Helga’s World orbitted far from its primary. Raging
methane winds screamed across its surface. They were as cold as its
mistress’s heart, as unremitting in their savagery. Storm
searched for the telltale heat concentration. Festung Todesangst
was dug in deep, tapping the core’s remaining heat.
He sent the stolen recognition codes, then injected his
singleship into a low polar orbit. He went around three times
before detecting the thermal anomaly. He took a fix and hit methane
in a penetration ran.
Spy-eyes above and below ignored him. No missiles rose to greet
him.
He had the right codes.
He smiled tightly, already worrying about the harder task of
getting out.
He regretted spending an advantage that could be used but once.
He hoarded those with a miser’s touch. This one could be
saved no longer, and could not be used again. Helga would eliminate
the gaps in her protection following his visit.
He touched down. Already in EVA gear, he plunged into a violent
methane wind. There was one instant of incredible cold while his
suit heaters lagged in their effort to warm him.
“Poor navigation,” he muttered. The doorway he
wanted lay a kilometer away. The wind-chill might kill him before
he got there.
It was too late to cry. Moving ship would tempt fate too much.
Hobson’s choice.
He started walking.
This lock had been an access portal during construction, a
workmen’s convenience that had not been sealed. One of
Helga’s weird guardians would be stationed inside, but she
should be a half-century unwary. He thought he could surprise
her.
He leaned into the gale, ignoring the bitter cold. Each few
hundred steps he examined the glove covering his suit’s left
hand. He was not sure it would withstand the chill.
His odyssey went on and on. The wind and oxygen snow were
gleefully malicious conspirators trying to contrive a disaster.
Then there was a slackening of the gale’s force. He glanced
up. He had entered the lee of the lock housing.
The outer lock door stood slightly ajar. He forced himself
through the gap and initiated the lock cycle.
Would the carelessness that had left the door open have allowed
icing in the mechanism? The door shuddered, groaned, protesting. It
whined shrilly. It broke loose and sealed. Frost formed on his suit
and faceplate as breathable air flooded the chamber.
He batted the haze from his faceplate and found himself facing
one of the more grotesque products of genetic engineering.
Helga’s guardian was an amazon of skeletal thinness, with
translucent skin, completely hairless and breathless. She was human
and female only by virtue of her navel and the virgin slit between
her sticklike thighs. And in her confusion at this unexpected
apparition stepping from the lock.
Face-plate frosting made Storm briefly vulnerable but she wasted
those seconds. She finally responded by switching on subsonics that
caused an increasing dread as he approached her.
There was no humanity in her death’s-head face. The little
muscles under that deathlike skin never twitched in expression.
Storm fought the mesmeric assault of the sonics, forced his fear to
work for him. “Dead,” he told himself.
He felt an instant of compassion, and knew it a waste. This
thing was less alive than his most often resurrected soldier.
Storm approached the guardian, left hand reaching.
She looked frail and powerless. The impression was false. No man
living could best her without special equipment. Pain, injury, and
the normal limits of human strength meant nothing to her. She had
been bred to one purpose, to attack till victorious or
destroyed.
Storm’s glove touched her arm lightly, discharged. The
shock was supposed to scramble her neural signals and make her
amenable.
It worked, but not as well as he hoped. She became less
truculent, but far from docile. He took control, stripped her of
her sonics, force-marched her down stairs and inclines. Every ten
minutes he gave her another shock, expending more of the
glove’s power.
He worried. He was squandering his best weapon. If the charge
went too soon he would have to kill her. He needed live bait to
pass the next obstacle.
His path, as did all corridors from the surface, debouched in a
dark, stadium-vast chamber, the ceiling of which was natural
cavern. The floor had been machined smooth and covered with a
half-meter of sand. This, Storm thought as he crouched at the tunnel’s end, is
the real gateway to Festung Todesangst. This is the real
guardhouse. Here the most powerful weapons were all but useless.
The watchman was of a size in keeping with that of his kiosk.
Helga Dee had a bizarre sense of humor, a cockeyed way of
looking at the universe. Her gateman was a reptilian thing,
tyrannosaur-sized, from a world so massive that here it was as
agile as a kitten. Only Helga herself, who had raised it from an
egg and lovingly called it her “puppy,” could control
it. Through its love for her, she claimed. Storm believed she used
implanted controls.
The thing subsisted on the flesh of brain donors and
Helga’s enemies.
As a defense it was primitive, crude, and devastatingly
effective. And it was a glass-clear illustration of a facet of
Helga Dee. Using it to back her sophisticated surface defenses was
her idea of a joke.
The thing’s bellow smashed at Storm. His ears ached. He
saw nothing but a suggestion of shifting immensity inside the
poorly illuminated cavern.
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 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 rehearsed 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 asserted 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 surreptitiously
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, rushing 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 passed, in a vastly
telescoped subjective time, was one in which she was aware of her
identity 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, snatched 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 pass 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 assassin.
He had thought that he hated Richard Hawksblood. That odium was
a child’s fleeting passion 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 cocks 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 Hell.
The Dees would go down with them. Every last one.
Helga’s World orbitted far from its primary. Raging
methane winds screamed across its surface. They were as cold as its
mistress’s heart, as unremitting in their savagery. Storm
searched for the telltale heat concentration. Festung Todesangst
was dug in deep, tapping the core’s remaining heat.
He sent the stolen recognition codes, then injected his
singleship into a low polar orbit. He went around three times
before detecting the thermal anomaly. He took a fix and hit methane
in a penetration ran.
Spy-eyes above and below ignored him. No missiles rose to greet
him.
He had the right codes.
He smiled tightly, already worrying about the harder task of
getting out.
He regretted spending an advantage that could be used but once.
He hoarded those with a miser’s touch. This one could be
saved no longer, and could not be used again. Helga would eliminate
the gaps in her protection following his visit.
He touched down. Already in EVA gear, he plunged into a violent
methane wind. There was one instant of incredible cold while his
suit heaters lagged in their effort to warm him.
“Poor navigation,” he muttered. The doorway he
wanted lay a kilometer away. The wind-chill might kill him before
he got there.
It was too late to cry. Moving ship would tempt fate too much.
Hobson’s choice.
He started walking.
This lock had been an access portal during construction, a
workmen’s convenience that had not been sealed. One of
Helga’s weird guardians would be stationed inside, but she
should be a half-century unwary. He thought he could surprise
her.
He leaned into the gale, ignoring the bitter cold. Each few
hundred steps he examined the glove covering his suit’s left
hand. He was not sure it would withstand the chill.
His odyssey went on and on. The wind and oxygen snow were
gleefully malicious conspirators trying to contrive a disaster.
Then there was a slackening of the gale’s force. He glanced
up. He had entered the lee of the lock housing.
The outer lock door stood slightly ajar. He forced himself
through the gap and initiated the lock cycle.
Would the carelessness that had left the door open have allowed
icing in the mechanism? The door shuddered, groaned, protesting. It
whined shrilly. It broke loose and sealed. Frost formed on his suit
and faceplate as breathable air flooded the chamber.
He batted the haze from his faceplate and found himself facing
one of the more grotesque products of genetic engineering.
Helga’s guardian was an amazon of skeletal thinness, with
translucent skin, completely hairless and breathless. She was human
and female only by virtue of her navel and the virgin slit between
her sticklike thighs. And in her confusion at this unexpected
apparition stepping from the lock.
Face-plate frosting made Storm briefly vulnerable but she wasted
those seconds. She finally responded by switching on subsonics that
caused an increasing dread as he approached her.
There was no humanity in her death’s-head face. The little
muscles under that deathlike skin never twitched in expression.
Storm fought the mesmeric assault of the sonics, forced his fear to
work for him. “Dead,” he told himself.
He felt an instant of compassion, and knew it a waste. This
thing was less alive than his most often resurrected soldier.
Storm approached the guardian, left hand reaching.
She looked frail and powerless. The impression was false. No man
living could best her without special equipment. Pain, injury, and
the normal limits of human strength meant nothing to her. She had
been bred to one purpose, to attack till victorious or
destroyed.
Storm’s glove touched her arm lightly, discharged. The
shock was supposed to scramble her neural signals and make her
amenable.
It worked, but not as well as he hoped. She became less
truculent, but far from docile. He took control, stripped her of
her sonics, force-marched her down stairs and inclines. Every ten
minutes he gave her another shock, expending more of the
glove’s power.
He worried. He was squandering his best weapon. If the charge
went too soon he would have to kill her. He needed live bait to
pass the next obstacle.
His path, as did all corridors from the surface, debouched in a
dark, stadium-vast chamber, the ceiling of which was natural
cavern. The floor had been machined smooth and covered with a
half-meter of sand. This, Storm thought as he crouched at the tunnel’s end, is
the real gateway to Festung Todesangst. This is the real
guardhouse. Here the most powerful weapons were all but useless.
The watchman was of a size in keeping with that of his kiosk.
Helga Dee had a bizarre sense of humor, a cockeyed way of
looking at the universe. Her gateman was a reptilian thing,
tyrannosaur-sized, from a world so massive that here it was as
agile as a kitten. Only Helga herself, who had raised it from an
egg and lovingly called it her “puppy,” could control
it. Through its love for her, she claimed. Storm believed she used
implanted controls.
The thing subsisted on the flesh of brain donors and
Helga’s enemies.
As a defense it was primitive, crude, and devastatingly
effective. And it was a glass-clear illustration of a facet of
Helga Dee. Using it to back her sophisticated surface defenses was
her idea of a joke.
The thing’s bellow smashed at Storm. His ears ached. He
saw nothing but a suggestion of shifting immensity inside the
poorly illuminated cavern.
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 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 rehearsed 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 asserted 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 surreptitiously
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, rushing 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 passed, in a vastly
telescoped subjective time, was one in which she was aware of her
identity 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, snatched 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 pass 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 assassin.
He had thought that he hated Richard Hawksblood. That odium was
a child’s fleeting passion 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 cocks 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 Hell.
The Dees would go down with them. Every last one.