seen on Virimonde, the people were ready to believe anything of her, and these new threats hit them where they lived. Isolated protests were put down with such fury and bloodshed that even the hardened populace of Golgotha was shocked, and they rose up everywhere at once. The underground did its best to guide them in the right directions, while hiding its smiles. It had always known people need motivating, and what they won't do for the right reason, sometimes they will for the wrong reason.
The authorities sent out every armed trooper they had, with orders to stop the riots at all costs and not to bother with taking prisoners. This just made matters worse, infuriating an already defiant population, and as fast as troopers put the rebellion down in one place, it just popped up in another, regrouping and re-forming faster than it could be dispersed. The underground disrupted all levels of communication, while using espers to organize their own forces. The Clans took one look at the growing chaos, called back all their troops, and retreated into their pastel Towers, safe behind organized levels of security. Encouraging the fighting on other worlds was one thing, but this was too close to home. So they kept their heads well down, avoided attracting attention to themselves, and let the rebels concentrate their hatred on Lionstone's authority. And when the mess was over, and the rebels were tired and aimless once more, the Families would emerge and take control again, as they always had. Or so they thought. They didn't know about the underground—its plans and its powers. They didn't know about the people who'd been through the Madness Maze. They didn't realize that the great rebellion had finally begun.
Parliament convened and agreed to stand aside and support whoever came out on top. Which surprised no one.
Above the worlds of Empire, starships clashed in the night. The underground had put out a call to the Hadenmen, and their great golden ships were abroad in the night again. Huge and fast and awesome, they were more than a match for the scattered Imperial starcruisers. As far as numbers went, the Hadenman ships were greatly in the minority, but they ran rings around the slower Empire ships, outgunning and outperforming them on every level. The Empire crews panicked, faced with the legendary old Enemies of Humanity, and put out general distress calls, demanding that all Imperial ships forget about the rebellions to face the greater threat of the Hadenmen. Starcruisers all across the Empire ignored Lionstone's increasingly frantic orders and raced to meet the golden ships, only to fall one by one. Blazing wreckage cartwheeled slowly down through the atmospheres of unsuspecting planets. And the Hadenmen sailed on through the long night.
The Church of Christ the Warrior saw the second coming of the augmented men as a spiritual as well as a martial threat, and threw everything they had against the Hadenmen, ignoring the rebellion. They fared no better than the Fleet, once again distracting ships and troops that might have prevailed against the rebellion. The underground confused things even farther by spreading carefully placed rumors that Lionstone was planning to seize the Church's tithes to replace her missing taxes, thus alienating the Church even more. Every little bit helped.
If Lionstone had had more than just a few E class starcruisers to call on, with their new stardrives and superior weapons systems, things might have been different. But after the rebels destroyed the Wolfe stardrive factory on Technos III, there were only five E class ships in service, and they couldn't be everywhere at once. There were even open mutinies on some Imperial ships, as junior officers with rebel sympathies and underground connections led takeover bids on the control decks, backed by disgruntled lower ranks who hadn't been paid for months, because of Treasury shortfalls after the Tax systems crashed. A surprising number of these mutinies succeeded, and the new rebel ships withdrew themselves from combat. They wouldn't fight their own kind, but they would take no further part against the rebellion.
Meanwhile, Toby Shreck and his cameraman Flynn were right there in the thick of it all, getting everything on film, transmitting live as often as they could. Dragged from one bloody firefight to another by their Imperial minders, they did their best to cover everything as objectively as possible. The army officers supposed to be in charge of censoring their output were mostly too busy with their own problems.
On a battlefield pockmarked with craters on the planet Loki, the Imperial armies were overrun by wild-eyed rebel forces, and Toby and Flynn took the first opportunity to make a run for it. They didn't get far among the body- filled craters before they were stopped by the advancing rebel forces, who luckily recognized Toby. A few even asked for autographs. Toby pleaded eloquently to be sent to Golgotha, where the real story was, and after a certain amount of discussion the rebels were happy to send them on their way. They understood the need for good propaganda, and it seemed only fair to all concerned that the two men who had covered so much of the story should be there for the final act when it happened. Toby smiled and nodded and agreed modestly in all the right places, and prayed no one would ask awkward questions about who was going to pay all the bills. No one did, so Toby and Flynn set off on the first of half a dozen uncomfortable journeys that would take them eventually to Golgotha, Lionstone's Court, and the Hell that she had made there.
For it was on Golgotha that the real fighting, the clashes that mattered, would take place. Who rules homeworld rules the Empire. Everyone knew that. And so Lionstone retreated into her Palace of gleaming steel and brass, set inside a massive steel bunker a mile and a half wide, sunk deep below the surface of the planet, and waited for her enemies to come to her.
They were burning the poets, hanging the troubadours, impaling the satirists. Blood and screams and horror. Just another day in Hell. The Court was a dark, dangerous place now, reflecting the mind of its ruler. The Empress Lionstone XIV, the worshiped and adored, sat on her Iron Throne as though she might leap down from it at any moment, to rend and savage some unfortunate enemy. She wore shimmering white battle armor, which together with her pale face and long blond hair made her look like some vengeful family ghost. Normally she wore her long mane of hair piled up on top of her head for Court appearances, but now it hung down in long uncared-for tresses, through which her icy blue eyes stared unwaveringly. And on her head the tall spiky crown, cut from a single huge diamond—the symbol of power and authority in the Empire.
At the base of her Throne, her maids-in-waiting crouched watchfully like the guard dogs they were. Naked and unashamed as animals, mindwiped and surgically altered to be loyal unto death, they watched the Court through cybernetic senses, ready for any threat to their beloved mistress. They would kill or die to protect her, and their ferocity was legendary. Their teeth were pointed and their fingers ended in implanted steel claws. Within their naked bodies they had other, nastier surprises, the best that money could buy. Once they had been as human as anyone else, with minds and lives of their own, but that was before Lionstone chose them, and took them away from their old lives to be a part of hers. They could be commoner or aristocrat; all were made equally vile under Lionstone's wishes. No one objected. No one dared. Besides, it was an honor to be a maid-in-waiting to the Empress.
Floating on the air before the Throne, dozens of viewscreens showed scenes from all across the Empire. The views changed rapidly, constantly updating themselves on the growing path of the rebellion. Announcers with sweating faces read the news almost apologetically. There were charts showing rebel advances and Imperial losses. Shaky cameras showed scenes of blood and chaos and the roar of battle. They all looked much the same. Increasingly confused commentators chattered endlessly about what it all meant. On some worlds the rebels had seized control of communications, and triumphant smoke-blackened faces called for the downtrodden to rise up and overthrow the Iron Bitch. Screens blanked in and out as the underground and their cyberat allies interfered with the comm channels, but there were always more signals coming in to replace them. The whole Empire was shouting at the top of its voice, desperate to be heard. The Empress watched it all, her steady gaze cold as death itself. For those who thought they knew her, her cold calm was more worrying than her earlier shouted orders and temper tantrums. It meant she was thinking. Planning. Deliberating on her revenges, and the awful forms they would take.
Standing quietly before the Iron Throne, at what they hoped was a safe distance, were two of the few people apart from guards and their victims still admitted to the Imperial Court. General Shaw Beckett and the Warrior Prime, the Lord High Dram. There were no courtiers present. No Lords and their Ladies, no representatives of the great Families, no Members of Parliament, no one from the one true Church, none of the usual celebrities and characters and hangers-on. Lionstone didn't trust them anymore. Any of them. And so Beckett and Dram stood together, ignoring each other as best they could. They were both men of war, but all they had in common was their loyalty.
Tall and imposing. Dram wore his usual jet-black robes over black battle armor, looking like some gore crow fresh from the battlefield. He wore both gun and sword in the presence of his Empress, one of the very few so allowed. Beckett, on the other hand, looked a mess, as always. His carefully tailored battle armor couldn't hide the fact that he was seriously overweight, his robes were decidedly scruffy, and he carried himself with immense calm but little authority. He was smoking an evil-smelling cigar and not caring where the smoke went.
