Deathstalker Coda (45 page)
Authors: Simon R. Green
So Finn went to see his pet clone master, Elijah du Katt, to see how his cloned army was coming along. He’d ordered five million new soldiers, all based on his own genetic makeup, but du Katt had only just produced the first batch, of under half a million. And the advance word on their condition . . . wasn’t all he’d hoped for. Sometimes, Finn thought, things wouldn’t go right if you killed them, chopped them up, and distributed the parts as party favors.
Du Katt’s laboratory was one of the most heavily guarded locations within the Imperial Palace. Finn preferred to keep his friends and allies close, where he could keep a watchful eye on them. Du Katt had one of the clone prototypes waiting for Finn when he breezed in. The lab itself was spotlessly clean, everything in its place, but it was perhaps just a little too brightly lit, too carefully arranged. Finn sighed inwardly. The odds were du Katt was running his own private projects again, and had tidied away the evidence a bit too thoroughly on hearing Finn was coming. Still, that was a matter for another time. Finn stood right in front of du Katt and the clone, and was pleased to see his proximity made the tic by du Katt’s eye just that little bit worse. He considered the clone. It had a muscular body and a face that resembled his own famously good-looking features, but there were so many things wrong with the clone that Finn didn’t even know where to start. The arms were of different length, there was a slight but definite hump on the back, and all the bones of the face were enlarged and distorted. The clone looked like Finn’s idiot brother. Still, he held himself well, and his gaze seemed clear enough. Finn looked at du Katt, who flinched.
“I told you, I warned you,” he said quickly. “Providing so many clones from just the one sample, in such a restricted time inevitably meant a certain deterioration in the template, and certain . . . tolerable defects.”
“He looks like damaged goods,” said Finn, slowly circling the clone, who stood calmly, apparently unperturbed by the things being said about him. Finn sniffed loudly. “Can he fight?”
“Of course, of course! Manual dexterity is well within acceptable limits. They have been programmed with knowledge of the sword and the gun, and to follow orders without question. As long as they’re not too complicated, of course . . . There was a certain amount of brain damage, just as I predicted . . . But you asked for simple brute soldiers, and that’s what you’ve got. He and his many brothers should be quite sufficient for the simple tasks you have in mind. Killing and property damage and . . . so on. They don’t have a lot of personality, but that’s probably just as well. You could have the whole of Batch One out on the streets tomorrow, if you wanted.”
Finn considered the matter. “Details, du Katt. I require details. What exactly is wrong with them?”
Du Katt sighed. “They all exhibit acceptable minor malfunctions of the body. You understand, these are the best of Batch One. Forty-seven percent of the entire batch were so malformed as to be useless for your purposes, and had to be scrapped and returned to the protein banks for recycling. Of the survivors, none of them are too bright, and they’ve all shown definite violent tendencies. A significant percentage exhibit some or all of the symptoms for schizophrenia. And they all score very low on empathy. None of this should be a problem, considering what you want to use them for.”
“Quite,” said Finn. “You have done well, du Katt. Get this batch out on the streets immediately. I want order restored, and I don’t care how they do it. It might be best to issue them all face masks of some kind; I don’t want them identified as clones just yet. And their features . . . might still be recognized. My face is worshiped all across the Empire, and I won’t share that with anyone.”
The first new Imperial guards, all dressed out in full body armor and featureless steel masks, appeared on the streets of Logres in under three hours, and quickly proved themselves every bit as brutal and merciless as the thrall peacekeepers. There had been parts of the Parade of the Endless that remained almost civilized, if not actually free, just because the thralls couldn’t be everywhere at once; but the new guards soon put a stop to that. Curfews were strictly enforced, all infringements of the law were punished by on the spot executions, and even the smallest signs of dissent or defiance were quickly stamped out. Sometimes literally. Joseph Wallace watched this new turn of events from within the safety of his bunker, and worried.
He’d known Finn was working on a private project with du Katt, but the new guards still came as something of a surprise to him. More and more, Joseph was feeling left out of things, his power and influence much reduced. He was still nominally the head of Church Militant and Pure Humanity, but neither enjoyed the popular support they once had. No one believed in the religion or the politics anymore, given all the things Finn had done in their name. Just the hard-core fanatics remained, most of them personally loyal to the Emperor, not Joseph Wallace. People didn’t even go to church anymore . . . because they were afraid to go out. Joseph felt lost. The people had turned against everything he believed in, and turned against him. And therefore deserved everything that happened to them.
Although he would never have admitted it to anyone, even himself, Joseph’s behavior had become increasingly erratic of late. He’d overseen the construction of a safe retreat for himself and his remaining loyal followers: a solid steel bunker deep in the heart of the city, staffed by the few people he felt he could still depend on. He had the place stocked with all the comforts and necessities of life, and surrounded it with every deadly defense known to man; and then he never left it, unless personally summoned by the Emperor. He had planned and launched what he thought were subtle and secret attacks against the thralls wearing his uniforms, disguised as purges against the unfaithful, but they weren’t particularly successful. For every thrall peacekeeper who died, two more came forward to take his place.
And so no one was more surprised than Joseph when the Emperor put into his hands the destruction of the Rookery. It had been a long time since Finn condescended to give Joseph his orders in person. (Their little chats didn’t count. They never involved business. That was the point.) Joseph had half expected to be told that the Emperor had finally lost all faith in him, and was throwing him to the wolves, but instead . . . Joseph smiled, sitting in the center of his comm room, listening to the growing chatter of his assembling army. The Rookery would be a hard nut to crack, but success in such a dangerous venture would put him right back on top again. Not least because Joseph had no intention of giving back his army once the job was over.
The Emperor should have used every means necessary to wipe out the Rookery after they drove off his last attack; but he’d hesitated. Finn said it was because he could be very soppy and sentimental over people who’d helped him in the past, but Joseph didn’t believe a word of it. More likely, Finn had believed he might still need the special talents found only in the Rookery. Which was, of course, another reason for Joseph to be very thorough in destroying it. If he planned this campaign just right, Joseph could come out of it in almost as strong a position as the Emperor himself, and then . . . maybe it was time for a change at the top.
In the end, Joseph Wallace put together one hell of an army. First he summoned every Church Militant and Pure Humanity fanatic he still had contact with, and had them plan the actual operation. He felt he could trust them to be suitably merciless and efficient. He also assigned them direct control of the invading force, as officers in charge, answerable only to him. The main bulk of the ground forces were made up of every soldier, trooper, and marine still left on Logres, plus a surprising number of thrall peacekeepers. Joseph made sure these latter would bear the brunt of the attack. The more dead thralls, the better for everyone. And finally, he called in every air unit still operating on Logres: every gravity barge, war machine, and gravity sled. This time, there would be no mistakes, no failures, no retreat.
And when he was ready, when he was sure he couldn’t add one more man, gun, or ship to his force, Joseph launched his attack without warning. His people flooded across the expanded and ill-defended borders of the Rookery from every direction at once, while massive gravity barges soared ominously over the crowded streets, firing their ranks of disrupter cannon straight down into the buildings below. The soldiers and the thralls and the fanatics cut down everyone in their path, showing no mercy, only varying degrees of exhilaration. Their orders were clear, their objectives simple, and it felt good to have a clear and obvious enemy to strike out at. Disrupters fired over and over, and fleeing crowds fell in waves. Swords and axes rose and fell, and blood flowed thickly in the gutters. Buildings exploded in showers of brick and stone fragments as energy beams stabbed down from the crowded sky. Fires broke out all over, and Joseph’s warriors pressed forward, ever forward, determined that this time there would be no survivors to rise phoenixlike from the ashes.
After the first shock, the people of the Rookery regrouped and fought back fiercely. Douglas had insisted that everyone in the Rookery’s expanded territory undergo at least some weapons training. He’d always known this attack would come. And so men, women, and even children took to the streets with swords and guns and all kinds of improvised weapons. Others prepared booby traps, ambushes, and hit-and-run tactics. Those too old or too young for direct action took to the roofs, and rained down heavy objects on the attackers below. Everyone in the Rookery was a fighter now. They’d had to learn to fight, to survive. Finn had seen to that.
Nina Malapert quickly put her people out on the streets, with every camera available, and broadcast the invasion live on her news site. Stand or fall, the whole Empire would watch as the Rookery fought back. The other planets needed to see that rebellion was possible—even if it ended in the slaughter of the last free people on Logres.
The pace of the invasion faltered, slowed, and even stopped in some places. The old-school citizens of the Rookery were hardened and motivated fighters, proficient in every weapon under the sun, and a few forgotten everywhere except in the Rookery. They hit the Imperial troops hard, with subtle, unexpected, and thoroughly nasty tactics, and dead Imperial troops soon littered the streets, along with the bodies of the defenders. The newcomers to the Rookery also fought fiercely and well, these last peaceful citizens of a fallen Golden Age. All the things they’d suffered under Finn had put iron in their souls, and a driving need to put things right again. They threw themselves against the invaders, howling like animals, and the sight saddened Douglas a little. He had become a Paragon to fight the good fight, in order that the everyday citizens wouldn’t have to. He had fought to keep them safe, and sane, and strangers to violence like this. He knew they had to fight now—in fact he depended on it—but he took no pleasure in the sight of innocence lost.
The Psycho Sluts took to the air, shooting up into the early morning sky like avenging angels. They tore in and out of the lumbering gravity barges, blowing the antiquated vessels apart with vivid pyrotechnic displays of psionic energy. Gun ports exploded, steel shells tore like paper, and terrible multicolored fires swept through the packed interiors. The huge war machines lurched off course, slammed together, or just drifted helplessly, black smoke billowing from their shattered engines. Attack sleds and their unprotected riders plummeted from the skies like burning birds.
But still the main fighting was on the ground, as the Rookery rose up as one against the invaders from outside, cutting down the enemy with vicious skill and righteous fury. The Imperial soldiers fought with close precision, the fanatics fought with ice-cold fury, certain their God was on their side, singing their terrible songs of glory, and the thralls . . . fought with wide happy smiles, not caring whether they lived or died because the body meant nothing to the minds that drove them. And none of that mattered worth a damn, because the Rookery had awakened, finally forced into battle and discovering how good it felt to strike back at a hated enemy. The streets filled with blood and bodies and the cries of the fallen, and the intersections were choked with pushing, heaving mobs, and the invaders were slowed, stopped, and finally pushed back by the sheer press of people spilling out onto the streets to oppose them. The invaders fought only to win; the Rookery fought for a cause. For freedom. And what was death, compared to the promise of freedom from fear and tyranny?
Douglas Campbell and Stuart Lennox fought side by side, and occasionally back to back, and no one could stand against them, though many tried. They were always there in the thickest of the fighting, inspiring everyone with their feats of daring and their calm determination. They threw themselves into the face of the enemy, defying the odds, and the people of the Rookery followed, calling out their names as war cries.
Diana Vertue, still occasionally Jenny Psycho, strode through the streets, and wherever she looked enemy troops died. Some exploded, some burst into flames that could not be put out, and some just fell back and screamed away their sanity at what they’d seen in her eyes. Diana didn’t even notice. She concentrated, reaching deep within herself, and then turned the full force of her extraordinary mind on the link between the uber-espers and the thralls they controlled in the Rookery. Diana could see it clearly, like the convoluted web of an insane spider, hanging over the Rookery and leading far away. She broke the link with a single surge of destructive energy, and all across the Rookery men and women collapsed, thralls no longer. With their minds restored to them, they stopped fighting immediately, and just sat and cried and howled, at the memories of what they had been forced to do. Some even hugged the bewildered fighters of the Rookery, thanking them for their release.
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