Deathstalker 07 - Deathstalker Return

designed from the beginning to be propaganda; a way of spreading our message to the masses. It was always intended to be a means to an end, never an end in itself."
    "But it's become the most successful soap in vid history," purred an unfeasibly fat man in an antigrav chair. "And you propose to spoil everything by forcing more politics into the scripts, making them much more overt, and risk losing our target audience. For the first time in generations, we are all as rich as our Families used to be. I won't have you rocking the boat in the name of ideological purity."
    " The Quality spreads our message well enough as it is," said a man in a full face mask. "Because of it, the Families are more fashionable than ever. What's wrong with that?"
    "Fashionable?" snapped the woman with the fan. "Fashions change, fads come and go; we're supposed to be in this for the long run! Who cares whether the Families are popular—we're supposed to be feared and respected.'"
    "The rich are feared and respected. That's good enough for me."
    "You've become corrupted by wealth," said a woman with a mask shaped like a bird of prey. "The vid show is a cult thing, nothing more, and the masses will drop it fast enough, once they find something else to obsess over. We have to push our message as strongly as we can now, while we still have an audience watching!"
    "Easy for you to give up the money," growled a man in a black gold mask. "Not all of us were born rich.
    We earned this money. It's ours."
    And so the argument went on, while Tel Markham, member for Madraguda, watched wearily from behind his black leather mask. He could see both sides of the question, but in the end he'd always known that power was more important than money. If you had enough power, people would give you money. It didn't always work the other way round. Power was why he'd joined theShadow Court , along with several other secret organizations. Angry voices rose around him, but he couldn't seem to summon up the passion or the interest to get involved in the argument himself. Truth be told, he was getting bored with theShadow Court . They did less and less, and squabbled more and more. They were all talk, and he got enough of that at Parliament.
    And then the door, which was supposed to be locked and bolted, crashed suddenly open, and what seemed like a small army of armed men rushed into the room, shouting to the shocked and startled Shadow Court to stay where they were, and not move, and keep both their hands in sight at all times.
    The soldiers quickly surrounded the nine men and women, covering them with energy weapons as they stared frantically around, eyes wide behind their masks. And that was when Finn Durandal strolled casually into the room.
    "Hi!" he said cheerfully. "Good to be here, in this… actually rather squalid little room. Please, don't anyone get up. Or I'll have you shot. Now, some of you aren't as surprised as the others, because you invited me here. Oh, yes, a few of you decided they were more interested in being rich than anything else, and contacted me, telling me where this little meeting would take place. The idea being that I would arrest those of you who cared more about politics, and leave the rest of you to get on with being very rich.
    Well, bad luck, people. I've come for all of you. There are far too many factions in the Empire these days, and frankly, I don't need the distraction. So I'm shutting down theShadow Court . Show trials, character assassination, followed by very public executions. You know, the sort of thing your aristocratic forebears were always so very fond of in Lionstone's time. And with the head gone, what's left of the body will soon wither and die. Feel free to speak up and object, and I'll feel free to have you shot as an example to the others."
    "How typical," said the woman with the fan. "The Families betrayed by their own kind. It seems we have learned nothing from history after all. But I trust we can at least show solidarity one last time. We can't afford to be arrested and identified. Our Families would be made to suffer. Better to go out with dignity, in one last act of defiance. We can still serve the cause as martyrs. Agreed?"
    And around the table eyes met and heads nodded, and hands went to transmutation bombs under their cloaks. There was a series of sharp, limited explosions, and soon there was pink protoplasmic slime splashed across the table, and dripping thickly from the chairs. Finn sighed and shook