99 Gods: War

by Randall Farmer

  “He’s got worshippers,” Dana said, with a pointless whisper. “Lots of worshippers.”

  Miami frowned and gestured. Divine energy, expressed as a beam of purple smoke, shot out at Dana, surprising Atlanta. A range weapon! That had possibilities. The purple smoke hit Dana’s shields and dissipated. Miami’s face settled into a dark frown, and he stalked over to Dana and swung a fist. Atlanta put the palm of her hand out to stop Miami’s fist, and his fist hit her hand with a metallic clang.

  “Don’t do this,” Atlanta said, voice low and dangerous. The physical contact gave her enough information to read the truth in Dana’s statement. She also realized Miami had extensively practiced the combat uses of willpower, but had never faced a divine opponent. His inability to subdue a lone Telepath, which she knew about from the Indigo crew, was the reason behind his recent practice. He had little power because he had no feel for Integrity; his larger than normal Rapture dwarfed his pathetic Integrity, aided by, to Atlanta’s surprise, his larger than normal Congregation due to his ties with the local Catholic Church. “I’m better than you.”

  She sensed she couldn’t trust Miami; he lied and broke his word regularly, he cheated, and he had no concept of honor. In other words, just another thug.

  Miami backed down, rage burning inside him, supposedly hidden. “I will grudgingly accept the presence of this mortal this time, because I’m kind and because I didn’t warn you ahead of time.” He gestured and a dark suited bodyguard appeared from the shadowed edges of the courtyard to attend him. Miami whispered to him. The bodyguard left and came back with a heavy gold-covered wrought iron chair. Miami’s throne. Miami sat, but didn’t offer them any chairs. “I won’t invite you inside. We’ll talk here.”

  Atlanta ignored Miami’s pettiness. She didn’t ignore the bodyguard, someone she would normally kill in an instant. She did notice Miami had tricked up the bodyguard’s clothes to be bulletproof.

  “Fine,” Atlanta said. “First off, the comment about worshippers is something a different God, Portland, is worried about. Several of the 99, including myself, have realized that allowing worshippers damages us. Worship interferes with our mental processes. It’s a drug.”

  “It’s a very good drug,” Miami said, the edge of a smile on his lips. His tittie jigglers smiled even more. “If you’re warning me against worship, too bad. It’s the reward for being a God.”

  “It’s the reward you give your flunkies as well,” Dana said.

  Atlanta grimaced. Part of her wanted to slap duct tape on Dana’s mouth for blurting out her random comments. Another part wanted to find a way to reward the bitch better, as she had put something together Atlanta hadn’t sensed, despite the fact Atlanta considered ‘sensing things’ her specialty. Dana wasn’t better with her magical senses, but she did have an edge with her mind, despite Atlanta’s own God-given mental enhancements. She also had a mortal’s perspective.

  “So, in your expert opinion, does spreading the pleasure reduce its mental harm to you?” Atlanta said.

  Miami snorted. “First, I haven’t seen any mental harm at all, and second, I don’t spread much of it. Why waste such wonderful pleasure? Besides, it all fits with what I ask of my worshippers. I ask them to show me a good time before I answer their prayers.”

  Atlanta chewed on her cheek and watched the functionaries scuttle around the edges of her vision. “What sort of a good time?”

  “What do you think?” Miami said, flicking his eyes at his three buxom women, who had retreated to the far end of the courtyard after Dana’s comment. His implication of ‘sex’ as the good time was certainly grossly incomplete. Atlanta remembered the touch of his fist and crossed her arms across her chest.

  “I think you appreciate a good beating as much as a good fucking,” Atlanta said.

  “Crude for a woman, but not incorrect,” Miami said. “Boxing was once called the sport of kings. Someday, I’m going to turn it into the sport of the Gods.”

  Atlanta kept her face impassive. So did Dana, to Atlanta’s surprise.

  “On to the real reason I’m here,” Atlanta said. “The Seven Suits are taking out medium sized corporations world-wide, destroying them and sweeping up the remains, and building themselves a business empire. In addition to the general economic troubles this will create, I’ve learned that they’re disproportionately going after businesses in your territory, as well as my own. I know why they’re going after me.” Atlanta told Miami a synopsis of her confrontation with the Suits, and Dana’s rescue. “Do you have any idea why they’re going after you?”

  “Yes,” Miami said. “They contacted me. They wanted me to help them get a piece of the drug trade in the Caribbean basin, and they wanted me to help get drugs made legal. I told them to go fuck themselves and keep their skanky asses off my territory. I thought they’d had the brains to listen.”

  Atlanta handed over her tablet computer, displaying a document showing the Suits’ activities in his territory.

  “Son of a bitch,” Miami said. “You’re right. They’re a problem, and they need stopping. You got some idea you’re working on?”

  “If we Territorial Gods unite, we should be able to stop them cold.”

  “Maybe. It’s at least worth a try,” Miami said. He glanced around at his estate, and shrugged. “If you want a Territorial consensus opposing the Suits, you’ve got my vote.”

  “Thank you,” Atlanta said. “Do you have any complaints you would like to add to the list of problems?”

  “Not with any of the other Gods,” Miami said. “The worst problem I’ve run into is that my willpower isn’t as good as the Angelic Host advertised. They implied we had the full powers of creation in our hands, and by a simple thought we could do anything. They lied, because they didn’t mention that to do anything cute takes practice, lots of practice.”

  “Interesting,” Atlanta said. She hadn’t run into anything she couldn’t do that took lots of practice. Either she could do a trick, or learn to do the trick after a few tries, or couldn’t do the trick at all. She hadn’t thought to try ‘lots of practice’. Perhaps practice was where the mind probes and divine range weapons came from. “Do you have an example you can show us?”

  He thought for a moment and nodded. “Sure,” he said. He gestured and a hole opened in reality, to reveal a smelly spherical other place. Inside were two men, the source of the stench. They appeared starved and dehydrated. “My own portable jail cell. It took me days to master this. The best tricks all take similar amounts of work.”

  Implying he had taught himself far more difficult tricks than this one. Atlanta wondered how justified she had been in her belief that she could take Miami. Skill often trumped raw power in the real world.

  Miami closed the hole in reality. “I don’t trust the Angelic Host,” he said. “They’re playing a game with us.”

  “I haven’t met a God yet who thinks otherwise,” Atlanta said.

  “With all those worshippers, I think Miami’s going to be a huge problem,” Dana said, shouting over the rushing air. The Dominican Republic lay far behind them, already over the curve of the Earth. Atlanta nodded. An encounter with a God encouraging mass worshippers had changed her mind about the severity of the problem. Portland was correct. The worshipper issue was as important as the Seven Suits.

  “Warn Portland through your linkage to her,” Atlanta said. “He shouldn’t have let me touch him. I learned too much. He bears the other Gods ill will, and sees himself as boss God. Not yet, though. He’s training up his willpower for combat. Range combat.”

  “How much of a danger is he to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Atlanta said. “I think I’m going to have to do some of this training as well.”

  They flew on in silence, Atlanta lost in thought. She identified several things she wanted to train up. Miami’s trick with the reality bubble bothered her a lot. She saw many potential uses for such reality alteration, many of which struck her as too powerful for the Gods’ own go
od. Why had their creators given them so much power?

  Atlanta hoped Miami kept thinking like a thug God instead of a military God. She made another of her endless mental notes to herself: not only did she need to practice divine combat, but she also needed to set up a think-tank to come up with ideas on what to train up. Range weapon ideas. The think-tank idea might be a good thing to assign to the Indigo, with their years of occasional combat experience against supernaturally enhanced foes.

  “Hey, wow,” Dana said. The whistling wind carried her voice away.

  Atlanta brought her thoughts back to the present. “Yes?”

  “What’s in that jet?” Dana said, still shouting. She didn’t really believe in her heart Atlanta could hear her voice over the roaring of the wind.

  Atlanta wanted to ask ‘which jet’, but a quick check of the dozen or so jets within her line of sight found an anomaly on the jet twenty thousand feet directly below them, barely above a line of thunderstorms. “The two magicians in the flying aluminum bomb?” Once a chopper pilot, always a chopper pilot.

  “Not magicians,” Dana said. “Something else.”

  Atlanta examined the two closer, and whistled. “Damn.” She exerted her willpower and covered herself and Dana from the prying eyes of those two. “They noticed us, and they aren’t connected to any of the Gods.”

  “Uh huh, those are self-powered mortals,” Dana said. Her voice resumed normal volume as she remembered she didn’t need to shout. “Their powers aren’t anything like ours, either. And, unlike those screwy people we met in the Anime Café, I can actually sense their strength.”

  “Oh, they’re powers aren’t that different from ours,” Atlanta said. “Save in experience. Both of them have had their abilities for at least two decades.”

  “Yah,” Dana said, excited and wary. “Way more powerful than either of us. Only, if they’re so powerful, then why are they taking an airplane? Atlanta, why haven’t we heard of such people before?”

  “Good questions,” Atlanta said. “To the latter? They likely don’t want the world to know of them. To the former? I think it’s because they still view the world in mortal terms. You have the same limits at times.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you,” Atlanta said. “How many great wrongs have you gone out and righted in your career?”

  “Well, none,” Dana said. “I don’t have the right to go out righting great wrongs. Or do I?”

  “You’d have to force yourself, and you’d be filled with self-doubt the entire time, and what you did would weigh on your conscience and morality. Those two are similarly limited. On the other hand, the Host created us Gods with the right built-in. We have the sanction to do anything we choose to do.”

  “That explains a lot. Scary,” Dana said.

  “Isn’t it, though. Scary and disquieting.” She scanned the two mortals again, and as she did the two increased their shielding to where she couldn’t tell much more than they were a man and a woman. Atlanta projected an invisible image of herself into the plane, good enough to see out of – a bit of a trick, considering their relative velocities – and saw the two of them were middle aged, a black man and a white woman. The white woman tugged on the sleeve of the man, he turned to look at Atlanta, and Atlanta’s projection vanished, banished by the white woman. “But those two are just as scary.” Her gut said those two were Telepaths, but other than a gut feeling, she had no proof.

  “I don’t like this, no I don’t,” Dana said.

  “Put them on our list of problems,” Atlanta said. The list refused to get any shorter. She realized she would have to think about everything she and Dana had discovered on the Miami trip before she visited any of the other Gods in her attempt to build a divine consensus regarding the Seven Suits.

  11. (Dave)

  Dave parked his SUV in the Hernandez Industries Building’s parking garage, wondering about the commotion out front of Hernandez’s Denver main office. Ready for his usual Wednesday meeting, he grabbed his briefcase and laptop case, wheeled them over to the elevator, then down. It was a good day; the wounds from his surgery healed slowly, but they were healing, and his constant headache was only mild.

  He found a crowd milling around the building entrance nearest the parking garage, their voices a wall of undifferentiated sound. He felt a chill when he saw the three uniformed security guards who blocked their way.

  Before he could find one of his many Hernandez contacts to quiz, a crying woman appeared in the building’s hallway behind the security guards, pushing an office chair overflowing with boxes. They let her through. Dave shivered.

  “What’s going on?” he asked the closest person wearing a Hernandez badge.

  “Damned if I know,” the older man said. “Looks to me like they’ve pulled an Enron on us.”

  The crying woman pushed her chair by, not commenting. Inside the building, another uniformed security guard walked to the entrance, talked to the closest members of the crowd, then escorted one of them in.

  One of the Hernandez-badge wearing women looked up from her smartphone. “It’s all over the news. Hernandez declared Chapter Seven.”

  Chapter Seven? Instant bankruptcy, shut down the company, liquidate, kapoof and it’s gone? Insane. Giant companies didn’t do such things.

  “But why?” the man next to Dave asked.

  “Nobody knows,” the woman said. “Their stock price wasn’t doing anything more than following the market. I don’t know of any special pending lawsuits. The reporters and bloggers are dumbfounded, with nothing but rumors to go on.”

  Dave shivered again, recalling Tiff’s comments from last Friday night, after Dave had returned from his chamber music practice. He turned and hurried off to return to DPMJ Consultants.

  Lunch grumbled in Dave’s stomach as he looked over the DPMJ financials again. Take-out food, eaten during an intense meeting, had never been good for him.

  He sat with his three partners in the main meeting room; they had chased out the admins and the other technical staff members just after lunch, a half hour ago. Boxes and paper wrappers still littered the table among the tablets and laptop computers, papers and printouts. “We don’t need to declare Chapter 7 or 11 immediately, but unless we can drum up some replacement clients soon, it’s inevitable,” Pete said, wiping his face again with a lunch napkin. “We sank too much money into equipment during the last two pre-God boom years.” Dave and Pete Diaz had founded DP almost a decade ago; Jose and Miguel had bought in one and three years later, sparking the name change to DPMJ.

  “I think I found a way,” Miguel said. Jose’s phone warbled; he took one look at the screen and dismissed the call. “I don’t want to suggest this, but we can restructure our way around this and scrape through.” He tapped his tablet screen and a set of financials appeared on the giant flat panel touch screen they used as a whiteboard. Dave grimaced.

  “Ouch,” Dave said, looking through Miguel’s idea. Simple, but painful: Pete, Jose and Miguel would buy Dave out, lay off all of Dave’s technical staff and his executive assistant Lupe. The remaining PMJ would take out loans for the buyout; the loan payments would reduce the hemorrhaging to where PMJ would have at least a year to get things back into the black.

  You can’t do this to my company!

  But they could, easy as opening a bag of cheese curls. Hernandez had been Dave’s big client. With Hernandez gone, Dave wasn’t contributing, at least not much. He had become a liability.

  “I’m not sure we need to go that far yet,” Pete said. He pawed through numbers, as did Dave. “Dave?”

  “I see what you’re saying,” Dave said. He sent his numbers to the whiteboard display. “If I go on unpaid leave, save for travel expenses, you can squeeze out another two quarters before having to buy me out. This would hopefully give me enough time to drum up enough new business to replace Hernandez.”

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” Jose said. He stared out the window at the sparse pine forest surrounding the small
building DPMJ rented. Most of the building served as a workshop and a warehouse. “The market’s down twenty five percent from its post-God high and still falling, and the commodity marketbasket tied to our clients is down nearly thirty percent. People are getting jittery about what the impact of the Gods is going to be on the economy, long term, and they’re all starting to sit on their money.”

  Which meant yet another killer recession, Dave realized. Goodbye utopia, hello breadlines. Dreadlines?

  “We’ll still need to lay off our dedicated Hernandez tech staff,” Miguel said.

  “That’s going to make it very hard for me to get any new clients,” Dave said.

  “We need to if we want to avoid going into Chapter 11 ourselves,” Miguel said.

  Dave sighed. “Gotcha.”

  “I don’t think we have any choice,” Pete said. “I’ll start my people working up some buy-out options, Dave. It wouldn’t be fair not to give you any input in this.”

  “Thanks,” Dave said. Damn.

  “They’re going to be covering your travel expenses?” Tiff said. Dave nodded. “That’s at least something.” They sat in the living room, each with their own tablet computer. Olinda puttered about the kitchen, preparing the kids’ usual healthy late night snack. After today, Dave would rather relax in their hot tub than stare at an iPad. Life called, though, angry, the bitch before you die.

  “We bet on growth,” Dave said, talking about DPMJ. “Not on this disaster. Hernandez had been in business forever. They got their start in the big 70s boom, the 1870s; their deep pockets should have absorbed the commodity price drop for years. I can’t for the life of me figure out how this…”

  “Focus, Dave, focus,” Tiff said. “We have our own financial disaster to think about. We don’t own this house, remember.”

  The bank did. The house and its location had been Tiff’s idea; she had thought there wouldn’t be any problem committing a quarter of their substantial income to a mortgage. They hadn’t had to scrimp or cut corners for years, and they hadn’t after they had built the house, at least until now. Dave found himself feeling unprepared, like being young again, save for the part about the old creaky and well-poisoned body.