Authors: Simon R. Green
He laughed aloud, the wind whipping the sound away almost before he heard it. The Empire was going to fall today, and he was going to help bring it down. And when he had it on its knees and begging for mercy, he’d spit in its eye and kick it in the teeth. He worked the sled’s throttle mercilessly, trying to force out even more speed, but the sled was already exceeding its safety limits. Random could see the first of the Towers in the distance, and he couldn’t wait to get to them. The Clans had to know he was coming by now. They’d have set up their defenses, adjusted their computer aiming systems to compensate for the sleds’ speed and maneuverability. They’d be waiting for him. And he didn’t give a damn. This was judgment day, and he was bringing down the hammer. It was almost enough to make a man believe in religion. He grinned harshly, the wind forcing his lips back into a wolf’s snarl. It was a good day for someone else to die.
He looked across at Ruby Journey. In her black leathers and white furs, standing rock-steady on her bucking sled, face grim and implacable, she looked like some dark Valkyrie out of legend, come to take the dead heroes to Valhalla, whether they wanted to go or not. Her sled was loaded down with weapons of all kinds, right up to the last ounce of weight that wouldn’t interfere with her speed. Everything from energy guns to grenades to throwing knives. Ruby liked to be prepared. She looked around, caught his eye on her, and grinned at him. She was on her way to a lifetime best in looting and mayhem, or quite possibly her own death, and she’d never looked happier.
Random smiled back at her, then turned to look at Storm, flying on his other side. The canny old warrior had strapped himself securely onto his sled, but even so he still seemed to shake and shudder with every sudden movement of his craft. His long mane of white hair flew out behind him as he stared unflinchingly into the rushing wind. He was too old for this kind of mission, and everyone knew it, including him, but he’d insisted on coming along, and Random hadn’t had the heart to say no. He understood Storm’s need to be in at the kill after giving so much of his life to the struggle against the Empire. So he’d put the old man right next to him, where he could keep an eye on him, and just hoped Storm could keep up. Hopefully the old warrior’s reflexes would keep him alive long enough to reach the Towers. A lot of people weren’t going to make it. There were bound to be heavy losses once the armada hit the Towers’ main defenses. Everyone in the armada knew that. But they’d all volunteered anyway. They knew the one-man sleds were the only force fast enough, mobile enough, and versatile enough to get past the defenses and into the Towers. Where the Families thought they were so safe.
Ground forces would have had to struggle for days against the heavily manned and armed Towers, fighting their way up floor by floor to reach the Families barricaded in their heavily defended top floor. Losses on both sides would have been enormous, with no guarantee that the Families wouldn’t just abandon their Towers and flee elsewhere before they could be captured. Gravity barges had guns strong enough to blast a way in, but they were too slow, too unwieldy. The Towers’ superior firepower would have blown them out of the sky before they could get close enough to do any real damage. Espers were helpless in the face of so many known esp-blockers. Which was why the Clans had retired to the Towers—the one place where they felt really safe—at the first sign of real trouble.
Random was here to teach them different. He’d thought about this plan for years, in the trenches and foxholes of endless battles on endless worlds, dreaming of what he’d do when he finally brought the war home to home-world. He’d thought of every problem, refined every detail, and now here he was, living his dream. Do or die. Death or glory. And he couldn’t have been happier either.
Gravity barges lifted off from the Towers’ private landing fields and launched themselves into the sky to meet the armada. They were great lumbering ships, with heavy armor and superior firepower, but the sleds were upon them in seconds, and ran rings around them. They snapped back and forth, whipping around the slow-moving barges, too small and too fast for the larger ships’ tracking computers. They’d been programmed for vessels their own size, or stationary targets. The sleds shot past them, more and more all the time, so the barges opened fire anyway, disrupter cannon blazing from the huge vessels’ sides, aimed at what seemed like the greatest concentrations of sleds.
The sleds scattered immediately, but there were so many of them the barges couldn’t miss all the time. With no force shields to protect them, they exploded into flames and fell from the sky like so many burning leaves. Dozens were blown apart in the first few seconds, screams sounding briefly in the wind, and then the survivors of the first rank of sleds threw themselves in close to the barges, so they couldn’t keep firing without hitting each other. Ducking and dodging the barges’ few smaller weapons, the sleds opened up with their own disrupters. At first they were too few to hurt the barges’ force shields, but soon there were hundreds of them, and hundreds more, buzzing around the barges like bees around a bear, hitting the shields again and again until they overloaded and burned out, unable to cope with being hit so often in so many places at once. The sleds fell on the barges, their weapons tearing ragged holes through the heavy armor by sheer persistence. As the sleds’ fire continued, inner explosions rocked the barges, and smoke billowed out the holes, thick and black and shot with flames. One by one the great heavy ships lurched or tilted helplessly in the air, drifting in the wind, already beginning their slow but inevitable descent to the ground. The armada of one-man sleds, only slightly depleted, left them behind and headed for the first of the pastel Towers, standing tall and proud against the early-morning sky.
The sleds filled the sky now, thousands of them descending inexorably on the last redoubts of the Clans. The Towers waited till they were safely in range, then opened up with their own disrupter cannon, blowing great holes in the armada. Sleds plummeted from the sky, twisted metal wrecks leaving long shaky trails of smoke and fire behind them. The majority pressed on. There would be time for grieving later. The Towers’ guns punched through the massed sleds again and again, filling the sky with blood and screams, explosions and shrapnel, but still the armada pressed on. There was no point in turning back now. The Towers would only shoot them in the back. And this close to their target, there was no longer any point in evasive tactics, so they just opened their throttles all the way and bore in on the Towers like so many guided missiles, driven by rage and determination and a lifetime’s grievances. Random was still right there at the front, with Ruby and Storm at his sides. He was howling and roaring now, shouting old battle cries and slogans, and hundreds of responses rose up behind him. For many, Jack Random’s name was battle cry enough. The rebels fell howling on the Towers, and the sound of their blood rage filled the morning sky.
The Towers’ disrupters fired again and again, blasting sleds out of the sky, their blackened husks falling on all sides. Hundreds of good men and women died, blown apart with their craft, consumed in fire, or thrown from their sleds by the impact of nearby explosions. They screamed in fear and pain and rage as they fell to the earth far below. Random and Ruby and Storm still led the advance, fire and explosions and people dying all around them, whipping their sleds through daring, dangerous maneuvers as the thermals around the Towers rose up to meet them. Behind them, the oncoming sleds darkened the sky, casting a dark, looming shadow over the Towers. For all the hundreds that had fallen, and continued to fall, there were still thousands of them, and they would not be denied. And the leading sleds were close now, so close the Towers’ disrupter cannon could no longer train on them. They shot inside the defensive perimeter, heading for the great steelglass windows on the top floors. Random thought he could see faces staring out, eyes wide with fear and shock, and his heart warmed at the sight.
He was still grinning when a disrupter beam from Tower Chojiro hit his sled. He grabbed the controls and hung on grimly as the sled bucked beneath him, and then the whole control panel exploded. Blinded by smoke and flames, Random hung on to the dead throttle as the sled dropped out beneath him. The sled fell like a brick, leaving the smoke behind, and Random could see the armada falling away above him, leaving him behind. Random cursed and struggled with what was left of the controls. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He was too angry. He hadn’t come this far, been through this much, to fail now.
The sled’s engine coughed briefly, and the sled lurched beneath him, almost throwing him off. Random snarled something indistinct, and concentrated on the controls, trying to coax a miracle out of the burning remnants of the crippled sled. And one of the gods he was praying to must have been listening, because the sled’s engine fired back into life. It sounded ragged and uncertain, and the sled lurched and tilted this way and that, but gradually its headlong plummet slowed to a halt, and then, as Random whooped and howled and shook his fist in triumph, the sled slowly began to rise again, heading up the side of the Tower Chojiro toward the Family on the top floor.
The sled’s engine wanted to cut out at any moment, but Random wouldn’t let it, nursing the controls along with scowling concentration. The armada was still flooding by above him, dark shapes racing unstoppably toward the many Towers. The guns still sounded, and great ragged gaps were appearing in the dark tide, but still the sleds pressed on. Some had already made contact, blowing holes in the steelglass windows and crashing into the top floors of the Towers. There were troops waiting for them with sword and gun, but the first wave of rebels fought well, with a fierce desperation, refusing to die until they had established a beachhead for those coming after them. Many of them died anyway, cut down by overwhelming odds, but more rebels were appearing all the time, and slowly, foot by foot, they forced their way into the Towers.
It was a fight the Families had never expected to have to fight. After the Wolfes’ sled attack on Tower Campbell, most Families had added extra disrupter cannon on the roofs, and invested in a few gravity barges, but they’d never anticipated such a near-suicidal charge.
More and more gravity sleds made it past the Towers’ defenses and crashed their way into the top floors. Random cursed regretfully as his sled slowly rose nearer the top floor of Tower Chojiro. He’d always meant to be one of the first in, Fighting to provide a landing ground for those coming behind him. Jack Random had always believed in leading from the front. He couldn’t see what had happened to Ruby Journey and Alexander Storm, but he couldn’t think about them now. The sled lurched up past the last few floors, and came to a halt facing the top floor of Tower Chojiro. And Random’s stomach lurched as he found himself facing a dozen leveled hand disrupters. Someone had smashed a hole through the steel-glass window but obviously hadn’t survived it. Random’s adrenaline kicked in, and everything seemed to move very slowly. He seemed to have all the time in the world to study the situation and think about what to do. He didn’t trust his control over the sled enough to risk dropping below the guns’ range, and he was moving too slowly to rise above it. And if he used up his last few moments trying to raise the sled’s force shield, only to find it didn’t work, the disrupters wouldn’t leave enough of him to bury. So Random did the only thing he could, as time crashed up to speed again. He gave the sled all the speed it had, and slammed the craft right into the waiting guards.
Their shots went wild as he was suddenly among them, but some hit anyway. The sled exploded, throwing Random forward over the controls in a cloud of flames. He flew blindly through the air, smarting from the heat of the flames, trying to get his feet under him. The guards scattered as what was left of the sled crash-landed among them and exploded again. Random hit the carpeted floor hard, driving the breath from his lungs. He curled into a bail, hoping the smoke from the explosions would hide him, desperately trying to draw his sword and gun. He could hear shouting and the crackle of flames and general chaos. And then what was left of the fiercely burning sled crashed down on top of him, pinning him to the floor, and there was only blazing heat and the roar of the fire all around him.
The surviving guards called for reinforcements as they fought the fires breaking out all over the top floor. The Clan Chojiro had already retreated to the floor below sometime back. More men arrived, and some fought the fires while others took up positions at the broken windows, keeping up a steady fire on the advancing sleds. Tower Chojiro had more disrupter cannon on the roof than most, and for the moment most of the one-man sleds were concentrating their efforts on the less well defended Towers. A handful of guards cautiously approached the blazing wreckage of the downed sled. There was no way anyone could have survived such a crash and its aftermath, but the guards were taking no chances. They’d been hearing disturbing things about some of the rebels. One of the braver guards leaned over the wreckage and poked it gingerly with the tip of his sword. The heat from the fire kept him from getting any closer, but he thought he could see a single blackened leg protruding from under the rear of the wreckage. He poked that with his sword too, and then leaped back as the leg twitched. He scrambled backwards to rejoin his fellows, and the whole wreckage lurched to one side as something underneath it rose up from certain death, determined to be free. The burning sled overbalanced and fell away, revealing a dark human figure. Its clothes were charred and smoldering, and the bare face and hands were blackened and red raw from burns. But its back was straight and its head erect, and the blistered hands held gun and sword securely. The eyes were pale slits in the dark face, but white teeth flashed suddenly in a disturbing smile.
“I don’t die that easily,” said Jack Random.
The guards stood where they were for a long moment, paralyzed at the sight of something that should have been dead and still, but instead had risen up to challenge them again. But they were trained Tower guards, conditioned to serve their Family unto death, and the moment passed. They threw the fear off with a cold shrug and started forward, swords raised to carve the burnt specter into a hundred pieces and see if it rose again. Random aimed his disrupter carefully and took out three of the guards with a single shot. They fell silently, and the rest came on. Random put his gun back in its charred holster, took a firm grip on his sword, and wondered how many he might take with him before they finally pulled him down. Even he had his limitations, and he could feel how close they were. Surviving the crash had taken a lot out of him, and he wasn’t going to be given enough time to recover. He would have shrugged if it hadn’t hurt so much. He’d always known he’s die alone, overrun at last by too many enemies. And that was when Ruby Journey’s voice suddenly grated in his ears.