The tunnel ran out sooner than he thought it would. He grabbed the bodies before him, pulling them apart and away from each other, opening up a path. Often limbs stuck out like barriers in his way, and he had to tug and pull, breaking them off and putting them aside, out of the way. The arms and legs snapped cleanly, like pieces of wood. He tried to think of them that way but couldn't. They were people, his people. Sometimes he had to smash in rib cages with his more than human strength to make the necessary room. The unmoving bodies were stubbornly resistant, and he came to resent them. Didn't they knew what he was doing was for their sake? He lashed out with his fists, and was glad his hands were numb, for more than one reason.
He could feel Hazel's presence behind him, and hear the ragged, breaking sounds of her slow progress, but when he croaked her name, she didn't answer him. Presumably her voice was as wrecked by the cold as his. Either way, he couldn't turn around to see if anything was wrong. There wasn't room. So he pressed on, heading for the door.
It was very dark now. The last of the light from the main cavern and the re-erected force field had long since died away. There were shifting and creaking sounds all around him, as the bodies redistributed their weight in response to Owen's actions. It was almost as though the dead were stirring, disturbed by the presence of the living in their midst. Owen was glad of the dark. He had a quiet horror that one of the dead faces might open its dead eyes and turn to look at him as he passed, and he thought if he saw such a thing he might well lose his mind. There were some things no man could bear to see and still stay sane. And so he fought his way on, his heart hammering in his chest, his breathing harsh and ragged, half convinced that at any moment a dead hand would reach out of the darkness and clamp down on his arm or leg.
Claustrophobia sank slowly into him as the weight of all the bodies seemed to bear down with increasing weight. He began to doubt the surety of the direction in his mind, of the location of the hidden door. He had no other way of telling one direction from another in the utter dark. They could be moving in a slow circle for all he knew, hopelessly lost in the kingdom of the dead. He began to feel he'd been moving for far too long without getting anywhere. That he should have been there long before this. That he'd be trapped in here forever, in his own private hell. But he wasn't alone. Hazel was there with him. And just knowing that gave him the strength to go on.
Sometimes hooked fingers snagged in his clothing, jerking him to a sudden halt, and he had to feel blindly back and snap or break the metal-hard fingers before he could move on. Although he couldn't see them, his fingers told him that the bodies before him weren't always complete. His people had died fighting the invaders, and most of them had died hard. The invasion and destruction of Virimonde had been written in their yielding flesh, and the marks were preserved here for all to read. Rage burned in Owen at what had been done to them, and the fury helped to warm him as he struggled on.
Finally he reached the other side, and his hands slammed up against unyielding metal. His thoughts had been slowed by the cold, and he considered the matter sluggishly for a while before realizing he'd reached his destination. He yelled for Oz to open the hidden door, and a panel opened in the wall, sliding silently to one side. Bright light poured in, blinding his frozen-open eyes. He called out harshly, in pain and triumph, the sound like some raucous gore crow disturbed on a battlefield. He pulled himself out into the corridor beyond and then collapsed, steam rising thickly from his body.
Cold air steamed out of the opening and thickened into fog as it hit the warm air of the corridor. Owen lay helplessly on the floor, the horrid cold curling and uncurling inside him like ratcheting razor blades. But the stoked heat of his rage still burned deep within him, and it burned away the cold inch by inch until life returned to his body and he could move again. His fingers moved first, bending and straightening, making sharp cracking sounds like twigs trampled underfoot. His body contracted and relaxed in a series of slow pulses as warmth flooded back into cold-deadened muscles. The pain was horrific, but Owen welcomed it. It meant he was coming alive again after so long spent among the dead.
After a while he forced himself up onto his feet and looked around for Hazel, and only then realized that she hadn't followed him out of the place of the dead. She was still in there. He hobbled over to the opening, his knees cracking loudly, and called her name. She didn't answer. Owen batted the freezing fog with his hands, trying to see into the darkness beyond, but even his eyes had their limits. He called again, but the cold and the dark swallowed up his voice in a moment. He reached inside himself, searching for the mental link that bound him to Hazel, but it eluded him, weakened by long neglect. He'd left her behind in the cold and the dark, in the kingdom of the dead. And he had to go back in and rescue her.
Something inside him protested immediately. He couldn't go back into the cold again. He just couldn't. The cold and the dark and the horror of it all had nearly destroyed him. It would be madness to give it another chance at him. But even as he thought that, he knew he was going to go back in. He had to. Hazel needed him. He still hurt from head to toe, but that would pass. He was afraid, but that didn't matter. He'd been afraid before. For a long time now, the only thing that really had mattered to him was Hazel d'Ark.
So he took a deep breath of the freezing air, and thrust his head and shoulders back into the dark. The bitter cold closed around him like the embrace of an old familiar enemy, but he made himself ignore it, thinking only of Hazel. He forced himself on, back into the dead, and then his heart stopped as a cold hand closed suddenly around his wrist. His breath burst out of him in a painful gasp, his imagination showing him the dead coming slowly to life all around him, holding him, keeping him in their frozen Hell till he was dead like them. And then his heart and his breathing started up again as he realized the hand was Hazel's.
He grabbed her wrist, tried to say something reassuring in his croaking voice, and scrabbled frantically backward, pulling her with him. It only took a few moments before he was out in the corridor again, pulling Hazel out into the light and warmth. She came out in a series of sudden jerks, unable to help him, her body frozen rigid, and when she finally fell to the corridor floor, she made a sound like a felled log. Her eyes were frozen shut, and her face had frozen into a defiant snarl, teeth gritted together. Her skin was blue.
Owen knelt beside her, chafing her hands in his, mostly just for something to do. Her body would throw off the cold just as his had, but he needed to feel he was doing something to help.
Steam rose thickly from her solid clothes. Her hair was thick with hoarfrost, but it soon melted and ran away in the warm air of the corridor. And slowly, inch by inch, Hazel's body relaxed, until she was nestling in his arms, murmuring his name.
Finally she sat up and pushed him away, and he knew she was back to herself. She shook her head slowly, as though trying to clear out cobwebs in her thinking. "I lost my way. The tunnel was a straight line, but I… lost myself, alone in the dark. With the dead. And you came back for me." She wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered suddenly. "Feels like I'll never be warm again. That the cold of the grave will always be with me."
"It'll pass," said Owen.
"Of course it will," said Hazel. "We're more than human now, remember? No longer bound by human fears and… weaknesses."
"Hazel…"
"I'm all right now. I'm fine."
"Of course you are," said Owen.
They got to their feet, helping each other. Owen quietly told Oz to close the panel in the wall, and the freezing air was shut off. The fog in the corridor slowly began to clear. Owen looked around him, searching for something he recognized. It had been a long time since he'd been… home.
"Right," said Hazel. "Which way do we go, Deathstalker?"
"Give me a minute," said Owen. "I'm not actually sure…"
"Come on, this is your castle, your Standing…"
"Well, yes, but I don't think I actually ever came down this far. I mean, it's
a big place. Mostly I stuck to my own quarters. I certainly never bothered with the maintenance areas. I had people to do that for me."
"Lifestyles of the rich and useless. No wonder your own people were able to throw you out of here so easily."
"They didn't throw me out! I retreated in the face of superior numbers. Perfectly sound military strategy."
"Yeah, sure. Look, are you saying you're lost?"
"Down the corridor and turn right," Oz murmured in Owen's ear. "That'll lead you to Valentine's new laboratories."
"Of course I'm not lost," said Owen. "We just go down here and turn right, and that'll take us right to Valentine's new laboratories. Bound to be someone there you can terrorize into telling us what we need to know."
"You don't appreciate me," said Oz as Owen and Hazel set off down the corridor. "You really don't."
"How did you know where Valentine's labs are?" said Owen, subvocalizing so Hazel wouldn't hear.
"Educated guess," said Oz. "There were only so many open spaces where he could have set up all the new tech he's supposed to have here."
"What would I do without you, Oz?"
"I shudder to think. Now get your ass in gear before some guards come along."
Owen passed that thought on to Hazel, and they increased their pace. The exertion helped to drive the last traces of cold out of their bodies. Owen began to feel almost human again. Hazel must have too, for after a while he noticed her beginning to pay more attention to their surroundings. They were worth noticing. The floor was carpeted, the rich material covered in designs so old that centuries of Deathstalker servants' feet had mostly rubbed the details away. Tapestries and portraits and holos hung from the old stone walls, mostly detailing lesser moments in the long Deathstalker history. The greater moments and treasures were on display on the upper levels, where they could be showed off to aristocratic guests. Or they should be. Owen frowned. There was no telling what Valentine might have done with them. Owen wouldn't have put it past Valentine to heap all the Deathstalker treasures in one great pile and then set fire to it, just for the fun of dancing around it. And for the thought of what it would do to Owen when he found out. Owen walked a little faster. It was a small anger, to add to so many others. Owen kept all his anger carefully tamped down, far enough away not to interfere with his mission, but ready to burst out free when he finally came face to face with the villain Wolfe.
And then there would be a reckoning.
Owen followed Oz's murmured directions till he and Hazel came to a sudden halt, their way blocked by a door that looked distinctly out of place. It was a solid steel door, blunt and functional, with a state-of-the-art and then some lock. Hazel immediately moved in close, studying the lock with almost hungry intensity. Hazel and locks were old friends. Or enemies, depending how you looked at it. Owen put his ear to the cold steel door and listened carefully. After a while he slowly made out the measured repetitious sounds of grinding machinery, and the hissing of gasses under pressure. Owen straightened up and frowned thoughtfully. He'd kept nothing in his Standing that would have sounded like that. And David hadn't added anything either. What new horror the Wolfe had introduced into what used to be his home? He looked down at Hazel, who was still studying the lock.
"Any luck?"
"Yeah, all bad. Without my tools we're talking half an hour at least. Maybe more."
"Too long," said Owen flatly.
"I know that!" said Hazel. She stood up and scowled at the steel door. "We could always shoot the lock out."
"Too noisy. Even if it didn't set off a whole mess of alarms, which it probably would."
"All right," said Hazel impatiently. "What do you suggest?"
Owen smiled at her, stepped forward, and kicked the door in. The lock shattered, the solid steel denting deeply under his boot, and the whole door tore itself away from its hinges and fell to the floor of the room beyond with a satisfyingly heavy clang. Hazel looked at Owen.
"Show-off."
They stepped over the door and into the lab, guns in hand, but there was no one coming to meet them. The only occupant of the vast room was a technician in a grubby smock seated before a computer terminal, the jack plugged into the back of his neck. Owen and Hazel lowered their guns. The cyberjock was so lost in his own world they could have shot him and he wouldn't have noticed till he unplugged. They looked around them, trying to make sense of the masses of tech and machinery that filled most of the laboratory.
The room was huge. Owen thought vaguely it might have been a wine cellar once. Unfamiliar machinery was bulked together in groups, taking up most of the floor space, their tops almost brushing the ceiling. None of it looked particularly subtle. It was mostly crude mechanical constructions (hence the need for a jack-in rather than using comm implants) designed for crushing and grating and sorting the materials presented to them. Owen turned slowly around, tracing the path of the materials. Tubing led away from the larger machines, stapled to the stone walls, crisscrossing each other in a riot of color coding. They delivered whatever they were carrying to a complicated filtration system, which in turn steadily dripped its end result into a series of unlabeled containers. Everything else was straightforward computer-monitoring equipment. He looked across at Hazel, who shrugged, which was pretty much what he'd expected. So, when in doubt, ask someone. Loudly.
Owen strode over to the lab technician, happily communing unawares with his computers, ripped the jack out of the back of his neck, spun him around in his chair, and stuck his gun up the man's nose. It took a moment for the tech to realize what was happening, dazed by his sudden exit from the computer systems, and then his eyes focused on Owen's face and he looked even more upset, if that was possible. Owen smiled nastily at him, and the tech actually whimpered. Hazel moved in from the other side and gave him her best menacing glower, and the man all but wet himself. Owen began to feel like he was bullying a puppy, but ruthlessly suppressed the thought. This was one of Valentine's people, and therefore guilty by association.
"Hi there," Owen said to him, not at all pleasantly. "I'm Owen Deathstalker, the nightmare made flesh to your right is Hazel d'Ark, and you are in deep doo-doo. Answer my questions fully and accurately, and you might just live long enough to stand trial. Nod if you're with me so far."
The technician nodded as best he could with a gun up his nose. All the color had disappeared out of his face the moment Owen mentioned his name, and cold beads of sweat were popping out on his forehead. Owen was secretly impressed. He hadn't realized he was that frightening.
"Who are you?" he growled to the tech. "And what is the purpose of all this machinery? Overview first, then the details."
"I'm Pierre Trignent, my Lord," said the technician quickly, his voice little more than a whisper. "Please, I'm just a little fish. I'm nobody. You want the ones who give me orders. I just do what I'm told."
"We'll get to them," said Hazel. "Now, answer the man's question. What are you doing here?"
Trignent swallowed hard, lowering his eyes. He was going to lie. Owen could feel it. He leaned forward so his face was right in front of his victim's. The tech tried to shrink back in his chair, but there was nowhere to go.
"If you lie," said Owen, "I'll know it. I can always get the answers from someone else if I have to, but I guarantee you won't be around to see it."
"Yes, my Lord, but…"
"I'm not a lord anymore. But I'm still a Deathstalker. Now, tell me everything you know or I'll show you what that means."
"This is a processing and refining plant, my… sir Deathstalker. We take in the raw material, break it down into its basic chemical components, siphon off the desired residues, and store it for later transport off-planet."
"But what's the raw material?" Owen said impatiently. "And what the hell is the end product?"
"The esper drug," said Trignent reluctantly. "We're manufacturing the esper drug."
Owen and Hazel looked at each other. They'd heard about the esper drug during their time with
the esper underground, but its composition was supposed to be a secret. Still, if anyone was going to dig up a new drug, it would be Valentine. And setting up production on Virimonde was a good way to keep it secret. Parliament had discovered his presence only by accident. Owen nodded slowly. He was following the trail so far. But none of it explained why the technician should still be so scared…
"What's the raw material?" said Owen. "What are you refining the esper drug from?"
"Please," said Trignent. He started to cry. "Please understand. I just follow orders. They'd kill me if I didn't."
"I'll kill you if you don't answer me! What's the raw material?"
"The dead," said Pierre Trignent. "The dead of Virimonde."
After that it was very quiet for a long moment. Apart from the slow, steady sounds of the rendering machinery, chewing up the latest batch of raw material.
Owen's eyes squeezed shut, but he could still see what he now recognized as crushing and pulping machinery. He could still see his dead people, stacked like logs, kept frozen so they'd keep until they were needed. His eyes opened again, and the technician took one look at the cold rage building there and began talking very quickly, almost babbling, as though relieved to finally be able to tell somebody.
"The Lord Wolfe came here because there were so many bodies just waiting to be harvested. The esper drug has always been derived from human tissues, just as the esp-blockers come from dead esper brain tissues, but you need a lot of… the basic material to produce just a small amount of the end product. That's why the esper drug has always been so rare, so secret. The Lord Wolfe saw an opportunity for mass production here and took advantage of it. He's processed hundreds of thousands of the dead and produced more of the drug, and in a purer form, than was ever possible before. It's really quite a simple process once it's been set up. There's just me, and a handful of others, to keep an eye on things. Please, I'm nobody. I just did as I was told—"