99 Gods: Betrayer

by Randall Farmer

  “Not a thing,” War said.

  Lorenzi, looking older than God these days, the roots of his remaining hair snowy white and the lines on his fat face chasm deep, closed his eyes and concentrated. “Their main shield is at least fifty percent stronger than it should be with such an overlap.”

  “They’re up to something.”

  “I agree,” Lorenzi said. “Should we call this off?”

  “No, but we’re going to proceed more cautiously,” War said. She sensed out and found all the attack groups in place, most behind makeshift cover like the stack of dumpsters, and a few in the air. She signaled for the first level of decoy attacks to start.

  A dim pre-dawn light chased away the night’s darkness, with true dawn a mere hour away. The change wouldn’t matter much, as a heavy cloud deck had settled in a few thousand feet up. Most of the local illumination in the area was artificial. From above, in the reflected lights of strip centers, streetlights and Dubuque’s megachurch itself, the area took on its normal surreal qualities – was it a church or was it an armed camp? Or was it a school? Although just an illusion of the mind, War thought Dubuque’s acquired megachurch and personal additions, the extensive partly completed dormitory-style outbuildings, gave this area a fantastic feel, with her as the dragon about to attack some doughty knight’s castle.

  War separated her train of thought into nine segments. She maintained two projections in each standard group and three in the false decoy group, which also included her disguised real body. Time to go to work.

  Alt flew over to her. “There’s fewer of them involved in the defense today, War,” he said. “Nicole says she’s picked up anxious and worried thoughts from the defenders who are there.”

  The Telepaths weren’t much help in this variety of fight, as Dubuque had long since found a way to build willpower shields into his buildings, blocking the meager long-range attacks of this Telepath crew. On the other hand they regularly provided unique information – and if they got inside, on the ground, the Telepaths and their quick finesse tactics would prove far more useful when things got up close and personal. In the meantime, the Territorial Gods had the Mindbound among Alt’s group, their ‘bodyguards’, set up as Grade One and Two Supported, and provided the appropriate training.

  “There must have been some defections, then.”

  “I don’t think so,” Alt said.

  Not good. Alt easily sensed people’s allegiances, part of his strange telepathy variant that gave him glimpses into other people’s plans and gave him his ability to recruit.

  “If there haven’t been defections, then why are there fewer defenders?” War said. The obvious answer was ‘they have a trick they are going to pull’, a group of Dubuque’s Supported held in reserve. Why did they think they could hold the besiegers off for any length of time, though?

  “Well,” Alt said, “I can tell you one thing. A bunch of worn out Supported are sleeping in this morning.”

  This didn’t make any sense to War.

  Inside, the remaining defenders maneuvered to block each of the three attacking groups. War measured their effectiveness, and the numbers came out as Lorenzi had said. Individually, each of Dubuque’s Supported put out a hundred and fifty percent of their normal average. War suspected the attackers faced the best of Dubuque’s fighters.

  In which case there was a good chance today’s plan would succeed if they moved fast enough.

  “Step up the pace,” War said. “Joanie, now!”

  Lorenzi gave War’s projection a puzzled look at the change from her ‘take it slow’ orders, then began to prep his magicians. Joanie’s decoy group approached a gap in Dubuque’s defenses and blasted the shields on his megachurch with a dozen varieties of Supported-style willpower. War sensed Dubuque’s defenders scrambling and sensed Dubuque himself at work, shoring up the shields.

  One enemy lance of power, blindingly powerful, ripped through the defenses around Joanie’s decoy group and vaporized two illusionary attackers.

  “That’s a Blind Tom attack,” Nicole said. “But not one of his standard ones.”

  “Amplified and amateur,” War said. The attack’s focus had wavered part way through. Still…

  Another identical lance of power blasted into Joanie’s group, this time into a real Boise Supported. Boise’s defenses on him held, but only barely. Again Blind Tom lost the beam’s focus part way through, the attack spreading out twice as wide as a human body, too diffuse to be a danger.

  “He can’t do that,” Alt said. The ‘all-powerful Blind Tom’ had, or was supposed to have, a killer weakness: he could only use his top end exsanguinary attack a few times a day, with ample rest between attacks. After two of their Supported had died in the first attack on Dubuque’s HQ, Portland had rigged one-use-ever defenses on everyone to suck down Blind Tom’s attacks.

  “This is something new,” War said. She weighed the idea of ordering a retreat and decided to press forward. She needed more information. “Fuck. Let’s go,” War said to the people in her overstrength attack group who had been lying doggo, still behind the dumpsters. She normally let Dubuque’s people adjust before hitting them with a sucker punch, but this felt wrong, today. They needed speed. The last thing she wanted was to give that derf, Blind Tom, enough time to learn how to focus his new attack.

  The force field shone red hot in the fragile places and the magicians, Supported and Telepaths in War’s overstrength attack group let loose against the now stretched thin defenses in front of them. For the first time since the second day of the siege, Dubuque’s shield failed, a hole fifty feet tall and perhaps forty wide. Three of Portland’s specially trained Supported sappers began to dismantle the megachurch’s now shield-less brick façade, opening a physical hole for the attackers.

  Both of War’s projections in Joanie’s decoy group winked out and the divine communication net filled with screams. War swiveled her senses as nine different versions of this new high-energy lance of power hit Joanie’s group. Nine. Only one of the new attacks was from Blind Tom. The others had been hit by what appeared to be standard Supported. Like with Blind Tom’s first two attacks, the lances of power from Dubuque’s Supported hadn’t held their focus for their entire discharge duration. Still, several of them had held together long enough to kill three real members of Joanie’s group.

  This was a fucking gatch. “Abort!” War said, and signaled. “Abort!”

  Echoes of the same command came from Orlando’s and Boise’s projections. Their real bodies must have sensed the same thing about these attacks that War had.

  The front members of the overstrength attack group, who had landed inside the megachurch, obeyed and backed off. Not fast enough, though. One of Dubuque’s mongs appeared, all on his idiot lonesome, and detonated a short-range blue helix attack, the current favored short-range attack among all the Supported warriors. Normally, a single blue helix attack would flail and fail against their shields. Normally, this would give War, the Supported and the magicians time to concentrate their attacks on the undefended attacker, which would vaporize the retard.

  This time the blue helix ate through the shields of an Akron Supported in three seconds and turned him inside out; and when War and the rest of their people concentrated their attacks on the Dubuque Supported his shields held. The Dubuque Supported skittered away, singed but still functional.

  “Get out. Now. As fast as you can! Everybody!” War said, signaling as fast as possible. “Go!”

  They got, but not fast enough. Dubuque himself rushed out into the courtyard below and started blasting away at the fleeing besiegers with these new lances of power. His lances of power were simple, white, and deadly, far more potent than anything War had seen before. Nor did they de-cohere part way through.

  Dubuque personally cooked four Supported and two projections before one of his beams targeted Alt. War interposed both her Leo body and a projection.

  Reality vanished.

  Time stood still before acquiring s
omething extra. War’s mind tried to piece her thoughts together; she knew her Leo body had taken an extreme amount of damage and that she had lost control of all but her local projections in this one attack group. However, she found her divided thoughts wouldn’t come together, somehow, impossibly, out of time synch.

  What she sensed was the world of projection transport, a fucked up version of the world of projection, some new place or state of mind.

  It was as if her mother’s “If you make an ugly face like that your face will stick that way” warning had come true. War had divided her consciousness into too many parts for too long and she feared her consciousness had frozen in place, forever divided across time.

  War looked at wherever her thoughts had fled, a riot of information – events, people, places, and objects. She sensed everything. No, she sensed more than everything, which didn’t make any sense at all. Then she understood.

  Because her thoughts were not in time synch, she could sense across time.

  Screams. Those were her screams. Panicked by this impossibility and by what she sensed, War amplified her willpower to force her mind back together. If skill and tricks didn’t succeed, try brute force.

  This time, brute force worked and time resumed its normal march.

  Reality reappeared. War’s mind inhabited just a single projection now, the one covering her now mangled, cooked but still ‘alive’ Leo body. Her disguise had held. Her consciousness had not permanently divided.

  “Go go go!” Boise said, and signaled.

  The retreat turned into a rout.

  Dubuque’s laughter boomed off the morning clouds.

  “It’s the true thrust of Dubuque’s innovation, exactly as War predicted,” Portland said. A Portland projection, one of the few to have survived the day’s debacle. “Those new beams were directly worshipper backed.”

  “If he can support such weapons, then we’re sunk,” Alt said. He was the single Telepath at this meeting. The rest were in hiding, having whatever form of total mental breakdown the Telepath in question found most appropriate. “And since you Helping Hands don’t do worshippers we’ll never catch up.” War suspected that Alt’s form of total mental breakdown involved attending meetings.

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” Boise said.

  “What’s worse, Dubuque’s Supported haven’t fully mastered this new technique,” Lorenzi said. They had retreated a hundred miles north, to Enid. Over twenty of their Supported had died. “Their control is overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the energies they’re playing with. When they master that control this is going to be worse. Much worse.”

  “War? Any ideas on how we can stop this?” Portland said.

  War, in her favored little girl projection, shook her head. Her real Leo body lay in the hospital, healing. “We can’t. Without worshippers to back us, stopping them in combat is no longer possible.” She paused. “A trick like this, though, is going to have a large cost to Dubuque. What he’s done isn’t an easy line for even a worshipped God to cross, based on the bleating Lodz and Verona were doing about the use of this trick ahead of time. I don’t know what the cost will be, but there’ll be one.”

  “So you don’t have any ideas at all on even a potential avenue to defend against this?” Portland said, a frown on her face. War snapped her gum, annoyed. They all counted on War to provide battle ideas in these meetings.

  “I’ll study what happened and get back to you later,” War said. She half watched Alt stare at his hands, moving his fingers one at a time, white faced. His last blurt, “we’ll never catch up”, was almost certainly a hunch. Not good at all.

  “Without an immediate way to combat Dubuque’s new Grade Zero Supported, we have to abandon the siege,” Portland said. War winced. ‘Grade Zero’ indeed.

  Nods around the table. Trust Portland to have a label for Dubuque’s trick before they knew the details, War thought.

  Alt stopped wagging his fingers and raised both his hands. “Television. Now,” he ordered. “I think we’re about to see the cost Dubuque paid.”

  War shivered at the tone of Alt’s horror-filled voice. What, she wondered, had happened this time?

  “The illegal, immoral and blasphemous siege of Portland’s heretical storm troopers has been lifted,” Dubuque said. All the cable news stations carried his news conference live. A box on the upper right hand corner of the screen replayed the end of the siege, as seen by television cameras, the scene on infinite repeat.

  “The lifting of the siege was a miracle, revealed to me directly by Jesus,” Dubuque said. His countenance was dapper and chipper, but his eyes were ice cold and inhuman today. Madman eyes. “Never again will I be so besieged; the ultimate answer to such depredations has been revealed to me. Portland and her thugs’ reign of terror is over. I am not without mercy, though. They have not sinned beyond redemption, and we can rehabilitate them. All who wish to do so, among Portland’s enslaved followers, can come to me and claim this redemption. All. Mortal and Living Saint alike.

  “For we are not Gods. As I have said many times, we are just holy men and women, chosen by the Angelic Host to bring peace and love to humankind.

  “In my moment of most dire desperation, I was given a new message. Jesus has chosen me to proclaim this to the world: there is a reason why I defeated the blasphemous siege, and that reason is because my followers have chosen of their own free will to venerate me as their sole intermediary to God while they live on this green Earth. Do not get me wrong. Their immortal souls, like yours, like mine, belong to Jesus. Only those saved by Jesus will live forever in Heaven. While we stagger and yearn for Heaven on this mortal coil, however, there is now a New Way.

  “Myself.

  “Furthermore, all Living Saints, if they wish to serve God and continue to act among mortals, must be similarly venerated by their own followers, and they must venerate me as their sole intermediary to God. This I have seen, and now I make this so. In my darkest hour, I gave myself wholly in prayer to Jesus, and he spoke to me and said ‘you, Dubuque, I choose, for this land of North America. Save my people while they live, so that in time I can bring God’s Kingdom of Heaven to Earth’. Through me, the City of God will be born, for in Jesus, my Savior, all things are possible. Thank you, and good bye for now.”

  Dubuque vanished and the talking heads began to reiterate Dubuque’s message. Boise flicked his hand and turned off the television from across the room.

  “You were right about a cost, Alt, but this cost will be paid by Dubuque’s divine soul,” Boise said. “This is blasphemy and heresy, a theological nightmare at an unexpected level. Dubuque’s ditched Christianity.”

  “This may not be all bad,” Alt said. “His choice has got to have severely pissed off Verona.” Verona, although Dubuque’s main ally, didn’t share Dubuque’s evangelical and ecumenical fervor. Verona, as far as the Telepaths could tell, was a rather conservative Catholic.

  “Undoubtedly, but given Mission and Dubuque’s success, Verona’s going to have to acquiesce, at least initially,” Boise said. “I predict Dubuque’s charisma’s going to be getting a big workout nailing this one down among his allies.”

  “Dubuque’s blasphemy and heresy won’t be enough to save us. He’s fully embraced the mob of worshippers in his head,” Portland said. “This nonsense is what they want. We’re all in the soup now.” They all frowned at Portland. “Can’t you feel this?”

  “The only thing I feel, religiously, is a warning,” Boise said. “Before you invest the enemy’s house, put your own house in order.”

  Portland nodded. “You’re right. We need a time of contemplation, not action. War, we must stand down.”

  “I agree,” War said. “For several reasons, some of which I refuse to speak about until I have time for my own variety of contemplation, you’re right.” Had she deluded herself when she thought she saw the future? Could she duplicate the state? “We must stand down until we can figure out the new limits of Dubuque’s Supported and fin
d a way to defeat them.”

  “Satan’s involved, somehow,” Lorenzi said. Eyeballs rolled as Lorenzi got on his anti-Satan hobbyhorse yet again. “I’ll bet she said something or did something to Dubuque to trigger this.”

  “Fine,” Portland said. “You talk to her and figure out what she did.”

  Lorenzi nodded.

  War left, despondent.

  25. (Dana)

  “Normally, when we’re telling stories, trashed bedrooms come after a different sort of activity,” Jan Cox said, as she opened another window to air out the room. The smoke still congealed near the ceiling of the converted office.

  Dana couldn’t open her eyes, welded shut by tears of rage. She saw with her willpower tricks, functional again after her…well, breakdown. She admitted, finally. Her whole body and soul hurt, anger too overwhelming to keep crammed down inside her finally bursting out around her and expressing itself. With uncontrolled willpower.

  She scanned around the trashed bedroom, the third trashed this way since she began to room with Jan. The remains of half the metal bedframe protruded, canted, from the ceiling about a third of the way across the room, twisted and half melted. She had torn the king-sized box springs into nine ragged and twisted pieces, two still smoldering from the red-beaded bolts Dana had flung in anger, before she switched to blue helixes and reality ripped the bedroom accoutrements into flinders.

  “Hah and hah,” Dana said, deadpan, disgusted. She couldn’t sob, not now. “I’m beginning to understand Boise.” She hadn’t realized she had been angry until she lost her temper. Then? Too late. Far too late.

  “Boise?” Jan said. “I can’t see Boise trashing bedrooms or losing his divine temper.” Jan was voluptuous and beautiful, whether her hair was its natural red or as today dyed blonde. She stood so straight she always seemed taller than Dana. Her eyes sparked with green fire, and her voice spanned a wider range than Dana had ever encountered, bass to contralto, and she could mimic a man’s voice if she needed. Despite the Dolly Parton look, the only bulges on her belly came from a muscular six-pack. From what Dana had seen, Jan had learned all the various Indigo tricks and skills. Jan stalked across the room, flipped her long hair to the side with a simple snap, and stomped out some smoldering remains of mattress. The bedding was long gone, complete char.