99 Gods: Betrayer

by Randall Farmer

  Betrayer was no longer the Practical God of War. Dana had heard of War’s betrayal of the Telepaths to Dubuque, marking her as yet another appalling divine turncoat. So many had fallen to Dubuque and Verona, and not only Gods and Supported, but mortals by the droves, such as Elise of the Indigo.

  The Betrayer projected a new and different aura, her force of will amplified by the evil she had done. Her ‘tall goddess’ form, formerly imposing and, truthfully, more than a little bit cute, now held the visage of sharp-edged evil, emotionally twisted and watch-your-back untrustworthy. Unkempt, even. Her eyes glowed white, and a palpable aura of darkness surrounded her, numerous and numinous lightless shadows that played with the mind. Dana had no idea if this was something the Betrayer did on purpose, or whether this was but an unconscious reflection of the now crack-brained God’s new Mission.

  Dana obeyed the Betrayer’s order to shut up, a reaction to her new aura. This wasn’t a charisma effect Dana was familiar with. This was ‘Obey me because I’m crazy, unpredictable and evil – or else’, something Dana had hoped never to see witness from any of the 99.

  They now had a Fallen God on their hands. How in the hell were they going to survive this? How in the hell were they going to survive having a goddamned Fallen God here? Dana semaphored willpower pleas for help to all her divine backers – and to her appalled disgust and shock, only Orlando and the Kid God answered. She huddled among the storage cabinets, disgusted.

  The Betrayer smirked, turned to Lydia (who had been with Alt’s Telepath group last Dana knew – how had the Betrayer captured Lydia, anyway?) and stuck her projection-hand inside of Lydia’s abdomen.

  Lydia yelped, and attempted to scrabble back, but with her feet held off the floor by the Betrayer’s willpower, she didn’t succeed. Three of Dana’s guardian Supported opened fire again, blasting the projection with purple fire beams. Their second attempt to spoof the Betrayer projection also failed.

  “I knew it! You’ve got a guts fetish,” Lydia said, growling as she also attempted to spoof the projection with her Natural Supported tricks. Dana was impressed the ratty teen found a way to summon up her sass with an evil God’s projected hand inside her.

  The Betrayer didn’t answer, instead fishing around in Lydia’s innards for far too long. When the evil God yanked her hand back, instead of Lydia guts, out came a slivery snaky presence that over a period of two seconds turned into Persona. Lydia, freed from the Betrayer’s hold, fell to the floor with a “yippityfuck!” and scrabbled back, to cower with her back against the leg of a worktable.

  The damned God smiled widely, as if she had just successfully pulled a gigantic fast one on somebody. The projection’s aura of power quadrupled, causing Dana to flinch back and her Supported bodyguards to cease their attacks and back away to the edges of the room.

  She needed better bodyguards.

  “Shit,” Persona said, after resizing herself and summoning up some of her normal haute couture. “Nobody knew I was inside Lydia. Nobody. Are you fucking omniscient or something?”

  “Yah,” the Betrayer said, bending down and getting into Persona’s face. “Of course I am, dumbass. That’s why I lost all those fights near Dubuque’s lair.” Dana leaned back in shock. Outside of her tactical specialty, War hadn’t been known for her brains, wisdom or sparkling personality. For a God, she had been one of the more understated ones, truthfully, as dull as dishwater unless there was a battle to plan. Now? As the Betrayer, the scum of the planet, her words dripped sarcasm and impolite disdain. Dana now sensed a wicked sense of humor at work, an actual and likely interesting personality, and a hell of a lot more brainpower than before.

  Had being stuck being a God of War broken the God? Well, as the Betrayer, she appeared broken in an entirely different way. Dammit, Portland had said she was going to send War back to the Almighty. How had she failed?

  Portland’s crew had better do something fast. Even the Betrayer’s sarcasm boosted her Mission. Uncorralled, the Betrayer’s Mission benefits from her unique position as the only officially evil God might end up with her being the most powerful God at the Mission level. This wasn’t what Dana wanted. The former War knew far too much about her and her organization.

  The Betrayer sneered at Persona and made her projection intangible, in preparation for her departure. Behind Dana, Bob, who had been lurking quietly beside Dana, took advantage of the Betrayer’s intangibility and turned on his crazy experimental trap device, dragging the Betrayer’s projection magnet-like across sixty feet of Dana’s HQ great room to a carefully constructed contrivance at the far end of the room.

  “Surrender or else,” Bob said. The Kid God smiled a seven year old’s smirk. Dana froze, wanting to smack Bob for trying something this risky against a God with unknown capabilities. Against War, he wouldn’t have had the slightest chance of success. “I can destroy you.”

  The Betrayer didn’t do the expected and attack Bob, or spoof her own projection. Instead, she examined Bob’s weaponry and let out a “Bwah hah hah” laugh. Bob slunk back and didn’t trigger his weapon. Two enchantments on either side held the Betrayer’s projection in place; another, about waist high, enhanced by Bob’s territorial willpower, was the real threat. All Dana knew about the weapon was that the Kid God had pledged never to use the weapon save in the direst of emergencies.

  The Betrayer snorted and turned up her nose, her expression morphing into a haughty sneer. “You’re bluffing,” she said. “First, you don’t have the balls to use something this evil. Second, all you have is a prototype. Lastly, you’re willfully ignoring the Host’s ‘do not disturb’ sign they have on this particular piece of tech. Whatever it is.”

  “It’s a willpower virus,” Bob said, crestfallen. “One of my inventions.” One of his many attempts at creating non-standard battle weapons. “You’ll have to admit they’re getting better. Surrender or get infected.”

  Dana winced at Bob’s flustered cliché speech. She readied her top triple-helix (red, yellow and purple), a willpower damper that would destroy the Betrayer’s projection, Bob’s toy and reduce Bob to silver. The Betrayer was right – the trap used Host-forbidden tech, which he had found a way to hide from her. Damn him, and damn the Indigo’s contamination of his mind. He had picked up the Indigo’s ‘rules are for suckers’ mentality in a very bad way.

  Dana examined the forbidden prototype. The device targeted the nanoparticles making up projections, enchantments and divine Imagos. If perfected, this would be the willpower equivalent of a computer virus. However, Bob had neutered his prototype, and if he used the device on the Betrayer’s projection, it would at best take out a few cubic centimeters of the projection before exhausting itself. He had made sure the weapon didn’t do the chain-reaction trick, the true danger in the device.

  The invention triggered Dana’s Regent-based ‘divine emotion two’, which she had tentatively labeled ‘disgust at activities which would annoy the Angelic Host’. The Host would brand anyone as evil who used such a weapon, potentially the divine version of a WMD. Dana couldn’t imagine using this even as a last ditch effort, and certainly not against another God. Bob’s invention bothered her a lot.

  “Save your whimpers for someone who cares,” the Betrayer said. She vanished, somehow solving the magnet effects of Bob’s trap.

  “Get rid of that thing,” Dana said, after realizing she had been holding her breath.

  “Nope,” Bob said. “The fact the Host dislikes this means this is something we need to understand and perfect.”

  “Well, it looks like I’ve got myself a convert,” Persona said. “Fuck the Host.” She and the Kid God exchanged a very strange high-five.

  All Dana could think of was a bit of inseer insight from nowhere: all Bob was doing with this was inviting the Betrayer to betray him personally.

  “I had the Betrayer – who was War – here in my goddamned HQ!” Dana said. She had sweet-talked Bob into loaning her enough willpower to activate Portland, Akron and Montreal’s
projections, so she could chew them out. They now stood before her in her HQ great room. “And when I asked for willpower support against the fiend you were supposed to have already gotten rid of, you three gave me squat!”

  Dana was also combustibly angry.

  “I’m sorry,” Portland said. “Unfortunately, you’re on your own, now, unless you and the Kid God change your minds about the City of God.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dana said. She had feared for Portland’s mind after she capitulated to Dubuque, and, unfortunately, her fears had turned out to be correct. “Look, Portland, you told me you were going to send the bitch back to the Almighty.”

  “We failed,” Akron said. “She outwitted us. She has her real body hidden somewhere where even she can’t extract it.”

  “So you’re just shrugging your shoulders and letting her do this crap? Look, you three, you need to wise up or you’re going to be the ones going to back to God Almighty,” Dana said. “Your betrayal of the Divine Compact to Dubuque is as bad as War’s betrayal of the Telepaths to Dubuque!” She had never been this angry before in her life. Something was changing in her, growing and expanding. A whole lot of things. She examined herself, yet again, to make sure her body wasn’t silvery divine crap, and it wasn’t. However, she now maintained three separate thought tracks, and she had created within herself a willpower-based cooling system so she wouldn’t half kill herself every time she used her willpower above the low end of her willpower energy range. Her Mission was not only to shepherd Bob into adulthood, but also to be the good guy. Which, right now, gave her a Mission advantage against the three Gods in front of her.

  Her success made her want to puke. The 99 Gods, it appeared, were out of ‘good guys’.

  “I can’t say I’m sorry enough times,” Portland said. “Unfortunately, the only way to fight Dubuque’s worshipper addled insanity is beside him, working at his side. Resistance is futile and the City of God is inevitable.”

  Dana lowered her head and eyebrows, her anger nearly ready to explode at Portland’s ‘borg-ism’. She had lost Atlanta and howled her loss to the heavens for a week. She had lost Jan and the Indigo, and cried until she ran out of tears. Now she lost Portland, the God who made her a Supported, but this time, there were no tears, just anger.

  And willpower was anger.

  “Idiots!” she said, and the three projections eased back. “As Regent, I’m a mortal with the willpower of a lesser God. I share both mortality and divinity – and I am the conscience of the Gods, like it or not. Despite your pretty words, you’ve become no better than Dubuque or Verona. Or the Betrayer. This is the same mistake you made by not ending the Siege of Dubuque before it was too late. You’ve allowed power to corrupt you, Living Saint Portland. Find a way to fix this, or I swear I will find a way to send you back to God Almighty myself!” With the last, and feeling the Mission boost from the look of horror and realization of truth on her three former divine supporters’ faces, she banished the three projections.

  Dana’s shoulders slumped. This righteous anger explosion was better than bedroom trashing, but not by much. She doubted any of those three would be speaking to her again with love, at least not for a long time.

  “You go, Mom!” the Kid God said, running up to her and leaping up to give her a hug.

  At the same time, Persona said “Holy shit, Dana! You’re amazing!”

  At the same time, someone else clapped slowly and sarcastically. Dana turned to the sound of the unexpected sarcastic clapping, and saw the Betrayer had returned – this time bringing with her Worcester’s entire Natural Supported contingent. Again, the Betrayer had walked through all of her defenses and detections.

  “You definitely have righteous virgin do-gooder down pat, don’t you, Dana,” Betrayer said. “Here. I have some presents for you. If you’re willing to take them.”

  Right. Worcester was back in the City of God. Worshipped again. Her Natural Supported crew would end up as messed up as Lydia had been before Alt’s crew rescued her. “I’ll protect and train them.” She licked her lips. “Unless you’re trying to extort something from me I care about.”

  “Just bargaining with you to accept another present,” Betrayer said. “Bwah hah hah hah. Hold tight, because I’m about to really blow your peace-addled mind.”

  The Betrayer grabbed a healthy gob of Dubuque-tinged worshipper-backed willpower from Persona’s innards, who howled in agony and mentally complained about the loss of the rainy day stash she had stolen from Dubuque. With Dubuque’s stolen willpower the Betrayer opened up a hole in reality, right where the window overlooking the old Imunogen garden had been.

  A hole to Hell.

  Persona backed away, nearly flattening Dana, and the HQ great room emptied save for Dana, Persona and Bob. And, of course, the Betrayer. Lydia at least was able to get the rest of the Natural Supported out of the room without too much of a panic.

  Instead of the feared attack of warped beasts and insane Hell-Gods, nothing came out of the portal. Instead, the portal showed a place in Hell, an inscribed flattened rock stage. Two people stood inside the triangle – square – five pointed star inscription, both wearing black cloaks. A group of powered glowing men and women ringed them, and beyond them was a scene out of one of Jan’s better fantasy pictures, a world with dozens of dark rectangles in the air above the clouds, of varying sizes, backed by a gauzy and less intense sun covering a full quarter of the partly cloudy sky, and vegetation all built on spiral and helical designs.

  “Come!” the Betrayer said, commanding with the willpower. The two in the center of the inscription wavered and appeared in Dana’s HQ – and the Hell-portal vanished.

  “Now, either clean this Hell-shit off of me or die,” the Betrayer said. The two pushed back their cloaks, and Dana cried out in heart-pausing shock.

  One was Jan, a fitter and far tanner Jan than from a week ago, just before she died. She had returned her hair to its natural flaming red color, and she carried her sword in her hand, as well as a backpack laden down with printed books. The thirty-five-ish woman beside her was improbably tall, perhaps six two, and looked like a stockier version of Epharis, but with the Godslayer’s glowing indigo eyes trick. Her satchel carried weapons, not Hell-enchantments, but also nothing like any Earth weaponry Dana knew about. Dana fell to her knees, her mind easing into her far too familiar ‘oh my God Hell Indigo insanity I can’t cope’ dysfunction.

  “Sure,” the improbably tall woman said, speaking with a noticeable Cajun French accent. “No need to get all angry.” She waved her hands, scattering three herb satchels around her, Jan and the Betrayer, while muttering inaudible nonsense words. To Dana’s surprise, the feeling of Hell faded and vanished.

  “This isn’t right,” Jan said. She pointed her sword at the Betrayer. “Who the fuck are you, and why the fuck did you bring us back into our home timeline early?”

  Timeline? Home? Early?

  “I’m Betrayer,” the Betrayer said. “You’re welcome, by the way. Bwah hah hah!”

  “Dana? What’s going on?” Jan said, not letting her eyes off the Betrayer. “Your Immunogen HQ’s supposed to be trashed. How the fuck early are we?”

  “April 1st.” April Fools Day.

  “Oh fucking shit!” Jan said, her voice stage thunder. “Only a week? We were supposed to show up on October 8th, Armageddon day. We’re supposed to be the goddamned cavalry.”

  Oh, how strange, Dana thought. Should I be attacking the Betrayer for this, or joining up with her? What the hell is going wrong with my mind? Timelines? Epharis’s timeline crap is physically real? The Godslayer saved Jan by shoving her into a parallel timeline? No wonder she couldn’t say what she had done. This is insane! This can’t be happening! Jan’s dead! I mourned her passing!

  Every goddamned time she dealt with the Indigo, something happened to yank her brain out her nose. This one was worse than even the Hell-beast fight, going beyond disgusting to clinically absurd.

  The Betr
ayer snorted and bwah hah hahed again. “By doing this, I’ve just postponed Armageddon Day, bitch.”

  “We had plans, dammit!” Jan said, now with a faint but angry indigo cloud around her. “We spent months on them. Now what am I going to do?”

  The tall woman dropped her heavy satchel and came over to Dana, warily eying the Betrayer. “Hi there. You must be Dana Ravencraft. I’m Diana.” She stuck out her hand, and Dana shook it.

  You look nothing at all like the pictures I’ve seen of Diana, Dana thought.

  “I can stay in this timeline because I don’t exist here,” she said, as if this was an everyday occurrence for her. “My father’s Jurgen, not Grover.”

  To which Dana had nothing at all to say in response.

  “Do? Well, how about saving everyone’s asses,” the Betrayer said, sticking a projected finger on the end of Jan’s sword, and moving it aside. She snickered the snicker of the insane. “Be the hero. I’m sure you remember how.”

  At which point the Betrayer, her Mission amped yet higher, vanished.

  55. (Nessa)

  Ken took off, starting the leisurely flight back to Alaska. He planned to do the flight in four legs, stopping when exhausted in various uninhabited places in Siberia. Nessa thumbed her nose at the high Caucasus Mountains, never wanting to see them again, boosted Ken’s will and gave him as strong a poke of telepathic support as she was able to manage. This would be a difficult trip for him. He had never before flown them long distance, and since he couldn’t even come close to breaking the sound barrier, this would be a long trip.

  No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t chase the self-image of himself as a donkey out of his head.

  Not a one of them would step in an airplane, with the possible exception of Elorie. Nessa knew she would have a full psychotic breakdown if she even tried. Ken likely would take the airplane apart with uncontrolled teek before leaving the ground.