It was a cold and cloudy day when Jack Random and Ruby Journey came back to Golgotha, homeworld of the Empire. A crowd of reporters huddled together beside the main landing pad, as much to keep warm and pass hip flasks around as to share the latest gossip. Everyone knew what had happened on Loki. They’d all seen the holo footage; seen the bodies hanging from the walls of Vidar. Parliament had sent Random and Ruby to put down a rebellion on Loki. Jack did it by hanging the leaders of both sides, and a great many of their followers too. Public response throughout the Empire was divided. They wanted to see the guilty punished, but by courts and tribunals, not by one man, answerable to no one. After all, who knew when such a man might turn on them? Parliament was predictably outraged, not least because most of the hanged dead were politicians, appointed by Parliament. So they sent a ship to Loki, to pick up Jack Random and Ruby Journey and bring them back to Golgotha, to answer a few very pointed questions. They also sent a small army of guards along, just to make it clear how upset they were.
The ship had landed over an hour ago, but as yet no one had disembarked. The great hull was still ticking quietly in the cold air as the hot metal slowly cooled. No one on board or in the port control tower was answering any questions. The reporters were beginning to wonder if anyone was left alive on board. It wouldn’t have surprised any of the journalists present if Jack Random and Ruby Journey had killed all the guards sent to escort them, and sent the ship home empty.
The main airlock suddenly began cycling open, and the reporters quickly moved forward to get the best positions facing it, while their hovering cameras fought it out overheard for the best covering angles, often resorting to savage butting contests to establish seniority. The lock remained open for several seconds of silent tension, and then a single guard captain stepped out onto the pad. He nodded tiredly to the journalists, his face grim.
“Jack Random and Ruby Journey want it to be known that they are not in the best of moods, and will take any intrusive questions as personal insults. Anyone wishing to get really probing should make his next of kin known in advance. They’ve got a few things they want to say, but you’ll have to wait for the rest until after they’ve spoken to Parliament. Everyone got that?”
There was a certain amount of confused nodding, and not a few sideways glances, and then Thompson of the Golgotha Times stepped forward. A tall, gangling sort with piercing eyes, he’d covered everything from wars to gossip at Lionstone’s Court, and there wasn’t much left that frightened him. “A few small queries, Captain. First, why are you acting as their messenger boy, when you and your fellow guards were sent to escort them back in semi-disgrace; and second, shouldn’t you be wearing some sort of weapon?”
The other reporters took in the empty holster and scabbard on the Captain’s hips. He cleared his throat unhappily. “Sir Random made us all give up our weapons. He said he found them ... distracting.”
While that was still sinking in, a hundred other guards filed silently out of the airlock. None of them were armed, and most of them looked demoralized, upset, and, occasionally, downright twitchy. They all carefully avoided the reporters’ gaze as they formed two ranks on either side of the airlock, and then snapped to attention as Jack Random and Ruby Journey finally disembarked. The cameras immediately went for close-ups of their faces, transmitted to the journalists via their comm implants, but the two Maze survivors looked much the same as they always had. Except perhaps a little colder around the eyes. Random and Ruby came to a halt before the assembled press pack, who suddenly had to fight down a collective urge to fall back several yards. The man and woman before them had always felt dangerous, but now there was something about them that was positively disturbing. They had the look of people who were no longer interested in taking prisoners. The reporters looked at the dispirited guards, and swallowed hard. Whatever had happened to so thoroughly upset the guards, the journalists were pretty damn sure they didn’t want it happening to them. Random looked them over, unsmiling.
“Where’s Toby Shreck? I thought he’d be here. Only damn journo I ever had any time for.”
Again, only Thompson found a voice to answer with. “He and Flynn are covering the forthcoming royal wedding. He’s got exclusive coverage rights.”
“Ah,” said Ruby. “They’re still going ahead with that constitutional monarch rubbish, are they? How are Constance and Owen?”
The reporters stirred, and looked at one another. “You haven’t heard?” said Thompson.
“Heard what?” said Ruby. “We’ve been busy.”
“Owen Deathstalker and Hazel d‘Ark are missing, presumed dead,” said Thompson slowly. “Constance Wolfe will be marrying Robert Campbell instead.”
The floating cameras whirred in unison as they concentrated on close-ups. Random and Ruby looked at each other.
“They can’t be dead,” Random said finally. “They just can’t. I’d know ... I’m sure I’d know, if they were ...”
“We haven’t been mentally linked to either of them for a long time,” said Ruby. “We let things drive us apart. But even so, I’m sure we would have felt ... something ...”
“They can’t be dead,” said Random. “They were the best of us.”
“They were bastards!” said a harsh, angry voice. “Just like you!”
There were sudden shouts and scuffles among the journalists as one of them suddenly produced a gun. He put it to another reporter’s head, and she stood very still, the blood draining out of her face. Her fellow journalists quickly fell back, partly to get themselves out of harm’s way, and partly to be sure their cameras were getting uninterrupted coverage. This was news. Soon the gunman and his hostage stood alone on the landing pad, his gun pressed tight against the woman’s head. The guards looked very much like they wanted to do something, but they had no weapons. The gunman had eyes only for Random and Ruby. He glared at them both, his mouth stretched in a desperate snarl.
“You try anything and she’s dead,” he said, almost panting for breath in his intensity. “I’ll blow her head clean off her shoulders!”
“If she dies, you die,” said Ruby flatly.
“You think I care?” said the gunman, and his voice was cold and flat as death.
“Let’s all be very calm about this,” said Random. “Ruby; get your hand away from your gun. No one needs to get hurt here.”
“Wrong,” said the gunman. “Someone’s going to die here today.”
“Better men than you have tried to take us down,” said Ruby.
“Hush, Ruby,” said Random. “You’re not helping.” He moved his hands ostentatiously away from his weapons, keeping his eyes fixed on the gunman. “Let’s take this one step at a time. Why don’t you start by telling us your name?”
“You don’t know me, do you?”
“No,” said Random. “Should I?”
“No real reason why you should, I suppose. I was just another soldier, fighting beside you in the streets during the rebellion. Right here in this city. My name is Grey Harding. No one important. Just like all the other poor bastards who died fighting your war.”
“We all lost people we cared for ...”
“Don’t give me that crap, Random! You didn’t know us. Didn’t care about our little lives. We were all just bit players and spear carriers in your great heroic saga. You had the power and the glory; we were just grunts with scavenged weapons. You might love the people as a whole, but in the end you just used people like us, and didn’t give a damn whether we lived or died, as long as you and your kind came out on top.”
“It wasn’t like that,” said Random. “It was a people’s rebellion ...”
“I was there! I saw my friends bleed and die, while you went on unscathed!” Harding’s voice broke, and for a moment he seemed very near tears. But his anger pushed that aside almost immediately, and his gun never wavered an inch from his hostage’s head. “I never really gave a damn about your war. Whoever’s in charge, life for people like me, people at the bottom, neve
r really changes. We marched off to war singing, because we’d been promised a chance to fight beside living legends, and afterwards nothing would ever be the same again. But in the end I saw damn all honor or glory, and most of my family and friends are dead. I saw them fall one by one, fighting strangers on behalf of strangers. And afterwards, when I went home, I found my village had been destroyed in an Empire reprisal raid. Women and children are homeless and starving now, because their menfolk marched off to war and never came back.
“And after all we paid in blood and suffering and death, nothing’s really changed. The same sort of people are still in power. And I ... I can’t sleep at night. I did ... terrible things in the war, just to survive. Terrible things. There are ghosts at my shoulder, with familiar faces. I jump at loud noises, and sometimes I hurt people for no good reason. I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m not the man I used to be, and I’m scared of who I’ve become. So you tell me, Random; what was it all for, really?”
“I understand how you feel,” said Random. “I really do. I’ve felt the same way, sometimes. But I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve come back to Golgotha to clean house. No more deals, no more compromises. I’ll put things right, this time, or die trying.”
“Words,” said Harding. “You were always good with words, Jack Random.”
“Look, what do you want?” said Ruby. “Money? Publicity? Some kind of ransom for your hostage’s life?”
Harding looked confused for a moment. “No. No; she was just to make sure I had your attention. I had to be sure you’d listen to me.” He lowered his gun and pushed the reporter away from him. “Go. Go on; get out of here.” He watched disinterestedly as she ran for the safety of her fellow journalists, and nothing moved in his face as he watched Thompson hold her while she cried. He turned back to Random and Ruby, the gun pointed nowhere in particular for the moment. “Now,” he said. “Now it’s just you and me.”
“Put the gun away,” said Random. “You don’t need it anymore.”
“Yes, I do,” said Harding.
“You can’t hurt us,” said Ruby.
“I know that,” said Harding. “I’m not stupid. I don’t think anything can hurt you anymore. But I’ve said all I have to say. And I can’t live with the things I did for you. With what I’ve become.”
He put the barrel of the gun in his mouth, and blew the back of his head off. His body crumpled to the landing pad with a quiet, defeated sound. And for a while all that could be heard was the quiet sobbing of the hostage, and the whirring of the news cameras as they got it all on film. Random moved slowly forward and looked down at the body.
“I’m sorry, Grey Harding.”
“We have nothing to be sorry for,” said Ruby. “Lionstone had to be brought down, for everyone’s sake. Where was he, when it was just the five of us against the whole damned Empire?”
Random looked at her. “We never did see Peter Savage fall on Loki, did we?”
Ruby shrugged angrily. “People die in wars. Soldiers kill and die. That’s what they’re for. He got a chance to fight for something that really mattered. What else is there?”
Random looked at her for a long moment, his face set and cold. “There has to be something else, Ruby. There has to be.”
Someone called out Random’s name in an official tone of voice, and everyone looked round as a Parliamentary representative arrived at the landing pad with a company of armed guards. The representative wore his official scarlet sash proudly, but he was careful to keep the bulk of the armed guards between him and Random and Ruby. The reporters brightened up, sensing more possible conflict. Even the ex-hostage stopped sniffing, and paid attention. Overhead, the cameras jostled one another for position. The representative crashed to a halt a respectful distance before Random and Ruby, started to speak, and then took in the dead body lying on the pad with half its head missing. He swallowed audibly, then straightened his shoulders and did his best to fix Random with a commanding stare.
“Don’t bother,” said Random. “Let me guess. We’re under arrest, right?”
“Well, yes ... ,” said the representative.
“Wrong,” said Ruby. “We don’t do arrest.”
“What does Parliament want this time?” said Random.
The representative took in Random and Ruby’s hostile faces, glanced at the dead body again, and abandoned his carefully prepared speech. “They need you Maze people. Your power and your insight. And with the Deathstalker and Hazel d‘Ark dead ...”
“You’re sure of that?” said Ruby. “There’s no chance they’re alive?”
“I’m afraid not. Hazel d‘Ark was abducted by the Blood Runners and taken to the Obeah Systems. The Deathstalker went after them. Nothing has been heard of either of them since. No one ever comes back from the Obeah Systems.”
Random looked at Ruby. “Try the mental link. We’re much stronger together.”
They looked into each other’s eyes, and their minds slammed together into a unison far greater than the sum of its parts. All around them they could see esper minds, burning like a forest of candles in the dark of the night. Here and there a greater mind burned like the sun or shone like a star, while other, stranger lights were too powerful to look at directly. Random and Ruby brushed against them as they rose high above the surface of Golgotha, and names swept briefly through their thoughts. Diana Vertue. Mater Mundi. Varnay ... And then they were gone, left behind, as Random and Ruby’s thoughts swept out beyond the planet, surging on through the populated worlds that made up the Empire. Lights came and went, some brighter than others, but nowhere did they find any trace of the two individual minds that had blazed brighter than suns or stars. Random and Ruby’s thoughts raced from one side of the Empire to the other, and there was no sign anywhere of Owen Deathstalker or Hazel d‘Ark.
Random and Ruby fell back into their own heads, and their thoughts separated. They looked at each other for a long time.
“They’re not here anymore,” said Random finally. “There’s nowhere in this universe they could hide from us.”
“Then it’s true,” said Ruby. “They’re dead. We’re the last of the Maze people. The last of the original rebels.” She turned away from him, so he wouldn’t see her face. He didn’t need to. “Hazel was my oldest friend,” Ruby said quietly. “The only one who ever trusted me, and when I let her down, went right on trusting me anyway. She was my last link with my past, with the person I used to be, before all the madness started. She was a fine warrior and a better friend. I was never worthy of her.”
Random moved in beside her, trying to comfort her with his presence. He’d never seen Ruby really hurt before. “We’ll both miss her. And the Deathstalker. A good fighter. A true hero. He brought me back from the dead on Mistworld. He believed in me when no one else did, including me. He made the rebellion possible.”
Ruby turned at last to look at him, and her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “What do we do, Jack?”
“We go on,” said Random. “They would expect that of us. Otherwise, they died for nothing.”
Ruby’s face became calm and cold again. “Everybody dies. Everything ends. I’ve always known that. Nothing ever lasts.”
“Not even us?” said Random softly, but Ruby had no answer for him. He turned back to the Parliament representative. “Take us to Parliament. I have some things I want to say to them.”
Parliament was packed full, for once. Everyone wanted to hear what Random and Ruby had to say for themselves, about the mass executions on Loki. So of course Elias Gutman, as Speaker of the House, refused to let either of them say anything until the House had first listened to a series of reports on how the war was going. First up was Captain Eden Cross of the Excalibur, leading his section of the Imperial Fleet against the insect ships, out by the Shark Nebulae. A large viewscreen floated on the air before the packed MPs and the even more tightly packed public floor. On the screen, Empire ships went into battle against insect ships shaped like huge sticky balls of com
pacted webbing almost half a mile wide. Computers slowed the action down enough so that human eyes could follow it, and picked out moments of especial interest.
Disrupter beams stabbed out from the Fleet, hammering against the unyielding shields of the insect ships, which flared and crackled with unknown energies, striking out in turn at Imperial ships the moment they came in range. Here and there a ship exploded silently, on one side or the other, as some attack overwhelmed someone’s shields. It looked almost like an eerie dance, with each side advancing and retreating in turn, but every time a ship flared up and disappeared, someone died. Occasionally an insect ship would fight its way close enough to attach itself to the side of a Fleet ship, like a great white leech. And then the insects would breach the ship’s hull and invade the human ship, and kill every living thing they encountered, until they were wiped out.
Or until the humans were.
The scene on the viewscreen changed suddenly, as the point of view switched to the security cameras inside a boarded Empire ship. Images switched swiftly from one scene to another, as different cameras tracked the insect invasion. They swarmed and scuttled through the steel corridors in a living, ravenous wave, all spindly legs and flickering antennae and clacking mandibles. Crewmen without armor fought bravely, till the insects dragged them down and ate them alive. Crewmen in hard suits finally arrived to blow great holes in the insect advance, destroying the aliens by the hundred, but there were always more, from tiny scurrying things to bugs the size of horses, slamming their heavy feet on the steel floors. When the disrupters fell silent, the crewmen tried flame-throwers, and when they were still pushed back deck by deck, they tried sealing off the lost areas and opening them to the cold vacuum of space. No crew ever abandoned their ship to save themselves. They knew how valuable ships were to the Empire these days. So they stood and fought and sometimes they won. But mostly they died.