Deathstalker 03 - Deathstalker War

went out of Alice, and she collapsed sobbing into Jenny's arms. David gestured for Jenny to move Alice over to the bar and get her a stiff drink. Jenny nodded and gently persuaded her friend to move away out of range of the viewscreen. She murmured soothing words, but wasn't at all sure her friend could hear her. At the viewscreen, David bent over the control panel, patching the screen into the signals going to the Standing. He jumped from one scene to another, trying to get some idea of what was happening to his world.
    And only then did he began to understand how widespread the horror was.
    David and Kit watched silently as Imperial troops ran howling through an isolated village, shooting at everything that moved. Villagers came pouring out of their squat houses to face the invaders, but they had few guns, fighting mostly with swords and axes and farm implements. The troopers had battle armor
    and force shields and energy weapons, but still the men and women of the village threw themselves at the enemy, making them fight for every inch of ground. But the troops had the numbers as well as the weapons, and they cut a swift and bloody path through the village, leaving the main street strewn with the dead and the dying. Soon they were cutting down the villagers as fast as they showed themselves. The soldiers torched the buildings methodically, and shot down the elderly and the children as they ran out screaming. Soon the whole village was ablaze, thick black smoke rising up into the early-morning skies.
    The scene changed to a nearby town. A small army of Imperial marines ran riot in the narrow cobbled streets, killing and burning, destroying all possible centers of resistance. Local officials were dragged out of their offices and into the street and hanged from the nearest lampposts. There was looting and raping and the butchery of innocents. Blood ran in the streets, and men and women and children ran in terror before the invading forces, driven from their homes by an enemy intent only on victory.
    David and Kit recognized the tactics. They were designed to shock and intimidate other towns and villages into surrendering without a fight. Resistance meant only death and destruction. That was why the holosignal was getting out. The tactics worked. The viewscreen jumped from town to town, showing whole populations being herded away from their homes and out into the open fields, their hands on their heads. Interrogation would come later. Those who didn't move fast enough were shot. Anyone who protested was shot. And everywhere there were buildings burning, and bodies hanging in the streets, and carrion birds circling in the skies above.
    To the cities came the war machines. Unstoppable battle wagons smashed through boundary walls, bricks falling like water from their armored sides. Mechanical
    constructs, beyond fear or panic or restraint, charged unflinchingly into enemy fire, soaking up endless punishment while their racked energy guns blazed, cutting through men and buildings alike. Whole blocks went up in flames as huge gravity torpedoes plowed through wall after wall, building after building, progressing in unrelenting straight lines from one side of the city to the other. Combat androids, robots shaped in the mockery of men for psychological effect, stamped through the streets, cutting and hacking their way through human resistance. Flesh yielded to unfeeling steel, and blood ran down metal arms and dripped thickly from spiked knuckles. There were machines small as insects, unblinking eyes in the sky, and vast metal assemblages bigger than buildings, slow-moving towers of destruction. Brick and stone tore like paper, wood burned fiercely, and men and women died screaming under remorseless metal treads. The machines slaughtered all who came before them, showing neither quarter nor mercy because that was what they had been programmed to do. Buildings fell, fires raged, and in the smoke-choked streets, sharp metal hooks tore through yielding flesh, and barbed flails ripped meat away from bones. The robots marched, the city fell, and the war machines moved on to their next appointed target.
    "No," said David finally. "No. I won't stand for this."
    "We'd better get out of here," said Kit. "There's no telling how close the nearest Imperial forces are."
    "I am the Lord of this planet, and I will not allow this." David glared at the blazing hell on the viewscreen, his hands clenched into fists. "This isn't war.
    This is