet to planet, until finally he ended up on Mistworld, like so many others, because there was nowhere else he could go. And there, his energy crystals mostly depleted, he lived among humans as little more than a human. No one in Mistport cared about his past. They had their own horrors to forget.

And so he became just another face in the crowd, accepted as such, and learned to live as humans did.

And then the rebels came, and the chance to finally go home, to find the Tomb on lost Haden and be the savior of his race, was just too great to turn down. He thought about the rebels and became even more uncertain. Good fighters, all of them, for their differing reasons. They had treated him as one of them, sometimes even as a friend as well as an ally, and they were fighting and dying now to buy him the time to awaken his people, even though the Hadenmen’s first act might be to slaughter them all. Moon stared fixedly at the Tomb. He liked the rebels. They were brave and true, warriors all, committed to each other through blood and sacrifice and friendship. They felt like the family he’d never had, and always felt guilty for wanting, suspecting that was not a true Hadenman feeling. But they were humans, and he was not, and never could be. They were men and women, and he was not. Men and women had their sex cut away, along with every other irrelevance, when they became augmented men. Hadenmen were made, not born, constructed from raw materials, human and tech, as required. He wondered if his fellow rebels would still have wanted to be friends, if they’d known.

Perhaps they would. They were remarkable people.

But they were not his people. If he was ever to have the company of his own kind, the sense of belonging he had craved for so long, he had no choice but to awaken the Hadenmen from their Tomb. He moved steadily over to the
control panels, set conveniently to hand, and began confidently to run through the quickening routines programmed into him so many years before. And even as his hands moved over the panels in response to implanted memories, he still found time to wonder whether his craving for his own kind was also programming, or a simple human emotion he had acquired along the way.

He’d almost finished when he sensed something behind him. His augmented hearing hadn’t picked anything up, but his Maze-adjusted mind knew he was no longer alone. He spun round and found himself facing the alien he’d seen earlier with the Empire forces. It towered over him, flexing its clawed hands, huge in its spiked crimson armor. Ropy saliva ran from its grinning jaws and smoked where it hit the floor. It occurred to Moon that a human might have been paralyzed by terror, but his calm logical mind was already studying the hulking figure for possible weaknesses. He computed its probable strength and speed, based on obvious facts such as size and weight and proportion of muscle tissue, and came up with disquieting answers. He drew his disrupter from its holster and fired it in one blindingly swift movement, but the alien was no longer there. It had moved even faster than him and dodged to one side.

Moon holstered his gun and drew his sword. It would take two minutes for the gun’s energy crystal to recharge, and he had a strong feeling the fight would be over by then. Maybe he should have picked a projectile weapon after all. He smiled, and felt an almost human thrill at the thought of a real challenge at last. Given time, he would have enjoyed studying the alien, its abilities and attributes, but it had to die. It was standing between him and the awakening of his people. He used the last of his remaining energy to revitalize as many of his built-in options as possible. New life surged through him, as though he himself was awakening from the long sleep of being human. Of being only human. Old systems, long unused, came on-line again, and Moon grinned coldly. The alien was about to meet a real Hadenman and find out why all the Empire feared them.

But he’d have to be quick, while the last of his energy lasted. He stepped forward, his sword a whistling silver blur on the air, and the alien couldn’t move fast enough to evade him this time. Instead, it blocked the blow solidly with an upraised arm. The sword blade was tempered New Damascus
steel, with an edge that could cut through solid stone, and backed by Moon’s inhuman strength it should have neatly severed the alien’s arm and left it twitching on the ground. Instead, it shattered on the alien’s living armor. Moon paused for the merest moment, then tossed the hilt aside as the alien went for his throat.

The two of them slammed together, strength and speed almost equal, driven by fury and instinct, two killers, each constructed to be the best. The clawed hands fastened around Moon’s throat, and he grabbed the smooth slippery wrists with all his strength. For a long moment they stood facing each other, silently straining, and then Moon slowly pulled the hands away from his throat. Blood ran down his neck from puncture wounds left by the alien’s claws. He suddenly relaxed his grip, stepped inside the alien’s reach and slammed a punch into its midsection. It was a blow that would have shattered a human’s bones and finished the fight there and then, but the alien didn’t even flinch. Moon’s hand throbbed with pain. The alien wrapped him in a fierce hug, driving the air from his lungs, its dripping jaws reaching down for his face. Moon broke the alien’s hold with an effort and stepped back, breathing hard.

The alien lunged forward so quickly its form blurred in Moon’s vision, and he consciously speeded up his thoughts and reactions. The cyborg and the alien circled around each other, moving inhumanly fast, fists hammering, claws cutting and tearing, and their different-colored blood spattered the floor. Moon felt fast and strong and powerful, and not even the slightest trace of pain or fatigue bothered him, but he knew that was an illusion. He was draining his power cells at a dangerous rate to maintain that state, and if he didn’t win the fight soon, he’d burn himself out and save the alien the job of killing him. So, when in doubt, cheat.

He concentrated, and the disrupter concealed inside his left forearm nosed out of the hidden slit in his wrist. The alien sensed something was wrong and jumped back. Moon grinned coldly and triggered the energy weapon. The searing beam punched a hole right through the alien’s gut and out its back. Moon darted in quickly to seize the advantage, but impossibly, the alien hadn’t flinched. Its clawed hands snapped out and tore Moon’s left arm out of its socket.

Moon staggered backward, black blood gushing from the horrid wound at his shoulder, but already his augmented
body was working to seal off the ruptured blood vessels, using the implanted steel webbing under his skin to self-cauterize the wound. He felt pain and shock, but only at a distance. He was still in control. He was a Hadenman. The alien looked at the twitching arm in its hand and bit savagely into the muscle. It tore away a lump of flesh and chewed the meat thoughtfully. Moon glanced at the control panels behind him. He’d almost finished the wakeup routines when the alien arrived to interrupt him. A few last codes, and his people would awaken and save him. But he knew that if he turned away, even for a moment, the alien would jump him. His energy levels were almost depleted, and the wound had cost him dearly. He had to win the fight now, while he still could.

He plunged forward, automatically compensating for the loss of balance his wound caused, and the alien threw aside the half-eaten arm and surged forward to meet him. Moon ducked under the reaching clawed hands and slammed his remaining hand into the hole in the alien’s gut. The creature jerked spasmodically as he forced his hand in deep, searching for a vital organ. He was hurting it now. He could tell. And then the sides of the hole slammed together to grip his wrist firmly, holding it in place. Moon looked up into the alien’s grinning jaws and crimson eyes, and knew, coldly and calmly and very certainly, that he’d made a mistake. The alien gripped Moon’s head firmly with both long-fingered hands and tore it off his shoulders.

Moon’s body convulsed, spouting blood from the ragged neck, and then it collapsed, its hand still held in the alien’s gut. The alien smiled into Moon’s fading golden eyes, and then threw the head away. It rolled across the floor and bumped up against the control panels. And with the last few moments of his sight, Moon watched with a cold, despairing hate as the alien began to devour his body. And then there was only the darkness and his thoughts fading away as the last of his energy ran out.

Giles Deathstalker and the man now known as Dram came together in the middle of the battle, and on Dram’s signal the Wampyr drew back to give them room. Blood dripped thickly from Giles’ blade, but Dram’s was spotless. He had held back till then, waiting for the best moment to commit
himself. Giles stood surrounded by dead bodies, marine technicians and Wampyr, bleeding from many superficial wounds but still defiant. He grinned suddenly, flicking drops of blood from his sword.