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.
Around them, the Hell that Lionstone had fashioned for her Court. The light was bloodred, and the air was thick with the stench of brimstone. Great vents had opened up in the floor of the Court, through which sudden bursts of flame erupted, adding to the sweltering heat. And from far below came the faint screams of the damned and the suffering. Great pillars of stone rose up farther than the eye could follow, covered with carved tormented faces, screaming in silent agony, contorted by unimaginable pain.
And all around, the dead and the dying. Unfortunates who’d caught Lionstone’s attention at just the wrong time. The hanged hung limply from their ropes or chains, the impaled had mostly stopped twitching on their bloody stakes, and only smoke rose from the charred and blackened figures burned in iron cages. There were others, denied an easy death. A ballerina with broken legs, a poet with his eyes gouged out, and a captured rebel leader with long ropes of purple guts hanging out of his torn-open stomach. And many more. They crawled around on their hands and knees, biting back their screams to prevent further punishment, begging quietly for just a little water. Beckett hoped that most of them were just holograms, computer-generated images called up by Lionstone to add to the atmosphere, but he couldn’t make himself believe it. Particularly when they tugged at his boots with broken hands and pleaded quietly for just a word on their behalf. He didn’t look down. He couldn’t help them. He wasn’t even sure he could help himself. To distract himself, he studied the armed guards standing in silent ranks behind the Throne. Lionstone had dressed them as devils, with curling horns on their helmets and blazing wings erupting from the back of their armor. Lionstone believed in every detail being perfect.
Finally she looked away from the viewscreens and turned her attention to Beckett and Dram. They both did their best to stand a little straighter. When she spoke her voice, like her gaze, was icy cold.
“General Beckett, we have called you here to place you in sole charge of this planet’s defenses. We put Golgotha into your hands. Guard it well and keep it safe.”
Beckett stared at her blankly. “But. . . Your Majesty; I assumed I’d been brought here to take command of your fleet! I am the only one left with the experience and seniority to pull things back together. They’ll listen to me! Who else is better qualified for this than I?”
“Don’t presume to argue with us, General,” said Lionstone, her voice dangerously calm. “You have your orders; carry them out.”
Beckett bore down hard on his anger, to keep from saying something he might be made to regret later, turned on his heel, and strode out of the Court. He’d been loyal to the Iron Throne all his days, and couldn’t change that now. No matter how much he was tempted. Lionstone watched him go, and then turned back to Dram.
“You will command my fleet, dear Dram. Beckett is too soft, for all his vaunted loyalty. He might hesitate to do the things that must be done. I admired your firmness, your thoroughness, on Virimonde, and I need someone at the helm that I can trust implicitly. So you’re to be the man in charge, Dram. My man in charge. Don’t fail me. Don’t dare fail me. You’ll give your orders from here, at my side. You’ll be safe here, and I’ll be able to consult with you, as necessary.”
“Yes, Lionstone. But . . . will the Captains accept me as Commander in Chief? They know I don’t have Beckett’s experience.”
“They’ll serve the Warrior Prime. The man they think you are. That’s all that matters. Take my fleet and crush my enemies, Dram. Break them and scatter them and show them no mercy, Just as you did on Virimonde. I am Empress, and I will be obeyed. And afterward . . . there will be a purging of all weak and disloyal elements such as no one has ever seen before.”
She smiled an unpleasant smile, and Dram made himself nod in agreement. “As you will, Lionstone. Pardon me for asking, but. . . do you think you would do well to protect yourself further, ev
en here? There’s no telling what lengths the rebels or the elves might go to, for a chance to strike directly at you.”
“Don’t worry yourself about such things,” Lionstone said easily. “I have sent for the best of the best to come here to be my personal bodyguards. No one will get past Investigator Razor and Kid Death.”
Up on the surface, the fighting went on, growing more bloody and more bitter all the time. Armies ran through the streets and crowded the open squares, fighting the Imperial troops for this cause or that, but all united against the monster Lionstone, the madwoman on the Iron Throne. The barracks had been emptied of troops to the very last man, and the two main forces slammed together wherever they met, each convinced that right and destiny were on their side. One fought for order, the other for justice, and there was no room for quarter or surrender in either camp. Both sides had to win overwhelmingly, or see themselves devastated by the victor. They fought with swords and axes, force shields and energy guns, and the disturbing, unfamiliar projectile weapons supplied by the underground. Blood sprayed on the air, and men and women fell to lie screaming on the gore-soaked streets, dying from their wounds, or simple shock, or just from the endless trampling feet of the close-packed fighters. No one had time to care for the wounded, and the dead were everywhere. They were kicked out of the way, or piled on street corners, forgotten by friends and enemies alike as the battles continued.
Some of Lionstone’s troops were using the new stasis projectors. Within their narrowly focused fields, time came to a stop, and all those caught in the field were held there helpless, trapped in a moment taken out of time, like insects confined in amber. Advances were brought to crashing halts, and whole areas became impassable. But this was new technology, and the number of projectors was strictly limited. They were also unstable and unreliable. Sometimes just activating the machine was enough to blow the whole apparatus apart and kill everyone in a thirty-yard radius. Understandably, the troops were reluctant to use them. Sometimes officers had to stand there with them and put guns to their heads. But where the machines did work, the effects were dramatic. Within the projected field, time could be slowed to a crawl or sped up beyond counting. Those trapped in stasis could become living statues, removed from the conflict, or, more often, they could age horribly fast. Skin shrank, bodies warped with age, hearts failed and brains rotted in splitting skulls. Even on low power, the machines produced clinging tanglefields that could fill a street, slowing advancing forces and making them helpless targets for more traditional weapons.
But this success didn’t last. As soon as the threat became clear, the cyberats infiltrated the machines’ computer-aiming systems, and shut them down. Battle espers took out the projectors’ operators from a safe distance, destroying their minds or setting them on fire. Where the troops were protected by esp-blockers, the espers used mindbombs. Nasty high-tech devices built around dead esper brain tissues. When detonated, every non-esper in the mindbomb’s range went horribly insane. The troops would turn on each other and tear each other apart with their bare hands, screaming and crying and howling wordlessly, soaked in their fellows’ blood. The rebel forces pressed forward, overran the stasis projectors and their dead or insane crews, and moved on.
There would be time to think about the terrible things they’d had to do later.
The Empress gave orders to turn the Grendels, the merciless killing-machine aliens found in the Vaults of the Sleepers, loose in the streets. Vicious monsters in blood-red spiked silicon armor, they moved too swiftly for the human eye to follow, killing all they came across. Weapons were useless against them. Too strong to be fought, too fast to be faced, they moved inexorably through the crowded streets, leaving only blood and slaughter in their wake. Unfortunately, the Empress’s control over these creatures was very limited. Once released from the enforced pacification of their cybernetic yokes, they killed every living thing they encountered, no matter which side they happened to be on. Beyond any control or guidance, they rampaged through the streets, scarlet devils from an alien hell, and the dead piled up behind them. If Lionstone had had more of them, they might have turned the tide. But their numbers were limited, and so was the damage they could cause in a city overrun with battling armies.
The underground sent battle espers against the aliens, but many of the espers died just from making contact with the Grendels’ minds. They were too alien, too different, too awful to be faced. And so the underground called on the elves, the hard-line Esper Liberation Front, who sent in the pollers and the firestarters. Soon roiling psistorms blazed through the streets, ripping the Grendels apart and incinerating the bloody fragments. The aliens fell one by one, fighting to the last against an enemy they could neither see nor reach, and as they were broken and consumed by raging fires, both sides cheered the espers as heroes. Never before had aliens been allowed to roam home-world’s streets, killing humans, and many on both sides saw this as another sign of Lionstone’s growing madness. Soldiers and civilians who had been forced to stand by helplessly as the Grendels butchered their comrades and loved ones now cursed the Empress and went to fight alongside the rebels.
The rebels didn’t have it all their own way. The legendary Half A Man led his own army of troops through the Parade of the Endless, fighting from the front, putting down rebellion wherever he found it, by whatever means necessary. His successes and calm military demeanor inspired his soldiers, and almost through sheer force of personality he held the center of the city, and would not be moved, no matter what the odds against him. To the troops he was a hero as well as a legend, the protector of Humanity, and they stood their ground and fought to the death rather than fail him. So the rebels left them the center of the city, and went around them. For in the end he was only one man, and he couldn’t be everywhere at once.
The cyberats hacked into Golgotha’s main communications systems and shut down every military comm channel they could reach. The troops were instantly shut off from each other and isolated in their own small pockets of fighting. Strategy became impossible and reinforcements ran helplessly in circles. Imperial espers were no match for the organized underground telepaths, and the military and security organizations quickly fell apart. Orders never reached their destinations. Calls for help went unanswered. Chaos reigned. But the rioters wasted their energies on looting and trivial revenges, for all the underground could do to guide them. The rebels themselves remained outnumbered and outgunned, and the longer the fighting went on, the worse the odds against them grew. They had to strike quickly, while they still had the advantage of surprise, and take control of Golgotha, or the rebellion could still fall apart and fail, for ail its successes. The military knew this, and played a waiting game, holding key areas and refusing to give way. And so blood spilled, and men and women died on both sides, the tides of battle went this way and that, and the leaders of the underground began to grow desperate. It was beginning to look as though all their hopes now depended on a small group of heroes and legends who hadn’t even made an appearance yet, that the whole rebellion could stand or fall on the actions of Owen Deathstalker and his companions.
The Shandrakor Standing of Giles Deathstalker, the original home and sanctuary of the Deathstalker Clan, dropped out of hyperspace and fell into orbit over the planet Golgotha. A huge stone castle with its own stardrive and force shield, and many other hidden surprises, it hung silently over the homeworld of Empire like a specter from the past, from the great days of Empire, before the dream became a nightmare and good men fell as the bad came to power. The ancient stone gleamed whitely in the light of Golgotha’s sun, pale as a ghost, the specter at the feast, the old retainer returned at last to kick the usurpers out. After 943 years, the Deathstalker Standing had finally come home.
Giles Deathstalker stood at parade rest in the great Hall of the Standing, his back to a blazing fire, studying the planet below as it turned slowly on the giant viewscreen at the end of the Hall. Clad in his usual battered armor, grubby furs, golden armlets,
and mercenary’s scalplock, he looked more like some barbarian warrior out of Humanity’s distant past then the first Warrior Prime of the Empire, hero and legend to all the Empire for almost a millennium. His long sword hung in a scabbard down his back, the leather-wrapped hilt peering watchfully over his shoulder, as though only waiting to be called into action. The original Deathstalker, namer and founder of his Clan, back from exile to a homeworld that knew him not.
His distant descendant, Owen Deathstalker, stood a little away, with his comrade in arms, Hazel d’Ark, at his side. There was a closeness between them that hadn’t been so clear before, as though they had discovered something important about each other and themselves during the invasion of Mistworld. They stood tall and confident, and strength and power hung about them like an aura of greatness. They wore no armor, but while Owen bore only his sword and disrupter, Hazel was packing as many weapons as she could carry. Hazel believed in guns. They’d come a long way since they first met, in a field on Virimonde which no longer existed, and it was hard to see in Owen and Hazel the reclusive scholar and reluctant pirate they’d once been. They had come into their destiny, and it showed.
On the other side of the enormous fireplace stood Jack Random, the legendary professional rebel. The broken-down old man Owen had found hiding out in Mistport, such a short time ago, had disappeared now, replaced by a strong, muscular figure in the prime of his years. Jack Random had re-created himself, through his faith and his power and his courage, and the mysterious powers of the Madness Maze, to be a hero and a legend one more time. Just standing there, calm and relaxed, he looked ready to take on the whole damned Empire by himself. And if there were blood and savagery and slaughter of the foe along the way, that suited him just fine.
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