Finlay sighed and decided the time had come to kill Gregor Shreck. He might as well. Everything he cared about had been taken from him. He’d lost his closest friend, Julian. He’d lost all hope of contact with Adrienne and the children. And he’d lost Evangeline too, by walking out on her when she needed him the most. No, he was alone now, and free to do what he should have done a long time ago. The law wouldn’t understand. Nor would his former friends and comrades in the rebellion. They’d call him a killer, a renegade, and band together to hunt him down. But none of that mattered. All that mattered now was punishing Gregor Shreck for all the pain and horror he was responsible for. Finlay nodded, once, and then strode away from the burning Tower.
Gregor should have known. The most dangerous man of all is the man with nothing left to lose.
He’d never given up his weapons when the rebellion ended. He’d always thought he might need them again someday. Just in case the new order didn’t work out. He had stashed them in a secure lockup in a part of the city where no one asked questions, and kept their existence a secret. Even Evangeline didn’t know about them. She would never have approved. A taxi took Finlay to them in under a half hour. He stopped the driver well short of the destination, tipped him enough not to remember who his fare had been, and walked the rest of the way.
He stopped before the plain steel door and carefully checked all his hidden telltales were still secure. None of them had been triggered. His secret was still safe. He opened the locking system with his thumb print and voice code, and nodded, satisfied, to see all his old friends just where he’d left them. Blades, axes, energy guns, projectile weapons, grenades, and all the other useful little items he’d acquired during his time as an assassin. There was enough firepower here to take out a small army, and that was just what he intended to do.
He put on full body armor first. Next came a force-shield bracelet around his left wrist and a sword belt around his waist. The weight of the sword on his hip was reassuring, like coming home. On his other hip, a holster carrying a fully charged disrupter. He slipped a projectile pistol into the back of his belt. He had something special in mind for that. Finally two bandoliers of assorted grenades, shrapnel and concussion and incendiary, crossing his chest and back. Finlay stamped back and forth about the lockup for a while, getting used to the new weight. His plan was very simple. He was going to walk in the front door of Tower Shreck and kill everyone he saw until he got to Gregor Shreck.
And that was what he did. As a plan, it worked surprisingly well. The security in Tower Shreck, as in most of the pastel towers, was mainly concerned with warding off attacks from the air, by gravity sleds, or on the ground, by massive armed forces. They weren’t prepared for a single, cold-eyed, cold-hearted killer who no longer cared whether he lived or died. Finlay walked up to the guards by the main door, shot the first one in the face, and cut the throat of the other. A shaped charge from his bandolier blew the main door in. He tossed a shrapnel grenade into the lobby, waited till it had gone off and the screams began, and then stalked into the smoke-filled chamber and cut down the few people the grenade hadn’t finished off. Finlay dropped an incendiary to start a distracting fire and made his way up the stairs to the next floor. He wasn’t dumb enough to use the elevator.
Guards came running down the stairs, and he killed them all, making his way steadily up the stairwell, stopping at each floor to toss around grenades and incendiaries. Those who didn’t die in the blasts were soon preoccupied with trying to escape the building fires and smoke. Sprinkler systems did their best, but had never been designed to cope with anything like this. There were always more guards, and Finlay killed them all, except for those with sense enough to turn and run when they saw death coming.
Finlay’s sword arm began to ache, and the blood that dripped from his armor was sometimes his own now, but he didn’t care. He was doing what he was born to do, and doing it well. His force shield deflected energy weapons, and in the narrow stairwell the guards could come at him only a few at a time, and that wasn’t enough to stop him, not nearly enough. He stepped over the bodies and kept going.
He’d set fires in half the floors of the Tower by now. Thick black smoke was drifting up the stairwell after him. He could hear screaming and panicking and the screeching of alarm sirens, and it was all music to his ears. Let Tower Shreck burn. He wasn’t planning on going back down again.
And finally Gregor ran out of guards. Their impressive-looking armor wasn’t much use in close-quarter fighting, and with the Tower burning up all around them, most decided they weren’t being paid enough to deal with this madman and took to their heels. Finlay carried on up the stairwell, sometimes coughing from the smoke, but not slowing down. He came to the top floor of the Tower and made his way down the deserted corridor, kicking open doors till he came to the reinforced door that led into Gregor’s private chambers. Finlay blew in the door with a shaped charge, and strode through the smoke into Gregor’s bloodred womb of a room.
Gregor was sitting on his huge rose-petal bed, clutching the sheets defensively around him. Half his oversize face was hidden behind a blood-soaked bandage, and Finlay smiled briefly. Evangeline had done well. But standing beside the bed, gun in hand, was a tall, slender figure, dressed all in black to show off his pale skin and delicate features. Valentine Wolfe. Finlay laughed softly, a disturbing, not altogether sane sound. Gregor flinched. Valentine didn’t.
“Well, well,” said Finlay. “It’s all my birthdays come at once. The two men I hate most together in one room. There is a God, and he is good.”
“You and I have never had much to do with Him,” said Valentine easily. “We’ve always served a much darker master. But your timing is impeccable, as always. I came here to make an alliance with Gregor, on certain delicate issues that needn’t concern you, and you choose this very evening to pursue your somewhat delayed vengeance. Well, I can’t allow you to interfere, Finlay, so I’m afraid you’re going to have to die.”
Finlay laughed, and it was an ugly sound. Gregor whimpered, and Valentine moved forward to stand between him and Finlay. He put away his gun and drew his sword.
“I’ve heard many tales of your swordsmanship, Campbell. Let’s see how good you really are. Man to man, blade to blade—let’s finish what we started in Tower Campbell so long ago. What do you say?”
“I don’t have time for this,” said Finlay, and shot Valentine Wolfe through the chest with his disrupter. The energy beam punched through Valentine’s chest and exploded out his back, throwing the Wolfe to the floor. Finlay sniffed once and turned to Gregor, who snarled soundlessly at him. Finlay strode forward, putting away his sword and gun, and grabbed Gregor by the shirt front with both hands. He hauled the huge distended body out of bed and threw Gregor on the floor. Flames from Valentine’s burning clothes had set alight some of the surrounding furnishings, and the flames were spreading. The heat and flickering light and shadows added a suitably hellish touch to the proceedings. Finlay looked down at Gregor.
“You hurt Evangeline. You’re a murderer, and a traitor, and a symbol of everything that’s corrupt in the Families and in the Empire. The world will smell better when you’re gone. Don’t waste my time with threats or warnings. Your guards aren’t coming, and I don’t care what happens after I’m through with you. All that matters is that you suffer as you made my Evie suffer. I’m going to make you hurt so bad that when you finally die and get to Hell, the fires of the Pit will seem like a release.”
He reached around his back and pulled the projectile weapon out from under his belt. He’d saved it especially for this moment. It was a simple handgun, with eight bullets. He took aim at Gregor’s left knee and pulled the trigger. The kneecap shattered immediately under the bullet’s impact, and Gregor screamed shrilly, clutching his bloody leg with both fat hands, as though they could force the kneecap back together. Finlay aimed carefully and shot out the other kneecap with his second bullet. Gregor screamed again, flailing his arms as though appealing for help that wasn’t there. Finlay raised the gun and shot out Gregor’s left elbow. Blood and splintered bone flew on the air, and the forearm swung back and forth at an unnatural angle. Finlay fired again, taking out the right elbow, and the right forearm was almost torn away by the impact.
Gregor was screaming steadily now, barely stopping to suck in new breath between each scream. His eyes bulged, and his mouth stretched impossibly wide. Finlay took his time aiming, and shot Gregor in his grossly distended stomach, just above the navel. This time the impact had a soft, muffled sound. Gregor howled like an animal. Finlay shot him in the groin, and blood spurted high up into the air. Gregor screamed and howled his sanity away, and still couldn’t hide from the awful, horrible pain.
Finlay stood and listened for a while, smiling his death’s-head grin. Half the chamber was on fire now. He looked around for Valentine, but there was no sign of the body anywhere. The Wolfe must have crawled away to die. He wouldn’t get far with half his chest shot away. Finlay turned back to Gergor, still screaming like a soul newly damned to Hell.
“This is for you, Evie,” Finlay murmured, and put a bullet through each of Gregor’s eyes, blowing the back of his head away.
Finlay Campbell lowered the empty gun and looked down on the dead body of his enemy. It comforted him. The flames were all around him, and no doubt sweeping through all the floors below. There were no windows in Gregor’s private quarters, no way out. He could hear explosions everywhere. The Tower wouldn’t last much longer. Finlay looked calmly around him.
And wondered what he would do next.
CHAPTER SIX
Cry Havoc
The Empire, dangerously weakened in its transitional state between the new and old orders, found itself under attack from all sides at once. And everything went to hell in a handcart. Old enemies came howling out of the dark, falling like wolves on undefended colonies out on the Rim. A massive fleet of Shub starships burst out of the Forbidden Sector, brushing aside the quarantining starcruiser, and laid waste to every inhabited planet in its path. Powered by the new alien-derived stardrive, they were effectively unstoppable by anything save the few remaining E-class starcruisers in the Imperial Fleet.
The great golden ships of the Hadenmen appeared out of nowhere, striking viciously at unsuspecting planets all along the Rim in The Second Great Crusade of the Genetic Church. It soon become clear they were emerging from hidden bases deep beneath the surfaces of uninhabited worlds. The Hadenmen had recently established secret Nests all across the Empire, not wanting to place all their eggs in one fragile basket again. The Deathstalker’s destruction of Brahmin II had proven them right, and spurred on by the elimination of what should have been their second homeworld, all the Hadenmen Nests opened at once. The huge golden ships of feared legend ranged the long night again, bringing death and destruction and worse than death.
The insect ships were back too. Gliding silently out of the dark like huge, sticky balls of compacted webbing, driven by unknown forces, they passed unaffected through planetary defenses and discharged crawling armies of killer insects, eating whole cities alive and leaving nothing behind save bare, gnawed bones. They made no threats, issued no demands, could not be talked to or warned off. They just descended from the skies in silent horror and fell upon everything that lived. Soon there were whole planets out on the Rim covered by scuttling, seething insects, crawling blindly through the ruins of what had once been human cities.
The Empire wasted remarkably little time springing to its own defense. Parliament organized Golgotha into one great communications and tactical center, alerted all planets and colonies in the path of danger, and rushed ships, men, and weapons to defend those not yet fallen or attacked. Luckily, though Shub, Hadenmen, and insects shared a common enemy in Humanity, they showed no interest in any form of alliance. They went their own way, chose their own targets, and did not cooperate, even when it was clearly in their best interests to do so. But they didn’t attack each other either, sticking strictly to their own territories, for the moment.
Planets and colonies fell, one by one, all along the Rim, and the three attacking forces moved steadily inward, heading for the greater concentrations of Humanity and the vulnerable heart of the Empire: Golgotha. Some colonists tried, against all Parliament’s wishes and advice, to strike deals with those attacking them. It did no good.
General Beckett’s devastated Imperial Fleet did what it could, but its capabilities were limited from the first. The few surviving E-class ships with the new stardrive couldn’t be everywhere at once, and worlds under attack cried out for help all the time. Beckett sent what was left of his Fleet darting all over the Empire, pulling in every last ship with a crew and working guns, even those patrolling the Darkvoid, and rushed them from one trouble spot to another, but all too often they got there too late to do any real good. He then tried splitting up the Fleet, dispatching his most powerful starcruisers to defend those planets in most immediate danger. But Imperial starcruisers caught on their own were quickly outnumbered and outgunned, and had no choice but to run for their lives, usually heavily damaged. Unnerved by the loss of too many irreplacable ships, Parliament ordered Beckett to regroup his Fleet and pull them back to protect the more densely populated inner worlds of the Empire. Everyone else was left to fend for themselves. Whole populations struggled to evacuate their worlds, cramming themselves into the cargo holds of any ship with a working stardrive. Many never reached their destinations. Many more populations stood their ground and fought, ready to die rather than give up the worlds they had made their own, through generations of hard work and sacrifice.