Deathstalker War (14 page)

They wandered on through the town, waiting for their turn to reboard the pinnace that would take them on to Mistport. First in, last out, as always. So far, they didn’t think much of Mistworld. It was freezing cold, with people who shot at you when you weren’t expecting it, and no comforts anywhere. So they went from house to house, checking those that hadn’t burned out too thoroughly for loot and booze, since there weren’t any women to be had.

“Miserable bloody place,” said Morgan.

“Right,” said Kast, leaning forward to light a cigar from a burning doorframe. “Still, good to be back in action again.”

“Damn right,” said Morgan. “Thought I’d go crazy sitting around the
Defiant
, watching that bloody Grendel planet. This is real work. Soldier’s work.”

Neither of them mentioned their time in the interrogation cells under Golgotha, sobbing and screaming as the mind techs dug pitilessly for information about the broken Quarantine. It was just good to be free and striking back at an enemy that could hurt. Spread the pain around a little. That was the Empire way, after all. They came across a woman’s body, somehow overlooked, sitting slumped just inside a doorway. As the marines stopped before her, her bloody head seemed to settle forward slightly, as though nodding to them. Kast dug Morgan in the ribs with his elbow.

“I think she fancies you.”

“Probably still warm, too. Toss a coin for who goes first?”

“Sure. We’ll use my coin, though. You cheat.”

They tossed for it, and Morgan won, but when he reached forward to take her by the shoulders, the woman’s head fell off and rolled away across the snow. Immediately the two marines were after it, laughing and shouting and kicking it back and forth in an impromptu game. The woman’s body lay slumped in the doorway, forgotten. Morgan punted the “ball” neatly through an open window and jumped up and down, punching the air in triumph.

“And it’s a goal! See, Kast, I told you. The old magic’s still there. I could have been a professional.”

“Yeah, and I could have been a Sergeant if my parents hadn’t been married. Move it. Time’s getting on.”

The rest of the town proved a disappointment, so Kast produced a packet of marshmallows, and they sat by the funeral pyre to toast them, swapping happy reminiscences of past campaigns. The evening continued to fall, little by little, and the pyre spread a crimson hellglow over the deserted town. Kast and Morgan sang old songs of comradeship and violence and lost friends, and finally marched out of the burning town singing the company march. The last of the pinnaces waited to take them to Mistport.

In Mistport, in the Abraxus Information Center, the children all woke up screaming. They sat bolt upright, mouths stretched wide, their eyes full of blood and death. The ones strapped to their cots thrashed and convulsed, desperate to be free. Chance moved among them, trying to comfort those who could still be reached, but the death cry of so many espers in Hardcastle’s Rock, too strong and potent to be denied, screamed on through the children’s throats. Slowly reason returned to some of them. Chance dosed the rest with strong sedatives so he could concentrate, and from the others gradually pieced together what had happened. And for the first time in a long time, he contacted Port Director Gideon Steel at the Mistport control tower.

Steel took a long time to answer, and when his fat face eventually filled the viewscreen he looked less than pleased to see who his caller was. “Make it fast. Half my duty espers have gone crazy, and the rest are catatonic. It’s bedlam in here. What do you want, Chance?”

“An Imperial force has just wiped out Hardcastle’s Rock,” Chance said bluntly. “It was a big force, and it’s on its way here right now.”

Steel frowned. “Are you sure? We’ve had no signals from that area, and our sensors are all clear.”

“The town is dead,” said Chance. “Every man, woman, and child. The Empire is here, Steel. Do something.”

“I’ll get back to you.” Steel snapped off the comm link and began issuing orders. He didn’t really believe the news, not least because he didn’t want to, but he couldn’t afford to take chances. He had the duty espers smacked around till they calmed down, and then had them spread their minds as wide as they could, while the control tower fired up the long-range sensors. It didn’t take the espers long to find a great void where the town of Hardcastle’s Rock should have been, a void they couldn’t penetrate. They also sensed something else, a presence, huge and powerful but hidden from them.

High above, Legion realized it had been discovered, and rejoiced. Its time had come to do what it had been created to do, to bring terror and despair and the end of all things to the Empire’s enemies. It threw aside its concealing shield, and spread its vast influence across the city of Mistport. The tower’s sensors immediately detected the orbiting
Defiant
and the hundreds of pinnaces bearing down on Mistport. Steel hit the alarm button even as his duty espers screamed and collapsed, unable to deal with the horror that was Legion. Tower personnel tried to revive them, but some were dead, some were insane, and the rest were beyond reach, driven into hiding within their own minds rather than face Legion. Steel used his emergency link to contact the esper union, but for a long time no one answered his call. Static flashed across the screen as the signal gradually deteriorated under Legion’s influence. Finally a wild-eyed man appeared on the view-screen, his face sweating and shocked.

“Get me someone in authority!” snapped Steel. “We have to raise the psionic shield! It’s an emergency!”

“We know!” said the esper, his eyes rolling like a panicked horse’s. “The Empire’s here! But we can’t do anything. It’s like a giant esp-blocker is covering the whole city. It’s shut down our powers. We can’t hear each other anymore. It’s all we can do to think clearly. Half of our people have had to go catatonic, just to protect their sanity. And the field’s growing stronger all the time! There isn’t going to be any psionic screen!”

Blood gushed suddenly from the man’s nose and ears. He looked surprised, tried to say something, and then his face disappeared from the screen. Steel tried to raise him again, but no one answered. And then the screen shut down, as all comm frequencies were jammed. Steel and his people tried all their backups and emergency procedures, and none of them worked. Steel sat in his command chair, surrounded by chaos and screaming voices. The psionic screen was out. The port’s disrupter cannon, salvaged from a crashed starship, were powering up, but without a working comm system there was no way to aim them. Port techs were working furiously to link the tower sensors into the comm systems, but there was no way of knowing how long they would last either. Already some of the weaker systems were shutting down, unable to function in the unnatural field emanating from the orbiting starcruiser.

Steel called together a dozen runners, and sent them out into the city to organize the Watch and the militias, knowing even as he did so that they weren’t going to be enough. Mistport had depended for too long on its psionic screen. Secure in its protection, the Watch had gone soft, and no one had taken the militias seriously in years. Steel grunted. The people of Mistport were still fighters. They had to be, just to survive. If the Empire forces thought they were just going to walk in and take over, they were in for a shock. And then Steel studied the remaining sensor screens, and the still growing count of the approaching pinnaces, and his blood ran cold. There were hundreds of them. This was no task force, it was a full-sized army. The invasion of Mistworld had begun.

High above, floating in its huge tank, Legion stretched out its invisible hands and stirred its sticky fingers in the minds of the espers down below. Legion was the product of thousands of esper brains crossed with barely understood tech systems derived from alien technology, and even its designers hadn’t fully understood what they were creating. Legion was far greater than the sum of its parts, and greater by far than the fools that had brought it into being. For the moment it followed orders, because it was having so much fun, but tomorrow was another day. It stretched out its power and espers died, their merely human brains unable to withstand the pressure. Others retreated deep inside themselves, shutting down their minds in self-protection. Some brave souls tried to probe Legion, and went crazy trying to understand its nature. Legion laughed, and spread its power in a great rolling wave that covered all of Mistport in one long unending scream of triumph. Even the non-espers could hear it, and cringed away from the awful, inhuman sound.

Steel turned away from the chaos that raged inside his control tower, an icy hand clutching at his stomach while sweat rolled down his face. He’d lived in fear of this moment all his life, but had never really believed it would happen. Like everyone else, he’d grown complacent. Even when Typhoid Mary had been running amok in the streets and alleyways of Mistport, he’d still been able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. With a little help from his friends. But now his defenses were down, the psionic shield had failed, and soon the Empire forces would be howling at the gate, eager for blood and destruction. Steel swallowed hard, pulled himself together as best he could, and turned to his comm officer, sitting hunched over the mostly useless systems.

“All right, people, pay attention. With our comm systems out, this tower is now useless, except as a bloody obvious target for the incoming troops. So our first duty is to get the hell out of here. We’re no use to anybody dead. Crash all the systems that are still working before you go. We don’t want to leave anything that might be used against us. Somewhere here there should be worst-scenario files, telling you all what to do and where to go. Security should know. So, fight well, die hard, and take as many of the bastards with you as you can. Failing that, run like fury. Pep speech over; I’m out of here. And the good God protect us all.”

He turned away and began packing a few useful things into a holdall. It occurred to him that he might never see this room again. Never give orders as Port Director again. Whatever happened next, a chapter in his life was closing, and he didn’t know whether to feel sad or relieved. Being Director had been a hard and thankless task, even with his little schemes on the side to rake in money. But he’d taken his job seriously, and protected the city, his city, as best as he was able. Until now. And all he could do now was cut and run, abandoning his home to whoever could take and hold it. He sighed, and fastened the bulging holdall. They really should have got around to installing that self-destruct system, but they’d always put it off, thinking there was plenty of time.

Around him, raised voices were blending into an angry, deafening din, with just a trace of panic in it. Steel ignored it all and made his way out of the control tower, never once looking back. He had other duties now. As a member of the ruling city Council, he had to get together with the others and start organizing the city’s defenses. What was left of them. Out in the street it was chaos, with people running and pushing every way at once. Steel used his great bulk to plow a way through the crowds. He felt better now he was doing something, now he had an objective. If he could just reach the Blackthorn Inn, he might yet be able to show the invading forces some unexpected and really nasty surprises.

It took him the best part of an hour to get there, fighting the surging crowds all the way. The word had got out, inevitable in a city like Mistport, and there was pandemonium in the streets. People were shouting and running, brandishing weapons that ranged from energy guns to generations-old blades, handed down through families for just such a day as this. Some made bold speeches of defiance, while others prophesied doom, and would-be warriors and refugees tried blindly to push each other out of the way. Street barricades were already going up here and there, causing unfortunate bottlenecks of desperate people. Pickpockets and cutpurses were having the time of their lives. This was Mistport, after all, and neither invasion nor sudden death could be allowed to get in the way of turning a quick profit. Steel kept his head down and bulled his way through.

When he finally got to the Blackthorn Inn, in the heart of Thieves Quarter, the place was already packed to overflowing, with lights blazing from every window. It couldn’t have looked more like a target if it had tried. Most of the Council had beaten him there, but were too busy shouting and screaming at each other to acknowledge his arrival.
Typical
, thought Steel, and left them to get on with it. He pushed his way wearily to the long wooden bar. He felt in need of a stiff drink, and to hell with his ulcers. Cyder, the tavern owner, was helping to dispense drinks at the bar, alongside a sepulchral bartender, and Steel ordered several large brandies from her, in the same glass, on the grounds that it might be some time before he could slip away to order more. Cyder poured the brandies into a large silver tankard with only the slightest of winces, and smiled broadly at Steel.

“If I’d known the emergency Council was going to be this good for business, I’d have volunteered long ago.”

“Now that is typical of you, Cyder,” said Steel. “The whole city is about to get trashed, and us with it, and all you’re worried about is your profit margin.”

Cyder batted her eyes at him. “A girl has to look out for herself.”

“Please don’t do that,” said Steel. “On you, it looks unnatural.”

Cyder shrugged. “Whoever’s in charge of Mistport, people will still want to drink. And soldiers’ money is as good as anyone else’s.”

“Assuming they don’t burn the Blackthorn to the ground for harboring the emergency Council,” said Steel, taking a large gulp from his glass.

“Damn,” said Cyder. “I hadn’t thought of that. Why did you choose my place anyway?”

“Because it’s central. Because no one will be looking for the Council in a dive like this. And because you know practically everyone in this city. A perfect combination. I’d order some more barrels brought up from the cellar, if I were you. People are going to be rushing in and out of here like their pants were on fire, once the Council gets its act together, and they’re probably all going to want large drinks. Imminent danger and the chance of sudden death will do that to you. I don’t suppose there’s any sign of Donald Royal yet?”