Deathstalker 03 - Deathstalker War

moved among them, trying to comfort those who could still be reached, but the death cry of so many espers in Hardcastle's Rock, too strong and potent to be denied, screamed on through the children's throats.
    Slowly reason returned to some of them. Chance dosed the rest with strong sedatives so he could concentrate, and from the others gradually pieced together
    what had happened. And for the first time in a long time, he contacted Port Director Gideon Steel at the Mistport control tower.
    Steel took a long time to answer, and when his fat face eventually filled the viewscreen he looked less than pleased to see who his caller was. "Make it fast.
    Half my duty espers have gone crazy, and the rest are catatonic. It's bedlam in here. What do you want. Chance?"
    "An Imperial force has just wiped out Hardcastle's Rock," Chance said bluntly.
    "It was a big force, and it's on its way here right now."
    Steel frowned. "Are you sure? We've had no signals from that area, and our sensors are all clear."
    "The town is dead," said Chance. "Every man, woman, and child. The Empire is here, Steel. Do something."
    "I'll get back to you." Steel snapped off the comm link and began issuing orders. He didn't really believe the news, not least because he didn't want to, but he couldn't afford to take chances. He had the duty espers smacked around till they calmed down, and then had them spread their minds as wide as they could, while the control tower fired up the long-range sensors. It didn't take the espers long to find a great void where the town of Hardcastle's Rock should have been, a void they couldn't penetrate. They also sensed something else, a presence, huge and powerful but hidden from them.
    High above, Legion realized it had been discovered, and rejoiced. Its time had come to do what it had been created to do, to bring terror and despair and the end of all things to the Empire's enemies. It threw aside its concealing shield, and spread its vast influence across the city of Mistport. The tower's sensors immediately detected the orbiting Defiant and the hundreds of pinnaces bearing
    down on Mistport. Steel hit the alarm button even as his duty espers screamed and collapsed, unable to deal with the horror that was Legion. Tower personnel tried to revive them, but some were dead, some were insane, and the rest were beyond reach, driven into hiding within their own minds rather than face Legion.
    Steel used his emergency link to contact the esper union, but for a long time no one answered his call. Static flashed across the screen as the signal gradually deteriorated under Legion's influence. Finally a wild-eyed man appeared on the viewscreen, his face sweating and shocked.
    "Get me someone in authority!" snapped Steel. "We have to raise the psionic shield! It's an emergency!"
    "We know!" said the esper, his eyes rolling like a panicked horse's. "The Empire's here! But we can't do anything. It's like a giant esp-blocker is covering the whole city. It's shut down our powers. We can't hear each other anymore. It's all we can do to think clearly. Half of our people have had to go catatonic, just to protect their sanity. And the field's growing stronger all the time! There isn't going to be any psionic screen!"
    Blood gushed suddenly from the man's nose and ears. He looked surprised, tried to say something, and then his face disappeared from the screen. Steel tried to raise him again, but no one answered. And then the screen shut down, as all comm frequencies were jammed. Steel and his people tried all their backups and emergency procedures, and none of them worked. Steel sat in his command chair, surrounded by chaos and screaming voices. The psionic screen was out. The port's disrupter cannon, salvaged from a crashed starship, were powering up, but without a working comm system there was no way to aim them. Port techs were working furiously to link the tower sensors into the comm systems, but there was no way of knowing how long they would last either. Already some of the weaker
    systems were shutting down, unable to function in the unnatural field emanating from the orbiting starcruiser.
    Steel called together a dozen runners, and sent them out into the city to organize the Watch and the militias, knowing even as he did so that they weren't going to be enough. Mistport had depended for too long on its psionic screen.
    Secure in its protection, the Watch had gone soft, and no one had taken the militias seriously in years. Steel