Deathstalker War (61 page)

“I regret I am unable to do so, Your Majesty. Much as it pains me. What remains of the fleet is under constant Hadenman attack. Many of my ships have been destroyed or boarded. Those I have left are scattered too widely to be recalled. We don’t have enough ships in any one place to attempt even a single scorching. We’re having to fight with everything we’ve got just to survive, Empress. I would estimate more than 40 percent of your fleet has been destroyed, or is in enemy hands.”

Lionstone lost it completely, and shouted and screamed abuse at Beckett’s unmoved image. She threatened him with everything from demotion to immediate arrest and execution if he wouldn’t carry out her orders, and still he wouldn’t answer her. Lionstone finally regained some self-control and stood panting before the viewscreen, her hands clenched into fists. Beckett waited patiently while she got her breath back. Lionstone fixed him with a cold glare.

“Very well. Again, we are failed by those we are forced to trust. New orders, General. All starcruisers are to return immediately to protect the homeworld. No excuses, no exceptions. We require a shield of ships around Golgotha. No one is to pass. Whatever happens, the homeworld must not fall. Is that clear, General?”

Beckett sighed deeply. “Lionstone, it’s over. We’re too far away. Even if we were to abandon the people we’re protecting from the Hadenmen, by the time we’d fought our way past their ships, it would all be over on Golgotha, bar the shouting. AH I can offer you are my best wishes, and my hopes for your personal safety. There’s nothing I can do for you anymore. Good-bye, Lionstone.”

“Traitor!” screamed Lionstone, as his face disappeared from the viewscreen. She breathed heavily, her eyes wide and staring at some private inner image, and then she moved quickly among the floating screens, calling up Captains in her fleet personally. Many didn’t answer, for one reason or another, and those who did couldn’t help her. They had their own problems. She saved the E class ships, her pride and joy, for last, but only one answered. The
Endurance
.

The bridge was in flames. Emergency sirens and warnings were sounding everywhere, overlapping each other. Crew members sat doggedly at their seats, manning the surviving stations with desperate concentration. Shouted orders and responses could barely be heard over the bedlam, but the screams were clear enough. Dead bodies scattered the bridge, some charred and blackened figures still sitting at their exploded stations. Smoke was building faster than the extractor fans could clear it. Wounded were sobbing and crying out, but no one had the time to tend them. Lionstone yelled for someone to report to her, and finally a disheveled minor officer lurched to a halt before the viewscreen. One of his sleeves was blackened and crisped from flames only recently beaten out, and the hair on one side of his head had been burned away. Half his face was roasted an angry red. He pulled himself to something like attention and saluted the screen. His eyes were wild and staring, like some creature confronted by a forest fire. Lionstone glared at him.

“Who are you? Where’s the Captain? What’s happening on the
Endurance
?”

“Navigation Officer Robert Campbell reporting, Your Majesty. The Captain’s dead. We’re under attack by three Hadenman ships. We’re faster than they are, but they’ve got better weapons and shields. Our shields are failing. We’ve seriously disabled one of the Hadenman ships, but doing so drained our reserves almost to zero. Power levels all over the ship are dropping fast. But we won’t give up, Your Majesty. We’ll fight till they tear this ship apart around us. If nothing else, we’ll buy you time.”

A massive explosion rocked the bridge. The hull had been breached. Air and smoke shrieked out the widening hole. People not strapped into seats clung to their workstations to avoid being dragged away. The lights flickered and went out, replaced by the dull red glow of emergency lighting. There was only one siren sounding now, loud and piercing, like a lost soul falling into eternal darkness. Robert Campbell clung to the edge of the screen and tried to shout something, but he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He pulled himself away from the screen, heading across the devastated bridge toward the emergency exit. All around him, the workstations were exploding one by one, throwing their dead operators away or blowing them apart where they sat. And then the screen went suddenly blank, and the Court was quiet again. Lionstone stared at the screen for a long moment.

“Brave boy,” she said finally. “Maybe I should have put him in charge. And the
Endurance
is gone. The finest of the E class ships. The ship that was supposed to be unbeatable.”

“To be fair, I don’t think the designers had Hademan ships in mind when they said that,” said Razor, apparently unmoved. “And it did take three of the legendary golden ships to take down one E class ship.”

“The ship didn’t fail me,” said Lionstone, her mood changing yet again. “It was the crew! Cowards and traitors and incompetents! Is there no one I can trust?”

Razor and Kid Death shared a glance, but said nothing.

Up on the surface of Golgotha, in the teeming streets of the Parade of the Endless, the fighting was getting dirty. The Imperial forces were being forced back on every front, and were not taking it at all well. They shot at everything that didn’t wear a uniform, and pulled down buildings to cover their retreat. They had tried using women and children as human shields, but tended to shoot them themselves when they couldn’t keep up. Most non-combatants had fled the city by now. Thick black smoke from the many burning buildings had gathered overhead, plunging the city into an early twilight. With most of the streetlights smashed, flickering crimson light from the hundreds of fires provided the only illumination. Dark figures moved through the bloody light with blood on their minds.

The Imperial forces hadn’t given up yet. The Grendels might all be dead, but there were still other, secret, unpleasant weapons they hadn’t used yet. Esp-blockers had been rushed to the front lines to hold back the elves, but the esper brains in their glass cases were limited in number and range. So they brought out the experimental living esp-blockers, captured espers brainwashed and conditioned into obedient shells. They weren’t very bright, and had to be led everywhere in chains, but they were effective, and their range was staggering. The rebel espers had no choice but to fall back and make way for the standard fighters. The rebel advance slowed to a crawl in those areas, giving the Empire forces time to regroup.

So the clones went in, crowds of people with the same faces, armed to the teeth and wearing Born To Burn T-shirts in memory of the fallen Stevie Blues. Massed disrupter fire slammed through their ranks, cutting them down, but there were thousands of them, and they would not be stopped. They just kept running into the fire, jumping over the fallen, until the survivors stormed the barricades and fell on the troops. They always went for the esp-blockers first, giving them merciful deaths so that the elves could come swarming in behind them. A few hours after they’d been introduced, there were no living esp-blockers left anywhere in the city.

The underground brought forward its own awful weapons. Polters sent razor-edged psistorms barreling down the streets, ripping apart all they touched. Soldiers spontaneously combusted, burning with a fire no water could extinguish, as pyros went to work. And then there were the mindbombs, simple devices built around esper brain tissues. When activated, they spread madness and horror through all nonespers in the vicinity. Affected troops clawed their own eyes out, or turned on each other, and tore their companions limb from limb. The rebels pressed forward, overrunning Imperial positions again and again, and then Valentine’s war machines appeared on the scene, and everything changed.

Huge hulking constructions stamped and rumbled down the wider streets, built-in disrupters cutting through the packed rebel ranks. Hundreds died in the first few minutes. People scrambled for cover, only to find there was nowhere the war machines couldn’t reach. They smashed through walls and entire buildings to get at their prey, and projectile weapons were no use against them. Hand disrupters couldn’t do enough damage to stop them. Espers came running from all directions to set their powers against the machines. Polters blasted them with chunks of fallen masonry, and barely dented the metal sides with their minds. Pyros swathed them with flames. But still the machines moved inexorably forward, street by street, block by block, retaking all the ground the Imperial forces had ceded. Troops pressed in after the machines, but were careful never to get in front of them. The war machines shot at everything that moved. Valentine could have distinguished between the two forces, but couldn’t be bothered. He was having too much fun. His mind moved across the city, carried by the war machines, while his body lay safely cocooned in Tower Wolfe. He looked upon the death and destruction he was causing through a thousand sensors, and found it to be good.

The espers massed themselves before the oncoming machines, and prayed for a miracle. They got one. The Mater Mundi, Our Mother of All Souls, once again manifested through the entire esper force, burning brightly in every man and woman. For a moment they shone like gods, lighting the streets around them, and then their minds came together in a single expression of will, and an unstoppable psistorm raged through the streets, tearing the war machines apart and scattering the pieces. Metal shrapnel rained down on the retreating Imperial forces, until they, too, were swept away by the advancing psistorm. Every esper in the city roared with triumph, and the Parade of the Endless shook with the sound of it.

In his fortified retreat in Tower Wolfe, Valentine was thrown rudely from his war machines, and sat trembling and panting in his control center. One by one, the systems around him were shutting down, wrecked beyond repair. Valentine himself was dazed and disoriented, but lucky to be alive, and he knew it. The esper attack had followed him home and would have destroyed anything less than his chemically augmented and expanded mind. He could still feel the fringes of the esper contruct searching for him, as yet unable to get a grip on his slippery, evasive mind. He would have to leave Tower Wolfe and seek sanctuary elsewhere. But concentrate as he might, he couldn’t think of anywhere else that would welcome him. Even Lionstone wouldn’t want him after he’d failed to bring her victory with his war machines. Valentine Wolfe sat alone in the heart of his Family Tower and wondered what to do next.

The maintenance tunnels for the Palace’s underground train systems had been sealed off and abandoned centuries ago, and the wait hadn’t improved them. They had that particular darkness unique to the deep underground, an absolute blackness unreachable by any glint of surface light. They were cold as arctic ice, and the air was thick and musty. Even the smallest noise seemed to echo on forever, as though the tunnels were grateful for any sound after so many years of silence. And through the dark, claustrophobic passageways came Owen and Hazel and Giles, stumbling along the uneven floor and keeping their heads down to avoid banging them on the low ceiling. The cold barely touched them, thanks to the Maze, but even their incredible eyesight was useless in such utter darkness. Owen and Giles both carried lamps, their stark white light gleaming unpleasantly on the curving tunnel walls. Hazel had the map Owen had drawn out of computer records almost as old as the tunnels themselves. The passages interlinked with each other in an endless maze, and only one carefully traced route would get the rebels where they were going in time for it to do any good.

The pallid light on the pockmarked, cable-strewn walls looked increasingly disturbing, almost organic. Hazel muttered something about moving through the bowels of the earth, but no one laughed. They didn’t feel much like speaking, lost in their own thoughts. After all the time and blood they’d given to the struggle, they were finally heading toward a confrontation that could mean the end of Lionstone’s rule and the way things were. Owen tried to visualize the kind of Empire he might be responsible for creating and wasn’t surprised to find he couldn’t. As an historian he’d studied any number of ancient societies, including some that were officially banned from the records these days, based on all kinds of politics and beliefs, but all he’d ever known personally was the Empire of the Families and the Iron Throne. Random and Hazel had taken it in turns to explain their differing views of a democracy-based Empire, but much as he wanted to believe in them, they just sounded like chaos to him. And he was damned if he could see how he’d fit into either of their futures. But then, he’d never fitted in Lionstone’s Empire, either. He smiled briefly, as it occurred to him that the chances of his living to see any of these futures were remote anyway, which made his worries somewhat irrelevant. Let him survive this mission, and he’d worry about such things then.

He still wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do when he finally forced his way into the Imperial Court and faced his Empress in the Iron Throne. All his life he’d been raised to revere and honor the Throne, irrespective of whoever occupied it, sworn to serve it all his life and to his death, if necessary. The Iron Throne was the source of all duty and honor and other things that could not easily be put into words. Overturning the Throne was like overturning God. Owen Deathstalker was an aristocrat, even if he had been outlawed, and he supposed in some ways he always would be. But he’d seen too much of the dark side of Empire, of the suffering and horrors on which his society of wealth and privilege was based, and he couldn’t just look away and pretend he’d never seen it. Duty and honor and sheer humanity demanded he put a stop to it.

So he became a leader of the rebellion, a hero and an inspiration to others, and his life had been given over to avenging others whose lives had been broken and discarded on an Empress’s whim. He was fighting now for all the poor and downtrodden, the espers and the clones and the other unpeople, for everyone whose lives had been ruined by an Empress who was supposed to protect them. And if sometimes he felt like an impostor, or unworthy to be part of the struggle, he comforted himself with the thought that no one else could do what he was doing. The Madness Maze had made him more than human, so he preserved his humanity by wielding his powers in the service of Humanity.