Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

with pain and outrage, but her mind held firm. When she finally felt the assault was over, she came out to look at the world again, and found that Joanna’s defenses had failed. Someone else looked out from behind her eyes. Her face twitched and twisted as some small part of her fought the possessing mind, but she had already lost. Joanna smiled someone else’s smile, and threw herself at Alessandra.
    They darted back and forth in the skies over the palace, swooping and diving and whirling around each other in cascades of pyrotechnic energies. They lashed out with physical and mental attacks, and psionic explosions ripped the air apart. Both Alessandra and Joanna took terrible injuries, and their blood rained down on the battle below. They threw rocks and stones and even corpses at each other, and lightning bolts stabbed down from a cloudless sky. Sleeting energies discharged around them, as they fought to get inside each other’s heads, and in the end, possibly because the possessing mind was distracted by what was happening in the court, Alessandra forced her way past Joanna’s shields, and crushed the madly beating heart in her old friend’s breast with a remorseless psychokinetic hand. Joanna cried out once, and then fell limp and dead from the sky. Alessandra dropped after her, and caught Joanna’s body before it hit the ground.
    She held her dear friend in her arms, rocking her back and forth like a sleeping child, and then the last of the Psycho Sluts put her dead friend aside, and went walking through the city streets, blowing thralls apart with the force of her gaze, while tears rolled jerkily down her blood-stained cheeks.

    Thralls were everywhere in the city now, filling the streets and squares. Baying mobs attacked the city’s defenders on every front, crowding in from every direction, and still more came flooding across the city’s boundaries. Only their lack of weapons and tactics gave the defenders any chance at all. And, every now and again, one section of the thrall army would break off fighting to attack another section, when one uber-esper thought another was doing too well, and carving out too much territory for themselves. They did not trust each other, and never would, even in this last battle for the heart and soul of Logres.
    With millions of thralls under their command, the uber-espers now enjoyed whole new levels of power. Some of their thralls were manifesting esper abilities on the uber-espers’ behalf. Some projected terrible emotions, so that defenders cried out and howled and crawled with disgust, and did not know why. Some generated psychokinetic storms that sent razor-sharp objects hurtling through the streets ahead of them. Others sent telepathic illusions against the defenders; visions of rampaging aliens or monsters, or loved ones dying in horrible agonies. Buildings seemed to come alive, while awful things fell from a splintering sky. Sometimes these new espers even managed to turn one set of defenders against another. But none of these proxy espers lasted long. They burned out quickly from the pressure; often literally.
    But there were always more to replace those who fell.
    The defenders were forced back by sheer weight of numbers. They fought every inch of the way, and thralls fell dead and dying in their thousands, and hundreds of thousands, but it was not enough. Slowly, inexorably, the defenders were forced back towards the center and heart of the city, the Imperial Palace.

    And that was when Lewis Deathstalker arrived with the cavalry. The fleet came howling out of hyperspace, and slammed into orbit around the beleaguered world of Logres. Thousands of pinnaces and gravity barges and war machines spilled out of the starcruisers, and descended onto the Parade of the Endless, followed by all kinds of ships, from Mistworld and Virimonde. The morning darkened as they filled the sky, and the defenders below raised a ragged cheer and fought on with renewed strength. The pinnaces and ships made landings all over the city, launching whole new armies of fighting men, already angered by what they’d seen on Nina’s news sites. Gravity barges hovered over the thralls crowding into the city, and blew them apart with disrupter cannon. War machines moved to block all the entrances to the city, so that no more thralls could get in.
    And falling out of the sky like avenging angels, flying under their own power and surrounded by halos of unearthly energies, came Lewis