The rest held back. They couldn’t do anything useful at this range.
The attackers slowed marginally and spread out, maintaining their range, continuing to pummel Orlando’s shields. As they spread out, Orlando’s shields spread with them.
he sent back.
Damn. This would, eventually, put Orlando’s Supported, the Kid God and S’up into play.
Nessa hoped that wouldn’t turn out to be the disaster she feared.
17. (Dana)
Which meant she needed to change tactics. A moment of thought provided the answer.
Orlando didn’t answer, but he heard and complied, reducing the radius of his shields by half. At the edge of her vision, Dana saw Dave and Elorie, carrying the twins, join the crowd of non-combatants scrambling through the darkness from their now exposed positions to some safer location. Dubuque’s army reacted with glee and charged, sensing imminent defeat. Half way across the gap, the Kid God typed in a command and energy points appeared in the air in the midst of Dubuque’s army. They detonated. Dana smiled. Bob’s willpower might not obey him in a stress situation, but when slaved to his computers he didn’t have his usual problems.
<Überawesome!> S’up sent. Dana studied the bouncing teen fighter, currently wielding a sword a full foot taller than he was. Freud would have a field day.
Four of Dubuque’s Supported targeted S’up.
S’up retreated far faster than Dubuque’s Supported could follow.
Shit.
Bob continued to type and Dana focused on overall battle direction. She sent the first of Orlando’s Supported out in a sortie, with orders to concentrate on one worshipper-supported Grade One at a time. Dana switched her Natural Supported from attack to active defense, repeatedly swatting incoming helixes before they reached Orlando’s shield.
Dana felt the enemy’s panic.
Dana signaled an overall charge, directing the Orlando Supported to form up in groups of six and do group rainbow helixes at Dubuque’s now worshipper-unbacked army. S’up bounded ahead and screamed out a loud “Ding, you mothafuckas!” after he flattened the first two enemy Supported he encountered. S’up’s glow, in Dana’s magic analysis vision overlay of her battle map, took a fifty percent jump, what her adopted son and his neo-Supported called ‘leveling up’.
The pinpoint attacks dropped enemy Supported by dribs and drabs. NessaKen, mentally quiet now, fighting exhaustion, continued their assault at a lower energy level, no longer taking out the enemy but playing with their unconscious minds, weakening their will to fight. Dana took the time to try a few massed natural Supported tricks that worked better when the adrenaline hadn’t redlined. Of the first ten cute tricks, the best one turned out to be the sticky air trick to increase air resistance by five orders of magnitude, neatly freezing one enemy Supported after another in place.
By the time Dubuque’s overly-well-ordered army backed off out of range and reformed, they not only looked weaker, they were weaker. Smaller in number, too. As far as Dana knew, not a single member of their side had fallen.
The enemy hadn’t managed to get their worshiper support going again, either.
“Status?” Orlando said, aloud, teleporting in next to Bob and Persona.
“
I count 270 unharmed attackers, another 190 reasonably functional wounded attackers, and another 30 plus semi-functionals. The rest are non-functional in some way or another,” Persona said. She shook her head. “They’re bringing up a joint-effort defensive shell around our camp.”
At least this was something. Up to this point in time, the damned dolphins had been stalling, unwilling to commit to anything.
“Throughout the Middle Ages, there were scattered clerics and politicians who pointed out the obvious, namely that there is no such thing as a witch… (Unfortunately, some of these skeptics ended up in torture chambers themselves.)” – Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature
“You owe me your lives”
20. (Betrayer)
Betrayer smiled. Orlando’s timing had been perfect: attack the enemy while they’re trying to understand what’s going on. Too bad this wouldn’t be enough.
She backed out of Persona’s mind for the moment; with the battle in a lull, nearly all of them would be able to detect the mind tap in use. From her position high in the air, over Orlando’s camp, she tuned her projection to analysis and dipped a toe in the Place of Time. Yes, she had improvised correctly.
There would be a siege, in the classic sense she and Portland had worked out during the fights against Phoenix and Dubuque. In the classic God-siege, the attackers put up a defensive shell and contracted the shell as they pressed against the defenders’ defensive shell. Pinpoint attacks could break through either shell, the battle decided by which side’s pinpoint attacks worked better. In a siege, both numbers and skill level mattered, as did other intervening factors, such as the skills of the Gods involved and the presence of Telepaths. At least there was one bit of good news. As far as Betrayer could tell, her earlier work at distraction had worked, and Dubuque didn’t have any reserves available anywhere to throw into the fight to tip the odds of the siege or its timing, or any cowed Gods to lend support to his Supported. Nor had any divine projections shown up.
When she analyzed the siege length, though, she didn’t come up with good numbers: the siege would last between a half hour and forty minutes, tops. Dubuque had the numbers; Nessa and Ken, potent as they were, were already overcome both physically and morally by what they had been forced to do earlier in the battle against the worshipper-backed Supported. They wouldn’t be useful until the siege ended and they and Nessa’s children were in mortal danger again.
If her plans were going to have any chance of success, Betrayer would have to trigger the next Persona trick early, long before the trick would have its full emotional impact. Such was life.
As the siege shields stabilized and the pinpoint attacks started, Betrayer re-entered Persona’s mind.
“…and with their aim messed up by this trick and with Korua’s help, they’re left open to more successful counterattacks,” the Kid God said.
Persona arced willpower in surprise. “What’s this?”
“Something’s happening to me!” Persona said, screaming. “I can’t control my willpower!”
Bitch. Damned Inseers. They sensed and understood far too much.
Ken sent. He and Nessa no longer functioned as one.
“I’m too busy with the defensive shield,” Orlando said, his voice disembodied.
Persona fought the compulsion, but with a few tweaks by Betrayer, Persona’s willpower soon fell under Betrayer’s control. Deep in Persona’s mind, where Betrayer had hidden the bomb when Persona had been fully under her power, a willpower construct grew and began to transmit.
Dana and the Natural Supported cadre landed; they had flown over, just above ground level. Dana pushed into Bob’s now crowded tent and put her hands on Persona’s head. “Betrayer’s got some sort of willpower tap going inside of Persona.”
“What’s this doing?” the Kid God said. “Elorie?” The Kid God’s voice mixed with worship and lust. Lydia, the top Natural Supported, glared at the Kid God, and nonchalantly walked over to take the Kid God’s hand.
“You want Elorie to Immune me?” Persona shrieked. “You’re insane!”
“This might work.”
“This might kill me. Don’t. Please.” Persona closed her eyes. “I don’t think this is an attack. Hell, all I’m doing is sending a message.”
Dana nodded. “Yes, and I can even see the target. You’ve been willpower linked to John Lorenzi’s cellphone.” Poor Dana sounded more exasperated than battle-worried.
“Good idea,” the Kid God said. “Dana? Is this all that’s happening?”
“Uh huh. Persona’s been turned into a transmitter and receiver,” Dana said. “I think I might be able to banish…”
“We don’t have time,” Orlando’s disembodied voice said. “Ignore this. We need you holding off these idiots, Dana, not dissecting this latest bit of Betrayer craziness.”
“Okay,” Dana said, unsure, her voice tinged with resentment and regret. She wanted to argue. She had the right to argue, being in command of the battle. But she didn’t.
Dammit! Those two were still unconsummated. What did it take to get those two to get it on, anyway? Engraved invitations? Viagra-emulation willpower insinuations?
Dana took off, but couldn’t resist trying to dismiss Betrayer’s willpower effect from Persona. Perfect.
Heh. Betrayer knew Dana didn’t want to be special. Perhaps this would work to hook her up with Orlando.
Nothing else had, so far.
“What’s going on?” Persona said, voice appreciably deeper. Her form melted into that of John Lorenzi. This had been Lorenzi’s question. Good. One of the worries with this trick was that Lorenzi would have had the bad luck to be dysfunctional when Betrayer ‘called’.
Nessa and Ken appeared from nowhere, Dave and Elorie in tow, finally answering the Kid God’s summons of Elorie. The Kid God didn’t take his eyes off of Elorie for a moment. Nessa looked about as drawn and shaky as Betrayer had ever seen.
“We were attacked by an army of eight hundred of Dubuque’s Supported, and although we’ve whittled them down to five hundred of varying functionality, and Persona and Bob here found a way to chop off their direct worshipper support, there’s still enough of them to kill us all,” Dave said, panting and shaken but able to pull together his usual leadership shit. “We’re besieged.”
Lorenzi looked around. “What’s with the link? I’m in two places at the same time. I’ve never been able to do that before.”
“This is Betrayer’s doing. You’re in Persona’s body. Betrayer grabbed her four days ago and played with her,” Elorie said. “We suspected Betrayer had put a trap in her, but we couldn’t figure out the trap until now.”
“Some trap,” Lorenzi said. “I can’t help. I’m tied up in the Watchers’ magic now and can’t do a thing with my own battle magics.”
“Then Betrayer’s found a way to take one of our Gods out of the fight and give you a front row seat of our deaths,” Dave said. “Damn the bitch!”
“Indeed,” Lorenzi said. “There are things going on with my work that may impact this, though. I don’t want to give you any overstated hope, but there’s a small outside chance I might be able to do something from this end to help you. Because of the timing involved, I suspect Betrayer knows full well what I’ve been working on.”
“Whatever you’re doing, do so quickly,” Orlando’s disembodied voice said. “We’re all deeply fatigued from the first part of the fight. I’m not going to be able to maintain my shields for much more than a half hour.”
“Go back to fighting,” Lorenzi said. “I’ll do what I can over here. Damn you have a lot of opponents out there.”
21. (John)
The laptop sat on the bare wooden table, the focus of every pair of eyes in the room. Fallen Angels and mortals stood, sat and reclined in the low ceilinged common room. John himself rested his aching backside on a bench padded with layers of hand woven blankets.
“But we haven’t yet agreed to any aspect of your overall plan,” Glory said, peering with mixed envy and horror at the battle scene unfolding on the screen. Glory was dressed as a Hollywood goddess today, and had been dressed so for the past several days. He suspected he even knew why, as he had caught Glory, Grover and Lara bounding around the Fallen Angel village, childlike, as they redecorated the place. He could really do without what they called the ‘Escher stairway’ they had installed along the edge of the compound’s main square. He wasn’t sure which of them had done the corrupting or seducing, but he was sure all three were enjoying every immoral second of their mutual infatuation.
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 22
