“No worries. They’re coming by Sand Mountain on two shielded helicopters; they’re paralleling the Interstate,” Bob said, surprising Dana. “They think their worshipper-backed defenses can shield them from me, but that mong Dubuque’s taught them only the basics, the old Atlanta-style beams and force fields and Old God crapola. If he put an ounce…”
Bob sneered at the standard Territorial God tricks and willpower uses, saying they lacked class, finesse, inventiveness or at times moral correctness. He skittered through attacks like oil through water, or oil on water, or something archetypically skittery. In his skittering he was, most obviously, Divine.
Dana tuned out Bob’s rant and began to signal her people, barking them into place. Once Bob pointed the enemy out to her, she found and IDed them instantly. The choppers slunk in ten miles out, much slower than the jets. As she zeroed in on them, the first of the jets fired its missiles, sending her heart into her throat and her own borrowed Divine willpower to all points around her.
Yup. Nothing like being an eternal target to keep you on your toes.
Dana dodged a combined four-Supported blue helix attack and put up a rock barrier. The fight, now twenty very bloody minutes old, had moved away from Flat Rock into Sand Mountain proper. Not that Sand Mountain deserved the name, barely a hill this far north, though there were ample forests on its ‘peaks’. Still…
Dubuque’s four Grade Zero Supported blasted at her again, this time with a red-beaded heat beam thudding into Dana’s interposed rocks. The rocks exploded. Two hundred feet farther, and skip-hopping with all their might, Lydia and her chained jeans jangled along in front of the Dubuque Supported, side by side with the other five Natural Supported who depended on Dana for their lives and freedom. Lydia and the Natural Supported had long since learned to combine their magics; the defensive barrier they kept behind them proved stiff enough to protect from any single fanatic-worshipper-backed Dubuque Supported, no matter how skilled or powerful.
Four Supported, on the other hand, appeared to be just a tad bit problematic this far into a fight.
Luckily, 99-God style Supported couldn’t combine the way the Natural Supported did; the power of the just-dodged four-Supported blue helix attack summed less than that of the four component parts. They lived with the inefficiencies in the off chance their combination would get past Lydia or Dana’s shields. This didn’t matter one whit to Dana, who was able to deflect only one worshipper-backed blue helix attack at a time. Against multiple opponents her only chance of survival was to dodge and deflect.
Ah, the story of her life. She had been dodging and deflecting family problems and unwanted advances from men and women for years. Eventually she would fail. Responsibility, anger, fear and adrenaline would take her only so far, in war as well as in her personal life, and after twenty minutes of attacking and dodging Supported, she now journeyed well past exhausted.
As she turned to dodge again, this time to the left, she lost control of her willpower-based skip-hop and face-planted into a tree. The pain of her injuries threatened her sanity; she had already lost her lower left leg and her right arm, and the side-blast from the arm-frying attack had done something ruinous to her hair and face she couldn’t bear to think about.
I’m a war-hating pacifist, she reminded herself. I really do want to save the whales, end world hunger and solve global warming. War’s not my thing. I’m not good at this at all. Really really not. Despite the number of Dubuque attacks she had found a way to squeak through, and the number of Grade Zero Supported she had thwarted, stunned, depowered or flat out killed.
She threw a millionth mental curse at the long departed January Cox and her impossible companion, Knot. “If you don’t give up on your Regency, you will die,” Knot had said, winning the argument about whether to stay to help Dana’s crew. “I’m not saying ‘might die’. I’m saying ‘will die’. A one hundred percent chance. And you die accomplishing nothing!” Jan had come back from her supposed timeline jaunt with death accompanied by Knot, and a new save-the-world Mission, a Mission more important than saving the Indigo or helping Dana if she stayed a Regent. When Jan and Knot went off on their first quest, the goodbye had been both tearful and tense.
Dana’s mid-battle internal carping didn’t, as usual, do her any good. The yammering hammering internal yips would have been even worse, save that this was the third – no, fourth – time since the Betrayal she had been badly injured. Inured she became, the pain and horror over being mutilated now old friends. The time when an enemy purple helix blinded her? Now that had been bad. She had almost quit in horror after the disastrous blinding debacle.
Luckily, or perhaps precognitively preordained by the Indigo, none of her battles horrified her as much as her one Indigo sortie. She had learned to be a warrior after Jan’s so-called death. She had learned her uttermost limits facing Hell.
Thwarting Dubuque? Just another job, despite the number of losses accumulating in her resume.
Cody and James, two of the loaner Supported from the neighboring Territorial God, Orlando, attacked Dubuque’s four, attempting to bury them in toxic fog. The fog gave Dana enough time to exert her willpower into a tree-dodging ground-hugging fly, which put some separation between herself and her attackers. Dubuque had sent fourteen top-end well-trained Grade Zero Supported on this attack, and although she didn’t think her group had killed any of the attackers, ten of the fourteen were out of the fight because of wounds, depletion or insanity. The insanity effect came from some nasty trick of Bob’s, who was finally starting to pull his weight in a melee with something besides rapid movement and hand-to-hand combat. He had invented something allowing three of the Dubuque Supported to run through each other, a physical superposition; when last Dana had heard them, five miles and nine minutes before, those three remained stuck together and yodeling the uvulas out of their throats for all they were worth.
Dana didn’t know where Bob was, or who he fought, or even if he still lived. She supposed so, as she still borrowed his willpower, but given that she still borrowed from the long-deceased Atlanta…
Cody and James went down screaming, down and dead. Today, unlike in the past, Dubuque’s Supported hungered for blood. So had the mind-befuddled and long dead jet pilots, slain despite the willpower ‘spells’ put on their jets to protect them from Supported attacks. Lydia’s team of Natural Supported took care of the problem far too long ago.
Dana sucked air into her aching lungs and scanned around her. Still no Bob. Had the attackers succeeded in capturing or killing him? She couldn’t tell; the ache in her heart might easily be for the far too many dead Orlando Supported.
In fact, her scan couldn’t find anyone she couldn’t see, not a single remaining living Orlando Supported. Cody and James had been the last two. Worse, Lydia and the Natural Supported pulled away from Dana. They did so at Dana’s orders, but their leaving still hurt.
She turned to face the enemy, the lump in her throat growing to where she couldn’t breathe. Her exhausted body shook. The sky arched a brilliant blue above her, marked by a few puffy white clouds. The four enemy Supported scrambled to turn themselves around, spread out and cycling back for another attack.
So much for finding a way to make up with her parents, who had now disowned her three times: once for turning down an old-fashioned arranged marriage, second for going to graduate school, and third for becoming a Supported. Her parents, her Anglo-Persian father and her Persian mother – the term ‘Iranian’ a deadly insult around them – old fashioned?
They took old fashioned to new heights.
So much for finding a soul mate. For a few days she had thought January Cox of the Indigo might be the one, but despite Jan’s miraculous reappearance, supposedly from a parallel timeline, their non-relationship remained as dead as she thought Jan had been. The last news was of Jan rescuing two of her Indigo compatriots, Jurgen Lowezski and Steve Clover, from some form of sexual enslavement at the hands of Montreal. Her last message from Jan had
been three weeks ago. Nothing since.
No, as always in Dana’s well-structured life, she stood on her own.
Dana held no illusions about the outcome of a fight between her and four Dubuque Grade Zero Supported this late in a fight. She just hoped Bob got away and that her death would be clean. She hadn’t ever been able to accept dying young, but she didn’t have any choice in the matter. Knot had been correct about her chance at living through her Regency. Pacifist or not, she wouldn’t go down without a fight, not these days, and she wouldn’t go down happy.
The four enemy Supported, ill-positioned, strung out and lacking teamwork, attacked anyway. Their first attack hit her with a blue helix, which Dana deflected. She returned fire with the last of her offense, a white lightning attack sourced impossibly from the depths of her support from the now deceased Atlanta; the Dubuque Grade Zero she hit fell, exhausted.
If Dana had another ounce of offense in her, she might have even started to degrade the worshipper-powered defenses of the other three. She didn’t, so she moved and dodged.
The last three, a man and two women, smiled knowingly, feral and bloodthirsty. They flew around her, fifty yards away and barely above the trees, savoring the moment and reducing Dana’s ability to deflect their attacks. They tasted her depleted resources. They lusted for her death as if she was the Antichrist.
Twin blue helixes shot toward her from either side, singeing pine needles as they penetrated the trees; she jumped up to escape them, wasting willpower she didn’t have to waste. On the way down – no choice in that – she raked one of the Supported with her AR-15, to no effect. Another blue helix, this time from the third Supported, hit her in the back before she regained ground. Energies coursed through and around the exhausted Dana, a dead-on attack she couldn’t deflect.
She expected a hole in her the size of a basketball, or oblivion, or at least her life passing before her eyes. Instead, Dana saw another way, some aspect of the willpower previously unseen. Something new, not exactly willpower, but something close. To her amazement, the defending survivors instantly became one with her, all working together to hold up her defensive shields against an attack her shields shouldn’t be able to stop. In this combination, the whole proved greater than the sum of the parts. Her shields held and stopped the blue helix attack cold.
The defending survivors were the Natural Supported. Somewhere in the distance, Lydia yelled “You’re not allowed to die, you damned zombie-assed bitch!” Tough love, the only kind.
Dana’s shields weren’t able to stop a second blue helix direct hit, though. When the next attacker helixed her a second later, her impossible defensive shield failed and the reality-twisting attack ripped her right shoulder off her body, exposing ribs and deflating her lungs. Dana’s heart stopped and she fell to the ground, limp, sustained only by the last of her willpower.
The expected coup de gras didn’t come; instead, a series of powerful explosions pummeled the ground, willpower attacks in such number Dana couldn’t count them. She turned to the source and sensed a formation of several dozen Supported angling across the sky at the last three Dubuque attackers. Bob led them, an unrecognized teen at his side. The rest she IDed by their auras as Orlando Supported. As she fell into clinical death, she realized Orlando himself had shown, invisible, blasting away with abandon.
Her willpower exhausted, she fell into the darkness.
2. (Betrayer)
“Awwwh, twuuu luv,” Betrayer said to herself, backing away in projection space as the Kid God, Orlando and his entourage swooped down to save the day. Tears of anger and horror dripped down Orlando’s face as he landed beside Dana to heal her. Anyone with eyes could see how much he loved Dana.
Betrayer couldn’t avoid meddling in battles in her mostly-former territory, and she couldn’t pass up any opportunity to goose Dubuque and his addled Supported holy rollers. She had spent the entire melee boosting the power of Orlando’s Supported and weakening Dubuque’s attackers, just enough to give the Kid God the time needed to bring in the cavalry. She had nearly crapped out the timing at the end, almost losing Dana, but a little mental distraction of the enemy Supported gave Dana the extra ounce of time she needed to cough up the ghost at Orlando’s feet.
Now, if Orlando could just get on with his necessary wooing and seducing. Of course, right now, one would need to have a hamburger or corpse fetish for any such seduction, given how far Dana had pushed herself in the melee. Damn, that woman had no quit in her.
Betrayer checked her spy network – crows all, as maintaining a link to bird eyeballs and brains was far easier than supporting a large network of stealthy projections. Given how bad Dana and Orlando were at human interactions, she suspected she would need to provide a prod or two later with the wooing and seducing. She sighed and started in on her mental paperwork, mostly records from her crow spies.
What was this? January Cox and her tall alternate-timeline sidekick, once named The Other Diana Lowezski and now named Knot to avoid confusion with the different looking Diana Lowezski already existing here, had corralled one of the 99 for a confab. This sounded far more interesting to Betrayer than listening to Dana whine.
“…got bored trying to hide from Dr. Evil and his numerous Mini Mes and decided working at GridderSpace would at least give me a chance to knock some of the rust out of my brain,” Progress said. Instead of the God’s usual overly-tattooed cyberpunk magnet-bait attire, she wore business casual and half-decent Desi looks. Jan and Knot, the two aggressively aggressive Indigo women, also in business casual, had plunked themselves down at Progress’s table during her lunch in the office park’s food court. That in itself was worth a bwah-hah-hah, as taking time for lunch hurt the lean-forward workaholic Progress’s blend-in Mission, even if she did take her lunch in the South Asian vegetarian Bits&Bytes. Given the lunch restaurant’s competition was the Premeeting For The Standup Meeting Planning Session (the national chain of Dilbert-themed business food court restaurants) and the almost always deserted Trop.Pics (where you got free food if you submitted to personalized vacation advertisements), that wasn’t saying much. “You found me anyway. How?”
“Tricks,” Jan said. Before her trip to never-never land she had been an athletic five nine with bottle blonde hair. Now her natural and frizzy red hair was back, along with the body of a woman bodybuilder. Her thinner and taller companion, Knot, shared the musculature, only on Knot the musculature gave her the aura of a WNBA pro, and her Day-Glo orange hair wasn’t even close to natural. Both of them radiated killer ‘follow me’ leadership even without their Indigo enhancements. “Tricks nobody else save a few of us of the Indigo can use to find people. Don’t worry, we’re not going to turn you in to the City of God.”
“What can I do for you, then?” Progress, one of the leading technical Practical Gods, looked skittish, ready to bolt. Stupid she wasn’t. She adjusted her floral pin on her dark red blouse, fidgety.
“Answer questions,” Jan said. Both Jan and Knot wore their screwy dark gray Indigo cloaks, seemingly non-magical but capable of keeping normal prying eyes from noticing their existence. “First off, do you know of any way to track a detached piece of one of the 99? We had one stolen from us, and we think we know where it ended up, but we’d like to figure out the who and the why.”
Progress nodded, relieved the two hadn’t asked her to jump into a fight against a Hell-beast or Hell-traitor. “Sure. Glad to help.” The sooner I do, the sooner you leave, Betrayer translated. She chuckled in amusement. “Is this God-piece anywhere civilized?”
“Seattle.”
“That will do.” Progress frowned. “Hand me your phablet, and…” She stopped when Jan did as she asked. “What’s wrong with this thing?”
“It’s been to Hell.” Jan turned to Knot. “I thought you said this was cleaned off?”
“It is,” Knot said. She turned to Progress. “Ma’am, we mean you no harm.” Knot, who spoke with an otherworldly Cajun French accent, was invariably polite to any of the
Gods she met. Betrayer still wasn’t sure why.
“So Hell is real, then,” Progress said, a dour smile on her face. “In answer to your question: some of the device’s electrons in the circuitry are a thousandth of a percent heavy. You might occasionally see a few dropped bits from this.” She concentrated for a second and passed it back. “I installed an app for what you want.”
Jan blanched, thanked the God, and began to tap. Progress turned to Knot. “So, are the rumors true, the ones saying you’re a refugee from a parallel dimension?”
“We call them alternate timelines, and, yes, they’re true,” Knot said. “Here. Be amazed.” She handed over an oversized old-fashioned candybar phone to the God. “I keep this around to remind me of my former home. This was cutting edge tech back there.”
“Hmm,” Progress said. “This one’s been to Hell, too, I take it?” Knot nodded. “This is indeed strange, with the combination of primitive chips and an advanced OLED display better than what’s available commercially here.” Progress started naming off technical differences neither Betrayer – or Jan – understood, but Knot did. “You do realize visiting another timeline should be impossible, and if they did exist separately enough to visit, the alternate timelines should have no commonalities with our own.” Jan continued to tap and mouse around on her phablet.
“Or I’m not real,” Knot said, smiling. “We’ve talked about this many times, and, no, we don’t fully understand what’s going on either. Our best explanation is we’re missing a few important pieces of the puzzle, the same way the heliocentric model of the solar system didn’t make any sense until Constantinius figured out planetary elliptical orbits.”
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 3
