The Fall of Deadworld Omnibus by Matthew Smith

Author:Matthew Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

THAT’S ENOUGH FOR now. Hand’s cramping, head’s hurting. Need to rest.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘IT ENDS...’

Cafferly removed the psi-amp helm and opened her eyes. It took a moment for the rush of the here and now to reassert itself, like she had to retune her perceptions. Colours settled, sounds stabilised; everything swam into focus. If she’d still breathed, she would’ve taken a gulp of air after feeling like she’d held it for the last two—three?—hours. As it was, despite her dormant pulse, the reorientation nevertheless brought a surge of… something. Fear? Excitement? It was enervating, and pronounced enough to take her aback. She was more than used to disappearing down the rabbit hole of her own mind, but the experience under the psi-amp had been something else entirely: the only way to describe it was if she’d slid outside herself and rode a narrow-cast beam of pure thought.

She looked down at the amp, turning it over her hands. Quite what Mortis had created here she didn’t know, but she’d never felt so powerful. It had boosted her psi-projection to an extraordinary degree, channelled it from a soft, wide-ranging talent into hard, laser-like precision. She’d felt in control throughout, never lost and at the mercy of her head like she did when she’d had to corral her senses previously to find meaning in the jumbled imagery. This was absolute mastery.

She had to admit that she’d felt a certain degree of apprehension when the Dark Judge had foisted the instrument upon her. She’d been in no position to refuse—certainly not in front of De’Ath, who in his paranoid frame of mind would no doubt consider it insubordination and relish any opportunity to have her purged from the ranks like so many others;—to show unwillingness to aid the hunt for survivors was to suggest you weren’t fully committed. Nevertheless, she’d had her misgivings: Mortis’s experiments were notorious, as much for their side effects as for what he actually produced. That walking abomination that served as his minion—Jackson, he’d been called in life, some victim spared the dignity of true obliteration—was a walking advertisement for the DJ’s unusual predilection for testing the viability of new forms, and, it had to be said, throwing a certain scientific rigour out of the window. There was no need for the Jackson thing to exist other than it pleased Mortis to violate nature. Cafferly was under the impression that his brothers Fear, Fire and Sidney tolerated the meddling he got up to in his labs because of the results that sprang from it, but ultimately considered that when it resulted in entities like his servant, it merely seemed inefficient and unfathomable. Why play with life when you can simply exterminate it?

The psi-amp had had the potential to be another grand folly—she’d heard rumours of his early forays into dimensional jumps that had torn his human guinea pigs in two—that could’ve rendered her braindead, or overloaded her cerebellum to the point where she’d haemorrhaged. Mortis, unsurprisingly, cared little for the failures, and

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