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Stories from the Verse
Con Verse Lea
Chapter 34: Beam 134
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Hastings 241
“Good evening,” the white-haired man said to the pair of soldiers at the door. “I am Emperor Beam. My entourage and I are planning to spend the night here, and would appreciate it if you and your companions could vacate the building so we can make ourselves comfortable.”
Shades of déjà vu, he thought, and both soldiers collapsed with blades half drawn and Dawn’s bullets in their heads. The door was locked, but Bron smashed it open. A scream and a thud were heard off toward one end of the building, one of the snipers falling to his death thanks to Ashleigh in her guise as Viper. Dawn led the way into the front hall, and the slaughter proceeded through the house much as the previous night.
Beam wondered only briefly whether he was pushing his people too hard. They had been up before dawn, and traveled quite a distance to get here. This was a larger villa with a larger security contingent than the other. Worse, before they could go to bed they were going to have to toss the bodies outside, because they were planning to stay a little longer this time and couldn’t have rotting corpses littering the building. But the soldiers were no match for them.
Once there were no more enemies in the open, Beam relied on Bob to determine whether there were any more thinking brains alive in the building. There was one, a cook hiding in a cupboard who very intelligently accepted Beam’s offer to let him flee the building. Beam wondered whether the man wasn’t also a soldier, but he wasn’t armed and anyway Beam didn’t care about killing them all, only clearing them out of the building. Bron made repairs to secure the front door, and although it took a couple hours, by nightfall Beam was serving whatever it was the cook had been preparing for the former residents. He stowed the ample leftovers in the large walk-in, and joined Ashleigh in the main bedroom for the night.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #463: Characters Unsettled. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
