Starfishers Triology - Shadowline Part 11

He was not here to ooh and ah at the animals in the zoo. The thing was an obstacle, not a spectacle. It required moving or removing. He took a kilo-weight packet from his tool belt, limpeted it to the amazon's back. He tossed a flare into the monster's chamber to get its attention. He hurled the guardian after it.

A vast, scaly head speared out of the gloom. The skeleton woman vanished into a fangy mouth. A huge yellow eye considered Storm.

The head rose. From the darkness came the sound of a vast bulk moving and of bones cracking.

Storm shuddered. The woman had gone to her death without a sound.

For an instant he wondered why he had not killed Helga when he had had the chance.

He waited. The munching faded. She would would choose a monster that chewed its food. choose a monster that chewed its food.

The beast rumbled. Storm waited. Soon it was snoring like a healthy volcano. He waited some more, fretting at the delay.

It seemed he had been there half his life, and still he had not started. He still had to penetrate the fortress proper.

The drug was supposed to be fast, but it was old. And the poison with it was slow. He had to wait to be sure.

He wanted the monster asleep while he was below, and dead only after he made his escape. Helga might monitor its vital signs.

He made it three quarters of the way across the arena before the monster abandoned pretense. Its immensity bore down on him like some anachronistic blood-and-bone dreadnought.

It was not moving as lithely as earlier. The drug had had some effect. Storm did not panic, though fear raked him with claws of steel. He faced the charge.

He had rehea.r.s.ed this confrontation for years. Rote reaction carried him through.

While backing toward his goal he set his glove to short in a single burst of power. The great head, the scimitar teeth, came down, slowly for the beast but incredibly fast in Storm's subjective perception.

He hurled himself aside, gloved hand reaching back like an eagle's talons. For an instant his fingers touched the moist soft flesh inside a gargantuan nostril. The glove blew. Charred flesh putrified the air. The beast flung back, screaming, falling over its tangled legs, tearing at its snout with its foreclaws.

Storm went sprawling. Up on adrenalin to a perilous level, he rose with a bounce astounding in a man of his age. He crouched, ready to dodge the next attack, hoping he could cat and mouse long enough to reach an exit.

The thing was preoccupied. Like a hound stung by a bee it had been snuffling; it kept pawing its nose. It tore its own flesh. When it ground its scaly snout into the sand, Storm laughed hysterically. He fled for the entrance.

The unbreachable gate had been broken. He had penetrated Festung Todesangst.

It took time to get hold of himself, to get his bearings. He wished he could quit. He wanted nothing so much as the peace and security of his study.

Giving in would not matter. He could not win anyway. Not in the long run. Why fight? Why not steal a little peace before the inevitable closed in?

That part of him which could not yield a.s.serted itself. He resumed moving, downward, deep into Festung Todesangst.

The deeps of Helga's World were sterile and lifeless. He walked long corridors with featureless metal floors and wall, under blue-white lights. The only odor was a mild taint of ozone, the only sound a barely discernible hum. It was like walking the halls of an abandoned but perfectly maintained hospital.

The life of Festung Todesangst lay hidden behind those featureless walls. Thousands of human brains. Cubic kilometers of microchips and magnetic bubbles shuffling mega-googols of information bits. Helga's World had become the data warehouse of the human universe.

What unsuspected secrets lay hidden there? How much power for someone able to possess or dispossess Helga Dee?

Immense power. But no force, not even that of Confederation, could plunder Helga's empire. Her father had promised the universe that she would bring on the Gotterdammerung rather than surrender her position. Any conqueror would have to surrept.i.tiously deactivate a dozen thermonuclear destruct charges and disconnect all the poison stores set to kill the brains in their support tanks. He would have to deactivate Helga herself, from whom all control flowed.

It was a setup characteristic of the Dees. What was theirs was theirs forever. Only what was yours was negotiable. No one, especially an avaricious government, was going to rob the family.

Storm meant to steal from a Dee. From the coldest, most hateful, and jealous one of them all. And he would accomplish it with the help of something stolen from himself. The great prize of the queen of the dead was going to become her most severe liability.

He was going to hurt her, and he was going to enjoy doing it.

Kilometers beneath the surface, beneath even the vast main fortress, so deep that his suit had to cool instead of heat, he found the terminal he sought.

It was the master for one small, semi-independent system. It existed for one limited, cruel purpose. It was the focus from which Helga meant to engineer her revenge upon Gneaus Julius Storm. Within it lay everything known about Storm and the Iron Legion. He suspected that it contained things he did not know himself. To it came every stray wisp of information, every gossamer strand of rumor, vaguely relating to himself.

To it, also, Michael Dee came when he had some scheme afoot.

Once upon a time Helga had been a wild-eyed wanton, rus.h.i.+ng from thrill to ever more bizarre thrill with the frenzy of a woman condemned. Being locked into the endless boredom of Festung Todesangst was the cruelest fate she could imagine. She extracted compensatory bites from his soul every minute this bottom-most system ran.

The corebrain here, the overbrain that controlled the others, was that of his daughter Valerie. She had not been ego-scrubbed before being cyborged in. Every second that pa.s.sed, in a vastly telescoped subjective time, was one in which she was aware of her ident.i.ty and plight.

For this cruelty he would kill Helga Dee. When the time came. When the moment was ripe.

All things in their season.

He stared at the terminal for a long time, trying to dis-remember that the soul of the machine was a daughter he had loved too much.

Age, Storm would declare when the subject arose, did not confer wisdom, only experience from which the wise could draw inferences. And even the wisest man had blind spots, and could behave like a fool, and remain so adamant in his folly that it would strangle him with a garrote of his own devising.

Storm's blind spots were Richard Hawksblood and Michael Dee. He was overly ready to attribute evil to Richard, and too trusting and forgiving with his brother.

A long time ago, much as Pollyanna had recently, Valerie had vanished from the Fortress of Iron. Storm still was not sure, but suspected the machinations of Michael Dee. Nor did he know Valerie's motives for leaving, though beforehand she had spoken often of making peace with Richard.

His memories of Valerie's case colored his behavior in Pollyanna's. He went baring off to the rescue-perhaps unwisely.

Valerie fell in love with Hawksblood.

Word of their affair filtered back. Storm flew into a rage. He accused Richard of every crime a father ever laid on a daughter's lover. Michael arranged a meeting. Fool that he was, Storm disowned her when she refused to come home.

He was sorry the instant he spoke, but was too stubborn to recall words once flown. And he became sorrier still when Helga, after gulling her own father, s.n.a.t.c.hed Valerie and hustled her off to Festung Todesangst.

Poor Valerie. She went into mechanical/cerebral bondage believing her father had abandoned her, that he had used her cruelly.

Storm had been working on Helga ever since. His vengeance thus far he deemed only token repayment for the destruction of a daughter's love.

They were hard, cruel, anachronistic men and women, the Storms and Dees, and Hawksbloods, and those who served them.

Enough, he told himself. He had crucified himself on this cross too often already. Hand trembling, he jacked his comm plug into a direct verbal input.

"Valerie?"

Came a sense of stirring into wakefulness. An electronic rustling. Then a return his equipment interpreted as "Who's there?" It contained overtones of surprise.

There was just one answer he dared give, just one that would not spark an explosion of bitterness. "Richard Hawksblood."

"Richard? What are you doing here?"

He felt her uncertainty, her hope, her fear. It hit him hard. He had an instant of nausea. Some foul worm was trying to gnaw its way out of his gut.

If he and Richard agreed on anything, it was that Helga should be punished for this.

Richard had loved Valerie. That love was one more unbridgeable gap between them.

"I came to see you. To free you. And to find out what Helga is doing to your father and me."

There was a long, long silence. He began to fear that he had lost her. Finally, "Who calls? I've slept here so long. So peacefully."

He could taste the agony of her lie. There was no peace for Valerie Storm. Helga made sure of that.

Storm replied, "Richard Hawksblood." He wished he knew their love talk, the pet names they had called one another in the night, or the all-important trivia that pa.s.s between a man and woman in love. "Valerie, what was that new complex I saw on my way down?" Between Helga's puppy and Valerie's pit he had encountered little but endless sterility and silence, except on the last few levels, where he had to slip through a construction zone as softly as a prowling kitten.

He wondered if Helga's zombie workers would have noticed if he had strutted through their midst. Personality-scrubbed, they were little more than robots. But they might be robots programed to report anomalies.

"Cryocrypts for the sons of my father, whose deaths will be the first step of my mistress's revenge."

Storm subdued his anger response. "How? Why?"

"Helga and her father have decided that my father will fight on Blackworld. They intend to capture some of my brothers and hold them here till the fighting is done."

"Helga would never release them."

"No. Her father doesn't know that."

"How?"

"Michael Dee will capture them."

Storm recalled Benjamin's nightmares. Were they a valid precognition? Could both twins have the psi touch? Could the Faceless Man be Michael Dee? "How will they kill Benjamin?" he blurted.

He grimaced as he spoke Benjamin's name. Richard Hawksblood could not have known that anything of the sort was planned. He could not have done the sums.

"You! You didn't sound like Richard. So cold. He would've...Storm. My father. Here. Only he could suspect..."

She seemed too stunned to give an alarm-or did not want to sound one. Perhaps she had forgiven him just a little.

"Valeric, I'm sorry. I was a fool." The words came hard. He did not admit error easily.

He had to move fast. Helga would have made sure Valerie could keep no secrets. "Honeyhair...Forgive me." He had to do the thing that, when first they had learned of Valerie's enslavement, he and Richard had agreed had to be done.

There could be but one escape for Valerie Storm. He could free her no other way.

Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood...He had trouble seeing. There was water in his eye.

Shaking, he reached for the large red lever prominent in the center of the terminal. The worm within his gut metamorphosed, became an angry, clawing dragon.

He had thought himself too old, too calloused to feel such pain.

He hesitated for just an instant. Then he pulled the safety pin and yanked the lever.

His helmet rilled with a sound not unlike that of someone slowly strangling. His hand strayed toward the comm jack. He forced it away. He had to listen, to remember. This dread moment would never have been were he not a bullheaded idiot.

One must savor the bitter taste of folly as well as the sweetness of wisdom, for wisdom is born of folly well remembered.

She was going. Faintly, she murmured, "Peace. Father, tell Richard...Please. Tell Richard I...I..."

"I will, Valerie. Honeyhair. I will."

"Father...Play something...the way you used to."

A tear forced itself from his eye as he remembered a tune he used to tootle for her when she was a child. He unslung the case on his back, praying the cold and encounter with Helga's guardian had not ruined his instrument. He wet the reed, closed his eye, began to play. It squealed a little, but yielded its child-memory. "That one, Honeyhair?"

Silence. The voiceless, bellowing silence of death.

He indulged in a frenzy of rage that masked a deeper, more painful emotion. For one long minute he let his grief take him. His music became an agonized howl.

Valerie was not the first of his blood he had slain. She might not be the last. Practice did not ease the agony. He could not do it without crying in the night forever afterward.

This Storm, the Storm of tears and grief and fury, was the Storm no one ever saw, the Storm unknown to anyone but Frieda, who held him while the sobs racked him.

He took hold. There were things to do. He had learned something. He had to move fast.

He used the dead face of Helga Dee as a will-o'-the-wisp to follow from Festung Todesangst's deeps. He stalked it with the intensity of a fanatic a.s.sa.s.sin.

He had thought that he hated Richard Hawksblood. That odium was a child's fleeting pa.s.sion compared to what he felt now. His feelings toward Helga had become a torch he would follow through the darkness all the rest of his days.

He had not asked the questions that had brought him to Helga's World. But their answers were implicit in what he had learned.

They had come to the end of Michael's game. Dee was pulling out the stops, laying everything on the line, risking it all to get whatever he wanted. The Legion and Hawksblood were being pushed into Blackworld like c.o.c.ks into the pit, to fight and this time die the death-without-resurrection.

Whatever obsession compelled Michael, it was about to be satisfied. Michael was about to attain his El Dorado. There would be war, and there would be feeling in it. The hatreds were being pumped up. The Gotterdammerung could not be averted.

The twilight of the Legion lay just beyond a near horizon. It might mean the end of all mercenary armies...

Storm made a vow. He and Richard might fight, and both lose, but they would go to the shadows with one victory to light their paths to h.e.l.l.

The Dees would go down with them. Every last one.

Twenty-Six: 2845 AD