Deathstalker Coda (44 page)

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Authors: Simon R. Green

BOOK: Deathstalker Coda
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Douglas felt just a little pervy having these deadly and delightful teenagers sticking so close, hanging on his every word and looking at him with their big worshipful eyes. He was old enough to be their father, or very nearly, and he was never sure if their constant flirting was as casual as it seemed. Not that he ever did anything about it, of course. It had been a long time since he’d done anything in his bed except sleep. At least he’d stopped them from pinching his bum when they were out in public.
He decided he’d had enough fresh air, or what passed for it in the Rookery, and went back inside. Alessandra and Joanna wished him good night, blew him a kiss, and took up their positions outside the door. That was as far away as they would allow. They’d wanted to actually sleep in his room, at the foot of his bed, to be sure of protecting him against night attacks, but he’d put his foot down about that. Espers were notoriously casual about privacy, but Douglas wasn’t. Alessandra called out to him to be sure to call out for anything he needed in the night, and Douglas shut the door firmly on her. He’d only just slumped into his chair when there was a brief knock at his door and Nina Malapert came breezing in. Douglas had to smile. Her boundless energy and never-ending smile always helped to cheer him up.
“Did you forget something at the meeting, Nina?”
“As if, lovey! I am always one hundred percent prepared and professional, and you know it. No, I just wanted to pop in and make sure you were all right. You looked distinctly down and moody at the meeting.”
Douglas sighed heavily. “I try to keep up an optimistic face, but the facts are we’re not making progress anywhere near as fast as we need to. We can’t keep expanding our territory to hold the refugees without Finn feeling the need to push back at some point. And I don’t think we’re ready to go to war yet.”
“Finn’s not dumb enough to start something he can’t be sure of winning,” Nina said easily, sitting on the arm of his chair. “If he commits his forces to a frontal attack, and we kick his arse, he’ll have rebellions breaking out on every planet in the Empire.”
“You’re forgetting the transmutation engines. As long as Finn has those, he has a gun to everyone’s head.”
“Oh, poo to the engines. You’ll figure out a way to stop them. It’s what you do.”
She chattered on cheerfully, and Douglas let her. He enjoyed her company, both as his adviser and his friend. She was always so alive, so full of energy and down-to-earth. He didn’t know what he’d do without her. Nina . . . was good for him. And she had a brain, behind all the chatter. She helped to plan rebel sorties into the outer city, based on information coming in all the time from the various stringers who kept the news site up to date on the very latest breaking news, facts, and gossip. She had people everywhere now, and her news site was on the air twenty-four hours a day, despite everything Finn could do to shut it down. Douglas approved of Nina.
“Oh! Oh! I almost forgot,” she said suddenly, beating her hands together before her like a child. “We finally got confirmation that the two fleets have made contact, fought a battle, and then Finn’s fleet surrendered to Lewis!”
Douglas sat up straight. “How the hell could you forget something that important?”
“Don’t be such a grouch, Douglas. You keep frowning like that and you’ll get lines on your face. I knew I had a reason for coming back here, it just escaped me for the moment. Anyway, we’ve been getting some marvelous battle footage, including Lewis doing a few things you are just not going to believe, but, but—the big news is . . . the combined fleet is heading straight for Logres!”
“An exclusive,” said Douglas, smiling.
“Yes!”
“Nina,” Douglas said sternly. “Are you sure you didn’t know this before the meeting?”
Nina pouted. “Only rumors, sweetie, nothing definite. And it isn’t the sort of thing you want to announce without definite evidence. We’re still getting details, and broadcasting it all, including the surrender, to every planet in the Empire. And my people are looking at some information provided from a ship called the
Heritage
, about what really happened at Usher Two, when the Terror came. Some rather disturbing details that Finn suppressed. You know . . . I can’t help feeling I’m getting jaded, darling. There was a time when news like this would have had me bouncing up and down and hyperventilating. I haven’t done my happy dance in weeks.”
“It is excellent news,” said Douglas, rising up suddenly from his chair, and almost knocking Nina off the arm. He steadied her absentmindedly, and then strode up and down in the small room, thinking hard. “Assuming there wasn’t too much damage during the battle, the sheer size of the combined fleet should mean Finn hasn’t got anything big enough or powerful enough to put up against it. All he’s got left are the transmutation engines . . . We have got to find a way to knock them offline . . .”
“What do you think Finn will do, when he hears the news?” said Nina.
Douglas smiled grimly. “Knowing him, something extreme. You’d better call everybody back, Nina. We need another meeting.”
 
Emperor Finn heard the news of his fleet’s surrender, and took it very badly. The loss of his fleet was just the latest in a series of last straws. He smashed every piece of furniture in his quarters, and pounded his fists on the bare walls, before falling back into a cold and very dangerous self-control. He needed to do something, something big and dramatic and horrifyingly nasty, to make it clear to everyone that he was still in charge. So he turned on the nearest target, the most irksome thorn in his side. The Rookery. He walked across the room, kicking pieces of shattered furniture out of the way, and when he was sure his breathing had returned to normal, he activated his viewscreen and called Joseph Wallace in his bunker.
Joseph appeared before his Emperor, straight from his bed, looking a little tousled and distinctly wary. News this late in the evening was rarely ever anything he wanted to hear.
“The time has come,” Finn said crisply. “I want the Rookery crushed, and you’re going to do it for me. I give you complete charge of all my armed forces, dear Joseph, and all I ask in return is that you should march into the Rookery and kill every man, woman, and child you find there. No one is to be allowed to escape. No mercy, no prisoners, no survivors. Burn the place to the ground, and leave not one brick standing upon another. I give you charge over all my soldiers, my Church Militant and Pure Humanity fanatics, all the thralls you can persuade to follow you, and all the air support you will need. This time, there will be no stopping us. You will keep pushing forward, despite any or all losses, until you come out the other side and the Rookery is no more.
“And Joseph, dear Joseph—if you don’t succeed, don’t come back.”
 
Diana Vertue was out and about in the Rookery, despite the lateness of the hour. She’d got into the habit of making regular patrols on her own, ostensibly searching out spies and informers, but really just to immerse herself in the flow of life and the living. She’d been dead a long time, and she was still getting used to the unexpected fires and passions of the body she wore. People watched her go by, and sometimes smiled or nodded, but always from a safe distance. Diana Vertue was respected rather than loved. Jenny Psycho’s legend had taken some pretty strange paths down the years, and it had been pretty extreme to begin with. Even Robert and Constance hadn’t been able to sanitize her, not least because she was one of the few great heroes still around and kicking over the traces on a regular basis. Diana did like to think she’d mellowed a little since she returned.
It felt good to be back in her body again, after so many years of existing only as a thought in the mass-mind of the oversoul; even if this wasn’t, strictly speaking, her own body. The Psycho Sluts believed Diana had manifested herself again through an act of will, and she had done nothing to dissuade them. It all helped her reputation. She didn’t tell them the truth because all her long years had done nothing to dull her natural paranoia. A secret shared is no longer a secret.
Diana Vertue’s original body had been very thoroughly destroyed in a battle with the uber-espers, over a hundred years ago. She’d been led into an ambush by someone she’d had every reason to trust, and her old tired body and mind had been no match for all the uber-espers at once. Her body was utterly consumed in mental fires, but at the last moment her mind was caught up and preserved by the oversoul. A psionic working performed so swiftly and so expertly than even the uber-espers didn’t notice until it was too late. And so Diana Vertue had lived on, at peace and content in the mass-mind, until recent events had called to her and brought her forth again, renewed and revitalized in the fresh young body she’d kept preserved, in the event of such need as this.
Diana had always had enemies, and knew the time would inevitably come when one of them proved stronger than her, so she made secret preparations for an emergency bolt-hole. After the war against the Recreated was over, Diana took advantage of her new (and fleeting) heroic status to do something awful, and unforgivable. She bullied the clone underground leaders into creating several brain-wiped adult clones, from her own tissues. This was a death crime, both for Diana Vertue and the clone leaders who agreed to it, but there were few indeed who’d ever been strong enough to say no to Jenny Psycho.
She’d expected to die in one body and wake up in another, but the oversoul intervened. This had rather surprised Diana, who had never thought they’d want anyone as notoriously disruptive as her, but it seemed she was a hero to them, as well. And in their midst she had found unexpected peace of mind, and forgotten all about the clones.
But she should have known; even heaven couldn’t last forever. She couldn’t abandon Logres to Finn, and leave with the rest of the espers in the Icarus Working; so when the floating city of New Hope took off for Mistworld, she had already left the oversoul and decanted her consciousness into one of the waiting clone bodies.
It was still there, in its body bank, waiting to be occupied. She slid into it as easily as a hand into a glove, and the body bank had recognized her presence and revived the body for her. She sat up sharply, drawing breath deep into her lungs, the shock of the body’s senses and sensations almost overwhelming after so long as a merely mental presence. After a while, she pulled herself out of the body bank, and tottered around the abandoned warehouse on unsteady legs. The other tanks were shrouded in dust and cobwebs, and there was nothing else in the warehouse, except the cold and the shadows. Diana checked the other bodies. Of the seven she’d put aside, only three were still alive. Diana brushed away the dust from one viewport, and a gray mummified face stared back up at her. Seeing her own dead face gave her a bad moment, but Diana was made of hard stuff, and she made herself turn away and put her new body through a series of exercises, designed to get the blood moving properly again. It had been a long time since she’d felt . . . human. The body didn’t feel quite the way she remembered. There were differences. In some ways, it felt like haunting an uninhabited house.
And she wasn’t used to feeling so alone, cut off from the other minds of the oversoul. She could have reached them with her thoughts; Mistworld wasn’t that far away for a powerful mind like hers, but she couldn’t risk the contact. They might object to the things she’d done and the secrets she’d hidden, even from them. Besides, she needed to be a mystery, to her enemies and her allies. Keeping them unsure meant keeping them off balance. She allowed herself a distant kind of contact with her new followers, the Psycho Sluts. They were keen and sharp and enthusiastic, and openly worshiped her, which was a useful thing in itself, but she couldn’t let even them get too close. She was a monster now, just like Finn. She’d sacrificed the lives and the souls of the seven women who would have been her clones, on the altar of her necessity.
But then, whether as Diana Vertue or as Jenny Psycho, she’d always been able to do the harsh, necessary things.
Just like her father.
She enjoyed the company of the Psycho Sluts, though it was no match for the closeness of the oversoul, and did her best to be honest with them when she could. They wanted to know about how things really were, back in the days of the Great Rebellion, the history rather than the legend, and Diana told them, even when it made her look bad. She’d never cared about being a hero or a legend, except when she could turn it to her advantage. But . . .
Was there never anyone special in your life?
Alessandra had asked, and Diana was surprised to find she didn’t have an answer, except . . .
There was never time, or room, in the life I had to lead, for anyone but me.
Diana Vertue increased the length of her stride, hurrying through the narrow streets, trying to leave such disturbing thoughts behind her. She was back, and she had much to do. And if inhabiting her stolen clone body made her feel just a little like one of the possessor ELFs, she tried hard not to think about it. Monsters did what they had to.
 
Meanwhile, the Emperor Finn was having his own problems. Since most of the transmutation engines were lost or destroyed in the battle, or, more properly, balls-up at Mog Mor, he had lost one of his most potent threats for keeping the other planets in line. If the people knew how few engines he actually had left, he’d be fighting off rebellions all across the Empire. He needed a replacement threat fast, before some damned hero dared to call his bluff. He’d heard of what the rebel fleet had done to the engines he’d left orbiting Virimonde, showing how vulnerable the things were to a surprise attack by a strong enough force.

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