Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

hugged the bewildered fighters of the Rookery, thanking them for their release.
    At one stroke, the size of the invading army had been halved, and the already faltering attack fell apart. Shattered into smaller, easily overwhelmed groups, they soon realized they couldn’t hope to win, and the wise ones turned and fled. The invasion became a rout, and collapsed. The Rookery killed the fanatics who stood, and pursued those who ran, cutting them down from behind. They had seen too much slaughter and destruction to think of mercy. In the end, only one man got out of the Rookery alive.
    Joseph Wallace had never ventured far inside hostile territory. He stuck close to the Rookery boundary, trying hard to keep on top of what was happening. He was only there in person because the Emperor had required it of him. He couldn’t believe how quickly his marvelous army had fallen apart. It should have been a walkover; his trained and fervent warriors against the rabble of the Rookery. All the computer simulations had said so. But instead he’d been forced to watch helplessly as his people died, outnumbered and overwhelmed. Even his glorious air force had been crippled, driven from the skies by those esper freaks. He sent frantic calls for reinforcements, for any kind of backup, but they went unanswered. There were no more soldiers to be had, Finn wouldn’t release any of his fanatics, and the ELFs . . . were silent. In the end, all that was left for Joseph was to turn and run. No one tried to stop him. He made it across the boundary of the Rookery and back into the rigidly controlled area of the Parade of the Endless, and found waiting for him a dozen of the Emperor’s personal zealots. They wore the scarlet cross of the Church Militant on their armor, but when he tried to command them, they fell upon him and forced him to his knees.
    “What are you doing?” he screamed. “ What are you doing? ”
    They cut off his head and stuck it on a spike, and took it back to Finn, leaving the body to rot in the streets. He’d been told not to come back if he failed.

    This was the Emperor’s first big failure to be seen live, as it happened, on viewscreens all across the Empire. Overnight the Rookery became a symbol for the possibility of successful rebellion. Proof that you could defy the Emperor, and get away with it. And as the Rookery celebrated their victory, and mourned their losses, uprisings broke out on planets everywhere. Imperial troops were caught by surprise, and overrun. Finn had no extra troops to send, and too many troubles of his own, so he did what he’d told Joseph to do, the one thing Joseph had quailed at. He chose a planet at random, a backward but comfortable world called Pandora, and used transmutation engines to reduce all life on the world to undifferentiated protoplasmic slime. The news spread quickly, and the rebellions stopped, because there was no one to tell them how few engines there actually were in the Empire.
    Until Nina Malapert appeared in her studio again, red-faced and breathless from fighting in the streets, to follow up her live coverage of the invasion with newly arrived information from the combined fleet currently approaching Logres. She told the listening, frightened worlds that most of the engines had been destroyed at Mog Mor, and backed it up with on-the-spot recordings from the starship Heritage. And the rebellions broke out all over again, this time fueled with fury over what had happened to Pandora.
    Finn Durandal sat alone in his private quarters, thinking. He could still win. All he had to do was cut off the head of the rebellion, and the body would falter and fall apart. All he had to do was take out the figurehead, the acclaimed King of Thieves, and the Rookery would be leaderless, and fall apart into feuding factions. They depended on Douglas, not just for leadership, but for vision. Yes, all he had to do was kill his old friend and comrade Douglas Campbell. The man who was the source of his problems, and always had been.
    Finn had known before of the fleet’s surrender, but the news of the incipent invasion had finally reached him. It took so long because no one wanted to be the one to tell him. They told Joseph, but he had been too busy planning his invasion of the Rookery to be bothered. Eventually a Church Militant fanatic was found with a strong sense of duty and no real sense of self-preservation, and he was sent to tell the Emperor. Finn listened in silence to the news