“Lionstone?” he said loudly. “You still with me?”
Of course,
she said immediately, her voice cool and familiar in his ears.
Welcome to my old home. Shub has teleported you as close to the hidden crypt as possible. Their abilities are limited here. There are strange powers at work in this place, old machineries still active in the crypt, even after all these centuries. Watch your step.
“Now she tells me. Why is it so bloody cold here?”
Parliament shut my Palace down,
said Lionstone.
You should remember. You authorized it. Said it was too vile a symbol to be allowed to endure, and should be systematically dismantled and destroyed at the first opportunity. Only you’ve all been so very busy recently, what with one thing and another, that no one ever got around to starting the job. They did shut down the generators, though, to save money. Shub has managed to restore some power, but only in this immediate vicinity. We don’t want our little visit to be noticed, after all.
“This job just gets better and better,” said Random. “Talk to me, Lionstone; what can I expect to encounter, between here and the crypt?”
The very best booby traps I could devise. I’ll talk you through them as best I can. How to deal with the stasis field enveloping the crypt is entirely your problem. But you’d better find a way in, Jack; if you expect Shub to teleport you back out again.
“Typical Shub. Never pass up a chance to make a threat, and prove you’re in control of the situation. For supposedly sophisticated AIs, they can be surprisingly insecure at times. Now point me in the right direction, before I freeze solid.”
Walk ahead of you till the passage branches, then bear left. It’s not far to the first nasty surprise.
Random sniffed, and set off down the metal corridor. There was only a bare minimum of lighting after the passage branched, and shadows moved menacingly around him, possibly concealing all manner of things. The air was still and silent, the only sound the soft slapping of his boots against the smooth metal floor. Random moved lightly, not too fast and not too slow, ready to jump for his life at a moment’s intuition. All his instincts were yelling at him that this was a trap, but he’d known that going in. He was betting his instincts and his skills against anything Lionstone’s twisted mind could throw at him.
The walls looked solid, the floor and ceiling too. Didn’t mean a thing. Lionstone’s little surprises would be as subtle and vicious as she had been. When she was still human. He felt the floor give just a little under his leading foot, and immediately threw himself forward, tucking his body into a roll that brought him straight back to his feet again. Behind him, long metal spikes had burst out of the walls from both sides; barbed spears that would have skewered him if he’d been an instant slower. Random smiled and shook his head, and padded on. Kids’ stuff.
In swift succession, he encountered several more such: Trapdoors that opened onto deep pits with spiked floors waiting at the bottom. Guns and gasses from concealed vents in the walls. Even a few old-fashioned bear traps with vicious metal jaws. Lionstone warned him about some, but not about others. Probably just to see him go through his paces. Make sure he hadn’t got soft. At least the exercise warmed him up a bit. Next came the ultrasonics, the subsonics, and various nasty light shows that would have disorientated, brainwashed, or brainburned any normal burglar into a drooling idiot. Random just walked right through them. By the time he finally got to the stasis field, he was actually starting to feel a little bored, but the sight of the opaque gray energy field blocking off the end of the corridor jolted him out of that mood in a hurry. Stasis fields were trouble.
Inside a stasis field, time does not move. Whatever lay within was preserved for as long as the field continued, like an insect in a drop of amber. You couldn’t affect the field by any physical means because, strictly speaking, the field wasn’t really there. It just marked the real world interface between the two time periods, within and without. Random once asked a renowned scientist to explain that, and the best part of an hour and one serious headache later, Random was still none the wiser. Which was a pity, because it meant he had no idea whatsoever on how to get through the field before him. Particularly if, as he suspected, the field was the result of old Empire technology. Random stared at the field, frowning, for some time.
Do we have a problem?
said Lionstone, finally.
“Possibly,” said Random. “How did you get in, when you needed to?”
Handprint and retina scan, along with a voice code, via the security panel to your right. Dram set it up for me. The original Dram. But since I no longer have access to my body ... Need I add that the system is designed to crash and scramble itself if tampered with?
“Handprint. Retina scan. Voice code.” Random glared at the security panel. He could do a lot of things, but shapechanging wasn’t one of them. And Lionstone’s late departed body had been destroyed long ago. Ritually cremated, while the crowds cheered themselves hoarse, just in case anyone got any smart ideas about cloning. The security panel itself looked to be state of the art and then some. Random was pretty sure even Hazel would have had real trouble with it. He thought hard, scowling fiercely till his brow ached. Something was stirring at the back of his thoughts; something someone had said earlier ... in the sea of dreams.
Hazel had said that all Time could be accessed through the undermind. Past, present, and future. So if he sent his mind back into the sea of dreams, and chose
when
to come out ... He shivered abruptly, and it wasn’t from the cold. Get this wrong, lose control, and he could become unstuck in Time, drifting helplessly back and forth for all eternity ... He’d taken risks before when he needed to, but nothing like this. But then, it wasn’t as if he had a choice. So he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and dived down into his own mind, through the backbrain and into the undermind.
He stayed just long enough to orientate himself (the endless sea, the brooding presence of Shub, the huge black sun of the Recreated), and then he concentrated on defining his position in Time. Many times before he’d felt his thoughts moving in strange directions, when he used his Maze powers, but this was something new, and altogether terrifying. Past, present, and future all howling at once, flashing past, stuttering and repeating, branching endlessly into varied possibilities. He saw old friends, long dead, and familiar faces, wars on Mistworld and Golgotha, saw himself fighting in crowded streets, fighting and bleeding, winning and dying, over and over again. Owen Deathstalker came to him and tried to tell him something important, and then was gone away, swept away by the relentless pressure of Time.
Random screamed. He could feel himself unraveling, torn in an infinite number of directions at once. Random made himself concentrate on the crypt, that bubble held in Time by ancient energies, focusing all his will and need into a single implacable thrust. Time roared and threw him out, and he fell endlessly in a moment that seemed to last forever, before he finally emerged into that moment of time sustained within the stasis field.
He fell to his knees on a thick pile carpet, shaking and shuddering, and for a time all he could do was lie there while his thoughts slowly came together again. At last he sat up, and looked around him. The chamber was about the size of a standard Family mausoleum, with a single bed where the coffin should have been. Various mechanisms he didn’t recognize filled the rest of the chamber, none of which he felt like meddling with. Random was touched by an uncommon sense of wonder. Here, the man called Dram had slept through the centuries, chasing his father down the many years, all in the name of hate.
Random knew the basic story. Everyone did. The original Deathstalker, Giles, had a son whose name was now lost in time. He betrayed his father, or was betrayed by him, depending on which version of the story you believed, and vowed a terrible vengeance. Somehow he discovered his father had placed himself in stasis, and arranged the same fate for himself, to wait until his father should reemerge. So he could have another chance at killing him. Only Lionstone found him first. Awakened him, probably not with a kiss, and made him her man. He took the name Dram, and became the Empress’s official Widowmaker, just to keep busy till his father reappeared. And when Giles did, son followed father into his Family’s greatest triumph and tragedy: the Darkvoid. Dram died there, on the Wolfing World, and everyone assumed Dram’s chances for revenge on the Family and Empire he hated died with him. But Random could bring Dram’s dark dreams back to life again, if he chose. Who knew what terrible knowledge, what awful weapons, could be retrieved from this old Empire crypt, to be used by Shub against Humanity?
“Lionstone?” said Random. “Can you hear me? Lionstone!”
There was no reply, and Random smiled and relaxed just a little. The crypt was in another time, as far as Shub was concerned. Lionstone would have to wait till Random emerged again to question him. Which was what he’d privately hoped. He’d never had any intention of handing anything over to Shub that could be used against Humanity. He might be an outlaw, but he hadn’t gone mad. He was here looking for hope in forgotten old Empire tech. A cure for the nanotech plague perhaps, or powerful weapons that could be used against Shub and the Recreated. Or even by himself, in his continuing war against corrupt authority.
He set about searching methodically through the various forms of high tech scattered through Dram’s old crypt. Some were clearly responsible for maintaining the stasis field. Others were variations on existing tech, slightly behind or ahead of current thinking. Some he couldn’t recognize at all, either in design or function. But there were no obvious weapons, and nothing that even suggested nanotech. So; no cure, after all. No mighty weapons to save the day. Random sighed tiredly. He would have liked to have been able to save Humanity one last time. If only to rub their noses in it, to prove they couldn’t manage without him. An unworthy thought, perhaps, but what the hell.
What he did eventually find, in a locked box bearing the Deathstalker Family seal, concealed behind a secret panel in Dram’s bed, was a collection of holos, documents, and other papers from a forgotten age. Random broke the lock easily with his bare hands, and sat down on the bed, emptying out the box’s contents before him. He pawed slowly through the collection, and gradually assembled a history of sorts of the beginning of Clan Deathstalker. Much of it was handwritten, presumably by Dram. Random snorted. He would never have taken Dram for the sentimental sort. More likely he’d assembled these reminders of his past to refire his hatred. Selected memories of hate and betrayal, to remotivate him during the long wait for his father to reappear. Who else but a desperate and half-insane man would sleep for centuries, to awaken in a strange new world where everyone he knew was dust and less than dust, if not for hatred and revenge?
Dram was his father’s son.
There were a series of letters, to Dram, from himself, written down on paper because that was still the best way to preserve a secret; a single copy to which only you had access. The sheets were creased and crumpled, from much rereading. And a holo, to which Random’s eyes kept returning; a simple scene showing Giles Deathstalker in what appeared to be a family group. The woman at his side was presumably his wife; a tall, slender blonde dressed in flowing white. Her smile seemed forced, and she looked into the camera as though pleading for help or rescue. Beside her stood the man who would kill her; her son, Dram. He looked a little younger than Random remembered him, but just as intense, even then. They should have known there was something wrong with that one. It was in the eyes, and the smile that wasn’t a smile. But the one that really caught Random’s eye, and kept pulling it back, was the final Family member. A tiny baby, laid on a stool before them, wrapped in a very familiar cloak. Random had seen that baby, in that cloak bearing the Deathstalker Family crest, once before. On the Wolfing World, in the very center of the Madness Maze.
At the time, Giles had said the baby was his clone, produced by him, and gifted with terrible powers. A baby who had put out a thousand suns in a moment, murdered billions of people, and created the Darkvoid. A baby supposedly destroyed when Captain Silence destroyed the Madness Maze, but Random wasn’t sure he’d ever really believed that.
Random continued skimming through the letters, and slowly put together a picture of the truth. The truth Giles had kept from them, hidden behind a curtain of lies and half truths. The baby wasn’t a clone. It was Giles Deathstalker’s bastard son. Giles had had an affair with the then Emperor’s wife, the Empress Hermione. And somebody wasn’t as careful as they might have been, because the Empress became pregnant. The Emperor Ulric II just assumed it was his, but soon after the birth the truth came out. Giles snatched the baby, to protect it from the Emperor’s wrath, and went on the run with it. There was no legendary conflict between the two greatest men of their age; never had been. Just the rage of a cuckolded husband.
Random and the others should have known Giles was lying. The baby couldn’t have been a clone. The science of cloning didn’t arise until centuries after Giles’s time. But the baby’s powers had so impressed them that the issuing of cloning had been taken for granted, another part of lost old Empire tech. Why had Giles lied? To protect his reputation, or that of his bastard child? Certainly the truth of the baby’s parentage had infuriated Dram. His letters became almost incoherent with rage on the subject. He fully expected to be passed over, disinherited, forgotten, in favor of this child of a Deathstalker and the Empress. He didn’t believe the child to have been an accident. Dram saw the baby as part of a plot to put the Deathstalker Family on the Throne.
And maybe it had been. Certainly Giles had proven himself capable of such a thing.