Deathstalker 03 - Deathstalker War

The lights flickered and went out, replaced by the dull red glow of emergency lighting. There was only one siren sounding now, loud and piercing, like a lost soul falling into eternal darkness.
    Robert Campbell clung to the edge of the screen and tried to shout something, but he couldn't get enough air into his lungs. He pulled himself away from the screen, heading across the devastated bridge toward the emergency exit. All around him, the workstations were exploding one by one, throwing their dead operators away or blowing them apart where they sat. And then the screen went suddenly blank, and the Court was quiet again. Lionstone stared at the screen for a long moment.
    "Brave boy," she said finally. "Maybe I should have put him in charge. And the Endurance is gone. The finest of the E class ships. The ship that was supposed to be unbeatable."
    "To be fair, I don't think the designers had Hademan ships in mind when they said that," said Razor, apparently unmoved. "And it did take three of the legendary golden ships to take down one E class ship."
    "The ship didn't fail me," said Lionstone, her mood changing yet again. "It was the crew! Cowards and traitors and incompetents! Is there no one I can trust?"
    Razor and Kid Death shared a glance, but said nothing.
    Up on the surface of Golgotha, in the teeming streets of the Parade of the Endless, the fighting was getting dirty. The Imperial forces were being forced back on every front, and were not taking it at all well. They shot at everything that didn't wear a uniform, and pulled down buildings to cover their retreat.
    They had tried using women and children as human shields, but tended to shoot
    them themselves when they couldn't keep up. Most noncombatants had fled the city by now. Thick black smoke from the many burning buildings had gathered overhead, plunging the city into an early twilight. With most of the streetlights smashed, flickering crimson light from the hundreds of fires provided the only illumination. Dark figures moved through the bloody light with blood on their minds.
    The Imperial forces hadn't given up yet. The Grendels might all be dead, but there were still other, secret, unpleasant weapons they hadn't used yet.
    Esp-blockers had been rushed to the front lines to hold back the elves, but the esper brains in their glass cases were limited in number and range. So they brought out the experimental living esp-blockers, captured espers brainwashed and conditioned into obedient shells. They weren't very bright, and had to be led everywhere in chains, but they were effective, and their range was staggering. The rebel espers had no choice but to fall back and make way for the standard fighters. The rebel advance slowed to a crawl in those areas, giving the Empire forces time to regroup.
    So the clones went in, crowds of people with the same faces, armed to the teeth and wearing Born To Burn T-shirts in memory of the fallen Stevie Blues. Massed disrupter fire slammed through their ranks, cutting them down, but there were thousands of them, and they would not be stopped. They just kept running into the fire, jumping over the fallen, until the survivors stormed the barricades and fell on the troops. They always went for the esp-blockers first, giving them merciful deaths so that the elves could come swarming in behind them. A few hours after they'd been introduced, there were no living esp-blockers left anywhere in the city.
    The underground brought forward its own awful weapons. Rollers sent razor-edged
    psistorms barreling down the streets, ripping apart all they touched. Soldiers spontaneously combusted, burning with a fire no water could extinguish, as pyros went to work. And then there were the mindbombs, simple devices built around esper brain tissues. When activated, they spread madness and horror through all nonespers in the vicinity. Affected troops clawed their own eyes out, or turned on each other, and tore their companions limb from limb. The rebels pressed forward, overrunning Imperial positions again and again, and then Valentine's war machines appeared on the scene, and everything changed.
    Huge hulking constructions stamped and rumbled down the wider streets, built-in disrupters cutting through the packed rebel ranks. Hundreds died in the first few minutes. People scrambled for cover, only to find there was nowhere the war machines couldn't reach. They smashed through walls and entire buildings to get at their prey, and projectile weapons