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  LEGION OF HORROR

  José crossed himself when he saw who it was—or, rather, what it was.

  Now he knew what had happened to his missing patrols.

  He heard a small gasp from Consuela, but he could not tear his eyes away from the shambling, decayed parodies of humanity that had lurched into view on the trail. Shreds of their uniforms hung off their twisted limbs, the wounds that had killed them clearly visible through the rags. Hoses from the dull metallic tanks on their backs circled their tortured bodies and entered their chests in several places.

  “The dead have risen from the grave,” he breathed.

  VOR: THE MAELSTROM

  Vor: Into the Maelstrom

  by Loren L. Coleman

  Vor: The Playback War

  by Lisa Smedman

  Vor: Island of Power

  by Dean Wesley Smith

  Vor: The Rescue

  by Don Ellis

  Available from Warner Aspect®

  VOR: HELL HEART. Copyright © 2000 by FASA Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  VOR: The Maelstrom and all related characters, slogans, and indicia are trademarks of FASA Corporation.

  Aspect® name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  A Time Warner Company

  The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2212-1

  A mass market edition of this book was published in 2000 by Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: January 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  For Fred and Joan Saberhagen

  Words (and book dedications) are not enough

  but it’s a start.

  Thanks to Mike Nielsen for loaning me such a wonderful universe to play in.

  Special thanks also to Donna Ippolito, Annalise Raziq, and Wyn Hilty for the pep talks and support, and to Jaime Levine for such good direction and outright fine ideas on how to make this better.

  And a tip of the hat to Mike Stackpole for the recommendation and years of friendship.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  * * *

  Brighter than a star it blazed, spewing out deadly radiation in all directions throughout the turbulent Styx Nebula. But the Pharon spaceship Destroyer for the Faith drove straight for its burning core, oblivious to the possible damage to its equipment and crew.

  “Prepare to grapple,” ordered the Death Priest in command of the vessel. Most of the control-room slaves hurried to obey, but one, more decrepit than the rest, did not move quickly enough for the priest’s liking. Without warning, a wickedly sharp, meter-long devotional blade sliced through the air—and the slave’s neck. A dust cloud rose where the curved diamond blade severed mummified head from torso, only to be quickly vacuumed away by the relentless flow of air through the control room—designed to prevent contamination rather than to hold down the ever-present, throat-tightening stench of death. The slave’s carcass thudded noisily to the deck. Fluids dribbled from sundered life-support hoses until three other slaves stripped the corpse of its back tank and dragged the pathetic remains out of the way. Another hurriedly took its place at the control console.

  The Death Priest sheathed his blade at his side, adjusted the greasy gray bandages around his head, and turned back to the array of sensors in front of him, his quick mind calculating the approach vector and the amount of damage his ship might sustain in his quest to capture this bit of errant matter.

  It had to be a piece of the Vorack itself, that swirling eye of bleeding energy responsible for their captivity in the peculiar chaotic region surrounding it. Other races might fear the power of the Vorack, but the Pharon reveled in it. Their homeworld was located close to the energy vortex at the heart of the Maelstrom, constantly bathed in the Vorack’s erratic radiation. Destroyer for the Faith had picked up the intense energy blasting outward from that speck of strangeness several days ago, and the priest had ordered his crew to follow.

  The Pharon had detected such fragments of pure power before, but never had a ship been close enough to pursue them. Until now. With this incandescent tidbit harnessed to the will of the God-king, the Pharon would have sufficient energy to do anything they liked: move their planet freely throughout the Rings, a mobile fortress to conquer all the other races; harness it as a directed-energy weapon; even, perhaps, use its power to return them to true life. It was the Vorack, after all, that had revived the Pharon from their tombs after their homeworld had been drawn into the Maelstrom. Who was to say that, tamed, it could not do more?

  The ship had followed the mote for days as the priest studied it, trying to discover the best way to capture it. As nearly as the sensors could determine, the energy source itself was microscopic. It was encased in a solid globe of some sort of crystalline structure that seemed to contain most of its immense power, allowing only enough radiation to leak out so that their instruments could detect it. But the Pharon knew he had to act quickly. The powerful speck might be a piece of the Vorack, but the crystal encasing it almost certainly was not. That could mean other races might be aware of it—might even have captured and then lost it—and could very well be in pursuit. Perhaps even the hated Shard, those crystalline abominations. The Death Priest had to capture the mote quickly, surround it with a force field to contain its deadly radiation, then return it to the homeworld for the glory of the God-king.

  “Slayer!” barked the Death Priest. Immediately the enormously tall, prodigiously strong warrior, outfitted in shining, exquisite golden armor that contrasted horribly with the sickly gray of his skin, came to his side. The Slayer clacked his battle claw in anticipation of his orders, and the control room filled with the whine of the energy weapon at his right hand, charging to full capacity for even more widespread slaughter.

  “At your command!” the Slayer snapped. His voice came out in a croak; the vocal cords had decayed. He nodded his small head once, then stood ready for orders. One baleful dark eye stared at the priest from between heavy wrappings.

  “Assemble a squadron and launch them with force grapples,” the priest commanded. “Fasten the cables around the crystal, then reel it close to Destroyer for the Faith. But do not bring it aboard until the hold is evacuated and ready.” The Pharon chafed at the need to keep the inner force-shields lowered until the mote was aboard. Leaving them down rendered the ship vulnerable to attack. But they had to be lowered until the crystal was safely contained in the hold’s interna
l electromagnetic field.

  “At once,” the Slayer said. The deadly soldier spun, knocking a too-slow control-room slave from his path, then hastened to the launch tubes amidships, where four small, torpedo-shaped vessels would be sent on their mission. It was possible that, once outside the protection of the ship, the slaves aboard the squadron would be crisped by the radiation emanating from the mote. But the Death Priest cared little how many of the crew were lost; the Slayer cared even less. Compassion was as extraneous to their makeup as life itself—and, with all the inferior races struggling to survive in the chaos of the Maelstrom, there were always new slaves to be had.

  Confident that the Slayer would fulfill his mission with dispatch, the priest turned his attention back to the speck from the Vorack, the quintessence of death and power, and indulged in a small smile of triumph. He would return to the Pharon homeworld and bask in the God-king’s favor. High Priests, soldiers, Slayers—he would be elevated above them all with this gift. How this treasure had come loose from the Vorack meant less to the Death Priest than how he could use it. Conquest. Pain to the living. Destruction to anyone or anything in his path. Glory to the God-king!

  Turning his head slightly, the Death Priest glanced at the sensor screen centered on the Vor-stuff. The external polarizers strained to hold down its blinding, pure white light, and still the intensity was excruciating. Space bent reluctantly around the edges of the pellet from the heart of the Maelstrom, corrupting light and mutilating time.

  “How can I use it fully?” the Death Priest murmured aloud, lost in contemplation of the mote’s potential. Such a resource could not be squandered.

  “We are ready for launch,” came the Slayer’s corrupt voice over the ship’s communications system.

  “Launch now,” the priest ordered. He felt a moment of satisfaction as the four small ships blasted away from Destroyer for the Faith and went into tight orbit around the Vorack-stuff. Four force grapples would be positioned, each interlocked with the other three, their beams directed toward the incandescent speck. Then lines spun from single-crystal monofilament steel, almost impossible to break, would be woven through the rings mounted on the force grapples. The combination of the material with the energetic would ensure proper entrapment of the gift from the Vorack.

  As the small ships jockeyed into position, an alarm clangor startled the priest from his intense contemplation. The Death Priest’s head whipped around so fast that his elaborately crafted life-support tank shifted on his back, sending him reeling off balance. One hand shot out, hooked the edge of a control panel, and steadied him. His deep-set eyes widened in surprise. Then a gut-wrenching fury began to build.

  As he had feared, he was not the only hunter in the cosmos with a hunger for a piece of the Vorack.

  * * *

  Without need of instrumentation, the Shard drove its vessel through the murky dust of the nebula filling this portion of space. It was difficult to tell where the sharp, curved edges of the alien’s crystalline shell ended and the smooth walls of its ship began. The Shard itself lay motionless in the center of its tiny vessel. It needed no controls and wasted no physical movement as it speared through space toward the source of energy it had detected only a few hours ago. Piezoelectric nodules on the glassy surface of its body fed commands directly to the ship, which responded instantaneously to the Shard’s desires.

  Even the Shard’s body felt the strain of the ship’s intense acceleration. Ignoring the sensation and the warning signals from its vessel, the alien dispassionately scanned the data being fed into its body by the ship, calculating the best course to intercept the mysterious energy source, coolly weighing risks and alternatives.

  The signal it thought it had detected earlier came again. It was not the only being to have discovered the powerful fragment, after all; a Pharon ship pursued it closely, and was in fact about to capture it.

  That was impermissible. A bare flicker of anger touched the cool surface of the Shard’s mind. Bad enough it was forced to exist in a universe filled with shambling hulks of flesh, the disgustingly biological organisms that infested the Maelstrom. But the Pharon were a double insult: once dead, now restored to a semblance of life they did not deserve. Their rotting flesh, their mockery of life, their very existence was an affront to the Shard that could not be borne.

  And now they dared to claim a source of unknowable, immeasurable power for their own. A force so powerful it might even lead the Shard to the freedom they had hungered after for so long—escape from the Maelstrom, and from the loathed crystalline cells of their bodies. If this tiny shred of raw power really was from the Maw, perhaps it held the key to unlocking their prisons.

  The cube-shaped hull of the Shard ship heated as the Shard raced through the inky black nebular gases, then slowed and masked its approach as it came within range of the Pharon sensors. The electrostatic charge on the hull oscillated to chaotically stir the nebular gases around it, shutting off direct visual observation. The Shard cooled the hull until it matched the temperature of the gases around it; EM pulses from sensing lidar were absorbed by the crystalline structure of the ship’s shell. Then it lowered its internal voltage until even the most sensitive Pharon equipment would pick up only nebula-filled space. All this took place in a matter of seconds, the ship obeying the Shard’s unspoken commands instantly.

  The Shard lay quietly for a moment, its ship undetectable, sorting through its options.

  Problem: The Pharon.

  Goal: The Maw-stuff.

  Solution: Destroy the Pharon.

  The crystalline humanoid tensed and relaxed, generating electrical currents all over its quicksilver surface. The outer surface of the spaceship shimmered and transformed, turning pearlescent and highly reflective—and, the Shard knew, instantly alerting the Pharon enemy to its presence. One more command, and lasers lashed out from the side of its ship, blasting the four Pharon vessels attempting to capture the mote into dust.

  From half a hundred ports on the Pharon ship lanced ravening beams of energy, licking tentatively at the smooth hull of the Shard ship before reflecting away. In its crystal cocoon, the Shard rocked only slightly from the impact. As the energy bounced off, superheating and ionizing the gases around the ship, the Shard had time for only one flash of apprehension as it detected one reflected laser beam’s new course—aimed straight into the core of the Maelstrom-stuff.

  Just as it had deflected from the crystalline surface of the Shard’s ship, the laser bounced ineffectively off the globe surrounding the microscopic pinpoint of light. But it lashed back at the two warring ships with a thousand times more power, feeding off the unthinkable amounts of energy contained within the mote’s crystal prison and sending a shock wave of pure destruction through the Shard and Pharon’s battlefield.

  The Pharon ship caught the brunt of the explosion, positioned as it was between the Shard vessel and the mote. It was hurled far off its original course, spinning and tumbling helplessly deeper into the nebula. The Shard was also buffeted by the wave front of radiation, but it was shielded from the worst of the blast by its hapless foe. The Shard struggled to regain control over its vessel, its body generating higher voltages to better command the ship’s damaged circuitry. Slowly, the ship came under the Shard’s dominion again, and it headed back for the mote from the heart of the Maelstrom. It noted with quiet satisfaction that the Pharon ship had come to rest deep in the Styx Nebula, lying silent and apparently dead in space.

  The Shard stopped a few kilometers away from the fragment, its quick mind studying the emanations, calculating the best way to take the crystal globe into tow. The Pharon ship was no longer of concern; it had been badly damaged and was in no position to claim the potent speck for its own. Now it was only a matter of time.

  The mote would belong to the Shard.

  * * *

  The Death Priest forced himself to stand. His senses were fogged, and the confusion in the control room further stunned him. Destroyer for the Faith had susta
ined incredible damage when the Vorack-stuff had unleashed its wave of malevolent energy. In that split second, the Pharon ship had suffered more destruction than any enemy vessel had ever delivered. Slaves all around the priest were dusty, smoking ruins. Corpses piled on corpses along the bulkheads until the few survivors could barely force their way back to their stations.

  Somehow, this wall of charred, undead flesh had protected the Death Priest. His interleaved metallic armor had grounded more of the EMP burst, and his devotion to the God-king had sustained him even further. The priest survived. The lesser castes died. So it was written.

  “Slayer, report!” barked the Death Priest. When he received no answer, he checked his few working sensors and saw that communications to the hold were down. He spun, lost his balance in the slippery life fluids on the deck, and went to one knee with a clatter that sounded louder than the alarm bells ringing throughout the ship. He refastened a vital hose that had come loose from his sustenance tank and took a moment to calm himself.

  Regaining his feet, the Death Priest ordered a badly damaged slave to go to the hold and fetch the Slayer. The slave picked its way through the litter of bodies, trailing body parts and a long length of hose from its life-support pack. The priest did not care if the slave returned as long as it fulfilled its mission before it went to its final rest.

  The few sensors still working on his control board showed that the Shard vessel had come to rest only a few kilometers away from the mote. The priest clenched his fists in impotent fury, his rage building until it could no longer be contained.

  Screeching, wild with anger, the priest yanked his scythe from its sheath at his side and began hacking wildly at the pile of unfortunate slaves. Oily fluids spurted from hoses, and decayed bodies simply fell apart at the impact of the blade.

  But his fury could not sustain itself for long, and the priest slowed and finally stopped, his wickedly edged scythe dangling forgotten from his hand. His rage had changed nothing. His ship was devastated, his crew was dead, and his mortal enemy was in possession of the greatest prize the Maelstrom had ever offered up. Defeating the Shard through force of arms was not an option. If he had any hopes of salvaging triumph from this defeat, he would have to calm himself and think.