Deathstalker Coda (17 page)
Authors: Simon R. Green
“All right, you’re hired.”
The Emperor Finn Durandal was not at all happy about being roused from his sleep at such an early hour of the morning, but since the only people who had this particular private comm number were the ELF leaders, he supposed he’d better answer it. Somehow he just knew it wasn’t going to be good news. He sat slumped on the side of his bed, yawning and rubbing at his eyes, and finally activated the viewscreen built into his bedside table.
“This had better be important,” he growled.
The scowling face on the screen was unknown to him, but he expected that. The ELF leaders never showed their true faces; they only ever spoke through their thralls. Even after all this time, Finn had no idea who the ELF leaders really were—one of the many things that had been bothering him lately. The possessed face on the screen looked distinctly upset, which pleased Finn somewhat. If he wasn’t having a good time, no one else should either.
“We have been attacked,” the ELF leader said flatly. “A psychic assault of incredible power. Many of our people are still recovering.”
“Who the hell could do that to you?” said Finn.
“Diana Vertue has appeared in the Rookery.”
Finn blinked a few times. “That’s a good trick,” he said finally. “Considering she’s been dead for over a century.”
“That doesn’t mean anything where she’s concerned. She was an avatar of the Mater Mundi, and even the uber-espers were scared of that force. Diana Vertue is back, and she has sided with the Campbell. You should have let us kill him long ago.”
“Possibly,” said Finn. “But I did so want him to suffer first. Very well, kill him, if it will make you happy.”
“We can’t. He is protected by Diana Vertue and her army of rogue espers! Already they have cost us hundreds of thralls. Our presence in the Rookery has been almost wiped out! You have to do something!”
“I am doing something,” said Finn, just a little testily. “I never thought you and your thralls would be enough to stop Douglas from putting together a rebellion, once he came out of his sulk. He always did have a way with words, along with that damned charismatic personality of his. So I’ve been preparing my own little army, to fight specifically in the Rookery. I always knew I’d have to deal with the ungrateful little bastards someday. The Rookery has finally become too dangerous to be allowed to exist. I’ve been reluctant to sign their death warrant . . . partly because there was always the chance that I’d need their special talents again someday, and partly because I’m a sentimental old softy, but . . . Get your remaining people out of the Rookery. I’m going to send in my very best fanatics, to cleanse the place with fire and steel. I will tear down the buildings, and raise a mountain of skulls.”
“You’d better,” said the ELF.
The viewscreen went blank. Finn stuck out his tongue at it. He sighed, stood up, and rang for his servants to come in and dress him. No point in trying to get back to sleep now. Not when he had slaughter and devastation to plan. He ordered a series of calls to his generals in the Church Militant. If he didn’t sleep, no one else got to sleep either.
Pure Humanity and the Church Militant had become one church and one philosophy, under the benevolent guidance of the very practical Joseph Wallace. The shock troops of the Empire now worshiped Finn directly, and natural selection among the faithful, bolstered by numerous purges, had produced an army of implacable zealots and fanatical soldiers. They would die for Finn, though of course they would much rather kill for him. He was the Chosen One, the Defender of Humanity, their day and their night. And they were his attack dogs.
There were thousands of them, armed to the teeth, their heads boiling with battle drugs and virulent propaganda. They were the righteous, and mercy and compassion and all such weaknesses were not in them. They gathered at the boundaries of the Rookery and then marched in by all the entryways at once, singing their awful hymns, and killing everyone they saw. They shot down men, women, and children, and cut down those who didn’t run away fast enough. They set fires and planted explosives in buildings. Their lord had said that not one stone should remain standing upon another, and not one heathen soul should be left alive to see the coming day. They did not care, or falter. They were doing God’s work, and it felt fine, so fine.
Men, women, and children lay dead and dying in the streets, and the Church Militant soldiers marched right over them. Fires burned brightly against the dark, and explosions sounded in the night like the heavy footfalls of an avenging God. Anywhere else in the city there would have been nothing but panic, and people running blindly, but this was the Rookery, and the people here were made of harder stuff. Word passed quickly of the invasion, and all too soon the Church Militant advance ground to a halt in the face of implacable opposition. Men, women, and children came running from all directions to block the invaders’ way, all of them armed with some kind of weapon. More people gathered on the roofs, to rain down debris on the enemy. There were snipers with energy guns at the higher windows, and fast-footed youths darted out of alleyways with improvised grenades.
In the Rookery it was truly said: Any man against his neighbor, but every man against the outsider.
Douglas, Stuart, and Nina worked tirelessly through the endless hours of the morning, organizing the rebel forces, sending people to fight where they were most needed. Diana Vertue and the Psycho Sluts struck the armed forces again and again, darting in and out in vicious hit-and-run tactics, leaving death and destruction in their wake. Even some of the aliens emerged onto the streets, for a chance to strike back at their persecutors.
The Rookery rose up, combined at last into a single great force with a single aim. The Emperor had made himself their enemy, a threat to their homes and their lives, and they would never rest again till they had brought him down. The people surged through the streets, throwing themselves at the invaders in wave after wave, howling a hundred different battle cries in a single enraged voice. The end result of generations of people who had had to fight for everything in their lives. Guns blazed and swords flashed, and the Church Militant soldiers fell in their dozens, and then in their hundreds, and finally in their thousands. The people of the Rookery came from everywhere at once, to drag the fanatics down by sheer force of numbers. The Rookery rose up, savage and unrelenting, and all in a moment the invasion became a rout. The Church Militant abandoned their weapons, their orders, and their faith in Finn and themselves, and in ragged groups they ran for the Rookery boundaries. Of the hundreds of thousands of proud and arrogant zealots who’d marched into the Rookery, only a few hundred made it out alive.
Nina Malapert got a lot of it on film, and broadcast every bit of it on her rogue news site, with the tech team using all their ingenuity to keep it on the air for as long as possible. All over Logres, and on worlds across the Empire, people watched as Finn’s authority was challenged, and thrown back in his face. They saw the blood and the bodies, and whole families slaughtered by the Church Militant troops, and then they watched as Douglas Campbell and Stuart Lennox fought back to back against impossible odds, and never had those two looked more like heroes.
Finn’s censors shut down the broadcast, eventually, and there was nothing left but blank screens, all across the Empire.
In the Rookery, the people gathered up their dead, treated the wounded as best they could, and put out the fires. They didn’t feel much like celebrating. But at least now there was no doubt over whose side they were on. They stopped pursuing the troops at the boundaries only because Douglas sent messages to call them back. He knew they weren’t ready to go head-to-head with Finn’s armies. Not yet. Hot tempers subsided into cold, bitter anger as the people of the Rookery counted their dead and added up the damage. And hard-hearted and harder-headed men and women, who would never have come together for something as nebulous as a cause, now found themselves united in an aching hunger for revenge.
And on worlds all across the Empire, and most especially on Logres, people regarded their blank viewscreens, and looked at the Emperor Finn and his shock troops in a whole new way.
Finn was furious. He raged back and forth in his palace communications center, trying to summon up more troops, but most of his armed forces were posted as occupation troops in cities all across Logres. It would take hours to bring them all to the Parade of the Endless, and then, who would control the cities they left? . . . Finn had attack sleds, battle wagons, and even starcruisers at his disposal, but again it would take hours to call them in. Finn kicked out at the furniture—and any of his staff who didn’t get out of his way fast enough. He couldn’t understand how it had all gone wrong so quickly. How a rabble of outcasts and criminals could have wiped out his elite troops so easily.
Douglas. It had to be Douglas.
Finn drove everyone else out of the comm center, and called on the ELFs for help. A large enough army of thralls might yet save the day for him. Suicide troops, driven on by outside minds, could still overrun the Rookery’s defenses. But none of the ELF leaders, or the uber-espers, would take his calls. Finn sat down slowly in the empty room, his thoughts whirling madly, unable to settle. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t the one driving events, and he didn’t know what to do. He must have missed something, but what? What?
In the end, after it had been quiet for too long, the comm staff sent for Joseph Wallace. He calmed everyone down as best he could, with soothing words and rousing platitudes, and then he stuck his head gingerly round the door of the comm center. Finn was still sitting in his chair, thinking, ignoring flashing message lights on consoles all around him. Joseph decided this wasn’t the moment to inform Finn that uprisings were breaking out on planets all across the Empire, inspired by what people had seen happening in the Rookery. Joseph gently closed the door, and quietly began giving orders in Finn’s name. Security people came and went, putting together a depressing picture of what was happening everywhere at once. Joseph authorized vicious reprisals and clampdowns, but as fast as rebellion was slapped down in one place, it sprang up in another.
Alarms sounded in the comm center, but Finn turned them off. The noise made his head hurt, and he needed to think.
If he’d known what was going on with the ELF leaders and the uber-espers, Finn would have been even more disturbed. Behind the scenes, an even more bitter struggle was going on, with no quarter asked or given. The ELF leaders and the uber-espers had finally erupted into open war over who controlled the movement. Both sides had been secretly amassing great armies of thralls, to feed their power and back their play, and after what had happened in the Rookery both sides had decided that the time had come to break free from Finn, and go their own way.
It was an esper war, fought on mental battlegrounds, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world at first, but nonetheless vicious and deadly for all that. The huge thrall armies were living power sources, reservoirs of mental energy that both sides could tap into as they fought their war. Telepathic battles raged back and forth as minds clashed with minds, on eerie inhuman landscapes created just for that purpose. Minds crashed and splintered, and esper attacks sometimes spilled over into the material world, in outbreaks of weird weather and probability fluctuations. Psi storms sleeted through the surrounding areas, destroying all unshielded minds in their paths. The two sides raged back and forth, neither strong enough to entirely overwhelm the other. But neither side would back down, and so the psionic pressure built and built, until finally the energies spiraled entirely out of control and blew one whole section of the Parade of the Endless apart in an explosion so loud and bright the echoes could be felt all over Logres. (Finn later blamed the explosion on rebel saboteurs. Because he had to say something.)
The esper battle ended in a stalemate, with neither side gaining or losing ground, and so both sides retreated to lick their psychic wounds, and prepare for future battles. Both the ELF leaders and the uber-espers were determined to stand alone now, and follow their own destiny. They didn’t need Finn anymore. They would rule Humanity on their own terms, and to hell with all alliances of convenience.
Finn crushed the uprisings, eventually. It cost him time and money and manpower, far more than he could afford, but he had no choice. He had to maintain control. Planet by planet, city by city, the rebellions were stamped out with gun and steel, and a slow sullen silence fell across the Empire, every bit of it now under strict martial law. Rebel bodies hung from lampposts in their hundreds, in every city, and heavily armed and armored troops walked the city streets, looking nervously over their shoulders.
The Rookery was strictly off-limits. No one went in, and no one came out.
Finn was more worried about the loss of his ELF allies. None of them would talk to him anymore, and all his contacts seemed to have disappeared underground. He’d relied upon their support for too long; his spy organizations were lost without their telepathically gained intelligence. Finn told Joseph Wallace that production of esp-blockers was now to have priority over everything else, but couldn’t explain why. Unfortunately, it turned out you couldn’t manufacture esp-blockers without the required esper brain tissues, and the cloning of esper tissues had always had a high failure rate. So mass production was going to be a slow, time-consuming process. (Joseph delivered that message over the comm, from a safe distance. He still didn’t entirely trust Finn’s temper.)
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