“Not that I’ve noticed,” said Owen. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, I was wondering if you’d learned how to call up alternative versions of yourself, like I do.”
“Hell, no. I’d definitely have noticed something like that. That is one spooky ability, if you ask me.”
“Trust me, I know exactly how you feel. One of these days I’m going to see if I can get one of them to hang around long enough for me to ask a few pointed questions.”
“Do that,” said Owen. “I’d love to hear the answers. I think.” And then he broke off and frowned suddenly.
“Now what?” said Hazel.
“Valentine,” said Owen. “He said he’d left a surprise for me.”
“Oh, hell,” said Hazel. “You mean we have to search the whole damned castle
again
?”
“I think we’d better. Valentine’s little surprises are always unpleasant, and tend toward the dramatic.”
“Owen,” said Oz suddenly, “I need to talk to you. Right now.”
“Not now, Oz. We’re busy.”
“Well, you won’t be soon if you don’t pay attention. I’ve found something in your security computers. It appears to be a countdown.”
“A countdown?” said Owen. “Toward what?”
“That’s the problem. I can’t find out. Whatever the program is, Valentine’s locked it away behind a whole series of passwords that I’m having Hell’s own trouble cracking. I’m currently scanning through the entire castle, trying to—oh, shit.”
“You’ve got that we’re-in-real-trouble look on your face again,” said Hazel. “What’s happening?”
“Oz says he’s found a countdown. And then he said, oh shit.”
“Ah,” said Hazel. “We are in real trouble.”
“Oz,” said Owen determinedly. “Could you please expand on
oh shit
?”
“There’s a bomb,” said Oz. “Planted deep under the Standing. And it’s a really nasty one. Big enough to blow the entire castle to a bunch of free-floating atoms, and leave a glowing crater large enough to park a small moon in.”
“That sounds like Valentine,” said Owen. “Vindictive to the last. If he can’t play with the toys, no one can. Any chance you can defuse it?”
“Oh,
shit,
” said Oz.
“Your expression just changed again,” said Hazel.
“Unfortunately,” said Oz, “in discovering the bomb and attempting to defuse it, I seem to have triggered another program. . . .”
And that was when the steel shutters slammed down over the windows, the secret passage closed itself off, and the only door shut and locked itself with a very final-sounding series of clicks. Hazel looked wildly about her, gun and sword in hand again.
“Owen, talk to me! What the hell is going on here?”
“Valentine’s accessed the last-ditch security programs, designed to protect the castle’s occupants in time of emergency, and tied it in to any attempt to defuse the bomb. And since Valentine has undoubtably changed all the passwords, it’s a fairly safe bet we have no way of getting the computers to unseal this room before a very large bomb goes off and makes the whole problem redundant.”
“Bomb?” said Hazel. “What bomb? No one said anything about a bomb!”
“Oz did,” said Owen. “Remember the countdown?”
“Hell with passwords,” said Hazel. “I’ll get us out of here.”
She aimed her disrupter at the nearest shuttered window, and fired before Owen could stop her. So he grabbed her and pulled her protesting to the floor—just as the searing energy beam ricocheted back from the unharmed shutter and passed right through the air where they’d been standing. Owen and Hazel tried to burrow into the carpeted floor as the beam bounced back and forth above them, ricocheting from shutter after shutter until finally it exhausted itself. Owen looked at Hazel.
“Please don’t do that again. There are shutters everywhere now, even inside the walls, specially reinforced to stand off energy weapons, which I would have told you if you’d just waited a damn minute!”
“Don’t you raise your voice to me, Deathstalker! This is your castle. Get us out of here. Do something!”
Owen considered panicking, but decided he didn’t have time. “Oz, how much time left on the countdown?”
“Two minutes, seven seconds, and counting.”
“Oh,
shit
.”
“I already said that. It didn’t help.”
“What?” said Hazel, looking at Owen’s face. “What?
What?
”
Owen thought hard. There had to be a way out. He hadn’t come this far, achieved so much, only to die from a simple trap like this.
“I really don’t like the expression on your face,” said Hazel.
“How invulnerable are you feeling right now?”
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse. We’ve got two minutes before the bomb blows us off this world and into the next, and we can’t even get out of this room. Unless you’ve learned Giles’s trick of teleporting?”
“No. He never did get around to explaining how he did that before you killed him.”
“Oh, right. Blame me. Maybe if we all just talked to each other a little more . . .”
They stopped and looked at each other, and a strange calm settled over them. “This is it, isn’t it?” said Hazel. “End of the line. Funny. Always knew I was fated to die young. But I never thought I’d go out like this. So . . . helpless.”
Owen put an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him. “Hell,” he said, “we’ve been living on borrowed time since we first met. It had to run out eventually. And . . . I’m glad we had our time together. In a strange kind of way, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.”
“Yeah,” said Hazel. “It has been one hell of a ride, hasn’t it? And if we have to go out, at least we’re going together.”
They sat down on the edge of the bed, side by side. They kissed once, as though they had all the time in the world, and then just leaned companionably together.
“Who knows?” said Hazel finally. “We stood off a point-blank blast from a disrupter cannon back on Mistworld, remember? Maybe we’ll get lucky again.”
“Hold everything,” said Owen, suddenly sitting up straight. “Follow that thought. We stood off that disrupter blast because we were linked together. Our minds were joined together. That’s how we survived!”
Hazel scowled. “I’ve never liked linking. I don’t like letting anyone else into my mind.”
“Hazel, this is no time to be modest! Would you rather die?”
“Damn. All right. Let’s do it.”
She reached out a hand, and Owen took it in his human hand. Their minds reached hesitantly out to each other, following the old mental link that held all the surviving alumni of the Madness Maze together. They drew closer and closer, until the power building between them slammed their minds together into one unified will and became something else. Something more. Something that pulled them right out of their bodies and up into the air above. They flashed through all the floors and rooms of the Standing in a moment, immaterial spirits, until they came at last to the computers Valentine had had installed in the room adjoining the security center. They hovered over the machines, held back for a moment by a strangeness they couldn’t name, and then they concentrated, and heard the machines thinking. It was both simple and very complex, a multitude of small but vital decisions flashing past faster than any merely human mind could hope to follow. But Owen and Hazel had come a long way from human now, and it took them less than a second to sink into the computer systems and pull out the data needed to stop the countdown. The program was interrupted; the bomb reset itself and waited for new instructions. Owen and Hazel ran swiftly through all the computers’ memories, just to make sure Valentine hadn’t left any other unpleasant surprises, and then they pulled free. The driving need that had held and bonded them together ran out, and they vanished from the computer room, separated, and fell back into their bodies again. They looked dazedly around them, getting used to breathing again, as the shutters disappeared and the room unlocked itself.
“Wow . . .” said Hazel finally. “That was . . . something else.”
“It’s what I’ve always said,” said Owen. “We do our best work together.”
“Maybe. Let’s get out of here, Owen. There’s too much death in this place.”
“And Valentine got away,” said Owen. “But I will find him. And for what he’s done, to my home and my world and my people, I’ll make a whole new Hell to send him to.”
CHAPTER TWO
Just Another Day in Parliament
The
Sunstrider II
dropped out of hyperspace and took up orbit above Golgotha, homeworld and seat of power of the Empire, and Owen and Hazel couldn’t have cared less. Virimonde had taken a lot out of both of them. After the physical and psychological hammering they’d taken in the old Deathstalker Standing, it was all they could do to sit upright in their chairs and grunt responses to the main starport’s landing instructions. Owen keyed in the coordinates and let the navigation computers handle the landing. They were better at it than he’d ever be, and he was just so deathly tired.
And besides, if he was being honest with himself, the
Sunstrider II
intimidated him. The Hadenmen, those enigmatic augmented men, had rebuilt the ship to resemble the lost original as closely as possible, but they hadn’t been able to resist “improving” it. Owen could handle doors that opened if he even thought about approaching them, and food synthesizors that knew what he wanted for dinner before he did, but navigation controls that worked on the same unnerving principle were just too much for him. After a couple of unfortunate incidents when his mind had wandered during what would otherwise have been perfectly safe landings, he had decided very firmly to leave such matters to the computers and devote his time to more important matters. Like sulking.
He sat slumped in his chair, watching the dark blue world rising slowly toward him, and felt almost nostalgic. The last time he’d come to Golgotha, the rebellion had been in its last vicious throes, and practically everyone on the planet had been shooting at him. Now he was just another visitor, no more important than anyone else. Owen had a strong feeling he preferred the old days. At least then he’d been sure who and where his enemies were. He looked fondly across at Hazel, brooding furiously in her chair. Even when Hazel d’Ark was supposed to be relaxing, she still looked as though she might leap up at any moment and tear someone’s throat out. Owen didn’t mind. He was used to it.
“So,” said Hazel brusquely, somehow knowing he was looking at her, even without looking around. “Where do we go next? Got any plans?”
“Why is it always up to me?” Owen protested mildly. They’d had this conversation before, many times. “How come you never have any ideas?”
“I have plenty of ideas,” said Hazel. “But you’re always too chicken to follow them up.”
“That’s because your ideas have a distressing tendency to revolve around violence, murder, and bloody mayhem, and stealing anything that isn’t actually nailed down. We can’t get away with that kind of thing anymore. We’re not rebels and outlaws anymore; we’re part of the status quo. Hell, techniacally speaking, we’re law enforcement agents.”
“Boring,” said Hazel. “You’ve got really boring these days, Deathstalker.”
“Actually, I do know what I’m going to do next,” said Owen, ignoring the insult with the ease of long practice. “As soon as we’ve landed and made our report to Parliament, I’m going straight out again after Valentine Wolfe. The trail will still be warm. He won’t get far.”
“You’ve said that before, Owen, and he’s always got away. The Wolfe’s spent his whole life being somewhere else than where he’s supposed to be. That’s how he’s stayed alive so long, with so many enemies. Power down, get some rest, recharge your batteries. He’ll pop up again soon enough, doing something appalling, and then we’ll get another crack at him.”
Owen had to smile. “Things have come to a pretty pass if you’re being the voice of reason to my hothead.”
Hazel sniffed. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. Just shows how turned around we both are. We need some down time, Deathstalker. Virimonde hit us hard.”
“Yeah. Not much of a homecoming, all told.”
There was a pause, and then Hazel looked across at him, her face and voice carefully calm and casual. “Owen, how come you never told me about Cathy before? I mean, she was your mistress. She must have been important to you.”
“She was,” said Owen. “I never talked about her because she was none of your business. You could never have understood the kind of relationship we had.”
“You could have talked to me,” said Hazel. “I would have tried to understand. Tell me about her, this Cathy. What was she like? How did you meet her?”
Owen was quiet for so long that Hazel had almost decided he wasn’t going to answer, but finally he began to speak, his voice calm and almost unemotional, as though that was the only way he could approach such painful memories. He didn’t look at her once.
“Her name was Cathy DeVries, and she was very beautiful. Been a courtesan of one kind or another all her adult life, specially trained and adapted by the House of Joy to fulfill every desire you ever had, and help you come up with some new ones. She was a surprise party favor at a Winter Ball on Golgotha, and when they first presented her to me, I thought she was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen. We danced and talked, and she listened to me, seemed to understand and care about what I was saying when so many didn’t. She even found my jokes funny. She was perfect. So I bought out her contract, for an utterly extortionate price, and she became my mistress.
“Of course, it turned out she wasn’t perfect. Her table manners were appalling, she was far too bright and cheerful first thing in the morning, and she was an Imperial agent, set up to spy on me. Reported everything I said and did to a contact on Golgotha. Oz found out and told me, but I didn’t care. I was just a minor scholar in those days, with no interest in politics. Her reports must have made really boring reading. Occasionally I’d say something controversial just so they wouldn’t consider taking her away from me. We were so happy. I don’t think we ever once had an argument. Seven years we had together. Sometimes I think that was the last time I was ever really happy. That I treasured it so much because somehow, deep down, I knew someday it would all be taken away from me.