Deathstalker 03 - Deathstalker War

courage and honor where they would have sworn there was none, and went to the fight with calm eyes and grim determination. They lunged and soared, using familiar updrafts and hiding places to confound the targeting computers, stinging their targets like deadly insects.
    Some deliberately threw themselves into the gravity barges' engine bays, suicide attacks that were only occasionally successful. When a barge did fall from the sky, it crashed into fragile stone-and-timber buildings, crushing them with its immense weight. Exploding barges destroyed whole streets and spread fire across whole blocks. And for each barge that fell, there were always more to take its place, moving remorselessly forward about the city they had come to take.
    They moved slowly inward from every side, creating paths of death and destruction, heading for the center of the city, block by block, street by
    street. They kept to their previously arranged paths, ignoring the rest of the city. The Empire had come to conquer and control Mistport, not destroy it.
    There were fires burning all across the city now, flames leaping high into the night sky. Screams came drifting up from the streets below. Hell had come to Mistport, and Toby Shreck and his cameraman Flynn were right there in the thick of it, keeping up a live broadcast. Flynn's camera darted and soared above the inferno of the burning streets and blazing buildings, getting it all, while Toby kept up a breathless running commentary. This far above the devastation, it was easy to feel detached and godlike, but Toby did his best now and again to remind his audience that real people were burning and dying in the fires and ruins below. Not that most of them would care. That just added to the excitement for the home audience.
    Toby clung to the railings at the edge of the gravity barge as the boiling heat of a sudden updraft rocked the barge from side to side. Flynn was so taken with what he was seeing through his camera that he quite forget to hold the railing, and almost toppled over the side before Toby grabbed him and pulled him back.
    The cameraman didn't even nod his thanks. He was far away with his darting camera, swooping and soaring over the rising flames like an impartial angel recording the birth of Hell.
    "Getting good footage?" asked Toby loudly in Flynn's ear.
    "If only you could see what I'm seeing," said Flynn. "People have seen war footage before, but never this close, never this clearly. I can zoom in on individual buildings, individual people, or pull back to a panorama of the whole damned city. It's beautiful, Toby. The scarlet and gold against the black of night. The burning buildings, and the flames… it has a majesty and a grandeur
    that's beyond pity or compassion. It doesn't need excuses; it just is. A city is dying one inch at a time, and I'm getting it all. The colors are amazing—bright and primitive and striking. And the roar of the explosions is like a giant walking across the city, one great step at a time, as the ground shakes beneath his tread. It's… exhilarating."
    "Smell the smoke," said Toby. "That's burning flesh amongst the wood and grime.
    Listen to the screams. Don't get carried away, Flynn. This isn't an invasion; this is a slaughter."
    He broke off as a flying esper came howling out of the darkness toward him. The esper was armed with an automatic crossbow, jury-rigged from forbidden tech, and his deadly bolts stitched across the armed men at the railings as they tried in vain to draw a bead on him. They fell back from the railing, crying out as they clutched at transfixing arrows. Toby grabbed Flynn and threw them both to the deck. A nearby disrupter cannon turned to bear on the next building, and the esper was suddenly hovering there before it. He thrust his arm down the barrel, blocking it. Toby looked up, and their eyes met. The esper grinned savagely, scared shitless and not giving a damn, and then the bomb in his hand went off, blowing the cannon apart. The esper was thrown backwards, blood fountaining from the shoulder where his right arm had been. He fell toward the street far below, laughing breathlessly. Toby watched him fall until he disappeared back into the smoke and the flames.
    Lieutenant Ffolkes came staggering down the deck toward Toby and Flynn, stepping gingerly over the injured and the dying. He had a gun in his hand, and there was blood spattered across one sleeve of his uniform. It didn't appear to be his. He looked over the