Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

into cold, bitter anger as the people of the Rookery counted their dead and added up the damage. And hard-hearted and harder-headed men and women, who would never have come together for something as nebulous as a cause, now found themselves united in an aching hunger for revenge.
    And on worlds all across the Empire, and most especially on Logres, people regarded their blank viewscreens, and looked at the Emperor Finn and his shock troops in a whole new way.

    Finn was furious. He raged back and forth in his palace communications center, trying to summon up more troops, but most of his armed forces were posted as occupation troops in cities all across Logres. It would take hours to bring them all to the Parade of the Endless, and then, who would control the cities they left? . . . Finn had attack sleds, battle wagons, and even starcruisers at his disposal, but again it would take hours to call them in. Finn kicked out at the furniture—and any of his staff who didn’t get out of his way fast enough. He couldn’t understand how it had all gone wrong so quickly. How a rabble of outcasts and criminals could have wiped out his elite troops so easily.
    Douglas. It had to be Douglas.
    Finn drove everyone else out of the comm center, and called on the ELFs for help. A large enough army of thralls might yet save the day for him. Suicide troops, driven on by outside minds, could still overrun the Rookery’s defenses. But none of the ELF leaders, or the uber-espers, would take his calls. Finn sat down slowly in the empty room, his thoughts whirling madly, unable to settle. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t the one driving events, and he didn’t know what to do. He must have missed something, but what? What?
    In the end, after it had been quiet for too long, the comm staff sent for Joseph Wallace. He calmed everyone down as best he could, with soothing words and rousing platitudes, and then he stuck his head gingerly round the door of the comm center. Finn was still sitting in his chair, thinking, ignoring flashing message lights on consoles all around him. Joseph decided this wasn’t the moment to inform Finn that uprisings were breaking out on planets all across the Empire, inspired by what people had seen happening in the Rookery. Joseph gently closed the door, and quietly began giving orders in Finn’s name. Security people came and went, putting together a depressing picture of what was happening everywhere at once. Joseph authorized vicious reprisals and clampdowns, but as fast as rebellion was slapped down in one place, it sprang up in another.
    Alarms sounded in the comm center, but Finn turned them off. The noise made his head hurt, and he needed to think.

    If he’d known what was going on with the ELF leaders and the uber-espers, Finn would have been even more disturbed. Behind the scenes, an even more bitter struggle was going on, with no quarter asked or given. The ELF leaders and the uber-espers had finally erupted into open war over who controlled the movement. Both sides had been secretly amassing great armies of thralls, to feed their power and back their play, and after what had happened in the Rookery both sides had decided that the time had come to break free from Finn, and go their own way.
    It was an esper war, fought on mental battlegrounds, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world at first, but nonetheless vicious and deadly for all that. The huge thrall armies were living power sources, reservoirs of mental energy that both sides could tap into as they fought their war. Telepathic battles raged back and forth as minds clashed with minds, on eerie inhuman landscapes created just for that purpose. Minds crashed and splintered, and esper attacks sometimes spilled over into the material world, in outbreaks of weird weather and probability fluctuations. Psi storms sleeted through the surrounding areas, destroying all unshielded minds in their paths. The two sides raged back and forth, neither strong enough to entirely overwhelm the other. But neither side would back down, and so the psionic pressure built and built, until finally the energies spiraled entirely out of control and blew one whole section of the Parade of the Endless apart in an explosion so loud and bright the echoes could be felt all over Logres. (Finn later blamed the explosion on rebel saboteurs. Because he had to say something.)
    The esper battle ended in a stalemate, with neither side gaining or losing ground, and so