Deathstalker War

'Damn,' said Kast. 'All the people they could have sent looking for us, and it had to be Sergeant Franke. He won't let you get away with anything. Thinks he's officer material, the fool.'

Morgan shrugged, stepped forward, and cut the girl's throat with an economical sweep of his sword. She slumped back against the wall, clawing at her opened throat with her fingers. Blood gushed over her hands, and she fell back, her hands dropping to her sides as the breath went out of her. Kast swore feelingly, and did up his trouser belt again.

'Never mind,' said Morgan. 'There'll be other chances. Franke can't be everywhere.'

The two marines grinned at each other and went back into the street whistling jauntily. All in all, the invasion was going well.

In Tech Quarter, the starport had been thoroughly trashed. For a time its massed disrupter cannon, harvested from the crashed starcruiser Darkwind, had been enough to keep the gravity barges at bay. Up close, the cannon didn't need its crashed computers for targeting. But the barges soon learned the limits of the cannon's range, and stayed well back while they contacted their ship for reinforcements. The Defiant sent down six heavily shielded pinnaces to do the job. They came roaring down out of the night, too fast to track, and blew the cannon apart in an explosion that could be heard all across Mistport. With the starport defenseless, the pinnaces swept back and forth in strafing runs, taking out the ships on the landing pads like so many sitting ducks. And while they were doing that, the barges closed in on the control tower.

The rebel ships on the pads exploded one after the other in sudden bursts of smoke and fire. Strange lights radiated briefly and were gone as stardrives collapsed and released their energies. The landing pads would be wildly radioactive now until the Empire could bring in heavy-duty scrubbers. Only the Deathstalker's ship, Sunstrider II, survived, protected by superior Hadenman shields. The pinnaces marked it down for later attention, and moved on. They had more than enough other targets to keep them busy.

The control tower lasted the longest, with its reinforced structure and steelglass windows, but even that fell in the end, riddled by disrupter fire from the hovering gravity barges. The steelglass blew inward, transformed into deadly shrapnel that cut down everyone left inside the tower. Some still survived, so the barges set the tower on fire, and left it to burn. Their job done, the pinnaces and the barges moved unhurriedly away in search of other targets. People lay dead everywhere across the pads. Ground crews preparing ships for desperate takeoffs, and crowds of people who'd been convinced they'd be safest at the well-defended starport, or who had paid massive bribes to be smuggled offplanet. When the Empire ships came they were caught out in the open with nowhere to hide and nowhere to run, and they died screaming for help that never came. Wrecked ships burned on the cracked pads, and what was left of the control tower burned like a giant candle, its shattered walls running like wax in the great heat. The starport had fallen.

Young Jack Random led Owen and Hazel and Silver and his adoring followers back into the city, in search of people to help. The troops forced back from the southwest boundary had departed in search of easier ways into the city. No one doubted they'd find them. Random soon found a street barricade in danger of falling to an Empire attack, and moved in quickly to support it. The improvised barricade had been formed from furniture and other suitably heavy objects, dragged out into the street from the surrounding houses and stacked one by one on top of the other and lashed together till the resulting wall stood nearly a dozen feet high. Smaller furniture had been broken up to form jagged wooden spikes, projecting from the barricade to discourage the other side from getting too close.

Iron nails had been twisted together into caltrops, the points dipped in dung, and then thrown out into the street for the troopers to step on. Random's small army lined themselves up behind the barricade, shooting crossbow bolts and bullets through the gaps in the wall to pick off any trooper who so much as aimed a disrupter at the barricade. It quickly became clear to both sides that only hand-to-hand fighting was going to decide the fate of this stumbling block. And since the barricade blocked the last main route into the city center, its control was vital to both sides.

And so the Imperial troops came charging down the street, sheltering behind massed force shields, firing their disrupters blindly as they ran. The energy bolts punched wide holes through the barricade, incinerating those fighters unfortunate enough to be in the way, but as many shots missed as hit, and the barricade still stood. The rebels fired at the troopers' legs, unguarded beneath the force shields, and whole sections of the advancing force came crashing to the ground as they fell over one another, but still the charge came on. Until finally the two sides met at the barricade, and it was left to courage and desperation and naked steel to win the day.

Owen and Hazel fought side by side, still linked, feeling stronger and sharper than ever. They didn't need Blood or the boost anymore. Something new was working in them now, granting them strength and speed beyond anything they'd ever known before. John Silver had taken the last of his Blood long ago, and now only guts and duty were keeping him on his feet. He'd got over his fear of Owen and Hazel. Whatever they had become, they were clearly the best bet for defeating the invading troops, and so Silver had taken on the job of guarding their backs. It seemed even gods needed someone to watch their blind spots. Interestingly enough, Silver couldn't bring himself to give a damn about Jack Random. There was something about the man that made Silver's hackles stand on end, though he couldn't have told you what. Perhaps it was just that the man was too damned perfect. Certainly he seemed almost like a god, too, standing atop the barricade, swinging his great sword with both hands, defying the Empire to bring him down.

The struggle continued, fighting breaking out before and upon and behind the barricade. Owen and Hazel cut down every man who came against them, roaring their defiance, and dodging disrupter beams, which was supposed to be impossible. Owen's battle cry of Shandrakor! rose above the din again and again, and was taken up by many of the rebels, almost as many as those who fought with Jack Random's name on their lips. They pushed the Imperial troops back and back until finally the rebels came spilling up and over the barricade to drive the troopers back down the street.

Hand-to-hand fighting filled the street, the mass of fighters surging this way and that, trampling the dead and the wounded underfoot. The troops roared their battle songs and stood their ground, urged on by armed officers at their back and the battle drugs sweeping through their veins. Buildings burned and smoldered to either side of the fighting, but children and those too old or too weak to fight had taken to the roofs, and rained stones and slates and boiling water down onto the enemy below. They aimed carefully, and many a trooper was suddenly taken out of the fighting by an unexpected present from above.

Toby Shreck and Flynn were right there in the thick of things, getting it all on film. They were currently keeping their heads well down in a nearby doorway while Flynn's camera soared above the mayhem, picking out the best shots. Toby's commentary was becoming increasingly breathless, but he kept going, knowing that if he could only smuggle this past the censors, the news agencies would be making up whole new awards just to give to him. This was the good stuff. Ffolkes had been becoming increasingly stuffy about what they could and couldn't shoot, so Toby and Flynn ditched him by the simple expedient of shouting Look over there! and then running off in two different directions. By the time Ffolkes had made up his mind which of them to chase or shoot at, it was already too late.

Toby and Flynn had got together again easily enough after that, and went in search of the main action. It didn't taken them long to find some. And ever since then they'd been running and dodging and keeping their heads well down from one trouble spot to another, while Flynn's camera got it all on film. Troops and rebels alike both ignored Toby and Flynn as obvious noncombatants, but flying bullets and disrupter beams and crumbling buildings made no such distinction. Toby would have liked to cheer on the rebels, outnumbered and outgunned but still refusing to be beaten, but he couldn't, not if he ever wanted the film he was risking his life to get to be shown in the Empire. So he kept his commentary carefully neutral and let the pictures speak for themselves.

The young burglar known as Cat was up on the roofs, too, doing his bit. He'd delivered all of Cyder's messages, and strictly speaking should have been on his way back to the Blackthorn, but he couldn't resist getting involved. He'd never thought of himself as a violent man, but the merciless destruction of his city had raised in him an anger that couldn't be denied. And so he pelted the troops below with slates and tiles and anything else he could get his hands on, in between grabbing people who nearly threw themselves off the edge of the roof in their enthusiasm. They weren't as used to roofs as Cat.

He was overseeing the dismantling of a chimney stack to provide bricks for throwing when he happened to look down the far end of the street. Thick black smoke drifted this way and that from the burning buildings, blown by rising hot air and the disturbances of passing gravity barges, but it parted now to show Cat half a dozen troopers