Deathstalker War (56 page)

“Shut up,” said Kit. “Get your breath back, and we’ll head back up the passage.”

“No. I’m not going anywhere. I’m cold, Kit. So cold.”

Kit sat up, put his back against the passage wall, and cradled David in his arms, holding him close, trying to share his warmth with the dying man.

“Had some good times here, didn’t we, Kit?”

“The best.”

“Pity about Alice. And Jenny.”

“Yes.”

“Leave me, Kit.”

“What?”

“They want me, not you. Pointless, you dying here as well as me.”

“I can’t leave you, David. You’re my friend.”

“Then do as I ask. Don’t die for nothing. Kill me, and then go out to them. My death will put you in good with Lionstone again. Show her my head, and she’ll probably make you Lord of Virimonde. They’ll think you’re one of them, after all.”

“David . . . please. I can’t . . .”

“Yes you can. You have to. I don’t want to die here, by inches, screaming when the pain gets really bad. Do it, Kit. Be my friend. One last time.”

He coughed harshly, and couldn’t stop. Blood spilled down his chin. He tried to speak again and couldn’t. Kit hugged him tightly till the coughing stopped, then drew his knife and thrust it expertly between David’s ribs. The breath went out of the Deathstalker in a long sigh, and then he was still. Kit sat there for a while, cradling the dead body in his arms. David had been quite right. The Empress would take him back, as David’s executioner. She’d always had a soft spot for her smiling killer. And it wasn’t as if he had anywhere else to go. The rebellion was over. Anyone could see that. So that just left Lionstone. He was a killer, and he had to go where the killing was. He carefully laid David’s body down on the passage floor and arranged his arms and legs neatly. He drew his sword and leaned over David. The Deathstalker’s face was very calm. Kit leaned down and kissed David on the bloody lips.

“My love.”

He straightened up and raised his sword.

CHAPTER FOUR

EVERYONE GOES TO GOLGOTHH

And so the war finally began, almost by accident.

The live broadcast of Virimonde’s destruction and the slaughter of its population by Imperial forces backfired badly. A roar of rage and condemnation spread across the whole Empire, planet after planet seeing its own possible future in the horrific images unfolding before them on their viewscreens. Insurrections arose spontaneously on world after world, sparks fanning into flames as the incoming images grew steadily worse. The lower classes took to the streets, protests quickly becoming riots, turning on anything that could be seen as representing Imperial authority. The moneyed classes were right out there with them, as often as not, driven from their complacency by shock and outrage, ready to fight and die rather than see their world mechanized like Virimonde.

The underground seized the opportunity before it, and sent its people out on every world they had access to, guiding and assisting the spontaneous uprisings. They supplied weapons, pointed crowds in the right directions, and put long-crafted plans into operation. Deep-planted sleeper agents committed sabotage, disrupted communications, and generally brought people together to do the most damage possible. The army responded by emptying its barracks and sending troops straight out onto the streets, with orders to shoot everything that moved. It might have worked, if so many people hadn’t been shocked and sickened by what they’d seen happening on Virimonde. They were too angry now to be properly scared. Men and women spilled out onto the streets, armed with whatever weapons they could find or improvise, and fell upon the Imperial troops in such numbers that not even massed energy weapons could stop them. All across the Empire, on world after world, there was blood and slaughter in the towns and cities, and official buildings blazed like warning beacons of the battle to come.

In the streets they cursed the name of the Widowmaker Dram, and tore down the portraits and statues of the Iron Bitch, and howled for revenge for the dead of Virimonde.

Increasingly isolated as well as outraged, the Lords added their troops to the rebellion, sending their armed forces out to fight the Imperial troops alongside the rebels. The Families were nothing if not survivors, and Lionstone had become a greater threat to them than any momentary uprisings. They’d always known she was crazy, but now she had become dangerously insane. If Lionstone had consulted them first, about David or Virimonde or even the mechanization, things might have been different. They’d have found some way to turn it to their advantage. But the first they knew of any of it was when their viewscreens showed them the rape of a Lord’s planet. It didn’t take too much imagination for any of them to see themselves as Lionstone’s next object of opportunity, outlawed so their planet could be next in line for mechanization under Lionstone’s direct rule. Faced with a clear threat to their lives, their position, and their wealth, it was inevitable that the Lords would tacitly encourage the rebellion. The lower orders could always be put back in their place later. And if many Lords saw in the chaos an opportunity to place themselves on the Iron Throne, they kept it to themselves, for the moment.

Suddenly, it seemed like everything was up for grabs. Anything seemed possible. Every group and faction and cause saw a chance to overthrow the way things were, and went out into the streets to fight for it. People who wouldn’t normally have spoken to each other without spitting became temporary allies, fighting side by side, held together by the shared aim of throwing Lionstone off the Iron Throne before she could destroy them all in her madness. In city after city, on world after world, the people went head-to-head with Imperial troops, and the cry of rebellion was on everyone’s lips.

The army and the Fleet could have coped with a few planetwide rebellions, but not everything at once. Stretched thinly across the Empire, attacked on every front and even from within by those sympathetic to the rebels and their cause, the Imperial forces were crippled by confusion. Starcruisers appeared over the worst trouble spots, but they’d never been intended to deal with planetside rebellions. Their only real threat was a scorching, and for the moment, at least, they were spread too thinly for that. Rebels in their crews sabotaged their communications, isolating them further. The underground had planned for this day, and the Empire, in its arrogance, had not.

On the planet Golgotha, homeworld of Empire, center of authority, outraged people filled the streets, rioting and looting and burning down the command centers. Because they’d had so much more to lose, they’d hesitated at first from open rebellion, but the underground had swiftly spread rumors that Lionstone was planning harsh new taxes, even more repressive laws, and was even planning to shut down their precious Arenas. After what they’d seen on Virimonde, the people were ready to believe anything of her, and these new threats hit them where they lived. Isolated protests were put down with such fury and bloodshed that even the hardened populace of Golgotha was shocked, and they rose up everywhere at once. The underground did its best to guide them in the right directions, while hiding its smiles. It had always known people need motivating, and what they won’t do for the right reason, sometimes they will for the wrong reason.

The authorities sent out every armed trooper they had, with orders to stop the riots at all costs and not to bother with taking prisoners. This just made matters worse, infuriating an already defiant population, and as fast as troopers put the rebellion down in one place, it just popped up in another, regrouping and re-forming faster than it could be dispersed. The underground disrupted all levels of communication, while using espers to organize their own forces. The Clans took one look at the growing chaos, called back all their troops, and retreated into their pastel Towers, safe behind organized levels of security. Encouraging the fighting on other worlds was one thing, but this was too close to home. So they kept their heads well down, avoided attracting attention to themselves, and let the rebels concentrate their hatred on Lionstone’s authority. And when the mess was over, and the rebels were tired and aimless once more, the Families would emerge and take control again, as they always had. Or so they thought. They didn’t know about the underground—its plans and its powers. They didn’t know about the people who’d been through the Madness Maze. They didn’t realize that the great rebellion had finally begun.

Parliament convened and agreed to stand aside and support whoever came out on top. Which surprised no one.

Above the worlds of Empire, starships clashed in the night. The underground had put out a call to the Hadenmen, and their great golden ships were abroad in the night again. Huge and fast and awesome, they were more than a match for the scattered Imperial starcruisers. As far as numbers went, the Hadenman ships were greatly in the minority, but they ran rings around the slower Empire ships, outgunning and outperforming them on every level. The Empire crews panicked, faced with the legendary old Enemies of Humanity, and put out general distress calls, demanding that all Imperial ships forget about the rebellions to face the greater threat of the Hadenmen. Starcruisers all across the Empire ignored Lionstone’s increasingly frantic orders and raced to meet the golden ships, only to fall one by one. Blazing wreckage cartwheeled slowly down through the atmospheres of unsuspecting planets. And the Hadenmen sailed on through the long night.

The Church of Christ the Warrior saw the second coming of the augmented men as a spiritual as well as a martial threat, and threw everything they had against the Hadenmen, ignoring the rebellion. They fared no better than the Fleet, once again distracting ships and troops that might have prevailed against the rebellion. The underground confused things even farther by spreading carefully placed rumors that Lionstone was planning to seize the Church’s tithes to replace her missing taxes, thus alienating the Church even more. Every little bit helped.

If Lionstone had had more than just a few E class starcruisers to call on, with their new stardrives and superior weapons systems, things might have been different. But after the rebels destroyed the Wolfe stardrive factory on Technos III, there were only five E class ships in service, and they couldn’t be everywhere at once. There were even open mutinies on some Imperial ships, as junior officers with rebel sympathies and underground connections led takeover bids on the control decks, backed by disgruntled lower ranks who hadn’t been paid for months, because of Treasury shortfalls after the Tax systems crashed. A surprising number of these mutinies succeeded, and the new rebel ships withdrew themselves from combat. They wouldn’t fight their own kind, but they would take no further part against the rebellion.

Meanwhile, Toby Shreck and his cameraman Flynn were right there in the thick of it all, getting everything on film, transmitting live as often as they could. Dragged from one bloody firefight to another by their Imperial minders, they did their best to cover everything as objectively as possible. The army officers supposed to be in charge of censoring their output were mostly too busy with their own problems.

On a battlefield pockmarked with craters on the planet Loki, the Imperial armies were overrun by wild-eyed rebel forces, and Toby and Flynn took the first opportunity to make a run for it. They didn’t get far among the body-filled craters before they were stopped by the advancing rebel forces, who luckily recognized Toby. A few even asked for autographs. Toby pleaded eloquently to be sent to Golgotha, where the real story was, and after a certain amount of discussion the rebels were happy to send them on their way. They understood the need for good propaganda, and it seemed only fair to all concerned that the two men who had covered so much of the story should be there for the final act when it happened. Toby smiled and nodded and agreed modestly in all the right places, and prayed no one would ask awkward questions about who was going to pay all the bills. No one did, so Toby and Flynn set off on the first of half a dozen uncomfortable journeys that would take them eventually to Golgotha, Lionstone’s Court, and the Hell that she had made there.

For it was on Golgotha that the real fighting, the clashes that mattered, would take place. Who rules homeworld rules the Empire. Everyone knew that. And so Lionstone retreated into her Palace of gleaming steel and brass, set inside a massive steel bunker a mile and a half wide, sunk deep below the surface of the planet, and waited for her enemies to come to her.

They were burning the poets, hanging the troubadours, impaling the satirists. Blood and screams and horror. Just another day in Hell. The Court was a dark, dangerous place now, reflecting the mind of its ruler. The Empress Lionstone XIV, the worshiped and adored, sat on her Iron Throne as though she might leap down from it at any moment, to rend and savage some unfortunate enemy. She wore shimmering white battle armor, which together with her pale face and long blond hair made her look like some vengeful family ghost. Normally she wore her long mane of hair piled up on top of her head for Court appearances, but now it hung down in long uncared-for tresses, through which her icy blue eyes stared unwaveringly. And on her head the tall spiky crown, cut from a single huge diamond—the symbol of power and authority in the Empire.

At the base of her Throne, her maids-in-waiting crouched watchfully like the guard dogs they were. Naked and unashamed as animals, mindwiped and surgically altered to be loyal unto death, they watched the Court through cybernetic senses, ready for any threat to their beloved mistress. They would kill or die to protect her, and their ferocity was legendary. Their teeth were pointed and their fingers ended in implanted steel claws. Within their naked bodies they had other, nastier surprises, the best that money could buy. Once they had been as human as anyone else, with minds and lives of their own, but that was before Lionstone chose them, and took them away from their old lives to be a part of hers. They could be commoner or aristocrat; all were made equally vile under Lionstone’s wishes. No one objected. No one dared. Besides, it was an honor to be a maid-in-waiting to the Empress.

Floating on the air before the Throne, dozens of view-screens showed scenes from all across the Empire. The views changed rapidly, constantly updating themselves on the growing path of the rebellion. Announcers with sweating faces read the news almost apologetically. There were charts showing rebel advances and Imperial losses. Shaky cameras showed scenes of blood and chaos and the roar of battle. They all looked much the same. Increasingly confused commentators chattered endlessly about what it all meant. On some worlds the rebels had seized control of communications, and triumphant smoke-blackened faces called for the downtrodden to rise up and overthrow the Iron Bitch. Screens blanked in and out as the underground and their cyberat allies interfered with the comm channels, but there were always more signals coming in to replace them. The whole Empire was shouting at the top of its voice, desperate to be heard. The Empress watched it all, her steady gaze cold as death itself. For those who thought they knew her, her cold calm was more worrying than her earlier shouted orders and temper tantrums. It meant she was thinking. Planning. Deliberating on her revenges, and the awful forms they would take.

Standing quietly before the Iron Throne, at what they hoped was a safe distance, were two of the few people apart from guards and their victims still admitted to the Imperial Court. General Shaw Beckett and the Warrior Prime, the Lord High Dram. There were no courtiers present. No Lords and their Ladies, no representatives of the great Families, no Members of Parliament, no one from the one true Church, none of the usual celebrities and characters and hangers-on. Lionstone didn’t trust them anymore. Any of them. And so Beckett and Dram stood together, ignoring each other as best they could. They were both men of war, but all they had in common was their loyalty.

Tall and imposing, Dram wore his usual jet-black robes over black battle armor, looking like some gore crow fresh from the battlefield. He wore both gun and sword in the presence of his Empress, one of the very few so allowed. Beckett, on the other hand, looked a mess, as always. His carefully tailored battle armor couldn’t hide the fact that he was seriously overweight, his robes were decidedly scruffy, and he carried himself with immense calm but little authority. He was smoking an evil-smelling cigar and not caring where the smoke went.