Deathstalker Honor (44 page)

He walked home alone in the middle of the crowds, and people in the streets saw his face and hurried to get out of his way.

 

Diana Vertue, now only occasionally Jenny Psycho, was hard at work again in the computer-records section of the newly established Esper Guild House, in the Parade of the Endless. The Houses existed to train, succor, and politicize espers, and to provide sanctuary for those in need. Diana didn’t feel at all in need of protection or succor, and she had no interest in esper politics, but she did need access to the esper underground’s extensive computer files. Over the past few centuries the underground had built up a massive database on the theory, practice, and history of all esper abilities, a library of knowledge far more extensive than anything available anywhere else. And Diana had a lot of questions she needed answering.

Though if the esper underground had known exactly which questions she was pursuing, they would undoubtedly have moved heaven and earth to keep her far away from their computers. So Diana hadn’t told them. She hadn’t wanted to upset them.

There was a cautious knock at the door, and then it eased open just enough for a servant’s head to peer carefully in. People in the Guild Hall had learned the hard way not to interrupt Diana when she was working, without very good reason. Her Jenny Psycho persona could still erupt occasionally if she was annoyed enough. As a result, people walked very softly around the infamous Diana Vertue, and had as little to do with her as possible. Which suited her just fine. She turned slowly in the swivel chair and gave the unfortunate servant at the door her best daunting glare. He paled visibly, and had to swallow hard before he could deliver his message.

“Beg pardon for disturbing you, most illustrious, revered, and very calm senior esper, but the head of the House asks again if you would be so good as to speak with him concerning the . . . nature of your current research. He’s sure he could be of help if you would only—”

“No,” said Diana. “I don’t think so.” Her voice was harsh and grating, distressing to the ear. She’d ruined her throat and vocal chords screaming endlessly in the terrible detention cells of Wormboy Hell. Diana could have had her voice repaired, but had chosen not to. It made a useful psychological weapon. She fixed the servant with her best unwavering glare until he started twitching. “I’ll speak to the head of the House when I’m ready, and not before.”

“It’s just that . . . well, you’ve been tying up our computer resources for three weeks now, and the list of people waiting to use them is now so long that some have been asking whether they should make arrangements for their descendants to inherit their position on the list.”

Diana didn’t smile. It would have undermined her image. “Tell them patience is a virtue. Anyone who doesn’t feel particularly virtuous is always welcome to complain to me in person.”

“Can I at least persuade you to attend regular mealtimes? Snatching ten minutes to wolf down a hurried meal in here, when you happen to think of it, can’t be good for you. You hardly ever leave this place. You’d probably sleep in here if there was room to fit in a cot.”

“Thank you for your concern,” growled Diana. “Most appreciated. Now get out of here before I decide to turn you into a small hopping thing.”

The servant’s head disappeared, the door closing quickly behind him. Diana smiled slightly. She knew she shouldn’t take advantage of her reputation like that, but chances for humor were few and far between in her life of late. He was quite right; she wasn’t eating properly or often enough, but the work was so important she often couldn’t drag herself away until her body forced her to.

She had to find her answer before someone sufficiently powerful arrived to stop her.

She sighed and turned back to the computer terminal before her. The monitor screen buzzed impatiently, waiting for her to put something useful on it. She was using an old-fashioned keyboard, infuriatingly slow and tiring, but she couldn’t risk setting up a direct link to the computers through her comm implant. It would have left her vulnerable to all kinds of things. Diana Vertue was investigating the single greatest mystery of the esper age—the nature and origins of the enigmatic Mater Mundi, Our Mother of All Souls.

No one knew exactly who or what the Mater Mundi was; ask a hundred different people and you’d get a hundred different answers, all of them equally vague. Some said she was the uber-esper, the single most powerful esper mind ever created. Others maintained she was a group of senior espers in the underground working together. To some she was the God of the espers, and those whose lives she touched were considered Saints. They’d tried to make a Saint out of Jenny Psycho, but it hadn’t taken.

To those who weren’t espers, the Mater Mundi was a dangerous unknown, a menace all the more disturbing because its nature was so unclear.

Diana had her own reasons for distrusting the Mater Mundi. The phenomenon had manifested through her once, uncalled and unexpected, boosting and expanding her esper abilities far beyond anything she’d ever been capable of before. She’d blazed like a sun in the dark pit of Wormboy Hell, binding all the esper prisoners together so they could break out of their cells and fight for freedom. Hundreds of espers had been drawn into her focus, guided by her augmented will, fused into a single, unstoppable force. The gestalt hadn’t lasted long, but while it did Jenny Psycho worked miracles.

Afterward, she’d convinced herself she was the chosen avatar of the Mater Mundi, the permanent agent through which the Mother of the World would manifest. She believed she was the Chosen One, the leader destined to bring her people out of slavery. She was wrong. She found that out the hard way on Mistworld, when she tried to summon the Mater Mundi’s presence at a vital moment and nothing happened. People died around her, and she could do nothing to save them. Later, the Mater Mundi manifested through the rogue Investigator, Topaz, and she combined all the espers of Mistworld into a single potent force. And Jenny Psycho found out the hard way that she wasn’t who she thought she was.

At the end of the rebellion, the Mater Mundi had pulled together hundreds of thousands of espers, in cities all across Golgotha. She hadn’t bothered with a focus then. Just slammed into their minds and used them to do what was necessary. Again, the gestalt didn’t last long, but while it did it swept away all opposition to the rebels with an almost contemptuous ease. The Mater Mundi manifested just once more, at the very end, possessing Jenny Psycho just long enough to teleport a handful of useful players into Lionstone’s Court.

Diana should have felt grateful, even honored. Instead she felt used.

So she set out to find who or what had been using her, and why, only to run into a brick wall. The Mater Mundi apparently didn’t want her true nature known, and had gone to great lengths to cover her tracks. There were rumors and gossip aplenty, but nothing at all in the way of hard facts, no matter how deep she dug. It was taken as a matter of faith that the Mater Mundi had founded the esper underground, somewhen in the distant past, and then retreated into the shadows to watch and guide from a distance. But there was no record anywhere of anyone who had personally witnessed any of this, or knew anyone who had.

The one thing that was clear was that people who went looking for the Mater Mundi tended not to come back. People who asked too many questions disappeared. Eventually the underground declared her officially off limits, a mystery too dangerous to be investigated. Diana didn’t give a damn. In her experience, people who stayed in hiding usually had a good reason for doing so, and she wanted to know what it was. Why the God of espers hid from her worshipers. And why she thought she could just use and discard people, and not answer for it.

Diana decided that if anyone knew anything, it had to be the esper underground’s records. So she walked into the esper Guild House in the Parade of the Endless, took over its records section, and basically defied anyone to do anything about it.

At first Diana got nowhere fast. There were all kinds of blocks and passwords, secret files within files, and double encryptions that she had no experience of. The esper Guild protected its secrets well, even from its own. Perhaps particularly from its own. But Diana had planned ahead, cultivating useful friendships among the cyberats, who just saw the Guild’s blocking tactics as a challenge. Diana watched and learned at a rate that astonished herself. The Mater Mundi might have abandoned her, but it had left her much more than she had been. Soon she no longer needed the cyberats’ help, and dug steadily deeper into the past in pursuit of an enigmatic ghost.

She discovered a great many hidden truths about the early days of the underground, when the espers had been still struggling to put it together. There were files on secret deals and unpalatable agreements, of good men sacrificed for the greater good. Of conflicting organizations savagely crushed so that the underground could represent all espers. Past heroes were revealed to have feet of clay, and past villains emerged as simply people in the wrong place at the wrong time, or with too many inconvenient scruples. As in so many organizations that have been around for a while, the winners wrote the history, and truth was sacrificed on the altar of necessity.

Diana wasn’t really surprised. But dig as deep as she might, the Mater Mundi remained elusive, flickering around the edges of the underground, touching this person or that, guiding the underground’s progress with a subtle nudge here and an unobtrusive prod there. The pattern was clear when you stood far enough back, and Diana couldn’t believe she was the first person to have done so, but there were no records anywhere, no solid facts worthy of the name, no official files of any kind on the Mater Mundi.

If the truth was there, they’d buried it deep, where maybe even the current leaders couldn’t find it anymore. Something had frightened them. And given some of the things the underground did still maintain in the records, whatever they had found out about Our Mother of All Souls must have been pretty damn unpleasant. Or dangerous.

Espers had been first created through genetic engineering just under three centuries ago. A happy accident, the unexpected result of experiments intended to produce something else entirely. It took some time to stabilize the process so that specific abilities would breed true; as telepaths, polters, pyros etc. After that it was just a question of establishing quality control, so the end result could be successfully marketed. Espers weren’t human. They were property, like clones. The end result of Empire science.

No one objected. Or at least no one that mattered.

Once the esper underground was founded, sometime later, its leaders tried many paths, some more successful than others. One of their more disturbing notions had been their attempt to secretly gengineer existing espers into some form of super-esper that could be used as weapons in the great struggle. Espers capable of wielding more than one ability, or even manifesting new, undreamed-of powers. Espers who would burn so brightly they could outshine the sun. There were objectors, but they were shouted down. This was war, after all.

At first there was no shortage of volunteers, but these quickly tailed off as it became clear the end results were almost entirely negative. The scientists couldn’t produce super-espers. Only monsters, physical and mental, horrible beyond bearing. The underground destroyed all they could, and did something else with the others. No one knew what. The files were hidden away where no one could find them. Until Diana came along. Little solid evidence remained of what the esper scientists had created in their hidden laboratories, just a list of names. The Shatter Freak. Blue Hellfire. Screaming Silence. The Gray Train. The Spider Harps. And one final name, attached to a date so old it predated the esper underground by centuries. A familiar name.

Deathstalker.

Diana still wasn’t sure what to make of that. She’d tried cautiously raising the subject with Owen, but he just sat there for a while, looking very thoughtful, and then clammed up entirely. She tried reason, and threats, but neither of them got her anywhere. Even Jenny Psycho didn’t have what it took to pressure Owen Deathstalker.

Diana scowled. The Maze people worried her. Human beings shouldn’t be able to do the things these people did so casually. And all the signs were that they were still growing stronger, with no clear end in sight. Perhaps in time they might become something like the Mater Mundi—certainly they were all a long way down the road to leaving humanity behind.

Diana had talked to them all, at one time or another, about the Madness Maze, but they didn’t have much to say. The one thing they did agree on was that the Maze was gone, destroyed by her father, Captain Silence. So Diana went to him for answers, half convinced by then that the Mater Mundi might have been someone who’d passed through the Madness Maze centuries earlier. The same double initial might even be some kind of clue. But Silence couldn’t tell her much either, except to say he’d only gone partway through the Maze before retreating. He was developing strange abilities himself, but wouldn’t discuss them. He did say he’d seen the Maze kill many members of his crew who’d entered the Maze with him, in hideous, nightmarish ways.

The Madness Maze took a few ordinary men and women and made them superhuman. But it killed a hell of a lot more.

Diana never asked her father why he destroyed the Maze. If he did it because he believed its existence threatened all Humanity, or to deny it to the rebels, or just because it had killed so many of his crew. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to answer her.