Deathstalker (33 page)

“Jump now! That’s an order!”

“Yes, Owen. On to Shandrakor, and death or glory!”

The lights flickered and went out. Smoke filled the lounge. The ship lurched heavily as the stern blew apart in an echoing explosion, and then the
Sunstrider
dropped into hyperspace and was gone on its way to an uncertain destination.

John Silence, once again a Captain in the Imperial Fleet by Her Majesty’s pleasure, sat stiffly in the command chair on the bridge of his new ship the
Dauntless
and tried unsuccessfully to get comfortable. It wasn’t that there was anything actually wrong with the chair, it was just so new, like everything else. It didn’t give in the right places, or make allowances for his habitual gestures, like the old one had. But that chair was long gone with the rest of the good ship
Darkwind
She’d been his ship for many years, and a good ship, too. Silence snorted silently. Here he was, with a new ship and a second chance he’d had no right to expect or hope for, and all he could do was find fault.
Well
, thought Silence,
do what you’re best at, that’s what I always say
.

But he had to admit the
Dauntless
was something special, even if she was still fresh from the stardocks, all sparkling clean and completely untested. If she lived up to even half the claims the engineers made for her, she’d be the fastest, best-gunned ship in the Fleet, and a genuine wonder of the Galaxy. She had the new stardrive, more disrupter cannon than any ship before, and force shields powerful enough to survive a dive into a sun. The
Dauntless
was a whole damn navy in itself, and Silence wasn’t blind to the trust the Empress had placed in him by giving him the command. Any other Captain might have been tempted to just take the ship and run for the Rim, to build a small empire of his own, secure in the knowledge it would be years before any similar ships could come after him. But Lionstone had known he wouldn’t do that. She had given him back his life and his
commission, when she needn’t have given him either, because she trusted him, and now he was her man, blood and bone and spirit, until they were both dead and gone to dust.

But until then, he was the new captain of a very new ship, where nothing could be trusted until it had been thoroughly tested and tried and proved reliable. Fine claims were all very well, but Silence reserved judgment. Engineers had a tendency to overenthusiasm, especially when it wasn’t their butts on the firing line. Besides, Silence knew where the new stardrive had come from. The engineers had derived it from the drive in the alien ship he’d found crashlanded on Unseeli, barely a year ago. Silence supposed it was just possible the stardocks now had a full working knowledge of the alien technology, but just in case, he made it a point to know where the nearest escape pod was at any given moment. That was the other side to the Empress’ appointing him Captain of the
Dauntless
; if nothing else, he was entirely expendable.

He deliberately put that thought aside and concentrated on the viewscreen before him. The
Dauntless
had dropped out of hyperspace and taken up an orbit around the planet Grendel some two hours ago, and he still couldn’t get any sensible data out of his brand new sensors. The information they were giving him was questionable where it wasn’t obscure, and no bloody use to him at all. Practically every question he put to his computers came back “insufficient data,” and the ship’s AI was sulking because he’d shouted at it. But he couldn’t in good faith put off planetfall much longer. The Empress’ orders had been quite explicit. He was to locate and open the Vaults of the Sleepers and subjugate or destroy whatever creatures he found in them. Nothing new in that; it was the Empire’s standard attitude to all aliens. But the aliens on Grendel, or rather buried deep beneath its surface, were different. Vicious, unnatural killing machines, they’d slaughtered the last Empire team to encounter them. Some fool opened a Vault, and that was that. Hopefully things would be different this time. Firstly, he had some idea of what he was getting into, and secondly, when he finally got around to opening up a Vault, he was going to be backed up by a full company of fifty marines, ten battle espers, and twenty Wampyr.

Which should give him an edge, if nothing else.

Silence was frankly surprised that there were still twenty
Wampyr left in the Service. Their uses were limited, they were expensive to maintain, they disturbed the hell out of anyone who had to work with them … and by now everyone knew all about plasma babies. And that was all he needed on a new ship with a new crew: a new addictive drug to tempt his men. They were probably already building illicit stills and cooking up new battle drugs in the labs, just to see if they could get away with it under a new Captain. Which was possibly why the Empire had insisted on supplying him with a new Security Officer: V. Stelmach by name. He hadn’t volunteered his first name, and Silence hadn’t pressed him in case it was something embarassing. (Vernon, Valentine … Violet?) Big, broad, close-mouthed and entirely humorless, the Security Officer was never far from the Captain or the Investigator, keeping a watchful eye. Just a little reminder that the two of them still had to prove themselves. Silence did his best not to notice.

He glanced across at Frost, standing rock-solid at parade rest beside his chair, her fierce gaze fixed on the view of Grendel before them. He hadn’t had much chance to talk to her since Lionstone had pardoned them both. There’d been too much to do getting the ship ready to depart, the nature of their jobs kept them apart, and besides … he wasn’t sure what he would have said anyway. The Investigator had saved his life, but he didn’t know why. Anyone else, he might have made a few educated guesses, but Investigators had none of the softer emotions. Their training saw to that. There were those who said the Investigators were as inhuman as the aliens they studied. That there was no room in them for anything but cold, calculated killing.

In which case, she’d feel right at home on Grendel.

Silence sighed quietly and gave his full attention to the viewscreen. Grendel filled the screen, a gray featureless ball of ash, hiding secrets. The planet had a surface once, complete with the decaying husks of deserted alien cities and machinery, but all that was gone; lost or destroyed when the Imperial Fleet scorched the planet from orbit to be sure of destroying the terrible creatures that had boiled out of the Vault of the Sleepers.

Grendel had been under full quarantine ever since, and six starcruisers hung permanently in orbit over the planet to ensure that nothing and no one got in or out. Silence had thought that something of an overreaction, but that was before
he’d seen the surviving records of the first contact team and saw how they died. Now he was just grateful the ships were there. Not that they’d actually back him up, even if things went disastrously wrong a second time, but they would ensure that whatever happened not one alien creature would escape from the planet. Even if they had to scorch it again. Silence shivered briskly, as though someone had just walked over his grave, and put that thought aside, too. First things first: check that the quarantine remained secure, for the record. He had his communications officer raise the command ship of the quarantine, and the cold, calm features of Captain Bartek of the
Defiant
filled the viewscreen. Bartek the Butcher. In his time he’d overseen the scorching of three worlds and put down a dozen rebellions, by whatever means he thought necessary. A personal favorite of the Iron Bitch, and just the kind of man you needed to run a quarantine like this. Try and bribe Bartek, and they’d hand you back your balls on the way out. Silence nodded to him courteously.

“Last contact before we make planetfall, Captain Bartek. Just checking that everything’s still secure. For the record.”

Bartek sniffed and fixed Silence with a cold, unyielding stare. “For the record, then: quarantine remains unbroken. Not one ship has survived to make planetfall since this operation was set up, and there has been absolutely no trace of alien activity on the planet itself. My orders are to stand by and observe as you send your people down in pinnaces. They will disembark, and the pinnaces will return to the
Dauntless
, where they will be thoroughly inspected by my people. So if you do let loose something you can’t control, it will have no means of leaving the planet’s surface. Understand me, Captain Silence: you and all your people are completely expendable. I have been expressly ordered that under no circumstances am I to assist or help you in any way once you have made planetfall. Whatever happens, once you’re down there, you’re on your own. And in the most extreme case, acting on my judgment alone, I am to destroy the
Dauntless
completely if there seems any risk that she might be … contaminated. Have I made myself clear, Captain?”

“Utterly,” said Silence calmly. “I’ve seen the records of the first team. Take no chances. Silence out.”

He sensed as much as heard Frost stirring at his side while Bartek’s face disappeared from the viewscreen, replaced by
Grendel’s enigmatic surface. He turned slightly to look at her.

“Problem, Investigator?”

Frost sniffed. “Thinks he’s so hot. All he’s ever done is give orders from the rear. Never killed in hot blood in his life, like as not. Darling of the Academy, but no guts. No real guts.”

“Not to worry, Investigator. We’ve gone into sticky situations before without any backup.”

“At least then we didn’t have to worry about being shot in the back by our own side.” She flicked a quick glance at the Security Officer, who was quietly studying the most recent sensor readings at the science console. “We’re not even entirely safe on our own ship. V. Stelmach. Wonder what the V. stands for. Vile, Vicious … Vermin?”

“Probably all three,” said Silence easily. “You could always look it up in the computer records.”

“I already tried that. He’s got it under a personal security code. Must be something really embarassing.”

“Ignore him. We’ll do what we have to, same as we’ve always done. I just hope our luck’s better than the last time. Unseeli was bad enough, but Grendel looks as if it could manage something really unpleasant, if it put its mind to it. Shame there weren’t any survivors from the first contact team. I would have liked some firsthand impressions of what we might encounter.”

“There was one survivor,” said Frost. “The Investigator. She failed to spot the dangers.”

“Might have known an Investigator would survive, if anyone could. What happened to her?”

“They sent her to a hellworld.”

“Where she’s no bloody use to all. Typical. Still, I’m surprised they didn’t execute her.”

“The hellworld will do that.”

Silence decided not to press the point. Frost was clearly touchy about her fellow Investigator. They were all supposed to be perfect, dependable, infallible. It said so in their job description. Just like a Captain was always supposed to know what to do for the best. … Silence smiled briefly and leaned back in his command chair. Time to get the show on the road, starting with a good look from a safe distance at exactly where they’d be landing. The landing site had already been decided, and remote control mechanisms were already
busy constructing secure landing pads. Silence called up the view on his private screen and frowned thoughtfully. Grendel had no solid land masses anymore. Only ash. Silence had chosen this particular location because one of the few things his sensors could agree on was that there was a Vault there, barely a mile below the surface. Which made it the easiest by far to get at. Remote control mining equipment was currently digging its way down through the ash toward it.

Except it wasn’t alone down there. Surrounding the Vault for miles in all directions was a city, or what was left of it. There was no trace left of the deserted cities on the surface. The scorching had left nothing but an endless sea of ash, from pole to pole. But under the ash, somehow miraculously untouched by all the destruction, lay the remains of an alien civilization. The first contact team had passed through an underground city to reach their Vault. The experience nearly drove them all mad. There was something about the city, something unbearable to the human mind. The sensors couldn’t tell much about it, except that it was there and completely deserted. And right in the middle of that miles-wide city lay the main Vault of the Sleepers: a colossal steel tomb the size of a mountain. Only what slept within that tomb slept very lightly.

Silence had already studied the first team’s records of the city they encountered, but they didn’t make much sense. They were far from complete, and what there was was decidedly unpleasant. The details were too strange, too alien, too unlike anything Silence had ever encountered before. Even Frost admitted to finding them disturbing, and she had more experience of the alien than everyone else on the
Dauntless
put together. Although some of the people on board were pretty strange in themselves. Silence grimaced briefly at the thought. He ought to check in on his contact team again, now that the drop was getting so close. He raised the marine sergeant Angelo Null on his private screen and nodded politely to the broad, faintly scowling face.