Nikki Sixteen, that proud and feisty human-alien hybrid from the Rookery, ran through the square at that moment with a dozen of her fellow fighters, heading for the palace, drawn by what they'd heard in Jesamine's song. She stopped as she recognized Brett and Rose, flashed Brett a smile, and then hesitated. Brett was different. She could feel it. There was… more to him. Brett and Rose looked at Nikki, at the same moment, in the same way, and Nikki backed away from them. She was frightened, and she didn't know why. She ran after her companions, out of the square, not even sure what it was she was running from. Except that it felt… like Brett was dead. Or at least gone.
Gil Akotai led his Mistworld warriors through the streets, using sharp and cunning tactics to split the thrall armies apart into more manageable groups. Mistworlders knew all about strategy and dirty fighting. Gil swung his long curved blade with wide easy strokes, husbanding his energy, always leading from the front. More and more people came to join him as news of his success spread, and soon he was leading an army of his own through the Parade of the Endless. His skill and courage were unmatched, and he built his own legend that day, through feats of valor and derring-do that were all the more impressive because they came from a simple man, untouched by the dubious blessings of the Madness Maze. The Mistworlders chanted his name as a battle cry, and others took it up as Gil Akotai led them unstoppably towards the heart of the city. News cameras came rushing in from all directions to broadcast it all live. People on worlds all across the Empire followed his exploits, because he was one of them, not a legend or monster from the Maze; just a man, with a man's courage and determination. Gil Akotai led his people on, cutting a bloody path through the chaos towards the Imperial Palace.
John Silence, the last survivor of those who'd come down in his pinnace, made contact with the clone guards and took control of them. They weren't much use without officers to guide them, but they recognized Silence's natural authority, and gratefully accepted his tactics and orders. Silence recognized them as clones, but had no idea of their origin. They still wore their steel masks. But they were a fighting force, and just what Silence needed, so he didn't question them too deeply. He just set them to work, killing thralls and pulling together, and then he led them into battle, fighting solidly and well. The Maze might not have granted him miraculous powers, like Owen and the others, but he was still the greatest fighting soldier of his time. He'd even gone head-to-head with Owen Deathstalker, and held his own. The thralls were no match for him. He looked into their possessed eyes, and was reminded of his battles long ago against Shub's Ghost Warriors. Nothing changes, he thought, just a little bitterly. The Ghost Warriors were a very long time ago, but he didn't feel old. In fact, it seemed to him that he'd never fought better than this.
He said as much to Investigator Frost, and she agreed, smiling. She stuck close to his side, warning him of dangers he missed.
Silence and his clone guards reached the palace steps not long after Jesamine's marvelous song, and he led them carefully through the fallen thralls bodies to the foot of the steps. Nina spotted him, yelled a cheerful greeting, and came bounding down the steps for a quick interview with this new leader of the guards. (Lewis and Jesamine had already refused an interview, and Stuart never had much to say.) But she stopped suddenly, distracted by one of the guards. The steel mask had been torn away during a struggle, and for the first time Nina could see one of the guard's faces. And for all the distortion, she recognized it immediately as Finn's. She turned quickly and ripped the mask off another guard.
"Clones!" said Nina. "Finn's clones—all of them! Another exclusive!"
And she did her happy dance, right there in front of a bemused Silence. And then she went bounding back up the steps to spill the news to Stuart. She forgot all about interviewing the solemn-looking man who'd led the guards into the square. She had a feeling she ought to know him, but that could wait. Besides, she thought, glancing back for a moment, he did seem awfully busy chatting with someone who wasn't there…
Elsewhere in the city, the aliens from the Rookery had joined the fight against the invading thralls. They emerged from unexpected places to rend and kill unsuspecting thralls, and enjoyed themselves immensely. Led by the silver-armored Toch'Kra, they came boiling out of sewer openings and factory outlets, and erupted from boarded-up factories and pollution dumps, catching the thralls by surprise. The aliens tore the possessed humans apart. They didn't know the bodies were mind-wiped, and they didn't care. They had grievances to address, and besides, they were hungry. Sometimes they had to be restrained from attacking the clone guards and the fleet's soldiers. The Rookery people cheered the aliens on, which was something of a new sensation for them.
The monsters from Shandrakor quickly gravitated towards the aliens, and fought by their side. They felt more at home there, though they politely declined when asked if they'd like to join the feasting. The monsters excelled at fighting the thralls, partly because of their bestial natures, honed by long years of struggle for survival on Shandrakor, but mostly because they had nothing left to lose.
They had been promised that they could come home, and here they were. It might be called Logres now rather than Golgotha, but this was still the Parade of the Endless, just as they remembered. Even if it had been fancied up a bit since their time. They were home again, and if they had only come back to fight and die, that was fine by them.
Michel du Bois, one of the few surviving members of Parliament, fought with his back to a wall in a side alley already choked with bodies. Most of the Virimonde warriors he'd come down with were already dead, but he and a dozen others fought on, stubbornly refusing to be dragged down and torn apart like the others. Du Bois chanted the old Deathstalker battle cry, Shandrakor! as he swung his sword with more defiance than skill. Du Bois had always been fiercely loyal to his homeworld, if not always to its most famous Paragon, Lewis; but with the slaughter of Clan Deathstalker by Finn's creatures, all the people of Virimonde had sworn to become Deathstalkers in their place; and du Bois was no different. He had been among the first to volunteer to come and fight on Logres, even though he was far more a politician than a warrior. He thought he'd done well enough, considering. He'd killed thralls. His only regret was that he should have to die in such a squalid back alley, so far away from the House of Parliament and the Imperial Palace, where he'd spent so much of his life.
He'd wanted to see them once again, at least, before he died.
One by one, the men and women around him were dragged down, and killed. Each and every one of them went down fighting to the last. They fought impossible odds, as a Deathstalker should, and not one of them broke and ran. So Michel du Bois couldn't either. And when he finally fell, still flailing about him with his sword, his last thought was: Ah, Lewis, I always knew you'd be the death of me.
The whole city was a battleground now. The thrall invasion had been halted by the starcruisers' actions outside the city, but the armies of thralls already inside the city were still surging through the streets of the Parade of the Endless. The tides of battle swept this way and that, and apart from one small area around the Imperial Palace, no one could tell for sure which way the war was going.
Inside the court, the five assembled uber-espers launched the full force of their considerable will against the waiting Douglas Campbell and Finn Durandal, and once again they failed. They simply could not reach the two men standing steadily before them. The uber-espers looked at each other, baffled. No esp-blocker ever made could have stood up to such an attack. And then cold, harsh laughter rang out on the air from nowhere. The uber-espers' heads snapped round. Screaming Silence shook violently, rattling her chains, and Blue Hellfire let out a low moaning. Gray Train actually lost control of his dusty shape for a moment. All the uber-espers knew that laugh. And as they looked wildly about them, Diana Vertue stepped casually out from behind Finn's throne, to fix them all with her savage glare.
"I've been here all along," she said flatly. "Hidden behind the stronges
t shields I ever created. I walked in here with Douglas and Tel, and nobody saw or heard me. Even they couldn't be sure I was with them. They just had to take it on trust. You see, Douglas and Finn were the bait, but I am the trap. I knew you'd never face me willingly, even if you did manage to kill me once, so Douglas and I came up with a plan to bring all of you to me. And guess what—I brought a few friends along."
She rose up into the air, hovering above the throne on unseen wings, and suddenly she was shining brightly as the sun. Her presence joined with the presence of many other minds to beat on the air of the court. Even Douglas and Finn flinched away from her. The uber-espers howled and shrieked in inhuman voices as Diana Vertue became a conduit for all the power of the mass-mind of the oversoul, and Diana laughed again.
"The oversoul has come back! The city of New Hope traveled here with the Fleet from Mistworld, unseen and unsuspected. Only I knew. A secret weapon, to be preserved and kept ready for just this moment. You uber-espers are all that's left of a particularly shameful episode of our past, and we will finally be rid of you!"
The uber-espers tried to flee, teleporting out of the court, but Diana Vertue held them where they were. And the oversoul struck at the uber-espers through Diana, who was still sometimes Jenny Psycho. The terrible destructive force beat upon the monstrous minds of the uber-espers, driving them together to support their mental shield. Douglas and Finn were forced back, unable to bear even the side effects of the psychic assault taking place before them. They huddled together, hands clapped uselessly to their heads, the only human souls left on an inhuman battlefield. The oversoul kept up the pressure, beating at the uber-espers' shield with brutal strength, determined to wipe out the menace of the mad minds, once and for all. Diana Vertue grinned like a death's head as the attack focused through her enlarged mind. This was what she had come back for. An old vengeance for an old crime.
The uber-espers huddled together as their mental shield shuddered and cracked, failing under the onslaught of the oversoul and Diana Vertue, and then… something utterly unexpected happened. The dusty gray figure of the Gray Train collapsed, losing its human shape to become a gray cloud that swept over Blue Hellfire, surrounded and sank into her, darkening the color of her corpse-pale skin. Icy flames leapt up around her. The Shatter Freak lurched forward, almost against his will, his body parts appearing and disappearing at dizzying speed, until he too fell into Blue Hellfire like a rock into a pool, absorbed and swallowed up in a moment. Screaming Silence lunged forward, grunting like a hog at the trough, and her great fleshy body wrapped itself around Blue Hellfire. The flames blazed brightly, radiating an impossible cold as the two figures melted together to become one. A dark silhouette of a human figure, like a hole in the world. And finally the two withered homunculi of the Spider Harps just snapped out of existence, like a popped soap bubble. Only one figure now remained, bathed in icy flames like a clay shape being recast in a kiln. And when it was all over, and the cold fires had died away, there stood just a single figure, a short blond woman who shone like the sun. Diana looked at her blankly as the oversoul's attack cut off.
"Who the hell are you? Where did the uber-espers go?"
"Back inside me, where they belong," said the new woman, in a flat, measured voice. She rolled her head around and flexed her shoulders, as though it had been a long time since she'd been in a body. "I should thank you, Diana Vertue, and the oversoul. The pressure of your attack brought about what I've been unable to achieve for hundreds of years. You put me back together again."
"The uber-espers—all of them—they were just parts of you?" said Diana.
"I went through the Madness Maze, a long, long time ago, and it split me apart into five separate subpersonalities, because that was the only way I could cope with what I found there. Greetings to you, King Douglas and Emperor Finn. I am Alicia VomAcht Deathstalker. I am finally back, and all the worlds that are shall tremble before me."
"This is not good," said Finn.
"You think?" said Douglas.
The sheer force of Alicia's presence seemed to fill the court, pressing against the far walls and shuddering in the floor. It pushed Diana's presence aside effortlessly, and both Douglas and Finn had to fight an urge to kneel and bow their heads. They felt as though they didn't belong in the court, like vermin in the gaze of a living goddess. The oversoul was silent in Diana's head, struck dumb by this turn of events. Even their best precogs hadn't sensed this coming. The entire mass-mind of the oversoul looked upon the restored, incandescent mind of Alicia VomAcht Deathstalker, and was afraid. She smiled slowly upon Diana.
"We have met before. When you manifested the Mater Mundi, all those years ago, that was part of me. I was spread far and wide by the Maze, torn apart into grotesque subpersonalities, crude representatives of my various needs and functions, but I always had an agenda."
"Who… were you?" said Douglas, fighting to get the words out. "How did you become… the uber-espers?"
"What?" said Alicia. "You mean the oversoul never told you about the mad old aunt they kept in the attic? I am the beginning of the esper movement. They all have their root in me. I was one of the group of scientists who first discovered the Madness Maze, in a cavern deep inside Haden, centuries and centuries ago. I was an esper, one of the very first. I found others, bound them to my will, and forced them to go through the Maze with me. My intention was to produce a mighty esper gestalt, with me in total control, but… the Maze wasn't what I thought it was. It tried to change me, remake me… and I couldn't have that. I fought it, but the effort broke me. Tore me apart into the uber-espers and the driving force in the mass unconscious of the other espers, who became the esper underground. Later, they called me the Mater Mundi, Mother of All Souls. Even scattered and separated I was a force in the history of mankind. Now I'm back, and steeped in my true power again.
"I like this new mass gestalt you call the oversoul. So brightly shining, so very tasty. Why, I could just eat it all up."
Alicia VomAcht Deathstalker withdrew her controlling presence from the thrall armies, to gather all her power in one place for one purpose, and all across the Parade of the Endless, no longer possessed men and women and children fell limply to the ground and lay still. Eyes open, still breathing, but utterly empty. Alicia would reoccupy them later, after she'd finished with more pressing business. Fighting stopped in the city, as exhausted and bloody men and women slowly lowered their weapons and looked uncertainly about them. A great cheer went up, that the war was over and they had survived. They didn't know about Alicia. The various fighting groups came together as they headed for the heart of the city, and the Imperial Palace. The acclaimed greatest hero of the fighting, Gil Akotai, led the way.
Above the Imperial Palace, the vast floating city of New Hope manifested, its glass and silver towers shining like an impossibly huge snowflake. The people below cheered out again to see it, but the espers didn't notice. They fought to focus every bit of power they had through Diana Vertue. It was a terrible thing to come face-to-face with their progenitor, after all these years. They had found at last their founder and creator, only to discover she was a mad god that wished only to devour her children. But the oversoul still had a few tricks up its sleeve. A few hints from the pre-cogs. The oversoul sent down Crow Jane and the Ecstatic called Joy, to join the others in the court.
Standing alone before the last throne, Alicia didn't actually look like much. Just a small, short, blond woman in an old-fashioned spacer's uniform, the only mark of strangeness about her the huge dark eyes that dominated her small pale face. The kind of woman you'd pass every day and never give a second look. But even though she'd turned off her glow, her presence was still stamped upon the court, like a boot crashing into a face. She dominated the whole court by her very existence.
Behind her, a man and a woman entered the court, striding along side by side. Alessandra Duquesne, last of the Psycho Sluts, and John Silence, last of the old legends. She had dropped down out of the sky a
nd snatched him up from the thick of the fighting. She carried him towards the palace, and Because we're needed was all she had to say. Silence went along with it. He was used to sudden changes in direction in his life. At first, Alessandra had been a little confused, thinking there was someone else with Silence, but she pushed the thought aside to concentrate on getting to the palace as fast as possible. Why are you crying? Silence had asked, and she told him about having to kill her oldest friend. Silence had nodded, understanding. Rebellions always kill your friends first, he said, remembering Alexander Storm, and others.
Silence and Alessandra circled carefully around Alicia, giving her plenty of room. They could feel the power radiating from her. They joined Douglas and Finn and Diana before the throne. They'd heard Alicia tell her strange history as they approached the court. They told the King and Emperor of the collapse of the thrall armies, and Douglas nodded, relieved there was at least one problem that he didn't have to be worried about for the moment. He nodded to Silence.
"I understand you're really the legendary Captain John Silence. Why did you masquerade as Samuel Chevron for all those years? Did my father know?"
"No," said Silence. "No one knew. That was the point. I felt it best to conceal my true nature."
"Lot of that going around at the moment," said Douglas.
And then Crow Jane materialized in court right next to them, along with Joy, and they all jumped. Crow Jane wore her battered leather jacket, with a bandolier of throwing stars across her bosom. Her sharp face looked even paler than usual, showing off her jet-black hair and lips and heavy eye makeup. Joy, whose brain had been surgically altered so that he lived in a constant state of orgasm, smiled brightly on one and all, an average, almost anonymous-looking man in a simple white tunic. Crow Jane nodded briskly to Diana.
"The oversoul sent us. No one seems too sure why, but our precogs were unanimous that Joy needs to be here. Don't ask me what good he's going to do, unless he intends on smiling Alicia to death."