99 Gods: Betrayer Read online

  War didn’t think Dana possessed the Mission strength, either, even with Dana’s insistence that the moral rightness of their cause allowed her participation. Even so, Dana was only present as a projection.

  They didn’t have a hundred percent chance of success. Truthfully, War still had a hard time putting solid numbers on what she saw in the Place of Time. Still, she thought they had enough of a chance of success for this adventure to be worth a shot.

  If they succeeded? Good things happened in nearly all the futures War examined. She didn’t see any way around the three dystopias yet, but she saw enough promise in this caper to pull her out of her funk. The price of participation – War had to donate a projection to the cause, a Dubuque projection duplicating him all the way down to the natty white suit – was well worth the risk.

  They sneaked down the stairwell in the Empire State Building past three sets of guards, Supported of all vintages, before Dana hand-signaled they had reached a floor where one of their targets was enslaved. War signaled for them to stop, arranged them in a battle formation, and slipped them through the door in such a way the door didn’t move. She knew many Telepath tricks now, and she mimicked fake telepathic illusions with ease.

  Dana pointed left, and they flew down the empty corridor, slowly enough for Inventor’s magic item of ‘no air current disruption’ to work. War, twitchy about how empty the place seemed, glanced at Dana, who looked worried as well. Where were the office workers? The paper pushing peons who made the Suits’ corporate empire hum?

  “We’re in a trap!” Dana said, her scream breaking their cover. War brought up her battle tricks. Change and Freedom picked up Dana and War’s projection, attempting to flee the hallway and find a better place to hold the battle. They hit a newly interposed invisible barrier, plastering them like squashed flies. War analyzed the barrier and decided it was something new, a reversed battle force field, set up to keep everything inside but not to stop incoming. She tested the barrier with a bit of Golden Fire, which as she feared, bounced back at her.

  A hundredth of a second later a tuned anti-projection field dropped over the group. Save for the small amount of power keeping her mind in the projection, War was now powerless. Change and Freedom fell to the corridor floor, their willpower tricks and enchantments taken out by other defenses.

  Shit. War made mental notes by the hundreds on how better to handle battle preparations using the Place of Time next time. This one was definitely down the rathole.

  “Excellent,” a voice said. Passion, the most physically aggressive of the Seven Suits. He stood behind them, expensive business suit over bulging muscles, twenty feet down the corridor. He wore an obi around his waist with a katana and wakizashi through it. War sensed a throbbing of willpower from the katana and made a mental note to put a priority on avoiding contact with that thing. “More volunteers. I always wondered if you’d turn on us, Dubuque.”

  “This won’t work,” Change said. “You can’t…”

  Change passed out, as did Freedom. The willpower of a dozen or more Gods beat on War’s mind, fraying her defenses. She flicked the mental switch to turn off the projection, but nothing happened. Passion’s willpower supported War’s projection now. Tendrils of mental control crept into her mind.

  Dana laughed. “Sorry, Passion,” she said. “You’re not getting me this way.” Dana flung a narrow needle of willpower through the anti-projection field and with it connected herself to her Territory. Using the power of her territory, Dana’s projection covered the entire group with her willpower and undid everything, including the trap field and the tuned anti-projection field. Unfortunately, neither Change nor Freedom stirred. War boggled at Dana’s performance. She didn’t know of any current Territorial Gods who had enough skill and focus to free even one of them with this trick. Atlanta had been able to, though. Perhaps this is how Dana pulled off her trick, War decided.

  After nodding a quick ‘thanks’ at Dana, War’s projection detonated a five-helix aquamarine beam at Passion. The physically overmatched Ideological God screamed and passed out after being tossed out of reality then phased back into the local air and walls two milliseconds later. He wouldn’t be worth squat for the next week, at least.

  Unfortunately, Passion wasn’t their only opponent. Fifteen Supported appeared behind Passion and attacked with a rainbow’s worth of helixes, rays and beams. Fifteen more came from the front and did the same. War felt the odds shift as she blasted at the Supported, so she grabbed Change and Freedom and boogied.

  She and Dana’s projections were overmatched.

  War got less than four feet before the attacking Supported overwhelmed her own and Dana’s defenses, destroying both their projections and recapturing Change and Freedom.

  So much for Mission benefits, War thought, back in her Leo body, listening to Alt and Nicole argue telepathically over dishwashing duties. This wasn’t a complete disaster – she had picked up enough on the reverse force field trap to duplicate and improve it. Something that screwy would come in handy someday.

  Still, there must be some way to use the Place of Time to keep her from stumbling into disasters. There just had to be.

  29. (Dave)

  “Oh crap,” Dave said.

  “Tell them to go away,” Elorie said, from the bathroom. Dave looked over at the door and the large stack of room service trays. Nobody knocked at their door.

  “No visitor this time,” Dave said. “It’s this email.”

  “Dammit, quit worrying about work and get into the shower with me.”

  Dave chuckled and did as told. He closed the bathroom door behind him. Steam. Appropriate. He slid past the shower curtain into the bathtub shower combination, grabbed the freebie shampoo and began to wash Elorie’s curly black hair, now almost an inch long. In another month, she would be able to go without a wig, if she could stand a punk hairstyle.

  “Uh, watch the ear,” Elorie said. She grabbed the miniature shampoo bottle and started in on Dave’s hair. “I like your eyes. They’re sorta like cartoon villain eyes, all dark and overshadowed by your oversized eyebrows.”

  “Huh,” Dave said. He lowered his eyebrows and shifted his eyes back and forth in what he thought might be a menacing manner. “I’ve got you at my mercy, now.”

  Elorie laughed. “So, what was the ‘oh crap’ email about? Lawsuit?”

  “Nope. I’m not even going to try and explain. Hell, I want to read the damned thing again before I even try and think about it.”

  “Now you’ve got me curious.” She began to soap up his privates. “All worn out, are we?”

  Dave settled under Elorie, she in his lap, his laptop on her lap. He read the email again over her shoulder. The email hadn’t changed, much as he wished. He didn’t comment, waiting for Elorie’s reaction.

  “Well,” she said, after she read the email several times. He didn’t respond.

  “If you’re worried this puts you off the team, or threatens our relationship, it doesn’t,” Elorie said. “I half expected something like this.”

  “How about the rest of the team? They’re going to go ape-shit when they learn I’ve been made into a Supported. They feared this from the start.” Elorie didn’t answer immediately, so he continued. “If I had a handlebar moustache, I’d twist it and go ‘nyah hah hah.”

  “Yeah, right, oh fiendish saver of the team leader’s life. Read the email again.”

  From: Dubuque

  To: Dave Estrada

  Subject: Support

  CC:

  Dave! How’s it going!

  I heard your prayer and I hope the response was appropriate. My divine situational analysis showed an immense number of problems if I did the healing personally, so I called in the previous healer, Persona, via projection. Now I hope you don’t mind, but to do so I had to turn you into a Grade Three Supported. I should have done so earlier, when you accepted a place on this mission, but at the time my situational analysis was that doing so would have adversely affecte
d your professional and personal relationship with Elorie.

  Congratulations on the marriage. You two are perfect for each other and you’ll have a happy life together…if you can find a way to keep yourselves out of danger. What I fear is now that you two have gotten a taste for the affairs of the 99 Gods, it’s going to be hard for either of you to give up the game. This is, alas, a common occurrence.

  Don’t worry overly much about the conflict between myself and Portland. It’s necessary for Portland to explore all the possible avenues of independent leadership before she enters into the City of God. I saw this before the conflict between us started, and nothing that has transpired has changed my mind. To forgive a soul such as hers is quite easy, and in time, she will make an excellent Living Saint.

  I’ve also enclosed some standard documentation on what a Grade Three Supported of mine can expect, and the exact benefits you’re going to be getting out of this change.

  Be Good. Do good.

  With kind regards,

  Dubuque

  “Ah, he seems to take a lot for granted,” Dave said. “He didn’t ask my permission; nor did I pray to be a Supported. I can see how this was necessary for him to send a Persona projection through me…but still.”

  “He didn’t say a thing about the lifting of the siege or his statement afterwards.” Elorie tapped the laptop and opened up the attachment, which detailed Dave’s benefits as a Grade Three Supported. “Self-healing. Emergency prayer requests. Improved verbal and visual memory.” She paused. “I hadn’t realized the Grade Threes got so little.”

  “Well, there had to be a reason why Grade Threes are not Grade Twos or Ones,” Dave said, and snorted. “I can think of worse things. He might have made this a test of faith for me to figure out what I get out of being a Grade Three.”

  “That’s a perverse idea.”

  “Not really. You see, there’s no mystery in this,” Dave said. “The lack of mystery is the largest thing that bothers me about the 99. To me, the mysteries are what makes religion, the theology part of it, at all tolerable. Mystery is the power behind faith. What is God and what does God want? What is the meaning of death? The afterlife? Why is there evil? Do miracles occur, and how? Now, with the 99 Gods around, who needs faith? All we have to do is ask. They’re making everything too easy.”

  “But how about God?” Elorie said. “Nothing the 99 Gods have done has revealed anything about God Himself. Or Herself. I think the appearance of the 99 Gods created more mysteries than they solved.”

  Dave shrugged.

  “You’re being quieter than I expected.” Elorie took his hands in hers. Her hands weren’t freezing cold any more.

  “I don’t know what to say or what to believe.”

  “You’re afraid I’m going to get pissed at you over this,” Elorie said. “I’m not. Hell, without this, I’d be dead. If anything, I’m starting to think I might have been wrong about Dubuque, or at least about the fight between Portland and Dubuque. There’s a lot more ‘subtle’ here than I expected.”

  “I guess it’s going to bring us closer together, because Dubuque’s post-victory speech gave me the willies. I’m still not sure what to make of his ‘sole intermediary’ statement.”

  Elorie closed the laptop, climbed off Dave’s lap and snuggled in beside him on the bed. She closed her eyes and thought, silent, for over a minute. “Don’t you dare go and get weird over this,” she said, three minutes later, not meeting his eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Walking out on us. Rejecting Dubuque. Or going and becoming a monk devoted to worshipping Dubuque. Anything crazy.”

  Dave furrowed his forehead and took a deep breath. “You’re thinking of how you might react if you got yanked around the way Dubuque’s yanking me around.” In the back of his mind, he just couldn’t ditch a bad feeling about the recent days’ events. Too wrong. Too coincidental. Too manipulated. Yet, who or what might be the puppet-master? Up until now, he thought the answer was ‘Dubuque’.

  Now Dubuque felt like just another puppet.

  Was this how people felt when God entered their lives, personally?

  He sure as hell hoped not.

  After another long pause Elorie nodded. “At least in my situation my choices are easy: go along with what’s happening to my life or die.”

  “Easy? If I was in your shoes, I’d be intolerable.”

  Elorie chuckled, deep voiced. “So would I, if I was in your shoes. There’s a moral lesson here, one I’m having a difficult time facing.” She paused and kneaded his fingers. “You ever thought about having any more children?”

  Dave blinked at the subject change. “You mean the two of us?” Dave said. He immediately regretted his question. Knowing her, she had been thinking about this for days, waiting for the proper moment to bring it up. “The advisability of children would depend on what sort of life we end up having after this is over. You’re interested?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Uh, sort of an every ten year thing with me, I guess. I keep thinking you’d make a hell of a father. No, I haven’t forgotten your earlier comments about not being a kid-person. I think a lot of that was because of your relationship, your overly competitive relationship, with your… with Tiff.”

  “Perhaps,” Dave said. “I… I feel comfortable with you, El. Not competitive…well, at least not too much.” More trusting. Less unsure of himself. More able to be himself. “I can’t see the two of us having the sort of fire and ice relationship Tiff and I had.” Abject love mixed with the urge to strangle, perhaps…

  “Oh? I guess I haven’t told you enough of my dirty secrets yet.” She smiled. “So how many do you want? How fast? I’ve never had any fertility problems.”

  “Um, ahh, you do remember you’re over forty...” She had always been the same age as he was. Funny how things worked out that way.

  “Uh huh. The age thing. Especially thinking about having a kid so late that you’re ready for the rocking chair before the kid’s ready for college.” She shook her head. “Think about it, nothing more. I also think, unfortunately, we’re going to have to brace the rest of the crew today about what Dubuque’s done. I don’t think it would be a good idea to hit them with this by surprise.”

  Dave nodded. He feared the reaction would be bad no matter when they told the crew. He had been accused by half of them of being a closet Supported ever since he had found the Ecumenists’ air-travel trail.

  “…here,” Dave said, after forwarding the email and the attachment to the questers’ smartphones. They gathered in the sitting area of Lisa and Georgia’s so-called suite. The room was smaller than Dave and Elorie’s by one velvet covered chair.

  “Just ducky,” Lisa said, after a quick read. She sat cross-legged on a narrow twin bed. “What’s next, Estrada? Mastering your unconscious and becoming a kick-ass Telepath? How about we find out you’re King Carlos of Spain’s heir to the throne, or you’re secretly worth ten billion dollars.”

  “I wouldn’t mind the latter at all, but the first sounds painful,” Dave said. He shrugged. “As far as I know I don’t have any more surprises out there.”

  “You didn’t know this one was coming.”

  Dave held out his hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Point to you.”

  “I suspected,” Georgia said. She read the message from her laptop on the small desk. “I sort of wondered why he wasn’t a Dubuque Supported from the start.”

  “Look at this list,” Jack said, interrupting, after reading the attachment. “He is Dubuque’s spy.”

  “I sort of thought that was obvious from the start,” Dave said. Jack didn’t have to wear a uniform to be in a uniform. His voice wore epaulets. His permanent straight-backed posture didn’t help, either. “Although I think representative is a better word than spy.”

  “It’s a better word, but not a more accurate word,” Jack said. Lisa and Darrel laughed at him. Elorie tapped her foot. Dave wondered if he should go find some popcorn to burn in a microw
ave. Or some expensive dishes to break.

  “Look, I didn’t ask for this,” Dave said. “Well, I guess I did pray, but any of us can pray.”

  “Well, this doesn’t happen when I pray,” Mohammed said. He leaned against the window in the sitting area with his arms crossed and the look on his face said he had mislaid his laid-back. “I’m wondering if we should go on. Before, we weren’t messing with the affairs of the 99 Gods because none of us was a Supported or a damned Telepath.” And now they had a two-for-the-price-of-one deal! Dave barely repressed a chuckle. “The worst was Mr. Lorenzi’s interference, but he had just cause, him being the one who dreamt up this mission. Now what if the local Territorial God – Athens, I think – decides we’re poaching on his turf, he has just cause.”

  “Technically, we’re on Alexandria’s turf,” Georgia said. Yes, she did know all. “I don’t think we’re in any worse trouble than we were before. Mr. Lorenzi’s rep’s as bad, if not worse, than the Telepaths. Besides, the real problem Territorial Gods, such as Beijing and Guangzhou, are far away from here.”

  “Too bad you’re only a Grade Three, Dave,” Lisa said. “From what I’ve read, a Grade One would be able to walk through all our problems without breaking a sweat.”

  He must have flunked nose-wiggling or potion making or something, Dave decided.

  “One wonders why a Grade One wasn’t sent along with us,” Georgia said. “Or two Grade Ones, one each from Portland and Dubuque. Now, if Dave here was turned into a Grade One, he would be utterly useless. From what I’ve read, not only does a Grade One Supported need a special aptitude for the job, they need extensive training as well.”

  “Thanks, I think,” Dave said. He was never sure with Georgia’s comments. “I suspect there’s important information here. I think the answer might be along the lines of ‘if Grade One Supported were sent on this mission, it would make the mission much less likely to succeed.’ Has anyone here given any thought to the idea that the killers of the Ecumenists might be powered types? Violent and jealous powered types.”