Deathstalker 03 - Deathstalker War

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 nonesper 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 bloodred 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 polters 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 homeworld'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